Sam F Davis Nominations

John Michael McDonagh thanks Guard his Ned Kelly days are over

McDonagh, whose debut feature (as director and screenwriter) The Guard opens in Australia next week, tells Reel Time he was "pushed" into directing after his experience on Ned Kelly. "I didn't want it to happen to me again," he says. "The script was destroyed. That was one thing, the main thing. I was treated pretty shabbily. I was well paid, I'll say that." McDonagh says he was not told about changes to the script, and was ignored. In his opinion, Jordan was not a collaborative filmmaker. He contrasts his "collaborative effort" with cast and crew on The Guard with Ned Kelly. "If anyone has a good idea that will improve the film, you take it, you use it," he says.

NED Kelly was a disappointment given Jordan's previous achievement with Two Hands and Heath Ledger's lead role with a cast that included Orlando Bloom, Naomi Watts, Joel Edgerton and Geoffrey Rush. The film took $5.5 million at the Australian box office and failed to fly internationally. "Well, imagine how disappointing it was for me," McDonagh says.

McDONAGH says he contacted a producer to option Robert Drewe's book, Our Sunshine, and wrote the script on spec before it was picked up by Working Title. "It was intended to be a lyrical poetic western in the style of Terrence Malick or Sam Peckinpah and it was turned into a bog standard studio biopic where they're trying to do another f . . king Robin Hood story!" McDonagh says his disappointment was compounded because of the "many talented people" working on what became a "humourless film". He was also concerned about "this strange elitist thing going on in the press where they were always referring to Peter Carey's book (True History of the Kelly Gang), which was the more famous book". McDonagh, a feisty character, admits that one positive outcome was that he had the money to enable him to write The Guard, which is now a major success. "But the problem is you can never make the [Ned Kelly] story properly now because people are fed up with it," he says. He is not the first writer to criticise Jordan's direction of their source material. Bret Easton Ellis was frank in his assessment of Jordan's The Informers, telling Movieline last year that the film went wrong due to "an Australian director and a German producer". "I think Gregor was looking at it as something else," Ellis said. "I think we had this miscommunication during pre-production that it's not supposed to be played like an Australian soap opera." Ellis also said the film "is not funny at all" although he said the blame should be shared with its studio producer, Senator. Jordan is at present filming a documentary about Ian Thorpe's preparations for next year's London Olympic Games.

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