By Erin Free
In one of the wildest scenes in Abe Forsythe’s uproarious comedy, Down Under – which tracks car loads of fired up young men in the fevered aftermath of 2005’s Cronulla riots – legendary Australian actor, David Field (Chopper, Gettin’ Square, Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead) has an absolute field day playing a sexually ambiguous, fiercely deranged drug dealer who plies his trade in a palatial beachside home surrounded by pandering male Thai servants. Sure, there’s no “Jesse’s Girl” blaring on the soundtrack, but the whole scenario peels out like the film’s own version of Alfred Molina’s notorious cameo turn in Boogie Nights. On the other end of Field’s deranged tirades is Lincoln Younes’ Hassim, an otherwise sensible young guy caught up in a whole rumble of trouble, largely caused by his friend, Nick (Rahel Romahn), who has fronted David Field’s drug dealer looking to buy a gun.
“We did that scene on the first two days of the shoot,” writer/director, Abe Forsythe, laughs to FilmInk. “There were scheduling issues, so it needed to be that way. David is just so deranged in that role, and he’s never played a character like that before. That was going to be the fun of it: getting someone familiar that is intense but that can apply that to a role that we haven’t seen him in before. That scene was always intended in the script to be slightly above all the other scenes. I wanted the audience at that point to be thinking, ‘What the fuck is this movie? What are we in for?’ But starting the shoot with those days was hard, because I wanted to push it in this area, but I still had to work out where everything was below it in terms of the tone…as opposed to doing that first, and then just amping this scene up a little. It was fucking hard, but I’m really happy with what we ended up with. It was very strange to shoot a scene at the beginning of filming that was so unlike anything else that we shot.”
The entire scene is pitched at a strange, funny, and very unsettling level, and its stands loopily as one of the film’s highlights. “That strange tone has a lot to do with the acting and the on-screen performance, but there’s also a hell of a lot that the sound design is doing in that scene that people might not be aware of. You can hear the other people in the room reacting to what’s happening. In a way, we just started with the hardest scene and then moved on. It was just very, very surreal shooting that.”
And has young actor, Lincoln Younes, ever done anything as weird as that scene? “No,” the actor laughs. “I don’t think I realised how weird it would be with 50 extras all staring at me and David Field telling me to take off my pants. It’s kind of a highlight reel.”
Down Under is released in cinemas on August 11. Click for our review, our interviews with the film’s stars, Lincoln Younes and Justin Rosniak, and director, Abe Forsythe, and to see the first four minutes of the film.
