Postcard from a dark place [Cambodia]

By Philippa Hawker 

April 14, 2012

WISH You Were Here is a story about danger and fear, but it's grounded in the ordinary and the everyday. It's about people who find themselves in an extraordinary situation - an overseas holiday goes awry and characters are left in a limbo of uncertainty about what has happened to one of their number.

Gradually, we come to learn more: there is a puzzle, a sense of suspense, a mystery that is essential to the story. There is, co-writer and director Kieran Darcy-Smith says, ''a need to know and that's what I want from a story. I want to turn the page. But what's more important is that, ultimately, I need to care. The real investment is in the characters, in the relationships.''

Darcy-Smith co-wrote the script with his wife, Felicity Price, who also stars in the film and had the initial idea for the work. It grew out of something she was coming to know well: ''Our world and that of our friends: growing up, having kids, tasting parenthood and a sense of responsibility and at the same time longing for the freedom of your 20s. I was interested in thinking about how you learn to fight for your relationship and the people you love - the work of a relationship. But I knew that this alone was not a feature film: it was the world of it, the emotional core.''

Joel Edgerton and Felicity Price with Teresa Palmer and Antony Starr in Wish You Were Here.

She needed an additional element and found it in a story she heard about two couples who travelled to Asia together and one of the four went missing. ''I was interested in the gap that was left behind, when you don't know what happened and the damage that can do to people's lives,'' she says.

Price wrote a treatment for a low-budget movie, ''something we could make during the next few years''. Darcy-Smith was looking for a script to direct and so the two began working on the screenplay together. ''I could see it was fertile ground,'' Darcy-Smith says. ''And it became part of our everyday experience. Our entire vocation.'' In a way, he says, ''these characters became us''. It was a long process. When they began work on the script, they didn't have children; by the time it was finished, they had two.

In Wish You Were Here, Dave (Joel Edgerton) and Alice (Price) leave their two young children with their family and, on impulse, go on a holiday to Cambodia with Alice's sister, Steph (Teresa Palmer), and her new boyfriend, Jeremy (Antony Starr). Jeremy is an experienced traveller, a knowing, charming, enigmatic figure; but just before they are due to return, he disappears, for no apparent reason, leaving the other three bewildered, uncertain and trying to make sense of what happened.

Gradually, the story emerges, but in the meantime the relationship between the three, back home in Australia, takes some dark twists and turns. ''We often talked when we were writing about the notion of infection: how their lives become poisoned by what had happened,'' Price says.

Writing the script, she says, they were influenced by filmmakers such as Danish directors Susanne Bier (Open Hearts, Brothers) and Thomas Vinterberg (Festen) ''who create these incredible and complex stakes for their characters and then throw them in, and they're not afraid to really go there with the drama. We felt that we hadn't necessarily seen that in an Australian film in quite the way we were interested in exploring''.

For Edgerton, the sheer ordinariness of Dave makes the character demanding to play.

Edgerton thinks of himself as an actor who is a good observer, but says there is something disconcerting about turning up to work ''dressed sort of as you would dress, and talking sort of as you would talk … There is an exposing thing about playing a character close to yourself that I really don't enjoy''.

The actor says he enjoyed the role because he knows Darcy-Smith and ''part of me felt I was playing Kieran and Kieran's life''. Edgerton was best man at the couple's wedding and is godfather to one of their children. He understood the world Price and Darcy-Smith had created for their fictional couple and also the nature of the relationship between Dave and Alice.

Edgerton describes the movie as ''a thriller that moves forward in the wake of a personal tragedy, then reaches back'' as it begins to convey details about what might have happened. He says the audience comes to both trust and mistrust Dave. The drama is about what happened in Cambodia but also about what happens when they come home. It reminds Edgerton of one of his favourite Australian films, Lantana.

Wish You Were Here is made by Blue-Tongue Films, formed more than 15 years ago when Edgerton and Darcy-Smith were friends at drama school. ''It is a collective of directors, basically,'' Edgerton says. The group is made up of six people: Edgerton; his brother, Nash; Darcy-Smith; Spencer Susser (an American described by Edgerton as ''an honorary Australian''; David Michod (Animal Kingdom) and Luke Doolan (who directed an Oscar-nominated short called Miracle Fish). ''We are simply there to support each other as filmmakers. We are all like-minded in some sense,'' Edgerton says.

In the mid-'90s, the two Edgertons and Darcy-Smith ''wanted to make something that would give us a chance to get other work, so that Kieran and I could have an acting scene, and Nash and his mate could do some action scenes''.

They made the movie, Edgerton says, ''but the real benefit was that we hadn't realised we would fall in love with making films. It started there and it's never stopped. It's an informal thing, but if any one of us is shooting and the other is available, they'll drop in and help out in any way they can''.

Darcy-Smith has a new script called Memorial Day and hopes to start shooting later in the year in Florida, with an Australian crew and several Australian actors playing Americans. Post-production will be done in Australia.

Wish You Were Here opened the Sundance Film Festival this year and Darcy-Smith and Price found agents in the US as a result.

''Over there, they are very interested in hyphenates, actors who are writing and creating work,'' Price says.

■Wish You Were Here opens on April 25.