Solo

Listening to the expressive and composed Morgan O'Neill speak about his new crime thriller 'Solo', one might be surprised that just a few years ago he was struggling to find work around Adelaide as an actor.

"I studied acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art," he says, "but it was not long after I graduated that I realised it was going to be pretty unfulfilling if my career was going to amount to sitting and waiting for the phone to ring with my agent offering me the limited number of jobs there are in this industry, and then waiting to be validated by producers, directors, studios and networks and so forth.

"So I started to write, produce and act in short films, and basically tried to be as proactive as possible. I came down to the fair city of Adelaide in 2001, and naively thought that I was going to be able to find employment. But it didn't turn out like that. I found myself in a very cold terrace house on Stanley Street in North Adelaide wondering what the hell I was doing here - I didn't know anyone."

But it was during this period of 'under-employment' that he wrote the first draft of the screenplay for 'Solo' that surpassed over 1200 other entrants and took the $1 million in production money in last year's Project Greenlight Australia. The competition, which also involved the actual selection and production processes being documented for a television series (which in this case aired on Movie Extra), is the concept of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck who have seen the competition through three seasons in America. O'Neill is predictably a proponent of their cause.

"They had just won the Academy award for 'Good Will Hunting'," he says, "and they sat back and realised that there were probably huge numbers of writers out there who were experiencing exactly the same disappointment and dissatisfaction that they had earlier, because no one knew who they were, none of the powers-that-be were willing to read it, and it was just sitting on producers' desks gathering dust."

The end product of all this idealistic reasoning was O'Neill's $1 million grant, an amount he notes seemed increasingly small as production progressed.

"I had anticipated it was a lot of money because I'd always funded my own short films and they had nothing like that budget," he observes. "But when you realise the number of people you have to work with, the number of councils you have to pay to park your trucks up the street, and so forth, it really doesn't go very far. Inherent in that is drama as you realise that you haven't got the resources to make it."

The result was a hasty, but, O'Neill maintains, effective and spirited production process.

"We had to work very very quickly," he notes. "We had about four and a half weeks of pre-production and then we shot for 21 days - it was incredibly compressed. But we were really aided by the fact that we had hugely experienced actors on board; Colin Friels and Vince Colosimo especially, as well as a girl who can only be described as a revelation to me, Bojana Novakovic, who played Billie in the lead role. To have actors of that calibre meant we could get the take in two or three takes and then move on. It gives the film a real energy I think, because you can see the people who are on top of their game the whole way through."

Being O'Neill's debut feature both as director and as writer, some nervousness and even failure might have been expected as he tried to order around this more experienced cast.

"On my first day it was terrifying to say the least," he remembers, "but you realise really quickly that the reason those guys are so well known and so celebrated is because what they do is come up on to a set and facilitate the telling of that story. All they want to do is serve that story, usually in whatever capacity the director asks them to. I just found it such a refreshing thing to walk in and to have people who are so vastly more experienced than me, just say 'what do we do?' and 'where do you want us to go?' It was terrific."

Wil McGinley



'Solo' is now screening nationally. See the Prize Frenzy(tm) to win double passes