TWO FISTS ONE HEART

Running Time: 105 minutes

Rating: M

A PALM BEACH PICTURE

Filmed on location in Perth, Western Australia

Do not be afraid son, he is justa like you, with two fists and one heart. - JOE FAZIO

Short synopsisAnthony Argo (Daniel Amalm) is a champion boxer and nightclub

doorman. His pursuit of the Australian ‘dolce vita’ increasingly puts him in conflict with his father and trainer, Joe, (Ennio Fantastichini) who has brought his Sicilian values of family, loyalty and iron-fisted respect with him to Australia.

Anthony meets Kate (Jessica Marais) who opens his eyes to a world beyond his boxing-obsessed upbringing and fuels further rebellion against his father’s values. His mother (Rosemarie Lenzo) and his best mate (Paul Pantano) support him, however it is Tom (Tim Minchin), Kate’s musician brother, who helps Anthony see the world and his life from a different perspective.

When Joe is betrayed by another boxer Nico Manchini (Rai Fazio) and finally reveals to his son the pain and violence in his own past, Anthony decides to return to the ring to defend the honour of his father.

Director Shawn Seet

Producer David Elfick

Writer and Executive Producer Rai Fazio

Long synopsisTWO FISTS ONE HEART is a contemporary story set in Perth, Western

Australia. Australia, as a multicultural country, is at the heart of this story, portraying the struggles of a young Italian/Australian and giving an insight into the world of boxing.

Anthony Argo (Daniel Amalm) is a champion boxer and nightclub doorman. He is trained by his father Joe (Ennio Fantastichini) who has brought his Sicilian values with him to Australia. Joe’s proud traditional view of the world increasingly comes into conflict with his son’s pursuit of ‘la dolce vita’.

When Anthony meets the beautiful Kate (Jessica Marais) - a university psychology student, he begins to see his life and the role of violence within it in a different light. He loses focus on boxing and has an emotional confrontation with his father who orders him out of the family home forever. His mother (Rosemarie Lenzo) tries to hold the family together, but Joe has turned his back on his son.

Anthony leaves the ring to spend more time on his blossoming romance with Kate, but when Anthony becomes involved in a street fight at a public event, Kate dumps him. Without Kate, Anthony has time to reflect on who he is and all that he has recently lost. He is supported by his best mate (Paul Pantano), however it is Tom (Tim Minchin), Kate’s musician brother, who helps Anthony

see the world and his life from a different perspective.

While Anthony is revaluating his life, Joe continues training boxers. Then Joe is betrayed by Nico (Rai Fazio), another boxer of Sicilian descent. Anthony, now mature enough to make his own decisions, chooses the traditional way to honour his father and his family and re-enters the ring to fight his nemesis, Nico. Joe agrees to train Anthony for the big fight and finally confesses to his son about incidents from his own past in Italy that have influenced his behaviour to the family he loves.

TWO FISTS ONE HEART is an intensely emotional and personal story of a complex father-son relationship. The Sicilian traditions of family, loyalty and obedience clash head-on with the Australian philosophy of freedom and a fair go.

Director Shawn Seet

Producer David Elfick

Writer and Executive Producer Rai Fazio.

The storyFormer champion boxer Rai Fazio drew inspiration from many of his real-

life experiences in creating the screenplay TWO FISTS ONE HEART, a contemporary drama set in Perth, Western Australia.

Multicultural Australia is at the heart of this story, portraying the struggles of Anthony Argo, a young Italian/Australian. Essentially the film revolves around the complex emotional relationship between a father and his son.

Talented boxer, Anthony Argo (Daniel Amalm) is pushed to the limit by his passionate Sicilian father and trainer Joe (Ennio Fantastichini). Coming from a working–class background, Joe wants Anthony to achieve the success in the ring that he was denied as a young man.

When Anthony meets the beautiful Kate (Jessica Marais) - a university psychology student, he begins to see his life and the role of violence in a different light. He loses focus on boxing and has a painful confrontation with his father. His mother Concetta (Rosemarie Lenzo) tries to hold the family together but Joe turns his back on his son. Anthony leaves the ring to spend more time on his blossoming romance with Kate. When Anthony becomes involved in a street fight at a public event, Kate dumps him.

Without Kate, Anthony has time to reflect on who he is and all that he has recently lost. Supported by his best mate (Paul Pantano), it is ultimately Tom (Tim Minchin), Kate’s musician brother, who helps Anthony see the world and his life from a different perspective

While Anthony is re-evaluating his life, Joe continues training boxers but is betrayed by Nico (Rai Fazio), another boxer of Sicilian decent. Anthony, now mature enough to make his own decisions, chooses to honour his father and his

family in the traditional way and re-enters the ring to fight his nemesis, Nico.

TWO FISTS ONE HEART is an intensely personal story of a complex relationship as the Sicilian traditions of family, loyalty and obedience clash head-on with the Australian philosophy of freedom and a fair go.

Director Shawn Seet

Producer David Elfick

Writer and Executive Producer Rai Fazio.

The productionWith the focus on boxing, it would be wrong to categorise TWO FISTS

ONE HEART as another action film. Boxing is only one element of this rich story, which explores tradition, multiculturalism and loyalty, alongside the trials of a young man coming to terms with life and his role within his family. In the father-son battle for understanding, both are determined and both believe they are right.

The project was born when Rai Fazio was nine and read a book about Sylvester Stallone and how the film ROCKY was made. Being an Italian and the only kid in school who boxed, this sparked a desire in Rai to one day write a movie drawing from his own boxing and family experiences.

Some years later Rai had a chance meeting in a New York café with Harvey Keitel, an actor he had always admired. Keitel was interested in boxing and encouraged Rai. Keitel said that ‘everybody has an idea for a film, but if you’re passionate, don’t talk about it, do something about it’.

Inspired, Rai returned to Perth, Western Australia, locked himself in a room and began writing a screenplay. After months of hard work he had a very long first draft. Rai began showing it to people in the film and television industry who encouraged him to keep working on the screenplay. They saw a story full of vitality with a great heart. With this encouragement Rai continued his work on the screenplay.

Rai was introduced to David Elfick (RABBIT PROOF FENCE, BLACKROCK, NEWSFRONT) who decided the screenplay was the type of project he was looking for and they became a formidable team.

Nine years after Rai began writing that first page, principal photography of TWO FISTS ONE HEART commenced in Perth, Western Australia.

Shawn Seet directs TWO FISTS ONE HEART in his feature film debut. Shawn has an impressive career as a thought-provoking television drama director and feature film editor. With an ethos of ‘keep it real’, Shawn has brought an unpredictable excitement and energy to this Australian family drama, set in the boxing world and with a multicultural mix of Italian, Australian and Greek characters.

The film was shot entirely in Perth using the sensational backdrop of

Cottesloe Beach, the port city of Fremantle, the colour of inner-city Northbridge, the Perth city skyline and the Swan River at sunset.

The castingTwenty-one actors were in final consideration for the lead role of Anthony

Argo. Daniel Amalm secured the role.

Casting Director, Ann Robinson: “He’s a superb actor, had the right physicality and it was a bonus that he had the boxing experience. The role of Anthony required someone who is believably southern Italian, possessed strength and resilience, whilst also being able to access the vulnerability and the emotional aspects of the character, all of which Daniel clearly demonstrated in his auditions.” Daniel had some boxing experience so he could spar properly and wasn’t put off if he had to wear a few punches, all part of a boxer’s training.

The casting of Joe, the father figure, proved more difficult. An extensive search by Mullinar's Casting failed to uncover an actor in Australia in the right age group, who could slip into Italian dialogue easily and portray a seasoned boxing trainer. The role also demanded a performance that would evoke compassion from the audience even if they disagreed with the character’s philosophy and actions. The search extended to America and the UK without an obvious candidate emerging.

Producer David Elfick felt that the part would be best played by an Italian actor who spoke English because that would give the role a reality that cannot be easily created. He secured the services of Beatrice Kruger, one of Europe’s leading casting agents. Elfick’s actor friend Tony Poli, who is fluent in Italian, happened to be in Italy at the time, so he went to Rome to work with Beatrice. The search continued. Director Shawn Seet joined Poli in Rome to test the potential Joes that had been uncovered. When Ennio Fantastichini auditioned, Shawn knew immediately they had found their Joe.

Ennio Fantastichini had never been to Australia but was passionate about playing the part. Tony Poli agreed to play a supporting role in the film and to work with Ennio as dialogue coach. Thus began one of the many friendships that developed during the making of TWO FISTS ONE HEART.

Jessica Marias has had an extraordinary year since graduating from NIDA. She was cast in a lead role for the television pilot, then the series of PACKED TO THE RAFTERS, played Kate in the feature film TWO FISTS ONE HEART and was on stage in the MTC’s production of Patrick White’s SEASON OF SASPERILLA. Jessica has that most elusive of actors attributes - being able to emotionally connect a character with the audience, whether it is through a lens or live on stage. Her talent coupled with her natural good looks makes Jessica one of the brightest new stars to emerge from NIDA, a school which has produced such stellar talents as Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush and Mel Gibson. Jessica, like Tim Minchin who plays her brother Tom in the film, hails from Perth.

Tim Minchin’s involvement began after David Elfick saw him perform at an inner-city club. The material was topical, modern, and socially aware. David approached Tim to create a character who could open up Anthony’s world from the tough ethnic suburban life he knew. Making this character Tom the brother of Anthony’s love interest Kate gave the story a clear and economic narrative.

For the film to succeed, the final showdown in the ring has to be the climax of the film. Director Seet’s mantra was ‘keep it real’ and the casting had reflected this. How do you shoot an extended boxing finale without throwing real leather? The character of Nico Manchini is older, tougher than Anthony, a fighter rather than a boxer, a brutal unforgiving opponent, a knockout specialist. Rai Fazio was ready to play this role. In preparation Rai had been taking acting classes for several years and appeared in three short films. As both director and producer looked at these films they realised that Rai has on-screen chemistry. After an intensive one–on-one rehearsal period, director Seet was confident that Rai could deliver a performance that would have the brute power this role demanded but, just as importantly, an inner complexity to ensure Nico was not a one-dimensional ‘bad’ character.

An added bonus for the production was the ability for Rai and Daniel to train, rehearse and choreograph the fight scenes together.

When it came to shooting the end fight sequence Daniel joked that this was the only fight movie where, for the early rounds, they were putting make-up on to cover facial bruising, then taking the make-up off for the later rounds rather than faking it.

Theo, Anthony’s amusing mate, was always going to be played by Paul Pantano. Of Sicilian extraction and one of the director’s favourite actors, Pantano revelled in the chance to play a role with a light touch, while also getting into some of the fight action.

Another NIDA graduate Rosemarie Lenzo plays the role of Anthony’s mother, Concetta. A Perth resident for the past 15 years, Rosemarie has worked extensively on stage with the Black Swan Theatre Company. She relished this film opportunity to play opposite Ennio Fantastichini as his wife. Her Italian upbringing allowed Rosemarie and Ennio to create an improvised scene entirely in Italian language during the shooting of the film, a scene which adds an intimacy to their on-screen relationship

An important theme in TWO FISTS ONE HEART is the role boxing training has played in giving young Aboriginal men focus and discipline in their lives.

Rai created the character of Athol, a thirteen-year-old Aboriginal boxer who is trained by Joe. It’s a rich character laced with pathos and humour drawn from the many experiences Rai has had with fellow Aboriginal boxers. The role is played by Karl Bin Rashid, who in front of the camera has a natural bright confidence, and then is able to give an extraordinary vulnerability. Karl, with his million-dollar smile, quickly became the on-set favourite. Ennio became deeply

attached to this talented young fellow, Ennio having a son back in Italy who is just a few years younger than ‘Young Athol’ as he was affectionately known.

TWO FISTS ONE HEART unites a cast of international and Australian award winners and nominees, newcomers and stars of the future.

The musicThe music for the film TWO FISTS ONE HEART was drawn from four

areas: dramatic score, live performance, Italian music and contemporary tracks.

The Dramatic Score

Australia has a wealth of talent when it comes to composers for feature films. A brief was sent to a select number of composers who provided us with some very exciting musical concepts.

David Bridie’s music stood out. It had a wonderful abstract quality in the melodies that made the music feel very original and contemporary. His use of rhythm and percussion drawn from his many years experience working with South Pacific and New Guinea musicians gave a primitive energy and vitality so perfect for the boxing sequences of the film. His use of electronica gave the score a contemporary flavour using loops and sequences and analogue keyboards.

