John Collee

In Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) the chase keeps stopping so that people can work and talk. Weir and Collee's adaptation of Patrick O'Brian gives the pursuit at sea room for conversation and conflicting ideas about duty, and the battles matter because we have been allowed to take an interest in the men first. That is the Collee habit: he would rather we knew who was in the cabin than what the cabin was about to hit. The same screenplay is episodic and lets the middle lose urgency, and that is the other Collee habit. The two have travelled together ever since.

He came to the trade sideways. He trained in medicine at Edinburgh and practised as a doctor in Sri Lanka, Madagascar and the Solomon Islands before writing novels in the 1980s; his first produced screenplay was the 1990 adaptation of his own novel Paper Mask. He moved to Sydney in the mid-1990s, and after Master and Commander came Happy Feet (2006) with George Miller, Tanna (2015), made with a community in Vanuatu, and Hotel Mumbai (2018) with Anthony Maras. Nearly all of it is drawn from a book, a life or a documented event. He is a writer who starts with something true and arranges it.

Then three in one year. Monkey Man (2024), written with Dev Patel and Paul Angunawela, is a revenge film in the old shape whose fights land hard while the story wanders and repeats itself, a quarter of an hour too long. Lee (2024), written with Liz Hannah and Marion Hume, has a great deal of ground to cover and covers it in order, with Mikkel E.G. Nielsen cutting back to a kitchen table so that each scene can be explained aloud. Boy Swallows Universe (2024), the series he created from Trent Dalton's novel, is generous, loud, often lovely and far too much. The fault is the same in all three and it is the opposite of a lazy writer's: not too little, but everything, tidily. The scenes of the two brothers alone in a room moved us more than the series around them had any right to expect, and every time the plot came back through the door we minded.

Collee has said that being a screenwriter is like being a furniture maker, that every piece is different but only a few structures work. His pieces are honestly made and they stand up. What he needs is a director with a long voyage and no hurry, who will carry out the chairs he does not need. Weir was one. Patel, twice now, is learning to be. Most of the others have simply shipped the lot.