Maintaining his rage

So, you're a successful writer for the stage - where do you go to from there? If you're Tony McNamara, the answer is into film; and specifically into the strange and slightly surreal world of Placid Lake, the kid with hippie parents who wants to rebel by working in insurance. In The Rage in Placid Lake, McNamara crafts a world in which everything is upside down, in which conventional values are usurped and the act of buying a suit becomes a byword for revolution.

But for McNamara, it wasn't a case of creating his central character from personal experience. "It's kind of the opposite from my background," he says. "It partly came from cousins I had whose parents were a bit like that. I'd read some articles, and I noticed when I moved to the city from the country that kind of parent. You know, this idea that 'if I'm happy my kid will be happy'; so their happiness is more important than their children's."

But it wasn't entirely unrelated to McNamara's past. "I did work in an office," he admits, "and a lot of that stuff [in the office scenes] came from there."

McNamara is the first to acknowledge that The Rage in Placid Lake isn't your conventional Aussie comedy. "We've had nice coming-of-age stories like The Year My Voice Broke. But I wanted something that was entertaining and fun and really much more the Australia that I knew and grew up in than that big, broad suburban Aussie comedy."

But that same unconventional approach made it difficult to convince producers to back the project. "Everyone who read the script loved it," McNamara explained. "But we did run up against this resistance that it wasn't a crime caper, and it didn't have a stand-up comedian in it. You couldn't say it was like Crackerjack, for example. It just wasn't that kind of comedy."

Some suggested a path of least resistance. "Yeah, some people said, 'If you change this or make this more formulaic, it might go easier for you'. But I didn't want to make a conventional teen comedy, you know."

"So we just hung in there, and eventually we found the people who wanted to make the movie we wanted to make."

Once the film did come to be made, McNamara found it was a very different experience from his usual work as a writer for the theatre. "I'm used to sitting in my room by myself, writing away," he observed. "Then suddenly you're on a film set and you're in charge of like 85 people! And, as friends of mine who've made 2 or 3 movies say, you're always the least experienced person on the set; because the crew will be working on 3 movies this year."

The director decided that, being his first feature, he wouldn't go for anything too flashy. "I just concentrated on telling the story and focussing on the performances. I knew we could shoot it simply, but then give it a strong design look, and that would be enough. I didn't want to do something I wasn't capable of, with whiz-bang camera stuff that the movie doesn't call for."

Singer Ben Lee probably wouldn't be the first name to spring to mind for a leading man. But McNamara knew what he wanted for Placid, and Lee fit the bill. "I was looking" he says, "for this kind of idiosyncratic presence; and I was looking for someone who was fast-talking, 'cause I wanted to go against that slow-talking Aussie kid who can't articulate. I wanted someone strong, who knew who he was, but who was kind of odd and you could imagine people wanting to punch him."

"I saw Ben and he had this great presence about him, so I thought I'd see if he could act. Coming from the theatre, I'm very against non-actors; and casting a non-actor was the last thing I thought I'd do. So I asked Ben to audition, because if he couldn't hold his own against Miranda Richardson and Gary McDonald and Rose Byrne, he wouldn't work out. So he kept auditioning and he kept being fabulous."

Lee was cast opposite that legend of the British screen, Miranda Richardson, who plays his mother. Getting her involved in the project was, according to McNamara, as simple as her liking the script. "My producer asked me, if I could have anyone in the world for the role, who would I have - and I said Miranda, because I knew I needed someone who could be funny for three-quarters of the movie, then bring some emotion to bear. So we just sent her the script and her agent rang and said she loved the script. Then two days later she sent us a fax saying she'd do it."

And the experience of working with her was apparently just as straightforward. "She was fabulous," says McNamara. "For me as a director, it was like 'Take 1'… 'OK, thank you, that was perfect. Can you come back and do another scene later?'"

For all the talent on-set though, one of the biggest names to appear in the movie has one of the smallest parts - Terminator 3 star and Lee's real-life girlfriend Claire Danes. McNamara explains, "For a couple of weeks she was on set, and we just thought it would be fun really. So I just wrote this little bit for her."

With The Rage in Placid Lake having done the Australian film festival circuit, it next travels to Edinburgh for a screening at that prestigious event. European audiences, accustomed to recent Australian films packed with broad humour and larger-than-life performances, may find the film is a little left field. If that's the case, McNamara will be happy. As he explains it, "Rose Byrne said it was like American Beauty meets Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And I thought 'Yeah, that'd be good'".

David Edwards