In a rare feat, three locally made movies are the biggest hits in Australia, thanks in part to stars intent on homegrown stories. It only took a pandemic.
Audiences know Eric Bana as a Trojan prince, Mossad agent, time-traveling Chicago librarian, and an easily angered Berkeley scientist. But as his Hollywood career took off, rarely did they get to see the Melbourne native play an Australian.
By and large “there are just no Australian parts in any international films,” Bana said in a video interview from his home in Melbourne, adding, “When you consider the impact that Australian actors have had internationally over the last 30 years, they must be pretty used to hearing our voices — because we’ve done a lot of talk shows.”
Even in Australia, audiences tend to flock to the latest imported Hollywood releases over films made in and about their own nation. But in February, for reportedly the first time in the country’s box-office history, the top three films were all Australian. Two of those — “The Dry,” starring and produced by Bana, and “High Ground,” with Simon Baker — are receiving American releases this month, while the Naomi Watts-led “Penguin Bloom” premiered globally on Netflix in January.
“It does feel significant that the stories are native to Australia and that they have Australian leads and that the characters are Australian,” Bana said.
It’s been decades since “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” and “Muriel’s Wedding” had a similar joint domestic theatrical coup in 1994, and even longer since “Crocodile Dundee” became the country’s biggest commercial smash, a record it still holds.
“We have the double whammy. We get all the American content, plus we’ve got huge connections to the U.K., so we watch all the British stuff, too,” said Graeme Mason, chief executive of Screen Australia, the government agency in charge of supporting local film and television production. “It puts a real strain on Australian stuff to cut through in cinemas.”
But then came the pandemic. As Hollywood studios delayed many of their blockbusters, they left room for Australian productions to capture ticket sales in a country with relatively few coronavirus cases. Still, it wasn’t a given that audiences would show up.
Baker, the actor, who is based in New South Wales, believes “Australians have a little bit of a cultural cringe with seeing their own accent on the screen” and “an inferiority complex,” he said. “People have said to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I saw this movie the other day. You should see it. I am going to warn you, though, it is Australian.’”
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