by Anthony Frajman
We speak with one of Australia’s most prolific, acclaimed writers [pictured with Trent Dalton]
For over three decades, John Collee has been one of Australia’s most respected, in demand writers of film and television. With an incredible CV spanning myriad genres, and collaborators ranging from Peter Weir to Dev Patel and Russell Crowe, his body of work includes Master and Commander, Happy Feet and Hotel Mumbai, to name a few.
Collee, who is also a doctor, novelist and an environmentalist, co-founded Hopscotch Features, and has had films nominated for Oscars three times. This year alone, Collee’s output includes the acclaimed global hit series Boy Swallows Universe, the Kate Winslet film Lee, Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, and the upcoming Juliette Binoche-Ralph Fiennes re-team, The Return.
Though he is today one of the industry’s most prolific writers, it was not film that was Collee’s initial inspiration, but adventure novels.
“I wasn’t and still am not terribly film-literate”, he recalls. “I grew up reading Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Graham Greene, basically adventure writers who turned their real-life experiences into meaningful fiction. Having said that, Graham Greene learnt his craft as a novelist by writing film reviews and that might be what made his stories so well structured and propulsive.”
As Collee began to become interested in film as a medium, he became interested in similarly adventurous filmmakers – such as John Huston and Claude Chabrol.
“I’ve never been a fan of serialised epics like Star Wars. I have always loved filmmakers who manage to constantly re-invent themselves, moving from genre to genre at a fairly fast clip – John Huston said something like ‘none of my films have anything in common, and neither did any of my wives’. Spielberg is the same – Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Saving Private Ryan.
“I have followed Peter Weir’s films since The Cars that Ate Paris. Witness is an all-time favourite, he adds. Collee went on to write the screenplay for Weir’s Master and Commander.
“I always loved the romanticism and immediacy of the French New Wave. Claude Chabrol – roughly a contemporary of Huston, made a film a year from 1958 until his death aged 80 in 2010. There’s a lot to be said for working fast, on the cheap, and not obsessionally overthinking things as Kubrick did in his later years.”
Not unlike the writers he admired, Collee spent time travelling overseas. When he was young, he lived in India and Edinburgh, a period that he calls formative.
“I think living somewhere exotic when you’re young opens your eyes to the fact that the customs, traditions and values you grew up with are not the only customs to live by, nor necessarily the best. It gave me the confidence to do a lot of solo travelling from my teenage years onwards. Happy Feet is about a penguin breaking free from Scottish Calvinism and finding his tribe among arty folks on the far side of the mountain.”
One of Collee’s projects out this year, is the massive Netflix hit Boy Swallows Universe. It was Collee who was one of the first to spot the potential of the material, and had an instrumental role in developing the series.
Collee, who wrote the whole series, adapting Trent Dalton’s work, says working with the author was a delight.
“We were going to co-write, but in the months that it took to finalise contracts he got wrapped up writing his next novel. I’d send him the synopses and the scripts of course and he’d invariably write back saying ‘brilliant – I love it keep going.’ He’s a uniquely generous and collaborative person and having worked in fast-turnover journalism so long, he’s not at all precious about changes, edits and re-interpretations.”
Very shortly after its bow, Collee and the Boy Swallows Universe team began to receive incredible responses from global viewers, as well as Australians.
“It’s interesting with a streamer like Netflix that you can instantly measure how well something plays in foreign territories. We got commentary online from, for example, a black woman living in poverty in Alabama saying something like ‘This reminded me so much of my own life.’”
Another one of Collee’s projects being released in 2024, is the Kate Winslet starring feature, Lee.
“Lem Dobbs (Dark City, The Limey) wrote a script for my pals Andrew Mason and Troy Lum, but when Kate Winslet came on board, she found the point of view too masculine. Kate’s friend Marion Hume – formerly an editor of Australian Vogue – did a ton of additional research, and then Marion and I rewrote Lem’s draft. Liz Hannah did the final pass,” he says.
“I think we all loved the arc of a woman who starts off relying on youth and beauty and the patronage of famous men, then discovers her own talent as a photographer… and finally discovers her mission in life – and that is to reveal the terrible truth about war – that the perpetrators are mostly men and the victims are mostly women.”
Also set for release is the Juliette Binoche/Ralph Fiennes starring film, The Return.
“It is about the return of Odysseus to Ithaca after ten years of war and ten years of travelling. Which is actually the beginning and the end of Homer’s Odyssey,” he says.
“This is a Greek legend written by a Scotsman, directed by an Italian [Uberto Pasolini], performed by an Englishman and a French woman.”
Throughout his varied career, Collee has worked with some of the biggest names in front of and behind the camera. Yet, he says one of the highlights so far, was collaborating with French director Jean-Jacques Annaud [for whom he wrote Wolf Totem].
“Strangely, you can have just as much fun as a writer working on a movie that didn’t get made – wandering around Paris for weeks with Jean-Jacques Annaud discussing Arctic exploration or American diplomacy. It’s always nice of course when a film you were involved in makes it to the screen in some form or other, but the real luxury of the job is being paid to have adventures, or to hang out with people you admire, discussing complex ideas.”
Having worked with an incredibly disparate range of genres, from animated films to historical epics, Collee says that there are at least two more types of features he would like to tackle.
“I’d like to do a musical … and a romantic comedy.”
He says that he is optimistic about the opportunities for features in Australia in the next five to ten years, and he continues mentoring emerging filmmakers such as Alastair Newton Brown, whose film Here Be Dragons Collee advised and mentored on.
“What I’d like to happen is for us to go back to making small contemporary movies in which story and character are valued more than special effects, set building and post production – a sort of Australian New Wave if you like, but that would require us to focus far more on the craft of screenwriting, to make 20 films for $10 million instead of one for $200 million and to stop encouraging every pop-video director to see themselves as an auteur – there’s a lot to be said for collaboration.”
