What Do The Critics Say?

"Peter O'Toole is just wonderful. I think he's entered a stage of his life where he just doesn't care very much, and he's terrific. I think Sam Neill and Bryan Brown are both very good, too." David Stratton ABC AT THE MOVIES "This whimsical tale, based on a short story by Lord Dunsany, has moving undercurrents of loss and grief and in underplaying his role Peter O’Toole brings a beautiful sense of reconciliation to his character. Sam Neill is simply delicious as the eccentric Spanley and Bryan Brown is perfectly cast as the mongrelish Wrather." Margaret Pomeranz ABC AT THE MOVIES "The climax, where the film's various strands converge, is moving, and provides a neat pay-off to all the oddball proceedings and ornately smart (arsed) linguistic quirks that have gone before. The film features some of England's finest period locations. 4 STARS." Daniel Etherington CHANNEL 4 FILM "Dean Spanley is both whimsically thin and begging of belief at times, but is held together by Peter O’Toole’s moving and understated turn. Once you let it, the genuine endearment draws you in like a tractor beam. 4 STARS." Paul Griffiths EYE FOR FILM "Toa Fraser here sticks to his guns and delivers an unapologetically intelligent, cultured and insightful character study kept in check by warmth of heart and unique personality. If there is one major selling point for the feature, it simply lies within the timeless presence of Peter O'Toole who gives a wonderful performance befitting of his stature and the character in which he resides. 8/10" SusurrusKarma LIVE FOR FILMS "The four men at the centre of the film all give great performances, particularly Peter O'Toole as the elder Fisk and Bryan Brown in a role that makes better use of his larrikin charm than any Australian film has managed in the last 20 years. "Dean Spanley" is an inventive little film that is, at its core, thoroughly nice and un-cynical. A rare feat nowadays. 3 1/2 STARS." Morgan Derera MOVIEFIX

"Small film, big delight. New Zealand playwright-turned-director Toa Fraser has made a fine fist of adapting the curious, titular 1930s book by idiosyncratic Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany. Delivers a highly pleasurable if modest experience. 4 STARS." Wally Hammond TIME OUT LONDON "Alan Sharp’s script is both laced with magic and expertly handled by Neill, Aussie veteran Bryan Brown, Jeremy Northam and the brilliantly irreverent Peter O’Toole. The 76 year old Lawrence Of Arabia star does indeed look like he’s in ‘the anteroom of eternity’, his comedic chops are well intact. 4 STARS." Ashley Bird FLICKS "Northam, our guide, navigates us strongly through the story and the extraordinary O'Toole plays his stiff upper-lip British father to perfection. Bryan Brown is better than ever is this tailor-made colonial larrikin role, while Sam Neill injects subtleties we have never seen before, allowing us to believe his every word. There's something delightfully innocent about this film." Louise Keller URBAN CINEFILE "The film's beautiful images are adorned with an economical score and marvellous production design; in all, a gently reassuring film about the human condition that offers healing for the deepest wounds. Dean Spanley gives an original twist to the eternal and universal father-son relationship story, in Alan Sharp's satisfying expansion of the original novella." Andrew L Urban URBAN CINEFILE "A British film, featuring some of our finest actors, touching affectingly on relationships between fathers and sons and fathers and daughters without getting unduly sentimental, and having aliterate script. It moves from everyday reality into realms of fantasy and doesn't constantly alludeto popular Hollywood films." Phillip French THE OBSERVER

