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Life etc magazine | September 2007

Chris Lilley and the team from We Can Be Heroes are back with a new mockumentary

For an actor who can playa spoilt private schoolgirl one minute and a megalomaniac teacher the next, while creating a script about a group of high-school thugs, Chris Lilley seems pretty down to earth.
He happily admits he was more surprised than anyone by the cult success of We Can Be Heroes, the hilarious six-part series, first broadcast on ABC TV in 2005, about five fictitious nominees for Australian of the Year.
Now Lilley, a former student at Sydney's prestigious Barker College, has tackled life in a public high school in a new show called Summer Heights High. Lilley has created two new characters - Mr G, an out-of-control drama teacher, and Jonah, a teenage bully of Pacific Islander descent - and brought back one of the most talked-about characters from We Can Be Heroes, the spoilt private high-school student Ja'mie.
In Summer Heights High Ja'mie does an exchange from her privileged private school to a public school in another suburb. The series was filmed in Melbourne, but Lilley wants the identity of the school where it was shot kept under wraps to preserve the notion that the setting is a real place. He spent 18 months researching and writing the eight-part series, then a few months filming and another few months editing. It's been a labour of love.
"It could be any public school," he says. "We were careful to remove any Victorian references; we even changed the cars' number plates. The idea was to cover the school environment as a mini-universe.
"I wanted to show the contrast of [Jonah], who everyone thinks has all the problems, with Ja'mie who is really the nasty one. She comes across as being so confident but she is really a shallow, mean girl.
"Paired with the right person, Jonah can change. There is some redemption by the end of the series."
Then there's Mr Gregson, known around the school as Mr G. "He's familiar in every workplace," Lilley says. "He's the guy who thinks he's better than his position."
Lilley, 32, says he was "never really encouraged to be a showbiz person", although he did enjoy drama classes and productions at high school. The youngest of four children - his mother was a nurse and his father a pharmacist who died almost a decade ago - he went to school, played cricket and rugby, loved The Goodies and watched "rubbish" TV such as Neighbours while spending hours creating shows and characters, often on his own.
In his teens he sought work doing voiceovers on promotions for ABC Kids and advertisements for McDonald's and Coke, and enjoyed playing what he calls "the enthusiastic youth voice", while at university he did some standup routines. Three years ago, he moved to Melbourne to work on the sketch series Big Bite as well as Hamish and Andy before the ABC-backed We Can Be Heroes.
While researching and casting Summer Heights High, Lilley visited about 15 schools in Sydney and Melbourne. Many students in the series aren't actors and will be thrilled to see themselves on the small screen.
"Jonah and the other Islander roles were hard to cast," he says. "I spent a long time looking for the right kids for those roles. In the end, he was the most relaxing to play.
"Mr G was harder to play, especially in front of the kids. Shooting was different from We Can Be Heroes because we were in a real school environment. Suddenly, a bell would go and there would be kids everywhere, looking in from windows etc. We had to have the cameras far away."
The best news for We Can Be Heroes fans is that Lilley would like to bring back each of the characters from the series. Obviously, he concedes, that might be difficult with Pat, the West Australian heroine who planned to roll from Perth to Ayers Rock and died from cancer in the series.
Still, with Chris Lilley, anything is possible.