Inexperience proves a virtue in bonding first-time director Stuart Beattie with his adolescent stars, writes Scott Kara.
Stuart Beattie may have worked on some of the biggest films in recent times but his first directing role on big budget Australian film Tomorrow, When The War Began was a daunting step up for the seasoned movie man.
For starters, he loved novelist John Marsden's 1993 book that the movie is based on, where a bunch of kids from a small remote town go on a weekend camping trip and return home to find a hostile foreign power has invaded. So he wanted to do the book justice.
And then he had to get to grips with the scale of the production, which is part action movie, part adventure tale.
"Taking all that on at once was a huge deal," says Beattie who was in Auckland last week with two of the film's stars, actress Caitlin Stasey (Neighbours) who plays heroine Ellie Linton, and former Home & Away heart-throb Lincoln Lewis as cowardly stud Kevin Holmes.
While it was Lewis who caused quite a heart-fluttering stir among girl fans at the New Zealand premiere last week, it's 20-year-old Stasey, who has a beautiful tom boy look about her, who's the star of the film.
Beattie knew from the moment he watched her audition tape that she was the one to play Ellie. "You always look at that thing going on behind the eyes and she just had it, where you are drawn right into her world and everything she cares about, you care about.
"And you just want to hang out with her and be her friend and that comes through on screen."
It was his young and inexperienced cast - or, as Stasey puts it, "a bunch of slackers just out of school" - who Beattie called on to support him in making the film a success. He remembers taking Stasey out for lunch early on and telling her, quite seriously, that they have to be in this film together right from the beginning to make it work.
"We've got to trust each other, fight side by side, us against them, and it was cool that way," says Beattie, who's screenwriting credits also extend to blockbuster series Pirates of the Caribbean, western 3:10 to Yuma, recent epic Australia, and it was his original screenplay Tom Cruise played out in Collateral.
"It was a lot of the cast's first feature film too, so it felt like we were all learning together, and figuring it out with each other," continues Stasey in her well-spoken, almost posh lilt.
"It allowed us to trust each other more, there was no superiority - and we're all in the trenches together," says Beattie.
Very much like the film, which is about teenagers stepping into the breach, taking back what's theirs, and fighting for survival.
"To me the film is about physical and spiritual survival. When everything turns to shit how do you cope? When you have to kill people when people are trying to kill you. And how do you survive in your soul? What the film is saying is you have to feel, you can't block off your feelings, and cry when you need to cry and love when you need to love even when all this madness is going on around you."
So while Tomorrow starts out, well, a little bit like a sunny day in Summer Bay and then becomes an Australian version of an American high school road trip, there is a brutal turning point where it morphs into an action movie and fight for survival yarn. The action and chase scenes are explosive and fiery, just like Hollywood, and there's everything from a dune buggy getting caught up in power lines and pinged against a wall, to rubbish truck and tanker-smashing action.
"We don't get to make many movies like that down here," says Beattie with a smile.
But what Lewis, who is the son of former Aussie league legend Wally Lewis, likes about TWTWB is that it's not too over-the-top.
"No offence to the typical Hollywood movies where the hero destroys an army of 500 million people with a bow and arrow. But it's not too overplayed."
Lewis' character Kevin is not initially given to heroics. He's the type of guy you dislike intensely, especially when he leaves his girlfriend Corrie and Ellie for dead. Nice one Kevin.
"I wanted to sink him so low, I wanted everyone in the cinema to punch him, and you get this sick feeling of, 'oh you mongrel'," he laughs.
But when Kevin realises his cowardly and selfish ways, he undergoes a transformation - as do all the characters throughout the course of the film.
"At the start they are just kids and they don't know anything about what's outside their town. By the end of it they are soldiers, and survivors," he says.
Even though Stasey's teenage character, Rachel Kinski, in Neighbours had streaks of rebellion, she's nothing on the gun-toting, tanker-driving teen in TWTWB.
"Ellie is an essential role model for lots of girls. I love that she's not a romantic heroine, and that she's not a passive, romantic heroine at that.
"John Marsden wrote these books because he wanted to show teenagers in a positive light, because every generation is branded as being lazy and useless, and we have all suffered through it. My parents do it to me occasionally, and I'm like, 'hey, I just worked for six months'," she laughs.
"But [the book and film shows] if teenagers are thrown into these intense circumstances, then they can step up and fulfil the roles of adults."
And yes, you can expect a sequel, or two.
What: Tomorrow, When The War Began, opens today
Who: Director Stuart Beattie, and stars Caitlin Stasey (Neighbours) and Lincoln Lewis (Home & Away)
Based on: The book by John Marsden, which was the first in a series of popular 1990s books
- TimeOut
