From ‘Full Monty’ to imaginary friendships

PETER CATTANEO hit a home run his first time directing a feature with 1997’s “The Full Monty,” which received several Academy Award nominations, including best film and director. For “Opal Dream,” opening Nov. 22, he ventured into the opal mines in the Australian outback for a family drama that revolves around a sensitive young girl, Kellyanne (Sapphire Boyce), who firmly believes that her imaginary friends, Pobby and Dingan, are real. Her unwavering faith helps bring the small town together.

Based on the Ben Rice book “Pobby and Dingan,” the screenplay was penned by Cattaneo, Rice and Phil Trail. Cattaneo says it was “nice to go somewhere very different, a different canvas. I didn’t know anything about that world of opal mining in Australia. I was even doubtful it really existed. Then I went there and found out what it was really like.”

Cattaneo was drawn to the novel because he had long wanted to make a film with a young boy as a protagonist. “It basically comes from my favorite films: ‘My Life as a Dog,’ ‘The Bicycle Thief’ and [Francois] Truffaut’s ‘The 400 Blows.’ It’s a way for a man to revive one’s childhood.”

But finding a child to play Kellyanne’s 11-year-old brother, Ashmol, proved so daunting, Cattaneo nearly walked off the film.

“There was one dark night of the soul where I thought, ‘I am just going to get on a plane and go home because I literally don’t have our boy yet,’ ” he recalls. Then, a week before rehearsals were to start, the film’s producer saw Christian Boyers’ audition tape. “He had been Romeo in a school play and his aunt saw an advert we put in the paper in Sydney,” says Cattaneo. “He was just really natural.”

The gamin Boyce was a lot to easier to find. “On the audition ape, she started talking about her imaginary friends that she had left outside,” says Cattaneo. “Then she brought them in. I said, ‘Hang on, either she’s acting which is fine or she has these imaginary friends, which is really interesting as well. She really got into it.”

Coober Pedy in South Australia, where the film was shot, was originally a sea bed, Cattaneo says. “It’s incredibly surreal. ‘Mad Max’ was shot not far away and the odd film comes in. I had Val Kilmer’s hotel room, I was told many times by the people who ran the Opal Inn!”

-- Susan King