Australian Author’s Novel-Turned-Film Goes Global

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, a reporter based in the Northern Territory.

On a film set in Berlin, Lily Brett cried as she watched the novel she’d written about her father come to cinematic life. Stephen Fry was essentially playing her father; Lena Dunham played the character Ms. Brett had based on herself.

“Stephen looked so like my dad. Which is just phenomenal, because Stephen is 6-foot-5 and my father at his peak was 5-10,” she said.

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

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

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

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

Officials there were so concerned about the shriveled orange sticks she’d 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 cut into absurdly thin slices.

“I was carrying five pounds of dried carrots for a three-week book tour,” she said incredulously. “The two customs guys just looked at the woman from my publishing company and said almost simultaneously, ‘Does she think that we don’t have any carrots in Vienna?’”

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

From the outset, Ms. 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” that she was included in round after round of script writing and production, and that the film turned out as well as it did.

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

After World War II, Ms. Brett’s parents left Poland and built a life for their family in suburban Melbourne. Until she started school, Ms. 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 plan for six months there turned into 35 years.

Ms. Brett had been to Poland but had never been able to persuade her father, a survivor of Auschwitz, to accompany her. But finally, he agreed to go.

The opening scene of the film is set in Warsaw, at the airport, where a stressed Ruth sternly tells her father to stand still and not wander off.

Edek’s character seems at ease, talking to anyone and everyone in Polish — just as he did when Ms. Brett traveled with him in Poland in the early 1990s.

“He talked to every single taxi driver about their car, which were mostly Mercedes,” she said. Although he immediately appeared comfortable, she could tell he was at the same time deeply troubled to be back in Poland.

In the film, that manifests as a constant mission to divert his daughter’s carefully planned itinerary. He insists on taxis instead of trains, takes her to an unremarkable crumbling brick wall rather than the ruins she’s hoping to see, and waits in the car while she looks around 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 she stands on red carpets for the premieres of “Treasure” in places like Berlin and New York, Ms. Brett said her father would have been “thrilled” (and a “hilarious nightmare”) had he been there by her side.

Ms. Brett said she’d received messages from friends and family around the world saying that the film had made them feel as if they’d spent an evening with her father.

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

Here are this week’s stories.

Australia and New Zealand

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