Australian box office a mystery: Cowell
According to I Love You Too lead actor Brendan Cowell, it is difficult to say if the Roadshow Films release will be a hit when it opens this week, but it does have the elements necessary to become one.
“Box office in Australia is one of the hardest mysteries known to man, but this one has got all the makings of a hit, all the marketing angles, and it’s a real warm and beautiful story,” he told Encore.
Cowell can be currently seen on screen in Beneath Hill 60, now in its third week of release (with more than $2m in box office earnings) and, as of May 6, in the comedy I Love You Too.
“I don’t know if it’s a romantic comedy. There’s romance, but it’s also a relationship drama about a family. Maybe that’s what’s different about it; there are a few more genres in it, which is what’s unique about it,” he explained.
The film was directed by Daina Reid and written by Cowell’s co-star Peter Helliar.
Cowell, the writer, will release his first novel later this year, but he says it has been written to fulfil his literary ambitions, not as a vehicle for a film adaptation
“One of the things that pisses me off about fiction is that more and more writers have the production companies and the film rights and the movie stars in mind when they’re writing the book,” Cowell said.
According to Cowell, contemporary fiction is often structured like a film, with cinematic endings, but that was not his goal with his first work – which tells the story of two men in the Sydney suburb of Cronulla, growing up together and remaining friends over a number of big life experiences.
“The novel is about the violence and the beauty of male friendship in Australia. I wanted to write a novel to write a novel; a movie would have been a lot easier and taken a lot less time. I won’t be making that movie; I wrote the book to explore language, and the internal monologue of these characters,” he said.
Cowell is also writing a script, a comedy about a Melbourne cricket team that goes to India on tour, which he hopes will go into production early next year.
“Things have been bad between India and Australia recently, and cricket and sport are great at bringing people together. It’s going to be a great comedy; I’ve been to India a couple of times and arguably it’s the greatest place on Earth, a magical nation,” he said.
‘Box office in Australia is one of the hardest mysteries known to man’.
No mystery – local audiences want entertainment – not the shallow PC crap that’s been served up the past decade. Commercial filmmaking is no different than any other section of retail – give them the product they want (not what you think they should have) – & they will purchase. Reads like Brendan Cowell is undergoing some sort of mid career crisis? Acting or writing?
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Film Writing, Stage Writing, Novel Writing, Stage Acting, Film Acting, NRL Tragic…Cowell is the ultimate Renaissance Man. And from the Shire too.
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If he thinks it would have been easier to write a film then he obviously has no idea about how to properly write a screenplay.
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