The Inside Story Appropriately enough, "Dean Spanley" began life at a dinner party, almost eight years ago. New Zealand-born producer Matthew Metcalfe was visiting a friend, when he slapped a short script on the table, penned by Scottish screenwriter Alan Sharp ("Rob Roy"), and asked Metcalfe to take a look. It was an adaptation of "My Talks With Dean Spanley" by Lord Dunsany. "I read the script, and thought it was amazing," recalls the Christchurch born producer Metcalfe ("Nemesis Game"), "but it was fifty pages long and there wasn’t really anything you could do with it for a commercial point of view." Two years went by, and Metcalfe was about to begin work on his most recent feature, the 2007 horror-thriller "The Ferryman", when he had a Eureka moment. "I literally sat bolt upright in the middle of the night and went 'Dean Spanley'! I have an idea to make that into a feature film." It meant tracking down the New Zealand-based Sharp, taking him to lunch and convincing him to turn his short script into a feature-length work. "He was very sceptical about that, thinking it was really based on just a novella. So we went through this wonderful dance where he would write some more." Metcalfe would then say, "Just make it ten pages longer: I know it can’t be a feature but just humour me!" While many novellas lend themselves automatically to feature film adaptation, My Talks With Dean Spanley was structured around a series of dinners between the titular Dean and the story’s narrator, Henslowe Fisk. To expand the story, Metcalfe and Sharp decided there had to be a reason why Fisk was continuing with his dinners with the Dean. Finally they decided: "Maybe he’s doing it because he wants to understand something important to him; he’s reaching out. That’s when the idea of the father came up." Enter the character of Horatio Fisk, who not featured in Lord Dunsany’s original. As Sharp’s script reflects, it’s his strained relationship with his son, the narrator, which helps form the emotional arc of the film. Thus reincarnation is swapped for reconciliation. "What it really reflects is that I think every father has, at some point, struggled to understand his son, while every son has struggled to understand his father," says Metcalfe. "It’s about how sons feel when their fathers don’t say they approve of them, or they appreciate them, or that they love them, or that they think they’re worthy. It’s about how fathers seems to struggle to communicate this to their sons, and how sons don’t feel they can pull their fathers up on this." Fast forward to November 2006, when Metcalfe was at AFM with "The Ferryman", accompanied by Alan Harris, who co-produced the film. They received a copy of Sharp’s script, still missing the final thirty or so pages but now definitely shaped like a feature and decided to proceed. With the title now shortened to "Dean Spanley", in January 2007, Harris and Metcalfe decided to set up an Anglo-New Zealand co-production to fund the film. "I’ve only ever done co-productions, and putting together an Anglo-New Zealand co-production is pretty straightforward for me," says Harris ("Laws of Motion"). The next few months were spent finding the finances, while Harris and Metcalfe decided on who should direct the film. I felt very strongly that Dean Spanley should be told by someone who understood families, says Metcalfe. "As much as it’s a comedy, and it’s wry, dry and acerbic, and very wonderful and eccentric, it’s also deep down got a lot of heart. It’s very powerful from that point of view." They gave the nod to a local director. The person they tapped was Toa Fraser, an emerging talent whose 2006 debut film, "No.2", the story of a Fijian-Kiwi matriarch gathering her clan around her for one final barbecue, won the prestigious Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Metcalfe recalls thinking, "This guy really understands human beings and the way they communicate." Sent the script, Fraser read it and responded immediately. "I began reading the script and it was really surprising to me that actually it’s a quite charming and emotional story about a father and a son. That wasn’t what "No. 2" was about, but there are definite similarities. They’re both stories about what it takes to bring family together in a sense," Toa notes, "although they’re very different families." Just as "No.2" was a nod to his Fijian roots on his father’s side, Fraser sees this as a tribute to his mother, who hailed from Essex. "I see Dean Spanley as a love letter to my Englishness," he says. "The family of Dean Spanley reminds me a lot of my English family. On a personal level, this project has given me the chance to reconnect with my English roots." For a script so dialogue driven, Fraser and Metcalfe knew the casting process would be critical. "I said going into it that I didn’t want to make it without a very good cast," Fraser says. He got his wish, drawing on the crème-de-la-crème of talent from New Zealand, Australia and Britain. The first on board was Bryan Brown, the veteran Australian-born star of such films as "Cocktail" and "Gorillas In The Mist". He was cast as the Australian entrepreneur Wrather, who befriends Henslowe Fisk and helps him lure the Dean into further revelatory dinners. "He can hustle up things," says Brown. "He calls himself a middle man or a facilitator. In other words, he intends to do well and he’s happy to get in and graft." Just like Wrather, who also takes