Eric Bana says the future of film looks bleak but he hopes The Dry can help kickstart battling cinemas

The Melbourne actor’s big-screen adaptation of best-selling murder mystery The Dry will open on New Year’s Day, having been pushed back from its original August release date due to coronavirus shutdowns. While cinemas have reopened around the country – with the current exception of Melbourne – they have had an uphill battle wooing audiences back as studios pushed their major releases such as James Bond film No Time To Die and Marvel’s Black Widow well into next year, leaving them with precious little new product to screen. “Living here in Melbourne and going through what we have been going through here, I think it’s going to be at a good time,” said Bana. “I know the exhibitors are really excited and it’s a title that can’t be taken away from them at the last minute, which is something different than they have been experiencing in the last six months. We’re really impatient to share it with people.” Bana, who usually works on one major project a year, said that it was too soon to tell the effects of the pandemic on the film and television industry but said that he hadn’t filmed anything this year due to COVID and the outlook for next year was also looking bleak. “I think it’s very early days,” he said. “I thought to myself at the beginning of this that I was unlikely to work until the end of 2021. That probably sounds very pessimistic but I don’t know that I will be far off that. We’re probably going to be one of the last to get back to normal Bana signed on as producer and star after his wife gave him a copy of The Dry, written by former News Corp journalist turned best-selling novelist Jane Harper and set in the drought-stricken Mallee Region of Victoria, where the film was also shot. Motorcycle enthusiast Bana has seen the tough conditions first hand thanks to his frequent road trips through the region and hopes the film will also highlight the struggles of many Australians on the land dealing with extreme weather. “I think the events of the last 12 months have brought the drought and the effects of the bushfire pretty close to home,” he said. “But there is still that ability to have a physical disconnect between the two – it’s not until the smoke hits the city that people are forced to consider how difficult that period must have been for people day in, day out.” Bana said the cast and crew were welcomed with open arms by the remote local communities, some of which didn’t even have drinking water, but rented out their houses and businesses and appeared as extras in the film. “In terms of all the support we got in all the towns we visited, it was very real and you did get a sense that for a lot of them there wasn’t a lot happening and any kind of show coming into town was a welcome distraction and gave people a little bit of energy and a lot of people got jobs out of it,” he said.