Ten Empty - Interview with Brendan Cowell & Anthony Hayes
Best mates Anthony Hayes and Brendan Cowell talk about their joint effort
By Ruth Hessey
Ten Empty is as Aussie as beer breath and soggy coasters, but it was cooked up by Anthony Hayes and Brendan Cowell as an answer to the clichés strangling Australian cinema. "After The Castle there was a string of comedies trying to replicate that success with cardboard cut-out characters, which really annoyed me," says director Hayes.
"That's what we were working against in Ten Empty. That surface wit. Men cracking jokes instead of dealing with their emotions. What happens when you run out of jokes? The people I grew up with kept things to themselves, but they'd open up too. The average Aussie bloke is not just a beer-swilling idiot, and we wanted to show that."
Take a look at Hayes and Cowell if you're interested in the state of Australian manhood. You'd be hard pressed to find a picture of Anthony Hayes out of character. "I'm usually the guy sitting in the corner with his back to the wall," he laughs. "I'm a happy soul. I leap out of bed and I've learned to like myself."
Cowell is the unlikely media pin up boy, his personal style is dero-chic meets op-shop hero, a fresh breeze in the world of Big Brother and corporate arts funding. Just to show he's not an apparition from a bygone era, Cowell sports Kermit green earphones winding across his breast pocket from his iPod.
"What I respond to in Brendan is I never quite understand him. He's always coming in with a new angle. He's always thinking. And even though he works in the artistic world he still loves rugby and his mum and his family," says Hayes.
Upon meeting in 1999, the pair founded Roguestar Productions, and have been on a mission to rewrite the landscape they work in. "The film set is where good ideas go to die," quips Cowell. "It's very different to the café where you wrote the scene."
"We had a lot of pressure to make Ten Empty lighter," Hayes agrees. "But we wanted to dig deeper. Mike Leigh and Ken Loach really tap into the courage of ordinary people."
The pair has also given Lucy Bell her best role in years, as a young wife with an older husband, struggling to deal with his first family, as well as her new one. "We talked a lot about not letting the female characters get lost in the testosterone," Hayes says. "Diane's really the only person in that family trying to deal with the issues, and stay positive. She's nursing all these men because she has such a beautiful heart. It's probably to her own detriment. But she doesn't blame anyone for her situation."
The other female character, Bernadette (Blazey Best) is no walk-on girlfriend as Hayes points out. "We didn't want her to be needy character, desperate for a man to complete her life. She's vibrant and alive."
"It came out of our friendship," says Cowell. "We kicked the story around. Whatever we were working on, we'd meet up and it would always come back to this. We had to make it to move on with our lives."
Read Time Out's review of Ten Empty