Disclaimer: This My Brilliant Career interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
My Brilliant Career was first published in 1901. To this day, it remains author Miles Franklin’s most famous work. The 1979 film adaptation stars Judy David and the late, great Sam Neill as the central couple, Sybylla and Harry.
This new adaptation, developed by Liz Doran, expands the perspective to include a more diverse group of Australian characters. Sybylla’s main love interest, Harry, is now of a mixed-Chinese ethnic background. Furthermore, there are multiple Indigenous Australian characters who are entirely new creations for this version.
I spoke with Doran about the careful consideration of how to go about including more diversity, the common struggle of all the characters, and other aspects of navigating and adapting this classic work of literature.
LadyJenevia: First of all, congratulations on this series. I was intrigued by the trailer, but upon actually watching it, it so far surpassed any expectations that I had. I was just blown away. I thought, ‘I found a gem.’
Doran: Oh, thank you. I do keep telling people that. We’ve had a lot of response from the trailer, and people have been going, “Oh, it’s great.” I’m like, “Yeah, but the show is better than the trailer.” As you know, there’s so much more.
LadyJenevia: My Brilliant Career is a spirited, romantic period piece. As a quick icebreaker question that will also be a segue into us talking more in depth about the series, as a fan of one of Australia’s greatest romantic storytellers of today and especially in so far as period pieces go, I have to ask you, what is your favorite Baz Luhrmann project?
Doran: Oh, that’s easy. It’s Romeo and Juliet.
LadyJenevia: So good! That’s my favorite Shakespeare play. I asked this question because I’ve studied a fair bit about how he adapts and interprets classic art and history to reimagine those works into a version that is accessible to a modern audience. I would argue that your version of My Brilliant Career does something similar for the original book of the same name, which was released a bit over a century ago. What sort of modifications did you prioritize when adapting the material so that it would be better understood and resonant for a 21st-century audience?
Doran: Thank you. Great question. The thing I started with when I reread the book was two questions: Who else was living in Australia at that time who aren’t in the book? My second was much more about how do I, as a person back in 2020, respond to these stories?
In the first instance, it was obviously: First Nations characters, gay people, and women of a certain kind of spirit. Also, Chinese people. We have a huge Australian Chinese population. We have a big Chinese history and all those elements were not in the book. It makes sense for the period it was written in. But when you look at it now, and you think about showing this to a contemporary audience, how do we show this?
One of the very first things that was in my mind and from the very beginning of development was making Harry Beecham have a Chinese mother. That gave him more complexity as a character and more vulnerability. In the book, he’s [a] very white landowner, colonial squattocracy. We were looking for this idea of why would Sybylla fall in love with this guy? He’s not that interesting in the book. Giving him that background gave him this vulnerability within the society that matched hers and gave them a really strong spiritual connection.
The First Nations inclusion is obvious. It took us a long time to find the right balance for those stories. We had writer’s rooms. We do them quite differently in Australia, but we had a writer’s room that always involved First Nations writers and some amazing people who I love and respect, writers and elders in that community. Still, it took us a long time to find the balance of those stories, and eventually we decided, well, they’re the same. We have to see those stories under the umbrella of love versus career, which is the way that we’re looking at Sybylla’s story. Once we did that, then I think we found the key to telling those stories.
The other thing genuinely came from me reading the book and having a reaction as a contemporary person. Things like changing how Harry has two elderly aunts in the book. I’ve always been really fascinated by that early feminism movement in Australia and in the rest of the world, but how it is particular to our country. In that sense, Aunt Augusta – we made those two characters into one person, made her a suffragette and a bohemian and someone who sort of traveled and lived through the world and had found herself back in this small country town because of her obligation to her nephew.
LadyJenevia: One of the most moving parts for me was the Indigenous characters. I think I almost had a breakdown when the bit with the feather happened. That was a real moment for me. I was interested in how much extra research you did into the history specifically in so far as it applies to Indigenous people in Australia. How much of that was just about hiring Indigenous people versus actually going and digging into literature and history and research?
Doran: It’s a combination of both. As an Australian person, this is a long and complicated history which we grapple with every single day. I’ve actually worked on quite a lot of First Nations-based projects and have a lot of really close friends who are First Nations people within the film and television industry. I’ve personally had personally a lot of conversations about this. We had some incredible First Nations collaborators in our writer’s room who were fully informed with their own history. We also did outside research, spoke to academics and other First Nations people who’d written books about that particular period, because there’s a lot in that particular period that we weren’t necessarily super familiar with.
To be honest, in the early days the research fed into the story and made it too didactic. There’s a lot of trauma in that backstory, the story of Aboriginal people at that time; there’s a lot of displacement. There’s a lot of all of that sort of history that comes with First Nations people. The one positive thing, and not the only one, but one thing we found was this really strong history of Australian stock women. These were Aboriginal women who worked as stock women, stock men who worked with horses, who worked with cattle and sheep, and who worked on these farms, the sort of colonial farms. That was the discovery that informed Nell as a character and gave us this really strong, great horsewoman character whom we adore.
