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THE KIDS AREN’T ALL RIGHT WRITER/DIRECTOR BEN C LUCAS HAS MADE A BOLD STATEMENT WITH HIS DEBUT WASTED ON THE YOUNG – A HARD-HITTING TEEN DRAMA THAT’S ABOUT AS FAR FROM THE OC AS AUSTRALIA IS FROM ORANGE COUNTY, AS HE TELLS BAZ MCALISTER.
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ustralian writer-director Ben C Lucas was home-schooled until the age of 13 – he spent his few years at school trying to work out where he fit in, trying to become one of the cool kids, but he found he was always coming at things from an outsider’s perspective. It’s no wonder, then, that Wasted On The Young, his debut feature, paints a fairly bleak picture of the final year of high school. “Wasted On The Young was never autobiographical, you’re right,” he says. “It’s not a personal story in the true sense of the phrase. It’s just a little fable about how I feel.” It certainly plays out like a fable. Wasted On The Young follows two boys with single parents - popular jock Zack (Alex Russell) and nerdy, shy Darren (Oliver Ackland) - thrown together as step-brothers by their parents’ marriage. Then there’s the sweet blonde girl at school with the incandescent smile, Xandrie (Adelaide Clemens), who captures the eye of both. Zack has an army of loyal followers who’ll do anything he bids; Darren has a dark side he keeps well hidden. This isn’t going to end well at all. “It is a melodrama, you know,” says Lucas, “and that can be really ham-
fisted, but the only thing that makes it work is the people you pick to play it out.” So Lucas says he had one priority when he started to make the film: find the perfect cast. “We had bugger all money and we did have time, so I said to the producers ‘let’s not skimp on casting’,” he says. “If we have the right cast and we then have to skimp on locations or post-production it’ll still work. I’m so glad of that decision. We got Greg Apps – the best casting director in Australia – who cast Chopper and Romper Stomper and put his faith in people like Eric Bana and Russell Crowe. He was pivotal. We spent five months casting, we went everywhere.” Lucas’s cast are indeed the goods, all talented relative newcomers to film who convincingly sell the tragic, horrific events. It would be doing the movie a disservice to be more specific here – to get its full impact, you really have to see it – but both parents and kids all over the world are sitting up and taking notice of Lucas’s take on teenage tribalism and high school revenge. “I’m kind of surprised at the reaction – I thought we were a lot more indie
than we are, but the mainstream response has been quite good,” Lucas says. “From the beginning, we imagined this as a film that kids wouldn’t want their parents to see and parents wouldn’t want their kids to see. There was a screening in Toronto where there was a mother in the audience with her 17-year-old daughter. At the end she told me she thought I must have a bit of an axe to grind, that I was pretty scathing of teenagers and their culture, and then her daughter piped up and said, ‘No mum, that’s what it’s like’. Parents are reacting usually quite positively – but are also a bit scared. And the teenagers themselves? Well, their potential reaction when the film opens this week is scaring Lucas more than his own film will scare them. “I get kind of scared as to what the reaction’s going to be from a teen audience,” he says. “No power on Earth can tell them what’s cool. You can’t make a film ‘for the kids’, in the dorkiest possible sense. So it was risky – all you can do, I guess, is make the film the way you want to and hope it strikes a nerve. But it seems to have – we even got a teenage fan review on IMDB that suggested it should be made part of the school curriculum.”
Perhaps the craziest part of this whole saga is the fact that Wasted On The Young was almost an afterthought to the original project Lucas was hired to direct. Producer Aidan O’Bryan hired Lucas to write and direct an idea he had for a B-movie slasher film. “I had no interest in doing this film, but I did have an interest in working!” Lucas confesses. “I liked the idea, as a writer’s exercise, to put together someone else’s story from a writer’s point of view, so I wrote it – I didn’t love it – and it took a year. Then when Aidan got funded and wanted me to direct it, that’s when I realised it was not the right film for me.”
It took a hell of a lot of courage for this young filmmaker, on the cusp of principal photography on his directorial debut, to march into an office full of money men and tell them he’s off the job. “I had this big scary meeting with the producers – we were already into casting at this point – and I said ‘I’m really grateful for the opportunity but this isn’t a film I can make, give me a few weeks and I’ll get something different’. Thankfully they were all on board. They were more interested in the film the team would make than the actual project itself, and they were very supportive of us. Australia’s very privileged
in that sense. It’s one of the only countries in the world where the government gives you money to develop your career. “But that rewrite,” he grins “...that rewrite was five weeks of insanity. That’s not something I think I’ll be able to do again.” It’s a dramatic way to launch what’s sure to be a dramatic career, if Wasted On The Young is any indication of things to come. WHAT: Wasted On The Young WHERE & WHEN: Screening in cinemas from Thursday Mar 3
“IT’S CAFFEINE FUELLED FUNK TAP!” THE COURIER MAIL || Australia
SATURDAY 12TH MARCH, 7.30PM REDLAND PERFORMING ARTS CENTRE – CONCERT HALL
Bookings: call the box office on 3829 8131, or visit www.rpac.com.au Tickets: Adult $39, Seniors/Pensioners $37, Student (17 years and under/student) $25 • A $2 transaction fee applies to all ticket purchases made online. Supported by Major Media Partners: Bayside Bulletin, The Redland Times and d’fine.
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