Sometimes a director gets lucky casting an actor at exactly the right time. That happened when Gregor Jordan was shooting his first film, the crime comedy Two Hands, which was inspired by the young bouncers he noticed outside strip clubs in Sydney’s colourful Kings Cross. In fact, it happened twice.

The actor he cast as Jimmy, one of those young bouncers, was just 18 at the time: Heath Ledger, who was yet to shoot his Hollywood breakthrough, Ten Things I Hate About You. Opposite him as Alex, a photographer who had just arrived from the country: 18-year-old Rose Byrne, who was almost as unknown.

Success in film is a mysterious alchemy. In the case of Two Hands, which Jordan made after winning Tropfest and the jury prize at Cannes with the clever short film Swinger, so many things that could have gone wrong worked out terrifically.

His photogenic young stars were both on the way to stellar acting careers, which, for Ledger, who died in 2008, was tragically cut short. A year after Two Hands, Byrne won best actress at Venice for playing a blind teenager in another Australian film, The Goddess Of 1967.

Bryan Brown, who had made Cocktail, Gorillas in the Mist and two F/X movies in Hollywood, initially baulked at playing crime boss Pando because he thought the script wasn’t clear about what sort of film it was. But after a rewrite clarified that it was a romance between Jimmy and Alex, he was in. “That’s the heart of the thing – two people find each other,” Brown says.

His delivery of the knockabout Aussie humour in the script, memorably doing origami with his young son while having someone killed in a phone call, became a highlight of the film. Other funny scenes had Wozza (Steve Le Marquand) needing to find childcare before robbing a bank and Acko (David Field) stuffing up a hit because he’d accidentally put his bullets through the wash.

And while things did go wrong – more on that later – Two Hands was a hit in Australian cinemas in 1999, cleaned up at the Australian Film Institute Awards and has become beloved 25 years later. Now Jordan tells Spectrum that he has written a sequel, Two Hands 2, which takes the story forward 25 years and brings back some of the characters.

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“We have a script that I think is really good – that brings it into the modern day,” he says. “If we’d tried to do a sequel five years later, it probably wouldn’t have worked, but 25 years later is the right time.”

Two Hands is about Jimmy’s attempt to get out of debt to Pando for a job delivering $10,000 that goes wrong, while falling for Alex and being watched over by his dead brother (Steven Vidler).

Jordan didn’t intend for it to be as much of a comedy as it turned out. “I was trying to make it real, but those real people are kind of ridiculous,” he says. “The idea that hardened killers, bank robbers and drug dealers can’t find a babysitter and have to look after the kids is absurd but also real.”

The film now seems like a charming portrait of a past Sydney, a time when crims wore tight shorts with thongs and drove around in a V8, banks were robbed and the monorail snaked through the city. But Jordan says it had “a retro vibe” at the time “in that they were driving old cars and they were dressed in slightly outlandish clothes”.

He says his luck with Two Hands was finding Ledger and Byrne: “Heath especially, because this role was tricky to cast.

“He was an 18-year-old so he probably wasn’t going to be very experienced. He had to have a sort of toughness to him but also a softness and approachability. He had to have real acting chops and something about him that could carry a whole movie and make an audience want to pay their money to see him at the cinema. There was a very small pool of people we could consider. Heath was there and perfect for this role.”

Jordan refutes the idea that he discovered Ledger. “He was on a lot of people’s radar,” he says. “He was a movie star already, just the world didn’t quite know it yet. Heath turned it into something special because he was special as an actor and a presence on screen. Likewise, with Rose. She was about to pop as well.”

Kim Ledger, Heath’s dad, remembers Two Hands as a step “in a journey that he’d pre-programmed into himself many years earlier”.

“We both used to chuckle at it a lot – an Australian gangster movie in shorts and thongs,” he says. “He loved the film and he loved filming it with everybody. People like Bryan Brown and Susie Porter were really great people and really good to Heath. It’s a good piece. Very funny.”

Jordan says Pando was based on Lenny McPherson, a ruthless criminal who seemed to live a relatively normal life. “The costume designer [Emily Seresin] put together this look which included the socks with the shorts,” he says. “At the first costume fitting, she just sat there going ‘oh my god’. She burst out laughing.

“We were all laughing our heads off at the outfit. She said ‘I’m never going to work again’. And Bryan said ‘you and me both’ because it did look ridiculous but it looked great at the same time.”

Brown doesn’t think he’s seen Two Hands since it was released, but remembers how funny it was. “A bloke said to me the other day that it’s his hangover movie and that makes perfect sense to me,” he says. “Bad Saturday night, wake up Sunday morning, don’t want to get off the lounge. ‘What’ll I put on? Two Hands’.”

Brown shot the origami scene first up. “That’s a really good scene for a character,” he says. “He’s playing with his kid then he gets on the phone and talks to someone and says ‘kill the c---’. You’ve got a fabulous understanding of who this bloke is. But I’d never heard the term ‘origami’ – didn’t have a clue what it was – so I just said it.”

