Australian author's novel-turned-film goes global

The letter from Australia is a weekly newsletter from our Australian office. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, a journalist based in the Northern Territory.

On a shoot in Berlin, Lily Brett cried as she watched the novel she had written about her father come to life on film. Stephen Fry essentially played her father; Lena Dunham played the character Brett had based on.

“Stephen looked a lot like my dad, which is great because Stephen is 6’4” and my dad, in his prime, was 5’10”,” he said.

The film, Treasure, opens in Melbourne in a few weeks. Based on Brett’s 1999 autobiographical novel Too Many Men, it tells the story of Edek, a Holocaust survivor, and Ruth, his daughter, on a trip to Poland, where Edek was born.

Ms. Brett says the adaptation, directed by Julia von Heinz, is faithful to her book and its main characters — versions of her father, Max Brett, who died in 2018 shortly before his 102nd birthday, and herself.

“When Lena did some of the weirder things that my character had to do, all I could think was, ‘Oh my God, did I do that?’” she complained, recalling a scene in which her character sits at the breakfast table and pulls out container after container of dry food. “Oh no, I did that. Why did I do that?”

Ms. Brett’s true tales of traveling with Tupperware include a delay at customs in Vienna.

Officials were so concerned about the wrinkled orange sticks she had packed in clear plastic boxes that someone from her publishing company was summoned to the airport to explain that they were, in fact, dried carrots sliced absurdly thin.

“I was carrying two and a half kilos of dried carrots for a three-week promotional tour,” she said incredulously. “The two customs officers looked at the woman from my publishing house and said almost simultaneously: ‘Do you think we don’t have carrots in Vienna? ’”

The film is full of similar moments that bring her story to life, says Brett, 77, the author of six novels, seven books of poetry and three collections of essays.

From the beginning, Brett’s attitude was that it wasn’t her movie — “It was Julia’s movie, it was the actors’ movie” — but she considers herself “incredibly lucky” to have been included in round after round of scriptwriting and producing, and for the film to have turned out so well.

One thing missing from the film version, however, is the Australian connection.

After World War II, Brett’s parents left Poland and settled in a Melbourne suburb. Until she started school, Brett genuinely believed she lived in a country called Paradise, because that was what her father always called Australia. As an adult, she moved to New York and a six-month plan there turned into 35 years.

Mrs Brett had been to Poland before, but had never been able to persuade her father, an Auschwitz survivor, to accompany her. But he finally agreed to go.

The opening scene of the film is set in Warsaw, at the airport, where a stressed Ruth firmly tells her father to stay still and not walk away.

Edek’s character seems comfortable speaking to everyone in Polish, just as he did when Brett traveled with him to Poland in the early 1990s.

“He talked to all the taxi drivers about their cars, which were mostly Mercedes,” she said. Although he seemed comfortable at first, she realised that at the same time he was deeply worried about returning to Poland.

In the film, this manifests as a constant mission to derail his daughter’s carefully planned itinerary. He insists on taking taxis instead of trains, drives her to a crumbling, unremarkable brick wall instead of the ruins she expects to see, and waits in the car while she visits his old factory and home on her own. All the while, he tells everyone he meets that this is his “famous journalist” daughter.

Now, as he walks the red carpets for “Treasure” premieres in places like Berlin and New York, Brett said his father would have been “thrilled” (and it would have been a “hilarious nightmare”) if he had been there by his side.

Ms Brett said she had received messages from friends and family around the world saying the film had made them feel like they had spent a night with their father.

“My father would have loved it,” she said. “He thought every novel I wrote was about him. Sometimes I had to remind him that, for example, he didn’t marry a big-breasted blonde and open a meatball shop. He would just say, ‘Oh, maybe. ’”

Here are this week’s stories.