The Boys are Back: An Interview with Scott Hicks

By Rochelle Siemienowicz

October 2009

Picture a beautiful beach with the sun low in the sky. Aussie families play cricket on the sand and splash in the gold-tipped waves.  Now imagine a four-wheel-drive cruising along the shoreline disrupting the peace. Wait a minute, there’s a six-year-old boy clinging to the bonnet of the car! He’s laughing crazily as his father grins at him from behind the wheel. 

This is the opening scene of Scott Hicks’ latest feature, The Boys are Back. It sets the film up wonderfully: the beauty of the South Australian landscape, the handsome daredevil parent (played by rugged British star Clive Owen) and the ever-so-slightly endangered child (Nicolas McAnulty). Based on a memoir by journalist Simon Carr, it’s a tale of a modern workaholic who is thrown into the deep end of fatherhood when his wife suddenly dies, leaving him awash in grief, but with an urgent need to reconnect with his two sons, the young Artie, and the teenage Harry (George MacKay) who lives with his mother in England.

Director Scott Hicks (right) is no stranger to nuanced stories about children, parents and the complications of balancing work and family. In his Oscar-winning Shine (1996) Hicks portrayed a gifted artist, David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush) damaged by an authoritarian father. The sweet Hollywood romance No Reservations (2007) had Catherine Zeta-Jones playing an obsessive chef reassessing her priorities when her orphaned niece comes to live with her. Even the documentary GLASS: a portrait of Philip in twelve parts is a revealing study of a famous composer struggling to balance creativity with his noisy brood of youngsters.

The Boys are Back is a film that’s sure to strike a chord with parents everywhere, particularly men who juggle children from different relationships on opposite sides of the world. This is a landscape of airports, laptops, mobile phones and tree-change commuting. It’s also a story ripe with co-production potential  – Australian location, UK star, international director. And in this particular case it’s a marriage that doesn’t feel forced.

Here we talk to Hicks about filming in South Australia, about working with Clive Owen, and about that difficult and rather loaded term: ‘commercial filmmaking’.

AFI: One of the things I love about this film is its portrayal of a very modern kind of Australian family – globally dispersed, living in this kind of beautiful rural winegrowing region yet by no means isolated from the city or the world at large.

Scott Hicks: Yes it’s a very powerful idea, that Joe can be this highly successful sports writer with all this travel and the different environments he moves in, and yet he chooses to live in this rural paradise, as it were. In fact in that part of the world where we shot – about 45 minutes out of Adelaide – there are people who do exactly that. They commute from there out into the world. And in some ways that’s precisely what I do. I have a vineyard that’s quite close to the vineyard that’s featured in the film, and in fact some of those scenes of Joe and Artie on the beach are shot from the balcony of my beach house. So those are the places I retreat to when I come back from my filmmaking ventures around the world.

AFI: The film wasn’t always going to be set in South Australia was it?

SH: It was a wonderful accident. It was originally going to be shot in Queensland, and the writer had made it a contrast between tropical Australia and England. And then the South Australian government really got wind of the film and wanted to bring me back to make a film in South Australia so they put up further financial incentives to the producers, and lo and behold we shifted the production, and it was just wonderful from my point of view because I felt completely relaxed, and like I understood that world and I knew how I could stage it and set it in that environment. Which just happens to be the place that I love.

AFI: One of the real drivers of drama in this film, and in some of your other films, is the conflict between work and family life.

SH: I think it’s one of the great issues of today. Particularly as our lives become busier and busier.  I grew up in the 60s and early 70s when we were promised that the big challenge of the future would be how would you cope with your leisure because everything would get so automated and life would become so easy and you’d only be working 2-3 days a week, so what are you going to do with the rest of your life? What happened to that promise? You know, everything got faster and busier and we can accomplish more, and yet we just seem to have to do more all the time. And in that process the balance with family and the other facets of life gets challenged. And yes, it became, unwittingly, a central theme in Glass. Or an important idea in that film. [Initially] I thought I was making a documentary about a man who had everything in balance, only to find that like everybody, he struggles to achieve that. And then in The Boys are Back, the drama is such that it takes a shattering loss for Joe to realise his life is unbalanced and that he has to either change it or risk losing his son. And so he sets about that process.

AFI: If you go to an airport at the start or end of the school holidays you see all these children saying hello and good bye to their fathers.

SH: That’s right. You realise there’s a whole stratum of our population and culture that’s wrestling with these very difficult emotional issues constantly. And I think that is the surprise impact of the film’s emotion. Joe’s imperfect struggle to piece together his family from the different bits and pieces that he’s got scattered about.

AFI: I’m sure you won’t be offended if I say that this film seems commercial in the way that it takes the audience on a particular kind of satisfying emotional journey.

