Taking the Narrow Road
The Narrow Road to the Deep North star Jacob Elordi, director Justin Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant discuss their route to making this five-part drama, which tells a love story set against the shadows of the Second World War.
Following its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, The Narrow Road to the Deep North has forged a path around the world.
Debuting on Prime Video in Australia, New Zealand and Canada in April, it has also been picked up by broadcasters including Sky for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, RTÉ in Ireland, Movistar Plus+ in Spain, LG in South Korea and NBCUniversal in Latin America. Its final episode aired on BBC One in the UK last night.
Set against the shadows of the Second World War, it follows Lieutenant-Colonel Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi) and his all-too-brief love affair with Amy Mulvaney (Odessa Young), his time held captive in a prisoner-of-war camp and his later years spent as a revered surgeon and reluctant war hero. Told over multiple time periods, it blends a love story with an intimate character study and an investigation into a marriage and an unforgettable love affair.
Based on the novel by Richard Flanagan, the Australian drama is written by Shaun Grant (Nitram, Mindhunter) and directed by Justin Kurzel (The Order, Nitram). Elordi stars alongside Ciarán Hinds as the older Dorrigo, Olivia DeJonge as Ella Evans, Heather Mitchell as older Ella and Simon Baker as Keith Mulvaney.
It is produced by Curio Pictures and distributed by Sony Pictures Television, with filming taking place in Australia.
Here, Elordi, Kurzel and Grant offer an insight into how the show was made and the challenges of bringing Flanagan’s voluminous book to the screen.
Euphoria star Elordi plays Dorrigo Evans, a lieutenant colonel and a medical officer in the Australian Army.
Elordi: He takes us on this dreamlike journey from the camps on the Burma Railway back to Melbourne, moving through time from the past to the present. He’s quiet and stoic and somebody who is entirely driven by love – especially the purity of absolute love, which he has a strained version of with his wife Ella and feels deeply in his affair with Amy.
Dorrigo’s relationship with Amy appears to be a “storybook idea of love at first sight.”
Elordi: Richard said something to me that just clicked – that the moment they look at each other, stars explode. When you work with Odessa Young, that’s not a hard thing to convey. In Australia, the class system is really evident, and I think there’s an alien element to being in love outside of your class. So when he meets Amy, who is somebody from the same world as him, they have an automatic language. That’s something he has to force when he’s with Ella.
The actor received a message from director Justin Kurzel and immediately wanted to join the project, even though there weren’t any scripts at that stage.
Elordi: I had to play Dorrigo, because he has a kind of inner dialogue that Richard writes so well, and every time I read something about the inner workings of his life, I thought, ‘That’s how I feel. That’s that thing I can never say, that’s that thing I can never touch on.’ I remember taking it around to my family, saying, ‘If you want to understand me, read this book’ – which was a profound experience to have.
He says Kurzel gave him a lot of freedom with his performance.
Elordi: When you get to the set, the cameras are basically just rolling – so you have to know all your scenes, you have to know what you’re doing and you have to be willing to throw it away, because he doesn’t yell ‘cut.’ It was like a physical and mental transformation to the point where there wasn’t a clear line between myself and Dorrigo.
Elordi was also supported by a group of supporting artists called Bravo Team, who went through the same weight-loss programme and were on set every day.
Elordi: It felt like 100 young men who were placed in the middle of the jungle and forced to survive under extreme circumstances. It was nowhere close to the real thing, but it was as real as we could possibly make it. The main thing I learned from people’s accounts of that time was that the Australians never stopped smiling and laughing. They were always together and nothing was ever serious, which speaks a lot to the way I grew up.
Filming the show’s prisoner-of-war scenes was “the greatest part” of making the series for Elordi, who compares it to being in a huge theatre production.
Elordi: There was no CGI or adding of bodies or anything like that. We had a limited crew, with very little hair and make-up touches. We carried a real tree up the side of a cliff for I don’t know how many hours.
All the labour was intense. I know it was nowhere even remotely close to the real thing, but when I see it, I still get chills. I can’t even fathom, from the research I’ve done, the things those boys went through in the camps. Some of them were 15, 16 or 17 years old and I can’t imagine what they endured.
Kurzel describes Richard Flanagan as a family friend, and picked up the “amazing” novel after the rest of his family had read it.
Kurzel: My grandfather was a Rat of Tobruk [Allied soldiers during the 1941 Siege of Torbruk], so I had a deep connection with Australian veterans, and I found the book to be so poetic. The idea of framing the war experience around a love story was unique.
Flanagan then asked the director if it had the potential to be adapted into a series.
Kurzel: I hadn’t done any television at that point, but I took another look at the book and I found the story – spanning Dorrigo’s lifetime, with this idea of him still being in love with a ghost or a memory – to be really powerful. It was a very personal thing because Richard and I are good mates, so it was about trying to work out whether I could see it as a TV show.
