The gulf between the Gallipoli campaign and the theatre of modern war may span a century, but actor/producer Sam Worthington, now filming the television drama Deadline Gallipoli, says the struggle to find the truth in war reportage remains as challenging today as it was in 1915.
"People back home had this almost romantic aspect of what it was to go off and fight for one's country, because that's how it was portrayed," Worthington said. The simultaneous media battle - reporting the reality of war, and how reportage shapes perception at home - is a battle which "rages even now," he said.
The 37-year-old AFI award-winning actor and star of Avatar and Somersault is playing The Age's war correspondent and photographer Phillip Schuler in the project, which is filming in South Australia. It tells the Gallipoli story through the prism of four men who reported from its trenches: Schuler, Charles Bean, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Keith Murdoch.
"By using the journalists' stories, you can track it through all wars: Gaza, Vietnam, Afghanistan," Worthington said. "Our infancy back in World War I wasn't just about the journalists, it was everyone. There was nothing to compare it to."
Schuler's account of Gallipoli is remembered for the power of its imagery, and was noted for its candour. The son of The Age's editor Frederick Schuler, he criticised the British leadership, and unsentimentally wrote about the reality of war. "Nothing can ever convey the awfulness of the trenches," he wrote. "As I walked ... it was impossible to avoid the men who had fallen. They were lying on the parapets and their blackened hands hung down over our path."
Worthington said he wanted to tell the Gallipoli story in a new way. "If you mention the word Gallipoli to any generation in Australia we go, oh, I know that story," he said. "I didn't want this to be a stodgy, sentimental look at it. I wanted to break that, or bend it on its ear. I felt there was another way to look at this that makes it more contemporary.
"Bean was despised by the soldiers initially because of the articles he wrote but went on to become the biggest champion of them, Schuler thought it would be a swashbuckling adventure and realised there was a bigger tragedy in play he couldn't control, those journeys were in the history books," Worthington said.
Worthington wanted to highlight the courage of the journalists in reporting the reality of the campaign, often at odds with the military leadership and government. "If it wasn't for these journalists managing to almost commit an act of treason by releasing information, the campaign wouldn't have stopped," he said. "That's something new and relevant, that's something I never learned in history."
The project, which is being produced by Penny Chapman for Foxtel, will air next year as part of a suite of World War I cententary programming. The cast includes Hugh Dancy (Hannibal), Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) and Australian actors Rachel Griffiths, Bryan Brown and Anna Torv. It is being directed by US-based Australian director Michael Rymer, whose credits include Hannibal and American Horror Story.
"Michael [Rymer] didn't want it to be sentimental, he wanted it to be forward thinking and contemporary," Worthington says. "When you look at the edge he gives to shows like Hannibal and American Horror Story ... we don't have the budget of some of the show's he's worked on, [but] he brings an aesthetic that is unusual compared to stock, standard Australian TV."