SH: I hope I’m a commercial filmmaker. I make films that have something in them that speaks to me personally. I don’t just sort of pick up any old thing and say “this will be commercial” and do it. I take films that will speak to me personally. But I hope to engage an audience with them. And I think you know, if we are to grow and continue to grow as an industry, there has to be a stratum of filmmaking that does just that, that works on a scale that will connect with a large audience. There was a very interesting piece by Rachel Ward in the Sydney Morning Herald. A plea for a free kick for the sort of niche Australian film and you know that’s fair enough to say that. But at the same time I think filmmakers have to have a certain responsibility to reach out to an audience as well, or accept that they remain a niche. And there’s nothing wrong with that. When Shine was made it was seen as a niche film. It was first reviewed by an Australian who rather patronized it with a sort of “oh, it should do alright in arthouses” and of course it became a sort of box office colossus because it crossed over. It wasn’t made with commercial aims in mind, it just happened to connect with an audience really powerfully. I think we need to make films that will connect with audiences. And we are. I think that Rachel made a wonderful film [Beautiful Kate]. It’s getting its turn. There is an audience for that film. And Samson & Delilah, is just an incredible film, so it has been a great vintage this year.

AFI: I suppose one of the things I meant when I called the film ‘commercial’ is that it is the kind of movie that will appeal to lots of people, and have them crying and then laughing at different points. It grabs you emotionally right from the very first scene.

SH: Yes, but you look at The Boys are Back and it’s not a plot-driven film. It’s character driven and it’s really a chamber piece about the relationships, the interconnected relationships, and the notion of family and what is family and all those sort of themes that are not overtly commercial at all. In the American context the film has to be handled very very carefully because it’s not sort of a shoe-in. It’s not formulaic. The word commercial can be overused in its context because it’s not designed quite like that. What was wonderful to me was seeing it for the first time yesterday with an Australian audience, which was hundreds of exhibitors at the movie convention in Queensland and feeling the connection they had with the film – their laughter, their tears – hard-boiled people weeping on my shoulder afterwards. Fantastic. And I’ve seen it with a number of American audiences in New York we had a very successful preview there, but it’s still an unusual film for Americans to connect with. If there’s any complaints about it it’s that there’s not enough plot. Or not enough action. It’s not about that. So you see it’s not commercial in America but with luck and good management it might cross over.

AFI: Can you tell us about the process of working with Clive Owen on this role?

SH: Well I got Clive involved very soon after I got involved and we didn’t realise it was going to be several years before we got to actually shoot the film. Both of us, our schedules were just conflicting. But during that period of four or five years, between 2004 and now, we met a number of times and sat in hotel rooms and went through every line of the script and in that process got a very clear understanding. We got our processes in sync. Any struggles that we had were done in those rooms. They weren’t left to be sorted out on the set. We knew when we went in [to shoot] that we had interrogated every line of the script and that was hugely valuable.

We were completely in sync with each other about how Joe should be, keeping his rough edges and keeping the flaws and keeping the abrasiveness and sometimes shocking sort of lack of feeling for Artie, which is so potent. That’s why it’s a real emotion because  it’s refusing to be cute. So going back to your comment about it being commercial, we actually avoided what would probably be more commercial choices. It’s not Mrs Doubtfire or Mr Mom! It’s like a very flawed attempt to create a new set of rules for bringing up boys. And for me some of the strongest moments in the film are where Joe is kind of hard-hearted towards Artie. It sort of shocks. But at the same time you know he’s struggling because of grief. He’s wrestling with these emotions that you witness and haven’t gone away.

AFI: Can you tell us how you first came to the world of filmmaking?

SH: I went to Flinders University and I studied drama, and that was where things happened because I’d never considered filmmaking. I had never thought about it. But it happened to be a small part of this drama course and it just sort of took over my life really, as the most interesting thing to do and so that’s really where it began. It was a very exploratory kind of course. It wasn’t strictly instructional. It was more imaginative and I have appreciated that more as I’ve gone on. I had to learn the technicalities of it later. I would rather it that way around. My eyes were opened to areas of filmmaking that I might not otherwise have discovered, and it meant that I discovered European cinema really, when I was 16 and 17. I feasted on that. And that became my film school in a way. Sitting in the dark. At a fairly late age too, because I had very little experience of cinema or TV for that matter. I grew up in Kenya and there was no TV and very little cinema. And I went to boarding school and it was the same story. So I was audio visually deprived.

AFI: Over the past few years you’ve been directing a lot of commercials. Has this been a useful creative exercise and has it changed the way you work?

SH: It helps to hone your skills, sure. Telling a story in 30 seconds is a huge discipline. It’s a really tough one. It’s a really good one to learn, and it does sharpen your eye. I work with really smart people and the best cinematographers in the world and the best designers in the world, and that forms terrific relationships and you get to try things out that you might not get an opportunity to in the day-to-day processes of making a film. It’s really kept things alive for me.

AFI: And what are you working on now?

SH: I’ve got a couple of scripts that I’m involved with and that producers are working with me towards getting financed and it’s a very tough environment for everybody – particularly for – again back to the word commercial. Right now anything that smacks of drama is just impossible to finance, as opposed to action, popcorn, cartoon big event-oriented filmmaking on a colossal scale, or TV remakes or things with a perceived marketing plan that drives it. By comparison the work I’m doing doesn’t fall into that category at all. Because I continue to be drawn to stories that are about emotional drama, character-driven stories. And it’s just not easy to get finance for that at the moment.

AFI: Thanks for talking with us. We hope to see you at the 2009 Samsung Mobile AFI Awards Ceremony in December.

The Boys are Back releases nationally on November 12. Click here to learn more about the film.