I was intimidated at first, but Richard said we should approach it from Dorrigo’s point of view, and that freed us up. He also kept saying, ‘It’s a love story, it’s not a war story,’ and that became our mantra. Shaun and I always approach things through the minutiae, and here it was through the nuance of Dorrigo’s love story – not only with Amy but also with these other men, how they bond and form relationships to survive in this pretty horrible place.
Kurzel partnered with cinematographer Sam Chiplin and costume and production designer Alice Babidge to bring the numerous time periods of the novel to life.
Kurzel: You’ve got Dorrigo in his early 20s meeting Amy on the beaches of Adelaide and there’s a certain taste, smell, look and light to that.
With the prisoner-of-war camp, even though it was horrific, there was an energy to those scenes too. We approached these opposing time periods in a similar way, using a lot of handheld shots. Then we had this other world, which is of Dorrigo later in life, sitting in very large open spaces that sort of feel like mausoleums, where the camera is very still. That part is quite classic, controlled and mannered, with a dignity to it, whereas those other time periods feel much more unruly, wild, spontaneous and visceral.
Working with the cast members who would play the prisoners of war gave Kurzel the chance to partner with a group of actors “at that point in their lives where they’re wanting to do something challenging and are really engaged.”
Kurzel: I knew that a huge part of the enjoyment of doing this would be getting to work with a bunch of young men who were going to be up for enduring a pretty hard time to get themselves into the right condition, yet who were also going to create genuine relationships with each other that you could feel on screen. They did a lot of prep and spent a lot of time together, building that camaraderie.
It’s an amazing book and you’ve got a man like Richard Flanagan, who all the boys got to meet and who is engaging, charismatic and fiercely intelligent, with the biggest heart that I know. When you get someone like that, who is engaging with you as an actor, it’s pretty powerful and I think they realised it too – that they were doing something that was a marking of a point in time, where they recognised that this was a unique experience they might never have again.
Shaun Grant considers The Narrow Road to the Deep North to be “one of the greatest Australian novels of all time” and had read it countless times before agreeing to adapt it.
Grant: It’s about the two most dramatic things that you can ever write about, namely love and loss. The book also taught me about my grandfather, who I never really knew. He worked on the Thai Burma railway and was a prisoner of war for two years. Richard’s father also served at the same time, worked on the line and inspired him to write the novel, but while Richard’s father spoke about it a lot, my grandfather was very insular and closed-off. Through reading the book, I felt like I got to know him for the first time in my life, long after he passed. I was daunted about adapting it, but I had to do it.
Due to the size of the novel, a faithful, direct adaptation was out of the question. But Flanagan trusted Grant and Kurzel to create the “best” interpretation of his story.
Grant: Funnily enough, one of our producers, Jo Porter, had approached me years before to adapt it but I turned her down, not because I didn’t think the book was extraordinary but I because I was overwhelmed by the scope of it. Two years passed before Jo asked Justin if he would do it. He is a friend of Richard’s, and he said yes. Then when Jo asked Justin who he would want to write it, his answer was me. It was a different conversation, because a lot of change had happened in the TV industry – where you were seeing things of scope and size and where you thought it was possible that you could make something cinematic for the small screen.
The show is Grant’s fourth project with Kurzel, and the pair’s partnership is based on “mutual trust.”
Grant: We both come from working-class backgrounds but we’re different in lots of ways, which I think is a good thing creatively because it means there’s a push and pull of thoughts and ideas. He’s involved in everything during the development process, and he directs everything too, but I’m there through casting, I’m on set every day and I spend days with him in the editing room.
Grant also felt pressure from the weight of the novel and those who inspired it.
Grant: The challenge here was that we were dealing with the heaviest of situations, scenes and subject matter, but that’s also what made it so great. There were days on set when terrible things were happening within the scene, but you’re also watching the most extraordinary performances happening in front of your eyes. You hug it out afterwards and tears are shed. It was stressful but it was worth it because what those young boys, led by Jacob Elordi, brought to the screen was extraordinary.
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Band of Brothers: During the Second World War, a company of American paratroopers fights from Normandy to Germany, confronting harrowing combat and the limits of loyalty and endurance.
The Pacific: Three US Marines struggle to survive the Pacific theatre of war’s brutality, each grappling with the physical and emotional scars left by the battle and the ones they left behind.
Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (Generation War): Five German friends are thrust onto different paths during the Second World War, testing their ideals, friendships and capacity for survival as the conflict deepens.
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tagged in: Curio Pictures, Jacob Elordi, Justin Kurzel, Prime Video, Shaun Grant, Sony Pictures Television, The Narrow Road to the Deep North