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Sometimes directors are lucky to cast actors at just the right time. It happened while Gregor Jordan was filming his first film, the crime comedy Two Hands, which was inspired by a young bouncer he saw outside a strip club in Sydney’s glitzy Kings Cross. . In fact, it happened twice.
The actor he cast to play Jimmy, one of his young bodyguards, was Heath Ledger, who was only 18 years old at the time and had yet to film his breakout Hollywood movie, 10 Things I Hate About You. Across from him are Alex, a photographer new from the country, and Rose Byrne, an almost unknown 18-year-old.
Two Hands stars Heath Ledger and Rose Byrne were 18 years old when they were cast.
Success in film is a mysterious alchemy. In the case of Two Hands, which Jordan made after winning the Tropfest and Cannes Jury Prize for his clever short film Swinger, a lot of things that could have gone wrong went right.
Both of his photogenic young stars were headed for great acting careers, but in the case of Ledger, who died in 2008, their careers were cut tragically short. The year after Two Hands, Byrne played a blind teenager in another Australian film, The Goddess Of 1967, for which she won the Venice Film Festival Award for Best Actress.
Brian Brown, who has produced Cocktail, Gorillas in the Mist, and two other F/X movies in Hollywood, initially thought the script wasn’t clear what kind of movie it was, and the story is about a crime boss. – He expressed reluctance to play Pando. However, he developed that feeling after a rewrite revealed that it was a romance between Jimmy and Alex. “That’s the crux of the matter: two people finding each other,” Brown says.
The Australian humor he incorporated into the script, in which he plays origami with his young son while someone is killed over the phone, was memorable and a highlight of the film. Other funny scenes include Woza (Steve Le Marquand) having to find a daycare center before robbing a bank, and Akko (David Field) accidentally cleaning a bullet, which causes one There were scenes where he tried to hit the target with a bullet.
And while things didn’t work out – more on that later – Two Hands was a hit in Australian cinemas in 1999, cleaned up at the Australian Film Institute Awards, and is still beloved 25 years later. It has become a work that can be admired. Jordan has now told Spectrum that he is writing a sequel, Two Hands 2, which will take the story forward 25 years and bring back some of the characters.
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“There’s a script that I think is really great, and I’m bringing it into the modern day,” he says. “Trying to do a sequel five years later probably wouldn’t have worked, but 25 years later is the right time.”
Two Hands follows Jimmy’s unsuccessful attempt to pay off his debt to Pando for a job delivering $10,000, while falling in love with Alex and being watched over by his late brother (Steven Vidler). This is a story.
Jordan never intended it to be as comedic as it actually turned out to be. “I was trying to make it real, and real people are kind of ridiculous,” he says. “The idea that a master hitman, bank robber, or drug dealer can’t find a babysitter and has to look after a child is ridiculous, but it’s also real.”
Bad Boys: (from left) David Field as Akko, Tom Long as Wally, and Brian Brown as Pando.
The film now looks like a fascinating portrait of Sydney in the past. It was a time when criminals wore tight shorts with thongs and rode V8 engines, bank robberies occurred and monorails snaked through the city. However, according to Jordan, there was a “retro vibe at the time, with people driving old cars and wearing slightly outlandish clothes.”
He says his luck with Two Hands was finding Ledger and Byrne. “Heath in particular, because this role was difficult to cast.
“He was 18 years old, so he probably didn’t have a lot of experience. He had to have a certain toughness, but he also had to be soft and approachable. He needed real acting ability and something that would drive the whole movie and make people want to pay to see him in theaters, and there were only so many people we could consider. Heath was there and perfect for the role.”
Jordan refutes the idea that he has discovered Ledger. “He was attracting a lot of people’s attention,” he says. “He was already a movie star, but the world didn’t really know that yet. Heath turned that into something special, because he was special as an actor and as a presence on screen. So was Rose. She was about to jump out.”
Kim Ledger, Heath’s father, remembers Two Hands as “part of a journey that was preprogrammed into me many years ago.”
“We both used to watch and laugh at Australian gangster movies where we wore shorts and thongs,” he says. “He loved this movie and loved filming with everyone. People like Brian Brown and Susie Porter are really great people and were really good to Heath. Good production. It’s very interesting.
On the Run: Jimmy and Alex ride the monorail through Sydney. Credit: JAMES ALCOCK
According to Jordan, Pando is based on Lenny Macpherson, a ruthless criminal who seemed to live a relatively normal life. “The costume designer[Emily Seresin]put together this look with shorts and socks,” he says. “At the first costume fitting, she just sat there and said, ‘Oh my God.’ She started laughing.
“We were all laughing so hard at the costume. She said, ‘I’ll never work again.’ And Brian said, ‘You and me too,’ because it sure looked silly, but it looked great at the same time. ”
I don’t think Mr. Brown has seen Two Hands since it was released, but he remembers that it was very interesting. “A guy told me the other day that this was his hangover movie, and that made perfect sense to me,” he says. “Saturday nights are the worst, and Sunday mornings I wake up and don’t want to get out of the lounge. ‘What should I wear? Two hands.’
Brown filmed the origami scenes first. “That’s a really good scene for the character,” he says. “He was playing with a kid and he got on the phone and talked to someone and said, ‘Kill that kid–‘ You have a great idea of who this guy is. But I… I had never heard of the word “origami” and had no idea what it was, so I just said that.”
Hits Fail…Heath Ledger, Tom Long, David Field, and Brian Brown in two hands.
