Most days, actor Eric Bana and director-producer Robert Connolly are at their office in Melbourne, a building they bought and renovated and where Connolly admits to being a bit slack about emptying the dishwasher. It’s not a formal partnership. They just enjoy having another Australian screen industry veteran within cooee.
“It’s a really lonely business when you’re not actually working. You’re really siloed,” says Bana. “There was never any pressure to make films together. We just enjoy each other’s company and having someone to bounce ideas off.”
Some time in the late 2010s, one such office conversation went something like this: “I’ve been asked to direct The Dry.”
“Really? My wife said that book’s great. Can I be in it?”
“Sure. Do you fancy a coffee?”
Fast forward a few years and one box office hit later, and today, the pair are in a Sydney hotel room, hunched over a single computer talking to the Listener. It’s the morning after the premiere of Force of Nature: The Dry 2.
When released in early 2021, despite cinemas still being no-go zones for many because of the pandemic, The Dry became a box office hit on both sides of the Tasman. This was helped by the presence of Bana, who was a comedy star at home in the 1990s before Hollywood came calling after his performance as a notorious Melbourne crook in Chopper.
For Bana, starring as Aaron Falk in a film based on the first of Jane Harper’s three novels that centre on a white-collar-crime federal detective, was a rare lead in an Australian production. Even rarer for him is starring in a sequel.
“It felt like a bit of a cheat. I’ve never been able to do a character in two films. So it was amazing to turn up and having, you know, already established and knowing the character, it enabled us to sort of concentrate on ‘where’s he at now and what’s his emotional journey?’”
In The Dry, Falk investigated a supposed murder-suicide – and his own past – on his own time in the drought-stricken town where he grew up in country Victoria. The performance of the first film demanded a sequel and another strong supporting cast which includes Jacqueline McKenzie, as Falk’s federal agent partner, Anna Torv and Deborra-Lee Furness.
It’s Connolly’s first sequel, too. The Dry was his most successful film in a career that has included everything from Balibo, his drama about Australian journalists murdered during the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, to hit family flick Paper Planes.
If Harper named The Dry for its parched setting, the wintry high-country rainforest of its screen sequel suggests it could have been called The Damp or The Moist. Falk must go bush after a woman goes missing on an outdoor pursuits corporate retreat in the central Victorian ranges.
Her disappearance from an all-women tramping party may have connections to an international money-laundering case he’s investigating in Melbourne.
“It’s one of those gifts from Jane’s books – they all deal with landscape as a character. That impacts on all elements of the film, psychological and practical, in terms of the narrative.
“It’s a survival film. We took these five women and put them in the middle of nowhere and it was kind of that visceral experience on camera.”
Falk has childhood memories of the area from a life-changing family tramping trip. Told in flashback on screen, the storyline wasn’t in the book, but it echoes how The Dry ran on parallel narratives of the present and the past.
Connolly wrote the scenes informed by his own memories of growing up in the Blue Mountains and camping trips with his parents. Harper was consulted on the addition and was fine with it, says Connolly.
“I love it as a device and I think it worked so well in The Dry. You want to deliver some elements that audiences loved in the first film, but you also want it to be surprising and new. Audiences really loved the way the past informed the present.”
Harper’s former life as a business journalist informed the corporate characters and Connolly’s first feature as a director was his own financial world thriller, The Bank.
But there are a fair few red herrings in those back-country rivers. Much of the story doesn’t actually focus on Falk. Instead, it focuses on the women workmates, who, at the beginning of the film, have emerged from the bush; one of them requires hospital attention and another is missing.
It’s quite a different film from the first. It’s been titled and sold as a sequel but like most screen detective mysteries, it’s its own self-contained story. Connolly says it’s fine to call it a sequel as he sees it as a continuation.
“What we committed to was a journey for Falk that is the evolution of him as a character, rather than, say, an Agatha Christie story where they’re almost interchangeable. James Bond doesn’t really change between James Bond films whereas I think for Aaron Falk, things happen to him in The Dry that set him in motion psychologically about questioning his life and the choices he’s made. Then the second film really goes deep into the grey area of policing. What is a crime? What is it like to devote your life to prosecuting a crime? That’s why it really is a psychological progression from the first film.”
Are they thinking yet of whether they should do Harper’s third and final Falk book, Exiles, set in the South Australian wine country (so a possible alternative title could be The Dry Red)?
“We never once discussed Force of Nature when we were preparing The Dry,” says Bana. “It was the same with this one. It just feels so presumptuous. I mean, in Australia how many films get a follow-up, and the characters get to be reprised?”
Well, yes, The Dry has joined an exclusive club where the membership includes Crocodile Dundee, Mad Max, Red Dog, Babe and Barry McKenzie.
And talking of Lucky Country cinematic greats, when the Listener talked to Bana for The Dry in 2021, we inquired if its backwater setting had him pondering the famous question posed by the greatest Australian film he’s ever been in. That is: “How’s the serenity?”
Yes, but not out loud, he said.
Good sport that he is, Bana, and Connolly, are amused by our second attempt at a Castle line of inquiry: Given they shot in the bush inland from Melbourne, did they shoot anywhere near Bonnie Doon, where the Kerrigan family had their humble lakeside holiday home and which is now an Airbnb rental with Bana’s character’s kick-boxing punchbag still hanging from the tree?
“No. We probably could have gone into the high country near there, but it wouldn’t have been as lush,” says Bana with a smile.
“This is a really particular kind of landscape that not many people from overseas would associate with Australia … one particular location near the Latrobe Valley looks like something out of the dinosaur age. So lush, so much fernery – and so many leeches.”
Force of Nature: The Dry 2 is in cinemas from February 8.
