by Dov Kornits
“I actually bought a house in LA in 2004,” Gregor Jordan tells us on the line from Los Angeles during lockdown. “This has been my base. Having said that, I’ve lived in a lot of different places. When I was doing Dirt Music, I did this TV show for Channel 7 directly before it [Australian Gangster], so I ended up being in Australia throughout the year that time. But this is pretty much our home base, although we’re looking at how we’re going to get the hell out of here right now to be honest. It’s just so bizarre. It’s a very weird state of affairs. Look, it’s weird for everyone in the world, but it’s just a horror show here.”
The ‘we’ is his partner, actor Simone Kessell, and their kids.
“I think everyone’s really been forced to look at themselves and look at their close family,” he continues about his experience during COVID-19. “It’s been a pretty cathartic experience in a lot of ways. And especially considering when I was doing Dirt Music, I was away from my family so much and that was really, really difficult. So, I’m extremely grateful to be able to be with them all the time now, but in terms of how we’re going to manage the future, we’re just trying to work out what we’re going to do. We’re definitely looking at how we’re going to get back to Australia and maybe try and spend time in Australia as much as possible.
“In the grand scheme of things, I’m actually reasonably fortunate in that I had some stuff on the boil to write and so throughout the whole lockdown, I’ve been writing pretty much every day. And in terms of the medium term future, probably the best places in the world to potentially mount production is Australia and New Zealand. So, in that sense, fortunate in that there’s a chance the stuff I’ve been developing might actually be able to go into production later in the year. Touch wood, we’ll see how it goes.”
Were you a director for hire on Dirt Music?
Yeah, I was actually. I’d met the producer [Finola Dwyer] at a dinner party that I had in Cape Town in South Africa of all places. We had a mutual friend in Sam Neill, and he brought Finola along and we just got along well, and started chatting and swapping emails. And then she asked me if I’d be interested in reading the script and I said, “Hell, yeah.” I’d read the book already and I was a big fan of it. And I was very impressed with the screenplay, just the writer [Jack Thorne] had done such a brilliant job in terms of corralling that massive, sweeping epic of the novel and its unusual story. He found a way to put it into screenplay form and have it all make relative sense, and captured all the mood and the sense of the place, and all the emotion as well. And it was a really beautifully written piece. So, I pitched for the job and luckily got it.
Was there a certain take on the material that you pitched, which you think they liked?
I think so. Look, I think there’s the actual story, which is a really unusual story. It’s a very unusual setting but the things about it that really spoke to me was the sense of the place and that’s something that’s very evocative in all of Tim Winton’s writing. Just the sense of the place and the state of Western Australia, but this one in particular is very visceral in terms of how it responds to landscape and the ocean, and the vegetation and the smells, and the heat and all these natural elements play a big part in how the story works.
I’ve always been quite an outdoorsy person, I’m a surfer and someone who’s grown up in the ocean. And I had a real understanding of that element of the story. And I’m assuming that Finola wanted an Australian who really understood the natural landscape and how that affects the culture, and how that affects people’s mood.
It’s not to say that brilliant films about the Australian landscape haven’t been done by people from overseas, but I think that was something that I put in my pitch document for the job that resonated. But also, I think I really understood the emotion and also the sense of loss as well. It is a very tragic story about a man who has lost everything and lost people who are very close to him. And I think until you lose someone very close to you, it’s hard to really comprehend what that is like. And also, just having my own children helped me understand elements of the story. I remember reading the book when it first came out and I appreciated it on a much different level than what I do now.
Breath worked at the box office in Australia, but not necessarily internationally. Were the producers leaning on you at to make it as broad as possible?
Well, look, irrespective of Breath, that’s something that we took some notice of, but it’s not like it ruled our lives in any way. Simon Baker is a friend of mine and he gave me a whole lot of advice on how to shoot in Western Australia, and we used some of the same crew. There was a relationship between the two films and obviously the Tim Winton link is a big one. But having said that, because the film was set up at Channel 4, which is a UK company, there was always a desire to try and make the film feel international that would work on an international stage. Obviously, we want Australians to love it, because that’s extremely important because it’s about them. But also, we want the film to be able to play in Norway, or in Argentina, or anywhere, and whether or not we were broadening it in any real sense… I suppose we were. We were trying to focus on things that would be universal, like try to make it true and feel real to the place, but at the same time making a film that would just speak to people everywhere. I think that’s the ambition of any film and I’m sure if you ask Simon Baker, he’d say the same thing about Breath.
What about casting Garrett Hedlund and Kelly MacDonald?
There wasn’t any sort of thing like we have to cast actors from other countries. And in fact, we tried to find Australian actors who are going to be right for those roles, who had the right kind of marquee to be able to justify the budget. And it just didn’t work out that we could find actors for those roles that were absolutely perfect. They’re very specific roles in a way. And the number of Australian actors who fit that bill is actually a pretty short list at the end of the day. And the ones that we were looking at were unavailable for whatever reason.
Did you spend a lot of time in Western Australia before production to try and wrap your head around it?
I spent so much time there and did so many different trips. It was a lot of research about getting a sense of the place, but there was also just the logistics; just mounting a production in a place that is so vast… At one point we looked at our locations, one was in the Kimberley and one was in Esperance and when we looked at it on a map it was the same distance as London to Moscow. It was quite an ordeal. Everyone really had a huge part in trying to work it out. It was a massive puzzle just to work out how to shoot this.
Was it ultimately a bit of an adventure for you?
It was in a way. There were some amazing moments, especially when we were right up north. You’d be traveling back from a day shooting and you’d be on these speedboats and the sun would be going down, and there’d be fish jumping and whales and you’re literally out in this place where there are no humans anywhere. But at the same time, it was extremely gruelling. Trying to shoot in those kinds of places, just in the heat and the insects, and these razor sharp rocks and no infrastructure at all… Also doing it with a pretty small crew. It was extremely gruelling. So, I think the feeling most of the time was just of survival and exhaustion to be honest.
Dirt Music is in cinemas October 8, 2020
Main Photo Credit: Behind the scenes image of Director Gregor Jordan on the set of DIRT MUSIC. Photographer credit: Kerry Brown
