Heroin addiction tangles the affair

AFTER establishing himself as one of Australia’s innovative theater directors, Neil Armfield wanted to do a project that was “as far away from the theater as possible.” And he found it in Luke Davis’ novel, a harrowing love story about a couple who become hooked on heroin.

“I was taken by its momentum and by this kind of poetic sadness that sits there with it. And perhaps more than anything else the intimacy,” says Armfield, who’d also made a few TV movies and miniseries. “Being able to take the camera inside this relationship is something you can’t do at all in the theater, and that was really the attraction.”

“Candy,” which opens Friday, stars Heath Ledger as Dan, an intravenous heroin user and struggling poet, and Abbie Cornish -- who also stars in another Friday release, Ridley Scott’s “A Good Year” -- as Candy, his new girlfriend, who is a painter.

At the film’s outset, Candy is just beginning her descent into heroin use, but she quickly bullies Dan into letting her inject the drug. The two quickly become unable to control their habit, and Candy turns to prostitution. Every attempt to break free of the habit is fruitless, especially after Candy becomes pregnant.

Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, who frequently collaborates with Armfield in the theater, plays a gay chemistry professor and a father figure to Dan who supplies free drugs and money to the couple.

“It was really a five-year process adapting the screenplay,” says Armfield, who co-wrote the script with Davis. “I kind of learned how to do it by the process of doing it.”

Armfield says the script remains true to the tone and the spirit of the book, but they introduced several new plot points in the screenplay. “I was very interested in [Candy’s] parents having a much stronger role in the film than in the book,” he says. “I thought it was a way of creating an entry into the story for a general audience that might otherwise feel locked out -- it’s such a hermetic world that Dan and Candy create around them.”

-- S.K.