By Erin Free
Anthony Hayes is one of Australia’s best character actors, with fantastic performances in terrific works like Alice, Suburban Mayhem, Look Both Ways, The Square, Bastard Boys, The Slap, Devil’s Dust, Mystery Road, Ned Kelly, and many, many more. It was in Rowan Woods’ grim 1998 classic The Boys, however, that Hayes really made his big splash after appearing in a swathe of episodic TV as a younger actor. His role as a brutish criminal in waiting, however, sent Hayes’ career in a decidedly nasty direction. “I was just an unknown 19-year-old,” Hayes sighed to FilmInk in 2005. “I was believable in that role, so where do you put a hairy, overweight nineteen-year-old animal? You aren’t gonna send him in for leading roles, are you? ‘Oh, what have we got here? Another rapist in three scenes – I’m sure you can do it.’ ‘Yeah, really exciting for me, thanks!’”
Highly adept at creating characters both decent and grimly unpleasant, it was the run of not-nice-guy roles that saw Hayes set up the production company Roguestar with fellow actor and playwright (and good friend) Brendan Cowell. Hayes eventually turned writer/director in 2002 via the company with the gritty and authentic 56-minute 2002 drama, New Skin, with the accomplished actor taking the lead role opposite Jessica Napier. “I was kind of unhappy with the scripts that I was reading as an actor at the time,” Hayes told FilmInk in 2002 about the motivation behind moving to directing. “I was kind of always labeled as the bad guy, and I was sick of seeing female roles that weren’t strong. I was going out with Jes Napier at the time I started writing, and when we got close to getting the money we actually split up. Then I had to make the decision whether I was going to hire my ex-girlfriend to play my love interest.”
Thankfully, Hayes decided to hire Jessica Napier anyway. Not that he auditioned many of the actors, with many well-known stars of Australian TV and screen (including Napier’s late father Marshall Napier, eventual international name Sam Worthington, and local hero Samuel Johnson) on a first name basis with Hayes. “I didn’t audition anyone,” Hayes told FilmInk in 2002. “I knew most of the cast. I knew Sammy Johnson since we were about seventeen. He hadn’t done this sort of role before, so I talked him into it saying it would be good for him to do something a bit more subtle like this. He was totally into it, and it just so happens that after this film, his profile soared, which was great for us as well. It was hard getting people you could trust. I was acting and directing and I guess I didn’t trust myself to direct people if I was in front of the camera. I just needed that support base because I was going off my head.”
New Skin is the story of youthful love, with lack of money, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and pregnancy getting in the way. It’s a grungy tale, shot and acted wonderfully, but the question begs, how did Hayes, who virtually grew up on our screens, know this milieu. “A lot of my friends have died from heroin overdoses,” Hayes replied. “I guess I was kind of spurred on by that and I guess people’s perceptions of it – that they are just junkies, when they’ve got their own stories. I like character-based films. It really shits me when I don’t see well-formed characters on screen. I don’t see an excuse for it. A lot of the time the lead character is the silent guy that stands there looking good on screen and the support characters aren’t well formulated. I’m tired of it.”
After teaming with Brendan Cowell for another short in 2002 – Sweet Dreams, co-written by Cowell and Hayes, and starring Nathaniel Dean, Brett Moses and Jessica Napier – Hayes reunited with his talented buddy in 2008 for his feature directorial debut with Ten Empty. “Brendan and I met at a pub, got drunk and ended up singing under a pool table,” Hayes told FilmInk in 2008. “We were both passionate about storytelling and creating our own work; he’s just full of ideas, and I respect him immensely as a writer, artist and a man.”
Co-written by Cowell and Hayes, Ten Empty details a prodigal son (Daniel Frederiksen) returning home and encountering a fractured family marked with pain, aggression and an empty hole left by the suicide of its matriarch. Its title refers to ten empty canvases left behind by the mother. A psychologist had recommended that she paint them as a way of confronting and potentially easing her growing mental illness, and they serve the film as something of an elephant in the room. Boasting powerful turns from Daniel Frederiksen, Geoff Morrell, Jack Thompson, Lucy Bell, Tom Budge, and Blazey Best, the film is a tough, psychologically dense treatise on family and responsibility, and has received disappointingly little love since its relatively quiet release.
“It has this voyeuristic feel,” Hayes told FilmInk in 2008. “There’s this intimate, simple landscape that feels claustrophobic. It’s not an easy watch at times, but that’s drama and life: sometimes it’s ugly, but sometimes that ugliness is beautiful. Fragile people making mistakes is interesting, and flawed human beings who mean well but have lost the ability to express their love, or are too scared to, is interesting. People aren’t cut and dry, and family is even harder. I’m very proud of Ten Empty and always will be. It’s honest and it’s about family, and everyone’s got one, so that’s a good starting point. While there are already a million things that I’d change, it’s about something, and it packs a punch. I love Nil By Mouth and The War Zone and Secrets & Lies and My Name Is Joe; they speak in a language that I understand, and I don’t find it uneasy or confrontational. It’s just good, honest storytelling. I don’t love everything I watch, so I can’t expect everyone in the world to love what I make, but lord knows we have enough filler and mindless trash out there. I don’t mind Transformers, but sometimes I want a little more.”
It was a long time between drinks for Hayes the director (though certainly not for Hayes the actor, who works almost constantly in both film and TV), who didn’t get back behind the camera until 2022 with the gritty, sun-scorched outback thriller Gold, in which he also plays support to big-name leading man Zac Efron. “We had to find an actor who could captivate an audience,” Hayes told FilmInk in 2022 of his need to nab a performer like Efron. Written with his partner Polly Smyth, Hayes shot the film in under twenty days in a remote spot in outback South Australia in fierce conditions where the cast and crew battled terrible heat, sandstorms and an unforgiving schedule.
Gold is the tight, taut tale of two men (Efron and Hayes) stuck in the middle of nowhere who start to fray and fragment when the titular mineral enters the picture and places them on a knife’s edge. “With my co-writer Polly Smyth, we looked at The Wages Of Fear and John Huston’s The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre as references. But unlike those pictures, Gold is minimalist. It’s a survival story, too. It’s just a handful of characters, with very little dialogue, and the desert. I guess you could liken it to revenge stories too, though that’s a different genre to Gold. But they share a very simple throughline. There’s no backstory for any of the characters. That was a big thing. There is no real conventional scriptwriting in a lot of it. We would show it to people, and someone would say ‘it’s got no backstory’ and then the second you write backstory into something this sparse, it comes over as ‘written.’ Usually, you learn about the character through exposition, where they interact with other characters, but here, we tried to covey the essence of the character as an attitude thing.”
As well as establishing himself as a director capable of stirring up great tension and collaborating with his DOPs on vivid, striking imagery, Anthony Hayes not surprisingly has also drawn excellent performances out of his casts. “I love actors,” Hayes told FilmInk in 2008. “I love what they do and there’s nothing more exciting to me than a truly great performance. I’m in awe when I see it, and that’s what I’m trying to capture in my films as a director. How you get that is a mystery, and is different from actor to actor, but I do know that nothing kills performance quicker than too much bullshit talk.”
Though justly acclaimed and awarded for his supporting body of acting work, Anthony Hayes is certainly due a little more praise and recognition for his excellent work as a writer and director…hopefully his trio of stellar behind-the-camera efforts will be added to sooner rather than later.
Additional reporting by Brian Duff and Dov Kornits
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