This is a modern film shot in a very specific way, and the music needed to complement this approach to the storytelling. A conventional dramatic score would have lessened the effect of Shawn Seet’s original direction and Hugh Miller’s camerawork.

David Bridie worked closely with sound designer Andrew Plain creating the pieces required for the dramatic underscore, but also providing rhythm and melody tracks that could be used as extra texture in scenes. David also threw in some templates from his SUCCUMB album, which was being compiled at the same time. Having such a wealth of material provided by the composer meant we had greater freedom in creating the film’s soundscape.

David describes the score elements as ‘a mixture of electronica and ambience with Melanesian undertones, plus some more conventional usage of piano moods.’

Live performanceTim Minchin performs two original songs in the film. Tim plays the part of

Tom, a musician with a quick wit. He composed I’M NOT GOING ANYWHERE and DROWNED with lyrics that illustrated this clever and confident aspect of the character. The songs also serve to open a new world to Anthony (Daniel Amalm) and lead into the amusing dialogue that begins their friendship.

Tim recorded the tracks in Perth with Dan Minchin (his brother), Robbie

Lumsden and Joshua Jones, who appear as the on-stage band in the film.

I’M NOT GOING ANYWHERE

I am not

I am not a polyglot

I can only speak one language

I hope you comprendez (vous)

I can see

You’re listening but not hearing me

Like Tarzan gripping onto a grapevine

You’re looking for street signs

I’ll leave you be if be is what you’d rather

I guarantee you’ll never find another

Cos I’m not going anywhere

I’m not going anywhere

Take my hand

I’ll be here when you wake up again

I’m not going anywhere

I’m not going anywhere

Please don’t cry

Close your little violet eyes

Who’d have thought

That I could be an Argonaut

I can only carry you so far

Searching for my star

I can see

We’re sliding towards entropy

Like Ulysses beginning his Odyssey

It’s all Greek to me

I’m only hearing half of what you’re sayin’

I’ve never heard a single song you’re playin’

Now I’m not going anywhere

I’m not going anywhere

Take my hand

I’ll be here when you wake up again

I’m not going anywhere

I’m not going anywhere

Please don’t cry

Close your pretty violet eyes

I am not

I am not a polyglot

I can only hear one language

I hope you can speak it (too)

I can see

You looking but not seeing me

Like Homer writing poems that he can’t read

It’s very temporary

You look at me I see you’re doubting Thomas

I’ll let you be but leave you with a promise

Girl I’m not going anywhere

I’m not going anywhere

Take my hand

I’ll be here when you wake up again

I’m not going anywhere

I’m not going anywhere

I’m not going if you’re not going

You’re stuck with me now

You’re stuck with me now baby

Stuck with me now baby

Ya ya ya ya ya-aa oh

DROWNED

Your love is like finger nails on a chalkboard

Your love is like throwing myself overboard

A breakdown on a motorway

A heart attack on Christmas day

Like scaling a cliff then falling off

Like trying not to cough

And I didn’t see this one coming, now I’m in too deep

I didn’t see this one coming, now I’m in too deep

I think I’ll just keep swimming down, down, down

There’s no point in trying to turn back now

I’m drowned

I’m drowned

Your love is like sand inside a bathing suit

Your love is a symphony with the sound on mute

A letter sent to the wrong address

Or red wine on a wedding dress

Like broken bones in my playing hand

Like trying to swallow sand

‘Cos I didn’t see this one coming, now I’m in too deep

I didn’t see this one coming, now I’m in too deep

I think I’ll just keep swimming down, down, down

There’s no point in trying to reach dry ground

I’m drowned

I’m drowned

Your love is like one last breath of salty air

Your love is like a map that leads to nowhere

A wine glass on a concrete floor

The overuse of metaphor

The straight ahead in a sideways glance

Like the misstep in a dance

Cos I didn’t see this one coming, now I’m in too deep

I didn’t see this one coming, now I’m in too deep

I think I’ll just keep swimming down

There’s no point in turning round

I’m drowned

I’m drowned

Italian Music

Three places in the story are quintessentially Italian - Bar Angelo, Concetta’s Birthday Celebration and the Blessing of the Fleet. For these scenes we needed music that reinforced the strong Italian texture of the film.

Marina Rei’s PRIMAVERA is the popular dance track for the party. Young Perth musical talent Adrian Galant mingled with the guests, playing SORRENTO on the clarinet as they tucked into their pasta and vino rosso. Fratelli D’Italia provided popular music for the party and Bar Angelo.

For the Blessing of the Fleet, Joe Argo (Ennio Fantastichini) carries the Madonna to the docks as the Canning Brass Band play traditional Italian procession music.

Contemporary tracksThe contemporary tracks in the film needed to reflect the type music being

played in the clubs and bars of Perth today.

With the assistance of Musical Supervisor Julie Hodges, tracks were selected from TZU, Fish Go Deep, Gyroscope, Custom Kings, Lowrider, Eskimo Joe and Pyromesh. By obtaining mixes of the tracks with and without lyrics, the tracks were adjusted so that they could be played at a level that didn’t compete with the dialogue, rather than the standard approach of dipping the music under dialogue when song lyrics were competing. Boxers are cool and confident customers and so the music skewed toward tracks with an R&B influence.

The big challenge was to select two tracks to dramatise the entry into the stadium of Anthony (Daniel Amalm) and Nico ‘The Bull’ Mancini (Rai Fazio) for the climactic final championship fight. For Anthony we needed a track with a sense of occasion and destiny. TZU’s STEP WITH THE PRESSURE has a sense of gladiatorial drama reminiscent of a matador entering the bullring, perfect for a contestant who relies on his boxing skills for victory. For Nico the heavy metal of Pyromesh has the wall of sound that announces the confident and arrogant fighter, the knockout specialist, and the undefeated champion.

The cast

DANIEL AMALM (Anthony Argo)Born in Brisbane, Australia to a Maltese mother and a Swedish father,

Daniel was classically trained at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music and has worked as music teacher of classical flamenco guitar.

Daniel left home at 14, secured a role in the television series HOME AND AWAY and was nominated for a Best New Talent Logie. After leaving the series Daniel recorded two singles, one getting into the ARIA Top 30.

Daniel has always had an interest in boxing. As a child, his musician father would bring home boxing magazines for his son, although he was not keen

for Daniel to enter the ring because of potential damage to his hands. Daniel really wanted to step into the ring and have a proper contest. At 20 he had his first Amateur Boxing Association fight, in the welterweight division. He won the first round, but the bout was stopped in the second round when he sustained a cut on the cheekbone. Daniel’s opponent went on to become an amateur champion. He loved the thrill of the contest, but in such an extreme sport as boxing you have to give it 100 per cent to stand any chance of success. Training and diet dominate your life and Daniel found it impossible to juggle this with acting and music. Daniel continued to spar on a regular basis and as he says, ‘some of those sparring sessions were tougher than the fight’.

A huge acting break came his way when Daniel was cast as Dino Dibra in UNDERBELLY. “Daniel loved playing this cocky character doing all the fun stuff like shooting guns and stealing cars, although I can’t say the same about the towel dropping scene - more fun to watch than to do.” When it came time for Daniel to be gunned down, a dozen squibs were attached to his body. The armourer advised him against clutching at the area as the explosions activated, as it would probably blow a finger off. Not a good idea for a flamenco guitarist!

Then came the opportunity for the lead role in TWO FISTS ONE HEART. “When I first read Rai’s script, my palms got sweaty,” says Daniel. “Rai takes up the story: When I first saw him, he had that look in his eye of a boxer and he sounded very street, like the guys I knocked around with. Then when he took his shirt off he started complaining about his love handles saying, ‘I can get these off’, which is exactly what I say and that made me laugh. When he started throwing a few punches, I thought, ‘We’ve got him, that’s Anthony Argo’.”

Daniel Amalm interview

It’s about a boxer from Balga. It’s a good family story. It’s got a lot of action, a lot of dramatic, emotional stuff whacked into the one movie. There’s aspects of this movie that everyone will enjoy just because it deals with boxing, but also relationships and everything else that’s fun in life. It’s a movie with a lot of balls.

Anthony Argo is a boxer who trains at my father’s place, has been all his life. We do a lot of bag work, a lot of sparring, fighting, fighting, fighting. That’s all my character ever knows about life and he meets a girl and, as it happens, and I’ve experienced it myself, it tends to stray you from training. You start thinking, ‘Well you know, I could be... instead of copping a leather mitt in the mouth, I could be kissing soft lips.’

So it turns out he gets a little bit distracted when the romance starts, there’s fall-out with the father and the story continues on from there. With the research, I was fortunate to have a little boxing experience and I was also fortunate to work as a bouncer because the character also works as a bouncer.

When I first heard about the casting for TWO FISTS ONE HEART I got really excited. I’ve always been interested in boxing and at one stage I competed. I was reading the script and my hands got sweaty. I thought, ‘This has been

written by a boxer, round by round, punch by punch.’ It was right on the money and I really wanted to be part of it from day one.

As far as research goes, there are similarities between the character and myself. I’m not Italian, I’m actually Maltese/Swedish, but Malta’s not far from Sicily. Just the family environment and all that sort of stuff, it’s very similar in many respects to my life and how I’ve grown up as well. The research was more about just getting in touch with who I am as well, what I can bring to the character, and that’s the good thing about this movie, it’s very real and people will notice that.

All the boxers used in the movie are real boxers, so when we came down to shooting boxing scenes, we were able to mix it up. We knew where we wanted to land for the camera and then it was just a matter of mixing it up a little bit and we all know how to respect each other in the ring. Occasionally, we wore a punch or two, but for the movie, why not? We’ve all been sparring before and you pay to get punched up. In this case it’s the reverse!

The last character I played shot guys. It wasn’t hard to pull a gun and shoot someone, this time I’m using my fists and these scenes are very physically demanding. There are a lot of emotionally demanding scenes as well. It’s a really good balance, but at the same time, it takes a lot of focus.

Ennio (Fantastichini)... what an amazing guy! He’s a real inspiration and to work with that guy... from his experience, you can learn so much and he’s so open and so generous. I’ve got 100 questions a day for him. I could talk to him forever and again with Ennio, there’s a real connection there, which was really good. We had scenes where he was opening up to Anthony about his past and I’d leave set with a bit of a lump in my throat. He really knew how to hit the heart. To feel comfortable with someone, to feel in that comfortable space with them, there’s a level of trust and you can feel that. You can take the scene into areas, which you may have not discovered yet and it really does help.

Shawn’s awesome. You couldn’t ask for a better director. First-time feature, first-time lead. I came into this project pretty nervous, he immediately eased those nerves and it was a lot to do with trust and he gives us a hell of amount of freedom, which is a blessing as an actor. You can go and do your thing. He knows how to communicate what directions he’d like to see in the certain part that you’re playing, if you’re giving it too much or not giving it enough, because at times you get so involved in what you’re doing, you need a watchful eye and he’s perfect for that. A top bloke as well.

With Jessica it’s great. I mean it doesn’t make my job hard, I’ve got some nice romantic scenes and we’re really comfortable with each other and that just comes across, it really helps.

I did a little research of course. I spent time with Rai too before we started, just understanding where he came from and like socially what was going on in Perth. Every state has its own thing going on but I’ve moved around a lot as a kid, so all that element wasn’t hard at all to embrace. There are some nice

contrasts in the movie, especially between Anthony and Jessica, because they’re from two different worlds and that’s where they meet.

ENNIO FANTASTICHINI (Joe Argo)One of the most recognisable actors in Italy, award-winning Ennio

Fantastichini has starred in over 50 film and television productions. The son of a policeman in the small Italian spa town of Fiuggi first trod the boards in the local parish theatre in what he describes as a very ‘orthodox’ beginning to his career.

By the age of 15, the bug had bitten hard. With $2 in his pocket Ennio set out for Rome where he became involved very early on in experimental theatre. His first pay slip as an actor came from Nobel Prize winner, Dario Fo’s legendary theatre group, La Comune where he received what he calls his ‘imprinting’ as an actor.

