DAVIDA ALLEN


My first awareness of your work was in the Bicentenary Art Exhibition in Melbourne, 'Australian Spirituality in Religious Art', curated by Rosemary Crumlin. There was a very large, mainly blue painting of your which has stayed in my mind. She chose your work to represent aspects of Australian Spirituality.

Davida Allen: That was 'The Death of My Father'. She also chose one called 'The Priest'. But 'The Death of My Father' is large, very cinematic in scale. Rosemary is now a friend of mine. I don't know why she chose me but I do know that she was the first person in the art world who wrote the synopsis for the catalogue, found my address through my gallery, sent it to me and asked would I please edit this synopsis. And this respect that she had given me, no one in the art world, journalists, or directors of exhibitions, no one had given that trust back to the maker of the art.

Did she say why she wanted you in that exhibition?

No, I'm used to being in exhibitions where the image is direct and tells a story. It's one of the reasons that I've been successful in the art world simply because people generally love stories and my images are fairly clear. They've been said to be childlike, naive, rough, direct but, basically, people can see what they're about. There's a lot of art around where the meaning is ambiguous.

The Death of My Father'?

Everyone, even if they've never looked at a painting before, has had an emotional reaction to that picture, reactions of pain and horror. You have an image of a baby. It might not be a Raffaele baby but everybody identifies it as a baby. And there are crows in the sky picking at this baby, so the images tell a story. For Rosemary the man has a halo, so there's an icon image.

This is interesting because in my movie, Feeling Sexy, the icon imagery that I use to place specific things (and I say that to you and wouldn't bother saying it to anyone else because we're talking on a platform of Catholicism) is when she holds up the pill. That was a specific time that I remember well when the pill was allowed medically but the Pope was condemning it. I was a young Catholic girl in a boarding school. And, when we went out into the world, our parents were utterly frightened that the morality that they had taught us had just been literally sunk because we now had a freedom of choice. Fear of pregnancy was one thing that our parents, our Catholic parents, had in their favour. So, for me, it's a little snippet of an icon that I've used in the film that grounds it in the time of the 60s and 70s. It shows that thirty years later we can still, as with 'The Death of My Father', read the story. You can still see the story no matter what age group is reading the story. It's still the same story.

So, in the movie, when Vicki says to Greg, 'It's okay, don't be worried. You may have a lot of moral problems. You may have a set of moral responsibilities that will happen because we will have sex, but that's okay', it's an icon for her saying that, as a woman, 'I'm free'.

The painting of The Priest?

It was a painting where you have three distinct figures in a dirty reddy, blacky background. There's a woman image. There's a man image with quite African icon genitalia, very strong and very abstract but, obviously, very male. And then there's a non-sexual, non-icon identification figure with a halo. And it's called 'The Priest Picture'. It was a specifically autobiographical picture and I used the idea in a novel that I wrote called 'The Autobiography of Vicki Myers'. In it a woman falls in love with a priest and there are great difficulties. The priest is anxious. While it's a sexual thing, she's actually fallen in love with the priest's power and his imagination that he believes in God. So she's questioning, in fact, whether he has an imagination.

I've been on this imagination thing since I was born. I'm playing the same fiddle but playing different tunes. It's the same instrument for us imagining as women and for you imagining as audience. It's always been for me, 'let's tell a story of things I believe in'. When you tell a story to children, they can't hear it unless they're using their imaginations. We tell the Hansel and Gretel stories, the Cinderella stories, all the Hans Christian Andersen stories and we take it for granted that they're listening. But how they're listening is all up there in the imagination, the wonder of it.

In Feeling Sexy, there's a discussion between Greg and Vicki with the figure of a brain and they ask where imagination is located and they can't definitely locate it.

That's another icon thing. It can't be located. A lot of people won't ever locate their imagination. In my story, there's a celebration of Greg, the husband, who may never be able to imagine. It's a celebration of Greg's respect for Vicki's imagination. That's his great love story.

We can see this in the scene where Greg is sitting in the room Vicki has painted for him and for herself eating his cereal and she looks in through the door and sees his delight.

It's a compliment to him. He wins in this story. He wins. People can be frightened by behaviour like Vicki's. What's going on in this girl's mind? The question is how she can keep loving him in the way she first loved him when she met him at the dance. It's a very rich story. It's not my story. It's been told for hundreds of years. It's a love story. Which partner sees the wealth in being together and how can they find the way to staying together?

A word about Vicki and her imagination and her painting. She dramatises creativity in painting but she is showing us in her painting in the film something that has been, in fact lived by you.

And by every artist in the universe...

But the way she stirred the colours, applied the paint... Don't we have something of you?

There are a few little directorial things which I was probably doing as director using the knowledge of the only way I know how to paint. If I had used a small sable paint brush, it would have been a different story.

Another powerful scene is that where Greg weeps in the toilet after Vicki tells him about her affair. It frees and enables him to go a step further. But Greg has wanted to punish her and brings home a dog?

It was a metaphor for punishment. I wanted it to be a dog that we were allowed to have. As an icon for his punishment of Vicki, it was a practical thing. We had to have a dog that Greg could physically carry, a dog that looked as if it had a capability of being dangerous but wasn't evil. That would have happened if Greg had arrived with something quite savage. I hate dogs but it was a dog that in Australia many people have, a loyal dog, a choice of how to balance it, not to hate Greg too much. And it's a piece of the icon, an Australian thing that people know a blue heeler is a guard dog and it can be dangerous.

You've mentioned that you did not like the editing device with the black space between scenes.

While it gives the audience time to reflect on what they have seen and stay with their emotions, it also gives us time to distance ourselves from what we have seen, to be self-focussed.

I want to seduce you into liking the way I've edited the film. The editing is the way I paint and in the editing I wanted to put a whole lot of paintings together. One of the reasons I moved into film-making is that you do all these paintings, you put them on a wall in an exhibition and people come to see them - and that's been my profession for the last twenty five years. They move from one painting to another and there's a space in between each painting on the wall. A lot of people come, my audience. My utter and total love affair is with the audience. Any artist with any honesty in them would have to admit it. When people come, I'm a bit anxious to know whether they are aware that in this gallery there are twenty five paintings which are all telling a story about the one thing. At the moment I'm doing a series of sea-scapes of a seaside place that I love.

Usually on the third or fourth time that people see the pictures they pick up on the meanings. You can do that at art galleries. People see the exhibition and then tell their friends and bring them so they've seen the pictures several times. You don't usually get a second go at a cinema.

So, the style for Feeling Sexy was completely premeditated. What is the style to use? People kept asking me what's your look? What's your style? But what are they talking about? I'm actually thinking what's the bloody best way of making them feel that each scene is a painting. You might think there's too much black space between scenes in the film but I don't think there's enough. But the black space is also saying that you should move on and look at the next picture because I've said all I want to say. That's it.

The pressbook for the film says something like that, that the running time is the precise time that you wanted to tell your story.

It's only fifty minutes. And yet, because it does affect every sense in your body, it means that you don't feel that you've been given only a short course.

It's also the timespan.

Yes, you feel satiated but you don't feel you've been robbed.

As regards the theme of the film itself: it seems important that it is a woman's story and woman's experience, especially with empathy for an Australian women's audience and for Australian males to respond with empathy.

Hopefully it's not just Australian. They speak Australian because they're Australian actors. If it's only peculiar to Australian then I've failed.

Growing up we used to have plum pudding at Christmas with real money wrapped up in alfoil because you weren't allowed to put the real money straight into the pudding. I used to glutton myself to get the money. I wasn't hungry anymore but I wanted the money. I'd eat another piece of plum pudding to get the money. The money in my particular plum pudding, the movie, is that Greg wins. He is on a winner because Vicki stays with him and their sexual experiences are going to be an incredibly deep rollercoaster. So, when it comes to the question of whether it is a woman's film or a man's film, the men who think it's a woman's film obviously need to go and take a few more pieces of the plum pudding to realise that there's a good fifty cent piece in there for them.

Are you going to make longer films?

No, that's the interesting thing. It's got nothing to do with the length, for me absolutely nothing to do with the length. I may be out of kilter here for the rest of my life, but I refuse to hear people say that your next film has to be ninety minutes because that's the standard we are now packaging. It's like Mc Donald's chips. It's the weight. It has to be.03 kilos of chips because all the packets have been made. But I come along with the most unbelievably spicy chip and there are only three of them and they totally satisfy. They taste better than the packet of ninety minute chips. So, if I've got another story to tell - and I've got a few up my sleeve but I've no idea what the next one's going to be - I'm just going to tell the story I want to tell and I refuse to put a few more trees into a landscape because the art world at large says it's not balanced unless there's three trees there. All I'm trying to do is tell a story about a landscape that had a tree in it. I will not be bottled.

You remarked that you think the Pope ought to see your film.

I think the pope needs to see it because we have great problems with relationships in the world at the moment. I have a tendency to talk about how hot pink patent leather shoes shouldn't be allowed on deck and I've no sooner said it than around me is an entire queue in hot pink!

There is a great sadness for me that people, as soon as it doesn't work out in a relationship, they walk away. It seems an easy way out. Hollywood has said, 'Once you don't feel the butterflies, go somewhere else until you feel them'. There's an evolutionary argument that we always need to feel the butterflies with a heterosexual partner in order to procreate and spread the genes, so the more partners you have... - an evolutionary theory. But there's another theory that I'm aware of - and the Catholics had a monopoly on this theory and the Pope would like to think he still has - where two people are meant to get married, have children, not falter and stay together for the rest of their lives. The cold hard reality of that is that it's hard work. Personally, I don't want and I know a lot of my women friends don't want to wake up every morning and think, 'O my God, this is really going to be hard work. I've got to enjoy this man whose got BO or whose shoes make a mark on the carpet or who has no social grace or who beats me'. So, how can you say you can work on a relationship your own way?

