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Going it alone
Morgan O'Neill is living the dream. He won $1 million on Project Greenlight Australia to make a feature film, and the result of that hard work and money is Solo. This month, the first-time feature director gets to finally see his project open on screens across the nation. The Blurb's David Edwards caught up with the wunderkind of Aussie cinema.
Q:
There’s been a fair bit of publicity about you winning Project
Greenlight; but I get the impression this film started long before that.
MO: Absolutely. I’d been writing the film since 2001, so it’s been ticking over for a while. I started writing it when I went to Adelaide with my then-girlfriend. She was an actress who got a job down there, so I perhaps naively went with her expecting to get a job myself – and it didn’t happen. So there I was in a city that I was completely unfamiliar with, didn’t know a single person outside my girlfriend. I had all these long days with nothing to do; and I started writing to celebrate the fact I’d gotten through that period in my life. So by the time the competition came around, it was in a pretty complete state.
Q: Being from Sydney, did you set out to make Solo as a tribute to that city?
MO: It’s a cliché I guess, but you write what you know. I was born and raised in Sydney, so it was always going to feature heavily in the narrative. It’s such a brassy city anyway, it seemed the perfect place for a crime thriller. What I was conscious of was that I wanted to make a film that was obviously and definitively Australian, but that if you didn’t know it was Sydney, you could be forgiven for thinking it was any big city anywhere in the world.
Q: In some recent Australian crime films, humour – whether it’s black humour or not – has played a big part. But you’ve shied away from that.
MO:
Yeah. Maybe it was almost a subconscious reaction to the fact that when
I was writing the film, there were only comedies on Australian screens.
There was a spate of these comedies, and it seemed like that was all we
were ever going to do. So for me, writing Solo, I wanted to go against
that. I’ve always preferred drama to comedy and realism to cartoonism,
or whatever the opposite of realism is. But there are still some very
black moments of humour in the film, which comes from the fact that criminals
seem to be very good storytellers; and there’s a bravado and a real
black joy or a gallows humour, that works in any crime story.
But although Solo is a dramatic telling, I think the crime stuff is secondary to this emotional journey that Barrett takes. I mean, he’s a guy who wakes up and realises that the sum total of his life doesn’t amount to much; and he’s the only one who can do something about it.
Q: Were you influenced by American film noir when you were making the film?
MO: Oh yeah, very much so. Early in the writing process, I sat down and
thought about how the film was going to look. Would it look kind of familiar?
Would people who loved film noir, who loved films from Chinatown to The
Professional, relate not just to the story, but to the tonality of it?
Some people would have shied away from a story with that kind of ambience;
but I went the other way and decided to embrace it. I mean, if you’re
going to pay homage to films, pay homage to great ones, you know. So if
you watch Solo and you’re reminded of Scorsese or Guy Ritchie or
Robert Towne, that’d be the greatest compliment you could pay me.
Q: Did the choice of a jazz score have a significance for you beyond the ambience it brings to the film?
MO: Oh yeah. Well, first and foremost, the score was written specifically for the film. As a jazz musician myself, to be part of producing an Australian jazz soundtrack that will be released in its own right, I think is terrifically exciting. It’s one of the strongest elements of the film – I think it’s beautiful. But I think it’s radically right for the genre of the film; that smoky jazz flavour is so resonant of so many amazing films that have gone before it.
Beyond that though, it’s important to me because Barrett wakes up on the first morning in the film and realises that he’s actually out of time. He’s completely out of step; he’s an old man in a young man’s world. For me, the soundtrack of his life was really important in telling that story, because jazz is a music from a bygone era. It was popular in the past, but isn’t anymore; and is seen by many as an anachronism – and that’s what Barrett is. I mean, all the way through the film, he’s reminded how old he is. So while the jazz sets the atmosphere, it also serves the role of setting Barrett apart.
Q: Tell me about Colin Friels; what's it like as a first-time filmmaker to get someone like that?
MO: Well, that in itself was one of the most exciting – and humbling – elements of this experience. The producers and I made a wish-list of people we wanted to be in it; and I guess the nature of a wish-list is that none of them will say yes. We sent the script out to a number of people, but Colin was the only one we sent it to for the part of Barrett.
I got a phone call from him a couple of days later, and he said “Mate, Colin Friels here. Come round for a beer.” So I went round to his place and he’s making a roast. Anyway, he said to me “Mate, I love it”; and I thought “I might be in here”. And he says, “But I can’t do it”. I said, “Look, Col, I sent it to you on spec and I didn’t think you’d read, so the fact you did is a real bonus. I understand you’re a recognisable face, and we don’t have much money: we’re paying everyone scale.” He says “It’s not the money – it’s just I don’t want to play a crooked cop”. I said “Ahhh, I think we might have have our lines crossed. The crooked cop is Vince Colosimo, he’s already agreed to do it. I want you to play the lead, Barrett”. So straight away he said he’s do it.
Q: Your leading lady, Bojana Novakovic, is something of a newcomer. How did you make her feel comfortable in such an experienced cast?
MO: Interestingly, on some levels, I didn’t. I was quite happy to have this ensemble cast of heavy-hitting Australian actors who’ve been around the traps and know their craft inside and out; and to have Bojana apart from that, because that’s her character. Billie’s naïvely wandering into something she doesn’t understand the complexities or heaviness of; and as an actress, that’s exactly what Bojana is doing too. So for me, it kind of worked out fine. I think that the fact she was the young green recruit really worked in our favour.
Solo opens nationally on July 6, 2006.
David Edwards
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Morgan
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Film: Solo