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On today's episode of TV Reload with Troy Lum, we will be talking about Boyce Swallows Universe, which is now out on Netflix. This Australian drama series for Netflix has an all star Australian cast, stunning cinematography and eighties period setting that fills modern and a fast paced story that is deadly serious but full of love, hope and humor. And a becoming of age story set in the nineteen eighties Brisbane that blends the magic of innocence of youth with the brutal.
Reality of the adult world. A lost father, a mute.
Brother, a recovering addict mum, a heroin dealing stepfather, and a notoriously criminal babysitter. Hmmm sounds interesting. Adapted from Trent Dalton's iconic Australian novel boy Swallows Universe, exploring the crossroads where a boy becomes a man, toys with good and evil,
and the everyday meets the extraordinary. Today's guest, Troy Lum's film career started in distribution and exhibition at Dandi Films in the late nineteen eighties, and while he has a quiet and release some of the biggest independent movies in history, including The Blair Witch Project and Amie, the twenty seven year old launched Hopscotch Films alongside Sandy Don and Frank Cox.
The independent film distribution company's many successes include Pans, Labyrinth, Fahrenheit nine to eleven, The Sapphires, Spotlight, and even the Oscar winning Lala land Lum shares the role of series in executive producer title with Andrew Mason, and with the massive success around the world with this title, I think we're going to continue to see plenty more collaborations between the two. There is actually so much to unpack with
Troy today, which I'm very excited about. What drew him to the project, how they captured the tremendous performances from their young actors, what techniques they use to balance out the bleak at times overtones with things like music and cinematography. I will ask about the possibility of continuing their relationship with author Trent Dalton and what their relationship was like with him, and if there was a bit of pressure
having him as the author on set. Anyway, let's bring Troy into the podcast and guys, sit back, relax, and I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into the world of Australian television. Hi Troy, thank you for joining me talking about this series Pleasure. This could be the most successful Australian made series for twenty twenty four. You must be so elated at this point by the success of the show.
Oh, I'm over the moon. It's it happens so rarely that you have something that catches fire like this, and so I'm just enjoying the wild ride as they say, so you should.
I mean, at this point you've been through the press and spoken about this before people could see it, and now people are reveling in how good.
This series actually is.
So yeah, is it interesting now to be talking to me at this point now that audiences are lapping it up?
Yeah, because look, you never really know, and you know, this has been five years of my life and I moved to Brisbane to shoot the show and was living there for six months, and so there's a whole kind of journey that goes along with something like this. You never really know. And because it was based on such a beloved book. You know, I was bracing myself for people to really, you know, be disappointed by the show
because they loved the book so much. And so look, the last week has just been well, first of all, one of relief just to know that people really like it. But then since the relief has subsided, it's more been an excitement about how the whole world has actually been loving the show. And that was something that I probably didn't expect that it would be such a global hit.
Well, you've taken so much of people's time.
I had this story where we would recommend my mother in law shows to watch, and so we went to recommend this and she was like, no, I watched it all in one sitting, which is a lot of content, but that's the start. That's what this show is. It's so intoxicating, it's so real, so visceral, that I feel like people step into that and they don't want to step out.
They need to know what happens next.
Yeah, all of that was obviously based on trans amazing novel, which is all in there, but I guess the challenge for was to how do we adapt that for screen and then kind of make it so that at the end of every episode, you were leaving the audience wanting more, and so there was a real kind of challenge on how do we break the book down into what became seven episodes so that every time you finished and up you were wanting more.
Well, there's many ways to talk about the success of this story and why it translates so well to audiences, But at the heart of where I think this series really works is that choice that happened in the book and that you carried through to the series, in that choice of telling a story from the pov of a child, and I think allowing Eli to actually act out all of those things that kids want to do and look.
I think also kids are essentially hopeful beings, and when you do something through the eyes of a kid, it can't help but being magical and hopeful. And I think what Trent did with the book, and I like to think what we've translated onto the screen was that real feeling of hope and magic. And I think that is what the universal theme is. It's it's the fact that no matter where your life is at or who's in your life, as long as you have a lot of love in your life and hope that that will always
see through. And I think it's been quite interesting looking at I was looking at the global metrics of where the show was really ranking, you know, like we're ranking we're ranking top five globally, which I think will move up. But there were certain places where it was ranking number one or number two, and I was places like Jamaica and lots of places in South and Central America where I think the resonance of the story of you know, working class people under peril who are trying to do
their best and it's really about family. I think that's where it all comes together for a lot of people anyway. But yeah, it's been such a it's been so great watching the response.
Going back to my point though, I guess it allows audiences to be a kid again for a while, you know, without and also remembering our original instincts. It takes you back to thinking, how would I as a child before the lens of being an adult that we now have.
