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Clubland is the latest in a reel of films to depict life in Sydney's west. Steve Dow talks to director Cherie Nowlan about the dramas that lie in the burbs.
It's the other Sydney, its heart pumping in a growing body of film. Rowan Woods has already explored western Sydney's crime and addictions in The Boys and Little Fish, and Anh Do shared the westies' sporting spirit in Footy Legends.
Now comes Cherie Nowlan's Clubland, about how deceptively dark the funny business of suburban families can be.
The film stars award-winning British actor Brenda Blethyn as the deeply flawed Jean Dwight, who left behind her burgeoning stage career in England when she married, moved to Australia and had two sons.
Now divorced, Jean traipses around faded club ballrooms with a repertoire of songs and jarring man-hating jokes, still hoping for the stardom that has clearly passed her by. Jean has two loving sons at home whom she cannot let go, and her monstrous mothering leads to her inevitable unravelling.
Clubland calls on Canterbury, Bankstown, North Ryde and Marrickville; for Nowlan, western Sydney is the "real Sydney".
"I think it's appealing to tell the stories of working-class, ordinary people," Nowlan says. "It's not alienating. They're characters that we can connect with and I think that's why the Americans liked it as much as they did; they loved that it was about family."
Clubland's Australian opening on Thursday will be followed by its US opening a week later, with many other countries to follow, thanks to lucrative distribution deals struck at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah in January.
It's a heartening response for Nowlan, whose previous film was her 1997 debut feature, Thank God He Met Lizzie, starring Cate Blanchett. Ten years is longer than Nowlan would have liked to leave between features. She says other film projects didn't get off the ground.
Nowlan has been working on Clubland since producer Rosemary Blight showed her Keith Thompson's script in 2001, although earlier versions of Thompson's story date to at least 1993, written always with Blethyn in mind.
Clubland had to attract funding beyond its Film Finance Corporation principal grant, and the director, producer and writer had to fit work on the film between other commitments.
Consistent TV work has kept Nowlan resilient: she directed the ABC miniseries Marking Time, which in 2004 won seven AFIs including best director, as well as episodes of The Secret Life Of Us and The Alice and two telemovies, and she directed commercials solidly for two years.
Passion for a film project was Nowlan's key consideration: "I get given a lot of scripts about middle-class people with no problems other than how to get a boyfriend, and I find that very hard to invest in as a director or as a viewer, unless it's a dark, satirical treatment."
Nowlan protests she has little time for romance herself. She divides her time between a "little flat in Mosman" and friends' spare rooms in Los Angeles. Her next film is likely to be made in the US.
"I'm just me, I live a very quiet life," the dark-haired Nowlan says, laughing. She's single? "Yeah, I'm not married. Nor will I ever be. I had a recurring nightmare for years that I was getting married. But I love it when other people get married, and I make films about weddings for some reason.
"It's not that I don't believe in marriage, but I only approve of it in other people. Maybe it's a kind of feminist revolt. Maybe one day it would feel appropriate."
Nowlan grew up in a close-knit family in Singleton in the Hunter Valley in the 1960s and '70s, the eldest of four girls. Her father, Ray, monitored and weighed coal in the valley's open-cut mines, while her mother, June, ran a nursing home.
Nowlan was a regular at the local Art Deco Strand cinema, which was later pulled down to make space for a shopping mall. In grade six, she insisted students audition for her school concert, even though she gave everyone a role.
"I think I just liked the power," she says.
Her Catholic high school English teacher would take the class to the city to see films such as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and encourage students to deconstruct the hero myth in Star Wars.
"I think if I'd grown up in the city I wouldn't have become a filmmaker," Nowlan says. "I would have been too daunted. I think because I was from a small place, anything was possible."
Nowlan began work as a journalist on the local newspaper, and then moved to Sydney to write for TV Week and New Idea, before becoming a TV drama research assistant.
But she harboured a secret desire to make films, a wish that went unspoken to her parents until Nowlan made a documentary at the age of 27. Her mother "laughed and thought it was ridiculous" when Nowlan voiced her ambitions; her father concurred.
"I mean, they're so proud of me," Nowlan says. "Part of their enjoyment is the fact they thought it was impossible." She's not criticising her mother: Nowlan's heart sinks when the children of friends say they want to act or direct. "I've become my mother," she says.
"The whole time I've been directing, the industry's been contracting. It's got tighter and tighter and the money's harder to get.
"Sometimes things have to get desperate, or even die, for people to realise things are important to them, such as having a film and television industry."
But she says: "Death and renewal is part of life and it's part of our industry. And you can't kill the creative spirit."
The travel involved with making a film is a pressure for Nowlan, however.
"Dad just had bypass surgery and I could have killed him, actually; he lied to me about when he was having the surgery because he didn't want me to worry when I was at Sundance.
"So the day we sold the film, mum sent me a text message saying, 'Dad's had the operation, all's well.' I just burst into tears."
