australian television information archive

Confronting characters

WHEN the ABC's senior brass log on to their computers tomorrow and examine the overnight ratings data, they can be excused for feeling more anxious than usual. Tonight marks the debut of the keenly anticipated — and hugely rewarding, on the basis of the first four episodes — mini-series The Slap, the undisputed jewel in the crown of the ABC's 2011 drama slate.

Defying conventional wisdom, the ABC opted not to run it on Sunday but on Thursday nights. What's more, in the slot previously reserved for the unloved Crownies, which last week didn't even make the night's top 20, and a full two months after the excitement generated by a sold-out sneak peek at the Melbourne International Film Festival, where it was voted one of the 10 most popular dramas.

The programmers are clearly hoping the unprecedented buzz for the adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas's bestseller will ensure that at least 1 million eyeballs — the unofficial benchmark for an ABC "hit" — will tune in on what is generally regarded as a slow TV night.

Jonathan LaPaglia as Hector and Sophie Okonedo as Aisha are two of the stars of The Slap who might not be readily familiar to Australian audiences.

Since publication in 2008, the novel has sold more than 200,000 copies in Australia alone (and an additional 600,000 internationally) and generated more dinner-party conversations than any button-pushing radio shock jock could hope for.

As the mini-series' executive producer and "showrunner" Tony Ayres notes, the novel "spoke to something that hadn't been spoken to before". Ayres and his partners at Matchbox Pictures were one of several production companies vying for the rights to the book. Tsiolkas is a long-time admirer of Ayres's films, particularly The Home Song Stories, and was closely involved with the Matchbox deal as well as the page-to-screen process.

The novel recounts the aftermath of a family barbecue where a man slaps a child who is not his own. Mirroring the book, each of the mini-series' eight episodes is told through the eyes of a different character, which presented the filmmakers with the first of the many challenges they faced in the adaptation.

From the outset, they didn't want The Slap to play like eight self-contained episodes in the style of an anthology. Two story arcs were developed to bridge the eight episodes: the first being the court case instigated by Rosie, the mother of the slapped child; the second revolving around the uncomfortable infatuation the teenager Connie develops for Hector, at whose house the barbecue and slap took place.

The power of the story is cumulative, says executive producer Helen Bowden. "We felt that the structure of the book, if we could achieve what Christos had done, would be very satisfying for [viewers]."

Hand in hand with this story structure was the bold creative decision to enlist four directors — Ayres, Robert Connolly, Jessica Hobbs and Matthew Saville — for two episodes each and allow them stylistic free range in their treatment of their episodes.

For three weeks the writers and directors workshopped the scripts with Tsiolkas and talked about the style of the filming and performances. "The brief to me was to visually and directorially interpret these episodes," says Connolly, who ended up with the episodes about Aisha [Hector's wife] and Rosie.

Rosie, played by Melissa George, is the character who generates the strongest and most divisive reactions to both the book and mini-series.

Married to deadbeat drunk Gary, Rosie is still breastfeeding her bratty five-year-old son, Hugo, and is by turns resentful and envious of her better-off and more fulfilled gal pals Aisha and Anouk. She was the character who most attracted Connolly when he was approached to direct what is his first big foray into television after a string of feature films, including Balibo and Three Dollars.

"We had this philosophical approach that each episode would explore a character, not critique a character, which I think is fundamental to any drama," Connolly says. "I think as a director the moment you judge a character, you're in trouble. I remember when we did The Boys, David Wenham, playing this character Brett Sprague, said, 'If I judge this man I will never be able to play him.'

"With Rosie … you look at her background, her relationship with Aisha, and you start piecing this together. You have this great opportunity in one hour of TV drama to take the audience into that world to try to understand her."

Another challenge for the filmmakers was to make the characters at the very least empathetic to an audience without softening the raw and brutally frank edges that are hallmarks of Tsiolkas's vision.

"I want the audience to feel they're coming with you on an investigation and come to maybe feel more compassionately about a character they previously didn't like but not because the hard edges are gone," Connolly says.

For Connolly, it was crucial that the moral questions the book raised about the characters remained open. "Was Rosie right in going to the police?" he asks rhetorically. "You still have to make all that up yourself. A credit to the producers in their brief is they didn't ask you to complete the journey for the audience."

According to a story Melissa George told Connolly, she was at a barbecue where people were talking animatedly about the book and getting stuck into Rosie.

"She gave them a blast," Connolly says. "As a director, I can't do that but the actors can.

"Their episodes were a chance for them to argue the case for their character."

