Glendyn Ivin

Film: Last Ride
Releasing in cinemas: 2 July 2009
Website: lastridemovie.com

A case of light and shade

Glendyn Ivin shot to prominence in 2003 when he won a swag of awards – including the Palme d’Or in Cannes - for his short film Cracker Bag. Six years down the track, he’s opening his first feature film, Last Ride.

Based on the book The Last Ride by Denise Young, the film had a rather unusual genesis.

“Nick Cole, the producer of the film, was looking for a film to make and he optioned the book before it was even published,” Ivin explains.“Then he got [screenwriter] Mac Gudgeon involved to do a couple of drafts [of the script]. Nick did a lot of TV, and he looked at it and decided this wasn’t a film that he would direct, and that might be a good film for a first-time director. So he sent it to me, and after Cannes I was approached about a lot of scripts, but I was really focussed on doing my own thing. So I got this script from my agent saying that I should really read this, so I did and within 10 or 15 pages I was in love with it – and haven’t fallen out of love with it yet; and that was 5 years ago.”

The film follows a father Kev (Hugo Weaving) and his son Chook on an epic journey through the Australian outback. Their relationship isn’t an easy one, due mainly to Kev’s past. That posed its own particular challenges in translating the script to the screen.

“I never wanted to make a character who was just a dickhead,” Ivin says frankly.

“I mean, I never wanted to make Kev, the father character in the film, this one-dimensional ‘bad dad’. When we approached Hugo it was very much in mind that we wanted to create this very human character. Even though he’s incredibly flawed, you get this sense of how he could be like that and particularly towards the end there’s this kind of empathy towards him. It’s a really hard thing to do because he does some pretty horrible things and yet I think we have been able to craft – with Hugo’s performance – a character who does some bad things, but there’s something else going on there; something that resonates.”

One of the more striking elements of the film is its use of the harsh but picturesque outback landscape. To achieve the integration between the story and the country involved a lot of work.

“When Mac and I started working on the film, we did the trip from Broken Hill and beyond; and while I love those broad flat landscapes, I thought it didn’t have enough variation for what we wanted to do in the film. So then we started looking in South Australia and went on quite a few 8-day drives through every road and dusty track and I guess I fell in love with that landscape and I decided to make the film a kind of love letter to this country – but not in a really postcard kind of way” he says.

“I mean, people talk about the spaces and how beautiful they are, but I feel they’re very mixed up into the story and the characters. In the final edit, we actually went through and took out anything that didn’t seem like it was pushing the story forward, so we edited out a lot of the ‘glamour shots’”.

He even went to the extent of “auditioning” the locations. “There was a process of going out and photographing these places and then working out how we could fit them into the film,” he explains.

“There are lots of places in the film that weren’t in the script because I wanted to find a way to get them into the story. Some scenes that take place in a particular place in the film that are different from the places in the script. So there was an auditioning process for the places as much as the actors.”

While many films make use of particular places as critical elements in their stories, Ivin was careful to make sure his film spoke for itself.

“One of the films that made me fall in love with cinema as a teenager was Paris, Texas and that film was always about the landscape for me. But we wanted to make our own statement about the countryside; so we ended up looking at a lot of paintings more than anything else. Hans Heysen of course – the stuff he painted in the Flinders Ranges was just incredibly beautiful. When I saw those paintings, I thought the landscape really had an effect on him, and I felt that some kind of effect. There was also a Tasmanian painter who does a whole lot of stuff at dusk, and it’s all about the light. I guess doing these drives I got a sense of these places at all different times of day.”

While the locations might be naturally spectacular, Ivin builds on their beauty by making inventive and often striking use of the outback light.

“The use of the light is a technical exercise”, he says, “but it’s also a constraint that you put on yourself.”

“I mean, one of the good things about film is that if you don’t get it, you can come back and try it again. Shooting stuff at ‘time of day’ as we call it, is something you have to get right the first or second time, and I think it puts everyone into a very different state of mind. The actors, for example, know that it’s almost like a stage play then. In the last scene, it’s almost real time; and in that 10 minute period we go from pre-dawn to the sun coming up. Working with light is almost a quantitative thing – you only have so much of it so everyone focuses in a different way. But I love it – dawn and dusk are such transitional periods – and I hope that comes through in the film.”

When it came to casting Last Ride, Ivin scored a major coup by luring Matrix and Lord of the Rings star Hugo Weaving to play the lead role of Kev.

“Hugo was always in the mix,” he confides. “I mean, it wasn’t like I was desperate to work with a big-name actor, but in putting out the photos of all these great actors we had – and some lesser known ones as well – Hugo’s photo just kept coming to the top. So we explored all the options, but in hindsight of course there was no other choice. But when you send a role to someone like Hugo and they say yes, you just have to go with it. We sent him the script and within two weeks he told us he was in.”

“My approach always was to take what was on the page and breathe as much life into it as possible, and I think Hugo responded to that approach. He was one of the most generous, patient and dedicated people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.”

When it came to the other side of the equation however – finding someone to play Kev’s son Chook, it was rather different.

“The casting process for Chook was as much about finding a 10-year-old that you could trust your film with as finding an actor,” Ivin says. “Thankfully, most kids have never done a day’s work in their life, let alone be thrust into this 6-week intensive experience. There’s always the danger that you’ll cast a kid and after 3 days they’ll say ‘I’m sick of this’. But I got a really strong feeling with Tom when I first saw him in the screen test was that he was really grounded. The first thing I did was to ask to meet his parents and see where he lived. He was the youngest of four kids, and the others were mostly grown-up, so he’d spent a lot of time around adults which was important. Towards the end of the shoot when we were getting tired and a bit over-it, he was getting more enthusiastic. He’s just one of those kids – he could be the next Billy Elliot.”

With the film opening around Australia on July 2, Ivin is confident the film will go onto bigger things.

“We know it’s going to have an international life,” he explains. “While everyone wants their film to be seen as widely as possible, we know it plays really well with an art-house audience, so it’s about taking it out there as much as we can. Having someone like Hugo in it really helps as well, because people know him and the fact that he delivers such an incredibly performance will help. I mean, everyone loves Hugo Weaving.”

David Edwards

Send us your feedback on this review