A kind of homecoming

The latest film from director Scott Hicks, The Boys Are Back starring Clive Owen, tug hard at the heart strings but without too much sentiment and manipulation. The tale about a man learning to be a better dad after the death of his wife, does not try to turn on the tears with music, for example, and has considerable authenticity, in part because Hicks determinedly rejected the familiar.

“I wanted the audience to find the emotion themselves,” he says. “I also put scenes through a primitive filter in my head. I asked, ‘Have I ever seen this in a film before?’ A lot got cut out as a result. I had seen a funeral in almost every film but not a body bag coming out of the family home.”

The UK-Australia co-production came to Hicks in 2004 via its UK producers, Tiger Aspect Pictures, and will be released in Europe and the UK early this year. It took an admirable $1.1m (a$1.2m) in its first 10 days in Australia after opening on November 12, but the limited US run through Miramax Films was unspectacular.

The Boys Are Back is the first feature filmed on home soil for Hicks since his breakout hit Shine, though he always conducts post-production in Australia. Making the film in a place he knows and loves, and in a real house not on a soundstage, injected air into what could have been a drama without scale, he says.

Hicks agrees that he “defaults to the intense” but believes in humour, both on screen and in production. When deciding who to work with, the question is never whether their work is any good because you know it is, he says, but “whether you will survive in the same room together for six months without killing each other”.

Sandy George