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Additional Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Lee Cormie, Christian Byers, James Fraser, Jack Thompson
Production Status: On DVD (R1, R2)
Premiere Release Date: Australia - September 9, 2007
Cinema Release Date: September 14, 2007 (UK, USA, limited)
Directed By: Rod Hardy
Screenwriters: Ronald Kinnoch, Michael Noonan, Marc Rosenberg
Genre: Drama, Romance
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for sexual content, nudity, underage drinking and smoking
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A story of four orphan teenagers growing up behind the closed doors of a catholic convent in outback Australia. For years the boys watch the younger orphaned kids leave with their newly adopted parents, and have finally come to the realization their time may never come. The Reverend Mother gives the boys something to look forward to by sending them to visit the seaside for the first time. Their long awaited vacation doesn't turn out the way they planned until they meet Teresa and Fearless, a young autocratic couple who would make the perfect parents. Now as grown men, they reflect back on the '60s when, as boys, they spent their first tumultuous summer by the sea, as they sabotaged each other's efforts to be the 'chosen one' - only to discover that the real meaning behind what it is to be a family.
Teresa Palmer plays Lucy, a free spirited hippie girl who catches the eye of Daniel Radcliffe's Maps.
Filmed in Australia.
Won 2 awards.
Freddie Highmore was originally set to star. His agent and mother also represents Daniel Radcliffe which is how Daniel came on board; Freddie had to pull out because his grandmother became sick and he couldn't leave England to film in Australia.
To make sure he could deliver an authentic Australian accent for the film, Daniel Radcliffe started studying and practicing Australian accents six months prior to shooting.
The December Boys are so called because the four new orphan boys all arrived at the orphanage in December, and celebrated their birthdays in this month.
Teresa has never read or seen Harry Potter.
"I just come up here to observe."
"You ever think about running away?"
"You like music?!"
"So what do you do for fun out there?"
"Can you sing?"
"Give it a go, and I'll give you a prize."
"Shh. Listen.
Been a fable,
I watched the tower grow.
Five years plans and new deals,
wrapped in golden chains,
and I wonder, still I wonder,
who'll stop the rain."
"Father Maps... I've been a very bad girl."
"This is going to sound really weird but I actually didn't know who Daniel was because I hadn't seen the Harry Potter films and I heard 'Daniel Radcliffe' and I was like 'Oh, okay' and then someone was like 'Harry Potter, helloooo!' I was like 'Oh my gosh! I haven't seen it. I didn't know.' But, everyone around me made such a huge deal about it that I couldn't help but be really nervous when I first met him. I remember I was like shaking. It was sort of bizarre because I'd never seen him in anything. Too much hype about it but it was sort of great for us. We shot in South Australia where I'm from and we have no celebrities in South Australia at all. For him to choose a little Australian independent film after Harry Potter was just so amazing for an Australian, just so exciting and, obviously, for me personally, it was such a huge thing to have him onboard."
"I've been told that you need like two weeks to sit down and watch all the Harry Potter films and read all the books at the same time and I've been just so crazy busy the past few years, I haven't been able to."
"I think it's very easy to get typecast out here and I think that's something that I've tried to steer away from as much as possible by doing some darker films and taking on some darker, grittier characters. I really love the fact that I've never seen or heard of a character like Lucy before who was this young flower girl who is very overtly sexual and she uses her body to manipulate men. It was so interesting to play with all of those elements."
"I'm naturally quite a bubbly, happy person and I'm not a seductress so it was hard to draw from any personal experiences but I did watch a lot of different movies. I watch Lolita for December Boys. I studied Dominique Swain's performance. I thought she was really brilliant in that movie.
"I, obviously, shot in South Australia, Adelaide which is my hometown. I've lived there my entire life so I had my friends there. I got to stay there. Daniel came and shot there and, obviously, didn't know anyone so we got to hang out a fair bit in between shooting. But, for the most part, I kind of went home and hung out with my friends. I had been traveling and working on this other film in Sydney so it was actually refreshing to come back home and be able to sleep in my bed and work out of my own place."
"Daniel is such a delight to work with. He is so brilliant and talented. At the same time, he has all this amazing success and fame and all these things which, you would think, he would be very affected by it all but he really isn't. He's very unaffected and unassuming. Just like a regular 18-year-old guy. I think, he really brought that to set and made the younger boys, who obviously idolized him, just feel so comfortable. They're all like brothers hanging out. I felt like the sister. It was so fun. It was such a good experience."
