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Features
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Defining a Down Under Dream
A decade after focusing on where financial desperation can lead the British working class male, director Peter Cattaneo opts for an Australian fable about the power of children’s imaginations.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007 at 5:00 PM
By Telly Davidson
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Jeff Vespa/WireImage.com
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Filmmaker Peter Cattaneo
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With his signature film being the classic 1997 comedy The Full Monty, Peter Cattaneo would seem an unlikely candidate to zero in on helming a quiet, sweet children’s fable for the big screen. But with Opal Dream, new this week on DVD, the signature playfulness and sly humor of his storytelling approach remain intact.
Based on the popular Ben Rice novel Pobby and Dingan, the movie tells the story of an Australian Outback family named the Williamsons from the perspective of their two children: 8-year-old Kellyanne and her 11-year-old brother Ashmol (Sapphire Boyce, Christian Byers.) While their father (Vince Colisimo) slaves away each day in the opal mines hoping to prospect his way to a fortune and their mother (Jacqueline McKenzie) finds life more and more claustrophobic and predictable, the creative young Kellyanne retreats into her world of imagination and fantasy. Her two best “friends” are her constant companions, Pobby and Dingan (who are naturally seen and heard from only by her). Then one day, just like that, they disappear from Kellyanne’s world, leaving her grief-stricken and physically sick.
To try to rally Kellyanne’s spirits, her courageous brother Ashmol goes on a sort of quest to “find” his sister’s elusive pair of pals. And while he never exactly finds them, what he and Kellyanne learn about life and growing up is more than worth the trek.
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Strand Releasing
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(l to r) Co-stars Byers, Boyce
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“I always like to find a story that has a bit of heart and soul to it, and some hope at the end,” Cattaneo explains during a recent interview with FilmStew. “Opal Dream appealed to me because it was set in such a different world than I’d ever seen on screen. Its themes of reflection, absence, and loss were things that I wanted to play with visually and in storytelling.”
“When I went to some of these opal mining towns to research the film, I found people who’d come from all over the world for something that [most of them] would never find,” he adds. “The whole place is sort of built on hopes and dreams.”
Those universal themes formed the center of Opal Dream, one that was hardly confined to the children: their mother is dreaming of getting out, while their father is dreaming of striking it rich. In reaction to the constant miasma of non-fulfillment at home, Cattaneo says that the pre-teen Ashmol became kind of a cynic.
“He’s really a realist for a child of his age,” Cattaneo suggests.
The 43-year-old Member of the British Empire recipient (1998) goes on to explain that as much as his latest film is a “Puff the Magic Dragon-style goodbye to childhood fantasies and wishful thinking, it is also a celebration of the power of dreams and imagination. As he tries to help his sister, the prematurely pessimistic and hard-nosed Ashmol finds himself liberated to celebrate the possibilities of life, without guilt or shame.
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Ron Wolfson/WireImage.com
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Australian actress Jacqueline McKenzie
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While directors and impresarios from vaudeville to sitcoms have joked that you should never work with dogs or children, Cattaneo insists he enjoyed the challenge of leading a pre-pubescent crew. “I’ve worked with kids a lot, even though a lot of people I know avoid it,” he observes. “I did some kids TV stuff when I started, and my film school movie was about an 11-year-old boy. I also have 4 kids myself!”
“I like kids, I find working with them really great,” Cattaneo continues. “There’s a directness and simplicity towards their thinking – none of that, ‘Where’s my motivation?’ business. They either get it or they don’t; there’s not the middle ground that adult actors will get stuck in some times. It’s either rubbish or it’s brilliant. This is the first time I’ve really worked in a big part with kids since I’ve had kids myself.”
Cattaneo cites the mysterious sequence where young Ashmol goes down into the opal mines in the middle of the night, lit only with a mag-lite, as his favorite scene in Opal Dream. “All the while, he’s thinking, ‘What am I doing here?!’” he says. “All those shadows, and only the torchlight – the visual effect was stunning.”
Since the worldwide success of The Full Monty, Cattaneo has made only one other film besides his current one, Lucky Break (2001), in which a group of prison inmates stage a musical as part of an escape plan. For this one, Cattaneo was eager to get author Ben Rice’s input before he adapted the contents into a screenplay. Rice has also seen two of his short stories get turned into short films.
“He’s a fellow creative person,” Cattaneo says of Rice. “I very much enjoyed meeting and talking to him. The little [emotional] details and nuances in the book took me back to my own upbringing. They really impressed me.”
Both Cattaneo and Rice agreed early on to resist the temptation to visualize the enigmatic Pobby and Dingan onscreen, noting that their cinematic power was much greater if each viewer was invited and allowed to imagine these imaginary playmates for themselves, just like they do when reading the book. This also hopefully allows audiences to tap into their own memories of childhoods past.
Although one might automatically associate Opal Dream with the school of magic realism, Cattaneo says the film also belongs to a post-Sixth Sense genre of films about children. “I believe in the importance of film,” he muses. “I want it all – something that’s entertaining, but is also about something real. Not just something to look at for two hours.”
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