You know, Feeling Sexy is a lovely plum pudding story. It's not out there with a big sign saying that this is the answer. But like all stories you can just get a little taste of 'we could do that'. There's hope and, as a Catholic, I feel that there is hope and I want to tell stories that say there is hope. It's a love story unlike the Hollywood stories which say move on; it's not working here so move on. Feeling Sexy is not a kind of Bible story that says, 'Drat it, this is going to be hard work'. It's just a different angle at looking at a universal situation. It's a celebration of monogamy.

It's very similar to a seed which, unless it's watered, dies. You can want to be a ballerina but unless someone comes in and tells you that they know where the ballet shoes are and that you need ballet shoes, it's not going to happen. It's like that with my moving into movies. Unless I'd met Glenys Rowe, the producer, I would probably still be painting pictures and saying, 'I'd love to make a movie'. Glenys kept on saying to me, 'What is it you want to say?'. For eight years she relentlessly kept on asking this same core question. Having made the movie, I know that if you know what you want to sy, everything somehow falls into place.

It's the people you know who say I believe in you. And that's the importance of family and the family structure. You have people who wake up every day and say 'we believe in you'. That's why you need people to stay together, men and women in relationship and women and women in relationship and men and men in relationship who can say 'I believe in you'. And that's what Greg says to Vicki, 'I believe in you'.

And the Queensland look of shorts and long socks?

In Brisbane it's a uniform!


Interview: 9th September 1999

MARIO ANDREACCHIO



Your main focus in film-making and television has been on children's films?

It's been primarily children's films - I like to call them family films because what I do with a lot of the films is I try and hit three levels. Of course, it's got to appeal to the kids and be relevant to them. It's then also got to appeal to the parents in some way so that they can get something out of it, but then there's the grandparents as well.

What makes this style of film-making very difficult is not only do you have those three generations that you have to appeal to, but you also then have to appeal to the three generations in other countries. So you're dealing with an enormous variation in taste and style and attitudes, which then, in the end, means that you have to resort to the universal themes because they're looking at what is it that we all have in common rather than what it is it that actually separates us.

How does that work for Napoleon and The Real Mc Caw? What's for the children, what's for the parents and what's for the grandparents?

In both of them there's an adventure story. Both are driven by a sense of adventure, a sense of exploration, a sense of a child going out of an environment that it knows into an environment that it doesn't know. And, along the way, the central character actually tests itself - tests itself against the major elements, both physical and ethical, and they finally get to a point where - usually I like to set my climactic scenes in the midst of a flood. You'll notice in Napoleon and in The Real McCaw?, as well as Captain Johnno, the major climactic scene happens in the middle of a flood and there's redemption and cleansing and rediscovering.

That imagery of the flood - where does it come from in your experience? Is it religious, psychological, both?

It's actually both, because I trained as a psychologist and I did a major research project looking at the development of storytelling, and I applied motivational theory to storytelling. I looked at the Bible, the Bhagavad Ghita, the Koran, ancient Greek tragedies, Roman tales and modern cinema and television. I got a perspective on the development of storytelling. And one of the things that I noticed really strongly was the use of water. Most of the major religions of the world are desert religions and water has a really strong meaning. And that's percolated through our thinking, the whole use of water and the cleansing effect of water.

I also believe that having parasites in the Sydney water system is actually going right to the root of fundamental psychology, because water is supposed to represent purity and cleansing and to have it impure is quite amazing.

You symbolise water in the sea in the three films, you've chosen the harbour and the open sea?

That's right. In a major scene in Napoleon there's a flash-flood and the dog gets whisked away. But then within the flood, he actually finds himself. The same with The Real McCaw?. There's wind and water and it's right in the midst of that environment. Thematically, I think that it touches all the different generations because it touches kids but it touches buttons within adults and grandparents as well.

You're a family man yourself?

Three boys. That's how I've lost so much hair.

You've focused on boys in the films as well?

Yes, I have, but my next movie is called Sally Marshall is not an Alien and it is actually all girls. I specifically went for that film because it did have girl characters. It's the same sort of thing; it's looking at really fundamental ethical questions in an entertaining medium. I think it's really important that, while there is such a huge amount of family material, there's very little family material that has an Australian voice. And that's really what I'm on about.

Speaking of voices - talking animals and talking birds. What's the attraction of the animals?

Well, animals have been around in storytelling since Aesop's Fables. There's something about an animal representing a human character that immediately reduces all the complexities of this human character to very simple, very accessible and very understandable terms. We can see and we can project so much of ourselves onto an animal. Anybody who has a pet can do that. I found that the use and the symbolic use of animals is, in fact, extremely appealing.

You won an Emmy for Captain Johnno. How significant was your contribution to the movement of Children's Television and Film in the '80s and '90s?

Reasonably significant because, with a film like Captain Johnno, we moved away from the idea that kids' films need to be froth and bubble. Captain Johnno is actually quite a serious film. Lots of people said to me, "Kids aren't going to watch this. Kids aren't going to relate to this. They want fun." And it proved them all wrong. In fact, I think there's such a need that kids have to have some strong moral pillars or ethical pillars around the place, so they can get a sense as to where they stand, that when they see films like Captain Johnno, they gravitate to them like bees to a honeypot.

I did that and I did Sky Trackers. I also did Lift Off. They were all attempts to try to add something or contribute on a level that went beyond what was being done at the time. Then I got to a point where I thought, well, rather than going with other people's ideas and other people's scripts, why not become involved in myself and have a lot more control, rather than always getting to the situation where you've got to go through explaining the storytelling, what you're trying to do and so on.

Relationships are important in your films. Part of yourr ethical consideration seems to be the family as in The Real McCaw?

Absolutely. It doesn't look at family in an analytical way, but it's really trying to look at those instinctive human emotions that push and pull people. We need to see that represented and we need to acknowledge that it is a conflict we all have. We need to see how some people resolve it, that this is what we're all striving for and how important it is - then I think we've achieved something. When I look at the fact that I'm still getting letters from kids around the world who have seen Napoleon ten, fifteen times, it makes me realise what an impact cinema can have. And I just hope that I can contribute in some small way.

The Dreaming and Fair Game - where did they come from?

Fair Game came out of a situation where we were wanting to make a movie that was a B-grade video suspense thriller. I wanted to treat it like comic book violence - it was always like a comic book study of violence. What amazed me and the thing I found quite disappointing was that it started to become a cult film in some parts of the world and people were taking it seriously. And that, for me, became a real turning point. I thought, if people are taking this seriously, then I don't think I can make this sort of material.

Some reviews said it was misogynistic and sexist. Did you see it that way or was this more of the comic book style?

Yes, it was very much comic book. It wasn't really saying anything. It had references to other movies and it was more like an experience. In the end it's the woman that wins out: it's a growth in strength of a woman who's being harassed by these three guys.

But then I went on to The Dreaming, which was originally a script that was tackling, quite strongly, the issue of the past treatment of aborigines, the white-black conflict. Unfortunately, there was a time when the script was changed right in front of me and I was subject to other people saying, "No, you can't make that film, you've got to make this film". So, when you're in that position where you're starting out and where nobody trusts you, nobody really has total faith in your vision because you haven't actually got a track record. Then they take the prominent position.

You would have been able to make some statements about Aboriginal problems?

Absolutely, yes. But it's that trial and error process you go through. It's finding where you actually stand and why you want to make the sort of films that you do.

The South Australian perspective pervades a lot of your work.

Yes, very much so. I was born in South Australia in Leigh Creek, a coalmining town. I think one of the good things about Adelaide that I've found - because I actually lived in Sydney for nearly four and a half years - is that in Adelaide I can have an individual voice. You've got to find your own voice. For instance, a film like Priscilla could never be made out of Adelaide. That's a Sydney type of film, whereas you look at a film like Napoleon, it's looking at the Australian landscape and Australian characters from a completely different point. That, to me, is what characterises Adelaide.

Out of Adelaide - well, what have you had over the past five years? You've had Bad Boy Bubby, you've had The Quiet Room, you've had Shine, you've had Napoleon - it's an environment that actually encourages individuality, which is the thing I really love about the place.



20th September 1998

CHRISTINA ANDREEF


You have something of a multinational background but, originally, you are from New Zealand?

Yes, I'm born and bred in New Zealand.

And studied journalism?

I studied journalism first, when I was 18, then travelled the world for many years as a backpacker. I ended up at university in Northern Ireland, wanting to further my journalism skills. But part of the degree course that I was doing included a media degree with film studies, film theory. We had wonderful teachers and I got completely hooked on film and shelved the journalism. This was the late 70s, early 80s. Since then I've been completely impassioned about film.

So, what brought you to Australia?

I came to Australia after finishing my honours degree in Ireland hoping to go to the Film and Television School. I applied in the early 80s, with my first-class honours degree, to get into the School but, unfortunately, I was not successful. That was a big shock because there had never been anything in my life that I really wanted so much. But I then got a Commonwealth Scholarship and ended up at Macquarie University, doing postgraduate film theory. I continued for another four years at university, studying film theory, before I met Jane Campion. I think I met her when I was writing my thesis.

What was the topic of the thesis?

Australian women film-makers and their films. Truthfully, I was never an academic and I was there at university only because I didn't get into film school. I was craving to actually be on-set and I used to work for nothing whenever I could on people's 16mm short films. I was a runner, an AD and all the different jobs I did to create my own film school. And then, of course, I had a fantastic break, meeting Jane. We became friends and I worked as her assistant on Sweetie. That was the beginning.

And An Angel at My Table and The Piano?

Yes. So I had my film school. Actually, I had a much, much more valuable film school than I would have got at the AFTRS.

Your short film, Excursion to the Bridge of Friendship, raises the issue of your Bulgarian background. Your ancestry, then? From Bulgaria to New Zealand?

