“We don’t want to tell just a story about a genius cricketer”

EXCLUSIVE:

When Seven announced a Shane Warne miniseries for 2017, biography dramas were hotly pursued by networks.

Dramas on Paul Hogan and Olivia Newton-John drew mixed reactions and Seven cooled over scripts on the Warne project -which never made it to screen.

Following his tragic death last month, Nine hurriedly announced a new Warne drama project which has led to some questions if the two projects are related?

“No. Not that I’m aware of,” Nine’s Head of Drama Andy Ryan tells TV Tonight.

While the Seven project was under Screentime’s watch, Ryan declines to confirm its producers.

But he is adamant it won’t be a standard bio-pic of Warne, who was a Nine personality.

“People have been talking about, and actually making, Shane Warne related documentaries, musicals… taking about making bio-pics when bio-pics were the big thing. Shane Warne has been always a name that gets bandied around.

“His life was so intriguing, and a work in progress. It became more intriguing and interesting with every passing year and it’s a tragedy that Shane died so young. But the outpouring of grief adds an extra dimension. He’s definitely flawed, but a genius, a rogue and a rascal.

“Our relationship with him at the time, and now, has ebbed and flowed…we’ve seen the best and worst of ourselves in him. At the core, he was a genius cricketer but we don’t want to tell just a story about a genius cricketer. He was also a cultural icon but we don’t just want to tell a story about a cultural icon.”

Ryan maintains that while consultations will continue with Warne’s family, the success of the Melissa Caddick Underbelly drama is a reminder that drama allows for a more interesting lens than a conventional documentary.

“I don’t want to make dramas that are just box-ticking biographical factuals. You need perspective. You want to make a show that is greater than the sum of its parts… it has something to say about the nature of a shared experience, the nature of emotion, the nature of characters. I think sometimes you need a little bit of critical distance from somebody’s ongoing life to do that,” he continues.

“As with Melissa Caddick, a documentary can tell the facts of what happened but drama allows you to allows you to hypothesise, it allows you to explore, to go into issues of motivation and a backstory that you don’t get in a documentary.”

He also teases, “Which phase of Shane’s life will we foreground? I think it’s fair to say a cradle to the grave biopic is not our style.”