The Drinks Surrounding The Making Of 'Ruben Guthrie'

“Yeah mate,” Cowell drawls. “It was inspired by a 12 month period I took off the booze and became a stage play in 2008. It’s about some of the wild discoveries I made about myself and also some of the wild behaviour my sobriety provoked in those around me. I kind of kept a diary about some of the shit that happened to me, and that then became the basis for a play. It was just kind of remarkable how I surprised I was with so many people going, ‘Just have one, just have one!’ I had set myself up as a party boy, but there were people who were not accepting of my sobriety. And at the same time, my perspective on who I was and my behaviour over the past seven years... I was kind of appalled by. So it was a combination of that. There were enough laughs and horror in my realisations over the last year, that there was enough there to create a successful stage work out of it.”

Cowell stresses that he never intended the play nor the subsequent film to be an anti-drinking polemic, but rather to use Australia’s drinking culture as a way into talking about social pressure and expectations. “This movie’s by no means a blame tale, by the end of the film the character is surprised by the fact that he has to take responsibility for himself as an adult.”

Still, it’s difficult to argue that drinking isn’t a large part of the Australian national identity. “I think it’s hard to poke your head out in Australia in any way, especially when you’re gonna say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna do the opposite of what everybody else is doing and not drink.’ I think in my industry - probably yours, probably most - everything is based around meeting for a drink on Friday, or for lunch, or to have a meeting. It’s hard to meet anyone romantically unless you’re on the piss, it’s hard to start a work relationship. Everything in this sunburnt country is surrounding the taking of a drink, and that is the device I use to talk about the culture.”

The journey from stage to screen was not a quick or easy one, and the script went through many permutations as budgets grew and shrank with every new deal cut. “It was gonna be a bigger budget thing, but when that didn’t come about I went back to the play. If anything, the screenplay is just a little broadening out of the stage play in terms of making it a more visual experience and bringing in that wonderful contrast between what’s happening to Ruben inside and the beautiful landscape that’s around him. It’s almost making it worse for him. It was more a man against his landscape, against his city - the city he used to own.”

Cowell himself had no hesitation in throwing himself into his first feature directing gig, having cut his teeth on television movie, The Outlaw Michael Howe, in 2013. “Like everything, I kind of don’t know what I’m doing, and then I get on set and get into the situation and work out that I absolutely know what I’m doing. I think, with this one, I’ve been on a hundred sets starting from when I was eight, so all that stuff helped. 

“I don’t think you can be too prepared in making a film; you kind of have to know absolutely everything that you’re going to do so you can throw it away when you get on set and go with what’s available. But I know the piece so well, and I knew the attitude in which I wanted to shoot this. You just have to trust your instincts, because you don’t have a lot of time.”

Originally published by X-Press Magazine