Brown was also unfamiliar with Ledger and Byrne when he shot the film. “Didn’t know ’em from a bar of soap,” he says. “But both, absolutely great. As a man, Heath was a lovely fella. Just losing a lovely fella is bad enough but he was a very talented bloke as he showed. And Rose is Rose, isn’t she. Delightful. No matter what she does, she’s f---ing brilliant. Seeing the pair of them so young, they just lit up the screen.”

Brown thinks of Two Hands with great affection. “I’m really glad I played Pando and no other bastard did,” he says. “You had no idea it was going to jump out like it did. I remember when it first came out and I was walking in the Cross one day and a couple of rather heavy looking dudes walked past and one just looked at me and winked. I thought, ‘I’m all right with the boys these days’.”

There was another little-known 18-year-old in the cast: Mariel McClorey. As street kid Helen, she avenges the death of young friend Pete (Evan Sheaves) while Powderfinger’s These Days blasts out at the film’s climax.

“I was just starting acting professionally but not really knowing what I was doing,” she says. “So it’s a very nostalgic film for me.”

McClorey remembers being bored in a trailer waiting until she was needed on set one day – she’d forgotten to bring a book – when Ledger walked past, doubled back then knocked on the door.

“He said ‘how are you going? You look really bored. Do you want to borrow my Discman and all my CDs?’ That was very lovely.”

McClorey watched Two Hands at the Sydney premiere and remembers “feeling like I was having an out-of-body experience in the theatre. It was more powerful than I thought it would be when I read the script. It was intense.”

She acted until her early 20s, studied painting, then became a prosthetic make-up artist working on the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road, Thor: Love and Thunder and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

A friend talked McClorey into watching a cinema screening of Two Hands a couple of years ago and she thought it was a lot of fun. “I have a lot of friends obsessed with that film,” she says. “My partner is a stand-up comedian [Eric Hutton]. A lot of his friends are obsessed with that film too. It’s one of their favourite Australian films.”

Having loved the script, Susie Porter was so excited about appearing in Two Hands that she remembers the call saying she had the role of Deirdre. “I thought a lot of that stuff was really funny and really clever and I hadn’t really seen that before – quintessentially Australian I suppose,” she says. “I just loved the whole idea of the crime family.”

As well as really enjoying working with Ledger and Le Marquand, Porter was struck by how charismatic Ledger was. “I remember him reading Lolita on set and I thought, wow, what a cultured fella at that age,” she says. “He was very serious about his acting and really wanted to be good at it.”

Le Marquand still gets regular reminders about how much Wozza was liked. “The famous line – ‘shotties are good’ – I’ve probably been asked to do that a hundred times in pubs over the years,” he says. “The other one is ‘told you not to play with a shottie in the house. Dad’s got a splitting bloody headache’.

“There’s a guy who’s got my face tattooed on his left buttock with the line ‘this is going to be a f---ing ripper’.”

While Le Marquand thinks Jordan is “an absolute genius” for writing such a funny script, he thinks the deadpan delivery by fellow crims played by Brown, Field and the late Tom Long as Wally made it work.

Le Marquand’s scenes were all with Ledger, Porter and Kieran Darcy-Smith, who played fellow bank robber Craig. “No scenes with Rose, but I saw a lot of her when we went to Sundance,” he says. “We all crashed on Gregor’s loungeroom floor.”

He shot the scene planning the bank robbery with Porter in a cramped studio at Rozelle. “In those days you could smoke real cigarettes on set,” he says. “My character smoked the whole time during that scene. I was a smoker but for continuity purposes I had to have a drag at a certain time, which meant that I probably had about 70 cigarettes that day. That was good for my voice but not so good for my lungs.”

A disappointing reception for Two Hands at the Sundance Film Festival prompted Jordan to cut about eight minutes and revoice the scenes featuring Jimmy’s dead brother for the Australian release.

“We went into that screening very confident, but it didn’t go well,” he says. “I’m philosophical about it because I made the film very unashamedly Australian, with a lot of Australian slang. There’s a line where Pando gets kicked in the balls and he says ‘my testicles look like a pair of pikelets’.

“People outside of Australia would have no idea what that means and there’s a lot of that all through the movie … So at the time, it didn’t travel that well as a movie.”

There was another problem. After the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999 – two students murdering 12 other students and a teacher – Jordan says there was a tacit agreement among studios and distributors not to show children with guns on screen.

“The fact that the climax of Two Hands involved a young girl coming in and shooting all the gangsters stopped it from getting distribution there,” he says.

Jordan, who has gone on to make the films Buffalo Soldiers, Ned Kelly with Ledger starring, Unthinkable and Dirt Music as well as the miniseries Old School and Australian Gangster, is reluctant to say too much about the sequel. Just that “we’re in the final stages of scripting and about to start looking for financing” and that he is working with Two Hands producers Marian Macgowan and Tim White, and Easy Tiger Productions’ Ian Collie and Rob Gibson.

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The director’s closeness with Ledger – they lived together for a while and were confidants about film decisions – and his admiration for Long, who died from encephalitis in 2020, means he finds it difficult to watch Two Hands now. “It’s just hard,” he says.

But Jordan thinks of the film with fondness.

“Two Hands was, I think, a slightly magical thing,” he says. “This group of people came together at the right time in the right way and it became something special because of that.”

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