Ennio continued to work in the theatre throughout the 70s and began landing movie roles in the early 80s. His big break came when he was cast to play Enrico Fermi by Gianni Amelio in THE BOYS OF VIA PANISPERNA in 1988. Two years later, he starred in Amelio’s Oscar-nominated OPEN DOORS, which earned Fantastichini various European laurels. Since then he has worked continuously for the screen, featuring in major Italian and European productions for both film and television, ranging from mafia-fighting saga THE OCTOPUS to his role as the obnoxious Roman bully in Paolo’s Virzi’s AUGUST HOLIDAYS, for which he was nominated for a Davide di Donatello (Italy’s major film awards), as he was last year for Best Supporting Actor in Ferzan Ozpetek’s SATURN IN OPPOSITION. To prepare himself to play Joe Argo, the Sicilian immigrant-boxing trainer Fantastichini undertook a gruelling training regime that saw him drop 20kg.

With my character, Joe, there’s a deep ethic that runs through everything, in his sport ethic. I think for Joe, boxing provides the opportunity to free himself, to make a clean slate of his past and come out on top morally, ethically. I clean myself through sport, I become more ethically refined and I bring forward the idea that kids can be taken from the street and dedicate their energy to practising a sport that is also, for certain kids, therapeutic. I remember the words up on the gym wall that said, ‘Better sweat in the gym than bleed in the street.’

Ennio Fantastichini interview

The beginnings of my career were almost a sort of ‘LIBRO CUORE’, orthodox in a way, because I began at 15 in the parish church theatre in my hometown. That was the first contact I had with the world I work in.

I lived in a small town called Fiuggi that is well-known for its water, because its water is used to treat kidney stones. A thermal spa, Fiuggi. So I lived there until I was 15, my father was the local ‘maresciallo’ of the town Carabinieri. It was a bit like PANE, AMORE E FANTASIA (BREAD, LOVE AND DREAMS) - my family, with dad, mum and my two brothers. And then at 15 I came down with

the illness, the disease, as I call it, of my work [acting bug]... that was when I left for Rome where I started to work in theatre very early on.

I have to say my imaginary world, my models, were all connected with American ‘40s movies, all the black and white movies, from Frank Capra to William Wyler... all in the great tradition of the American ‘noir’. At the time I was doing a lot of experimental theatre, workshops, theatre that was experimenting with new forms and new languages.

The first important film happened at the end of the 80s, around 87, 88, when I did RAGAZZI DI VIA PANISPERNA (THE BOYS OF VIA PANISPERNA, 1988), with Amelio, with Gianno Amelio. That was a very important encounter in my artistic life, because he’s the director with whom I did my most important film, which is PORTE APERTE (OPEN DOORS, 1989) which catalysed that dream I believe every actor carries inside, and that is to do a film with a maestro [one of the greats] and I did a film with the maestro, Signor [Gian Maria] Volonté. That was enormously good luck. Not all my colleagues whom I love and admire have had this magnificent opportunity to do what you would call ‘the film’, you know. I always pay homage [praise to the heavens] to Signor Amelio, to Gianni, for giving me that chance.

I did two films with Gianni: I RAGAZZI DI VIA PANISPERNA, where I play Enrico Fermi. That was a project both for cinema and television with different formats and lengths, there were two different cuts. And then PORTE APERTE for the cinema, and that led to a series of parallel encounters. It’s curious how with certain directors I did two films and the third one didn’t happen, and then only one with others. I think you always try to work with the same director, especially if it’s a director you love and have a high regard for, because otherwise you wouldn’t be there working with him... I think with the second film the communication channel is already open, no? I mean you enjoy working with a director if you’ve already made a film with them, you know each other better.

The chance to do TWO FISTS ONE HEART was one of those strange alchemic encounters that happen every so often in the life of an actor. A very good friend of mine, Beatrice Kruger, an international casting agent, now and then works on international films shot outside Italy. Every so often she calls me and says, ‘Ennio, there’s a meeting... I’ll send you this screenplay.’ And so that’s what happened. She said, ‘I’ve got this script.’ And the meeting with Shawn was particularly extraordinary in certain ways because we took a long look at each other and, more than understanding each other, we felt each other at once. It was a strong encounter from an emotional point of view. I read a scene from the film - quite a dramatic, important and melancholy scene and Tony (Tony Poli) read it with me - he was the person who helped me, the [dialogue] coach, who helped me with the accent. So it was like an opportunity to open a new friendship. It was one of those meetings that can go well or badly, because you always have to go to these meetings with great passion, but also with great distance, in the sense that you shouldn’t get overwhelmed about whether it’ll work out or not. In this case, it worked out (laughs). Besides, Australia was a country... it had been in my imagination for at least 25 years. Twenty-five years

ago I contacted the Arts Council in Melbourne, because I thought of leaving Italy. Australia was the country I thought I’d go to, an external and extreme place, far away, where I could figure out my way as a ‘seeker of poetry’ as I call it. I feel bit like a bricklayer, seeker of poetry. It was curious that due to a series of circumstances, I didn’t make that trip to Australia 25 years ago because my father fell ill and I had to cancel the trip - and then he died - in 85, so I went to New York. I stayed in America for a year instead of making that great leap [down under]. I have to say, after the trip (for the film) I thought to myself, ‘Damn it, I had the right idea back then’, in the sense that, from the point of freedom, independence, the opportunity for find your way, I saw this reality in Australia, a lot going on artistically, galleries I visited in Perth, a series of encounters, images I saw in journals, books, all gave me the feeling that in general there are strong feelings about art winding through things.

Working on an Australian set is like the Australians, very hard going (laughs), very tiring, very workaholic. ‘Let’s do it, move it... the sea is force seven? Not a problem. We are going to surf today.’ And this is the very child-like, fun part that you feel in Australian people, a certain heroicness, a certain energy. It’s a country where people have - I got this impression - a lot of energy.

Back here at home in Italy I have I stopped training for a bit because I’m doing up a room that I have in the garden here at home, I’m setting up a gym. This stuff that I sent arrived, a few weeks ago, I’m organising the punching bag, the gloves. When my son’s here - I’ve set up the punching ball and he boxes with it, he likes it a lot too. It was an interesting discovery, a new world, mysterious. Australia also triggered this relationship with boxing, a relationship I’d never had with any sport, except for swimming - when I was young I did a lot of swimming - but it’s a solitary sport, whereas boxing is a primitive sport, an ancestral sport, so it has other rules that can destabilise you more, give you more of a hard time in the sense that if you cop a punch in the face, it’s different from stroking through water.

I think Australia 25 years ago had characteristics that were different from today. I found perhaps 50-50, perhaps 50 per cent of the things of this Australia that I had imagined, thought, seen from afar were quite close to this image that I had from a distance, of this enormous country, that covers a lot of different climates, that changes smells, winds, animals, panoramas, so a vastness that is the impression that you get in the United States too. But here even bigger, because nature is very powerful, very present, no? So there’s this sensation... Whereas the other 50 per cent is a certain hardening, social hardening, hardening of self-protection that, however, exposes the country to the risk of lowering its capacity to communicate with other countries in the sense that it’s a country that’s very far away from Europe, from the US, from other countries, but it’s made up of Europeans, Anglo Saxons, people from all over the world. In some respects, it has lost the memory of its true and deepest nature, that is, to be a country that was made by immigrants, prisoners, people who were more unfortunate, who arrived from other countries and today there’s this closedness At least I hope with this new government there’ll be greater openness to social

issues, immigration and other things because I had this perception of relative closedness, if you know what I mean.

Many sports have changed value for sure, but not only because in sport there’s a sort of sense of fashion, some sports are fashionable some years, and others in other years, this is the pattern that’s repeated. Boxing had a massive, more epic, more spectacular presence at the beginning of the last century. In the past 20, 25 years, perhaps it’s assumed characteristics that are different from its original ones. It used to be about redemption, there was always a social metaphor behind boxing, a sort of getting even with, they took a boxer who’d had a rough childhood, from a tough background, from a dysfunctional family with more difficult social contexts, whereas today the show business-isation - just think of the match with Tyson, they rush through it, he shows up, lands three punches, hits the ground, a turnover of millions. So it’s all much colder, much more mechanical in many ways, than it was when there was a sort of romanticism associated with certain boxers in the past. With my character, the character of Joe, there’s a deep ethic that runs through everything, in his sport ethic, in his believing deeply... a very important vision... I think for Joe, boxing provides the opportunity to free himself, to make a clean slate of his past and come out on top morally, ethically. I clean myself through sport, I become more ethically refined and I bring forward the idea that kids can be taken from the street, away from the risk of bad company, and dedicate their energy to practising a sport that is also a sport that for certain subjects, certain kids, is also therapeutic, paradoxically. I remember the words up on the gym wall that said, ‘Better sweat in the gym than bleed in the street.’ That seemed to me provocative and violent on one hand, and on the other it made you understand that in a context like the outskirts of a big city with problems of inclusion, this sport could have had an educational function, no? It helped boys to do physical activity, to train, take them off the streets and away from bad influences, bad practices. In fact, I remember this plaque that was hung up in Joe’s (Joe Fazio) gym, a commendation for the work he did in his gym with neighbourhood boys. I mean it’s not as if they were paying for the lessons. For them it was a sort of parish recreation centre, it’s like what we were talking about before, what the parish theatre was for me, it has an important educational, social function. And this, despite Joe’s hard exterior, which covers a great fragility, between parentheses, inside, a great... deep down he’s a softie. In Italy we have a saying, ‘His bark’s bigger than his bite.’ Often people can have an outward appearance and approach that may seem violent when they’re really not. This is one such case. Joe and Carmel Fazio’s garden is still there imprinted right behind my eyes.

Joe’s house, I remember, one night we were shooting later than usual and there was this red sky and my boy ‘my dream boy’ dear Daniel (Daniel Amalm) - that was a magnificent, passionate encounter... it’s not that you’re always so lucky, an extraordinary kid, so full of honesty, so clean, who was very easy to like. He helped me a lot to play this character with his goodness, his mental cleanliness, he wasn’t competitive, he was incredibly helpful, and that helped me a lot working on my character, playing a very closed, silent, taciturn, man, but one who has a ‘wound in his heart’ I don’t know how to put it.

This window on this theme of immigrants is something I had opened in New York, with the Italian-American community that I met on Long Island. Of an evening we’d go to these Neapolitan friends’ place for dinner, and there’d be these old ladies there who no longer spoke anything, because they spoke this dialect that was a cross between American and slang so it was a sort on invention of a new language... Anyway, that window that I opened there, in 81 was a bit faded, but the theme of the immigrant, the person who picks up their suitcase and sets off, taking their imagination, dreams and desires with them, is a theme that you come across, and it’s dealt with forcefully here, but with other characteristics. This came out in some of the stories that Joe [Fazio] honoured me with, so to speak. They deeply affected me. There were some days when it was very difficult to have self-control. There was this one day when we were shooting this sequence where I was watching home movies and there were these films playing on the screen that were real home movies films, there was this film of Rai at four years of age with boxing gloves boxing away and that was a difficult day, because at a certain point I got so moved that my eyes got moist because I got choked up watching this tiny little boy with these big boxing gloves, and to understand the theme of the film, no? That is, the theme of obsession, of the ritual. So the central part of the film is this, true body of the film is this, no? Rai told me, ‘When I was a kid I boxed, my whole life was the ring.’ So that image of Rai, the look in his eye that I saw in that home movie really affected me. I’ll never forget that day. So looking at Daniel, you took away [I saw] that look, that weight, that bitterness, of someone who says, ‘I can only be what I am, no? I’m sorry if I’m rough at times, but this is my life.’ That’s why I mentioned a wound that this person has inside and then problems that a father like that and a son have relating to each other, that are the problems between anyone. I’ve got a son who’s 11 and a half and it’s not as if there aren’t communication problems, the problems begin immediately... So this film told the story of the average conflict that is already starting to happen to me when Lorenzo is having a bad day, he’s nervous, he doesn’t answer you, or if he does he’s rude. Let’s say you get used to, you train for being a father, it’s a job you do every day.

The relationship with Shawn Seet the director began with this very strong emotional rapport, but one that is very quiet from a point of view of language, because Shawn is quite introverted at first, and you think it’s going to be difficult to relate to him, but then instead as you gather speed - it takes a certain breaking in - he’s someone who opens completely with all his heart. And I have to say, that we had, I call it ‘the language of the eyes, the language of silence’ - that’s something I love in the relationship that happens between a director and an actor on set - that’s made up of looking at each other and understanding each other straight away. Let’s try that and see if what you suggest is more or less what he wanted... It’s like a synchronisation of intentions that enables you to work with fluidity, so it was very pleasant.

