By John Mangan
Jay Ryan, Luke Arnold and Bella Heathcote star in Scrublands.Credit: Stan
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The story starts with a bang. A priest in his white and purple robes strides out of a country-town church with a rifle – yes, a priest with a rifle – and starts shooting parishioners, leaving five of them dead. Father Byron Swift is then himself shot dead in self-defence by the local copper. Thus begins the saga of Scrublands, a new mini-series set in regional Australia – and obviously there’s no mystery about whodunit.
Jay Ryan stars as the gun-toting Father Byron Swift in Scrublands.Credit: Stan
In fact, at first there’s no mystery about anything at all. The priest had recently been accused of paedophilia, and the official explanation is that he got himself killed rather than face up to the crime. But then, a year later, burnt-out Sydney Morning Herald journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in town to write a perfunctory story about how the town is faring 12 months on, and starts to smell a rat.
Based on former journalist Chris Hammer’s best-selling novel of the same name, Scrublands is a thriller set in a remote country town, Riversend, which has been battered by years of drought, fire and flood, is reeling from a terrible act of violence, and harbours a profound distrust of outsiders generally, and anyone in the media specifically.
Producer David Redman, whose credits include Charlie & Boots and Strange Bedfellows, says distilling the novel, a whydunit rather than a whodunit, into a four-part series is no mean feat. “It’s amazing how much story you can tell in four episodes,” he says. “It’s pacy. No one’s going to fall asleep in this one, particularly not after the opening scene. It’s such an iconic and unusual way to start, as far as making sure you have an engaged, attentive audience.”
Writer Felicity Packard (Underbelly, Janet King) agrees. “The opening scene is pretty much what takes place in the novel. That’s a really powerful way to start. You’re not hiding your light under a bushel, it’s right up there in episode one, scene one.”
Luke Arnold plays burnt-out Sydney Morning Herald journalist Martin Scarsden in Scrublands.Credit: Sarah Enticknap/Stan
Director Greg McLean has form when it comes to filming Australian crime drama. His CV includes the legendary outback horror flick Wolf Creek. Packard enthuses about his vision. “He has such a strong idea of what he’s doing. He’s already got the edit in his head, so he know what he’s shooting for. He doesn’t just shoot the shit out of things, he knows what he wants.”
The story revolves around two men, the charismatic and dedicated but mysterious priest Byron, played by Jay Ryan (The Creamerie, Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake) and the jaded, frustrated journalist Martin, played by Luke Arnold (Michael Hutchence in INXS biopic Never Tear Us Apart). Linking the two is Mandy Bond, played by Bella Heathcote (The Man in the High Castle, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows), the beguiling owner of the local bookstore-cafe who has a few secrets of her own.
Bella Heathcote in Scrublands.Credit: Narelle Portanier
It was McLean who introduced Heathcote to the project. “I’d worked with him on Bloom [with Bryan Brown and Jacki Weaver] a couple of years ago and he and I were going to do another project together and that didn’t happen sadly, and he said, ‘I’ve got this other great project.’ He sent me the first two episodes, and I was hooked, I wanted to know what happened next.”
Heathcote’s character, who had studied at uni in Melbourne before returning to look after her dying mother, fascinated the actor. “Mandy just seems so tough and cool. No bullshit, the way she carries herself through life, the way she interacts with people in the town. I just really admired her. So often she has those quips I wish I had in any given situation!”
Instinctively playing her cards close to her chest, Mandy has to decide if she can trust the journalist who’s just shown up in town. Martin, meanwhile, is reassessing his commitment to unearthing the truth after an investigative story that spun horribly out of control.
“Martin is someone who was jet setting around the world righting wrongs, bringing justice to the world,” Arnold says. “This truth is so important that you know, if I’m going to hurt a few people along the way, it’s worth it if the story gets out.
“There’s been the tragedy of a massacre happening here and the media stomping around, and is Martin going to contribute to that, or through setting the story straight can he help give this town a new future?”
The other main character in the story is the fictional town of Riversend. Film crews worked on location around Maldon, near Bendigo, and at the more remote Nyah West, up in the Mallee. “The advantage we have over the book is we can show things,” says Redman. “So visually, I don’t know if it’s literally a thousand words per image but we are definitely able to express the sense of isolation very quickly through what we show.”
The town author Chris Hammer created is inherently cinematic, Arnold says. “The idea of the kind of isolated town that was really wrecked by the event, picking up the pieces, so lent itself to screen”, Arnold says. “These key moments, these key locations, the bookstore-cafe being the centrepiece for a bit of romance.
“This was a beautiful country town, there was the chance for a flourishing community, but what happens when a town gets tarred with this, all people now think of when they hear Riversend is this awful massacre. If you’re a business owner, if you’re a local, if your family has grown up here what does this do to yourself, your future, your investment in your community and your family?”
There’s always the temptation, Redman says, to make films in studios, citing his movies Charlie and Boots and Strange Bedfellows, both starring Paul Hogan, as examples that benefited hugely from breaking out and working on location. On this production, recent floods gave them plenty of detail to work with. “In Baringhup [near Maldon] there was a caravan park we were using for some of the scenes. In October last year it was 2 metres under water so all the caravans were ruined, these were people’s houses. We could’ve created that visually on a backlot somewhere, but you wouldn’t have got the same feeling that these are people’s homes.”
Also, filming on location can produce moments of visual serendipity. Packard recalls a scene where Martin is talking to the sympathetic local cop Robbie (played by Adam Zwar). “At the end of the scene Robbie’s left sitting on a park bench. Greg McLean didn’t call ‘cut’ straight away, just waited to see what the actors might do. The actors didn’t do anything, but a flock of 200 corellas came swooping down and circled around him and then took off. The whole crew just gasped.”
With its dramatic scenery and the increasingly murky activities of the townsfolk, the series has all the hallmarks of an Australian thriller, but still, the heroes, villains and victims of this tale are not the usual suspects. “There’s an awful lot of stories about young women being killed,” says Packard. ”Not that it’s great to see five men being shot dead, but we’re doing something quite different there, it’s a different sort of crime.”
Scrublands premieres on Stan on November 16.
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