an interest in the Dean’s stories of reincarnation, Brown is open-minded when it comes to such topics. "I don’t have a problem with the spiritual world. Sounds quite logical to me. I had a ghost jump on my back and wrestle with me when I was a young actor in England, after I’d been to the Orange Tree Pub in Richmond." When it came to casting the role of Horatio Fisk, Metcalfe, along with Harris and Fraser, decided to 'dare to dream' and send it to eight-time Oscar nominee Peter O’Toole who had previously worked with Bryan Brown twenty-five years ago. "Months went by, and it was really was months," says Metcalfe. "I was actually filming a documentary in Northern Iraq, when I managed to listen to my voicemails through a Sat phone, and I got a message from the casting director, Dan Hubbard. The news was good. "Peter is interested. He really likes the script. Is it still on offer?" "Peter was solid from the get-go," says Metcalfe. Reading "Dean Spanley", reminded O’Toole of its source writer, Lord Dunsany and was like a blast from the past. "I’ve not heard of him for fifty years," O'Toole remarked. "I looked through his credits, and I remembered him for three works. I knew him as a short story writer and I knew him as a playwright, but not for fifty years have I even heard his name. An amazing man, as we now know: and a great chess champion!" "He’s just a man who is at the very peak of his capabilities," says Fraser. "He knows completely what he can do with his face, with his voice, with his body, with his heart." O’Toole then recommended Jeremy Northam to play Horatio Fisk’s son. "Peter hadn’t worked with Jeremy before but he knew of Jeremy’s work, and suggested him, effectively," says Metcalfe. British actor Northam is a veteran of numerous English-set period dramas including David Mamet’s "The Winslow Boy" and Robert Altman’s "Gosford Park" for which he received a Screen Actors Guild Award. But it was Michael Winterbottom’s post-modern comedy "A Cock and Bull Story" that won the team over. "We saw this different side to Jeremy Northam," says Metcalfe. "He was more alive, more vibrant, more daring: after all, our character is one who goes on a crazy adventure!" "A lot of people, certainly by the time they reach a certain stage in life, have fairly complex relationships with their parents, if they’re still around," notes Northam ("An Ideal Husband" & "Happy, Texas"). "But it seems that parents generally of a certain age don’t say to their kids what they think of them. It’s very easy for people to get crossed wires and the offspring to think that they’re not cared for perhaps. And it’s very easy for the parents to think that they’re detested by the children. I think that’s at the nub of their relationship." As the narrator of the piece, it meant that Northam was in virtually every scene, and was required to be on set for every moment of the thirty six day shoot. He admits he was impressed with director Toa Fraser. "For someone relatively inexperienced, he’s incredibly level-headed. He doesn’t blow smoke up people’s arses! There’s no hysteria and throwing his weight around. He has a quiet authority about him, and he thinks on his feet." When it came to the crucial selection of who would play Dean Spanley, Metcalfe offered: "There’s only one name we ever talked about: Sam Neill. We had never actually discussed another name. I don’t know what we’d do if we didn’t have him." Getting Neill ("Jurassic Park" & "The Piano") to come onboard wasn't easy. The producer recalls they went back to him, even after being reject on two previous attempts. He thinks Neill probably thought, "They’re going to have me down on the ground licking my bollocks, scratching myself and being dog-like!" Eventually Neill decided to take on the role, presumably as an owner of three working NZ vineyards himself (Two Paddocks, Alex Paddocks & Redbanks) he was taken by the idea that Dean Spanley always begins his recollections after two glasses of Imperial Tokay, (made from the Tokaj grape) from Hungary. Wine writer Michael Broadbent described it as "a prince among wines, more of a liqueur than a wine." "It’s a sort of desert wine, one I know nothing about, but I’m prepared to believe it’s transcendent," says Neill. "It seems to have this magical effect on the Dean. He’s a fool for Tokay." The biggest challenge for Neill was learning the lines. "There’s as much dialogue in this film as I’ve done in the last five years across I don’t know how many films," he says. The final monumental dinner scene required learning lines spanning some nineteen pages. "When you start a film, it always seems like a mountain too high to climb. But once you’ve got your crampons on and a rope around your waist, it doesn’t seem too bad, once you realise you’re enjoying yourself. That’s terribly important," Neill said. Rounding out the cast as Horatio Fisk’s housekeeper Mrs Brimley, is Judy Parfitt, another favourite of O’Toole. "Judy and me, we go back ages," he says. "She’s an excellent actress. She’s good news." Filming began in November 2007, in several locations around Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, including Elm Hill in Norwich as well as the city’s Cathedral’s cloisters. Scenes were also shot at Holkham Hall and Peckover House. One of the key locations was Elveden Hall, near Thetford which featured in Stanley Kubrick’s "Eyes Wide Shut". In late January 2008, the production moved to New Zealand. Synopsis