When I think of my three months in Perth, of the film, the mornings when I got up, the diet, the training - I lost 20kg - the supermarket, the light, the colours, the organisation, the Joe machine, it all seems like someone else’s life. It’s as if it was all 10 years ago, it’s weird, every so often I zoom back, and I have these

images, fragments, lights. The day we shot at Cottesloe, a series of sensations, an afternoon with Tony in the car, as if it were another film, a film of the film, a strange sensation. And I think in that street there’s that girl in that shop where we stopped every day and bought stuff and had a chat, the Thai guy at the front desk, there was an Indian concierge we made friends with who gave me a Ganesh, a series of strange things that are like parallel lives - I’m here [in Italy] in front of the window, there’s a mountain, a thread of smoke from a fire they’ve lit over the way. Whereas there, there’s that street, those people and the world, life, things going on...

In reality all the people I met had different backgrounds: Italian, Anglo Saxon, Greek, they each carried the story of a different people that has fused into a single idea of a people, the Australian people. One person had a French grandmother, another was Canadian, another was English - many encounters with many different cultures, I don’t think I noticed many differences. In Sydney at Bondi there’s this general image of a type of woman who’s very physical, very connected to the idea of sport and nature. I’d watch these kids who spend all day surfing. There’s this great desire for physicality, for strong physical activity. This seemed to me to be the thing that stood out. That and at times, there appears to be less attention to, they are less maniacal about, the obsession with beauty at all costs, with perfection. They forego it for a certain naturalness, a simplicity, which isn’t at all unpleasant - a certain simplicity - surfboards, surf, the salt, sarongs, a piece of cotton, nothing sophisticated, but that’s extremely elegant in its simplicity.

To sum up the experience of Two Fists, One Heart, I could say a great match with very few fists and many hearts. Few punches, many hearts, that’s how I’d put it. The encounter with Daniel stands out because of his age, because he plays my son. He really struck me for his easy-going manner, his passion and humility, which are things that, unfortunately, get a bit lost with some of my younger colleagues. Whereas with him... I’ve got this boxing trophy he gave me, he won it. I won the trophy for the biggest buyer, he won the trophy for the hardest worker in training and on the evening of the party, he gave it to me and that gave me great pleasure. That shows you what sort of kid he is. Dear Daniel, he’s always in my heart, this is something that gives me pleasure. That’s it.

JESSICA MARAIS (Kate)As one of the most exciting talents to graduate from NIDA in 2007, Jessica

Marais travelled back to her hometown for her first feature film.

Born in South Africa, Jessica moved to Perth with her family when she was eight years old. She grew up acting in school and community theatre productions with dancing, art and music her favourite pastimes when she wasn't taking drama lessons. With Jessica on vocals and guitar her band won Battle of the Bands for WA. She was 15 and composed the winning song.

Before attending NIDA Jessica studied psychology at the University of WA - as her character Kate does in TWO FISTS ONE HEART.

In an extraordinary year since graduating from NIDA, Jessica has starred in the television pilot and then the series of PACKED TO THE RAFTERS, the feature film TWO FISTS ONE HEART, was on stage in the MTC’s production of Patrick White’s SEASON OF SASPERILLA and played a guest role in the American television series LEGEND OF THE SEEKER.

Jessica Marais interview

Kate is the love interest, so to speak, in the film - she’s a 21-year-old psychology student, she lives with her brother Tom (Tim Minchin) in quite an artsy, bohemian sort of flat with their other friend Mia. She’s an immigrant, originally a London girl who moved to Australia when she was five. Her parents have gone back, so she and Tom kind of have free reign of their lives. I really like her as a character. She’s got a lot of integrity, she’s strong and it’s really refreshing to be a girl and not have to play a victim or a weak love interest - she’s quite ballsy and I was really drawn to that from the second I read the script.

She’s tattooed, which Joe Argo (Ennio Fantastichini) doesn’t too much like, even though he’s tattooed himself, which is a little bit hypocritical! She comes into Anthony’s life by mistake, they have a chance meeting and he pursues her. I think there’s definitely a really raw attraction between the two of them on a purely physical, hormonal level, and on top of that I think her psychology background makes her quite fascinated by the dark side of life that Anthony tends to walk. She’s attracted to and at the same time disturbed by the violence and conflict that surrounds his family, his upbringing and his boxing. When she sees Anthony actually fighting outside of the ring and on the street for the first time, it’s something that’s really confronting for her - it’s a big turning point for the character and their relationship.

Kate enjoys the zest for life and identifies with Anthony’s family. I think it’s something that’s innate with a lot of Italian upbringings, and you only have to watch Ennio in his everyday life to see that guts and that passion, and I think she finds that really appealing. She herself is a passionate character, the way she and her brother Tom explore that passion is passive, non-confrontational... that doesn’t mean she isn’t able to speak her mind.

In a pivotal scene she finds herself at a family dinner where she can’t seem to say the right thing, and you could cut the tension with a knife. At the same time, she wants to get involved with the family, and that’s another thing that comes from her psychology background, and I think something a lot of girls can identify with - trying to help out hopeless boys and their relationships with their messed-up fathers (laughs). But honestly, there is a saviour element to what she sees herself as in Anthony’s life, and I think she wants to mend the rift with his father - it’s something that she wants him to face up to. She wants him to be brave and actually take the passive road to being brave for once, instead of always fighting fire with fire.

In terms of preparing for Kate herself, I have a certain way of working I’ve been exposed to at NIDA where you answer certain questions about your

background and you get a really strong sense of who the character is, and then you are quite safe to improvise within that. If you know where you’ve come from you have a really strong sense of who the character is. In terms of actually rehearsing lines I tend to find you can be more spontaneous because you’re improvising within a really safe character space.

We have a lot of similarities - I actually did psychology as a unit at uni before I decided I wanted to be an actress and go to drama school. I have a real tattoo - yes, the tattoo in the movie is mine. And I come from quite a musical, some would say bohemian, background in a lot of ways as well. Kate’s parents are academics, so she’s been bought up with a strong sense of literature and a hunger for knowledge, which I think I have, but obviously I brushed up on and read my old psych books, just to try to get it up to speed for the film.

In terms of her interaction with the family, I guess everyone has come into contact in their life with someone who is from a different cultural and ideological walk of life to you, so I’ve tried to draw on those experiences in my own life, as well as just be open to reacting as honestly as I can to the way other actors are. Luckily Ennio and Daniel are both from quite different backgrounds to myself and they’re both very well cast, so I think a lot of the reactions don’t need to be too premeditated... you can work with a lot of spontaneity on set, which is really exciting, because often you don’t get that. Obviously I’ve done my homework, I have a few secrets up my sleeve as to how I prepare for a role, just reading the script as many times as possible - that’s a really huge thing for me, going over and over and over it, having a really open dialogue with Shawn because he’s such a warm, understanding and fluid director. He doesn’t hold you down to any iron decisions and he’s really happy to explore your character with you and to put a lot of trust in his actors. Luckily I knew most of the places so I didn’t have to do the ‘sensory, I know where I am’ so much, ‘cause The Mustang Bar and all that, I’d been to them before. Shawn’s direction is exciting for an actor because I think it allows for a lot more realism and spontaneity and quite an honest exploration into character and relationships. You get directors saying, ‘Now do the line like this’, and say it... he doesn’t do that, he is really happy to just hold your hand.

It’s a first-time feature film for him, so there’s an exciting, fresh buzz. It’s Daniel’s first feature, it’s my first feature... though it’s obviously not David Elfick’s first feature! But there are a lot of first-timers, so there’s this fresh, excitable vibe that is throughout the cast and crew, which is really cool. It’s a little scary sometimes, but it’s awesome - I think that nervousness and that fear and that not quite knowing what the outcome is going to be gives it an extra edge, gives the work an extra edge.

Daniel has no ego, and that’s so important when you’ve got the leading man, and especially coming in as the love interest you think, ‘I hope my leading man’s not going to give me any trouble!’ But he has absolutely no ego which means that he does better work all the time because of it, he’s so open to all the other actors and to suggestion and direction from Shawn. He and I have had a really open dialogue about the relationship between Kate and Anthony, he’s just been so approachable and fun to work with, and on top of that he’s a really

talented actor and a really, really talented guy. He’s an amazing boxer - it’s quite weird how well he’s been cast and I think that’s a credit to the casting director and to Shawn for casting him so well. He has that perfect balance between coming from the hard side of the tracks but being a really sensitive soft soul, which is so important because you need to get that sensitivity along with the hard edge of Anthony, otherwise the audience don’t go on that journey with him and don’t feel for him - I think Daniel does that really well.

Ennio is such a charmer off-set! We all had flowers on our first day as a little present from him, and off-set he’s just such a lovely, approachable guy, such a gentleman, but as Joe he has that fire, and he can actually be quite intimidating on set. You see actors passionately ‘pursuing their objectives’, we always talk about ‘What does my character want?’ and I think Ennio is always passionately pursuing his objective, on and off screen, which makes for a really exciting character and a really exciting guy just to have around set and to learn from.

I think acting is an apprenticeship craft essentially, especially for film for me because I come from a school where we have had film training, but it is primarily a theatre background, so you absolutely treat it as a huge apprenticeship, and a really awesome experience and an awesome opportunity to watch someone do what they do well, and what they’ve done for years, refining their craft, while the rest of us are starting out - it’s really cool.

I was so excited when I found out that David was producing this film, it was a really big selling point for the film for me because I’m such a fan of his work, and I really admire films like RABBIT PROOF FENCE and BLACKROCK. He’s such a gentle, lovely guy - and again, he’s this ominous presence on set, him and Rai. They’re hanging around in the background all the time and you can see that he has a lot of trust in everyone that’s been put on board. He’s not autocratic and dictatorial in his manner of producing - well from my experience anyway, he might be secretly - but I wouldn’t know about it! He knows what’s he’s doing and you only have to look at his body of work to feel quite safe, as a performer, being involved in a production that he’s happy to be producing - I think it got all of us feeling really, really secure and calm and safe.

Film is such a manipulative art-form... with theatre you have so many factors that you can’t control with an audience, and I think it’s amazing what people can do with film to evoke a response in an audience. I think there’s nothing quite like a beautiful soundtrack and beautiful cinematography and amazing editing to get a response from an audience, and that just excites me so much about film. That, as well as the collaborative effort that goes into making a film - I have such a huge respect for the amount of work that goes on. Unlike theatre where the actor is in control and very much at the forefront, there are still amazing designers and directors and everyone that goes into the whole ‘theatre-making’ process, but at the end of the day I think the actors have a little more control over the outcome of the performance than in film.

In film you’re just kind of this commodity and it’s kind of scary, but I’m a bit

of an adrenaline junkie and there must be a bit of masochist in there somewhere because I like the not knowing and seeing what people can do. Hopefully your best work doesn’t end up on the editing floor! I just have the most amazing respect for all the technical production that goes into film, and the directing... everything I grew up on was film, since I was young watching all the old MGM classics, cartoons like ANIMAL FARM, things like that have left the biggest imprint on my mind, and informed my growing as an artist that I’m so happy to be working in that medium.

I think NIDA is just an amazing opportunity for three years to do what you love every single day, and you’re surrounded by such talented people - not only from your course... you’re surrounded by other actors that are so talented and just as hungry for it as you, but from the other courses you have these amazing designers, these amazing technical production students and you come from this really tight-knit family, and these teachers that devote the most phenomenal amount of time and energy to making you a better actor, I’m really grateful to my experiences there.

I always acted as a child, at school... I was Wendy in PETER PAN in Year 7, and that was my first experience I suppose with acting. My sister and I were always putting on shows for our parents and the rest - I was a bit of a show pony! I guess I did it as a I grew up - I did drama lessons, I went to St Hilda’s, which is a girl’s school around here, and I had some really great drama teachers there, and we put on shows every year, musicals or theatre pieces and I did it for my TEE as one of my subjects. I was always just a fan of a really good story. I loved stories, I loved being read aloud to when I was little and I thought that nothing told a story like a good play or a good film. A good song can tell a story, dance tells stories, but I think the power of language - my Mum’s a literature teacher - and the power of the spoken word and all the silence that you experience in film and theatre just tells such a great story and I just wanted to be a part of that.

