Skills on the up: Actors in the football movie Blinder, which is being filmed at Torquay, work on their sporting prowess. Photo: Rebecca Hallas
Karl Quinn, The Age, reports
When Glenn Archer signed on as one of the producers of the footy film Blinder, he fully expected to contribute his expertise as well as his dollars. But on his first day on the Torquay set of the movie yesterday, the former North Melbourne great was relieved he'd had second thoughts about the skills training.
''It's pretty exciting that we're doing this but gee, it's a bit boring,'' Archer said of the interminable waiting around that constitutes the typical working day on a movie set. ''I'm glad I decided to handball the training.''
Archer outsourced the task to his old mate Michael Tout, a former Fitzroy player. ''I had them all last week for three or four hours a day, working mostly on kicking and marking,'' says ''Touty'', as he is universally known, of his cast of mostly AFL virgins. ''We don't start shooting the footy scenes until April, so I'll be working with them whenever I can until then, to get their skills up to scratch.''
Blinder tells the story of Tom, a promising footballer (Oliver Ackland, who played the young soapie star Rhys on TV drama The Slap) who gets caught up in a scandal. The phrase ''St Kilda schoolgirl'' seems to hover over proceedings, but Kiwi actors Rose McIver and Anna Hutchison, who play the sisters at the heart of the scandal, are admirably tight-lipped on the details. Tom flees to America, becomes a kicker in the NFL and a decade later comes home to try to clear his name.
The genesis of Blinder was a script written in 1998 by Scott Didier. He worked with a number of directors over the years trying to develop it, but it wasn't until he met Richard Gray that the project finally took off.
''He was commercial, and that really mattered to me,'' says Didier. ''I couldn't ask people to invest in it if I didn't think there was a chance they'd get a return.''
Gray was fresh off his cinema debut Summer Coda and on his way to America to make his second, a thriller called Mine Games. Blinder - which Gray and his wife Michelle Davis-Gray have co-written with Didier - is the third film the 31-year-old has made in the past two years, an astonishing feat in an industry where directors can often wait a decade between drinks.
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