Let the omnibus battle begin! Just weeks after John Polson announced his collaborative ode to Sydney, Sydney Unplugged, to be helmed by David Michod (Animal Kingdom), Kieran Darcy-Smith (Wish You Were Here), Liev Schreiber, Rachel Ward, Russell Crowe and Toni Collette, Melbourne writer/director, Robert Connolly, (Balibo, Three Dollars and The Bank) has unveiled a similarly potent list of collaborators for his episodic adaptation of Tim Winton novel The Turning.
Actors Cate Blanchett, Mia Wasikowska and David Wenham will make their directorial debuts, joining theatre director Benedict Andrews, Jonathan auf der Heide (Van Diemen’s Land), Tony Ayres (The Slap), video artist Shaun Gladwell, documentary maker Rhys Graham, Justin Kurzel (Snowtown), actor and writer Ian Meadows, theatre director Yaron Lifschitz, Claire McCarthy (The Waiting City), Ashlee Page (The Kiss) and choreographer Stephen Page.
Each will direct a chapter from Winton’s short story collection which his publisher describes as “seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia”.
Other details are scant but for now let’s just imagine what would happen if this was a cinematic fist fight and we had to pit film against film and director against director. For now we’ve got Cate Blanchett vs. Toni Collette (likeable award winning actresses), David Michod vs Justin Kurzel (first time filmmakers who focused on crime) and Russell Crowe vs. David Wenham (actors most likely to play a bearded war general). Someone make a bracket for us?
Image by: Marty Melville via Getty
