There’s a stunning sleight of hand to How to Make Gravy in that it’s almost impossible to pin the film down to an era. An earthy, 70s colour palette. The fashion and cars are 90s shabby. The backyard trestle table, tinselled up for Christmas lunch, and the screen doors, banging more insistently as the red wine flows, are perennial. Eventually I spot a vape, but the overall effect is to drench the brain with nostalgia.
Binge commissioned How to Make Gravy as its first original feature film, based on the 1996 Paul Kelly song of the same name. Its creators have been loyal to those early fans (like Hugo Weaving, one of the stars) who vividly remember discovering the song on Rage back in the day and still hold it dear.
“You’re inside the Kellyverse,” says Meg Washington, the singer-songwriter who co-wrote the movie, “and for that reason, we didn’t want to have any temporal anchor.”
Kelly’s song takes the form of a letter written from jail on the 21st of December, just before lights out. An explosion of violence on Christmas Day set the author, Joe, on a new course, and now he’s separated from his family. The song conveys a lifetime of pent-up angst in just 357 words.
“It explores the space between what men say and how they actually feel,” says director Nick Waterman. “And for that reason, a lot of men connect with it.”
Waterman and Washington, who are married, conceptualised the film during the pandemic. Their twin touchstones were Kelly (sometimes directly, sometimes in a what-would-Kelly-do sense) and Dr Richard Goldwater, an 83-year-old Boston psychiatrist who Washington had been seeing for 10 years. Dr Goldwater became the project’s shrink, helping unpack the characters.
“We’d speak to him every Friday and talk about what was going on with our scripts, our characters and in our actual lives,” says Waterman. (Dr Goldwater is credited in the film as “Maieutic”, which comes from the Greek word for midwifery.)
The toughest nut to crack was Joe, played by Snowtown actor Daniel Henshall with nuanced anguish. Joe’s riddled with resentment, prone to self-sabotage and poor impulse control. If someone shows him compassion, his response is a terse, “Ah well. Shit happens.”
Kelly says the movie’s Joe was a surprise to him. “A good one. I like to be surprised. The reason he goes to jail is something I hadn’t imagined at all,” he tells Guardian Australia. From time to time he’s imagined that Joe is the same hapless protagonist in his songs To Her Door and Love Never Runs on Time, but he’s not 100% sure.
Redemption for Joe comes in the form of Noel, an old-timer played by Weaving. Noel runs the prison kitchen – a safe harbour from “politics”, as he calls threats and violence. The catch is, all kitchen staff have to attend his men’s meetings. And let’s just say if Noel wasn’t in prison he’d probably be leading a drum circle in Mullumbimby.
Tortured masculinity has long played a part in Australian film, but Weaving says he was tiring of playing “those wounded men” before he read the script.
“It’s about feelings and internal states, and that’s a really hard thing to capture on film,” he says, crediting Waterman’s work on short films, advertisements and music videos, which served him well when it comes to distilling a mood. The film has a warm hue; even the prison uniforms are gravy-brown. It was shot in Jacobs Well, halfway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, but as Weaving says: “It’s a timeless Australian suburb that might be here, might be there.” The idea is you’ll swear you know it.
The ensemble cast take their names from Kelly’s lyrics. There’s Angus (Jonah Wren Phillips), Joe’s young son who is at risk of following his father’s footsteps if the cycle isn’t broken. Stuck inside, Joe agonises that his brother Dan (Brendan Thwaite) is “holding down the fort” at his house, playing “funcle” to his kids and maybe moving in on his long-suffering wife, Rita (Agathe Rousselle). As Kelly’s lyric goes, “she’s the one to save me”, and Rita has become Joe’s partner, mother and therapist all rolled into one.
Then there’s Roger, Joe’s smug brother-in-law, married to Stella (Kate Mulvany) and played with relish by Damon Herriman. Herriman may have portrayed Charles Manson (twice, in Mindhunter and Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), but Roger is a new kind of lowlife: accidentally-on-purpose forgetting that Joe has just lost his job, and needling Dan about his lack of financial security as a semi-successful musician.
“It was important for us to have a character who embodies the choice to live as a musician,” says Washington, herself a triple Aria winner, “because it can be very difficult to justify a life in pursuit of art.”
A generous dollop of musicians make up the prison cast. Patience Hodgson from the Grates and rapper Briggs put in a hilarious turn as guards, while solo artist Brendan MacLean, rapper Dallas Woods, and Zaachariaha Fielding and Michael Ross from Electric Fields play inmates.
Having a prison choir sing heart-swelling musical numbers written by Washington nudges sentimentality into the film, without turning it into a turkey.
“Genre-wise, this film had to be a prison film, but it also had to be a Christmas film,” says Washington, “so there’s a beautiful opportunity for redemption and awakening that seems to be intrinsic in the Christmas genre.”
Kelly’s song itself joins a limited canon of non-cheesy Christmas classics, the Pretenders’ 2000 Miles and Fairytale of New York by the Pogues among them.
“I love Fairytale and 2000 Miles too,” Kelly says. “Of course, there are a whole lot of other great ones as well. What Would Santa Claus Say by Louis Prima and River by Joni Mitchell, just for a start.”
Back in 1996, he had no expectation that his song would become such a festive hit. “I do know that the band and I liked playing it from the start. The structure has these inbuilt gear changes that lift us up each time we play it. It’s like going on a ride. From pretty early on I knew we had a good tool for the tool kit each time we went to work, Christmas or not.”
While How to Make Gravy is available to watch from Sunday, Binge is no doubt hoping that “Gravy Day” – the Kelly-inspired unofficial Australian holiday on 21 December – will result in another boost. And this may not be the last we hear of the characters, either.
“I have a feeling that I’m not done with Joe and Rita yet,” Kelly reveals. “I’ve been playing around with a sequel which has more of Rita’s side of the story. Working title: Rita Wrote a Letter.”
How to Make Gravy will be on Binge from 1 December
