Drought over

Eric Bana’s new movie

Eric Bana shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be doing this. He’s been Chopper. The Hulk. Dirty John. Thanks to one of Hollywood’s more eclectic careers, the Australian actor has been all of these things, and many more. In Troy, Bana wore a chainmail vest and tried to impale Brad Pitt with a spear. In Star Trek, he shaved his head, sported face tattoos and tried to kill Spock.

At 52, Bana is an acting superstar, one who deserves the royal red carpet treatment. But things are a bit more low-key these days. Here he is, jumping on a Zoom call with a Kiwi journalist.

‘‘Hello,’’ says Bana, his thick Aussie accent cutting through the awkwardness of a celebrity interview conducted online. ‘‘How are you?’’

Like many who’ve been locked down because of Covid-19 restrictions this year, Bana has keeping busy trying to do his job remotely.

Yes, even movie stars have had to socially distance, suffer through lockdowns and spend too much time at home this year.

For Bana, that’s meant an extended period of time in Melbourne with his wife, Rebecca, and their children Klaus, 22, and Sophia, 18.

‘‘I’m looking forward to the world getting back to normal and being able to travel for work again,’’ Bana admits.

‘‘I’ve been home probably 10 months of this year. My family is well and truly sick of me.’’

Usually, for blockbuster premieres, Bana would press the flesh, flashing his cinematic smile for a parade of international journalists.

For The Dry, his first Australian film in more than 12 years, that’s simply not possible.

‘‘It’s kind of become the norm,’’ says Bana, when asked how he’s coping with online movie promotion. ‘‘It’s going to feel weird to go back to inperson stuff.’’

The Dry, based on the bestselling book by Jane Harper, was supposed to be in theatres from August.

Covid screwed that up so, if you live in a country that allows cinemas to be open, like New Zealand, you’ll be able to see it from today.

Either way, The Dry is a hell of a way for Bana to make his big Aussie comeback.

Directed by Robert Connolly and set in the parched Aussie Outback, it’s a small-town murdermystery in which everyone is a suspect.

Bana plays Aaron Falk, a big-city cop who returns to his rural roots to attend a friend’s funeral.

Falk becomes entangled in a world full of twofaced rogues and dodgy scoundrels, as he begins linking what happened to his friend to another murder committed 30 years earlier.

Bana is a big fan of Harper’s page-turner, and had just finished the book on his wife’s advice when the offer for the lead role came through.

‘‘It felt like if you dropped a match the place was going to go up. It was a very deliberate decision that we shot where we shot.’’

‘‘I was like, ‘I just read the book, I love the book,’’’ he says.

Bana was such a fan, he also offered to produce it. ‘‘It was this amazing happy accident, the opposite of what we’re used to, those tales of woe. This came together quite quickly.’’

If it was warm and fuzzy behind the scenes, that doesn’t translate to camera. Bookended by bodies, and full of historical trauma and regret, The Dry is not a feel-good film. But it does look good.

One of its biggest drawcards is its cinematography. Filmed at the end of 2019 in Wimmera, a four-hour drive from Melbourne, the region was suffering a record-breaking heatwave at the time.

That energy infuses its way into the film, with sweeping vistas of burnt landscapes and singed paddocks smothering the audience in searing, oppressive heat.

Kiewarra is a fictional Aussie town, where watering your garden is outlawed, and farmers struggle to grow crops.

But Bana says that’s exactly what it was like where they were filming. ‘‘It was hot. It felt like if you dropped a match the place was going to go up,’’ he says.

‘‘One of the towns we filmed in had no drinking water. Their drinking water was being trucked in.

‘‘It sort of adds to the tension and the stress that the town’s going through. It was a very deliberate decision that we shot where we shot.’’

That constant focus on weather patterns hit home how many parts of Australia are struggling with climate change, says Bana.

Once filming finished, he started celebrating when it rained in the region.

‘‘They were explaining to us what it’s like when the good rain comes and everyone’s mood shifts and changes.

‘‘You could really get a sense of that lack of control while you’re there. They’re completely reliant on the weather patterns. It’s an unbelievably dry, vulnerable part of the world.’’

In one scene, Bana strips off his clothes, steps into a shower, and turns on the tap. Pipes that grind and shudder with the promise of clean water instead spew thick brown gunk out of the showerhead. Bana screams.

Not a half-scream or screech, but a proper primal yell that can only come from someone well practised in being the bad guy in big-budget blockbusters. It’s the best moment in The Dry, a film full of them.

Bana is rightly proud of the film, which teases out the culprit until the bitter end.

If you haven’t read the book, you really will struggle to work out whodunit. That’s not always a given: the audience for The Dry might be inbuilt thanks to the book’s popularity, but readers already know the ending. Surprising those fans isn’t just hard, it’s impossible.

Bana admits the hardest part of making a film like The Dry is staying one step ahead of the audience. They’re used to the clues, the shifty looks, the knowing glances that cast instant suspicion on a character.

‘‘The edit was quite complicated and it took a long time to get the balance right because it’s a mystery,’’ he says. ‘‘So it’s a case of calibrating the cast, how much they appear, how much we give away, how much we misdirect.

‘‘It’s so complicated. It’s such a fine thing to strike that balance.’’ Ahh, balance, the one thing no one has had in 2020.

As our Zoom call comes to an end, Bana admits he’s been struggling just like the rest of us.

He desperately wants to be back on film sets, back making movies, just like he’s been doing for the past 20 years.

Right now, he’s heading back to his home in Melbourne, to his family, and his kids, where he’s spent almost every day this year. He’s working on a few things, including a documentary on Isle of Man racer Mike Hailwood, but he doesn’t know when he’ll get to do any of this again.

‘‘You’ve just got to be open, and play it by ear,’’ he says, brushing the curls from his face.

’’I’m not sure what I’ll do next.’’