“There’s a lot of great characters in this that aren’t in the song”

Paul Kelly’s classic 1996 How to Make Gravy paints the story of a prisoner writing home to his brother, lamenting that he won’t be home for Christmas, deftly dropping names such as Dan, Stella, Angus, Frank, Dolly, Rita, Mary and Roger.

Any listener to the song knows its author is doing it tough behind bars with at least another six months to go.

But how did he get there? What’s happening to him inside? And what is his relationship to Angus and Frank and Dolly?

That was the challenge for writers Meg Washington & Nick Waterman, who also directs the new film of the same name.

As star Dan Henshall (pictured above, centre) explains, they have brought to life the story of prisoner Joe, drawing inspiration from Kelly’s lyric, and expanding on it.

“There’s a lot of great characters in this that aren’t in the song,” he tells TV Tonight.

“The song doesn’t allude to why he’s in there or what he’s done. It never really says that Angus is his son, ot that Frank and Dolly are his children. We only know that Rita is his wife, Stella is his sister and Dan is his brother – and Roger’s, a bit of a d***!”

In this version Joe is the film’s anti-hero, sent to jail following an incident and separated from his family unit. While his brother Dan (Brenton Thwaites) steps into his brother’s shoes -triggering Joe’s fears of losing his partner Rita (Agathe Rousselle)- Joe is befriended by a veteran lifer Noel (Hugo Weaving).

Making gravy on the inside, serves as a metaphor for taking steps to improve his life.

“When we meet Joe, he’s in a spot of bother and has been for an entire lifetime, I think, but he hasn’t addressed it,” Henshall explains.

“He hasn’t had the tools or the space to. There’s a lot of repressed pain that’s manifested into, at times, outbursts of rage, I think. While he’s a brilliant father and good partner, I think there’s this traumatic event that’s happened to him in his life where he hasn’t quite been able to connect with it, because it’s just too painful.

“He’s lost a few things at the beginning of the film. People haven’t turned up for him -or that’s how he feels. An event happens, and the result is he finds himself in prison, but he doesn’t help himself while he’s in prison. He keeps making the same choice, and that’s quite common, particularly for men who haven’t been able to manifest their sadness or grief or events that have happened to them through communication and a support network. Sadly it manifests in some pretty awful behaviours that result in some very destructive ends.

“Thankfully for Joe, he finds someone and a group of people that help him heal himself.”

Henshall contacted Washington and Waterman when a mutual friend mentioned they were developing the project after the blessing of coposeer Paul Kelly. While Waterman had won acclaim for several short films, How to Make Gravy is the debut feature for both.

Henshall couldn’t be more proud of the finished result.

“It’s broad, it’s nuanced, it’s funny, it’s heartfelt. It’s got so much humanity in it. It’s like a big, warm hug. It’s cathartic. It pays homage to the brilliant song which they adapted, then lifts it into a different space. It’s an entity unto itself, but yet it partners the song so well,” he continues.

“I genuinely love this film, and I’m genuinely proud to be a part of it. I know people say that in this position often, and that I’m sure that they do mean it, but I’m so proud to have been asked to been a part of it.

“If you listen to Meg’s music it feels like storytelling. It’s the same with with Paul Kelly in that regard. He could be writing short stories on a page without any music attached to them, He does it so succinctly and with so much clarity and simplicity that it resonates and speaks. Every time you come back to a song of his it resonates even deeper. And I think that’s the same about Meg. Her lyrics are brilliant and of course, the music is also. So it’s not such a stretch.

“She writes dialogue so wonderfully and she understands story and the many layers. The way that she and Nick have entered the Kelly-verse, they’ve come from inside the song, not from an outside point of view. They’ve found all this rich material that’s now in the film,” he says.

“To their credit, they have stood their ground at each step, and they got final say on a lot of stuff. So, they made it the way they wanted to and they believed and backed themselves to do it in that way. And obviously everybody who’s involved felt and believed in them to do that, even though they hadn’t had many things on the board.”

The cast also includes Damon Herriman, Kate Mulvany, Jonah Wren Phillips, Kieran Darcy-Smith, Kim Gyngell, Adam Briggs and in a cameo Electric Fields’ Zaachariaha Fielding and singer songwriter Brendan Maclean. Music plays a big part of the story, no surprise given the creatives involved.

Henshall’s connection to Paul Kelly music extends back to hearing Dumb Things in 1988’s Yahoo Serious film, Young Einstein.

“His songs have just play through my childhood in the ’90s, somewhere in the background. I can feel summer, and I can taste the salt when I listen to his music. But for me, it really hit in my late 20s, when I started travelling back and forth, mainly from America when work started to pick up there for me. It would invariably just come onto my playlists. Consciously or unconsciously, I would just start listening more and more to PK and this song always made me feel like home,” he admits.

“There’s a few songs of his that make me feel like home. Regardless of the people in the songs and the stories aren’t really recognisable, there’s a feeling that it gives me that makes me feel like, ‘You understand where I’m from,’ and I think that’s what a lot of Australians would feel.”

How to Make Gravy premieres Sunday December 1 on Binge / 8:30pm Movies Premiere.