Rod Hardy
isn’t going to beat around bush – he knows what it takes to get a movie
made, and that doesn’t always mean a good script - though that
definitely helps. In his case, it was the magical contribution of a
Hogwarts’ student that fuelled the December
Boys’ engine.
December
Boys tells of four boys, all orphans, who are
shipped off – they were
picked over the other orphans because this month, December, is their
birthday – to stay in a beautiful seaside retreat. It’s there that they
all fight to stay on as permanent members of the community.
A
film based on book 'December Boys' had been mooted for years, but it
wasn’t until British actor Daniel Radcliffe, better known as cinema’s
Harry Potter,
agreed to do the movie that it finally showed signs of
life.
Melbourne-based Hardy, who made his feature directing
debut with 1979’s Thirst,
says he snagged Radcliffe unintentionally. He
had actually offered another young British actor, Freddie Highmore,
star of Tim Burton’s Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, a role in the
film when he got wind of the Radcliffe possibility.
“The way I
found Daniel is – I’d seen a film called Finding Neverland,
with Johnny
Depp and young Freddie Highmore; I really liked Freddie. I thought
‘there’s an up and coming young actor who could bring a lot of heart to
the film. His mother is a big agent in London, she read the screenplay
and loved it. She became very interested in the project. Then, as
months progressed, she said ‘How would you feel about having Daniel
Radcliffe in your picture?’, and I was a bit surprised – he wasn’t my
first choice, but only because I didn’t think we had a chance – but I
agreed to let her pass the script onto [Radcliffe’s] parents. They then
passed it onto him. Within 48 hours there was a response back saying
‘they all love it!’. So for a while there we had both Freddie Highmore
and Daniel Radcliffe.”
Highmore’s grandmother became ill and
unfortunately passed away so he couldn’t take on the role. Thankfully
for Hardy, Radcliffe remained on the project.
It’s probably a
good thing that Highmore didn’t remain on the picture, because there
wasn’t a lot of money to pay two big-name actors, let alone one. Hardy
says Radcliffe took a sizeable pay cut to play the film’s oldest
December
Boy.
“We certainly didn’t have any money. He just loved
the product – and he wanted to do something between Harry Potter’s 4
and 5. What he liked about the film was its ‘simplicity’. And he was
fantastic! His parents came out with him – his father stayed most of
the time, as his chaperone – as did a tutor, because he was in a very
important year school-wise back home, but he was wonderful; he got on
so well with the other boys.”
The ‘other boys’ were local actors.
In
addition to Radcliffe’s attachment, it also helped that the book of
'December Boys' was written by the same man who produced the classic
horror hit, Village of
the Damned. But, that was “some forty years ago
– or more”, says Hardy. “Even then, people were confused – why wasn’t
this science fiction? What’s with all the heart in it? So it
sat in the United States for many, many years.”
Years later, a
Disney executive by the name of Jay Sanders, one of the producers on
the film, took the project with him when he left the house of Mouse. He
decided Hardy, whose remake of The
Yearling he felt embodied what he
wanted December Boys
to encompass, would be the perfect director.
The
first step, says Hardy, was tweaking the script. Originally, the main
characters in it were all “8 or 9 years old” so he wanted to change it
from “being a children’s story, to being more of a coming-of-age story.
If anything, people in the United States compare it to Stand By Me –
story about teenagers but from an adult’s perspective.”
Near every actor Hardy took the script too, wanted in – including the
legendary Jack Thompson.
Hardy
knows December Boys
is going to be a hard sell – because all audiences
want to see these days are “big-budget high-action drama. They’ll take
a big-budget American movie with Tom Cruise over this, any day – just
because it’s a big-budget American movie with Tom Cruise, doesn’t
matter whether it’s any good or not.”
Hardy, who says his bread
and butter is directing episodic American television (he’s directed
episodes of such shows as Battlestar
Galactica and Burn
Notice), is
also aware that December
Boys isn’t the type of film Australian
filmmakers usually make anymore – but he feels there’s a place for it
just as much as the movies that fix on “the lowest socio-economic level
– and by the way, these people are part of our society, and we need to
see everything, but there has to be a point to these movies too, and
some hope, otherwise I can just walk down any back alley in Melbourne
on any given day and see these people for free – and I might be
criticised because of how simple my movie is. I’m not saying my movie
has any kind of major point [to make] but it’s a search for family and
a search for self and I think that’ll work for a number of people.”
Hardy,
who says his favourite genre is the Western (he’s directed such
westerns as the High
Noon remake, and worked second unit on Monte
Walsh, among others), is trying to get another film up at
the moment –
with his good friend Tom Skerrit (star of Top Gun and TVs Picket
Fences) but in the meantime is flying back to Vancouver to
shoot
another episode of the ground-breaking television series Battelstar
Galactica.
“It’s great. They fly me there. I then cut in L.A for a week. And then
I’m back home. It couldn’t be sweeter”.
And neither could his new film.
DECEMBER
BOYS opens nationally September 20th, 2007.