Yes. My father is Bulgarian and emigrated to New Zealand in the mid-'50s when a lot of eastern European and Mediterranean men, particularly, were migrating all over the world, away from the poverty and, in Dad's case, away from Communism. He washed up in New Zealand and married my mum, who is Anglo- Irish, and had us kids. There were six of us, all born in New Zealand. But we have a Slav- Celtic heritage.

What about religion? Was he Orthodox?

Dad's mum, my grandmother, was Greek Orthodox. Dad's not terribly religious. Mum's Catholic.

Quite a combination. And yourself? Did you have a Catholic education?

Yes, I did. I went to St Joseph's Primary School in a small town called Whakatane. The Catholic primary school in those days took you right through Intermediate to High School. I actually had an incredible education with the nuns in the small town. By the time we got to High School, all of us Catholic schoolkids were streets ahead in maths and languages.
A lot of Catholic kids in our town went off to Catholic boarding schools in bigger cities but our family couldn't afford that, so we went to the local state high school, which I'm also very glad about because my town in New Zealand is very much a Maori town and we became steeped in Maori culture and music. That was a really rich part of my upbringing.

The main thing I remember from Excursion to The Bridge of Friendship is the music. It was very striking. The black and white photography and music. What led you to write the film? Going back into your family heritage?

It was actually a crazy thing. I had been working as Jane Campion's assistant for several years by that time and, while I was working for her, I started writing my own short scripts. She was a great mentor and very generous overseer of my work. I'd written a lengthy short film that never got financed and I found that quite hard.

When I was growing up, my father and mother were always receiving letters from strangers in Bulgaria who wanted help to come to the west. Those were still the Cold War days before the Berlin Wall came. They wanted to come to the west or they needed medical help - you know, all sorts of things.

I remember the months and years of effort that my father and my mother put into negotiating with authorities, both medical and political, to help various people come to New Zealand, or for sending boxes of drugs, sending food. My grandmother was still living there. We looked after her from afar. So it was quite a part of our family's culture to receive these letters from strangers wanting quite big things and sometimes quite outlandish things, like very expensive angora twinsets! They'd write and ask for specific things, often things that my mother could not afford for herself, in fact, ever. They didn't really know what they were asking for. So, I used to feel that they were quite demanding.

Then when I became an adult, I started getting these requests myself. Strangers would write to you and often you'd write back. But I was a young woman on the dole, trying to establish a writing career and a film career. I could barely support myself. Out of the blue in the mail one day came a cassette tape from a fairly famous Bulgarian folk-singer who was an archivist of Bulgarian folk-music. She would travel the country collecting half-forgotten lyrics and she would recompose the songs and record them. She lived in Germany and her name was Evanka Ivanova - and she wanted to come to Australia and get gigs!

At the time, I was part of this very inner-city Sydney coffee bar culture where I'd hang out all day with friends and try and write - and basically scratch the rent together. So the thought was terrifying that this woman, who was not related to me at all (and I don't know where she got my name and address from) was going to come to Australia and land on my couch and be there, trying to become rich and famous.

When I was growing up, as well, my father was very strong-minded about his culture and very determined that we'd grow up little Bulgarians. He played this music and I used to hate it. I love it now. I think it's astonishing, so open-throated. It's extraordinary. There was something about the music that my father played that was even rawer than what we hear now. The studio produces more refined versions of that music now, but as a child I found it intolerable. Probably the way children find good wines intolerable and yoghurt and things like that. Then you grow up!

Well, I used to hate that music as a child and here it was in my letterbox. I was laughing about it with friends when one particular friend said, 'That would make a good short film'. So we made a film about it. I contacted the woman, but she never came to Australia. She did sell us her music and we used it in the film. Then it came to the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, invited for the Un Certain Regard section.

Your next short film was The Gap?

Since I've made the feature film, Soft Fruit, there have been requests for screenings of the three short films in retrospectives, which has been very nice. And I've seen The Gap again recently, not having seen it for years. It's a strange film and I don't know what it came out of. After Excursion to the Bridge of Friendship, which was so much part of my personal life and my family biography, I wanted to test my skills with a subject-matter that was not biographical, to see how I would be as a director.

It was based on a story that I read in the newspaper about a man who had sat on the edge of The Gap at Watson's Bay, trying to throw himself off, 24 hours of preparation, really, for this event. Two plainclothes police, a female and a male, tactical response police, came to try and talk him down. I read this little story and I read how they talked him down. So I went and interviewed the two police at length about everything that happened in that 24 hours on the edge of the cliff.

I found it really heart-wrenching. They quoted to me the actual things that they had said to the man and the things that had happened, his fear and how he wet himself. It was so visceral and corporeal and banal, too. So the film is that story. Filmicly, with short films you really want to go to places that feature films can't easily go to. There's a compulsion and desire to experiment and to use the medium in a more adventurous way.

I devised this idea of breaking from the straight narrative, each of the characters turn at a certain point and sing to the camera. They sing their secret soul. The man who's jumping is gay and he's married and has children but he's completely closeted in his relationship. This is all simply hinted at in the film. You don't really get to know him specifically. But he sings. He intimates all this in his song to the camera.

The policewoman, the longer she stays up on the cliff, gets that feeling that we all do sometimes, of wanting to jump. She becomes more and more attracted to the edge and the camera follows her to the edge as she gets more and more mesmerised. The man who wants to jump starts taunting her as if she's going to jump. So she sings about this desire to jump out into the wild blue yonder at The Gap.

The other character, the policeman, is quite hard-bitten. He's learnt through his training that you must never sacrifice yourself. The policewoman would. She'd go down with this man in her attempt to save him. The policeman would not. He goes so far as constantly lathering himself with sunblock because he's not going to get burnt for this guy. In New South Wales the police are not allowed to grab, touch the person who's jumping because deaths do happen that way. Cops do get dragged down. But this one is hard-bitten. He's not going to be psychologically or physically injured by any of this. It's just a day in the life of his job. So the focus of The Gap is that they sing their secret fears and desires to the camera.

You then moved on to relationships and intimacy?

Yes, and to violence. By that point I was thinking that my ouvre was going to be musical violence. Shooting the Breeze is about living in the heart of King's Cross, which we do, and the dilemma of how much you have to be involved with your neighbours. It's that modern syndrome in inner-city culture of minding your own business and not interfering. People do live in such close proximity to each other. I'm sure it's similar in the more open suburbs as well.

But this is very intense dramatically because it's set in an apartment building. A young couple come home. They hear the neighbouring couple fighting through the wall. We never get to see the fighting couple, but we hear them, and the soundscape grows. You can hear slaps, you can hear kicking, you can hear furniture being shoved around. And the woman in our story becomes more and more upset because she had promised her boyfriend that the next time this happened, she was going to call the cops. He doesn't want to call the cops, he doesn't want to interfere. So it's this dilemma of becoming involved or not.

The boyfriend starts taunting her. Her name is Greta. He doesn't want to phone the police, he wants to mind his own business. Then they start fighting, the pair of them. There's a mosquito that you see that travels between the two apartments, the two fighting couples. It's as if it's bringing the contagion of violence on the wind to them. You get the close-ups of the mosquito, increasingly closer, biting the neck of the woman and she breaks out in violence. Violence has bred violence and this couple end up in their own violent altercation.

All of that is a powerful preparation for Soft Fruit. How successful was the film in its Australian release?

It ran for 14 weeks in Australia, which we were thrilled about, because I'm sure we thought it would be taken off at Christmas for the big American holiday releases, but it stayed on. We got really great reviews, so we were very happy.

So what was the appeal? What did you touch in the Australian psyche?

I think people responded to the whole package. I think people were always interested in the short films. I was looking forward - it's a bit of an upstart thing to say, isn't it! - to the feature that I would make.

I certainly was.

Yes, people do. They get to know the family of film-makers in their community and they're interested in what your first feature is going to be.

In the film, we cast four big women in the roles. It's not unheard of but Sydney women who were larger than a size 10 or a size 12 got to come and audition and strut their stuff. Really, there's amazing talent in Sydney in the acting sorority of women who are not your conventional screen actors. The energy around the casting was fantastic, and we got a great cast.

I worked with Alison Barrett and Nicki Barrett, the casting directors. We spent many months in a heartfelt way, finding people. You know how you see films about families where they don't really feel like families? They have a couple of stars thrown together and they're meant to be sisters and it just doesn't work. This family had to feel like a real family and be profoundly related. We were looking for a certain gene pool that could have eastern European and Celtic roots - big, blowsy, oestregen-laden girls - and we found them. It was just fantastic. I think the cast are a big reason for the success of the film.

And the family theme?

Of course, that's universal. Personally, I love to see films about families where some of them are...

Warts and all?

Absolutely, warts and all, and not being afraid to go into the ugly obsessions in families in order to expose the beauty, to expose the bonds that you can't actually bear to be severed. As you grow older, it's so difficult to stay in relationship with your brothers and sisters and your parents. When you get into your thirties and forties, paths are dividing. That's not the case in countries like Spain. They remain very attached to their families. We don't so much.

So Soft Fruit is about that family struggle. You think you don't care when you have a fight and fall out. Then you realise that you're suffering profoundly because you're on the outer. It's about that struggle to get back on the inner, on the inside.

I took a Lithuanian woman and a French woman to see Soft Fruit and they identified with the family themes. But they were overwhelmed by the scene where the father took off his clothes for his son.

Really? For me, it is the emotional pinnacle of the film. The sisters bustle about and get into all sorts of strife and woes. But the real pain of the film is the relationship between the father and the son. That is their moment when they do something simple and human. They simply recognise each other for a moment. And it's only a moment. The window goes up, they see each other and then it goes down again.

The father apologised and the son didn't.

Do you think he apologised?

Well, taking off his clothes to be with his son...

Was somehow equalising. It's very primal. It's a quite instinctive thing.