Then again, it’s that thing of like, the history of First Nations people in Australia is full of trauma. We had to make a really big decision on tone and genre with this story. That was the secondary decision that we made. We went down a lot of paths. We went down a lot of paths over our five-year development period. We ended up with this script where these two stories were completely different where Sybylla had her story and then the First Nations story was like two different shows. We were like, how do we combine them?
Our umbrella for Sybylla is Love vs Career. That was always our guiding light. We thought, what if we applied that umbrella to the First Nations characters? Then we road-tested our new drafts, which are lighter. They don’t have the traumatic history. None of that is in the show. It’s not because we didn’t know it existed and it’s not because we just left it out because we didn’t think it was something that we wanted. It was more like, what we’ve created with all of these stories is we wanted to bring stories of joy and independence, these young women making their own lives and making their own decisions. When we applied that to a First Nations story, we also wanted a story that had no trauma attached to it on purpose so that Aboriginal people, all First Nations people, everyone can watch this show and it’s a safe space. It’s a safe space for everyone.
LadyJenevia: With Sybylla’s story, I’d be interested to know about the choice to age her up. In the book she’s 16-17, and in the show she’s being called a spinster. Also, what were you looking for that helped you to decide on Philippa? She’s phenomenal in this.
Doran: She’s a 19/20-year-old spinster in our show. We didn’t actually age her up that much. I don’t think we ever exactly say how old she was, but in our minds that character was 19/20. That was an early decision as well because we felt that a 16-year-old colonial woman has similar problems to a 19/20-year-old contemporary woman. Also, it’s a bit creepy for a 16- or 17-year-old to be talking about marriage in contemporary times.
Philippa Northeast is our total joy. We couldn’t be more thrilled with her performance. The search for Sybylla was a big one. She’s an iconic Australian historical character. We knew Philippa already. She’s an actress in Australia who has a lot of experience, and we all knew her as a person and actor. We saw her audition tape, and it was just like, ‘She’s the one.’ It was the same actually with Chris Chung for Harry Beecham. Both of them, it was like, they sent in a tape and, “Okay, there they are.”
LadyJenevia: I want to follow up a bit on the points you made about the ostracisation that a lot of these characters experience because of things like being a woman, being a person of color, and so on and so forth. One of the things that I found interesting is that the great equalizer for all of those people is that it always goes back to economics: the endless worries about money, financial security. Even with a character like Augusta, where she’s this bold personality, but then she’s encouraging Harry to marry for financial security. That to me feels like something that can connect really well with a modern audience because of how bad economic inequality is now. Was that a connective thread that you were aware of while mapping out your story?
Doran: Absolutely. The class system in Australia is similar to America. It’s more about money than it is about class. Our class system is economic. That whole ‘have’ and ‘have not’ is really interesting. There’s a lot of material in the original book about poverty and wealth and where that puts you in society. That was definitely a consideration when we were writing the scripts.
LadyJenevia: One of the things that I loved about the series compared to the book is how funny the show is. I love comedy. It’s a very under-appreciated genre. What inspired you to create the show’s comedic tone and voice? It’s not funny the entire time, but there is a lot of humor.
Doran: That was always a guiding principle. We wanted joy in the show. Joy is a really big word for us. I love Sybylla in the book, but she’s very down on herself when you read the book. She’s very angry and upset. When you have actors like Anna Chancellor, Genevieve O’Reilly, Kate Mulvany, these are funny people. You write for them, and they’re funny.
LadyJenevia: What do you hope the viewers will take away from watching My Brilliant Career?
Doran: I hope they take the same thing that I took away from when I read the book as a child and then when I saw the film. Sometimes the choices that you make, particularly as a woman, are difficult. They’re not the easiest choices, but the choice that you make that is the truest to yourself is the best choice to make for your future.
That was complicated.
Make the brave choice, see where it leads you. Don’t just take what the world gives you and accept it. Get out there, be brave, and be bold.
LadyJenevia: Well, thank you so much again and congratulations. I cannot emphasize enough how much I enjoyed this. From start to finish, it was a total revelation of, ‘Oh my god, I found a good one. This isn’t just another thing I’m reviewing.’ I really enjoyed this.
Doran: Oh, I love that. Thank you so much. That’s all we wanted. We wanted people to just love it and to take it in as theirs.
LadyJenevia: When the sisters Betty and Nell were having their conversation, and you know you have Nell out that Betty [is] dating a cop, the first thing in my mind went, “Oh no, you can’t trust him. He’s a cop.” And then Nell says, “You can’t trust him. He’s a cop.” I went, “It’s my show! It’s my people!” [laughter]
Doran: Yeah, and I will just say quickly that scene with the feather is one of my favorite scenes in the whole show. It’s so beautiful. We had to wait for exactly the right time of day to shoot it. It’s my favorite engagement scene in the show.
My Brilliant Career will premiere on Netflix on August 13.
Watch my interview here:
Browse more of my reviews in print and video form. Support my work further on Patreon!