Brown also did not know Ledger and Byrne well when he shot the film. “I didn’t know about them just by drinking the soap,” he says. “But they’re both really great. As a man, Heath was a nice guy. It’s bad enough to lose a nice player, but he was a very talented player as he showed. And Rose It’s Rose. She’s great in everything she does. It lights up the screen.”
Brown is very fond of Two Hands. “It was really nice to play Pando because no other guy played him,” he says. “I never would have imagined it would pop out like that. I remember when it first came out. One day I was walking around the cross and some pretty heavy-looking guys passed by and one of them… He just looked at me and winked. I thought, ‘Boys these days are fine.’
There was another, lesser-known 18-year-old in the cast, Mariel McCrory. As street kid Helen, she avenges the death of her young friend Pete (Evan Thieves), and Powderfinger’s “These Days” explodes at the film’s climax.
“I had just started acting professionally and didn’t really know what I was doing,” she says. “So it’s a very nostalgic movie for me.”
Writer Gregor Jordan and Heath Ledger clean up after Two Hands at the 1999 AFI Awards. Credit: Daniel Smith
Ms. McCrory remembers waiting boredly in her trailer until she needed it on set one day – she had forgotten to bring a book – and Ledger walked by. I leaned back and knocked on the door.
“He said, ‘How are you doing?’ You sound really bored. Would you like to borrow my Discman and all my CDs?’ That was so sweet.”
McCrory saw “Two Hands” at its Sydney premiere and recalled that “I felt like I was in an out-of-body experience in the theater.” It was more powerful than I expected when I read the script. It was intense. ”
She worked as an actress until her early 20s, and after studying painting, became a prosthetic make-up artist, working on films such as Mad Max: Fury Road, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Furiosa. He was involved in works such as “Max Saga.”
A few years ago, a friend recommended McCrory see a movie showing of “Two Hands,” and he said he really enjoyed it. “I have a lot of friends who are obsessed with that movie,” she says. “My partner is a stand-up comedian (Eric Hutton) and a lot of his friends are into that movie too. It’s one of their favorite Australian movies.”
Susie Porter, who loved the script and was so excited to be in Two Hands, remembers the phone call telling her she had been offered the role of Deirdre. “I thought a lot of it was really funny and really clever, and I’d never really seen it before. I think it’s quintessentially Australian,” she says. . “I loved the whole idea of a crime family.”
Writer/director Gregor Jordan with (from left) Brian Brown, Rose Byrne and Susie Porter before the 1999 AFI Awards ceremony. Credit: Glenn Shipley
Not only did Porter really enjoy working with Ledger and Le Marquand, he was also struck by Ledger’s charisma. “I remember him reading ‘Lolita’ on set, and I thought, wow, what an educated man at that age,” she says. “He was very serious about his acting and really wanted to get better at it.”
Le Marquand still receives regular notifications about how well Woza has been received. “The famous line, ‘Shotty’s fine’ – I’ve probably been asked to do that hundreds of times in pubs over the years,” he says. “The other one said, “Don’t play with the little girl in the house.” Dad has a headache that makes his blood seem to be jumping.”
“There’s a guy who carved the lines ‘This is going to be a fucking ripper’ on the left buttock of my face.”
Le Marquin thinks Jordan is an “absolute genius” for writing such an entertaining script, but the deadpan direction of Brown, Field, and the late crime buddies played by the late Tom Long, who plays Wally, doesn’t work. I think so.
All of Le Marquin’s scenes were with Ledger, Porter, and Kieran Darcy-Smith, who played fellow bank robber Craig. “I didn’t have any scenes with Rose, but I saw her a lot when I went to Sundance,” he says. “We all crashed on Gregor’s lounge room floor.”
He filmed the scene in which he and Porter plan a bank robbery in a cramped studio in Rozelle. “Back then you could smoke real cigarettes on set,” he says. “My character was smoking throughout that scene. I was a smoker, but I had to take drugs at certain times to keep going, and I probably smoked about 70 cigarettes that day. It was good for my voice, but not so good for my lungs.”
After Two Hands received disappointing reviews at the Sundance Film Festival, Jordan cut approximately eight minutes and reshot scenes featuring Jimmy’s dead brother for Australian release.
“We went into the review with confidence, but it didn’t work out,” he says. “I’m philosophical about this movie, because I made it unashamedly Australian, using a lot of Australian slang. I remember Pando getting his balls kicked and saying, ‘My testicles are like pikelets.’ There is a line that says, “It looks like.”
“People outside of Australia wouldn’t know what that meant, and there’s a lot of that throughout the movie…That’s why it wasn’t so well-received as a movie at the time.”
There was another problem. After the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999, in which two students killed 12 other students and a teacher, studios and distributors agreed that children with guns should not be shown on screen. Jordan says there was a tacit agreement not to.
“The fact that at the climax of Two Hands, a young girl comes in and shoots the whole gang, it prevented it from being distributed there,” he says.
Jordan has previously starred in the films “Buffalo Soldiers”, “Leisure” starring Ned Kelly, “Unthinkable”, “Dirt Music”, and the miniseries “Old School” and “Australian Gangster”. He has been working on it, but he doesn’t want to say much about the sequel. However, “We are in the final stages of writing the script and are starting to look for financing.”・It’s just that we’re working with Gibson.
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The director had a close relationship with Ledger, they lived together for a while and were close friends when it came to film decisions, but he is now working on Two Hands as he admires Long, who passed away from encephalitis in 2020. ” is difficult to watch. “It’s just difficult,” he says.
But Jordan has fond memories of the movie.
“I think Two Hands was a little bit magical,” he says. “This group came together at the right time and in the right way, and that’s what made it so special.”
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