As I said in my previous post, the casting of the film adaptation of my book, The Way, My Way, didn’t happen overnight.

I mean, how do you cast someone to play me?

I rejected Brad Pitt because he wasn’t buffed enough, I rejected George Clooney because he wasn’t suave enough, I rejected Hugh Jackman because I was concerned he couldn’t do a convincing Australian accent…

So I cast Chris Haywood.

Chris is one of Australia’s finest actors. Theatre trained, with more than one hundred Australian films under his belt, Chris was a natural choice for many reasons.

Firstly, Chris and I go back to 1984, when he played the lead, opposite Jennifer Cluff who played female lead, in my Vietnam veterans drama, A Street to Die. Chris won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actor for his performance, and later we worked on other films too.

Perhaps the most memorable was in my Outback noir thriller, Kiss or Kill, where he played a detective chasing down a serial killer. The film includes the now famous “bacon scene,” which won Chris another AFI nomination.

Here is that scene:
https://aso.gov.au/titles/features/kiss-or-kill/clip3/

Sometime back I´d made the decision to have the real pilgrims who walked with me play themselves in the movie. I knew that Chris was masterful at working with “actuals,” and he was also unfazed by working on small productions.

I needed this film to be crewed tight and lean because there was no way I could get the real authenticity of the Camino if I had a large crew. I knew that Chris would chip in, become part of the team, part of the family – which he has done with full vigor.

Chris and I have kept in touch over the years and he knows me. That was also an important factor in the casting. If an actor was to play me, then that actor needed to know me. Yes Chris is a few years older, but that didn’t bother me – he has a mischievous and rascally streak in him and a flagrant disregard for rules regulations and authority, which some people claim is what I have.

Personally, I don’t see it, but then how would I know.

There are four other actors in the film, the rest are “actuals,” or non actors.

The first is Jennifer Cluff, who plays my wife in the film. Perhaps I should call her an actual, but she’s one of Australia’s finest actresses with a career that goes back to . She played Chris Haywood´s wife in A Street to Die.

Laura Lakshmi (below) plays the role of Rosa, who was one of the Biarritz Taxi Four, the four of us sharing a taxi from Biarritz airport to St Jean Pied de Port – and forming friendships for life. The real Rosa couldn’t unfortunately join the production because she’s just had a young baby. But Laura has done a stellar job in playing her…

Pia Thunderbolt plays the character of Cristina, who is a mysterious and haunted looking pilgrim who intersects with Bill’s journey to Santiago intermittently. She finally reveals her devastating secret on the mountain top of O Cebriero. Cristina is a composite character of several pilgrims I met on my five Caminos.

Spanish acto Daniel Espuńa plays a pilgrim I met on and off along the way. He told me that when he first met me, I came across as an arrogant wanker (I’m certain he must’ve mistaken me for someone else) but that later on when he met me again, I’d changed.

Then there’s the “actuals,” and the non actors. The actuals include:

Balazs Orban, who was one of the Taxi Four and played a huge role in helping me finish the Camino. He’s Hungarian, and a remarkable man –

Then there’s another Hungarian, Laszlo Vas, who was an inspiration to me during my walk, and to all of us in the crew during filming.

The two pilgrims that make such an impact in my book, and have become dear friends to Jennifer and me, are Ivan the Terrible (Beeel) and His Beautiful Wife Giovanna. (You take taxi, no?) They were on set every day, even when not doing their scenes, and kept me laughing always.

The non actors, those that aren’t professional actors but who have a connection with the Camino and who play roles are:

Kurt Koontz, a dear dear friend from Boise Idaho who plays an American I met who was quite convinced that I made porn. Kurt did a remarkable job playing a skirt-chasing mysoginistic loud-mouth and Kurt told me it was a big stretch for him to play such a role – he had absolutely no idea why I’d cast him – but he’d do his best. His best will be one of the highlights of the film.

Another dear Camino friend is Patty Talbot, who plays a woman whose name I can’t remember. Patty, in her performance, left Kathey Bates in Misery in the shade…

On my Camino, I asked a waiter to take a group photo of myself with my pilgrim friends. The waiter, predictably, took the shot and left in too much headroom. I told him this, gave him the camera back, asked him to do it again. Again there was too much headroom. I pointed this out to him, again asked him to take the shot and this time to get it right – we must have done it five or six times and he nearly knocked my block off.

Marie Dominique Rigaud, another very close Camino friend, played the role with gusto and left us all laughing –

The actuals and non actors have given performances that are real and truthful. And the actors, working with them, have had to fine tune their performances to match their level of authenticity.

It´s going to be a unique film.

Who’s in the movie The Way My Way, and why did I make the casting choices that I did?

To understand the casting, you have to know how this film came about.

This film, like most films that I do, has had a very long gestation period. Like about six or seven years. And let me say here that I never set out to make a movie about myself. That was the last thing I ever wanted to do.

