The dream team
By Debi Enker
The Age
Ten's mini-series After the Deluge features possibly the
strongest line-up
of local talent ever assembled for
a TV project. Debi Enker
visited the
set.
On a crisp August afternoon, Rachel Griffiths and Hugo
Weaving are at work
in the kitchen of a terrace in
Fitzroy. As cafe owner Annie, the single
mother of two daughters, Griffiths
is warily welcoming Weaving's dissolute
rock guitarist, Martin, into her life.
She's putting him through a family
dinner where the girls grill him
about his intentions.
The kitchen is crowded with lights, microphones and cameras.
moves into action: dishing up
curry, pouring drinks, chatting with her
girls and sizing-up her guest,
who's trying to play it cool. With each
take,
director Brendan Maher and editor
Uri Mizrahi to work with.
Weaving's Martin has seen better days. Once a rock legend,
he's now an
embittered bad boy. He wears a
black leather jacket and strums a guitar to
mask his discomfort.
flirtatious, warm, nervous,
guarded. The skill and sensitivity with which
the two play off one another is
electrifying.
The quality of their work is replicated throughout After the
Deluge, Ten's
$6.4 million mini-series, which boasts extraordinary talent
on both sides
of the camera. Written by Andrew
Knight (SeaChange), it is a profoundly
moving story of men and their
battles: in war, at home, at work and in
love.
At the heart of the four-hour drama are Cliff Kirby (Ray
Barrett), an
elderly man stricken by Alzheimers, and his three estranged sons, drawn
together by his illness. As the old
man melts into his memories, past and
present merge in the same image.
It's an inspired depiction of the disease
and the way it separates sufferers
from the world around them.
The cast reads like a wish list of Australian actors.
Weaving, David
Wenham and Samuel Johnson play the sons - musician Martin,
architect Alex
and solicitor Toby - with Aden
Young as the young Cliff.
Catherine McClements, Essie Davis and Kate Beahan play
their wives or
prospective partners. Vince Colosimo, Tara Morice, Marta Dusseldorp,
Robert Grubb, Simon Burke and Bob Franklin appear in smaller
roles.
"Direction with these guys is just trying not to get in
the way," says
Maher, an award-winning director (The Road
from Coorain). "My role with
people like this is just to create
a good environment for them to do good
work. At their level the choices
are always interesting and sound and it's
probably about giving them feedback
on how it fits into the overall piece.
This script is so finely tuned, you don't need big
discussions."
It's the quality of Knight's script, which he honed over
years with
SeaChange collaborator Deb Cox,
that is credited with attracting such a
stand-out cast. "When [actors]
read good scripts, they come to the work,"
Maher says.
While Knight mumbles modestly, "I don't know if in my
life I'll ever get a
constellation of stars like this
again," co-producer Richard Keddie notes,
"There's a lot of dignity and humility in the people
who worked on Deluge.
Keddie and co-producer Andrew
Wiseman spent 10 months casting in
consultation with Knight, Cox and
Maher. "There were often disagreements,"
Keddie says, "which is fantastic. No decision was taken lightly."
One decision was to keep the cast Australian. Even before
Knight had
written the script, Wenham agreed
to play Alex, the son who has sacrificed
family life for his career. Weaving
signed on after reading the script.
"Hugo said he would've paid me to do the role,"
Knight says with pleasure.
worked with Knight to flesh out
Annie's past, investing her with a limp
and a turbulent history.
Barrett, 76, was preparing to move from his home in
the role. Barrett's initial
reaction, he says, was "I don't want to do any
more", but Maher persisted.
"I read it and I couldn't wait to do it,"
Barrett says. "Cliff is the most demanding part I've
ever been given and
the most rewarding. Andrew Knight
is a genius."
Maher says "it was really important that we had an
actor who was in the
age range, that you could see life
on his face".
Knight concurs: "You forget how good Ray is. He's a
proper actor; he's not
someone who's come to it late and
plays old people. He's got this amazing
craft. I couldn't watch him work; I
found it heart-breaking. To get that
deadness in your eyes and still get
the performance out, that's
staggering."
While old Cliff's memories shape some of the drama, the
story of his sons
is one of men fighting on different
fronts.
"There are few, if any, men in the piece who have any
control over their
lives," Maher says. That is
one of the reasons he was drawn to the project
and why Knight wanted to write it
in the first place. Deluge is about
fathers and sons, husbands and
lovers, and what Knight calls their
"baggage", with the drama
driven by emotions rather than an action-packed
plot.
"I tried to write it like music," Knight says,
"a faster bit here, a
slower bit here; we're in this
mood, we'll move to this mood now."
Central to the creation of that mood were composer Cezary Skubiszewski's
score and the contributions of
production designer Jo Ford and director of
photography Geoff Burton. Ford's
rich palette of browns fits the feel of
The mini-series was shot over 11 weeks at 60 locations
around
with Ford and Maher opting for busy
backgrounds. "We thought that it was
an incredibly complex story and
heavily textured, but it also had to be
told very simply," Maher says.
"So we gave the backgrounds lots of texture
and made our characters stand very
clearly in front of those backgrounds
in big, block, cut-out colours."
While Maher and Ford were choosing locations,
motif for the series", Maher
explains. "He found the motif in the idea of
light at the end of the tunnel. We
looked for rooms that were long and
narrow with a strong light at the
end of them so there was a sense of
travel, a sense of heading towards
the light."
The sense of forward movement was crucial to Knight, who
acknowledges the
story is partly autobiographical.
"I wanted to bring in as many men's
stories as I knew and bunch mine
together with other people's."
After the Deluge started life at the ABC, where it was seen
by then head
of drama Sue Masters as an obvious
companion piece to Simone de Beauvoir's
Babies, Cox's 1997 mini-series about a
group of thirtysomething women.
When the project foundered at the ABC during the Shier administration,
Masters, who by then had moved to Ten,
snapped it up.
While there are some concerns about Deluge screening on a
commercial
network that has for years been
wooing a youth audience, there is praise
for Masters for backing the
project: "It is terrific that a commercial
network will put real money and
resources behind this style of drama,"
Wiseman says.
There are also hopes that Knight's credentials and the calibre of the cast
will attract viewers who might not
habitually turn to Ten: "Hopefully,
quality will out," Wiseman
says.
With After the Deluge, there's hope on the screen and behind
the scenes.
There's deep admiration for Knight's highly original work
and pride in the
way it has been realised.
"The reason it worked was because everyone loved the
show, loved the
script and cared about it," Keddie says. "If we'd had a really lousy
script for an American telemovie, no way you would've achieved half of
what we achieved."