The theme of death and Jeannie Drynan's ability to communicate the experience of dying to us was very powerful.

I was very concerned that the subject-matter could be sentimental. I myself am not that kind of person. When you're making your first film, you don't know what the tools are to avoid sentimentality. You just have to trust yourself, and that's very hard to do and you're full of self-doubt a lot of the time. But Jeannie, Patsy, the character in the film, has her faith. She is religious. Again it's not overstated in the film, but she's Catholic and she's always been Catholic in that old-fashioned way where she's almost embracing death. And her daughters get really angry in different ways. They want her to fight it, they want her to heal herself through natural therapies, they want her to be an obedient sick woman in bed. She is actually walking towards death. She knows it's coming and she's not afraid of it. Well, of course, everybody is sometimes afraid of it.

The 'buried alive' theme.

Yes, that's where it comes out.

You had her standing under the trees at the house and she said, "It would be terrible to buried alive." I thought that that was where she had been, buried alive in the house all those years.

That's exactly right. I think that's where her fear of death comes out in this kind of strange displacement, an irrational fear of being buried alive.

But also the glamour of Jackie Onassis.

And her own death with her loving family around her. Patsy's very keen on the parallels between her modest working-class life and Jackie Kennedy's palatial Catholicism.

A moment on the Catholicism theme, the sequence where Patsy and her daughter were cleaning the church and then they hid in the car from Sister.

Yes, Sister Stanislaus.

Are those little details from your childhood?

Yes, they are. I mean, I was a vestal virgin and I used to clean the church with my mother and my sisters. That was a big part of my growing up, polishing the brass and arranging the flowers. And the nuns - as I say, from age 5 to 13 I was under the spell of the nuns. I wanted to be a nun, of course, as all good Catholic girls do. They were strong women, and they were snooty about housewives, even back then. They were independent women who were quite sniffy if all you wanted to be was a housewife. This was in the '60s in New Zealand.

More than a touch feminist.

Yes, I know.

The details at the funeral, the singing of 'Hail, Queen of Heaven', seemed just right. It was moving to see Beau weeping, that you had the man actually dissolve and his soft side at last come out during the funeral.

We were blown away by his performance. I wrote that in the script, that he would be kind of snotty and snivelling, not snivelling, but just kind of... And he just did it. I had no idea that he'd be able. I had thought, well, let's see what he does here without putting any pressure on. Then he wanted to do retakes. He was amazing.

I know that 'Hail, Queen of Heaven' is the wrong song for a funeral, but it's such a hymn from my childhood. It felt right at the time, because Patsy had chosen it. It was her choice. The hymn doesn't have to be what it should be. It's just what she would have chosen.

Finally, how confident are you about the Australian film industry - and your place in it?

I'm not so confident about our industry. It's fragile and increasingly overwhelmed by American culture. That's my feeling. I feel confident of my place in it. I feel like I've done my apprenticeship, I really do. I'm excited to be going on, to make more films. And I'm very keen to make them in the Australian and New Zealand vernacular. I want to work in that world.


Interview: May 2000

MARTHA ANSARA



Has it been easy or difficult to make documentaries in Australia?

I don't think it's easy in this period for most people, but it has been easy for me in some ways and hard in others because of the way I've done things - I've never tried to make a living from doing it. So usually there hasn't been much worry about it. But it's very hard because I've had a family to look after and the two things don't go together. Also it's very exhausting work. Right now I'm doing a film about Frank Hurley, who's the model documentary maker. The reason I'm doing this film with my friend, Pat Fisk, is that his obsessive pursuit of bringing the film back from wherever is so typical of documentary makers, including me and her, we need to really examine this obsession we've had and we're doing it through him. And making documentaries allows you to get away from the foundations of your own life into other people's lives and you don't have to think about anything that you need to think about.

What drove Frank Hurley?

His first films were done on the Mawson expedition of 1911-1913. And because he never speaks of himself, it's been very hard to get a completely satisfactory analysis. He wrote many diaries but they're all at a distance. There are a few times when he lets things slip. He had a very difficult childhood and ran away from home at the age of 13. In later life I know that he avoided his family, including his widowed mother. His daughters dreaded going to see her. But I don't really know what it was. In those days there was great excitement about exploration, about science and about aviation, all of which he participated in, and in Empire and even war. It was a sort of glorified realm which men of stature were involved in and men of education.

Although he left school at 13, he did do some courses later. He always wanted to be a very well-educated person and, in fact, he was. But he had an intense wish to idealise things, which you see in his pictures. I have a lot of identification with his tendency towards pictorialism. The compositions were really very important to him, beyond the content, unlike, for instance, Damien Parer, who worked with Frank Hurley in the Second World War and represented a much more emotional type of picture. Hurley wanted to keep everything in its place and beautifully composed. I know that when I've shot films, those are the things I like, too.

In your film, how much is biographical and how much is study of his technique as a film-maker?

Well, we believe the two are very closely linked, so we're attempting to talk about him biographically, analytically, with a great deal of sympathy, obviously, and appreciation of his actual film-making and its style, and also about the social trends of the time.

From 1911 to the 40s is certainly a striking thirty-year period in the development of film, from silent to sound, and only 15 years or so after the Lumiere Brothers' first screening.

It's very, very interesting, yes. He came into film in the very early days in Australia and he made his last films after the Second World War, and he continued photographing stills until the day before he died in January 1962.

And yourself? When did you start making films in Australia?

When I arrived in Australia at the end of 1969, it was just the time of that big cultural upsurge which ultimately led, along with the social changes, to the Whitlam Labor Government. In 1970, I believe it was, the Film, Radio and Television Board of the Australia Council had its first round of applications for an experimental film fund and I received some money then to make a film for the Women's Liberation Movement. We made that film, called Film for Discussion, although it took quite a long time and babies intervened but that was the first film I made.

Did you do any formal studies here or had you done any in the United States?

No, but in 1975 I applied to the Film School and was part of the first full-time program there. I actually, by then, wanted to be a cinematographer but I didn't tell them that because I had failed everywhere to get work as a camera assistant because they said women couldn't do that. So I told them I wanted to be a director. But it's not really what I really wanted to do.

You would have preferred the cinematography work?

Yes, but you're away from home far too much. So, although I did do that for a few years - and I think I was pretty successful at it - I was learning all the time but it wasn't something I could pursue. I did shoot a lot of films for other people.

Why did they say a woman couldn't do it?

Well, it was a sort of throwback to the times when equipment was very heavy - but they even said that even to a friend of mine who's 5'11" - and because there was an entrenched view of what a cameraman was. Certainly Jan Kenny, who was one of the first women to work professionally, encountered a lot of prejudice. But it's interesting that, once you showed that you could be one of the boys, you were allowed to do the work. There are a lot of women who do do it but, in fact, because it conflicts with home life for women and child-rearing, although for some reason it doesn't seem to do so for men, it's hard for most women to stick to it. In fact, it's very hard for most women to work professionally in film because there's still the question of the home front. I always thought it was the film industry which should change, but it's supposed to be the people that change to meet the film industry - well, it's becoming an industry, but it was never really an industry.

You were associated with a number of women's groups, at least in the '70s, even later. Who were some of those groups and what were they trying to do with film in those days?

You must understand that we were really shut out. We had hardly ever seen a film directed anywhere by a woman or in which women played key creative roles, much less in Australia. But at the same time as this incredible social change was going on in Australia, there was a women's movement and an attempt to develop an Australian film industry. Naturally we wanted to have a place in it and we wanted women generally to have a place in it and not just be continuity girls, make-up and so on.

There had been a lot of stifled talent and many of the women who later became leading producers had been continuity girls, like Sue Milliken, Jill Robb, Joy Cavill - although she was one of the ones to break out of that - because that was the role that women were supposed to be able to do. So we were raising a lot of questions about women's position and women's ability, in the context of the Women's Liberation Movement, as it was called then - that word "liberation" rapidly disappeared!

What were the kind of films you actually did produce in those years?

We worked on each other's films and we had little groups to distribute the films because, in fact, most Australian films couldn't get distribution, and we very effectively managed to get our films into the schools and government departments and places where people still looked at films as part of education or discussion, that kind of thing. It still goes on, but not in the same spirit. And now, of course, they're all sold on video. But there had been a very strong film movement in Australia from the end of the Second World War and there were film societies everywhere. So there was a habit of looking at films and discussing films and we made films about women's condition, largely, and we worked through the Sydney Film-Makers' Co-op, which we had helped establish.

In Melbourne there was a group of women who weren't really serious about film-making, I don't think, because most of them didn't ever go on in film-making. They were called Reel Women and they insisted that the women's film group should be separate. We said, "No, we've built up this film co-op and, of course, we want to be part of it, but we can have a separate interest group within the whole." Ultimately that co-op fell prey to what I would call ultra-Left thinking which was its demise.

In the Sydney Film-Makers' Co-op, there was a time when people adopted these Left positions - and mind you, I was in the Communist Party all this time. But I feel that through the Communist Party I had learned that there are times when it's appropriate to put forward your ideas and times when it isn't, and to run a Left-wing film co-op in the circumstances we were in was absolutely ridiculous and I bowed out of it sometime in the late '70s when we went to an annual general meeting and everybody congratulated themselves that it was only the Left-wing people who were there, and I thought, "Whoops, that's the end of us." And so it proved to be, because it needed to serve the interests of all film-makers, whatever their particular bent, because that's the situation we're in in Australia, that everybody needs to put forward their ideas.

So, ultimately the co-op floundered, but it served a very important need. It was through the co-op and through our own work in the co-op that we were really able to get these women's films around very widely.

You photographed Essie Coffey's well-known film that was often used in seminars, My Survival as an Aboriginal. Was that part of the co-op movement?

