Seeing the Invisible

Writer and director Nicholas Verso opens up about the making of Australian YA drama Invisible Boys and how he wanted to lean on his own experiences to tell the story of four teens coming to terms with their sexuality in a remote coastal town.

After filming Itch, a children’s action-adventure series, in Western Australia, director Nicholas Verso knew he wanted to return to the state one day to make his own series. And when the chance arose to adapt Holden Sheppard’s award-winning novel Invisible Boys, he found the opportunity he had been looking for.

Set in Geraldton, WA, this emotional story of individuality and belonging seeks to shine a light on the challenges faced by a group of gay teens living in a remote coastal town, while also depicting facets of gay sexuality that are often overlooked.

When Charlie is outed on social media following an encounter with a married man, the fallout has far-reaching consequences for him and a group of boys, who find solace and support in one another as they explore their desires and identities in a world that often renders them invisible.

Joseph Zada stars as Charlie, alongside Aydan Calafiore as Zeke, Zach Blampied as Hammer, Joe Klocek as Matt, Pia Miranda as Anna and David Lyons as Father Mulroney. The cast also features Shareena Clanton, Myles Pollard, Elaine Crombie, Hayley McElhinney, Steve Le Marquand and Khan Chittenden.

Created, written and directed by Verso (Crazy Fun Park, Boys in the Trees), the 10-part series begins by following events from Charlie’s perspective, before slowly introducing Zeke, Hammer and Matt through each half-hour episode – a format inspired by the success of BBC series Normal People, which debuted in 2020 at the same time the filmmaker optioned the rights to Holden’s novel.

“I love that half-hour format. It’s just so bingeable and it gets you in so quickly,” he tells DQ. “It’s really curious to plot, though, because I keep putting almost too much in. You’ve almost got to leave some breathing space in there.

“But I always knew we would start with Charlie. He was the best way in. Then I just thought it would be really great to let the point of view start to blur and meld and come together as the show went on, as the boys get to know each other better and they really intertwine.”

The filmmaker first discovered the original novel when a DJ friend he follows on X started “raving” about this new book, and Verso was excited to pick it up. He had recently filmed in WA and so was familiar with the story’s setting, and the fact it was a queer story meant “it just really spoke to me,” he says. “There was a lot in there that I could really relate to and connect with. Plus it had been a while in Australia since we’d seen a really gay-focused story, and I thought it would be really exciting to see that.”

Verso then found numerous supporters who similarly felt it was an important story to bring to the screen, namely Feisty Dame Productions (which produces alongside his own Asphodel Films), local streaming platform Stan and financing partners Screen Australia, Screenwest, Lotterywest and the WA Regional Screen Fund. Banijay Rights also picked up international distribution rights.

There was once a time, however, when Invisible Boys wasn’t the sort of story Verso wanted to tell. “When I was first coming through at film school and working out what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be, I actually quite specifically didn’t want my sexuality to define me,” he explains. “I didn’t want to be seen as a ‘gay filmmaker.’ I was really strict about that. But that was also a slightly different time, a slightly more positive time, shall we say. In recent years, it feels like gay storytelling’s so much more important than ever as it starts to almost be broken up a bit and pushed aside.”

Relating to the experience of Charlie, Zeke and others in the novel, “I really wanted to speak about them. I do want to reflect them,” he continues. “I wasn’t seeing my experiences on screen, I guess, so this book lined up with them but also became a bit of a vessel that allowed me to explore other things.”

Verso also encouraged his writing team – Enoch Mailangi, Allan Clarke, Sheppard and Declan Greene – to bring elements of their own lives to the project and question why other TV series and films hadn’t reflected their experiences.

“Some of it’s just the little nuances of conversation, like things around texting or sexual activity, to be honest,” Verso notes. “It’s why we get really explicit with some of that stuff. It’s not to be arousing; it would be really tricky to be aroused by any of these things in the show. It’s more about the awkwardness of it, and the discomfort that can come from that.

“I tend to meet the characters not so much in the plot specifics, but in the emotional specifics. That’s where I really connect with them – the emotions Charlie feels, they’re the emotions I felt, and ditto for Zeke and Hammer, so I really tried to draw upon that.”

Some of the text exchanges that appear on screen through the series are lifted word-for-word from actual conversations Verso has had, as are some of the comments other characters make to the central quartet.

“It’s just me processing that,” he adds. “In the writing and creating of this show, a lot of it was me going back through what had been said to me, what I’d experienced, and looking at it going, ‘OK, how do I make peace with this? How do I thread this into something that makes sense?’ That was interesting.”

Though the novel is set in the present (it was published in 2019), Verso chose to shift the setting slightly by pitching the series against the backdrop of Australia’s 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite – a poll that led to a law change supporting same-sex marriage that same year.