Bowden admits that TV audiences struggle with "unlikeable" characters. "There's always an anxiety about anti-heroes and unsympathetic characters but when you look at the most interesting characters on screen, through the years the most significant number of them are unattractive. It's really about drilling down into why they work."

While the series was being edited, the producers held test screenings with two groups of people across a range of ages. In one group were people who had read the book, in the other people who hadn't. According to Bowden, the group that had read the book loved the Rosie episode the most, despite having disliked her intensely in the book. "They all said she's the same but you understand her," Bowden says.

The other group had similar reactions to the people who had read the book, which is to say a mix of fury and empathy.

The mini-series was shot as closely as possible to the actual locations that Tsiolkas made such tangible elements in his "very north-side-of-the-river" book, as Ayres puts it.

Geographically speaking, it is remarkably exact and authentic, all the while avoiding the cliched use of landmarks favoured by many local dramas to signal where the action is taking place. Hector and Aisha's house in the mini-series is in Alphington (Northcote in the book), while in one episode Hector's father, Manolis, makes a sentimental trip to a much transformed pocket of Richmond to visit old friends from Greece with whom he had a falling-out ages ago.

The houses inside which much of The Slap takes place are perfect reflections of their occupants: the slick, ostentatious but unlived-in house where Harry and his family live contrasts sharply with the oppressive, boho worker's cottage that Rosie rents.

Bowden says she was struck by the "rigour and enthusiasm" with which the cast and crew approached the production.

The Slap's two most central characters, Hector and Aisha, are played by Jonathan LaPaglia and British-Nigerian Sophie Okonedo (Hotel Rwanda, Dirty Pretty Things), neither of whom will be familiar to a general audience here. In the case of LaPaglia, brother of actor Anthony, this is the Adelaide-born actor's first role in Australia. Filling out the cast are expat Melissa George, Anthony Hayes as Gary, Alex Dimitriades as the violent Harry and Diana Glenn as his damaged wife, Sandi, and Lex Marinos as Manolis.

The gamble of casting relatively untried actors to play three teenage characters who have pivotal roles in the drama has especially paid off in the case of Sophie Lowe, whose depiction of the 16-year-old Connie in the throes of irrational, crazy first love for Hector is pitch-perfect and credible. Blake Davis, also seen in Tangle, plays Richie, while Oliver Ackland (Cloudstreet) is Rhys. As much as possible, the filmmakers looked to actors who matched the characters' ethnicity.

In the case of Aisha, this led to a drawn-out process after Connolly travelled to London to audition British-Indian actresses.

After meeting the "staggeringly great actress" Okonedo, a decision was made to change Aisha's cultural background to Mauritian. According to Connolly, Tsiolkas was very open to the changes, even writing a detailed backstory for the ethnically transformed Aisha.

While Tsiolkas's book is specifically about the experiences of Greek-Australian migrants, Aisha's Indian ancestry is explored in less detail. What mattered to Tsiolkas, Connolly says, is that Aisha regards herself as an outsider to mainstream Australia, a common bond that links her to Hector and his close-knit Greek family.

Connolly recalls how Okonedo remarked to him one day about the large numbers of Asian people she and her partner saw on the streets of Melbourne.

"She didn't realise Australia is so multicultural, because she's used to seeing Australian TV in the UK," Connolly says.

"I remember the groundbreaking moment when Deborah Mailman was in The Secret Life of Us, not as an indigenous character, just as a really cool character who happened to be indigenous. Whenever you cast anything, you ask yourself, 'Is it a real depiction of the world, not a tokenistic one?' Part of what's exciting about the book and now the TV series is how it's bedded down in a world that's familiar … honest and revelatory."

Bowden admits that she wanted to cast actors who would appear fresh and unfamiliar.

Discovering LaPaglia — via casting director Jane Norris, who is married to Connolly — was a revelation, Bowden says.

"When you talk about actors in their late 30s, early 40s, we know them all very well.

"But to find someone who is Australian, an experienced and really good actor but is not known in Australia, was a gem."

Bunkered down in production, Bowden has understandably been too preoccupied to think about the weight of expectation that rests squarely on the producers' shoulders. However, she notes the eagerness of some readers to "emphatically" talk about how much they dislike certain characters. "But the great thing is they're interested. They want to talk about it," she says. "They want to talk about why they didn't like the characters, all the issues that are raised to do with child-rearing and relationships and loyalty.

"One of the great strengths [of the book] is that it gets people talking."

Tomorrow we'll know whether the mini-series has the same effect.

By Paul Kalina
October 6, 2011
Sydney Morning Herald