Safe Harbour, I think, is really a drama for our times.
It focuses on what's happening right around the world.
There's something like 30 million
people right now on the move looking for a new country
to live in.
So what we've got is a microcosm of that.
It's a story that you probably hear in half-read headlines,
but they're true stories.
It's almost easy just to dismiss it as a refugee experience.
So this project goes, OK, well here is a refugee experience.
And this is the kind of pain that they deal with.
It's about a group of young Australians
on a yacht heading towards Indonesia.
In the middle of the Timor Sea, they
come across an overcrowded fishing
boat full of asylum seekers--
--who are in trouble.
The boat's sinking.
And what do you do?
What the heart of this is about is that moment on the boat.
Who's your captain?
Captain, captain, captain.
You're the captain?
Yeah.
Do you speak English?
English.
They're asking to come across to our boat
and if we will take them to Australia.
All the way through the script, you're getting flashbacks
to what happened on the boat, at the same time
as you're following the story four years later.
So you're following these two families.
And there's also a central mystery.
I was super excited and couldn't wait to read it.
And that's amazing.
Like separate to the character, I was just
like this is a great story.
The minute I pick something up and I get excited,
as an audience member, I 100 percent
want to work on it as an actor.
It's a very mysterious kind of show,
but not a thriller in the classic sense.
So what we were looking for was a combination
of mystery and emotional drama.
The story of Safe Harbour is so much more
of a social and emotional family drama
rather than it being a political message.
What spoke to me when I read the scripts--
and this was for the first time I'm seeing
these asylum seekers, these refugees as people--
that regardless of whether they were asylum seekers,
regardless of where they're from culturally
or what their religion is, they're
doing things that I feel like I would do in the same situation.
We would like for the audience to look at these characters
and connect with them.
But I think they'll also shift allegiances
throughout the story.
What I'm generally interested in in life is moral ambiguity,
where there's no right or wrong, there's
no good guys and bad guys.
And I think in this, there's a real ethical and moral
dilemma, an emotional dilemma for both sides of the story.
Well, we could try and take them on board.
There's like 40 of them or more.
But we could strip stuff out.
We could make some room.
Or we could tow them.
Yeah.
That could burn out the engine.
Do we even have enough food, water?
We could go for help.
We could mark their position, head
back into Australian waters until we get contact.
Their engine is dead.
It's totally cactus.
We're not set up for rescue.
So why don't we go to someone who is?
Look, we've got to think about the kids, Ryan.
And whether we take them aboard or whether we tow them,
we're putting everyone at risk, even them.
In many ways, we're trying to actually intertwine
the families and kind of bring home the idea that the story
is very much a human story.
So we're trying to use visual cues to tie them together.
It's about human struggles.
And all of them are struggling with the same thing.
So much of what Safe Harbour is about is how we deal with grief
and how we deal with guilt and whether or not
we have the capacity to forgive others for something horrible
that they might have done.
But more importantly, whether or not we
have the capacity to forgive ourselves.
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