There's more than one side to Bryan Brown.
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Most will know him for his onscreen work, of course. For more than 50 years, he's been a familiar presence in Australian and international films such as Dirty Deeds, Breaker Morant, F/X, and Palm Beach - directed by his wife and fellow actor Rachel Ward.
He's also starred in TV mini-series, from A Town Like Alice and The Thorn Birds - both based on popular Australian novels - back in the 1980s to Old School in 2013, in which he plays an ex-con teaming up with a retired cop (Sam Neill) to solve a crime.
Brown has played everything from a private investigator (Peter Corris's Cliff Hardy in The Empty Beach) to a seasoned bartender who takes Tom Cruise under his wing in Cocktail. Although he made Hollywood movies, he never "went Hollywood": he's still based in Australia, has continued to work here, and has retained his native accent and laconic humour - he answered the phone for the interview with "Hello, unknown caller."
And unlike many a Hollywood celebrity, he and his wife, actress and director Rachel Ward, have sustained a long marriage - they're up to 40 years.
But he's more than just an actor. In conversation, more than once, he refers to himself as a storyteller, no matter what the medium. In addition to helping to tell stories on screen as an actor, he's also a producer - among his credits is the TV series Twisted Tales.
And in 2021, Brown revealed yet another talent, as a writer, publishing the short story collection Sweet Jimmy. Now comes his first novel, The Drowning.
In the opening pages, David, an Indigenous boy, is poking around in the bush and sees a man come out of a hole in the ground, leading a woman on a rope. The man ties the woman to a stake and starts cooking some food on a fire. Then the man leaves and David keeps watching the woman, who sits still as the food cooks. It's the last sight he ever sees.
"This is a long short story," Brown says.
At 270 pages?
"Well, I'm joking!"
So, presumably, was Brown's frequent co-star Neill in his cover blurb for the book: "My friend Bryan Brown, quite apart from his other manifold talents, turns out to be an excellent writer. An authentic voice; highly imaginative yet completely believable, with a flair for fully realised characters and a gripping narrative ... a great storyteller. This is utterly baffling. I'm furious."
Although he had written short stories, Brown didn't think he was necessarily capable of writing a novel but when he began work on what would become The Drowning, something clicked.
"I just started writing a story, I didn't know where it was going to lead me - the long and the short of it was it started to get longer and longer and I thought, it's going to be a novel."
That opening scene is quite arresting.
"I don't know where that came from," Brown says.
"I have a place up the country on the North Coast and I think I was just thinking about the areas there where there's no entry on back roads."
Then came the boy who sees a no-entry sign and, kids being kids, is tempted to trespass and see what he can see. It's a fatal decision.
"We had three characters and quite a strong situation," Brown says.
In the sleepy town in which the book is set, crimes and secrets hide under what seems a placid surface. As noted, there's a captor, a captive and a murder in the opening pages.
There are bikies and cops and backpackers and locals, people caught up in drug dealing and sex trafficking and more killing. And there are the things that are clandestine rather than criminal, like a man who's deep in the closet and adultery.
More characters emerged as Brown kept writing and he says they were what led him in the process of creation, which took place, on and off, over four or five months. If he had "a good run" of inspiration he might write for a few hours, then leave it for a few days.
"I'd come back and see where the story wanted to go."
But he says he didn't know where it was going as he wrote.
"I didn't have a story till the day it ended."
Brown says, "I don't particularly like those resolves where the writer sits down then and ... explains things ... I'd much rather hope the story was telling you itself."
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The book is not chaotic. The opening sets up one situation and others emerge, revealing a web of connections.
"We've got an undercover bloke wondering what's going on and slowly but surely it has to come to an end," Brown says.
"I read quite a bit of crime fiction besides other stuff," he says.
"As a storyteller I go where I feel I need to in the story - sometimes it means I go back in time, go to another character and what's going on in their life at the time, so it feels quite natural to me."
He's not one for neatly mapping out the plot in advance.
"I don't plan anything - I go with the character that leads me to some sort of situation - sometimes I go right, I haven't got a clue about this situation and two days later I think 'What if..?' and I'm off and running again."
Sometimes bits and pieces of real people go into the characters.
"I quite love the fact that it's set amongst the surfing community," Brown says.
"I still surf ... and I delight in the different men and women that are out there - whether they're 40 or 60 or 70 - and I find them quite engaging characters."
Aspects of their lives, or how Brown imagines them to be, inform his writing.
He's no snob when it comes to genre fiction. Brown says, "Crime interests me. I think crime's a great vehicle for us to try to study our morality or study our values as human beings and perhaps our systems of judicial systems or family situations. Nothing comes from nothing. Crime comes from somewhere, sometimes from a little thing, sometimes from a big thing. So I find that interesting."
Crime is also a vehicle for Brown to consider moral issues that arise from the story, both for the reader and himself, and pose questions about such matters as deceit and adultery.
"Like, we think we know people. We don't know everybody exactly," he says,
"Even our closest, closest friends and family don't know certain things that might go on in our minds."
We don't even necessarily know ourselves all the time.
"I agree with that statement completely. We've got a bloody good idea of who we are. But sometimes we're surprised by things."
Writing is a relatively new pursuit for Brown but he's still doing plenty of screen work.
Recent projects include a Netflix adaptation of Trent Dalton's Boy Swallows Universe and the romantic comedy Anyone But You starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell.
As a youth Brown was keen to see the sort of things in movies other young people do, like car crashes and young people making love. Now that he's in his 70s, Brown is looking for something different: stories he can relate to that are of his generation - and he thinks he's far from alone.
"We're living longer. People 55 and over, 65 and over are looking for stories that represent them."
That was one of the reasons he and Ward made the comedy-drama Palm Beach (2019), which she directed, co-wrote and starred in: it dealt with older characters, three couples who are longtime friends, all of whom have secrets and stresses in their lives.
While technology has changed in the screen industry, and platforms like Netflix have also made an impact, Brown says one thing remains fundamental, whether in movies, TV or streaming.
"It's still about telling stories," he says.
Another thing has remained constant: it remains a challenge to get a project off the ground. Not that this has stopped him. Brown and Ward are developing a series she will direct.
He is also working on another book.
Details on both are sparse but as far as the new novel is concerned, as with The Drowning, his process is starting with people and setting rather than story.
"I've got a few characters that I like. And I go, Oh, that's an interesting character. And here's what his world is ... What's the story? I don't have the story. But I have the world when I want to play with it."
The Drowning by Bryan Brown (Allen & Unwin, $32.99) is now available.
- Bryan Brown will be in conversation with Alex Sloan on The Drowning on November 7 at 6pm at Kambri, ANU. anu.edu.au/events
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