After walking the Camino, I sat down and wrote my memoir for the sole purpose of trying to make sense of why I’d done the walk. I’d arrived in Santiago de Compostela after 30 days of walking in a huge amount of pain, confused as to why I’d put myself through it all.

I’d hoped that in writing the book, the reason would reveal itself.

It didn’t.

The transformative power of the Camino is such that it wasn’t until many years later that I was able to look back with a much deeper realisation of why I’d been so compelled to do that pilgrimage.

Anyway, I self-published the book and had no expectations for it. Ten years later it’s still selling strongly and it now has more than a thousand five star reviews on Amazon. Many say in their reviews that it’s the best Camino book they’ve read.

One of the people who read the book was veteran Australian distributor Richard Becker. The book had a profound impact on him and he urged me to make a film on it.

I said no, emphatically.

I didn’t think there was a film in it, and I certainly didn’t want to make a film about myself. Not for any reasons of vanity or to protect myself from public ridicule – it was more that technically, I couldn’t see a way of writing a film about myself.

And also I wasn’t interested.

I know me, now.

I didn’t then, but now I do.

I’d done the walk, I’d written the book. The Camino, for me, had fulfilled its purpose. There were other films I wished to make, such as my PGS series. But Richard was insistent, and so eventually I told him I’d take a swing at it.

As soon as I disengaged myself from the central character, being me, and began to see myself in the third person as a deeply flawed and humorously self-absorbed control freak who simply didn’t have a clue as to the carnage he left in his wake as he journeyed through life, then the character started to interest me and the screenplay began to take shape.

But the writing took literally dozens of drafts and many years.

At first it was going to be a big budget movie with star casting. Richard brought on a major Hollywood sales agent, and that sales agent required a “name” to play me in order for the film to be financed.

We went out to Mel Gibson, Pierce Brosnan, Ricky Gervais, Ewan McGregor, Rufus Sewell, Eric Bana, amongst many others – they all politely said no.

We didn’t go out to Hugh Jackman because we figured he’d be otherwise occupied – and I didn’t want him anyway because he wasn’t good looking enough.

The only actor, in my mind, who was perfect for the role of playing me was… wait for it…

George Clooney,

of course,

but I believe he was busy doing Nespresso commercials on Lake Como.

This process of going out to big name cast took years. You have to go out with an offer one at a time – at this level you have to make a personal approach, with a money offer, and you have to wait.

Usually that takes several months.

You have to wait for it to get “coverage” through the actor’s agency. Coverage is a process of assessment, usually carried out by low level agency development staffers, who critically evaluate the screenplay and make certain recommendations.

If it gets good coverage it then goes to the next level of assessment, which is the Outer Circle of the actor’s “people.” If it’s passes their more highly skilled and critical eyes, then it goes to the actor’s “responsible” agent who, if you’re very lucky, will read the screenplay him/herself.

Then the Responsible Agent will look over the offer, he/she will do a thorough review of the director, past work etc, review the producers and any distributor or sales agent already attached ( if you haven’t got good distribution or a solid reputable sales agent in place you’re dead in the water) – only if all this checks out will the agent even discuss it with the actor, much less recommend that the actor reads it.

Like I say, this takes months, and you have to go out one at a time.

After several years of going through this frustrating and mind-numbing process, without any name actor saying yes, an actor “meaningful” enough to trigger the financing of a $10m movie, I finally got jack of it. I could see this film never getting made.

Not only that, I couldn’t see how you could possibly mount a big budget movie on the Camino, merely from a production perspective. Dozens of huge trucks, big disruptive lighting set-ups, the massive infrastructure of a major movie in remote and wild locations on the Camino – I just couldn’t see how it could work.

It’s not as if my partner Jennifer and I haven’t done that sort of thing before- we produced In a Savage Land on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea – an $8m period film in one of the most difficult and inaccessible places on the planet-

But the Camino is different.

Even if I were to snag a “meaningful” actor and secure finance, to do the film as a big budget production on the Camino would require me to fake a whole lot of things – and I didn’t want to do that. Plus there’s no way a big budget movie could ever cover the whole 800kms of the walk. It would be a massive compromise all the way through.

I wanted to make a film that showed the Camino with total authenticity – that traversed the entirety of the Camino, and got to the essence of the transformative power of this unique experience.

I also wanted to film with the real pilgrims I met on my walk. This to me would bring an undeniable truth to the film. I’d remained friends with them over the years and they were prepared to come join me on this crazy adventure.

So that meant rethinking everything – going super low budget, having a very small crew, working “within” the Camino rather than outside it – but what big name actor would be prepared to work this way? And work with the actual pilgrims who’d been so instrumental in making my Camino something so very special ~

There was only one actor I could think of who could play me with total verisimilitude, and be prepared to work within a super small production environment, and who was skilled and proficient in working with “real” people, and that actor was Chris Haywood.

Part 2 next…