Script: Stories the australian way… or not

Producer Chris Adams doesn’t want to make so-called ‘Australian’ films. He told Paul Hayes that the origin of the idea doesn’t matter; it’s all about putting it on screen.

The Pennsylvania native and co-founder of Participant Productions (Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck) believes in making ‘Movies with a capital M’. The idea of making a film in Australia that doesn’t involve a group of blokes sitting around in the backyard, or a quirky Aussie family laughing and crying their way through a dramedy is one that is only slowly coming along. Not to say that other ideas don’t exist (the Edgerton brothers’ The Square being a recent example) but the matter of getting them from page to screen, any screen, is the hard part.

This is where Adams and his partner Steve Kearney come in. “Whether a movie is particularly about Australia isn’t really relevant if it’s great story,” he said. “It sounds so trite to say, but great stories told by great storytellers are transcendent.”

“For example, Chopper could have been about a guy in Liverpool, Nebraska, or Saskatchewan. It just happened to be about an Aussie. If it had been set someplace else, it would have still been a great film with a tremendous international appeal.”