England,1904. Henslowe Fisk has enticed his his ailing father Horatio, into attending a lecture by the Swami Nala Prash on 'The Transmigration of Souls'. At said lecture, they meet one Dean Spanley as well as Wrather, a self-described facilitator from the Colonies. Later they encounter the Dean at his father’s club. But when Henslowe runs into the Dean in the grounds of the local cathedral, the young Fisk takes this to be more than coincidence. He decides to ask the Dean to dinner, enticing him with the promise of his favourite tipple Imperial Tokay, a rare Hungarian sweet wine. Using Wrather to procure a bottle, Henslowe begins a series of dinners between with Spanley, in which: after two glasses of the wine, the Dean begins to recount strange recollections of his past life. Incredibly, the Dean’s clear-headed accounts of his former life appear to be a linked to Fisk Senior's childhood.

The Verdict "What a delightful experience "Dean Spanley" will provide for audiences, The cast is superb. The settings and the period recreation appears utterly authentic. The storyline, written by Alan Sharp, provides a most refreshing take on the well read 1936 novella, "My Talks With Dean Spanley" by Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany. This Anglo-New Zealand production is helmed by UK-born, NZ raised Toa Fraser. Lovers of small productions will remember him as the director of 2007's "No. 2", which starred American icon and Screen Actors Guild Award winner Ruby Dee ("American Gangster") appeared. Those who have, over the years, struggled through a testing father-son relationship will thoroughly enjoy "Dean Spanley", recognizing how true to life it can be, thanks to the performances of Northam and the iconic O'Toole. Younger viewers will certainly find some of O'Toole's facial expressions highly amusing. Neill gives a performance as good as it gets as the tippler Dean Spanley, whose tongue is loosened by Imperial Tokay. The Dean's favourite drop is supplied by a loveable aussie larrikin named Wrather, played by two time AFI winner, Bryan Brown. One performance that should not go unrecognized is that of Judy Parfitt, who plays the families long suffering housekeeper. The 74 year old veteran of film and, numerous TV shows gives an endearing performance that is every bit as good as those of her male counterparts. Rated 'G", Dean Spanley will appeal to a wide adult audience. Parents taking children with them will find it best suited to those aged eight years and over. Younger children won't have the attention span to sit through it, and that may spoil your own experience. Highly Recommended. 4 STARS." Who's Who?

Jeremy Northam Sam Neill Bryan Brown Peter O'Toole Judy Parfitt Elizabeth Goram-Smith Charlotte Graham Bruce Hopkins Art Malik Eva Sayer Dudley Sutton Ramon Tikaram

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Narrator & Fisk Junior Dean Spanley Wrather Fisk Senior Mrs Brimley A young lady of stature Woman in Cloisters Farmer Swami Nala Prash Girl Marriot Nawab of Ranjiput

The Production Crew

Director Writer Producers Original Music Cinematography Film Editor Casting Production Design Art Direction Set Decoration Costume Design

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Toa Fraser Alan Sharp Alan Harris and Matthew Metcalfe Don McGlashan Leon Narbey Chris Plummer Daniel Hubbard Andrew McAlpine Ben Smith and Steve Summersgill Barbara Herman-Skelding Odile Dicks-Mireaux

Adapted from the book "My Talks With Dean Spanley" by Lord Dunsany Run Time 100 minutes Rated G [AUST] ©2009 - Paramount Pictures - All Rights Reserved Copyright Protected ©1999-2010 The Movie Pages & impact Internet Services All Rights Reserved