A man, a boy and a dog
Bryan Brown has been around a long time, but there’s nothing he likes more than an oldfashioned kids movie, he tells
Jack van Beynen.
‘‘I’ve done movies with kids and animals before, and I think I’d prefer to do kids and animals over adults,’’ says the veteran Australian actor Bryan Brown.
‘‘I think it’s sort of more fun, anything can happen and it keeps you on your toes.’’
Brown has been a fan of both since 1987’s The Shiralee, a film he credits as a milestone in his acting career, a career that went on to include flicks such as Gorillas in the Mist, Along Came Polly and Australia. He likes, he says, the way children can be unpredictable on set; it forces more experienced actors to be on their toes.
Given the choice of specific animal, Brown is a cat person, but his latest film is about a dog.
Red Dog: True Blue is a follow up to 2011’s Red Dog and creates a fictional origins story for Australia’s famous canine.
The film tells the story of 11-year-old Mick (played by Levi Miller), who after the death of his dad is shipped off to his grandfather’s outback station in Pilbara.
Brown plays Mick’s laconic, cattlechasing, banjo-playing, steak-andmash-eating grandfather, who takes some convincing before Mick’s allowed to keep the titular dog Blue.
In many ways True Blue isa throwback to an older style of family film. Unlike most of today’s kidfriendly fare, there’s not a computergenerated image in sight.
‘‘I guess one of the things is that when we think about kids movies and family movies these days, we totally think about animated movies,’’ says Brown, who was invited to work on the film following another project with director Kriv Stenders.
‘‘The difference is, I think, that here’s a story for families that’s not animated. And maybe that’s what we mean about it being a throwback, it’s a throwback to being real.’’
True Blue is also a throwback to a different era. It’s set in the year 1968 – a time of social change that even reached the Outback. Aboriginal land rights, the Summer of Love, the conversion of outback farmland to mining – these changes encroach at the edges of the film’s simple comingof-age story.
‘‘That’s the time, you just get a sense that it is a time of change, that doesn’t absolutely affect the boy and his dog’s story, but you sense there is a certain time in the world, there is a world out there that’s undergoing some sort of change,’’ Brown says.
Brown sees the film as being fundamentally about relationships, but those details from the period add to its depth. ’’It is about a changing time in Australia,’’ he says.
'I never knew my grandparents on either side, and in fact I never even grew up with a father, so all that male behaviour, I think it's DNA.' Bryan Brown
He’s not convinced his character, whose idea of keeping up with the modern world is mustering on motorbikes instead of horseback, is going to adapt to those changes.
‘‘He’s been displaced just as the displaced are starting to ask for their land,’’ Brown says.
People who have seen the film have told Brown that his performance reminds them of their own grandfather - the character is someone many Australians recognise. Brown, a Sydney native who had never been to Pilbara before the film, was less familiar with the sort of bloke he was asked to portray. He puts his convincing performance down to his male DNA.
‘‘I never knew my grandparents on either side, and in fact I never even grew up with a father, so all that male behaviour, I think it’s DNA. I think it’s just in you somewhere,’’ Brown says.
True Blue is not the first time he’s worked with dogs. ‘‘Sometimes I’ve had a dog for like six weeks or something, felt like it was mine, and then they take it away again and it’s sort of quite sad,’’ he says.
‘‘You get very connected, you have to, because you have to know that you belong to it and it starts trailing after you, and this is what [Miller] had with this.’’
True Blue is about more than just a boy and his dog, though. It’s a window into an iconic community that is uniquely Australian. Brown thinks there will be something exotic about the film for audiences in New Zealand and other countries overseas.
‘‘I find that when I go overseas and see an Australian movie, suddenly it really brings it home very strongly to me, it’s like ‘Wow, I haven’t seen Australia that way,’ because I’m in another country and suddenly I can see it as exotic, the way other people do.
‘‘I quite like watching Australian movies form another country. You just see it slightly differently.’’
Red Dog: True Blue
See in New Zealand cinemas from January 1