Through the co-op we showed it at the cinema. And the co-op got wonderful audiences. Through our collective work that way, we really made this film and caused debate about its ideas. It's interesting, everything is professionalist now - an appearance that is often much larger than its reality. In those days I think the reality was much bigger than the daggy appearance.

I remember Essie Coffey introducing the family as they all came out of the caravan, and her walking one of her grandchildren through the bush and teaching him. Aboriginal grandmothers are great communicators.

When we made that film, one of the things that was in Essie's mind was that people were saying that, unless you're up in Arnhem Land running around in your undies, so to speak, you're not aboriginal. So that question of identity and being aboriginal was actually a debate, which it isn't now, thank God. There's a much broader view now of aboriginality, whatever that is. The film was made to reflect her views, and her views also changed over time, not a lot, but significantly, so that when we made the next film 17 years later, My Life As I Live It, she had thought a lot about some of the ways forward for aboriginal communities. It wasn't just protest, very concrete ways that things might change.

Another film was Changing The Needle. It screened at State Film Centre programs in Melbourne.

That's right. Because Australian documentaries were relatively rare and there was an audience for social documentaries, we used to be able to get audiences in those small state-supported cinemas for films on lots of different issues, mainly social issues. But, of course, that doesn't exist now. I was very pleased to see that my friend Gill Leahy's wonderful film, Our Park ran at the Valhalla for several weeks. It's a great film.

There still is an audience for these documentaries but with television and people moving into television which, I suppose is a good thing - I don't have a television and I don't like watching it - but it gives an economic base to your film-making if you can sell a film internationally. Now, of course, you don't get the theatrical screenings, but then those kinds of films couldn't get on television. In the year My Survival was sold to the ABC, they bought, I think, only five documentaries made outside the ABC. Within the ABC, although there were some wonderful films, they often tended to be formula films. At least My Survival was certainly not a formula film.

Did you go to Vietnam for Changing the Needle?

Yes. I had gone to a meeting in 1979 for somebody who had been teaching in Vietnam and was reporting back on the state of the country and I realised that, in fact, the war was continuing by other means. I felt very concerned about this and felt it would be a good time to look at the country and try to understand the condition of things because nobody heard anything. So I went to Vietnam with Mavis Robertson, who had been a joint secretary of the Communist Party and who, being in that position, gave us a lot of clout with the people there because there's a sort of Chinese system in the whole of government, very hierarchical in their thinking, a lot of respect for people in high positions.

We held long, long, long discussions day after day after day to try to work through the huge cultural differences and what they might expect and what we might expect and how we could make an arrangement, because we knew it would be very difficult to make a film there. We actually settled on a subject, a wonderful subject, which was to revisit the 17th Parallel where the great Dutch film-maker Joris Ivens had made a film in 1967, 1968 or 9, sometime around then, about how people managed in this intensely bombed 17th Parallel. We had wondered whether anybody would be alive or if anybody could find them. A man who had been head of the army film unit and had worked with XX had not only written a book, which had won a prize, about that area, but actually knew where most of these people were who featured in his film. They had mainly survived.

So we wanted to go back and visit where they were now, but Ivens was working with the Chinese and he forbade us to use that footage, even though Wilfred Burchett put it to him for us in Paris. That is what convinced us of the necessity of being absolutely independent of any government body when you make those films. Ivens was tied - I'm sure not just financially but emotionally - to the Chinese who were engaging in the border war with the Vietnamese, and he was not going to cross the Chinese by allowing us to use that footage.

It was very shocking. I had met him also in 1980, I think. Yes, we went to Vietnam in 1980 and I had met Ivens at the Flaherty Documentary Seminar in New York, and he was a marvellous man, absolutely marvellous man. He was eighty years old and he had more energy in his little finger than almost everybody in the whole place. He was just incredible and funny and we joked about some people walking towards us, the big-wigs, and how they looked like a Bulgarian delegation. We had the same sort of background and thinking and knowledge.

So we made a film about drug rehabilitation as a way of looking at the country, and we tried to take as objective a stance as we could. But it was a fairly conventional film in terms of a film in Australia. But in terms of making a film in Vietnam, anybody who had ever been to Vietnam, like John Pilger, was amazed at what we shot. But it took constant work, diplomacy, discussion, discussion, discussion. But we knew how to do that and, more than that, we were tough. I mean, the Vietnamese are really tough, but my friend Mavis Robertson is tougher, and more polite. So it took enormous politeness and enormous toughness. We did impossible things, even though it looks quite normal.

The Pursuit of Happiness and your decision to do a fiction film, and with a longer running time than your documentaries?

I hadn't decided to do a fiction film originally. Being involved in the Peace Movement for all this time and being involved in what was known as originally AICD, Association for International Co-operation and Development, which later became People for Nuclear Disarmament, I felt it would be good in 1985, after our big peace marches, to try to come to grips with the relationship between Australia and the United States. This seemed to be the critical issue: the reason why we have the US bases here, making us still a nuclear target.

At first I wanted to make a documentary, but we realised we couldn't see any way of getting to the issues that we wanted to get to through a documentary. All those documentaries have been made on the ABC, on Four Corners, over and over again really, by Jim Downey - he actually helped us with the film, some voice-overs. He was a Four Corners reporter throughout the '60s and '70s and his films said everything there was to say. But I realised that didn't have an impact because you had to put in all these facts and figures. So, ultimately, I thought I could make it in the form that I had made my first film in, Film for Discussion, which was a form of a psycho-drama. But it didn't turn out to be that kind of film because time had moved on and people I was working with didn't know how to deal with things that way. So it wasn't at all what I had planned. It was very difficult to make on the budget and in the way we were trying to do it. I still wanted to work in the way in the new circumstances, and in Fremantle, which was the correct place.

So I worked on improvising things there with the people we had. But it didn't come out improvised and we had documentary sections with facts and figures. And it was a story film in which there was a relationship between a husband and wife, a sort of paradigm for the relationship between Australia and the United States. It was a bit of a crude analysis, but it took so long to make (under the 10BA system) that by the time we finished the film - it was 1987 - for various reasons, the anti-nuclear movement was on the way out, so the film missed its time. And with films, timing is everything. If we had done it in a year, which we couldn't, it probably would have done very, very well. As it was, it did return 40 percent to the investors, but that was because it was very low-budget.

The interesting thing about the film is that, if the audience was not very sophisticated, they liked it enormously. If they were sophisticated, they thought it was really daggy. It got four stars and a huge audience on New Zealand television, whatever that means, and in Fremantle it played to packed houses.

With Pursuit of Happiness and in Questions of Peace, because I was born in 1942, I was ten years old in 1952. I experienced the stories of the Second World War, the horror of the concentration camps, the Japanese atrocities, as they were singled out, the Japanese and then, of course, the Cold War with the build-up of the nuclear arms race, it affected me very profoundly. I've been involved in the peace movement since I was a young thing taking around Ban the Bomb petitions. I have had a chance through the peace movement to get a very broad view of the world and of the relationship between the personal behaviour of people and the political things that happen. I can really see the inner and outer connections. The peace movement has influenced me profoundly.
I don't think that film actually reflects what I would want it to reflect. It's very crude and sort of programmatic, but nevertheless there are relationships between individuals and relationships between countries, nations, power relationships, the resolution of conflict, contradictions are still very pressing issues. I wish I had made a film which could have transcended its immediate use to explore some of those issues, but maybe we might do a little bit more along those lines, although not as overtly, in the film about Frank Hurley.

Between The Pursuit of Happiness and Frank Hurley, what have you been doing?

I did that film with Essie Coffey.

With the demise of the Communist Party, there was an attempt to form a much broader Left-wing party. I don't make films very often. I realised I couldn't. When my last child was born in 1982, I tried to keep on making films but, really, as a single parent of a young child, with other children, I couldn't. Besides, I was waking up to myself about my allocation of time, so it got harder and harder and I realised that I certainly couldn't go and shoot films because you're always away from home. You can't do it.

You mentioned "dragging your child through the goldfields of Western Australia"?

Yes, I did. I dragged my child through the goldfields of Western Australia. I was working with David Noakes and there was supposed to be a babysitter and there wasn't. We would just hand Alice to the nearest person who would wheel her in her pram over the land until we could wave in the distance and say that her crying would not disturb the filming. That wasn't very satisfactory. I remember there were all those pictures of the guerrilla mother with her rifle in one hand and her baby on her back. Bullshit! All this time I've been very involved in social movements and political things, trying to continue to do that.

So I was in Western Australia trying to help this new Left party, but it was started too much on the foundations of the old Left parties. The idea was that we, the respectable Communists, should link together with the weird sects instead of people from the environment movement or churches or whatever. Anyway, I didn't like that and, of course, for many reasons it didn't succeed. But I was working on that in Western Australia, living in a hotel in a room with the two kids, which was good, lovely. We rented out this little house - people kept lowering the rent on me - lower and lower and lower - but I loved living in a hotel room.

In the course of all that, I met up with my old friend, Robert Bropho, of the Fringe Dwellers of the Swan Valley. They were occupying the Swan Brewery and he kept working on me to do a film. I gave in and borrowed a camera and some used tapes and we made a little film that was really good. I just shot for five mornings with him. It was called Always Was, Always Will Be. It was about this occupation of the Aboriginal sacred site in the heart of Perth at the foot of King's Park at the old Swan Brewery, the opposition to the development of this very important sacred site and the battle that was going on over it.

So I came back to Sydney, finished the film as quickly as I could because it was needed, and it went everywhere. It was short, 33 minutes. Because it wasn't going to be for television, we didn't have to worry about the length, we could make it what it needed to be. And I managed to get some money from an inter-faith religious foundation in Perth. They gave us $2000 and I wrote this book. I was to have a creative arts fellowship at ANU and I went there and, instead of doing what I wanted to do for a long time - which is what I'm doing now - an oral history of the Australian film industry, I worked on this book about the Swan Brewery dispute and we printed it and it sold like hot cakes and we had to reprint. In the West it sold out and it's almost impossible to get. So that took up a bit of my time. That was another year or so.

