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ABOUT THE PRODUCTION Writer Keith Thompson wrote the screenplay of INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS for Brenda Blethyn. Although he has lived in Australia for many years, Keith grew up in Dover, near Brenda’s hometown, and created the character of Jean Dwight – a British comedienne who had immigrated to Australia 25 years ago with her Australian performer husband – with her English accent in his mind. Keith took the script to producer Rosemary Blight who immediately agreed that Brenda Blethyn was perfect to play the lead role. Rosemary had previously worked with Brenda in 1997 on the Australian film In The Winter Dark, an experience they both enjoyed immensely. Rosemary remembers, “After In The Winter Dark, I was sent many scripts and INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS was one of them. I read it for the first time in 1996 and immediately loved it. I can still recall the moment it first made me laugh. That line is still in the film today, and it stills brings me so much joy. There was always something very special about this project.” “Keith and I did some intensive early script and development work and then approached the person on top of our wish list for directors Cherie Nowlan,” Rosemary continues, “This film has had an incredible journey. Straight away we knew we had to take our time, we wanted the elements to be right. I remember our first meeting with Cherie, I admire her very much, she has a great talent with scripts and it was wonderful to see that she too had connected with Keith’s writing. We then approached Brenda, and she said ‘I’ll do it, when do we start.’ It was a while before she got her wish, she hung in with us until the script was where we wanted it and until we could find people with money who loved it as much as we all did. “I think each of us recognised the qualities in the script. It had heart and characters with life and emotional layers. I like making films that traverse dark emotional places but I wanted to make a film that delivered something back to the audience with joy. At the end of INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS you come out of it feeling good.” It was Cherie’s skill with actors, as evidenced by the performances from Cate Blachett, Frances O’Connor and Richard Roxburgh in her first feature film Thank God He Met Lizzie, that first suggested to Rosemary that Cherie was the right director for INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS. Subsequently, Rosemary and Cherie worked together on two telefeatures, honing their skills and professional relationship, before finance allowed production on INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS to begin. Cherie had already known Keith Thompson through scriptwriting circles. She thought him to be a lovely person and very funny, “I expected to like it (the script) but maybe not love it. What I didn’t expect was to connect with it as much as I did. I loved his humour and his originality and I loved the fact that it was a coming of age story about a mother and a son,” Cherie says. The film’s very creativity initially made it challenging for Rosemary to attract investors, “What was difficult was that it is Jean’s story but it is also Tim’s story, it’s about a coming of age that is told through sexual exploration and that can be rather confronting. It is a very distinctive film – it has an older viewpoint and it has a younger viewpoint,” she explains. For Keith, the genesis of the story was his daughter’s birth. With his parents still in England, he felt an immediate need to speak to his mother to tell her the news, “There is something special about the relationship between a boy and his mum. There’s a kind of passion in that relationship and I think that relationship is the nursery for all the relationships that boys are going to have with girls and women for the rest of their lives. There’s something about the reward and the joy that mothers give you for your every little achievement, so giving your mother a granddaughter is a really big achievement and it was important for me to get that little rush back from her.” The opportunity to work with Brenda Blethyn was also very attractive to Cherie, who flew to London to meet her before Brenda signed for the role, “I think she is one of the greatest actresses of all time and I really can’t think of anyone apart from Meryl Steep who’s in her sphere. When I read the script it was fairly obvious that it had been written for Brenda but I did do my due diligence. I looked at all her work and Rosemary encouraged me to do that. Rosemary, having worked with Brenda before, knew she was fantastic but didn’t want to force that choice on me. But I came to the same conclusion – there is nobody like Brenda and the experience of working with her exceeded my expectations, if that were possible.” For Brenda Blethyn, INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS was special enough to wait five years for, “I loved the character they were asking me to look at, but what I really loved about the script was how tenderly Keith Thompson had written the part for her son Tim. Tim’s falling in love and that first experience of a loving, sexual relationship with someone he’s besotted with – played by the fantastic Emma Booth –was so well observed. Often when you see films about young relationships it is like a young person going on 45 with all the knowledge of what goes on behind closed doors, but in this script that wasn’t the case, it really was a learning curve for Tim.” But how to find a cast to match Brenda’s brilliance, particularly for the roles of Jean Dwight’s 21-year-old virgin son Tim and his forthright new girlfriend Jill? “I think you have to cast every role on its own merit and try not to be too daunted by that prospect. Brenda’s skill level is so high I was shaking in my boots when we got her; wondering how we all could match that. I think my biggest concern was Jill because she really has to be a force to be reckoned with, but I was so lucky because Emma Booth was virtually the first person I tested. So right from the jump, this little force of nature appeared and she was the second person to be