Actors Sam Worthington and Myles Pollard made the part-surf, part-drama flick Drift over a packed 32 days in Western Australia.
He is a bone fide Hollywood star, the face of the Avatar and Clash of the Titans
franchises and an emerging producer, but Sam Worthington knows he is still
learning.
Take the incident outside an Atlanta bar late last year, when he was handcuffed and
pepper-sprayed after an altercation with a bouncer.
”I was an idiot,” Worthington says. ”If I show you the photo, you’ll understand why.”
The former NIDA student, who now lives in Hawaii when he is not making films
around the world, scrolls through his phone to show a scary-looking shot of him as a
character called Monster in the coming Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie Ten.
”I learnt not to go out in Atlanta, which is primarily a black town, looking like that –
with swastikas on me and ‘world Aryan race’,” he says. ”I forgot that I was looking
like that. So as I was going up to a bouncer, it kind of got out of hand.
”You suddenly realise the thing I have to learn from this is to take my tattoos off and
take my earrings out and I’ve got a bald head and I look quite intimidating.”
Once a promising but limited tough-guy actor, Worthington showed he could really
act in Somersault, opening himself up as a farmer’s son struggling with his sexuality.
When he graduated to bigger movies in Hollywood, he showed his action chops in
Terminator Salvation, Avatar and Clash of the Titans.
”The whole world went a bit upside down when Avatar hit,” he says. ”I call it running
with the bulls. Jason Clarke [the Australian actor from Zero Dark Thirty] and Chris
[Hemsworth from Thor] are doing it at the moment. You run with the bulls. You take
all the movies that come your way because of the fear you’re never going to work
again.
”I’ve got to the point now where I can put the brakes on. I can do movies that are
smaller. I don’t have to be the pretty boy running ’round with the short skirt and the
rubber sword any more.”
And one of those smaller movies shows that even if Worthington is still learning at
36, he is prepared to pass on his Hollywood experience to Australian friends.
When one of those friends, former McLeod’s Daughters star Myles Pollard, asked if
he wanted to be in the surfing action-drama Drift, Worthington was only partly
interested.
The two surfing buddies, who auditioned for NIDA together in Western Australia
then went through the country’s leading acting school in the same year, had long
talked about making the definitive Australian surf film.
While Worthington liked the sound of Drift, which Pollard was producing and acting
in, he had no intention of starring alongside him in the film.
”It could have been quite easy to phone up his mate who does Hollywood movies,
have his mate sign on and you get your money,” Worthington says. ”I refused that. I
said, ‘No dude, you’ve got to build a base around you. Go find a bigger producer, go
get yourself directors, develop the script.’
”It would have been too easy to do that and we don’t work that way as mates.
Amongst us boys, we forge our own way.”
It was a tough-love decision that Pollard now calls ”the biggest favour he could do
me”, encouraging him to learn the business of producing.
Shot around the rugged south-west of Western Australia, Drift is that rare thing: an
Australian surf film with not just spectacular wave action but an engaging story. It
centres on two brothers, Andy (Pollard) and Jimmy (Xavier Samuel from
Anonymous, A Few Best Men and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse), who launch a
backyard surfwear business in the 1970s. It’s a fictionalised version of the origins of
labels such as Billabong, Quiksilver and Rip Curl before they became international
brands, with a story of a family’s struggle to survive after moving to a new town and
facing conflict from a local bikie gang. Worthington plays a surf photographer who
arrives in town in a hippie-style bus.
”It happened here in our backyard,” Pollard says of the rise of the big surf brands.
”These backyard companies became world-beaters on the world stage. I don’t think
that’s been told in a feature film.”
While Drift suggests Pollard has the looks and talent to have his own international
career, he admits to lacking confidence when he tried the Los Angeles audition
circuit after McLeod’s Daughters.
”Myles has got a son,” Worthington says. ”He goes, ‘The primary thing is, I want to
do a movie that my son can watch down the track and be proud of something that his
father did.’ That sold me.
”Then you look at the story and it’s about family who are struggling and get their
dreams come true. Not to embarrass my mate but this is Myles’ dream coming true –
almost parallel with the guy in the movie’s dreams coming true.
”Him and his character had that great crossover, which makes Myles’ acting way
more honest and believable because he’s feeling it for real. That was something I
wanted to help endorse.”
Another former NIDA student from the same year, Morgan O’Neill, wrote the script
and co-directed Drift with Ben Nott.
Pollard says producing Drift was like a university degree, especially when the shoot
ran up against time constraints for lack of finance.
”We had a 38-day schedule,” he says. ”We had to reduce that to 32 because of the
lack of finance. Ripping six days out of the schedule was pretty rough. We were
shooting quicker than telly. So to be in the water as an actor, freezing, I had little
escape from that because I knew just how valuable the time was and how long we had
Sam for.
”It was stressful but pressure makes diamonds.”
Worthington is also moving into producing, starting with a TV series on the
journalists covering the Gallipoli World War I campaign to commemorate the 100th
anniversary next year, and two movies too early to announce – ”but they’re big” – in
the US.
”We’re doing a thing with [director] Phil Noyce as well, which I’m in because I liked
it that much. But the rest of them aren’t vanity. ”That’s what I think is the key: you’re
doing it from a place where you’re paying it forward almost;
it’s much more interesting to produce it.”
The surfing movie is a tough genre to crack, Worthington says. ”I said what you
should do – and Morgs and Myles agreed – was get proper professional surf
photographers who have shot Taj Burrow’s movies and actually been out in Grajagan
in Indonesia and places like that. Get those guys because the cinematography in a lot
of surf films is a land [director of photography] in the ocean trying to prove himself.
”But if you get the guys who live in the ocean, who know how to photograph the
waves and photograph surfing, that really helps.”
Being around so much surf sounds an ideal film shoot for two surfing buddies but
Worthington says six-metre to nine-metre swells in the middle of winter were often
perilous. ”We know we can hold our own but there were waves where you were
nervous,” he says.
”Even bobbing around in a 20-foot swell in the horizon, I’ve never been that scared
in my life. But I understand the ocean – I know that I’m not going to die. I have
enough trust in myself being able to read where the swells are coming.
”I said to Myles, ‘Let’s just go out there and take it on. It’ll seem more real for an
audience.”’
Drift opens in cinemas on May 2.
Garry Maddox – SMH – April 21, 2013