For surely, Yeah, I think the magic was really I think when Trent wrote the novel, the magical Realism was really about the child inventing a world to overcome trauma. Really, and what we've done in the book is done the same thing. And obviously we're really lucky to have Felix Cameron play Eli, who I think encapsulated that childlike wonder
in such a meaningful emotional way. And I realized sort of three days into the shoot, how lucky you were to have feelings, because if we didn't have him, I think the whole series would have fallen apart, because he's basically in every single scene in the first four episodes, and he holds the whole thing together, which was a lot of pressure for a thirteen year old, But.
That's a lot of heavy lifting.
That's a lot of heavy lifting for any actor of any age to be able to engage like that and keep you engaged with you know. The only thing I thought was that because he was so powerful in that role at the very end, in the final scene, I kind of felt like we needed a flashback to that early stages of him, you know, almost like him.
Funny our action that because we we talked about it, we tried different things, we actually putting little flushbacks at the end. There was a there was a version of the of the last episode where where Guss is holding Eli at the clocktailer and sort of crying whilst holding him, and we and we actually did this little sequence where we flushed back into sort of Guss and Eli's little journey.
But I think we just decided that it took us out of the show in that brief moment, and although it kind of worked, it was eventually we decided to take it out.
I kin'd of feel I kept thinking of Steven Spielberg when he was making Jurassic Park, where he was like, we need to change the ending, we need to bring the t Rex back, because the t Rex was so huge in the story, and that wasn't originally in the script, but Steven Spielberg understood the gravitas of the t Rex.
It was like all right back in. So it must have been that similar feeling of.
Very tempted little feelings. It is so amazing. I think we all decided that just took us out of the show too much where we were at in the show, because it was a bit of a bit of a rollercoaster from really that end part to get to the ending, and it just slowed us down a little bit. But it's funny. It was actually quite a strong debate. So it's funny how you've landed on that because we did talk about it a lot.
Well, taking a step back and then asking you what drew you to this story, you know, how did you come across the book and what was the evolution of you wanting to join the project?
Well, actually I got the book from a UK company called Chapter One, who produced the show with us, and the head of that company, Sophie Gardner, sent me the book and I'd never heard of it before, and it's very rare that an overseas person would send me an Australian novel and say this is amazing, and so I read it straight away and I just yeah, they needed an Australian partner, and I read it straight away and just recognized that for me, it was Australian in all
the right ways. You know, sometimes you read stuff, we'll look at stuff and for me anyway, as a as an Aussie, but someone who had a child of migrants, I look at Australia a completely different way, I think. And what I loved about Boys Fellows Universe is that it was Aussie in all the ways that I really loved, and that's what kind of got me.
Involved like that.
I don't know if you've read Christos Chokos's books, but it's like his.
I love him to also. I think just the emotional sophistication of being Australian and the fact that we have a unique culture, we have a unique perspective, which I think Boyce Weellow's universe through its storytelling devices, really shows and that's what Christos does as well. And that's what I love about it. It's it's it's a it's a
story that's about storytelling in a way. It's about how you tell stories, what you remember, and I love how nostalgic it is for a certain time, but I love how it's so confident and you know, there's a great what we what we were really focused on making the show was we had to be really authentic to the time in the period, and we realized that the more authentic you are and telling a story, actually, ironically, the more universal it becomes, because people really truly understand what
these people are going through and when they're going through and how they're going through it. So we're really focused on the detail just to make sure that we got that sort of Brisbane nineteen eighties, that spirit of Australia really shining through it.
Helps us tap in. When you see the bushel's coffee and you know, just the smaller details, you're like, oh, You're like, oh my gosh, I can smell this, do you know what I mean? That's when it becomes more than just that cinematic experience. All of that stuff was extraordinarily clever. You did talk about this before, but Voyce Faller's Universe is such a much loved book, and it had been for so long, which would have come with so much pressure from the fans.
You know.
Can we talk about the journey of wanting to choose a book and turn it into a series like this, and had you been worried about using novels before.
There's always that pressure when dealing with with novels. I you know, many years ago I was involved in film called Males Last Dancer, which was also a very beloved novel, so I've had some sort of experience with it. But I think you just have to be first of all, you have to have the key creative on born in this case Trent Dalton, who I think was just, I've got to say, just so incredibly supportive every step of the way. And it's not easy for an author watching
their you know, their imagination come to life. But never during the process was he ever precious about it, just really encouraging about Look, I think the testament to Trent was that, you know, when you make a show and adapted for screen from a book, you have to make certain changes to the book. It's just natural that you have to do that. And in Boyce wa As the Universe, there is certain departures from the book that are quite profound.