After that, I went to Uni to try to prepare for this oral history. I met up with Essie Coffey again and we made her film. That took a bit of time because, of course, doing all this without a lot of money, things take time. I went back to trying to do this work at uni, because I got admitted as an MA student in Applied History and, although I didn't have a BA, it was okay because I had done a lot of writing. But I wasn't getting closer to doing my book, especially as I stopped to do another film, which was an incredible disaster, with two men who were friends of mine. We didn't get along very well and I mistakenly gave them the power of the film, thinking such things didn't matter - I had such confidence in friendship - without realising that the grip of power in film is even stronger than friendship in some cases. It was quite an interesting revelation.

Then I have gone back to try to do a PhD, to write my history of Australian cinematography, but family problems intervened, so I'm going very slowly. Unfortunately, I've realised that I'm not very academic. I just can't make out what they're saying. I think I deal with ideas, but not in the right way for universities these days.

And I've gotten a job De Luxe Media Arts. It's an evolution from what used to be the Sydney Super 8 Film Group and then the Sydney Intermedia Network. They surround themselves with this hideous artspeak, but the films are fabulous. I've always had an interest in experimental film. The films are wonderful. A lot of them are a bit in this academic realm and I'm not so crazy about some of them. Anyway, I just love their films because they're making films for the sake of making films. There are all sorts of messages in them. Some of them are just beautiful objects. I'm sorry that it's surrounded by this artspeak. For instance, the newspaper Reel Time has taken the place of our old Film News. I used to be on the board. But you can't read it, you can't understand it. I can't understand it. Some people obviously can, or it wouldn't exist. So I'm sort of weird in those circles. But the films themselves, no matter how they try to talk about them, some of them are just wonderful.

I saw one the other day by somebody named Troy Innocent - it's probably an Italian name anglicised - and it was to techno-music, which I hate. But it was such a wonderful film. I saw it three times in a row. John Tonkin who is on the board of De Luxe has made a film which is just waves - I couldn't describe it - waves coming at us, just wave after wave, to beautiful modern music, or pieces of paper falling out of the sky. But this in no way does justice to what you see.

They're often made with computers. Sometimes they make virtual reality environments. So I'm really pleased to have that job and just go to work and try to promote the organisation and the films. But I need to get my thesis done and get back to my sort of social movements.

With almost thirty years in Australia, you've obviously identified with the country and its history and its culture. You came from outside and felt at home here?

Yes. I don't know, there's something about the way Australia has been, which I hope it isn't losing, that really suits me.
Where in the US did you grow up?

I was born in Boston, but my family went to Washington DC and I grew up in the South until I was 15. I went to back to Boston, then I lived in Chicago for a long time, and life was very difficult there, very brutal - if you don't have money, it's very nervewracking. And you don't have the freedom if you're in a very insecure economic situation. It's very hard to have the freedom to do all the wonderful things I've done here in Australia because life was very easy and because there's a lot of acceptance. I've learned so much about life here because there has been support for people, relatively speaking - although so much of that is gone. For instance, now people with illness don't get supported the way they used to. It's really dog-eat-dog. Lots of people work very long hours while other people have no work. It's heartbreaking to see this happen here, to come from a country where that experiment in the way to live, capitalism, has really made life very, very tough, to come to a place where there isn't this dog-eat-dog attitude and where there is some idea of a fair go, or was, was such a relief.

The things I've seen in my life, you would have to be Aboriginal in Australia to have seen - and that was a normal part of American life. The poverty and the frustration, the imprisonment, the acting out and destruction of families, the destruction of social fabric. So it's very distressing to me to see this happening in Australia. I'm not sure where I belong in it all because I've been unusually preoccupied with my own concerns. I still contribute money or go to a march or do those things, but I don't really engage in the way I used to. I just haven't got the strength I used to have. I really need to recupe.

I sometimes think I should join the Labor Party, but I can't come at it. Then I think, well, I'll join the Democrats but I couldn't join the Democrats because they don't understand the Labor perspective. Then I think, well, what about the Greens; the Greens are pretty good. But then they're all over the place. And it's very hard for me to work outside of a party structure. Now I get the Catholic Social Justice newsletter. That's my information on those fronts.

Your values, then, come from social awareness.

I was brought up by Communist parents, although I didn't know they were Communist - I didn't know, believe it or not, because this was in the United States and it was such a frightening time, people being jailed, so it was a secret. But I learned all sorts of values from them. And at the same time I was heavily influenced by Quakers, the Society of Friends, so I was brought up in an environment in which a lot of spiritual issues of that sort were linked with social issues. This made a profound impact on me. And then to be young in the '60s, be in your twenties in the '60s, when a lot of things were questioned, consumerism, the relationship of people to the earth, environmental issues, and then to have been involved in the Left with the social movements of the '70s, this has shaped me for life. Social justice has always been the leading philosophical problem for me in my life.

I'm very interested in discovering, even though I didn't know it and didn't recognise it, that the people that I felt confidence in or closest to had some spiritual values in the areas of social justice that really have led them to question the values of capitalism, of consumerism and of the sort of power plays that are all too common amongst people of any political persuasion. So, although I'm not religious and although I don't, for instance, believe in God as such, I find that most of the people that I respect or am drawn to in a personal way have a spiritual belief and I don't seem to care what it is, whether they're Catholic, whether they're Buddhist, whether they're whatever.

Ultimately there is a goodness in human nature which transcends all the difficulties, the excesses of capitalism or communism and that that is a sustaining spiritual belief.

I don't know if there is a goodness of human nature and I don't even know if there is a human nature, but I think there's a lot of potential for it. One of the reasons why I'm not so interested in many of the films I've done is that I find it very difficult for these things to be expressed on film - or let's say up until now it's been beyond me to really express what I feel on film. Sometimes even more abstract films for me express it more. Take Peter Weir. His films are very spiritual, I think. He's a great artist and a great thinker, in a non-programmatic way - or he's developed into that. But film as such interests me less and less in the mainstream. I know without a doubt that I have no interest in mainstream film. I haven't got the strength that somebody like Peter Weir has got to surmount the incredible problems that the so-called film industry presents in order to bring that vision to a film.

All I ever wanted to be was a cinematographer, and since I can't do that, I think I'll just make my films on the side. It is true that I'm involved in a project with Film Australia, but I'm trying to take a back seat in it and just try to inject ideas and let it turn out how it might. In other words, I don't really want to direct it in that context. I just want to make films in a quiet way, in my own time, with the wonderful new technology which has brought the possibility of making films back into our hands again, the way it was in the early days of 16mm.


Interview: 7th November 1998

RAY ARGYLL



You worked as a cinematographer. Was this where you began in the film industry?

It probably started with making my own films, on Super 8 and then eventually on 16mm, so I really did everything. That was back in the days of the Experimental Film Fund. It was very easy to do it then - well, I shouldn't say 'easy' - it wasn't very fashionable, film, and it was a very different sort of business than it is now and you needed to be very resourceful. I learned by just doing it and experience.

Then you made some films with Ian Pringle?

Yes. I'd made a few 16mm films and then went off to film school and during that time I shot the first film for Ian - and it just happened that I was doing camerawork. I'd always enjoyed it, I always really liked camerawork. I then went on and edited a couple of his films too, as I did with Brian Mc Kenzie, so I sort of split time between cinematography and editing.

Ian Pringle's films were features and Brian Mc Kenzie's a mixture of both documentary and features?

I've done a lot of work with Brian. Ian is very much into features and drama and very atmospheric pieces, which is really challenging because often it's not stuff I'd necessarily do myself, but it's wonderful to work with. Ian and I, when we found our way of working together, it was that we really trusted each other and that worked well.

With Brian, it took a long time too. I think it does take a long time when you're working with people. I probably found the same as a director and producer. You take a while to find people, to find out how to work best, but when you do and you trust one another, it will be the way you get the best out of a situation. Brian has been great over the years because he's forced - perhaps I shouldn't say 'forced' - the films he's made, particularly the documentaries and they have been very challenging. You've been thrown in there with a whole range of people and you've had to cope; and you're working with real people, particularly with his style of documentary. They dictate what happens in a feature or a drama.

I think I've just about worked on all of them, every documentary that Brian has done. He does them over a long period of time - years. I'll Be Home for Christmas was probably the first one I worked on. Homeless men - it's gruelling in some ways, but I think it's terrific. The film gets done eventually, and I say eventually because I know Brian, 6 or 8 months into the project, will often be despairing that he hasn't actually found the essence of what he's trying to do. But he does, it's there. It sometimes just takes a lot of time. With that film I did a bit of filming, I did a bit of sound work, I think I helped in the editing room. With the other documentaries I did some cinematography, some editing but not so much sound.

How did you make the transition from editing and cinematography to directing? What was the genesis of Return Home?

I had the script for seven years or so and worked on it. I always seem to take a long time. I've always kept doing my own work, mixing it up with doing various other things for Ian and Brian and Mary Callahan and all those people. I guess the story was just based on some people I knew.

What drew you to writing, since you were so hands-on with the other aspects of film-making?

It all begins with doing your own stuff. When I was a teenager, I'd always written, not very well. I'd always been writing and making my own films, a few on the Experimental Film and TV Fund. I sort of worked as a freelance while doing my own stuff on grants. But that was in the old days where people just put it together whichever way they could. You learnt on the job. There were things I'd written and I'd always got together with actors. In the early days they were just friends and we'd work the scripts out together. So in terms of writing and directing, I've always been fairly collaborative. I guess I never felt my writing was so good that it didn't need some sort of collaboration. And actors are the best people to work with. I've found that in just about everything I've done.

With Return Home, would you have been writing with actors in mind, say, Frankie J. Holden and Ben Mendelsohn?

