Geelong Advertiser (Regional Daily)
Edition 1 -SAT 28 MAY 2005, Page 053
Meet Mr Versatile
By MOVIES with GUY DAVIS


DAVID Wenham is nothing if not versatile. He has no qualms about getting
ugly on the surface (his mullet-headed junkie in Gettin' Square) or
underneath the skin (his chilling Brett Sprague in The Boys) for a role,
but he's also proven just as adept at bringing dimension, soul, humour and
style to everyman roles.

Such is the case with his role in Three Dollars, an adaptation of Elliot
Perlman's award-winning novel about average people trying to make their
way through a seemingly uncaring world. Wenham's second collaboration with
director Robert Connolly (after the financial thriller The Bank) sees him
playing Eddie, a family man who finds himself jobless and down to his last
three bucks.

Your character Eddie isn't without depth, and a lot happens to him over
the course of Three Dollars, but essentially he's a decent, everyday
bloke. Is that hard to portray?

I think it's one of the hardest things to do for an actor. I think it's
easier to play someone who has a whole heap of baggage, whether they're
psychological or whether they manifest themselves physically -- they're
easy things for an actor to do because they're tangible things they can
create and hold on to. It's much harder to create something that's hard to
do in real life, which is be a good person. It's easy to be angry, it's
easy to go to those emotions.

So how do you define him? Through his relationships with others?
Pretty much. And through his actions. He's a man who tries as hard as he
can to be true to himself, which he is. You described him as a decent man,
and he is. I obviously used the book as a primary source of research
because it's a wonderfully-written novel that describes the character and
his situations so perfectly. All I really have to do -- and I make it
sound like such a simple task! -- is understand what's there on the page
and give myself over to it totally. Hopefully things click into place from
there. But we've got such a great cast that it makes it a very, very
enjoyable process.

Was Elliot Perlman's novel kind of a bible when it came to exploring
storyline and characterisation?

Up to a certain point. The script is obviously based on the book and I
read it quite a few times before it became a screenplay, when Robert was
asking if we should do it. We agreed and I read it a few times and I was
involved in the process of adaptation only as far as giving a tick to each
draft that came through. As the process went on, I weaned myself off the
book and the screenplay itself became my bible. Looking back, I actually
can't remember what the screenplay left out. The main difference is that
the book's narrative is linear whereas the film's is not. The film jumps
around in time much, much more, and that's only because as cinemagoers
we're much more sophisticated in our viewing habits. We watch so much,
almost without realising. Without being conscious of it, we've become much
more cinema-literate and film has become a little more complex in its
storytelling methods. Rob decided we could afford to jump back at certain
points in Eddie's life to discover key moments in his past that help us
work out where he is today.

Were the thematic or dramatic elements the drawcard of Three Dollars for you?
I think they're hand in hand, really. The novel and the film, first of
all, they have to work as entertainment. They have to be a good story with
great characters; there's no point, otherwise. I'm not interested in
involving myself in something didactic, and this isn't that at all. It's a
bloody good story with characters people can relate to. But there's also
this undercurrent of social and political observation. You can take what
you like away from it if you're looking for a message, but it's a very
true depiction of how middle-class people live in Australia today.
* Three Dollars is in cinemas now.