Filming It Sweet

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Creative home for Neil Armfield is a former tomato sauce factory in Sydney's Surry Hills. It's here Australia's finest director goes, as Shakespeare's Hamlet says, "to sleep, perchance to dream." Here, under Armfield's gentle, bespectacled gaze, Geoffrey Rush first leaped to life as Proposhkin in Gogol's Diary of a Madman and Cate Blanchett came of age as Miranda in The Tempest. It's also where Armfield dreamed up his 1998 stage adaptation of Tim Winton's novel Cloudstreet, the epic production that put his name in theatrical heaven. With 14 actors playing 40 characters over 20 years in five hours, the director's craft was stretched to breaking point. But as Armfield says, "Having set yourself up for failure is actually a great spur."

Cloudstreet went on to acclaimed seasons in Sydney, London and New York—and planted the seed for Armfield's next artistic challenge: adapting Candy, novelist Luke Davies' 1997 elegy to young love lost to heroin. Not only was the story risky, but it was to be told in a medium he had yet to master: celluloid. While the director, 51, had toyed with filmed plays and TV dramas, "Candy was like starting again in a new form," Armfield says. Roping in some theatrical mates, including Cloudstreet production designer Robert Cousins, he set about opening up the story of doomed junkie love and offering audiences a more familiar entry point in the form of Candy's befuddled middle-class parents. In the process, he helped make the "hopeless optimism" of Candy's poet boyfriend Dan (Heath Ledger) as endearing as the Lambs and Pickles of Cloudstreet. At Company B, Armfield's genius has been in drawing stellar names, gaining their trust and stretching their wings. He went into Candy, he says, "wanting to quite bravely use the things that I'd found strong and helpful in rehearsing a play." But what sounded good in theory struggled in practice, especially when applied to young actors unused to the rigors of group rehearsal. Ledger, in particular, found the process "unsettling," Armfield recalls, and the director negotiated a one-on-one approach with his Brokeback Mountain star. "Lead actors in a film really have to take—and will take—responsibility for their own performances," he says.

In Candy (which opens in Australia this week), the camera doesn't lie. When Dan is told he is to become a father, his face, caught in the light of a window, floods with tenderness. Ledger appears to act only when his character must—to hustle for the couple's next fix. Otherwise his performance is fakery-free. As the sun Dan orbits, Abbie Cornish carries the same dreaminess she first displayed in Somersault. If she never quite plumbs Candy's depths, that's because she remains in Dan's eyes an ideal. Also directing their gaze is Svengali figure Casper, boldly played by Rush, Armfield's friend and colleague for a quarter of a century. At an early cast screening, "he said every character in this film does a 180-degree turn," Armfield recalls, "and what a great thing that is for all to end up in such a different place."

Perhaps the film's most surprising twist is its humor. When an unwitting real estate agent comes to collect his rent from the bed-confined couple, Candy tells him: "We're junkies; I'm a hooker; he's hopeless." When they move to the country, Candy complains that their living room is too dark, so Dan knocks a skylight through the roof. In this way, Armfield lets light into their darkest hours, bringing a heightened sense of mortality that seems to stem from his own childhood. "When I was 13 years old, my mum was given six months to live, and she was at the premiere [of Candy] last night," he says.

In December 2004, just as the film was due to go into production, Armfield was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Filming went ahead after a successful operation, and this February Candy screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. "It's been a mad and thrilling journey," Armfield says. And it continues. Come September, the director's beloved Belvoir Street Theatre will unveil an $A11.6 million makeover, including a new rehearsal space for his actors. In this dream factory, Armfield is master.