"Obviously a scene of that nature is always going to be very awkward and I was of course a little nervous. I had done a sex scene and kissing scenes before whereas Dan had never done that. I remember him saying 'I'm a little bit nervous' and we both kind of admitted it to each other. We laughed about it. That was actually the last scene we shot in the film and we finished shooting it at 4AM in the morning on Christmas Eve and everyone was so tired. By that stage you're so tired that you're just on auto-pilot and you didn't even have time to think about what you're doing. You're just like, "Ah, let's just get this out of the way. Let's just do it.” I think Rod Hardy did that especially. He knew that was how it was going to be. The last day of the shoot, we just want to get it done, and we really did and it was absolutely fun."
"I actually heard that Lucy wasn't in the novel, that it was something that they played with the idea of bringing in a love interest, one of the boys, obviously the oldest one, years ago when they first had the idea to do the film. I think she was kind of created from that as far as I know, but I could be wrong. But yes, I didn't end up reading the book. I was just told that she wasn't in it."
"I did build a back story. Rod and I worked together and that's actually one of the reasons why I got the film was because he asked me before the meeting, he said, 'Look, I want you to think about the character, tell me your thoughts.' I came with this elaborate back story starting from when she was 3 and like where she went to school and all these funny things. He was like 'Whoa! That's incredible,' because I had so many of the same ideas for the character. My ideas were that she was really brought up in a very dysfunctional family in a very sexually charged environment. If she is staying in this little caravan with her uncle, this tiny little caravan, you don't really know what happens to her and I think she's been subjected to a lot of bad influences. I think she's actually quite a tragic sort of character and I think that her relationship with Maps, she really gets as much out of it as what he does."
"It's funny because I used to go camping where we shot when I was a little girl so I had been there before. It was actually such a surreal moment because I remember standing on those rocks and I was looking down at the ocean, and I had my parents there with me and they said to me, 'It's just so bizarre thinking that we were here as a family 10 years ago and now we're standing here, you're in this big movie, we're shooting a film at the same spot we came here when you were a little girl.' And it was. It was just really amazing. I'm still kind of pinching myself."
"I can't believe we got permission to shoot there, but I'm so glad we did because I think it just looks so magical in the film. I think they really captured that whole presence. There is such a feeling when you stand up there. You can see the whole world. It's so beautiful and they really captured that in the film."
"She was trying to create her own fun and she has to build her own cave. I was like that when I was younger because I had no brothers or sisters so I had to create my own world to occupy myself."
"That was really challenging, for me to do that. I'm not as overtly sexual as Lucy is. But I think that sexiness comes from within. The way you are. Your confidence. I think the thing about Lucy is that she really uses her body, and the way she moves, to lure Maps into her little world. I think the sexiest people in the world, like Scarlett Johanson..."
"I was watching Lolita. I think Dominique Swain was phenomenal. It was one of the best performances I've seen in a very long time. I watched that many, many times. I saw what she did, and she was very about her body and her eye contact. That's kind of what I tried to do."
"Well, there are a lot of other things you have to think about. Like camera placement, and hitting your mark. I don't usually do it during a scene, while I'm acting. I do it right before. I'll get in a zone. I'll have my headphones in. I'll be listening to my Ipod. And I try to relive things that she may have gone through. I tried to do that as much as I could with this film. I was very new to acting, though. It was easy to get distracted. I'd be in my zone, then suddenly someone would start talking to me about continuity. I would lose it again. But, I do that more so now. I will totally zone out. I wont let anyone talk to me, I'll just get into my head. I will go straight into it without any distractions. Back then, it was all so exciting. I was like, "Whee!" I was jumping off the walls."
"She had her Christmas outfit. And she had another one. But Lucy came from a very underprivileged family. She had no money. Her parents didn't really have any money. So, she probably only had three outfits. Those cute little hot pants. Those blue little shorts that she wears, with her little butt sticking out. It is so bad. There is a shot in the film where I lean in to kiss Daniel. The camera is right on my bottom. It's the money shot. It's the worst. It's so embarrassing. But, yeah, she really doesn't have that many clothes."
"We had this wonderful costume designer, and the film was obviously set in the Sixties. We wanted to try and capture that whole Sixties environment. We just up-shopped. Do you have Up Shops? They're secondhand stores. People from the Seventies would actually bring their clothes there. The clothes I wore were actually from the Sixties that we managed to find. We fit them to my body. They do look sort of Scandinavian, but she is a flower child. She has been brought up around that whole thing. I love what I wore in the film. It is so cute."