No, because I took seven years or so from when I started writing. At the Berlin Festival I remember saying Ben was probably in nappies when I wrote it. He wasn't, obviously! But no, find I don't write with actors in mind. I guess some people do. You might have someone in mind, but it always changes. And an actor will always make the character into something anyway. You welcome that contribution to develop it a little bit further. Often you choose an actor who's going to do something really interesting with the part and develop it rather than just read it exactly as it's written.

The writing in Return Home and Eight Ball is naturalistic. It sounds authentic and Australian. That's a gift and your actors have the capacity to speak it and dramatise it well.

Yes, often the best stuff comes from rehearsals and workshops because people are relaxed. They haven't got the pressure of the film crew there. I can do a certain amount. I'm happy doing a certain amount of the work, but I can't take it much further beyond that because you're limited by your own life experience. I've met a lot of people and done a lot of things, but when people bring their own elements to it, that's what you pick up on and say, 'That's good,' and I put it straight in the script. If you're doing research, if someone coins a phrase a particular way, it can just capture something that you're after. I guess these are the sorts of things you want. A lot of the really nice moments in Return Home and Eight Ball are like that. I wouldn't say they're accidents. We've put the time into rehearsals and come up with this material. The same with earlier scripts where I'd been workshopping ideas.

I remember us talking about the pressures of a bigger budget and more money and so forth and how that was a restriction in some ways and something you had to learn to cope with. You had to learn to cope with those problems.

You mentioned the importance of landscapes and your feel for the countryside, even a preference for the countryside to the cities.

Yes. It's funny, I don't think of working in the backyard or something as a bit harder. I've always enjoyed working in South Australia. It's got a lot of elements that I find I feel very comfortable with. Likewise some of the country areas. Tasmania I think is another place; maybe Western Australia, although I've never worked there. It's away from Melbourne or Sydney. I know there are areas of Melbourne and Sydney that are really interesting. It's just that you've got to get in there but sometimes it's easier to transport yourself to another place. Maybe it's easier to be objective or maybe it's easier to observe things when you come fresh to a place. I certainly found that with South Australia. It does have a unique landscape. There are differences between suburban Adelaide and suburban Brisbane or Melbourne or Sydney, but I guess basically there are similar themes running through all those areas.

Another element is the quality of ordinary relationships in the family and the home and relationships between the generations. In Return Home you capture a lot of the Australian values of the home and the family, in a family of battlers.

Yes, the family theme. Sometimes you can look at your early work and you realise that you're repeating yourself in some ways. But, really, you can dig into any family and find the most fascinating stuff. It's funny, one uses the term 'ordinary', but in fact there's no such thing. When you scratch around, there's all sorts of interesting conflicts and seeing how conflicts are resolved, how people work through those day-to-day difficulties and what values people have in the end. I guess that's what's always interested me. Obviously this is where I live and work and the particular values within an Australian family situation is what interests me and what I try and bring out.

I think it was basically that in Return Home they were very decent people that you could like and respect. The other interesting thing you said the other day was about the younger generation. We were talking about Frankie J. Holden and his influence on the Ben character and you were talking about whether the younger generation really is lost or not.

I seem to have noticed recently that people are very happy to talk about how they would fix the world, how they would fix things for the young people and all the problems the young people have. They say the reason they have the problems is because of a loss of this and a loss of that. I think there's a lot of truth in those things, but when you actually get down and spend time with young people - not that I have recently because my kids are very young, but I've got nephew and niece-in-laws that I spend quite a bit of time with - it just seems that they do have a fairly mature perspective on what's happening. They're actually coping with the incredible pace of change in the world better than some of the older generation. I mean, in some ways they're not coping. But it seems easy from the outside to look at what the problems are and have solutions; I think a lot of the time people are suggesting solutions that are right for their generation or their social arena, whereas for young people, I guess they've got to discover it for themselves. I reckon a lot of them are doing pretty well. They're actually coping well and coming up with interesting ways of resolving those issues.

You have said that they aren't as articulate as they might be. It isn't that they are lost, that they are just inarticulate.

Yes. I'm struggling with getting articulate about things now, and I'm 40. A lot of the kids I've worked with over the 15, 20 years I've been doing films have got really good values, they really are quite focused. They just lack sometimes the verbal skills to articulate and express themselves very clearly. Some of them can, but I guess it just comes with maturity. You can't replace wisdom with anything; it comes with years. You can see it there, it will develop. It's great watching them grow up - most of the time.

With Eight Ball the production money was more readily available than it was for the previous film, but that that had its repercussions on how Eight Ball turned out.

Yes, but in the end it's a problem that you have to take responsibility for yourself. I have to say I spent too much time and put too much energy into making everybody else happy and doing the right thing by everybody else instead of doing the right thing by myself. There's a point where you need to actually focus on what is there. There were many elements of the storytelling that I could have focused on and developed, rather than just dropping and replacing them with something new, and it may have helped. The romance between the main character and his girlfriend - there was a great desire on the part of quite a few of the people who were financing it, to develop this and to make it a strong element. It's not a real strength of mine, and I did all that, but at the expense of other elements that were probably more in tune with the story that I originally had in mind. I developed those things but in the editing room we probably cut it down to what it was in the original script.

You sounded as if you were very interested in the ex-prisoner's story and his relationships?

Yes, I was. I liked the whole thing with the big fish and the character of Charlie developing it all. But I guess that how I got those two stories to work together was a big call and it was hard when the balance fell out, trying to chase through that romance bit, and it took quite a while before the story of the other character picked up. Here was a guy who had just got out of prison and was trying to resolve things with his son and stepsister, a very interesting family relationship. I felt in many ways that this part was quite successful.

Perhaps your ambition with Eight Ball was a bit like the architect with the fish; that everybody else thought the fish should have been different and more colourful or whatever.

That's true. But that's mainly in hindsight. You can always say there are similarities between the characters and the stories you're telling and your own experiences. But there was a certain amount of frustration and a certain amount of inevitability about trying to create something that was commercially appealing in one person's mind where in fact it might not have had the integrity.

You did some television work, episodes of Sea Change?

I haven't been working much in the last six years or so. I've got young kids, so I haven't been taking on many jobs. I've had plenty of scripts, and occasionally scripts come through but they're entirely different to the sort of thing I would normally do. It surprises me when people send them. But I suppose that's good; they think that you might be able to do it. I often think it's just a matter of finance, people trying to finance a project and just trying to get a group of good names that fit together nicely on a bit of paper so that it helps the financing, but you're going to have to put a lot of your life into it.

Until this recent job, I haven't actually felt much attraction to television. There are a few things I would like to have done that just didn't happen, a couple of shows that would have been great, but I didn't get opportunities to work on them. I did one episose of Raw FM and that was the first TV drama I'd done. It was very interesting. It was a great cast and it was probably the first time I'd felt attracted to something.

I had a lot of trouble because I was a co-writer on that. I had a lot of trouble working out what was right for me and what was right for the TV show, because you're talking about a whole series. It's a very good discipline to learn and to apply yourself and be true to what you wanted to do and the characters you wanted to create and also true to what the broader picture is.

When Sea Change came along, it was a co-production with Artist Services and I'd liked their work before. The scripts were just terrific. It really was something. I've loved Ballykissangel and Northern Exposure and that sort of show. There haven't been many of them and there certainly haven't been many in Australia. This was right down that alley, so you could say it was timing and I justg sort of fell into it. They also gave me the opportunity to be involved in the setting up of the series, the casting and all of the rehearsals which, of course, is the main thing I'm interested in. It's the process of developing something and working with actors away from the set, developing character and so forth. So it was just terrific. It was very hard work. You have to deliver a lot of drama in a very short amount of time, screen time per day. It was hard going first, because you had to get it all up and running, but I really enjoyed the process.

You directed episodes 3 and 4 first to help get the cast into it so that when the first two episodes were filmed they would be used to their roles.

Yes. Originally they were going to do 1 and 2 first and I was very happy to do that because those scripts were good. All the scripts I've read have been terrific and I think the quality of the show is very good. But apparently in the past they've done this, where the first episodes they actually shoot are not the first ones that will be seen. They can get the cast warmed up so they're a little bit more relaxed and comfortable with their characters by the time they get to episodes 1 and 2. Particularly on episode 1. A lot will always rest on that episode. If the actors are really punching the stuff out, then it helps get an audience. I don't know if it works or not. I like to think that episode 3 and 4 are dramatically as good, as rewarding for an audience as any of them will be. You will find that the styles differ from time to time, but I think the cast were so in love with their characters that that is what will come through. I felt my job was to try and help all of that come together in whatever way I could.

Interview: 13th March 1998

GILLIAN ARMSTRONG



You made documentaries and short films before you moved to features. They were your grounding in film-making?

My first short was The Roof Needs Mowing, my Swinburne graduation film. After I'd been out in the wilds working as an assistant editor for a year, I was accepted into the first year of the National Film School, and in that twelve months we were given the budgets to make three short films. The brief for the first was to choose a short story by a well-known Australian writer. They had approached a number of writers for ideas and Alan Marshall had sent an excerpt from his book, How Beautiful Are They By Feet(?), which was One Hundred a Day.

The second film was meant to be a documentary but I was quite pigheaded about wanting to be a drama director. I actually went to Storry(?) Walton and said, "I've only got three films and I really want to keep going in drama," and he suggested doing a dramatised documentary. One of the people I was sharing a house with at the time, Stewart Campbell, told me about this event in his life and we partly re-created it, Satdee Night. It was really one of the first gay films in Sydney. I structured the film so you knew it was a big Saturday night out and the audience was meant to feel that he was going out to find a young woman: he was getting ready, he was nervous then, when he finally gets to this dance, it's an all-male dance. We did film in a real gay dance at Glebe Town Hall. It was very big deal in those days to actually allow a film crew in.