Acting, I didn’t think it was a good idea for a long time to pursue as a serious career choice...everyone told me, ‘Get a back-up plan’, ‘Do something else’, so I wanted to be an historian for a while, or a psychologist, and I worked in a bar and played in a band and had that period of teenage angst and not knowing what I was doing with my life and I just thought, ‘Bite the bullet’ and I really wanted to do it, and I auditioned for NIDA and I did a barking yakko theatre show here in Perth, some travelling kids theatre stuff and I just thought, ‘Oh no, I’m going to give this a shot while I’m young, and hopefully if I need a back-up plan I can do it later.’

I never thought that my first feature out of NIDA would be back in Perth. It’s really great, because that pressure I was talking about before is lighter by just feeling innately at home and not being displaced or disoriented. So often you’re meant to play a character that knows all these places, but as an actor you get thrown into these places and you have 15 minutes on location getting to know it before you’re there. So luckily my bearings are a little more intact for this project, which helps me to be more relaxed, and I get to see my family! Perth is such a beautiful landscape for filming - it is phenomenal and we have great locations

and so much more space, so it’s a really fantastic experience getting to come back here and do it.

I love music, I adore it, and I’ll always play. I can’t read music, I’m not an ‘accomplished musician’ as such, but I do write, and I do twang away on my guitar, I don’t know how well. I did sing in a band for a while and I’ll always have a passion for that. If opportunities open themselves up to me to pursue that as a career, I definitely would be interested in doing that at some point in my life. But right now, I’m focusing on my acting - I think I can only pour so much creative energy into one thing at a time, and I’ve always been a bit undecided. I liked music, I liked art, I liked dancing, I liked this and that and if I spread myself too thin I think I’m just going to be rubbish at all of them, so I need to just focus on acting for now.

PAUL PANTANO (Theo)Since beginning his career as a child actor, Paul Pantano has appeared in

over 40 Australian television series (BLUE HEELERS, WATER RATS, NEIGHBOURS, ALL SAINTS, STINGERS). TWO FISTS ONE HEART is his feature film debut.

Paul was able to draw on his own life experiences growing up in Australia with his Sicilian family. In playing Theo, Anthony’s best mate, it was important that he forge a strong bond with Daniel Amalm. Off-set in Perth they trained and hung out together, developing a friendship that is evident on screen.

Pantano had never boxed before so sent to the famous Jimmy Curruthers gym in Woolloomooloo, Sydney to learn the basics of the ‘noble art’ prior to filming. For the role he bulked up, putting 12kg on his normally slim frame of 56kg. Paul left the production with a new appreciation for boxers and the boxing world.

Paul Pantano interview

Theo (Paul Pantano) and Anthony (Daniel Amalm) have been best mates pretty much since primary school I’d say, because I spoke to Terry, who Theo is based on, and I was speaking to him about when he first met Rai (Fazio) and it was back in primary school when they were like in Year 5, so they’ve been best mates since a young age, and they basically do everything together. Always together and getting into fights and getting into mischief together, that’s their relationship.

When I read Theo, I saw him, as that ‘best mate’, they’re a bit crazy; he’s almost like his corner man in life. He goes with him wherever, they’re like a couple - almost always together. It’s a good relationship.

Daniel and I had never worked together. When we found we got the roles, we were in contact pretty much straight away, just over the phone. I came down to Perth a couple of weeks before filming just to hang out with him and we hit it off straight away. We got a lot of similarities. We would spend 12 hours on set

together and go for dinner and his girlfriend would be ringing him up going, ‘Mate, are you alright? You sure you’re not gay?’ Twelve hours together on set then going to dinner together, but it’s just because we’re here and we don’t know anybody and we just got each other, but he’s a great guy and we get along really well, so I’m really happy about that.

When we’re on set and we’re doing those scenes, it’s not like we’re acting, it’s kind of just the way we are. We’ve built that friendship, but it’s a lot closer than normal friendships.

I grew up as a kid watching ROCKY over and over and over again. It was one of my dreams always to be in a boxing film. For me, this is almost like a dream come true. I know it sounds cliché, but it’s actually true. Just the story itself, I think it’s a great story and being from a Sicilian family I liked its understanding about race. I had a chat to Rai, hearing his story and his perseverance with the script over many years made it all real. I really enjoyed the script.

I threw on a pair of gloves about a month before I got here. They sent me to the PCYC (Police & Community Youth Clubs) back in Sydney. I learnt pretty quick, it was good though. Physically, I was 56kg when I heard about the role back in March and I’m 68kg now, so I was at the gym. It was tough man, it was real tough. I put on (weight) because I went from eating two to three meals a day to eating six meals a day, three protein shakes and doing the gym in the morning and I was working at the same time. So I’d get to the gym at about 6:00am work out till 7:00am and I’m not a very good morning person, so I was throwing up with the protein shake and all this stuff I was taking. My body’s just not used to it, my body is just like in trauma or something. That was the biggest preparation for me, was putting on that 10-12 kg, that’s massive for me. That was the biggest thing, because I wanted him to be well built. I did hang out with a few Greek mates back in Sydney as well just to get a bit of a lingo that the Greeks talk, the young kids.

Theo’s more of a slugger, he’s a street fighter. I definitely wouldn’t call him a boxer. He’s just throwing haymakers, just hoping they land. He’s just crazy, a wild kind of street fighter.

Mate, I love Shawn Seet, he’s an amazing guy. The vision that Shawn has when he’s directing, it’s an amazing thing that I’ve never seen any other director do before. I watch Shawn when I sit down at set, just watch him going through everything and you see the questions ticking over in his head, he goes over everything, he covers everything in such detail. Because he’s got an editing background he’s thinking, ‘Okay, how am I going to edit this?’ He won’t blow his trumpet at all; he’s a very shy, very down-to-earth guy. I don’t think he even realises his own talent. I love working with Shawn, he’s great.

What I like about David Elfick is if he really wants something in the film, he’ll go for it, he’ll make sure that it happens which is great. His perseverance is admirable.

It’s been a really good shoot. I’ve had lots of fun, we had fun with cars, we’ve had a bit of everything, we got the girls, the cars, the nightclubs, the fight scenes, and it’s been good. I had one scene where we were sparring and I was stuffed after that, so I admire Daniel having to do all those scenes with him fighting. I’m pretty fit now after all that boxing trainin’.

ROSMARIE LENZO (Concetta)An accomplished actor, Rosemarie Lenzo brings a wealth of experience to

the role of Concetta, Anthony’s mother in TWO FISTS ONE HEART.

Rosemarie first trained in a theatre arts course at Curtin University in Western Australia before moving to New South Wales to study at NIDA. Rosemarie then became a founding member of the famed Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney. Rosemarie’s impressive list of theatre credits includes work with the Perth Theatre Company, Deckchair Theatre, Hole in the Wall and Griffin Theatre Company.

In addition to her great body of theatre work, Rosemarie has appeared in numerous Australian television series including THE YOUNG DOCTORS, A COUNTRY PRACTICE and BUSH PATROL. Her film credits include KILLING OF ANGEL STREET, TUDAWALI, LOVE IN LIMBO and JUSTICE.

Rosemarie Lenzo interview

Concetta Argo resonates very strongly with me, being of Sicilian background. She’s the glue that keeps the family together and as is the case with a lot of Italian families, the women actually do have a lot of control. They may on the surface appear to be submissive, but they are actually the glue that keeps the family together.

Joe (Ennio Fantastichini), her husband, is very mindful of her feelings, so even though he’s strong and there’s tension between him and the son, he’s shattered if she’s hurt. On another level, and that resonates very strongly with me being a mother as well, it’s the whole Italian cultural significance I guess and just the whole thing of being a parent and wanting to protect your child and there are certain things you can’t protect them from. I know, again what I know from that is my own family background, which is that my father came out after the war and worked for a few years, then sent for my mother and two brothers. And he went through a lot of prejudice at that time before Italians became accepted and quite popular.

I think there is a very strong work ethic there and I think the character of Joe wants the best for his son; he also wants what he didn’t have. I mean, that’s probably true in a lot of families, but it is definitely a cultural thing with immigrants if they’ve come from a background of poverty or not having a lot, and they really want their children to have the best.

I think her main concern is Anthony’s happiness. Although she’s supportive of Joe, I think if she had her druthers she’d rather he didn’t box,

because to watch a child getting punched would be very difficult for her. But she supports that because it’s what Joe did, it’s what he’s brought Anthony up to do and Anthony’s very good at it. But there is a point in the film where she does confront Joe about that and says to him that all his life ‘all you’ve cared about is boxing.’ Her main instinct and main priority would be Anthony’s happiness.

I’ve never seen any boxing before, apart from maybe on film and when they did one fight I was astonished at how exciting it was. I never thought that I would say that, I mean I’m a huge football fan, but I never thought watching boxing would actually get the adrenaline going and even though, clearly, it was stunts, it was so realistic that the crowd was getting really pumped.

I think telling the story of someone who’s fought really hard to have their story told is an important part of it. I think again for me, it’s a cultural thing, it’s showing and exposing that cultural background without it being stereotypical, which I guess because the writer is Italian, it doesn’t fall into that stereotypical mould.

Shawn is a real actor’s director. He allows you to find what he wants organically and even though there’s a time limit, obviously you can’t do take after take, the way he gives direction is by just suggesting a tangent maybe or a way of approaching it and then you kind of go, ‘Oh yeah, of course!’

Shawn’s got a very boyish innocence, charm about him, I guess. I mean that in the best possible way. He’s just been so focussed and so eager to share and to take direction and to share direction. He’s been delightful.

What I found with the cast is, from the first time we all met; there was an instant kind of bonding. Everyone was very excited, very friendly, very accepting, and I think that will show in the film.

We’ve played ‘Briscola’, which is an Italian card game in the caravan while we’ve been waiting and that’s brought back memories of my father and uncle and it’s lovely having Ennio and speaking Italian because as the older people pass on, the culture goes with them. I said to my brother a couple of weeks ago we should enrol in Italian speaking classes so we don’t forget and he said, ‘Or we can go visit our cousins.’ You get so caught up in your own world and being so busy, it’s been lovely just refreshing that.

The biggest challenge for me was a technical thing of being a theatre actor and moving into film. With theatre, you can go in night after night, with film you finish, you go home, ‘Oh if only I could do it again.’ So that’s, for me, that’s been the biggest challenge.

TIM MINCHIN (Tom)Actor, comedian and musician Tim Minchin, now based in London,

returned to his home own, Perth, to play his first movie role in TWO FISTS ONE HEART.

Tim’s international career has taken off with tours of Europe and, in 2008,

his first tour of America. He has won a string of awards including Best Alternative Comedy Act, HBO US Comedy Arts Festival 2007, Perrier Award Best Newcomer, Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2005 and Best Artiste, Best Show, Best Original Songs, Green Room Awards (Cabaret) 2006.

A feature-length documentary on Tim’s rise to success ROCK AND ROLL NERD was one of the sell-out successes of the 2008 Melbourne Film festival and will be released theatrically in Australia. Tim wrote, recorded and performed two original songs for TWO FISTS ONE HEART.

Tim Minchin interview

I like to think he’s not me, but it’s been an interesting experience because I wrote Tom into the script. After David saw me live, he approached me to chat about the possibility of a character like me and I said, ‘Well give me a go at it,’ and then he said, ‘Sure and if we keep the bits you write in the script you can play it.’ So ever since then, I’ve been trying to get him away from being me.

He (Tom) was a comedian originally and I’ve taken that away and made him a musician. It has been interesting because he is like me and Anthony (Daniel Amalm) is like Rai, and when Rai and I first met, we are totally different, with totally different views of Perth. We think we know Perth and yet Rai’s Perth never crossed my radar and my Perth’s never crossed his and you carry that over into the characters, and that’s why it’s interesting that Tom exists in the script.

David Elfick saw me doing a set in Melbourne, just coincidentally, with no intention, he didn’t know me, and his niece took him to see me play, doing my funny songs, a comedy set. A music comedy set. He rang my manager and said, ‘Could I meet with Tim?’ Elfick’s very instinctive. He’s quite a hippy. He sees something and thinks, ‘Oh, I think that’s meant to be.’ He felt that in the screenplay the world that Anthony’s character was being exposed to, this new world that he hadn’t really been a part of, this arty different world, wasn’t being represented enough. Anthony was emerging from a very narrow boxing world.

With Kate (Jessica Marais), the girlfriend, that’s one part where he thought, if Kate had a brother who was an artist, that would help expand that world so that we could have some of the stuff that Anthony’s been drawn towards. He (David Elfick) told me this theory and said, ‘Watching you, I was just thinking, “Oh yeah, that’s the sort of guy, someone a bit funny who uses words to fight, who uses words to gain power.”‘ He gave me the script and then we met in London. He just happened to be in London, I lived there and I’d been at lunch and I’d been drinking wine at lunchtime. I don’t always drink during the day, but I went to this meeting with Elfick a little bit pissed and so I was like ‘You should do this’, and ‘This is what needs to happen.’

