The 1980s brought great change to Australia and few places felt it more keenly than the suburban football grounds that scattered the nation. Critically acclaimed Australian drama, The Final Winter, captures the years when traditional, working-class characters, fighting mud-splattered league battles every Saturday, were rapidly replaced by a new world of political-correctness and big business.
Writer, producer and star, Matt Nable, grew up in a proud rugby league family during those years. A semi-professional player himself, his brother was a champion pro, while his dad was a trainer for the Australian team. Matt talks to RT about the memories that helped him create this gritty, never-say-die film that is as familiar as the faces of the league heroes that fill the screen.
Is writing something that has always been a part of your life?
Writing is a very easy way for me to express myself. When I was still at school I would write for no reason other than I wanted to write. By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of The Final Winter, I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn’t know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself but when my love of writing returned it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life. I am always writing. It is not always good but if I am writing I am usually happy.
It sounds like your family and friends wouldn’t have been terribly surprised when you said ‘I have written a script’ but I imagine they were rather taken aback when you said you were going to star in it.
(laughing) That is very true. My mother and father said ‘you can’t do that; that is ridiculous’. And I guess the whole idea that I was going to throw myself into a feature film without paying my dues would have raised many eyebrows and concerned looks amongst family and friends and, to be honest, I can’t blame them.
Tell me about your first day on set.
It was a little terrifying and I will never forget that morning. I was woken at 4am by a song playing on the radio. It was Forever Young by Youth Group. I had just been to a function where I had watched this marvellous montage about the history of the Newtown Jets and that song was the soundtrack. It had really touched me. When that song woke me up it was quite an eerie feeling and through my enormous rush of nerves and exhilaration it had this calming effect. I suddenly felt like everything was going to be OK. The days leading up to that had been a little traumatic because it is hard not to step outside of yourself at different stages and think ‘are you really going to do this?’. There is a lot of money at stake and there are people investing in this and investing in you. That is a lot of pressure.
I guess a bit of blind terror is good for the soul.
In the end, yes. The unknown really excites me. What can go wrong? I am not going to go to prison; I’m not going to lose my house. I can only give my best effort and I have everyone who needs to be behind me, behind me. You just suck it and see and go from there.
Your love for this period of football in Australia is present in every moment of the film. Can you tell me what that time meant to you?
It was everything to me growing up. My week at school would be good or bad depending on whether Balmain won. I have such fond memories of those suburban grounds and everything was so undiluted. The players weren’t censored and for me it was a wonderful period of my life when everything was simple and pure. For me that resonated with rugby league.
What is your take on the current climate where sports people are expected to be role models?
It is a really tough question to answer. I guess because sport is so saturated in the market place and these guys have such an enormous stage to perform on and the adulation is so immense, they have a responsibility to the young fans to conduct themselves in a good way while they are playing sport. But outside of the sport, what they do in their own time, I am not so sure they can be measured on that. I think that is markedly intrusive. To be honest I think what is lacking now is the nuances of character in the game. Sport is so scrutinised and the players have to read from these tight scripts. How can there be individual character?
Also, these players may look like the epitome of what a man should be, but they are not men. For me you don’t grow into yourself until you are in your late twenties. It was like that for me. Also, they are not living in the real world. They play football, and they get paid very well to do it, and sometimes they lose track of reality because they are not subjected to it. There is a lot of stuff going on that really prevents them from having the capacity to be role models.
You play Grub Henderson, a defiant mainstay of old-school league. How would Grub have survived today?
Poorly. I think many of those guys, and Grub is such a concoction of guys who I knew from the sport and blue collar types from that era, would have found political correctness very intrusive on their ideology of life. The scene where Grub is in the car drinking beer with his offsider; I saw that. I saw that first hand because my grandfather did that. I think Grub would have struggled immensely from the changing of sport and life in general.
One often forgotten group from that sporting era are the women. Your women characters are extremely strong. Where did they come from?
The women of that era were the rock for many of those men. They had to be so strong to endure what was acceptable at the time. Growing up, I saw many women who were mothers of my friends or in my own family, who had that strength. I admired them greatly. It was Grub’s wife, Emma (Raelee Hill), who is behind what makes that guy tick and is ultimately the reason why he made the decision he did. And the bartender, Kate (Kate Mulvaney), had an incredible strength to be able to stand there and say: pull your head out of your backside fella and have a look at what you have in front of you. I saw women do that. It was a great pleasure to write characters like that.
This film is famous for its great selection of cameos played by football greats from the past. Did you have to hunt them down or were they pounding on your door to be a part of it?
Anthony Coffey, who is a great mate of mine and produced the film, came up with the idea to do the cameos. He cast a broad net and what we got back was an amazing response. Guys like Roy Masters with his “shove your pencil up your nose” line, are such an endearing memory from that time. They were so gracious and all did it for nothing. This was an era and a sport that meant a lot to them too. Author, Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s List), is a great Manly supporter so when I told him he was going to play the gate keeper, he said “I will do whatever I can, Matty”. He is a major influence on me as a writer and for me taking the leap to do this in a full-time capacity. He is an amazing guy and another football tragic. We’re all football tragics.
Matt Nable’s top five favourite films
Sideways
One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest
Boogie Nights
Magnolia
Braveheart
