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Date: August 07 2012
There was a fantastic, incendiary little Aussie film called Burning Man and last November I bored everyone around me senseless by telling them how amazing it was. It came and went from cinemas in a fortnight. With the commercial drivers behind cinemas - the need to pay their staff wages and their shareholders dividends - a film needs to demonstrate its profitability early, and the first weekend's revenue can decide the life of a film.
However, with the release this week of the Australian film The Sapphires, I have my fingers crossed that Australian audiences get off their backsides and take their families and friends to the pictures in its first fortnight of release. Why? Well, for the first time since Red Dog we have an Aussie film with a completely universal family appeal. To top it off, it is extremely well made and is the perfect ambassador for Australia's film industry on the international stage.
''Most films in Australia don't get the life they should have,'' says Sapphires' star, Deborah Mailman. ''One comes along in a blue moon that busts the box office, but you just never know,'' she says. ''And even though we're coming off the buzz of Cannes it's out of our control now and I just hope people come out of the cinema tapping their toes and wiggling their hips and feeling good.''
In The Sapphires, Mailman plays Gail, who along with younger sisters Julie (Jessica Mauboy) and Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell) and their cousin Kay (Shari Sebbens) make up a singing group. Discovered by talent scout Dave (Irish actor Chris O'Dowd), he moulds the country and western-loving quartet into soul singers and scores them a gig performing for the troops fighting in the Vietnam War.
The film is adapted from Tony Briggs's stage play, which he wrote based on the stories told to him by his mother and aunties of their experiences entertaining troops in Vietnam. Mailman played Cynthia, the younger, mouthier, sister in the original 2004 stage production.
At 40, she is older than the roles were originally written, but that didn't stop her from pursuing a role with the filmmakers.
''When I see a role I want I fight for it,'' Mailman says. ''I told them that I knew they might be looking in a younger age bracket and that I'd probably missed the boat but if they'd consider me I'd love to audition for them.''
The film's producers cast two relatively unknown actresses - Tapsell and Sebbens - alongside Australian Idol winner Jessica Mauboy, who made her film debut alongside Mailman in Bran Nue Dae in 2009. The casting works wonderfully, the four playing off each other with superb timing.
''We had four weeks of rehearsal and I thought that putting those four girls together to live and breathe each other for four weeks, getting down and dirty and sweating with each other, rehearsing 12 songs a day would bring them together and in the end we're a tight little group,'' says director Wayne Blair.
Mailman finds herself playing the protective momma-bear role for the group, which is at the other end of the spectrum to Nona, the role that made her famous in Rachel Perkins's 1998 film Radiance.
''This is a great time in my life,'' Mailman says.
''I celebrated my 40th birthday the other week, I'm mother to two kids, I'm married, and where I am as a person reflects emotionally in a role like Gail, just like a young, free character like Nona reflected where I was when I was young and playing her,'' she says.
Mailman looks radiant in the role, though when I suggest this to her she modestly throws the credit elsewhere. ''That was Warwick (Thornton, the Cannes Camera D'Or-winning director of Samson and Delilah who was cinematographer) and the costuming people,'' he says. ''Actually, Goalpost(the production company) gathered the best people to work on this film, which is why it all looks so fantastic.''
Asked how she enjoyed the back-teased beehives and white knee-high boots, Mailman says,''I'm a bit of a tomboy, not a dressy girl, so I had to get over that hump, but they were made for us, the colours were so vibrant and it was like stepping into a Tardis back to the '60s.''
It's been a big year for Mailman, with her series Offspring a ratings winner, though for her, playing Anita Mabo earlier this year in the television movie Mabo was a career highlight.
''I couldn't believe they gave the role to me,'' she says.
''I got to spend a lot of time with their family and filming in the Supreme Court in Brisbane was spine-tingling, goose-bump stuff, a homage to an incredible man and woman who changed the landscape. It was one of those moment where I say to myself 'this is why I do what I do'.''
The Sapphires is set in the late 1960s. Aboriginal Australia has just won the right to vote and Vietnam was a burning political issue, but director Blair and writer Briggs keep the tone light without ignoring these issues.
''I remember being at my grandmother's funeral and my cousins and I were on her verandah having a laugh at silly stuff for hours, which reminds me that comedy is sometimes the best form of healing,'' Blair recalls.
So what attracted Blair to the production? ''For me, this feels like one of the films I grew up with from the '80s.
''It's a story for young people and old people; people will walk out wanting to play piano like Chris O'Dowd, they'll love the characters for their faults and still want them to win.
''They're characters with the same needs and wants as us, to work, to be respected, to have equality, to have a laugh.
''I know when he wrote the play Tony Briggs wanted to give a musical to Australia and to the world and now a hundred countries are going to see it.''
Blair and his cast have just returned from the Cannes Film Festival, where Sapphire screened out of competition to a standing ovation in the 2000-seat auditorium, and where Hollywood powerbrokers The Weinstein Company bought the international rights.
''Watching the film with an audience of 2000 in Cannes was exciting and wonderful, but I can't wait to see how Geraldton reacts, or Broome, or Canberra,'' Blair says.
■ The Sapphires is now showing in cinemas
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