By RANIA GHANDOUR
The West Australian
The thought of a film about refugees would make many cinema-goers want to pay a people smuggler to smuggle them out of the theatre and back into their lounge room.
But Lucky Miles is not that kind of movie. Writer-director Michael James Rowland says he didn’t want to make a “spinach” film — one that didn’t taste great but was good for you.
“I’d seen quite a few plays on the subject and the message I took away from them was the righteousness of the writer-directors,” he tells me during a recent visit to Perth.
Lucky Miles is described as a buddy movie in the proud tradition of “the three-guys-stuck-out-on-a-limb genre”, a kind of Down by Law or O Brother, Where Art Thou? with refugees as the main characters.
Set in 1990, the film follows a group of Iraqi and Cambodian refugees abandoned by an Indonesian fishing boat on a remote part of the WA coast. Most of the group are caught quickly, but three men with little in common are determined to reach their destination of a better life in Perth. They wander lost in the desert with an army reservist unit in pursuit.
The film interweaves the story-lines of these two groups of men with that of a third, a pair of Indonesian fishermen trying to make their way home.
These tales were inspired by true stories of boat people landing on the remote WA coastline which Rowland read in The West Australian on a visit to the Pilbara in the late 1980s.
“The one that most people can remember was about 40 people from southern China who got told to get off the boat and walk over the dunes,” Rowland says.
“They were promised there would be a bus, but there was no bus so they walked inland because they thought that, like every other continent on Earth, there would be streams and mountains and forests.”
His story already has struck a chord with audiences both here and abroad and has picked up several awards, including the audience prize for Best Film at this year’s Sydney Film Festival and the recent Special Jury Prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic.
In developing his script, Rowland and co-writer Helen Barnes employed cultural consultants to ensure the Iraqi, Cambodian, Indonesian and indigenous Australian characters’ responses to their situation and each other were appropriate.
“For me, the film is about people having to communicate across a void and having to find a co-operative relationship with each other under duress, and that is repeated through all of the story-lines,” Rowland says.
He deliberately avoids painting character portraits with the sweeping brush of generalisations.
“It would deny them a banal humanity that the rest of us are allowed. They’ve gone past that,” he says.
He believes this common humanity is what often is missing from this sort of film, along with a sense of humour.
“Australians can play comedy and tragedy very close to each other — it’s a unique thing about us as a nation and I think we’d struggle to tell this story without a laconic or very dry wit,” he says.
“All we’ve done is tell the story of Burke and Wills, and we’ve just updated it to reflect events of the past 30 years.”
Although Lucky Miles was set in WA, it was filmed in Rowland’s home State of South Australia for logistical and financial reasons.
“We had a $3 million budget and because of the logistics of getting cast and crew to the Pilbara, it would have cost more than $4 million,” Rowland says.
And while he didn’t set out to make a political film, Rowland accepts the times have become more political around it.
“I started working on this in 1999, so it predates 9/11, Tampa, pretty much the whole thing,” he recalls. “A lot of the conversations which have come up around the film since 2001 have been about the 2001 Federal election and looking at it through that prism, but I think the film has bigger fish to fry than that.”
Rowland says Lucky Miles is “about the interconnectedness of all our lives, which is not inherently political”.
“What does it say about society that if you want to put forward a compassionate view of a group of people, rather than characterise everything in the extreme, that you become political? But that’s kind of what we’ve become.
“It’s principally a piece of entertainment for people that hold a moderate and informed opinion, and you get made to feel like you’re a dick if you’ve got that opinion.” Lucky Miles opens on Thursday.
But Lucky Miles is not that kind of movie. Writer-director Michael James Rowland says he didn’t want to make a “spinach” film — one that didn’t taste great but was good for you.
“I’d seen quite a few plays on the subject and the message I took away from them was the righteousness of the writer-directors,” he tells me during a recent visit to Perth.
Lucky Miles is described as a buddy movie in the proud tradition of “the three-guys-stuck-out-on-a-limb genre”, a kind of Down by Law or O Brother, Where Art Thou? with refugees as the main characters.
Set in 1990, the film follows a group of Iraqi and Cambodian refugees abandoned by an Indonesian fishing boat on a remote part of the WA coast. Most of the group are caught quickly, but three men with little in common are determined to reach their destination of a better life in Perth. They wander lost in the desert with an army reservist unit in pursuit.
The film interweaves the story-lines of these two groups of men with that of a third, a pair of Indonesian fishermen trying to make their way home.
These tales were inspired by true stories of boat people landing on the remote WA coastline which Rowland read in The West Australian on a visit to the Pilbara in the late 1980s.
“The one that most people can remember was about 40 people from southern China who got told to get off the boat and walk over the dunes,” Rowland says.
“They were promised there would be a bus, but there was no bus so they walked inland because they thought that, like every other continent on Earth, there would be streams and mountains and forests.”
His story already has struck a chord with audiences both here and abroad and has picked up several awards, including the audience prize for Best Film at this year’s Sydney Film Festival and the recent Special Jury Prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic.
In developing his script, Rowland and co-writer Helen Barnes employed cultural consultants to ensure the Iraqi, Cambodian, Indonesian and indigenous Australian characters’ responses to their situation and each other were appropriate.
“For me, the film is about people having to communicate across a void and having to find a co-operative relationship with each other under duress, and that is repeated through all of the story-lines,” Rowland says.
He deliberately avoids painting character portraits with the sweeping brush of generalisations.
“It would deny them a banal humanity that the rest of us are allowed. They’ve gone past that,” he says.
He believes this common humanity is what often is missing from this sort of film, along with a sense of humour.
“Australians can play comedy and tragedy very close to each other — it’s a unique thing about us as a nation and I think we’d struggle to tell this story without a laconic or very dry wit,” he says.
“All we’ve done is tell the story of Burke and Wills, and we’ve just updated it to reflect events of the past 30 years.”
Although Lucky Miles was set in WA, it was filmed in Rowland’s home State of South Australia for logistical and financial reasons.
“We had a $3 million budget and because of the logistics of getting cast and crew to the Pilbara, it would have cost more than $4 million,” Rowland says.
And while he didn’t set out to make a political film, Rowland accepts the times have become more political around it.
“I started working on this in 1999, so it predates 9/11, Tampa, pretty much the whole thing,” he recalls. “A lot of the conversations which have come up around the film since 2001 have been about the 2001 Federal election and looking at it through that prism, but I think the film has bigger fish to fry than that.”
Rowland says Lucky Miles is “about the interconnectedness of all our lives, which is not inherently political”.
“What does it say about society that if you want to put forward a compassionate view of a group of people, rather than characterise everything in the extreme, that you become political? But that’s kind of what we’ve become.
“It’s principally a piece of entertainment for people that hold a moderate and informed opinion, and you get made to feel like you’re a dick if you’ve got that opinion.” Lucky Miles opens on Thursday.
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