By Erin Free
“It had always been at the back of my mind, but life had always got in the way, and it just never happened,” Paul Ireland tells FilmInk in his charming Scottish brogue of finally getting behind the camera to make his directorial debut. “Then Pawno arose, and I thought, ‘Right, I’m gonna jump at this.’” After nearly twenty years of credited on-screen work as an actor (with everything from Neighbours and The Bill to Rush and Howzat! on his resume), it took a meeting with another actor to finally push Paul Ireland into the director’s chair. It was during a stage run of Ray Mooney’s poetically gruelling prison-set play, Everynight…Everynight, that Ireland met fellow performer, Damian Hill. The jobbing actor had written a script called Pawno – which tracked the rogue’s gallery of characters that orbit a pawnbroker’s shop in the hardscrabble Melbourne suburb of Footscray – and Ireland was well and truly intrigued.
More importantly, the two men forged a bond of friendship that would prove invaluable over Pawno’s extended period of re-scripting, financing, and development. “When you’re doing a play, you get to know each other inside out,” Ireland says. “You make yourselves so vulnerable, and Damian and I just clicked. We both had other ideas and scripts boiling away, but we thought that Pawno was the one. There was something there, and we decided to make a go of it. We both see ourselves as very humble people, and we have a sense of humour about things. That’s what really connected us together.”
As the pair sat in Ireland’s kitchen rewriting and reshaping the script for Pawno, they formed a production company, Toothless Pictures, and set about raising the money for the film. Without an experienced producer on board, it was near impossible to get Pawno on the radar of Australia’s funding bodies, and their labyrinthine array of checks and balances. “We didn’t qualify,” Ireland shrugs. “You have to jump through so many hoops, and though we weren’t quite totally aware of how it all worked, we knew that we didn’t qualify.”
Early in the project’s development, however, Ireland and Hill acquired the services of high profile entertainment lawyer, Bryce Menzies (the closer on many an Australian movie, and also an executive producer on the likes of Blinder and 100 Bloody Acres), who handled all the legal logistics while the nascent producers started chasing money. Kicking off with $12,000 raised through a crowd-funding website, and a little more thrown in by generous family members, Ireland and Hill found their way to a number of private investors, including a couple who had only recently lost their son. “I felt really bad even talking to them about financing the film after what had happened in their lives, but they really believed in the film, and they believed in us, and they were incredibly generous,” Ireland explains. “They kicked in a lot of money which really got us going, and then they introduced us to some other investors. There were a lot of little investors – $10,000 here and $5,000 there – but we hadn’t set the bar very high. We weren’t raising millions. We just came across a collection of incredibly philanthropic people who just believed in us, basically. The financing process was a jigsaw puzzle.”
With a relatively small amount of money jumbled together (considerably more would come prior to the film’s post-production, thanks to the later involvement of executive producer, Ian Kirk), Paul Ireland started assembling his cast to play the film’s motley crew of Footscray residents, who cut across all points of the social spectrum. “The casting was of the utmost importance,” the director says. “It’s such a diverse, multicultural cast of characters, and I just don’t see that shown much here. It’s either 90% white, or it has more of an indigenous slant, and there’s no in-between. I wanted to make something far more diverse, and something really vivid.” With Damian Hill in place as enigmatic pawn shop worker, Danny, the eclectic cast also includes veteran actors, John Brumpton (Dance Me To My Song), Malcolm Kennard (Catching Milat), John Orcsik (Cop Shop), and Tony Rickards (Holding The Man), alongside rising talents, Maeve Dermody (Griff The Invisible), Daniel Frederiksen (Ten Empty, Bastard Boys), and Mark Coles Smith (Last Cab To Darwin).
A surprise inclusion is Kerry Armstrong, in her first major screen role since TV’s Bed Of Roses. Though he “didn’t really know her”, Ireland fronted the veteran actress in a theatre foyer and mentioned Pawno, only to discover that Damian Hill had offered her earmarked part to another actress…who just happened to be a friend of Armstrong’s. “I thought, ‘Oh, shit,’” Ireland laughs. “But then I became obsessed about getting Kerry for the film, and I started bombarding her with messages. Then I was doing a read-through of a play for The Melbourne Theatre Company, and Kerry happened to be doing it too. She turned up and said to me, ‘I hear that you’ve been telling people that I’m doing your film.’ And I said, ‘Well, sort of, but not quite.’ Then we had a couple of lunches, and it was a long process…she really dragged it out,” Ireland laughs.
Kerry Armstrong – the great one-time star of Prisoner; the heart and soul of the masterpiece, Lantana; and the scene stealer from Razzle Dazzle – nearly dragged her way out of the film. Ireland had scored a role in a film shooting in Italy, and he needed to know if the actress was actually going to commit to doing Pawno, so to speak. Reticent about her long lay-off when it came to big screen acting, Armstrong was concerned about the size of the role in Pawno, and whether it would denote a decent enough comeback. Ireland, however, eventually sold her on the ensemble merits of the film, and Kerry Armstrong finally signed on, playing the anguished mother of a son who has gone missing. “Luckily, she was beautiful, and she came to play and help us out,” Ireland. “Nobody was earning a lot of money on this! Nobody was doing this for the money!”
Pawno is released in cinemas on April 21. For much more from Paul Ireland on the shooting of Pawno, stay tuned to www.filmink.com.au.
Irish brogue? Ahem, the man is a Scot!