But every time we did that, Trent would read that in the script and he'd actually always comment about it, but in a positive way. He will say, oh, I love how he did that. It was so much better than what I did. Or you'd always be very generous about the changes. And look, in my experience, authors can be the opposite. You know, they can be really intransient about up their materials. So yeah, I think having him
was always our north style. Knowing that he supported us and so it always gave us the confidence going through. And then you know, we had him on set a number of times and you know, he would literally walk onto a set and burst into tears, like look at the way that we designed the house and look at little Felix, And he would just be like, this is this is incredible. So, yeah, that was all really special.
Were the things in the book that were non negotiable in making their way making its way to the Netflix adaptation.
Well, I think one of the one of the kind of riskiest things about the adaptation was the sort of magical realism scenes. So the scenes with Gus riding in the air and the sort of gene sequences of the car and all that, all that stuff in the in the first four episodes, and you know that if that gets handled badly, it can really ostracize an audience because
they're like, what am I watching? Suddenly there's a kid writing in the air, There's there's station wagons flying past the moon, and so I think tonally we needed to get that right. And Netflix will always super encouraging about embracing the magic, and that gave us a lot of
confidence to make sure that we kept at it. We kept doing it, and we were really confident about doing it, and I think that makes a huge difference to the show, where you're watching something that's more than just a drama that has that element of magic to it, and I think that's what audiences around the world are really embracing is that it's so different.
Well, I guess it's a huge risk when you're going to do some of that surrealism. All it has to be just right, It has to feel like it fits within the universe. An audience have to go there with You could be silly, and thinking back to it, it is silly. But when I watched this, considering i'd read the book, I was delighted by that part of it, like it actually added to the hope in a weird way that this sort of fantasy added to it, complemented it.
I guess what we're always really conscious of was grounding all of that stuff in something real, And so whenever we went to one of those moments, it was always from Elie's perspective, So it always knew that you were grounded in a third ten year old's point of view, and I think that allowed the audience to sort of go with them, And so it was there was a method to the madness.
What were the hardest obstacles in translating the book to the screenplay? Were there things that you had to lose? Or I think they call it cutting their babies, or there's a saying for it, the.
Killing their babies try it's a terrible saying it like for.
Me to get it wrong as well, But I was so interested in that, you know, about those choices.
I think this in this one, we were quite lucky we didn't have to kill a lot of babies, but we had to think long and hard about how we're going to do things. I mean, one of the things in the book that is, you know, the book gets very fanciful with you know, the limbs factory and all that stuff in the ending is is like it gets it almost turns into a genre, like a totally different show, And with the TV show we had to do the
same thing. We had to follow this narrative, which at times was quite cooky, and I think one of the challenges we had was trying to bring some sort of logic like screen logic, film logic to that narrative because in a book it kind of works completely differently the way Trent wrote it, and we had to sort of match that ambition but give it more internal logic, I think, and there was a lot of consternation about how to do that, and I think we largely succeeded, but it
was challenging. The other thing that was really challenging was was aging the boys, because in the book and also the series, there's an age leap, and obviously we lose Felix in after episode five and we gained Zach Burgess.
There was a lot of consternation about who that actor was going to be, and I know Zach did so many rehearsals, bless him to get that role, But it was only because we were just so we knew that Felix that people were going to fall in love with him, and we needed an actor who the audience could really
go with. And then we were meant to replace Lee Tiger Halley as well for an older Gus and we honestly we could not find an actor to not just match Lee's look, which is incredible, but just his sensibility. His sensitivity is something about the way he encompasses the screen that's very unique. I think Lee's quite a unique guy.
And so we took the big leap of actually keeping Lee Tiger Halle all the way through the series and aging him up to twenty three, which at the time he was like seventeen years old, and I think he did it really well. I was so proud of the way that he was able to do it, and yeah, but that was a little challenge. We went through hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of auditions to land back at Lee Tiger Halle.
Well, I mean they're acting from these children, I mean, is a good way to put it, but is unbelievable. How do you go about getting the children to be able to portray such deep emotions without affecting them, you know, in their real life. You know, the subject matter is quite bleak. You know, how are you controlling those elements?
So there was two things. One is that we always had their parents on set. So Lee's parents and Felix's parents were on set all the time, and so when anything was sort of a emotionally confronting, which there was a lot of stuff, we made sure that their parents were there, that they were feeling okay, but everything that
was going on. Luckily, Ivan Kroll Christopher, who plays Ivan Kroll in real life, is like an absolute sweeth hunts It makings a lot easier that he was so he would switch to wive and Cole to being Chris and was just the nicest man and the boys were comfortable with him and in full threatened. So there was that and we also had this incredible drama tag, this woman called Nadia, who a dramaturg is someone who sort of coaches the actors offset and gets them ready for scenes.
