Rowan Woods "Little Fish"

[Niemmy]

The Director that brought us Nerve,Hidden Memory "Scorpy & Niem" Has a new movie "Little Fish" So every good hearted Farscape fan should go out and see it ! It has some really good actors in it like Kate Blanchett , Hugo weaving, Sam Neil!

How come Rowan gets all the good actors? all I get is some wino's and coles checkout chicks "accomplished actors one and all!"

[Sam Niem]

Little Fish Interviews

David Stratton speaks to Rowan Woods and Margaret Pomeranz speaks with Sam Neill about LITTLE FISH.

David Stratton speaks to Rowan Woods and Sam Neil about LITTLE FISH. (Requires RealPlayer):

* Hifi video
* Lofi video

ROWAN WOODS: In many ways she's a sort of a nobody from nowhere. And yet, she has this sort of epic struggle with the past and her past life and problems of addiction, that she's gotten over. And in the story that we have before us in the present tense, she's suddenly faced with all these huge temptations. And the intersections of several characters in her life at that time create this life and death situation which, you know, it seems Shakespearean. But at the same time it's tiny and small and from a small pocket of the world.

And I am interested in films that take classic crime thriller structures and put on top of that the social realist sensibilities of, say, a Ken Loach. I'm interested in doing that. I did that with 'The Boys'. I'm not interested in just stories of naturalism. I like those naturalistic sensibilities to be put on top of genre structures.

SAM NEIL: Rowan's always looking for A, what's real, and B, if it's a cliche, he'll subvert it. And, you know, the, If it's a love scene, how do you shoot a love scene in a cliched way? This is how you do it. So let's do it THAT way because it's more interesting than THIS way.

Rowan gave me a whole heap of stuff, of research. And he wants you to take what you feel is useful. So I thought about it for a while and thought about some actual people that I knew, not drug dealers, observed them very closely and then brought to the set, with this wardrobe that we'd developed this wardrobe and make-up thing that we'd developed over a couple of days with those departments, I brought it to the set, and with this voice. And Rowan was very startled. And then we discussed it and we toned it down a bit. So it was actually a pretty larger-than-life character.

ROWAN WOODS: With Cate and Sam and Hugo and Martin Henderson and Noni, they indulged in the research that I'd done, and that part of it is endlessly fascinating to me because we're looking at the real world and applying it to the script and testing the script.

And then trying to get under the skin of the characters and the story so that we can just let it all go and fly. And when you fly after doing that sort of research, it's a sort of a marvelous experience, because you're not improvising with the words. The words are all locked down. But you have this great reference point to the real-life equivalents of those characters. And you feel confidently that you can speak on their behalf.

[Niemmy]

LITTLE FISH - Rowan For Broke

After a seven year absence from the big screen, the director of The Boys is back in fine form with another scorching drama set in the Australian suburban heartland. In Perth to promote Little Fish, Rowan Woods is quick to point out that he has been far from idle in the meantime.

"Everyone has asked me: 'what were you doing? Why has it taken seven years between movies?' Well, it hasn't been because I've been in my garret, you know, obsessively working on Little Fish; I've been paying the mortgage, with probably five times as many hours of on-set time as most feature film directors. I've got this career which had me making a science fiction series for American TV, called Farscape, and I did three telemovies and miniseries between here and then, so in fact, yeah - I do spend a lot of time obsessively developing these projects, but I'm out there paying the rent, from morning to dusk, keeping my kids fed."

Cate Blanchett stars as Tracy Heart, a once promising swimmer whose life has gone south after a series of family disasters and poor life choices. A former heroin addict, Tracy is doing her best to make good by holding down a responsible job in a video rental store - a profitable business that she believes could be expanded, as long as her chequered past doesn't interfere with her future plans, that is.

Of course the past held happier times as well for Tracy, her mother Janelle (Hazlehurst) and her brother Ray (Henderson), who's since lost a leg in an accident. Tracy's warmest relationship outside her biological family is with ex-rugby league star Lionel Dawson (Weaving), a gay heroin addict who in turn has a history with shady underworld figure Bradley 'the jockey' Thompson (Neill). While Tracy struggles to get ahead and make good with honest work, Ray is cultivating a secret business opportunity with Thompson's trusted (but not all that trustworthy, it seems) righthand- man. As if this weren't enough to deal with, Tracy also learns that her former lover, Johnny (Nguyen) is back in town after many years away out in the big wide world.

Woods says that while his films strive for that sense of character and place that is so uniquely Australian, it's an active process that's a good deal more studied than simply throwing in a whole bunch of kitsch-y cultural references. "You start with what you think is a great story of our culture - in this case it was unusual: this suburban family, and this sort of heroic struggle to put the past behind you - but then the process of getting that story right, it takes a long time; you make a lot of mistakes, you go down sort of dead end roads with story, and it takes quite a while to get the broad brushstrokes right. But you still haven't finished. Getting the broad brush strokes, whether it's a comedy or a drama, is one thing; then the real hard yards are about testing every single minute aspect of those relationships, and exploring them further, and fine-tuning them, so the audience will just suspend their disbelief because they connect with it, because they believe it. I think it's really, really important to get to that stage, that end point, in the work that you do, as a filmmaker, before you even put it on the screen, to get it to that point where it's so real, and compelling and believable, that the audiences' hearts and minds just go to it, just let go.

"I think maybe it just comes out of my process," continues Woods, in relation to his habit of ruthlessly refining the distilling a story down to its essential core, "where you toil long and hard with material, you tend to - certainly in the second half of that process - you tend to shed stuff that doesn't work, or that's irrelevant; so that process is really one where you're crystallising the stuff that matters to the story, and to your own emotions and your own connections with the material; and hopefully, at the other end, you do get a very spare, exact plot structure, on top of which is a mess of complexity and nuance, in dialogue and character, that enables you to suspend your disbelief."

One of the director's little chores, before the interview takes place, is to check the sound levels on the print of Little Fish due to screen that evening. It's all in a day's work for Rowan Woods, who cheerfully confesses to being a 'hands-on' kind of guy. "First of all, I only work with people who I trust and I think are up to the job, but even then - and I guess this is getting into the deep, dark psyche of my own personality, which is possibly not a good idea - but I am a control freak," he chortles.

"I like to stick my beak into all aspects of the film making process, from the very seed of the idea, right through to the exhibition and what level it's being played at in the cinema; and you need to, because, you know, it's a sort of David and Goliath struggle, in making films and putting out films like this, because increasingly the gap between the big Hollywood cinema and small cinema is increasing, and the hearts and minds of the 'gen Y' audience, the under 30 audience, is already being snapped-up and eaten up by Hollywood stories."

Not that he doesn't like big, loud, Hollywood films - Rowan Woods is deeply in love with cinema itself - but Woods also bemoans the tendency for many of these films to be practically made to order by committees. "It's also an interesting corporate equation, as well; I mean, you have movies made by big studios now that have very, very well set-up chains of distribution and exhibition, right through to the audience, whereby they've won the argument already. But I don't believe they have, if you get involved in all aspects of it and fight for your place; and you do have to fight for your place, and struggle for it, just to get the film in front of the audience, let alone making a film that will affect their hearts and minds."

_DREW TURNEY
Posted on September 7, 2005 05:46 PM