I'm George and I play Ned, Ned Kelly and, yeah, I've played up.. there's two
versions of him, there's a young version and an older version I play the older one.
And I play Ellen Kelly who's Ned's mum, of both the young and the older version..
- I write to you now, so you do not go to confuse fiction for fact -
- and view your father in an unsavory light -
I knew that famous helmet and I knew his image and I knew his name but I didn't know any of his history
beforehand and so when we first auditioned for the role and got the role there was
a lot of research into finding out. I kind of first went quite an
autobiographical approach and then when we got to it, quite quickly we sort of
let go of that and made it more 'in the spirit' of it rather than the kind of bang on history that's there.
You know, in Australia he's quite a,
he's a bit of a carnival. You know, he's sort of..
there's beer coasters with his head on it, there's all sorts of, sort of novelty stuff kind of
about him. And there's so many books been written about him. There was just a great
observation of identity and why we suddenly kind of want to identify with
this man and why our history keeps on going back to him? The law was really
trying to work out what the hell it was around that time. It was a real sort of
badlands. So, you know, I love it when you can kind of see, you know, two really
opposing kind of characters trying to find some sort of similarity with each
other and, and, you know, definitely Ned's sort of relationship with the law in the
film was was one that was really interesting to me.
- Stepping out of your mongrel life into something new -
- My boy... -
The True History of the Kelly Gang is that we are the Kelly's and we are the gang.
And the family is everything, and the family is what Ned can become part of or be ostracized from.
And when he decides to step back into his mother's world he
really loves her so much he can't let it go. And the gang is this, you know, Ellen
is this matriarch who knows how to survive and will do everything in her
power to survive and to keep.. raise her children to be survivors.
- Are we going to take the future and make it ours? -
And there was just a particular period in Australian music that I was quite
inspired by in the 70s, I thought was just a good sort of touchstone, and
actually a lot of these photographs of certain bands in Australia at the time,
the way they dressed and looked, it was really similar in terms of silhouette to
the, to the Kelly Gang and to some of those sort of more pioneering
photos of Australia in the 1870s. So, you know, and then I got the
boys, the gang, the actors to kind of be a punk band for two weeks so that
they would become familiar with each other.
He says, I see this lot as a punk band, all of them. So I want you to embody that.
And it was just this really kind of creative, sensuous, kind of very expressionistic kind of experience. It was great.
Look, it was a really weird organic evolution
where the punk stuff kind of really just came through through the making of the
film. It wasn't a conscious, like, 'I'm gonna make this Punk.' It really was..
I want the characters to look and feel familiar, I don't want them to feel like
they're 100 years away and, and suddenly this music that they were writing just
somehow encapsulated a certain sort of spirit of them that, yeah, that played in the film.
For me it was a real scream, I'd sort of done a film where I was, sort of, quite
frustrated by it and I was really missing home and wanting to go back and there
was a sort of, almost, a kind of anger and a frustration with filmmaking. And in
in a sense Kelly was a.. was something that I just wanted to be bold and I
wanted to try things and I wanted to, kind of, be very loud.
It felt privileged to be there and a part of it and the journey of making it was so, kind of profoundly important.
I think. Yeah. We are now bound together for life in a way
that we wouldn't have been had, had it not been that process. The commitment
that everyone gave to it, is kind of profound. Its a sort of.. it's a mad feeling
to kind of go to your limits a little bit, that's quite exciting and then to
sort of break through. It's sort of like, I don't know, with a few things even in
rehearsals it kind of emotionally broke me open in a way that I've not had for a
long time. There's a couple of really profound things which were.. aren't even
necessarily in the film which is just through the rehearsal process of, like,
where you kind of crack open and it's such an amazing surprise but I couldn't
have had that unless it was Justin and also everyone's commitment to like, 'yeah,
let's all get on board with.. let's do this.'
Thank you for watching Picturehouse Cinemas' unique video content. Hit the
subscribe button to be kept up to date with our movie news, cast and crew
interviews, highlights, trailers and lots more.