The way I see the script, the broad theme is really just modern-day pen that’s mightier than the sword and Tom needs to represent the pen la, la, la, and I got home from that meeting going, ‘Oh shit, well I’ve gone this far’, and he rang me up and said, ‘Do you want to write it?’ and I said, ‘Sure.’

I’ve never written any script and you could probably tell if you looked at some of the earlier stuff I wrote, then with Rai and the various other people involved, it has become what it is and I think it’s alright. I think it fits and it certainly has added something to the movie that wasn’t there before.

When I said I haven’t written, I mean I’ve written a play and stuff, I mean I come from the theatre background, the trouble is pulling back on words, because film, you got pictures and ideally, you would tell most of the story with pictures. I was writing, I think top stuff, I was writing all this bang, bang, bang, it was a little bit unrealistic. So apart from holding back my natural verbosity, I found it really good and the process, because I’m new to it, I’m not sensitive about it. I just said to people, ‘Look, tell me it’s shit, tell me, just tell me, I just need to know’, and it’s been really good for me because I’m now trying to write telly and stuff and it’s just given me a little bit of confidence that I’ve had this experience. It’s very timely for me.

Tom is the embodiment of everything that Anthony isn’t and yet they get along well, and that’s the important thing we have to try and get right. We have to make real that Kate falls in love with Anthony and that Anthony likes Kate and that through Kate, he gets a friend that he never would have had - just like I’ve never met someone who boxes before making this film. I’ve never met someone like Fazio. In Perth especially, and in all cities in the world, but in Perth, there’s such a huge divide between what they call over here the ‘Golden Triangle’. The western suburbs, the private schools and all that. Balga where Rai grew up, it’s the joke suburb, that when you go to a private school like I went to, you go, ‘He’s probably from Balga.’

Tom needs to be the antithesis of that world where the talk is quite surface between males and this relationship between father and son is so damaged and there’s so much anger and violence is something that comes in very quickly as a solution and sometimes legitimately.

Tom represents the opposite. Tom represents someone who has never been in a fight in his life and who takes all his power from words and having a microphone and being able to manipulate, which is what I do in my life with comedy. It’s interesting to think about being a performer from that point of view and interesting on another level, which is that Daniel, who they cast as Anthony, is also not, he’s an atypical actor, he’s not sort of some soft sort of guy who went to NIDA and knows how to do body movement and breathing and who’s now pretending to be a boxer. I mean, Daniel’s like a, he’s a big strong bloody bloke, and so it’s been really good working with him.

Because I’ve done a lot more work on stage as an actor I don’t have a problem with sticking to lines, the odd thing is though, because these are my words I don’t have to say these, I don’t owe anyone my loyalty with these scripts, so actually I’m being quite loose on dialogue, which is the style of the film, being all hand-held the way Shawn works. I want it to feel like I’m talking off the cuff, there’s a skill in creating that feeling regardless, but I think by improvising, will make it feel a little bit more spontaneous as long as I deliver the lines that other

people need to know.

In fact, here’s a funny story, well I find it funny. I was in Melbourne for a few years trying to be an actor. I didn’t go to acting school and all that and Australia’s quite prejudiced, it’s very hard to get agents, it’s very hard to get attention if you are nobody from Western Australia. So I got very little work when I was in Melbourne and that’s why I turned to comedy really, out of frustration. The one gig I got in Melbourne was doing a little bit on a TV film called, LOOT, which had Jason Donovan in it. I was talking to Shawn and I went on, ‘I’ve only done one bit of stuff on TV ever, it was a thing with Jason Donovan’, and he went, ‘I directed that’ and I just went, ‘Oh my god! How bizarre!’ so the only two things I’ve ever done, Shawn directed and he had nothing to do with my casting in either of them, so it’s just purely coincidence.

I haven’t done a lot of work with film directors, but you know when someone’s smart and I think he’s brilliant. He’s obviously technically extremely proficient and knows what he wants, but he’s also great with actors. He’s very gentle and doesn’t try and say too much, he just tries to say the right thing. I think he’s fantastic.

I always come into these things with such naivety and it’s like everything I do, I seem to go, ‘Oh g’day, who are you?’ and everyone else is ‘David Elfick’, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ I really liked him as soon as I met him and I’ve spent loads of time just hanging at his house and talking about this script because apart from my scenes, I ended up being reasonably involved in the dramaturgical side of getting the script up to where it is now, so I’ve spent lots of time with him. I don’t know if I see him the way everyone else does. I’ve just had this one-on-one relationship with him, going to his house and going for a swim and stuff, so I don’t really know him by reputation or how he is as a producer or what the legend of him is. I just know this dude, who’s instinctive enough to involve me in a project in a way that I wasn’t necessarily experienced enough to do.

He’s very interesting, he’s like, ‘G’day fella.’ I don’t think many people would do what he did with me and go, ‘Yeah that’s right, come and write.’ He saw something in what I do on stage and thought, ‘Well that’s enough’, and also his push, his instinct to make sure it’s filmed in Perth, to make a Perth story, not just take a Perth story and make it a story about Sydney. To make it totally entrenched in Perth, I think that’s a huge thing. I think this movie... would have been a mistake to take this script and try to make into a Hollywood blockbuster, they’ve all been made. What was different about this is the particular geography and culture of this place and it’s unique, it’s this sky and this beach and this cultural divide, this socio-economic divide and it’s taken that commitment to Perth so far, that he’s insisted on casting me, who has no experience and casting Rai and all that stuff, he’s let it have its original heart.

Well I think in Rai’s world and therefore Anthony’s world, it’s the centre of power, the social power, it’s where the more doors you can get in without standing in the queue, the more cred you have and the more people who say ‘G’day Rai’ or ‘G’day Anthony’ as you walk down the street and because all the,

there’s lots of Italian restaurants and a lot of the sort of nightclub scene and all that is there. My version of Perth is the place you go if you’re really drunk and there’s absolutely nowhere else to go so you go, ‘Oh let’s go to Northbridge and vomit,’ or whatever, in fact the only places I ever went to in Northbridge were the gay clubs because you go and have a disco, wear your flares and sort of camp it up a bit - such a different version, it’s bizarre. Just over the road from Connections, where I go dancing to camp it up a bit, 15 years ago Rai would have been standing on the door of Heart nightclub or whatever. Next to that nightclub is The Brass Monkey, which is the only other place you go because they have a comedy night on and there’s a whole scene there, and then just around the corner is the theatre district, Arts Centre where there’s the Blue Room and Recobarts hall, where I’ve done HAMLET and the play I wrote all were there, but nothing to do with this and that power that Anthony has in this movie, and that, doesn’t exist, you know. It’s so weird, it’s one place with two completely different identities.

I’ve been on a really crazy schedule so, Tuesday last week, six days ago, I had my first day off since coming in from America. I came straight in and was on set, sort of 30 hours after I landed and then the next day I gotta write these songs and I had couple of little ideas. So I sat down and wrote these two songs and we rehearsed them on Wednesday. I decided to use people I played with before, which is I had a band in Perth, we recorded a record six years ago or something and yesterday we went to the studio to record the songs because we’re going to use them as the soundtrack for the scene. We’re not going to sound record live obviously. I stood in there, it’s just hilarious, it’s just exactly the same, different drummer but. We went, stood in the booth having done a take and listen to it back and I just went, ‘That’s our sound.’ It’s just exactly the same sound. I thought I had written these totally different tunes, I thought I’d written tunes that Tom might write, not Tim, but nah, can’t get away from it, yeah my brother playing his fender strat, which always sounds the way it sounds. It’s been really fun. I really like the songs we’ve written, one of them’s kind of weird, sort of slightly deep, slightly, slightly quirky lyrics, I don’t know how to write other sorts of lyrics and the other one’s just a full-on pop tune and so they’re the two I’ve written for the film.

KARL BIN RASHID (Athol)Karl Bin Rashid, who plays the part of the young Aboriginal boxer Athol,

grew up in Broome. He is from the Karajarri tribe. At the age of 10 his parents brought him down to Perth so that he could receive a better education. His first taste of the movie business was when he auditioned for Baz Luhrmann’s AUSTRALIA. He was one of 10 Aboriginal boys to come to Fox Studios in Sydney for a week-long workshop with Baz. It was a valuable experience. Karl then began voice and acting lessons with Ally Roberts back in Perth.

When Karl came to the Northbridge office of Palm Beach Pictures to audition for the part of Athol he was fully prepared. His screen test bowled over casting director Anne Robinson, not to mention Shawn Seet, David Elfick and Rai

Fazio; Karl had the part.

Karl began an intensive regime of rehearsals and boxing training while still going to school on his days off.

Oh yeah the boxing was pretty good. It’s really tiring and fun at the same time.

Well I like that he’s a boxer and he’s into that sport. I got into a routine where I stay up late, wake up early in the morning. The cast and crew were like my second family. I used to like hanging in the caravan with Ennio and Tony rehearsing lines and stuff, that was really good fun. Acting with Ennio taught me a lot, he would coach me when we were acting together.

Back at Governor Stirling Senior High, Karl was enjoying his new-found celebrity.

We was walking back from the library to the buses one afternoon and there was this big white car parked near the front gate. I said to my mates, ‘That’s my driver, do you want to come and meet him?’

Karl’s best experience on the film was seeing how it was all made.

It was great seeing how all the crew did their jobs, the lights and the camera and the way they used all this different equipment to get the shots. The way they would talk about things and make decisions.

For Karl’s mum, Linda, the film was a very positive experience for Karl and as a bonus she played a supporting non-speaking part as Athol’s mother which meant she had opportunities to be on the set and experience filmmaking first-hand. Linda sums it up as a top experience and when they logged onto the film’s website and read about his million-dollar smile that boosted him up bigtime.

Since the completion of filming Karl has continued his acting and voice lessons and is doing very well at school.

The filmmakers

SHAWN SEET (Director)Born in Malaysia, Shawn Seet is part of the new breed of Australian

filmmakers.

Trained as an editor, Seet made the switch to directing in 2003. He has established himself as one of the exciting talents in television direction in Australia. His ability to direct actors, and in particular actors of limited experience, has given his work an outstanding level of performance. Shawn has a strong visual style and this, coupled with his meticulous preparation, gives his work a quality that one does not expect, given the gruelling pace of Australian television.

TWO FISTS ONE HEART is a feature film shot in widescreen and so

Shawn's challenge was to adapt his shooting style to the larger format. The on-set mantra for the film was ‘keep it real’.

Shawn’s personal experience of coming to Australia from Malaysia at the age of 12 means that he has a deep understanding of the pressures young men from different cultural backgrounds feel in contemporary Australia.

Shawn Seet interview

Primarily for me it’s a father and son story. It traces Anthony Argo’s (Daniel Amalm) career as an amateur boxer and then into his professional career but that is only surface. For me, the core is about a young man, coming of age. It’s a young man achieving his manhood by understanding his father and accepting his faults then finding reconciliation through the thing that binds them and also maybe drives them apart, which is the father’s obsession about boxing. Entwined in this journey is a love story with Kate (Jessica Marais).

The father and son, that’s really close to my heart. I had a similar upbringing, that whole thing of wanting to be what your father wants you to be, but at the same time to become who you are. You need to ‘kill your father’ metaphorically. Boxing, it’s a gift genre, it’s one of the great genres of cinema, (there are) many great boxing films. Boxing is a spectacle that’s made for an audience. I always say there’s three characters in boxing; there’s the two boxers and there’s the audience. They’re the three elements, and I’m bringing the audience and pressure that the audience brings into the ring as well, to make the boxing sequences exciting.

It was really a gift when David Elfick rang me up and said ‘Oh, I got this film and I don’t know if you’d be interested blah, blah, blah,’ and suddenly it was like, tick the boxes. It’s about immigrants, I’m Chinese but it’s still, there’s a lot of comparisons, there’s the understanding being a minority culture. It was an action film but not violent, well it’s got violence of course, but there’s no guns in the film, I like that. The understanding of the father and understanding, as I say, of another culture, I’m not Italian, but having an understanding of being isolated by a culture. There’s so many things about this film that I love, so it was just like tick, tick, tick as I was reading the script.

