The films of Australian director Justin Kurzel have often been grim, violent portraits of male brutality. His 2011 debut, Snowtown, was about the 1990s South Australian serial murders identified with the titular town, while 2021′s Nitram was inspired by the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania.
On a happier note, he also put on screen the most notorious Aussie criminal of them all – Ned Kelly – in a film adaptation of Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning The True History of the Kelly Gang. The book gave Kurzel the opportunity to rework the Aussie Robin Hood mythology of the iron-clad bushranger in a mad, punk-rock kind of way.
Now, having committed one great Booker-winning Australian novel to the screen, Kurzel has delivered another with Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It’s also another quintessential slab of historical Oz-lit. And it’s one that gives rising Australian star Jacob Elordi (Euphoria, Saltburn, Priscilla) his first major screen role at home. More on him later.
Tasmanian novelist Flanagan was inspired by his own father’s experience as a Japanese prisoner of war, and his book won the Man Booker Prize in 2014. Mostly, his story followed the fictitious character of Dorrigo Evans, a medical officer among the Australian POWs working and dying on the Burma “death railway”. It was told in three interwoven timelines – one about Dorrigo’s summer affair with his uncle’s young wife Amy before shipping out; his capture after the fall of Singapore leading to his hellish internment; the venerated senior surgeon and national figure looking back at it all 40 or so years later.
After many years of development, Kurzel and his regular screenwriter Shaun Grant took on Flanagan’s juggling act of memory. They have made an epic but intimate five-part television series of it, one that was met with acclaim when it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February ahead of its streaming debut this month.
“The one thing that Richard said from the beginning was, ‘I don’t mind how you approach it, but the one thing that’s really important to me is just the structure of it,’” says Kurzel. “The way in which the scenes effortlessly go back and forth in time. That sort of tapestry is really important to how the book is experienced, and he would love to have that feel in the series. That’s something that we were very loyal to.”
Kurzel is talking to the Listener via Zoom from the home in Tasmania he shares with his wife, actor Essie Davis, and twin daughters.
Davis, who has a role in Narrow Road as she did in Nitram and Kelly Gang, is the local with family ties to the place they shifted in the late 2010s. Much of Kurzel’s early conversations with Flanagan about adapting the book took place in their respective weekend shacks on Bruny Island, south of Hobart. Reading the latest Flanagan novel had long been a Christmas holiday tradition in the extended family, he says. He’d read Narrow Road when it first came out. The following year, Kurzel and Davis were living in London when Flanagan won the Booker, and attended a celebration dinner for him the next night.
Kurzel had other reasons for agreeing to adapt the book. Australian military films, such as Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant and Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, had a profound effect on him as a kid, he says. “Especially Gallipoli – I watched that film not that long ago with my kids, and I was quite shocked how moved I was, but also by how moved my young daughters were by that film. It just has a point of view in it and a spirit in it and a beauty in it that’s just sort of staggering, still.”
Additionally, his grandfather had been one of the “Rats of Tobruk,” the Australian troops in the garrison that held out against German forces in the siege of the Libyan port city.
“I was just always interested in the shadow of that war, or both wars, really, but especially World War II, just because my grandfather was part of it. You were always sort of sneaking in and looking at the medals when he was out. I remember having to go into the RSL [Returned and Services League of Australia] and say, ‘Hey, we’re waiting outside for you’, and I could feel he was stuck in another place. There was always something about him that was distant and far off.
“That sense of history and understanding of it was like one degree [removed]. It was in the living room, at my grandparents’ place, every flight. Whereas now with my daughters, you really feel that it’s further away. There was a sort of sense that we’ve got to keep understanding and reflecting and telling these stories, because they have shaped this country enormously and I’m aware of that legacy, and wanting to make sure that it sort of continues to be remembered.”
But Narrow Road isn’t just a war story, it’s a love story, something that hasn’t really figured in Kurzel films before. His only devoted couple has possibly been the Macbeths in his 2015 film of the Scottish play, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.
How was it finding his romantic side as a director with the story’s summertime fling between Elordi’s Dorrigo and Odessa Young’s Amy? “I loved it. I just adored it. Yeah, I have made films about outliers and people on the fringes, and there’s definitely a kind of masculine point of view with a lot of those, but this was the first time I was genuinely building a very clear relationship and love story between two people. To be honest, the sections with Jacob and Odessa, I could have kept on filming and filming those.
“I’m always desperately worried about love stories becoming too forced and I think Jacob and Odessa were as well, and we just sort of found a very loose and fluid way to bring them together and for it to feel playful and alive and spontaneous.”
The sunny seaside affair under the South Australian sun is in stark contrast to the brutal chapters on the railway, as emaciated POWs suffer at the hands of their Japanese captors. Much of the cast playing the prisoners underwent managed diets to make them believably gaunt. The series might be set on the same line as the 1957 POW classic The Bridge on the River Kwai, but you won’t find any plucky captives whistling Colonel Bogey.
“What I really responded to in the book is that it was something achingly true. You could tell that the writing had come from real life experience. I also admired the love and care that Dorrigo had in this impossible quest of trying to keep all these men alive, while at the same time you’re being asked to kind of choose which ones lived or died. That was at the heart of what the tension is within the story.”
The project finally got off the ground after Kurzel approached Elordi about playing the young Dorrigo in the wake of his star-making turn in HBO teen drama Euphoria, and before his more recent roles in Saltburn and Priscilla (as Elvis Presley), which have only increased his pin-up status. The Brisbane-born actor had headed straight to the US after drama school.
“When we sat down and first talked about this series, I was blown away by Jacob’s knowledge of Australian film. It’s a huge love of mine, so to be able to talk fluidly to him about different Aussie films from years past was fantastic. He was desperate to come back and do something here.”
Finding a 40-years-later version of Dorrigo took Kurzel all the way to Irish actor Ciarán Hinds. “When we cast Jacob, there was a kind of stoicism and a kind of dignity that we were looking for with Dorrigo, and Ciarán was someone that Shaun and I had always thought about.”
Now that he’s made a good fist out of two great Australian novels, are there any others in his sights?
“I don’t know. There are many fantastic ones. But it’s a real commitment to adapt. It’s just such an anxiety-riddled kind of process because you are working under something so great.
“There are a few there I really, really love, but I think with any novel it’s about what’s the ‘in’? If I try to service the entirety of the novel, it’s just not going to work. So, I always look at a novel and go, ‘What’s the thing that’s going to make it its own thing and cinematic, and what’s the point of view that’s going to drive us through?’
“I love Australian literature. Maybe there’s something that I suddenly get extremely excited by, but yeah, not at the moment.”
The Narrow Road to the Deep North begins on Prime Video on April 18.