cast…and I spent that year worrying that she would be discovered and disappear to Hollywood before I got the chance to work with her. And indeed she did keep getting roles but strangely things kept falling over. Word spread very quickly that there was this new hot young actress around. She worked with me a lot during the recalls for the boys and I got to know her as a person and as an actor quite well so I got to be confident that, even though she was inexperienced, Brenda would find her interesting to work with…and luckily she did,” Cherie says. “Emma has all the skills that great actors cultivate, but she is completely authentic with everything she says and does. She can do repeated takes and it’s fresh every time. That’s what people like Brenda do with all her vast experience. Emma has to bare herself quite literally in this film, but fortunately she has great inner confidence and strength. She has had an unusual life as she travelled the world as a teenager modelling, so she’s worldly, and she’s really funny and I honestly think she is probably the most natural and gifted person I’ve ever worked with, and I’m very proud to have discovered her, as it were, in this film.” Finding the best actor to play Tim was a different process. It took three years to cast the right actor to play the role, with many wonderful young actors becoming too old for the part during the process. Khan Chittenden was filming his first lead role in the feature West and auditioned on the second last day of casting. He ‘absolutely nailed the audition’ according to Cherie who was beaming, along with casting director Nikki Barrett, following the audition. “Imagine being sandwiched by Jill and Jean – although it would have been pleasurable at times!” Cherie says. “But Khan has an inner strength to him, and a deep understanding of who Tim is. He’s got an incredibly kind and generous heart. He loves to be funny and he loves it when other people are funny. He and Emma were the most inexperienced and they really did have to rise in this formidable woman’s (Brenda’s) company – which they did, brilliantly.” Richard Wilson, who had impressed Cherie and Rosemary with his work on films such as the Nick Cave-penned The Proposition, playing the younger brother of Guy Pearce’s character, was offered the role of Jean’s younger disabled son Mark. The supporting cast is a fantastic ensemble of Australian actors – performer and actor Frankie J. Holden as Jean’s estranged husband, singer and sometime-security guard John; Rebecca Gibney returning to her New Zealand roots as Jean’s blowsy friend Lana; international star Philip Quast as Jean’s admirer Ronnie Stubbs; another talented newcomer Katie Wall as Jill’s flat mate and Russell Dykstra as Jean’s new manager. Much of INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS was inspired by Keith Thompson’s childhood as the son of a performer. “When I was a kid my mother had a dance band in England. I used to sit at the side of the piano while she was performing and so I was always around clubs. The working class milieu in those clubs is really interesting and really powerful. Plus, I love writing about women’s humour. Guys get so many opportunities to be funny, but what makes me laugh is the way women relate to each other with their humour. It’s a kind of domestic humour, they were doing observational comedy 30 years ago before it became popular with Seinfeld and people like that,” Keith says. Brenda Blethyn’s character Jean Dwight was an up and coming comedy star in Britain before she moved to Australia with her new husband. She plays the clubs of Sydney with her bawdy and often caustic act. Her biting wit is also employed at home, particularly against Tim’s girlfriend Jill. It is a demanding role for any actress and Cherie says she felt a tremendous responsibility towards Brenda. “Brenda has played a lot of flawed characters, including comic monsters, and she has had some criticism for that as well as accolades, so she was very concerned to make Jean likeable. Jean has a sharp tongue in her head, that’s what we love about her. She is hilarious, but she is scary and can be difficult to be around, and you have to be able to create that kind of character without losing sympathy – she must somehow be able to redeem herself, which of course she does. At first I probably did underestimate how important the role was to Brenda, but having gotten to know her, everything is important to her. She does more than her very best, she is exceptional in everything she does.” Brenda’s on-stage performances delighted the many hundreds of extras throughout the shoot, as well as the crew. “We did have fun,” Cherie says. “Shooting the club scenes was a comedy in itself sometimes, particularly the first set up of a shot, because the audience didn’t know what they were going to hear. “We had several big extras days. Our casted extras were perfect thanks to Jane Dawkins, our extras casting person, who did an amazing job and we also had the real life extras wandering around…it was pretty amusing. Brenda tells a lovely story about one extra who was sure that they had seen her performing her routine at a club in Melbourne, Brenda assured her that she couldn’t have as she’s not actually a stand up comic, but an actor. The extra responded ‘Oh don’t put yourself down, love’.” Producer Rosemary Blight sought and received the co-operation of a number of Sydney clubs. Many have live shows several times a day and are integral to the fabric of life in their communities. “The clubs were great, they loved us being there. This film is about a positive experience. It says ‘this is life, this is family, this is entertainment’. That’s what the clubs are all about. These clubs have tens of thousands of members, they have bands every night, they have ventriloquists, they have the time of their lives and we embraced that,” Rosemary says. Logistically, the club sequences made INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS a big film to produce. “It has over 20 songs in it, there are live music recordings, there are big clubs. We have Brenda performing in front of hundreds of extras. So it was daunting, but we had a great team. Cherie and I decided early on that we wanted people around