Soap star goes to war

BY MARGARET AGNEW

At the tender age of 20, Caitlin Stasey is no stranger to the limelight.

The pretty brunette made her major acting debut in 2003 when she was a young teen, in the lead role on popular Australian television series The Sleepover Club.

Since then, Caitlin has acted in various TV and stage roles, including a high-profile stint on Aussie soap Neighbours from 2005 to 2008, filming hundreds of episodes.

Tomorrow, When The War Began marks her feature film debut. The film, based on John Marsden's best selling novel, follows the journey of eight high-school friends in a remote country town, whose lives are suddenly and violently upended by a war no-one saw coming.

Cut off from their families and their friends, these eight ordinary teenagers must learn to escape, survive and fight back against a hostile invading military force.

For screenwriter Stuart Beattie, the decision to make his directorial debut with a much-loved Aussie novel was an easy one: "I was looking to make a character-based but commercial action movie set in Australia that could compete on the international stage.

"Tomorrow When The War Began has all the action, but also has the heart. Ellie and her friends are all wonderful, complex, engaging characters."

Young actress Caitlin Stasey captured the perfect balance of intelligence, vulnerability and strength that is essential to Ellie, says her director.

"I actually came across a photo of Caitlin about a year ago [prior to casting] and I said, 'That's what Ellie should look like'," Beattie says.

"I found out her name and brought her in for an audition. I kept asking my casting agent out of pure curiosity, 'What are the odds that the photo you pick out a year ago actually turns out to be someone who can actually really act, head and shoulders above everyone else?"'

The first of Marsden's seven Tomorrow novels for teens was published in 1993. The author has said Stasey was too good looking to play Ellie.

"She doesn't look like the way I had imagined Ellie much at all, I thought she would be a bit broader and thick set and fairly plain," he said.

"But Caitlin, when I watched her acting ... I thought 'Christ, she has become Ellie', she has an amazing presence and power."

This is not the stereotypical teenage girl character – obsessed with boys and not much else – that we see so often on the big screen.

Instead Ellie is a complex character with a tough journey ahead of her. Stasey was 17 herself just a few years ago, but one imagines she was never a typical teenager having made hundreds of hours of television by then.

"Before I started working on Neighbours, I was a relatively normal girl," she insists.

"But what defines normal anyway? Nobody's normal. I know I went through a different process to a lot of teenagers but I understand what it's like.

"I still went through the process of figuring out who I was and having to talk to the opposite sex and having to navigate my way through adolescence. I just went through different avenues to get there."

Stasey is one of those rare people who has known what she wanted to do as a career from a very early age.

"It's kind of been a blessing as well as a curse. I've focused wholeheartedly on it and I've achieved a lot in a small space of time.

"I've been really fortunate but I haven't experienced other things. I don't know what else I might be good at or what I could fall back on," she says.

"I don't feel like I've missed out on my childhood. My parents always treated me as the age that I was. I was lucky like that."

Recently, Stasey had to defend the addition of an F-word in the film for her character, plus a cold-blooded killing that wasn't in the book.

As grotesque as it might sound, teenagers are completely desensitised to violence now, Stasey says.

"There's nothing you can do now that shocks people. If you've thought of it, it's happened.

"It's kind of sad. You watch fantastic old horror films and virtually nothing happens yet you're scared out of your wits. You watch something now, and someone's getting hacked to pieces in front of you and you're just like, 'that's a bit gross'. It's not scary.

"I think what's important is to give weight to each killing. It's one thing to see a psychopath hack up a bunch of young women and hang them out to dry, it's another to see the disturbing reality that goes on behind all of it.

"To make a real horror film you have to make it a psychological horror film, rather than a physical one. A lot of our film is psychological."

Not that Tomorrow is a horror film, with its elements of action, romance, and guerrilla warfare, themes of loss of innocence, friendship and leadership.

"A lot of the film is about moral dilemmas that we face," Stasey says. "Ellie, in some ways, is more at home in the middle of a war than she is chatting with Lee [the boy she likes]."

With the release of her first big feature film, Stasey's not ruffled by the idea of increased international attention.

"It's not attention I'm after. The only thing I want from it is more work. I don't really live for the fame prospect because that kind of disturbs me. I find it a bit grotesque and I don't really like it.

"As for work, I hope it helps in some way. But there are a lot of really talented actors out there and I'm just one of many people vying for these jobs."

In aid of her acting career, she's moving to Los Angeles this month.

However, she'd be keen to revisit the character of Ellie, should this film lead on to a sequel.

"If two or three were made, I'd be back in a heartbeat. I can't think of anything better. Because if I don't I might be unemployed for a very long time."

- Tomorrow When The War Began is now screening.

- © Fairfax NZ News