There’s a great responsibility directing this movie, a great sort of onus on you to create the look of a film that hasn’t been seen before. And for the performances it’s not just with each actor, it’s a very collaborative process and what I like to do is let the elements come together, let everybody bring what they will to the table and then work with the mix and see how it goes. So I guess that’s my technique with the actors. I give them freedom and then start to mould what they’re doing as opposed to imposing my preconception because I always find, there’s gold in there, everybody’s made the movie in their head and they’re all different. Somehow that collision of ideas on set becomes the movie.

It’s partly the interpretation of the script and partly understanding that we’re going to make this in Perth and the resources that we would have through Rai, particularly because he’s our connection to a lot of very real things, so my

approach to it was to say, ‘look what we’ve got, we’ve got what no other boxing film has, we’ve got the real deal. We’ve got real boxers, we have real locations where they’re boxing, and we’ve got access to some real events which we can just slot in’, which has been fantastically successful, and so my approach is meant to kind of keep it on a, not to say doco level, but to give it a live-ness.

We’ve gone hand-held, gone very observational so we don’t always have the right shot. We’re shooting past things; we’re shooting over things, so we get the feeling that we’re flies on the wall. In reality, I guess that’s part of my approach and that works very well with the natural acting style. Sometimes I give one actor directions and won’t let the other actor know, so that little accidents and all natural things that are real will happen. We shoot with two cameras so we can let things happen and then you capture the reality.

Obviously you could do it another way, and it has been done many other ways in the past, but this is our opportunity to do something unique, which is to have real boxers. So we got Rai (Rai Fazio) and Daniel, the two main boxers, both have boxed before, we made sure all their opponents were real boxers. It meant we didn’t have to fake a lot of things. The guys pull their punches a bit, but they’re willing to wear it, wear a punch or two and that makes it that much more real.

The story was written in Perth and although there are many universal themes that will have resonance with people all over the world, this story has come from somewhere and Perth has its own character. There’s a lot of Perth in the film and I think it was important. It was important, in a story point of view because I feel location is character, it’s one of the characters in the film.

I worked with David Elfick many, many years ago on another film and it was good to have this opportunity to work with him again. He’s very enthusiastic and you need it in something like this. David’s a can–do person, he makes things happen, he’s got a wealth of knowledge. It’s great having someone like that who’s supportive and nurturing so I feel like I’ve got that safety net.

Ennio’s a dream, like I’ll say the same about everybody in the cast, they’re a dream, all in their own way, but Ennio... Ennio’s got this wild energy and it’s quite infectious.

Daniel’s a very different kind of actor. Ennio’s a lot more analytical about things, but at the same time they’re a perfect match. I just believe they’re father and son. Daniel’s an instinctive actor, he’s not sure why things work but then he does them. He just does it and it comes from here, then you can talk about it later and analyse things with him but he’s, nah he just goes and does it and he’s spot on.

Jessica! Again a dream on this film and, watch this space, she’s going to be a big star. The camera loves her, she’s got amazing technique, she’s a wonderful actress. Very generous and quite fearless, I know that’s kind of a strange thing to say about an actress, but I feel like she just puts it out there and that’s very important for me with actors.

DAVID ELFICK (Producer)David Elfick’s film career, which now spans four decades, is characterised

by robust, well-crafted films that tell quintessentially Australian stories. He was one of the key fimmakers of the Australian film renaissance of the 70s and while a number of his films have international elements, he has chosen to remain in Australia and develop screenplays that are deeply imbedded in the Australian psyche.

His themes reflect his concern with Australian identity, the relationship the people have to their environment and how this has shaped the Australian character. Many of the films have a strong biographical element and draw on real events for their narrative.

David met Rai Fazio when he was in Perth for the opening of RABBIT PROOF FENCE in 2002. Rai had written a long intensely personal screenplay centring on his relationship with his father and the world of boxing.

“Rai is a larger-than-life character full of energy, humour and enthusiasm and he carries with him the aura of a boxing champion. The screenplay had an intensity, a passion, that is often lacking in Australian drama. I decided to take the project on with myself acting as script editor. That began a journey of some six years honing the screenplay into a tight contemporary story. Along the way we sought the help of some experienced screenwriters who were of enormous assistance, particularly with the structure of the story. It was great for Rai to learn from some of the best Australian writers, but ultimately he was the one who had to deliver the screenplay.”

The development of the film received a confidence-building boost when Alan Finney from Disney and Jeremy Thomas from Hanway Films agreed to commit their companies to the distribution of the film. “Alan and Jeremy came on board early and stuck with the project, even when things didn’t seem like they would ever happen. These fellows are the best in the business and their continued support kept me believing in the film’s potential. I’m not someone who gives up easily, besides Rai and I had become very close and to walk away when things were not happening as you expected would be a betrayal of our friendship. At one stage a crucial piece of the financing structure fell away just before the end of the financial year (June 30) which meant we had to start all over again. It took a further two years before the film was financed but this delay resulted in a better financial structure and more importantly, more time to continue working on the screenplay.”

Director Shawn Seet had worked as an assistant editor on Elfick’s film HARBOUR BEAT. His career had flourished, first as an editor and then as a director of television drama. “In selecting a director for the film I wanted someone who had developed a confident style and would see this film as a tremendous opportunity to launch their feature career to the world. I liked Shawn from our earlier working experience. He is naturally shy, but underneath he has confidence and had developed his own strong visual style. There is an urgency about his camera as it discovers and focuses on information. His editing

background has given him enormous confidence to treat the material in a bold way knowing that it will cut together (well). Rai, Shawn and I are very different but I believe that our talents complemented each other. We were a formidable film-making team that took on the enormous challenges of shooting TWO FISTS ONE HEART.

“We have made a film in a realist style because I think that the best films in the boxing genre are realist - THE SETUP, ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS. The subtext of the film is the role of violence in contemporary society: can it justify its place? The differing views of the main characters Joe, Anthony, Tom and Kate are an important part of this narrative. Anthony’s emotional journey intertwines the resolution of the conflict with his father and his examination of the role of violence in resolving conflict. How much responsibility should each individual take in ensuring the working of a safe and just society? Do we take on the wife basher, the child basher, the ice-crazed junkie? That we do not draw a finite conclusion from this leaves the subject open for debate by the film’s audience. I think this approach to narrative is subtle and effective for realist cinema.

“Anthony is from a traditional Sicilian family; people from this tiny island have a fearless and ruthless way of resolving conflict, hence the disproportionate influence organisations like the mafia have in many civilised societies.

“We also tried to show what it is like to be a young boxer, the unrelenting toughness of the sport and in filming the fights sequences, with real leather flying; we have shot our film in a way that feels like an actual bout. Our make-up person was covering up facial bruises for the early rounds rather than applying fake bruises and blood.

“It’s a film about a young man from a restricted background gaining a wider view of the world and in so being better equipped to participate and contribute to society. Anthony justifies his father’s faith in him and he is now free to be his own man and make his own decisions. It’s a positive view, much in contrast to my 1996 film BLACKROCK, which was a negative and somewhat depressing view of young Australian males.”

David recently completed a six-year term as Deputy Chairman of the Board for the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). He was instrumental in the relocation of AFTRS to the Entertainment Quarter adjacent to Fox Studios. His film awards include the Australian Film Institute (Best Picture), Berlin Film Festival Crystal Bear (Jury Prize), International Catholic Film Critics Award (Best Picture), Australian Writers Guild (Best Screenplay, twice), Rio De Janerio Film Festival (Audience Prize), Taoromia Film Festival (Best Film). In 2005, David received an Australia Day award in recognition of his achievements as a filmmaker and mentor.

RAI FAZIO (Executive Producer/Writer)Born to a Sicilian/Australian family in Perth, Western Australia, Rai

entered the ring at the tender age of four. His father Joe was his trainer. There

was no choice; it was considered a right of passage. When Rai was fighting, Joe always said, ‘Do not be afraid son, he is justa like you, with two fists and one heart.’

By the time Rai was a teenager he had fought over 50 amateur fights, winning the Junior Golden Gloves Championship, state titles and the Australian Amateur Boxing Title. Despite the years of training and successes, both in the ring and in business, Rai felt there was still something that he really wanted in his life - it was to write TWO FISTS ONE HEART.

After years of hard work, finally Rai Fazio’s dream has come true...

Rai Fazio interview

I play an ex-prisoner whose name is Nico. He’s a guy who was incarcerated as a youth and there’s a visit to the prison by Joe Argo (Ennio Fantastichini) the boxing trainer and Nico spars with Joe’s son Anthony (Daniel Amalm). Ultimately Nico gets out of jail and he and Joe meet again and Joe is impressed by his toughness so he invites him down to his gym. Nico then becomes a kind of replacement son for Joe but eventually betrays him and there’s a big fight-off at the end.

When I was a kid I read a book on Sylvester Stallone and I was the only Italian in my school that boxed, so there was a connection. I read how he wrote the first ROCKY and I was always intrigued by that and had it inside me until I was about 29 and then I was at an age when I thought... ‘I’ve got to do this.’

Some years later in a New York café I ran into Harvey Keitel. We had a talk and this kind of triggered me again so I put pen to paper. Some of it’s ‘bang on’ and some of it’s fictional. Some of it in toned down and some toned up.

The beauty of the film is... and I suppose about film in general, is that you can get to say something to someone that you never got to say to them in real life, whether they’re alive or not.

The first thing I remember as a kid is the boxing gym in the backyard. I had my very first fight in 1972, I was four years old and I remember I got this medal and I used to roll it up and down in the driveway, it was my number one toy, that’s all I ever did.

Growing up I didn’t know any different so I thought it was the norm. As I got a bit older I realised it wasn’t the norm.

I had an interesting upbringing and found out a bit about my Dad’s past because he never sort of talked about it. I found an Olympic Games passport once and I thought ‘Something’s going on here.’

It’s not just a film that’s all boxing, boxing, boxing. Sure, there’s an element of boxing, but it’s a story about a man running from his past and trying to live his dream through his kid and about a kid who wants to do the right thing by his family but also do the right thing and have his own life. Ultimately it’s a love story between a father and son... with a boxing element and there’s a girlfriend

and betrayal.

I think I had a tougher upbringing than what the film shows but it’s pretty close to it. Obviously it’s hard to tell a 30-year story in about an hour. I wrote it, had some help along the way and David Elfick (producer) has the never-say-die approach. He just doesn’t give up and the runs are on the board for him with films such as NEWSFRONT and RABBIT PROOF FENCE.

I heard an interview once where Madonna said, ‘You just know’, and even in my gut as a kid, everything I was doing, the jobs I had, I just knew I wasn’t going to be there and that this is what I was going to do. There wasn’t a day I went out the door when I didn’t think the film was going to be made.

Here at the house in the gym, the great thing about our set is you’ve got kids learning, kids that can box, a couple of guys who are ex-Australian champions, so that it gives it a sense of realism. Of the guys that are in the fight scenes, there’s not an actual person, including our lead Daniel, that hasn’t boxed and the good thing is that there’s no egos, they’re all good kids.

You’ve got a task and so you say, ‘This is what I want’ and you choreograph it and they go through it and they do it. Over and above that, the beauty is when you’ve got two guys who can box, you can say, ‘Okay boys, just move around at 50-60 per cent and do your thing. Don’t worry about the camera, just think about this guy, you might get tagged.’ It’s an incredible sense of realism because you can’t choreograph that. So we couple that with the choreographed fights we have done.

Shawn’s got a real sense of ‘street’. This is a very real film so his whole thing is about keeping it real and he’s got a pretty good idea about that. With the boxing I worked closely with him and he’s been doing a few boxing lessons himself. What I tried to do with each fight scene is make every one different, so if you beat this guy it’s with a rip hook and a right hand and sometimes you might just win on points.

There were really two big worries at the beginning. My father’s a bit of a character, he’s about 5 feet 9 inches with big hands, big feet and big attitude and the hardest thing was to find someone who could come across on-screen to fill his shoes. There were a couple of guys we looked at, but when Shawn opened up the computer and I saw Ennio you could tell straight away. You meet the guy and he’s perfect and my dad fell in love with him.

When we started the audition process, Ennio’s got a huge job and my dad would sort of take care of that, but finding a young guy, an actor who can box, was something I thought was going to be a mission. We were looking at a few guys and obviously he had to look like a European, be the right size and have a bit of muscle on him... and he’s got to learn how to box, which is not the sort of thing you can teach someone in six weeks, especially to look good.