"The guy is like, 'Oh, yeah! I like those shorts short!' Even the way they did my hair with the pigtails, it really created a character. Without me having to say anything, you can just look at her and tell who she is. From her make-up, and her hair, and her little outfit. It is such a collaborative process. You have to get all of those things right before you can get a spot on performance."
"It's so funny. Him with his little glasses. He is so funny. He is wonderful, Lee Cormie. We all hung out. All of us. We got to know each other before we did the film. That really helped. When we got on set, we were all one big family. We would eat our lunch together, and hang out, and gossip. We'd chat. It was fun. I didn't really show off the fact that I was from South Australia. The whole crew was South Australia. I wasn't the only one. Everyone on the set was from Adelaide, too."
"I remember being there when they were fighting. They had natural fights all the time on the set. There would be little bickerings going on, and Rod would have to come in and break it up. One day, one of them would be in a bad mood and he would have his arms crossed. Another day, another one would have his arms crossed about something. I remember, Dan was like the mediator. He'd be, 'Alright, guys! Come on! We've got work to do.' He was like their big brother, and they absolutely idolized him. To everything he said, they were like, 'Yes, Dan, okay.' It was so wonderful. It was fun to see Dan really take on that fatherly role with them."
On Lee Cormie (who plays Misty)
"It was so funny. He came out of retirement to do December Boys, then he went back into retirement."
On Lucy leaving Daniel's character at the end of the film
"I think its because their relationship is such a sacred thing. It's so important to her. I think it's just as important to her as it is to him. I think she would have ruined the special moments they have by saying she's leaving, because she would have put a damper on their time together. They would have constantly been thinking about when she would be leaving. I think she did it in the best possible way. I think she was caught off guard. I don't think she knew she was going to start feeling the feelings she did for him. She'd never been exposed to someone that cares about her in the way that Maps does. It was very bittersweet. I think she would have been just as torn up about it as Maps was."
"Maybe the sexual experience was so horrific, he never wants to get laid again. And he wants to become a priest. I actually don't know. You'd have to ask the director about the reason he became a priest. He was actually meant to become a soldier and die in the war. I don't know where they kind of changed that up. I certainly hope it's not because of the sexual experience they had together. I think it's so beautiful."
"You are in a sex scene together, and if he was with a girl that was all jittery and excited that he was Harry Potter, I think it would have been pretty off putting for him. I didn't really care about that whole thing. I just thought he was a wonderful, great guy. Still, having said that, if I had seen him as Harry Potter before acting with him, I would have been affected by it. I would have been affected by his fame. He is so wonderfully talented, for me he was Maps. That really worked for us, and the scenes that we had to do together. I just totally believed him as that character. His nervousness, he really pulls that off in the film."
"I totally came up with a back-story. I came up with a back-story before I even got the role. And it was this epic essay. I wrote five hundred words. When I met with Rod Hardy to discuss the character, I had my pieces of paper with me, and I started reading about her life. He was like, "Whoa, hang on a second." He would have asked just one question about my back-story. He wanted to hear just one sentence, but here I was reading out my whole essay. I had the back-story that she came from a very dysfunctional family. She's been brought up in a very sexually charged environment. Her mother was somewhat of a hippy. And her father's not around. Rod and I came up with the idea that she had been sexually abused. That she had been for many, many years. That's kind of the only thing she knows. She's a tragic sort of figure. She is like her mother, in that her mother sort of sleeps around her whole life. That's what I mean by a sexually charged environment. That's all she knows. When she meets Maps, she is using her body and is so inadvertently sexual. Then he brings out this whole other side to her that she didn't know she could feel. I think you can really sense that in the scene where she tells Maps, 'I always want you to remember me as your first.' It's a really touching moment. I'm glad that I got to show another side of Lucy as well, and the influence that Maps had on her."
December Boys is a charming and touching film that came as a positive surprise to me. It reminds me of films like Stand By Me and Big Fish - if you enjoyed these, you will like December Boys. It has a great young cast, highlights including Lee Cormie, who is especially adorable as Misty, and, of course, the screen simply lights up whenever Teresa Palmer graces it. I loved her character Lucy and I only wish she had had more screentime. The Australian locations are absolutely stunning and the visual splendour is a true feast for the eyes! I also loved the soundtrack, especially "Who'll Stop the Rain" by Creedence Clearwater Revival, which Teresa actually sings to in one scene. - Riikka
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