us who knew more than we did, we wanted to work with the absolute best. Unfortunately for the Australian film industry at the time there wasn’t a lot of work around, fortunately for us, we had the choice of the most extraordinary people.” Rosemary explains. The recordings included Brenda Blethyn singing, as Jean, Nutbush City Limits along with her screen husband Frankie J. Holden, at a wedding. Brenda and Frankie recorded the song, with the bass player from Jamiroquai amongst others, and then sang again during the filming of the wedding sequence with 150 extras dancing, clapping and cheering. Rosemary Blight had tears in her eyes hearing Brenda sing, “I want people to come out of the cinema singing Nutbush, with a bit of a dance in their step….so to hear Brenda and Frankie singing it so well, was wonderful”. It also gave Brenda the chance to play at being a rock star, something she’s always secretly desired to do, “Recording and singing Nutbush is one of the highlights of my life – never mind my career. I’ve always had a fantasy about making a record, recording a song, and now I’ve done it. I kept saying to Rosemary “I don’t think I can do that song” and she said ‘yes you can, I’ve heard you’, anyway she had faith and faith will move mountains as they say. I went into the studio and with the help of (music producer) Daniel Denholm and Frankie, I did it!” Brenda says. Brenda says the role of Jean has also given her a new respect for comedians, “I take my hat off to all those wonderful stand up comics we know and love; it’s quite hard. Doing comedy for film was different again – if you’re doing it for real in a club, you get the instant reaction from the audience and you know how you’re going, but on film however, depending on which way the camera is shooting, the audience is not allowed to make a sound. So before filming, we did each routine so that we would know what response I would get if I was performing live.” Because the schedule was so demanding and her style of improvisation, Cherie wanted a cinematographer who could get excellent results quickly and who was flexible. She and Rosemary had both worked with Mark Wareham on a telefeature in the Small Claims franchise. “He is a great improviser. While we talked about look, at the end of the day it really is about story and character. The look is not secondary but rather second nature to us. What I love is that Mark allows changes within a scene to happen. I’m not really interested in knowing what I’m going to get, I want to be surprised by everything. I would be bored otherwise…and I think so would the audience,” Cherie says. Mark says that Cherie was very specific about the kind of film she didn’t want to make. “Being a film about relationships it was important that we didn’t let the camera get in the way of those relationships. The thing was to find the visual language which suited the film. I tried to deconstruct the visuals a little so that everything is not perfect. I didn’t want audiences to feel like they are watching a ‘film’; it was really important to ground the film in reality and honesty. “We were very careful that we don’t parody the characters with the visuals. It’s not a film about ugly people in an ugly world, the people are really warm.” Other heads of department include production designer Nell Hanson, costume designer Emily Seresin and make-up supervisor Chiara Tripodi. Nell Hanson explains how she approached the film, “The tone of the film is complex; it is bitter-sweet where every bit of comedy had has an underlying sadness to it. I found the character of Jean compelling and fascinating - the private life of a comedian, the dark side to the light, seeing all those different worlds in there, and being able to create all those different worlds – I could already visualise the film as I was reading it. “Even though it is a comedy, we talked about approaching it from a fairly ordinary level to start with in terms of design. We didn’t want to send anyone up; so we talked about the reality in Jean’s life - who she was and therefore where she’d been. It became more stylised as we went on. I was very aware of pulling from the natural and working from there. The only thing that needed to be funny was Jean on stage. “Cherie had a very strong idea that Jean lived in a 60’s house. The whole thing about Jean’s world is that she is harking back to a time in the past, but she’s still in the spotlight. So, under the right light the carpet looks glamourous, but when you turn the house lights on or daylight is on it, you realise it is actually stained and flawed. So that was our conceptual starting point. We picked a colour palette of very rich colours and then knocked the saturation out of all of them. Everything in the daytime should look fairly faded and dusted - but at night, with Mark Wareham’s lighting, it kind of glows and has a richness and a warmth. Jean is so charismatic, it has to be a very warm space when she is in full flight. “Creating the world of the clubs was a lot of fun. A lot of them update very often and there must be a lot of pressure to be snazzy and up to the minute but what we wanted to capture was that little bit of a run-down Las Vegas style feeling. I think we found the few clubs left in Sydney with character and old world charm and then we introduced more of our own colour and life, to make it a little more ‘fantastical’.” As with the visual style, Cherie wanted subtly in the design of the film, “I don’t like noticing production design, wardrobe and makeup on the screen – I’m taken out of the story. I wanted to work with people who understood the world of INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS and had a great affection for it. “The wardrobe and make-up is quite wonderful; I loved watching the picture grade and not seeing the make-up or indeed seeing it when I needed to, when Brenda is performing. We all had an awareness that Brenda is quite vulnerable up there on the stage and that we needed to create a look that would be real and that she would feel comfortable with. She’s the sort of actor who likes to know why her wardrobe is what it is, from the shoes up. It has to be real. “It was a beautiful team, I wouldn’t hesitate to work with any of them again.”