All these guys came to audition and there was this one who was delivering these lines and he had this look in his eye and boxers have this thing about them, it’s between the nose and the eyes and he had it. He was just like a cool

kid and he looked a bit ‘street’. Daniel took his shirt off, started throwing punches and within three seconds I said, ‘That’s him!’ He said ‘I’ve only had one fight’ but he moves like he’s had 20 and he moves beautifully, playing a boxer who boxes like Anthony Mundine.

HUGH MILLER (Director of Photography)Hugh Miller graduated from AFTRS with a Master of Arts in

Cinematography in 2002. He won the Kodak Award for Best Cinematography at the New York International Student Film Festival for his film ASH WEDNESDAY and the Gold ACS award for his Killing Heidi music video CALM DOWN.

Hugh has worked on numerous projects across HD, DV, Super 16 and 35mm formats. His documentary work includes the ABC mockumentary series BUSH MECHANICS. His extensive documentary experience perfectly complements director Shawn Seet’s ethos of ‘keep it real.’ TWO FISTS ONE HEART is his third feature film.

Hugh Miller interview

My approach to shooting this film was quite simple and hopefully not too self-conscious. It had to feel believable and real but also enhance the drama. We chose to use the hand-held camera and as much available light as we could.

What I love about this cinema verité -inspired style of filmmaking is that by not being precious about how every frame looks and the way it is serving the story, as filmmakers we create many happy accidents. An example of this is when you are lit and set for a particular moment in the scene, but for the nature of keeping the performance flowing, we run everything before and after our desired set-up. This often creates a challenge for the camera and the focus puller, as almost the entire film was shot wide-open aperture, but often provides very real and believable footage, in keeping with the mantra set about by Shawn and David of ‘keep it real.’

There were many occasions when we had to create a sense of realism through the lighting and camera placement in a totally set-up scenario. This was always inspired by the actuality of the environment we were trying to portray. An example of this is Concetta’s birthday party in the back of the Argo house. When we surveyed this location on the recce, there were two large industrial green floodlights that the owners had set up for large parties just like this. We used this as a reference and matched our film lights to these, but were able to use the existing fittings for the wide shots.

When I first met Shawn about shooting TWO FISTS ONE HEART, we had the usual discussion about what format to shoot on. As always, every option came to the table 35mm, 16mm, digital, even HDV. Shawn’s requirements were long hand-held takes, variable speeds and a shallow depth of field. Clearly this led to the choice of the Genesis camera system. The shallow depth comes from a super 35mm-sized format and I knew that 1000ft magazines aren’t much fun on

an eight-week, entirely hand-held shoot. For example, the scene where Anthony talks to his father who is carrying the Madonna in the Blessing of the Fleet parade. We just joined in the parade and shot a few takes, then replaced the real participants with our actors for the takes. Changing magazines on the run would have been impossible in a situation like this.

As for lenses we chose the Panavision Ultra Speed Prime lenses because of their faster aperture. On occasions we chose the modified lenses used on SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. These lenses had had the coating removed so that they gave unusual flares and contrast rendition.

Once we decided to shoot 2.35:1 there weren’t to many digital camera systems that could cope with this and have the flexibility of variable frame rates. The advantage of this system for the boxing was that we were able to shoot a lot of the boxing at 50fps with a 240 degrees shutter that could also be used at 25fps which has an equivalent shutter of 120 degrees when sped up.

For the big fight at the end we lit it with about 100 par can lights running off a large aluminium tri truss frame. These had the advantage of looking authentic in-shot and we could run them on several dimmers, so that we could turn off the ones above the cameras that we wanted to create a bit of contrast on. This gave us plenty of flexibility to quickly change set-ups. It also worked quite well as we had up to four cameras running on this scene so we didn’t have to frame around light stands and the circus that seems to follow the cameras around on the shoot.

In conclusion I feel that this observational style helped enhance the drama for the film. At some locations, the crowd reactions were real people at real boxing events. We used established boxing venues, filming our boxers in the ring at the half-time break for the evening’s boxing card. This approach is possibly the best way to marry the actuality with our constructed drama.

SAM RICKARD (Production Designer)‘Keep it real’ was the mantra production designer Sam Rickard heard from

director Seet and producer David Elfick. The design philosophy was not to design but rather to use what existed, then add or expand detail to make it work for the characters and the story.

Shawn and I looked at lots of movies together, especially boxing films like the ROCKYS and CINDERELLA MAN. Shawn didn’t like anything that was too composed. He was really excited about shooting in Perth because the story had its roots there which was a reality and it’s a city that hasn’t really been seen in Australian feature films. We decided to use real locations as much as possible.

The film had four strong visual themes. The first was the dry, hot, suburban terrain of suburbs like Balga. Within this terrain exist ethnic minorities like the Italians who have established their own oasis there. That was the concept for the Argo house. The property was owned by the Silvestros, an Italian family that used it as their family compound. It was a 1930s house with 70s and

80s additions, an established vegetable garden, chicken coop and training area. We created a living room, kitchen and hallway in the house, increased the garden with flowers, vegetables and trees and built a boxing ring outside on the lawn. This approach of adding to existing locations was also applied to Kate’s house. First we chose a house in a leafier suburb that felt closer to the city, more student, then we dressed it as the rented house of a musician (Tim Minchin playing Tom) and his psychology student younger sister Kate.

Northbridge was the second location group. We used venues for their eclectic look - Black Bettys, the Luxe Bar, Good Fortune Restaurant, the Mustang Bar and redressed the old Romany restaurant as Bar Angelo. The action takes place as much on the streets as in the venues and we tried to capture the Friday night hedonism of Northbridge, the eternal search for a good time often resulting in binge drinking, drug excess and violence, all under the colourful glare of the neons.

The third element is the visual beauty of Perth itself, the sun setting over the ocean, Cottesloe Beach, the Swan River, the city skyline, the 19th century architecture of Fremantle, the funky feel of Clancy’s Hotel.

The final visual element is, of course, the boxing. Again we used real boxing venues like the Embassy, the Hellenic Centre, the Italian Club and, for the climatic end fight, Challenge Stadium. In most cases we were required to erect the boxing ring for filming. For the Embassy we filmed on actual fight nights and slotted our sequences of a montage of knockouts in between real bouts. This gave us a very authentic look, especially with the fight crowd. For Challenge Stadium we dressed the venue the way it would look for a big title fight. For all the props associated with boxing, our approach was ‘Don’t buy it, borrow or hire it,’ and if you have to buy it, swap it for a used one.

We received tremendous co-operation from all the people we dealt with, right up to the Mayor of Perth. Rai was the great location finder and gave us access to his incredible list of contacts. Because so much of the fictional story drew from Rai’s life, it was a very personal film to work on and we reflected this in the design of the film.’

GAIL PETHER (Costume Designer)Costume designer Gail Pether is the inspiration behind Memory Lane, the

largest clothing rental business in Perth. It’s a mecca for any film, stage or for party requirements for costumes, with an incredible 20,000 items in stock. However, when Gail and her two assistants, daughter Sam and Holly Jones, went along to Friday night fight night at the Embassy Ballroom they realised they had a lot to learn for TWO FISTS ONE HEART.

We sat ringside and as we looked around at the real crowd, the fighters and their trainers, we began to understand what we had got ourselves into. Thirty years costume experience didn’t count for much. The film is contemporary so it has to draw on reality, and at the same time it’s a movie about boxers and boxing so it has to have style, danger and excitement in the wardrobe. The crowd at the

Embassy gave us a taste of the real thing. It was quite tribal in terms of their support for each fighter, very vocal, dagger looks from table to table. The males had a tough bikie-linked look - plenty of mullets, logos, tatts, the girls in tight tops and cleavage, tough people enjoying a tough sport.

“The inter-club bouts, like the one we staged at the Hellenic centre, were a totally different crowd. It was a family night and the loyalties were divided along club and ethnic lines. For the climactic end fight at Challenge Stadium it was a big social event, sports stars and glamour rubbing shoulders with the fight fans.

“As for the boxers, the Argo camp were old-school, even in a modern film, and they had to look natural for the parts they were playing. This contrasted with the Nico character who was more the showman, a lot more flash, especially when he came under the influence of used car salesman Costa Akides. I imported most of Nico’s boxing wardrobe from America and had to source the silver boots he wears in the final fight from Germany, as nothing like this existed here.

“The cultural diversity of Perth is a strong element in the story and, where possible, we used the real thing - the Chinese chefs in the restaurant scene, locating our actors amongst the actual event of the blessing of the fleet for a dramatic father-son confrontation.

“For the nightlife scenes in Northbridge we had a number of looks. For the Luxe Bar it was models, glamour, cashed up, semi-exclusive; for the Mustang, it’s a sports and music venue, some suits, lots of dress-up sports wear and, of course, the ‘white trash’ look for girls that has been popularised in the celebrity magazines.

“As for Black Bettys, where Anthony Argo works as a doorman, it’s a hard rocking music where bourbon is the favoured drink and a tight tee is not out of place. It was a demanding shoot, but a very enjoyable one for me, conveying the look of modern Perth through the costumes.”

Now after hundreds of tracksuits, 28 pairs of boxing trunks, 14 pairs of stinking boots and eight groin guards, Gail and her team consider themselves boxing experts, with Sam still making her 6:00am pilgrimage to the Alive Gym in Northbridge for boxing lessons.

CAST LISTAnthony Argo Daniel Amalm

Joe Argo Ennio Fantastichini

Theo Paul Pantano

Kate Jessica Marais

Concetta Argo Rosemarie Lenzo

Nico Rai Fazio

Francesca Louisa Mignone

Tom Tim Minchin

Athol Karl Bin Rashid

Claudia Monique D’Souza

Sandro Mark Cassamento

Uncle Charlie Tony Poli

George Akidis Renato Fabretti

Costas Akidis Costas Kilias

Sarah (Charlie’s wife) Jodie Buzza

Rooster Vito de Francesco

Arthur Geoff Miethe

Wazza Ben Young

Mick Sam Greco

Fong Chris D’Souza

Jessica Nicole Trufino

Anthony (7 years) Johnny Silvestro

Sammy (7 years) Paul Silvestro

Waiter Ben Khaw

Dario Sam Elia

Grease Monkey Josh York

Tanya Gemma Northover

Cheryl Katie Keady

Julie Pia Prendiville

Rebecca Sharmain Kendrick

Young Hoon #1 Paul Berenger

Young Hoon #2 Brodie Sharland

Pete Steve Morris

Pete’s Mate Sam Pilot

Athol’s Mother Linda James

Sgt Jack Harmes Luke Hewitt

Luke Luke Wyllie

Silvo Anthony Silvestro

Prison Boxer Mal McGrath

Davidson Shane Reilly Jnr

Davidson’s Trainer Shane Reilly Snr

Sports Club Referee Maxsim Suljmani

Ring Doctor Joe Shivers

Bar Angelo Waiter Sandro Signorile

Slats Matthew Hardie

Female Boxer #1 Clare Ghabrial

Female Boxer #2 Erin McGowan

Athol’s Opponent Jamie Pietersen

Opponents Trainer Steve Pietersen

Hellenic Club MC Luciano Vecchio

Referee Gary Ingraham

Available Girl Nat Foster

MIA Steve Cruz-Martin

Bouncer Peter Carr

Drunken Punter Goran Ozanic

Lecturer Ingle Knight

Nico’s RSL Opponent Monty Margjini

Opponents Trainer Omar Calluk

RSL Club Referee Dave Pearson

ICE Addict Damien Bradford

Nico’s Opponent #1 Lachlan Bell

Nico’s Opponent #2 Anthony Sayasone

Nico’s Opponent #3 Adam Hollioke

Nerd Guy Ben Russell

Col the Manager Wayne ‘Spinner’ Brennan

Kingston Craig Murat

Regent Fight MC Greg McNeil

Tattooed Man Rob Muslovich

Police Boys Opponent Ronald Cross

Opponents Trainer Sean Nash

Police Boys Referee Dave Evans

Com. Centre Opponent Frank Ioppolo

Anthony’s Opponent Kevin Lothain

Nico’s Opponent Dave Letizia

Ex Boxer Denis McInerney

Al Vardy Tony Ioppolo

Tony Mick Robinson

Referee Bill Ivory Carl Zapia

Ring Announcer John Taylor

Ring Girl #1 Renee Baker

Ring Girl #2 Michelle Johnson