In Monegeetta, Victoria, a town east of Mount Macedon and about an hour’s drive from the Melbourne CBD, a small group of people – including myself – are standing on muddy ground in the cold, outside Mintaro, a brick Italianate mansion built in 1881. Its spectacular features include a three-storey tower and Doric columns positioned at its imposing entrance. It is beautiful – and very creepy.
Our eyes are glued to two television monitors. They are displaying feeds from cameras positioned inside, where the Mintaro’s decadent vibe is countered by a Dogs in Space kind of scuzziness – its grime-splotched walls and faded wallpaper suggesting the place has seen better days.
This is the set of Justin Kurzel’s new film, True History of the Kelly Gang, the director’s scorching take on the legendary outlaw that brings a visceral, punkish energy to its source material, Peter Carey’s acclaimed novel of the same name. The scene being filmed is a relatively quiet moment for such an in-your-face production, depicting Ned (up-and-comer George MacKay) meeting his adversary, Constable Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult), for the first time.
Usually film set visits sound much more interesting than they are. A few years ago, for example, I spent eight long hours on the set of Thor: Ragnarok, observing many people fussily prepare shots that each lasted for about four seconds, capturing cast members who seemed to be posing rather than acting.
Kurzel’s set in Monegeetta couldn’t be more different. The takes are long and differ every time, giving the actors space to develop their performances and the camera operators opportunity to experiment. Watching it feels a lot like live theatre.
Speaking over a cup of tea during a break in filming, the South Australia-born auteur tells me that rather than being deterred by the numerous Ned Kelly movies that already exist, he felt they forced him to “think of things in different ways – to really aggressively try to find a new voice. That’s been a very deliberate thing throughout the process: to keep it feeling alive and fresh; to keep it feeling like it is walking along a tightrope.”
Some of the film’s most striking scenes involve Ned and his gang wearing dresses, which was an element in Carey’s book. It is not without some historical basis: Kelly gang member Steve Hart, for instance, is known to have worn dresses in order to ride horses undetected.
“There was something about those dresses – the idea of men wearing dresses in the Australian bush – that I found so evocative,” says Kurzel. “It was really interesting, looking at [Sidney] Nolan’s paintings again of Kelly, seeing Steve Hart in the background wearing a dress, the armour painted in different colours. I was like, what the fuck is that? It suddenly opened up a whole new way of looking at that period.”
One of the people standing with me outside the Mintaro during filming is the film’s writer, Shaun Grant. He has worked with Kurzel before – penning their acclaimed 2011 debut Snowtown – and reiterates that push for originality, or even extremity: “Peter [Carey] took it so far,” he says, “and Justin and I decided to take it a step further.”
Grant continues: “You know that history aficionados will say ‘that didn’t happen!’ But you can’t please everyone. And who really knows what happened back then? I’m all for messing with it and playing with it. There is always room for new stories about familiar legends. You just need to find a clear point of view.”
That point of view involves a move away from realism into a meta space. References to legend, myth-making and the idea of fulfilling or escaping destiny are strewn throughout True History of the Kelly Gang (a title which, as is the case with Carey’s book, is ironic).
Ned’s mother Ellen (Essie Davis), for instance, compels her son with lines such as “be who you are meant to be!”. There are occasions when Ned feels incentivised to take control of his personal narrative: “Every man should be an author of his own history,” he decrees. But there are also times when he seems resigned to the idea of never controlling how he will be remembered, on one occasion glumly noting that “a myth is more profitable than a man”.
Cast members articulate the film’s approach to these self-conscious elements in different ways. Davis, for instance, tells me the story is “all about curses” and “trying not to become what you are cornered into becoming”.
“There is of course a difference between the life of Ned Kelly and the legend, the story everybody wants,” Kurzel says. “He became bigger than what he was. We somehow found a way to use him to create an identity for what we are, and what we are not.”
For MacKay, who plays old buckethead himself – without (gasp!) a beard – embracing the legend involved forgetting about Ned Kelly’s status as one of Australia’s most iconic, larger-than-life historical figures.
“A legend is what other people made of him,” says MacKay. “He probably wasn’t a legend in his own time, so I play him as a guy who just happens to be called Ned Kelly. A bloke whose actions became – and stood for – something else. A man who became, in the end, a fridge magnet.”
• True History of the Kelly Gang is in Australian cinemas now and will be available to stream on Stan on 26 January. It is released in UK cinemas on 28 February