That decision was designed to “lift the stakes a bit” and give the story more relevance and “sting,” he says. “The book is quite timeless. Even though it is set in the modern day, it feels a little time-warped. It feels a little nostalgic. I did want to make it feel a little more contemporary. So weirdly, by moving it backwards in time to 2017, it actually updated it and made it feel fresher and more like the Australia that we live in now, because that was important to me.

“I didn’t want it to be a museum piece, because a lot of the time when we do tell gay and lesbian stories in Australia, they are connected to period. We often go back to the 80s because of the AIDS epidemic, and I think we’ve reached a point in gay storytelling where we don’t need AIDS to be a part of it anymore in in contemporary life. That was a really big thing for me. We can tell other stories. Even though it’s so important to tell those stories, the younger generation don’t quite connect to it because they just haven’t lived it.”

Verso likes specifics, and if the year in which the story takes place is one example, another is its setting of Geraldton, allowing him to apply the characters’ experiences to a real location rather than an imagined one.

The first thing he did after optioning the novel – and once Australia’s Covid lockdowns were lifted – was to visit the town, taking numerous photos he would then share with his fellow writers to give them a better sense of the location and allow them to write in accordance with places that would feature in the series.

“It was a really interesting thing for the location supervisor because I knew everywhere we would want to film, because we wrote it for that,” Verso says. “Charlie also has some pretty colourful language about what he thinks of the town, so we didn’t want to come to the town and just say a bunch of awful things about it either.

“Without giving too much away, the show hopefully has a little bit of a theme running through it that maybe the town isn’t the problem. When you’re in these environments, one person’s paradise can be another person’s hell. So if you’re unhappy in a place, maybe don’t blame the place. Maybe it’s your task to find a way out of it and find a place where you will be happy and where you will thrive.”

Having done a “fair bit” of kids’ TV in Australia, Invisible Boys allowed Verso to show an edgier side of himself, knowing he no longer needed to be polite or hold his tongue when it came to certain subject matters. “Luckily, Stan were super encouraging around that,” he says. “They wanted me to push it and be bold, which was fantastic.”

The writers room in particular was a safe space for the creative team to speak “really candidly and openly,” and where they were encouraged to push the boundaries of Australian drama, Verso says.

Mailangi is “a really brilliant, chaotic mind, and they’re just very anarchic in their approach to storytelling and character, which I adore.” Writing his first TV episode, Greene has “an incredible eye for character, but also a wicked sense of humour,” Verso continues.

Verso had also read Clarke’s short stories about growing up in regional Australia as a First Nations man. “They were so funny and frank, and I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s the tone I want for this show,” he says.

As a director in the writers room, Verso was able to keep one eye on production logistics during the scriptwriting process, as he attempted to build a big show without a massive budget. One episode was going to be set during a big outdoor music festival at night, but was shifted to become a debutante ball. There’s also a ‘bottle episode’ set entirely in one location.

But beyond decisions about locations, “this was a vulnerable time for everyone,” he says about the 10-week filming schedule that saw cast and crew battle temperatures reaching as high as 49°C in Geraldton and Perth. “The actors were going into some really vulnerable places. I like new faces and new talent, it helps widen the talent pool, so I wanted to make sure it was a really safe space for them, especially because we’ve got all the intimacy, and that only works if people are safe.”

On set, “I feel like I’m really in the trenches with them,” he says. “I’m quite personal with how I approach things, so I would be really open about why we’re doing certain things and the hows and whys and my connection to it so that they could feel confident to go into the same places themselves. I’m not a ‘shouting from a distance’ sort of director.”

Visually, he wanted the series to look “beautiful,” with Verso and DOP Jason Hargreaves looking to take advantage of the unique WA light “at the edge of the world.”

“I wanted to feel that isolation, and that light helped us get there and helped us feel that,” he says, “and just finding unconventional image choices. I tend to shot list and then I’ll throw out the first version and go, ‘OK, that’s the stock, standard version. Now what’s a more interesting version of this scene that gets us closer to character?’”

With the show now set to debut down under on Stan this Thursday, Verso hopes Invisible Boys will offer “different things to different people,” whether they are part of the LGBTQIA+ community or not.

“For gay teens coming through, I hope it brings them some solace and some reassurance, letting them know that they’re not alone and that whatever they’re going through is OK,” he says. “Things can be uncomfortable and alienating, but you will find a pack and you will get through.

“For older viewers, I’m hoping it brings back some memories and that they remember those experiences they went through, or that they enjoy the characters, because we did try to make sure they were characters people would really remember or identify with and connect with.”

He adds: “To be honest, I’d really love to see straight guys watch it. especially as the show does become less about sexuality and more just about masculinity – and a particular form of Australian masculinity. It does speak to certain qualities in men about what we talk about and what we don’t, and ways of showing intimacy and affection. I’d be really interested to see how they react to it.”

tagged in: Asphodel Films, Banijay Rights, Feisty Dame Productions, Invisible Boys, Lotterywest, Nicholas Verso, Screen Australia, Screenwest, Stan, WA Regional Screen Fund