Sam Neill Backtrack

Sam Neill Backtrack

Cast: Adrien Brody, Sam Neill, Robin McLeavy
Director: Michael Pertroni
Genre: Thriller
Rated: M
Running Time: 90 minutes

Synopsis: Having recently weathered the loss of his 12 year-old daughter Evie, psychologist Peter Bower and his wife Carol relocate back to Melbourne - where they first met - to start afresh.

Old friend and mentor, Dr Duncan Steward organises patient referrals from a psychiatric clinic for Peter to help restore some semblance of normality to his life, however things are far from normal. Troubled by the peculiarities of his patients, Peter delves into their history and discovers to his astonishment that every one of them died within hours of each other on July 12th 1987.

Realising he is being haunted by his past, Peter returns to his hometown to finally face a secret he has kept for 23 years. We discover that as a teenage boy he was responsible for the derailment of a train, causing the death of 47 passengers. It soon becomes apparent that Peter's ghostly patients are holding the soul of his daughter hostage.

Peter then confronts his strained relationship with his father William and his childhood friend Barry (who was with him on the night of

the accident), and decides to confess his secret to local police officer Barbara Henning - whose mother was killed in the derailment - at the local police station. Henning looks deeper into the case while the ghosts impel Peter to look deeper into his fractured memory of that fateful night.

Peter returns to the scene of the accident where the truth about the tragedy is revealed through a series of flashbacks. After a tension filled climax, the ghosts are finally laid to rest, as is the soul of Peter's daughter.

Backtrack
Release Date: June 16th, 2016

 

About The Production

Writer/director Michael Petroni began making preliminary notes for what would become the spine-chilling ghost story Backtrack as he was writing Till Human Voices Wake Us (2002). While pursuing a successful screenwriting career in Hollywood, Petroni let the story germinate in his mind over the years. By the time shooting commenced (in early January 2014) he had storyboarded the entire film. 'To make a movie you've got to be collaborative, you've got to be inclusive and yet at the same time as a director people want you to make the final decisions. It's a weird kind of benevolent dictatorship that you're trying to create".

Michael Petroni describes Backtrack as a 'multifaceted genre piece" about the 'universal themes of loss, guilt and memory" that remains one step ahead of its audience. Paying homage to such films as Don't Look Now and The Sixth Sense, Michael Petroni has crafted a screenplay full of dramatic tension and unexpected twists and turns. Boasting a stellar cast, the film is filled with intrigue, thrills and suspense - Backtrack will have the 'audience jump out of their seats" says Michael Petroni.

Screen Australia backed the project from an early stage and was instrumental in bringing Michael Petroni back to make films in his homeland after a long hiatus working in the US on such internationally successful films as The Book Thief, The Right And The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader.

Producers Jamie Hilton and Antonia Barnard saw great potential in the film based on the strength of Michael Petroni's screenplay, the depth of characters and the opportunity to bring the multi-faceted plot to the big screen. Says Jamie Hilton: 'Backtrack is a very clever genre film. It really delivers on an audience's expectation. Just when you think you know where it's going, it will take an unexpected turn. The film oscillates between a psychological thriller and a mystery".

Screen Australia, UK-based sales agent Bankside and Australian distributor Madman Entertainment came on board before Brody, Oscar winner for The Pianist and who starred in Midnight In Paris and THE Brothers Bloom, was attached.

Casting

Backtrack was cast by Nikki Barrett (Barrett Casting) and director Michael Petroni. Producer Jamie Hilton says, 'All the actors gave such fantastic performances. Nikki Barrett did a great job casting the film with Michael Petroni and I couldn't be happier".

In casting the film, Michael Petroni was looking for a lead actor 'with an interior life that can be read on his face" and Adrien Brody was an obvious choice. 'Adrien Brody has the kind of face that draws you into his interior world" making him the perfect choice for the role of Peter Bower and the psychological journey we take with him in the film.

'Peter Bower has a hidden history and I think everyone can relate to that idea of having something in your past that creeps up on you. It's the secret of his past that creates the intrigue in the story and takes you on an unexpected journey as it unravels".

Peter Bower's Australian accent was no obstacle for the accomplished lead, Adrien Brody. Of Adrien Brody's accent, Michael Petroni says, 'He did a spot on job. It's great. I'm really pleased and proud of him for that".

Adrien Brody says: 'I was a bit concerned with committing to an Australian accent, just because it is challenging to do and I wanted to do it well. It's a complicated thing because I think you have to find the tone of the individual you're playing more than just gravitating to sounds. You have to understand and differentiate obviously the dialect and the specificity of that dialect of the cultured, educated man from Melbourne, someone from a farm or from a regional part of Australia, so you have to find where that fits in. It has to sound like you; it has to feel like you, even if it's very different from yourself. I think one of the interesting things was it helped me find the character more easily because I did sound so different from myself".

The striking similarity between Peter and William Bower (Adrien Brody and George Shevtsov) will not go unnoticed by audiences. Says Michael Petroni: 'I can't believe how similar they are and how much like father and son they really physically are, even in their mannerisms".

Sam Neill is obviously a wonderful asset to the film in the role of Peter's friend, colleague and confidant Duncan Steward. Says Michael Petroni: 'It was a dream come true to work with Sam and Adrien. You know, they're such great talent. I felt that Adrien Brody and Sam Neill played off each other so well".

Production Design

Backtrack was designed by Elizabeth Mary Moore whose previous credits include The Turning, The Square and The Illustrated Family Doctor. Moore's challenge was in adapting the locations to make them work. 'It was pretty clear to me that it would most likely be set-build on a location". The biggest builds were the signal box - which had to be transported to Oberon – and the train wreck. Elizabeth Mary Moore says 'Some sets need to be emotionally strong so the train wreck needed to be devastating. You really need to feel this was a really big situation; people had died; it was graphic and it was big chunks of hulking metal that had ripped into people. It needs to feel like it was a tragedy".

Costume Design

Costume Designer Justine Seymour's costumes reflect the colour palette of the film. During the flashbacks of Peter with his daughter Evie, the costumes are brighter and lighter and Peter is in more colourful clothes to reflect happier times, but when the film flashes back to 1987 at the time of the train crash, Justine Seymour naturally chose to go with a completely different colour palette.

In designing the ghost characters in the film, Justine Seymour wanted them to appear in the clothes they were wearing when they died in the accident. Elizabeth Valentine is in her school uniform which also helped to make her look very young 'because the actress that plays Elizabeth Valentine (Chloe Bayliss) is actually 22 and she's playing a 14 year old, so to have her in a school uniform was ideal and the fact that she's very small was very helpful to me. I made her coat a bit bigger and I wanted her to kind of get lost in the hood. The way the DP (Stefan Duscio) played with the light in the hood – it made it more scary."

'The team of make-up artists would make the ghosts look more and more dead as the story became more and more obvious to Peter Bower. Peter Bower's awareness opens up and he realises what he's seeing, and, as he realises, so does the audience".

Anna Lise Phillips who plays Erica George, explains: 'Not only am I playing a ghost, I'm playing an English woman. There are three stages of development (for my character). There's the normal, there's the train accident and then there's death. You find yourself decomposing within the period of one day, and it's very detailed work."

Backtrack
Release Date: June 16th, 2016