Based on the 2017 novel by Jane Harper, writer/ director Robert Connolly returns with a follow-up to his wildly successful 2020 mystery film called The Dry with Force Of Nature: The Dry 2. Robert shares his views on his latest film starring Eric Bana as Aaron Falk and Jacqueline McKenzie as Carmen Cooper with Creative Screenwriting Magazine.
Connolly’s primary consideration was to adapt the novel cinematically rather than simply retelling the story in the book. “One of the things that appeals to me is the way they take you into a world that’s quite an intoxicating landscape. I grew up in the bush, the location of four subnatures.”
Author Jane Harper plays with time in her novel; “past and present and different threads. And I’ve always loved the way cinema can tell the story of the past and the present as hand in glove,” he continues.
The title Force Of Nature speaks to the philosophy of the film. “It speaks to the physical environment and landscape, which is a character, but also to the human characters within it,” he continues. It’s a story of survival and mortality.
“I think it’s part of the puzzle in the title that invites you into this kind of place where the two meet.”
Robert Connolly. Photo courtesy of IFC Films
Aaron Falk & Carmen Cooper – The Gray Area Of Crime
Falk and Cooper are the federal detectives leading the search for the lost women. But their motivations aren’t entirely honourable because they want to ensure Alice (Anna Torv), their corporate whistleblower witness, is alive and able to testify. Falk and Cooper are ostensibly partners, but their approach to their case, tests the limit of their collaboration.
“It’s all about policing, and what it is to have decided and devoted your life to being a detective, which is pursuing the truth, catching the criminals and bringing them to justice.”
“And in Force Of Nature, unlike The Dry, where the crime is much clearer and cleaner with a clear sense of right and wrong, what we were hoping to explore was all the gray areas of crime,” adds the writer/ director.
Aaron Falk “is starting to doubt the fundamentals of his life. He has a line. Are any of these women truly guilty? It’s a big philosophical shift for him.”
Carmen Cooper is a career detective and has a more black and white attitude to policing. “There is no gray area philosophically or ethically.” Putting pressure on witnesses is part of the job. Only outcomes matter.
This places the two characters in conflict. Aaron Falk does eventually cross the policing line with his over-zealous pursuit of a witness. “He steps outside of the ethical and boundaries of what he should be doing. He visits this woman and confronts her in front of a child at school. He puts a huge amount of pressure on her and now she’s missing. Because he is a fundamentally good man, he is starting to doubt, why he’s doing it?”
All the characters test the boundaries of the law in some way. “It would have been a mistake to create a story where Aaron Faulk was some morally uncorrupted character. There are certainly reasons for him to have quite deep and profound guilt at the end of the film.” He may not even stay in the force after this ordeal.
“Eric Bana is not interested in just playing a heroic character in Falk. He’s looking to play a character who is flawed and self-aware enough to be confronted by those flaws. Whereas, I don’t think Carmen is. Carmen just knows what she does. She’s worked it out. They set up a set of rules that govern the choices they make and then they live by those.”
Crossover Genre
Force Of Nature: The Dry 2 is ostensibly a rescue thriller. It’s also a detective story and a family drama. “Australian cinema tends to do its best work when it’s cross genre,” muses Connolly.
“I feel on one level Force Of Nature is a detective mystery. There is a mystery. There’s a missing person. There is a detective and he’s pursuing the truth. On another level, it’s a survival film set in the wilderness. You have these two genres inter-playing.”
Alice (Anna Torv) Photo by Narelle Portanier/ Roadshow Films Pty Ltd
“I have always taken a great inspiration from Peter Weir’s films and the way he works in different genres, but always with a deeply humanist eye. His films put the microscope onto the human condition and look into people and situations.”
There’s a lot going on under the hood in the intricate plot of Force Of Nature. “We escalate the stakes, but not throw every single spice in the casserole so that nobody knows what they’re eating?” The fine-tuning of the plot was a lengthy process, much of which took place in the edit, especially in tracking the different timelines and what information the characters and audiences have at a particular point in time.
“I always leave one timeframe with flashback structures. And when you leave it, you don’t want to because you want more information. Nothing is complete. But then you go to the other timeframe, and you’re happy to be there again to find out more. So the film keeps leaning forward for you.”
Juggling multiple time frames requires deftness so the audience doesn’t become overwhelmed and confused. “You’re calibrating it. You’re letting audiences connect things.”
“There’s a difference in this genre between being cryptic and being confusing. If it’s cryptic, audiences love it. It’s a puzzle that you’re trying to unlock. If it’s confusing, it’s just a mess.”
Distinctive Female Characters
Force Of Nature: The Dry 2 relishes its female cast. “Jane Harper shows, not just five women, but five women with a spread of demographics. There’s the ultra-wealthy older leader Jill Bailey (Deborra-lee Furness), Lauren (Robin McLeavy) a young woman in her mid-20s, Beth (Sisi Stringer) and Bree (Lucy Ansell) two sisters who are in their late 30s who work hand-to-mouth to pay rent.” There’s a diverse bunch of women lost in the bush.
“I think that Jane Harper wanted to discuss the nature of collaboration and conflict between that group of women fighting it out in the bush.”
Tracking five women requires constant monitoring of their goals, motives, and voice to make each sound distinct. “I was inspired by hearing the filmmaker Vincent Ward speak of his film The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey. All the characters dig through the earth of the medieval time until they come up in modern-day New Zealand. A lot of it’s in caves. He knew that the audience needed to know about everybody in the dark. He cast physically different characters and costumed them differently to make sure that you always knew who they were. They each have their own moments.” Connolly applied this principle.
Robert Connolly also used the screenwriter trick of covering up each character’s name during the read-through of the script to ensure that each character’s voice is distinctive.
“Beth’s been in jail. She’s taking a lot of drugs, vaping all the time, and smoking. She’s cheeky. Brie is the anxious, do-gooder sister who’s a bit more uptight. You can hear in the phrasing of how she speaks that it’s got a tightness to it, whereas Beth’s kind of more relaxed.” Beth is looking for some direction in her life and to bond with her sister.
Alice’s background also unfolds as we understand the circumstances that led her to becoming a police informant.
The group dynamic takes a dark turn when it’s suggested that one of them deliberately got them lost so Alice can’t testify.
Adapting The Book
The screenplay was written over a period of six months. Robert Connolly worked closely with emerging writer Tara Bilston to break down the book. Tara wrote some dialogue between the young women in the group to make it more authentic.
“I’m quite physical about it, breaking it down into scenes, putting them on cards and trying to understand how the book worked and that the film can’t work that way. What can we discard?”
The book was always the foundation of the story and he made sure he fully grasped it before he started to write. He had to get the fundamentals right.
“I subscribe a lot to the Paul Schrader view that you should be able to tell a story before you write it. The oral tradition of filmmaking is really powerful. That’s how I realized there’s not enough information in parts of the story. People need to know more at the beginning.” He added context scenes such as when Falk meets Alice under the overpass and pressures her to testify.
As Connolly powered through each draft, he made things clearer and more understandable, but not spoon feeding the audience. “It’s the Billy Wilder quote, “Let the audience work out that one plus one equals two and they’ll love you forever.” The two need to be balanced.