And so you obviously have your director who does all that work, and then Nadia's work was to get really granular with the boys and so she would spend weekends after after hours and then just prepping specially Felix and Lee for each scene. And so that he was she was kind of their life after acting coach, their bit of a life coach at the same time. And she's really incredible and it was great at the premiere to see Felix and Nadia see each other for the first
time after all these months. Such a connection there. But yeah, a lot of I mean, they were both they're both incredible actors. But yeah, there's a lot of preparation that goes into making sure aim that those kids are their welfare is sound, but also that their performance was up to scratch, because it's hard to get kids to be so for such we're talking about months, I mean months. You know, they were working six to eight hours a day for months, and you know, to be last.
It's huge, I mean it's huge but there's not a frame of this series where these characters are broken at all. Like the integrity of their process of how they're relating to what's happening in their surroundings is just so so deep and so believable. And again it goes back to what I was saying about. You know, so much heavy lifting for this particular story is done by children, So it's a real testament to the way in which you created that environment for them to be able to be
in that space. I just have two questions, but we'll go through these very quickly, if that's okay. I finished the podcast with the question I'm going to ask second, but it would be remissive me if audiences listened to this they don't see this. But there certainly is elements of darker the darker side of crime and poverty, drug used, domestic violence. But you really hit home with making this
story hopeful and fun. Did you have conversations about what works on screen to balance out some of that dark so?
I don't know.
People talked about how blick the book was. I wondered whether or not it was find another eighties rock tune that's uplifting or showcase Brisbane you know what were those decisions to counteract that.
So one was definitely soundtracked, and and we went through and made really precise musical choices from the era. It was actually one of my most enjoyable processes was delving into the archives and listening to music and coming up with ideas. But more importantly, though, I think this production design was really important. And one of the things that we decided at the beginning was that every shot had
to look hopeful. And so that meant that I think if you look at when you watch the series, everything's really colorful, like it's not dark, it's lit in a certain way that eveynthing looks bright, sunny and hopeful, and that, for me is what Australian summers are like, you know, the Australian And when I look back on my childhood, my idea of Australia, even though I grew up in Sydney, it's just this kind of sunny, bright, colorful place and I think that's the way that oversees people see our
country as well. And so yeah, we made a decision that every shot had to look bright and sunny and joyful. So even in their house, which is you know, you know they are very working class people living in quite a poor neighborhood. It made sure their house looked warm and loving and there were elements of joy that even if they were poor. And we did that across the board with everything, just to make sure that, yeah, that everything looked very, very bright and crisp and hopeful.
You could smell it. You could smell the chopped grass. You know, That's what reminded me of my childhood. You know, Troy, I could literally talk to you forever, but I will finish the podcast with asking you the same question ask everyone who joins the show, and that is, what is something from behind the scenes, something that you can share, kind of like a bit of an easter egg. I guess of what it was like to make this show something audiences might not see.
Well, I think there was a very strong sense of camaraderie on the set in real I know people say this about who they work with all the time after they finished something, but there really was something special about
this crew of people that we worked with. And I think one of the really great moments of that is in the first episode there's a scene of Little Felix and Travis Finnl who was also wonderful, and it's the scene where he says, oh, there's a lot of tears inside of me, and he breaks down while he's talking
to his father figure. It's an incredible scene and we knew how important that scene was for episode one, that Felix really needed to bring it that day, and we actually booked out the whole night just to shoot this one scene. So hours and hours to shoot this one scene. And we brought Felix on set and got in prepped
and he did that scene, that crying scene. He did it in the first take, one take, and he did it, and everyone was sort of hardened crew of you know, great dps and all these amazing people who have worked on big Hollywood stuff. I saw that the whole crew was silent when were watching the playback and watching it happen, and there was a few people crying, and Barrat, our director of the first series, just said, that's it. We
don't need to do it again. He's done it. It's we're never going to get anything.
Take the kids to McDonald's. Yeah.
So we actually had this whole night looked out for this one scene, and we only I think we only did it for like twenty minutes because that's because because Felix was so amazing and yeah, and so I think that's one of the I'm going to remember one thing is probably that moment.
Well, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, thank you so much for being able to take me through this. I mean, you and Andrew did such an incredible job with this series.
I kind of hope that every year we get.
One of Trent's books translated by you guys on Netflix to launch the year. I think that might be an impossible ask, but I think there'd be a lot to think so.
Yeah, times ticking mate.
Anyway, I appreciate your generosity with your time and talking to me today. I'm such a big fan of your work and this series is incredible, So thank you, and thank you to the team at Netflix for organizing this pleasure.
Thank you very much.