Casting was the first and most important building block for the film making team. The producers looked at the Australian films they liked and the same casting agent's name kept turning up: Greg Apps. "The guy who put Russell Crowe into Proof and Romper Stomper and put Eric Bana into Chopper, he was at the top of our list", Janelle Landers says, so we started there and to our surprise he accepted".
The team cast their net far and wide looking for unknown actors with the ability to bring real life, authenticity and presence to the characters, holding auditions in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth and looking at screen tests from as far afield as New Zealand, Canada and the US.
The most important thing to get right was the ensemble as a whole so actors were not cast in isolation but were tested and re-tested in different combinations to find the best fit. A number of the key cast came from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts which counts Hugh Jackman among its alumni. Open workshops in Perth provided a great pool of young actors to draw on for the minor roles and even turned up a key cast member.
Wasted On The Young is out March 3
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