“It gave me a really good ability to listen to people’s stories and try to find a human element behind the headlines.” Photograph: Roadshowįor Harper, that humanity was grounded in her 13 years as a print journalist. ‘It’s the most beautiful, extraordinary place’: Rob Connolly and Eric Bana during the making of The Dry. We had to look deep into the heart of these damaged characters and the tough luck they’ve had, and find the humanity.” “There’s a version of these stories that’s like Deliverance – ‘urban character gets stuck in dark, horrific regional place’ – and that wasn’t our intention. “Something Eric and I talked a lot about early on was not judging the characters that live in that world,” says Connolly, who also drew inspiration from Roman Polanski’s similarly water-driven whodunnit Chinatown. Onscreen, Connolly frames Harper’s characters like ants set against the vastness of the landscape – and the scale of their problems. While the apparent murder-suicide that initially draws Falk back home echoes all-too-common acts of male-perpetrated family violence, Harper’s books are also peppered with corporate crime, revenge porn, gambling addiction, crippling debt, preyed-upon backpackers and toxic masculinity that sweats into hi-vis and private school uniforms alike. Like the novel, the film’s slow-burning plot crackles with other 21st century pressures and anxieties that seem ripped straight from a Four Corners report. (The Dry’s story of a complicated small-town homecoming rings very differently to that of Wiradjuri author’s Tara June Winch’s The Yield in the film, a retired farmer, played by Bruce Spence, laments without irony how the automation of agriculture could all but clear the region of its people and communities – imagine that.)

It’s also part of a nation-building mythology that helped launder the realities of dispossession and environmental degradation on unceded country. In this tension, Harper’s characters inherit a settler narrative of pioneers carving hard-won homes and livelihoods from an often inhospitable, alien outback. But it’s tough … you feel this muscular, tough lifestyle of the landscape set against its beauty.” “I fell in love with it it’s the most beautiful, extraordinary place. “You drive one, two, three hours out of Melbourne, and by the time you cross four you’re into the Mallee region and the landscape changes immensely,” Connolly says. Before making the film, Connolly hit the road with Bana so the pair could immerse themselves in the world of the book.

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