By Simon de Bruyn
October 2009

 

Director David Caesar

According to the production notes, Prime Mover is David Caesar’s fifth feature, but as the writer/director explains it is also his first, with the first draft of the screenplay inspired by his short stint as a truck driver when he was 18 and penned in the early 1990s as his first feature script.

Fast forward almost two decades, through a string of documentaries, a range of features that included lawn bowls comedy Greenkeeping (1992), explosive black comedy Idiot Box (1996) and Guy Ritchie imitation Dirty Deeds (2002) and a lot of television, most recently Dangerous and RAN: Remote Area Nurse, to the end of last year, when Prime Mover finally hit the road.

Working again with producer Vincent Sheehan, who had produced Idiot Box follow-up Mullet, Caesar started to warm up his truckie thriller with a hefty dose of romance and redemption, which the duo felt was more important to the cinema experience than the Taxi Driver-esque dark tale Caesar had first penned as a young filmmaker. Most strikingly, they augmented the existing amphetamine psychosis hallucinations that were part of the darker story with magical fantasy elements, which lift the film into dreamlike realms.

The result is a potpourri of styles and themes, a modern-day Australian outback fable about the separate dreams of a young couple Thomas (Michael Dorman) and Melissa (Emily Barclay) twisted up in the heavy but enticing world of trucking the open road. With the 2009 NSW Premier Literary Award for his script already under his belt, ahead of a staggered innovative cinema release that sees regional audiences seeing the film first, Caesar speaks about the filmmaking process.

AFI: Prime Mover really does have a mix of dark and light. There’s these romantic and fantastical elements mixed with the realism of a dark crime drama.

David Caesar: That’s what Vincent and I did with the script, trying to make those elements seamless. We wanted to have those layers to it and the elements of all those different genres. I’ve become a big fan of the Korean directors from the last ten years, and I think the thing I enjoy about their films is the extreme contrasts between light and dark, hope and futility, violence and redemption, and I like that. It’s the contrasts which make all the elements stronger while the core of it is the journey with the characters.

 

Michael Dorman and Emily Barclay in

Prime Mover

AFI: You also drove a truck yourself when you were 18, which inspired the story. Were you fascinated by the romantic lure of the open road?

DC: Absolutely. When I was a kid, in the country working class culture I grew up in, the idea of being a truck driver was being your own man, like a cowboy out on the road, with no boss, and it very much was a fantasy. This wasn’t like the real world where you are a hired gun as opposed to a free spirit. So there were contrasts with the romance of it, the country and western music, the saccharine elements of the culture and the way trucks are done up in these bright colours and the pin-striping and decoration. It’s really garish almost, and has really feminine qualities to it. But it was an incredibly masculine world, so restricted and closed off in a way, and that is what excited me and kept me interested in the project.

AFI: What inspired the magical realism in the film, and when did it become apparent to meld in these fantastical visions with a more traditional outback story.

DC: The whole fantasy there was there from day one and it was there before the narrative in a way, before the story was worked out. I was trying to create a magical iconography around Australian things such as making a garage poster a magical thing, and playing with the Catholic iconography which is part of our culture. I’m not Catholic but even when I was a kid I always felt like I was missing out on something because our family was Protestant and they didn’t have that, it used to be all beige shorts like an accountant, which loses the magic somehow. I’ve always been interested in the representations of work especially the Russian propaganda representation of their heroic figures. So when Thomas first sees Melissa she’s this mixture of the Madonna and this Communist era revolutionary Soviet worker.

AFI: Given the project had fits and starts, how was the film cast? Did you have actors in mind for a long time?

DC: A lot of really good actors were attached to it over the years, but then time would go on and they would be older. Russell Crowe was going to it for a while and Ben Mendelsohn was going to play the lead for a while, and David Wenham was for a while and Sam Worthington, but then time went on.

AFI: How did you settle on Emily Barclay and Michael Dorman? It seems like a Suburban Mayhem-inspired casting.

 

Andrew S. Gilbert, Michael Dorman and Emily Barclay in

Prime Mover

DC: When we did the Aurora process back in 2004 [the Aurora script writing workshop run by the NSW FTO], part of that was to do a read through with actors and so we tried to find the actors we would cast. I’d just seen Emily Barclay in a film called In My Father’s Den, and I thought she was fabulous in it, and it was long before Suburban Mayhem or anything, so she was on board really early on. And we were looking at Michael, but he wasn’t available when we were going to shoot as we’d gotten it up a bit earlier, and he was doing all this stuff like Acolytes and Daybreakers back to back. We needed someone who could do the macho swagger but who also has the vulnerability and we were finding that difficult. But in time, Michael became available, and we got there. The reunion thing never bothered me and it still doesn’t bother me. I just go for the best people.

AFI: Was it inevitable that your regulars like Ben Mendelsohn or Andrew S. Gilbert would get a role?

DC: From my point of view I’d like to have Ben in every single thing I did. I have a long history with him and I really enjoy working with him and I tailored that role for him. And if there wasn’t a role for him I would have written one. That’s my feeling about it, I think he’s one of the greatest actors in Australian film history and I’d like to keep working with him. I really like having a history with people and I do like that process where people put up ideas about performance or line readings and the best idea wins. I want to do that with people I engage with me in an open way, that I can trust, so it’s not about ego.

AFI: This was the first independent film funded under the new Producer Offset* incentive, I believe through a deal with St George bank. What was your experience of that?

DC: It was a bloody nightmare, and I was just directing it. It was much worse for Vincent.  It wasn’t only the first film under the offset; it was right in the middle of the global financial crisis. The struggles went right up until filming with the whole project almost about to collapse, not because there were any structural problems but because the banks were panicking, they were literally worrying about their survival as institutions. And once the machine has started on a film it’s hard to stop it. That’s the good thing about having producers, they let you concentrate on the things you need to concentrate on, and a lot of the stuff you find out about afterwards, and you think ‘well, I’m glad I didn’t know that’. Sometimes you get protected, and that’s good because you can’t concentrate what you’re supposed to concentrate on and get your side of the job done.

Prime Mover is opening on October 29 in regional NSW – Orange, Wagga Wagga, Bathurst and of course Dubbo, where it was filmed. On November 12 the film will open in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, with Canberra and other centres to follow shortly.

For more information on Prime Mover, visit http://www.primemovermovie.com/