I thought the story had a lovely comic-tragic twist because, after this build-up, which actually did happen to Stewart in real life, he got so nervous and drank so much before he went to the dance - these dances used every two months, so it was very hard for young gay men to meet each other at that time - and he built his hopes up so much that when he got there, he passed out in the first five minutes, woke up next morning on the floor, locked in the empty town hall under all the streamers.

That was a true story and I thought it had a lovely poignancy, so we re-enacted it with Stewart playing himself and really getting drunk and really filming at a gay dance. He has run into many people over the years who said it was quite a seminal film, one of the first films where they saw an Australian gay young man, his pain and problems.

It turned out to be quite hard to make three films in one year; we were very busy and I was desperately looking for a final script, so I went back to the original pile of Australian authors and chose a Hal Porter short story, which was Gretel.

I think David Stratton selected Gretel for the Sydney Film Festival and One Hundred a Day was in the Dendy short film awards at the Festival which was pretty amazing. It won Best Cinematography and Best Editing. So those films and the profile, I suppose, that they gave me really kick-started my career.

You won the Dendy award for The Singer and the Dancer. Another Alan Marshall story?

Alan had been a delight to work with on One Hundred a Day. At the film school we were very privileged to have access to these wonderful writers. He was very encouraging and told me the details because he really did work in a shoe factory as a young man in the '30s, so he gave me great background details to think about visualising it. But I always felt that, as a story, it was very filmic because it was written in a rhythm, the rhythm of the factory. So we struck up a friendship and he was very happy with the film.

After I graduated at the end of that year, I worked in art departments, for Tom Cowan's Promised Woman and worked with John Duigan as his designer on The Trespassers. Then Gretel was selected for the Student Film Festival in Grenoble. It was the first time Australian student films had been submitted, because we were the first year of the National Film School. Philip Noyce and I were chosen. So we both did everything we could to make sure, as we got the fare to Europe, that we could go and see the world.

So Philip and his then wife, Jan Chapman, and I backpacked around the world for a year. It was a wonderful thing because we met all these other student film-makers at the festival and we visited them in their countries as we were on our little Eurorail passes. We met a film-maker again in Vienna and someone else in Munich and what we realised at that time was how lucky Australians were that we had this experimental film fund, it was called then, for money for short films. But all the time we were away, there was all this talk that there was going to be a change in government and that Labor would be out and all the grants would go. So Phil and I both decided by the end of the year that we'd better get home and we'd better make something fast.

When I got back, I started working on a number of scripts and Alan had actually sent me another story that he thought I might like. It was about Old Mrs Bilson - it was even called Old Mrs Bilson. I liked the central part of the story and the character of the woman, but I really wanted to do something contemporary because both Gretel and One Hundred a Day had been set in the past. I rang him and said, "What if I make this a story where she meets a young woman and this is really the beginning?" He said, "That's fine, but I can't write what the young woman would say. I'll write what the old woman would say; you write what the young woman would say." And that's what we did. I came up with the characters who went to the country, Charley and a boyfriend, and we mingled that with the story that had always been there about Mrs Bilson. You find out about her past through the story.

It was a great insight into those women of the country, the changing times and their stubbornness. Ruth Cracknell personified her.

Yes, it was funny because Ruth played older then - she was actually quite a young woman. Part of the plot was that she had to run down those hills; she used to sneak out and have a feeling of freedom as she ran. The real story was that Neva Carr- Glynn was going to play Mrs Bilson. I met her and talked about it and the next day it was in the paper that she'd died. I was actually the last person to see her alive, and I got such a fright because the last thing I'd said to her, "Now, you're sure you'll be all right running down those hills?" Imagine what would have happened if we'd all been out and she'd died running down the hill. I would have felt it was my fault forever!

After that I thought it was too risky and I'd better look for someone younger. Then I met with Ruth and she has such an extraordinary presence and power. It's funny that all those years later she became famous playing in Mother and Son, because we made her look that age in The Singer and Dancer. I'm very proud of Ruth's performance in it. I think she did a wonderful job.

The documentaries, especially the Smokes and Lollies series?

The South Australian Film Corporation had set up a unit in the early '70s. It was called the One to One Unit and it was to encourage women film-makers and subjects about women with women on the crew. They got special funding because it was helping the employment of women. John Morris was the head of the SAFC and Penny Chapman was the head of this unit and they approached a lot of young women directors. I went down and was actually assigned a project. I didn't have any say. They said, "We want you to do this one about what it's like to be fourteen today," and I know they chose me to do that one because I always looked so young for my age - I had a big round baby-face!

I had a researcher who had started work and it was pretty open about what sort of fourteen-year-old. The first night I was there, she said she'd found out about a youth drop-in centre in an inner-city area and asked would I be interested in coming along. So we went together. Kerry, Josie and Diana were the only three girls there, if I remember correctly. But there were forty Greek and Italian boys and three girls, because it was an inner-city area in Adelaide that had quite a big Greek and Italian population and they weren't going to let their daughters out, even though it was a government-run youth drop-in centre. Anyway, the girls came up and started chatting to me because they thought I was coming to join, so Penny's instinct about my baby face paid off - and they thought the researcher was my mother.

Because we were discussing age, they said, "Well, how old are you?" And I said, "Well, I'm over 21." I think I was 24. The first thing they said to me was, "Are you married?" And I was really quite surprised because part of the brief, what I think we originally all thought the film would be about, was the new 14-year-old, the more modern liberated 14-year-old. And I said, "No. When am I meant to be married by? Am I over the hill at 21?" And they all said, "18".

I was telling Penny this the next day and she said, "They sound great. Go for it." So I went back to them and said, "We're making a film about what it's like to be 14," and they all thought about it and said, "We'll be in it but we only want to be in it if it's honest, if it's really what it's like to be 14." I said, "I want you to be honest. That would be great." And that was the beginning.

It was really very low budget. I remember the editor, Rhonda MacGregor?, and I actually brought the footage back to Sydney because we had only seven days to cut it in Adelaide and Rhonda had her own editing equipment. I had quite a lot of footage, I generally do. I'd overshot a bit, the producer would say, but they were fantastic subjects and they they let us follow them around.

That film had an extraordinary effect that I was very proud of. It was run at places like the Institute for Adolescent Studies, Children's Hospital in Melbourne. The feedback I got was that they were using it as a teaching tool because it's so hard to actually get the real feelings and opinions of young girls for psychiatrists and doctors to really know what they're thinking today. Because I had spent the time with them and they had got very relaxed with me and they had also decided the whole point was to be honest, it became a very important teaching tool.

As time went by, I thought it would be really interesting to go back and see what happened to them. I've always been interested in time and what happens to people over time and I thought, I've caught them at 14 and they talked so much about being 18, why don't I go back. So Hilary Linstead became my co-producer and we raised the money - South Australia didn't have any money that time, so we went to Film Australia and managed to get the money to do 14's Good, 18's Better.

Once I'd shot the second one and we'd cut the two together, I realised how extraordinarily lucky I was, capturing people growing up, talking about the hopes and dreams, because the three, well especially two of them, had done a lot of living in the four years, more than most of us, so there was great story material there. But just to have captured somebody and then to have that time gap and to see what happened, their physical changes, how their faces had changed in that time. That was the first time anyone had ever done anything like that. I had no idea about Seven Up. I think it came out in Australia about the time I was going back to do number three.

It had an extraordinary effect, people were really moved by it. I remember I went to Canberra to lobby for the film industry - we went to have a dinner and Bill Hayden, Susan Ryan and so on wanted to ask me about Josie and the blonde girl in the old car, and I felt very pleased. They said they had really learned a lot about people's lives. And you think, well, these are the people who are making the decisions about health and welfare and education, and I felt fantastic that by just having a chance to get to know some people intimately, it broke down a lot of the cliches, the cliches of the school dropout or the unmarried mother. And, of course, once I'd done the two, I had tremendous pressure of, "You've got to go back. Everyone will want to know what's going to happen to them next."

You went back almost a decade later?

After I did the 18-year-old one I thought normally the most significant age in life is 21, but that was only three years away, so I thought I'd come back when they're 25. But I was shooting High Tide that year, so I actually went back when they were 26. So that's how I ended up with the seven-year thing, which starts paralleling Seven Up. Because Diane had the new baby at the end of 14's Good, when we came back it was her seven-year-old's birthday, so we got into the pattern of seven for the next one.

Then, of course, it was natural to do another seven because I wanted to come back when that baby was 14, the very age her mother was when we started. None of us ever thought that in such a short span we would get that cycle and see another adolescent generation.

There is great change from the '70s to the '90s. You were surprised when they initially asked about getting married. You've seen their marriages, the break-ups and the families. Not 14 Again is very optimistic in terms of their having a life and having dealt with the problems of the past.

Yes, it's a great advertisement for being in your late '30s. All of them have really come of age and found themselves as people and are very comfortable with who they are and what their lives are. They've all still got the normal ups and downs, things that aren't necessarily easy. Kerry's husband with his bad back and he may have to give up work; Josie trying to make ends meet with the pub and a young family. But I really felt that as people they had really matured and were very happy with themselves in their lives.

With the last film we had some money from BBC and they were completely amazed. "Well, this just doesn't happen in England. People from poor families, you don't suddenly see them with nice houses and nice clothes." And I said to the English producer, "But listen to their stories, how hard they've worked." In that middle time Josie was working two jobs and Kerry delayed having a family until they could put the deposit on the house - they've worked very hard.

The films capture so many changes in Australian society in that 20 years, from the food we eat and consciousness of diet and health to the male role in a marriage. Two of the families have done complete backflips where the woman has become the breadwinner and the father has been the one looking after the children, and it's no longer any guilt or a problem. I think it shows a very positive side for all those fathers, how they've been much more involved in the bringing up of their children than the generation before.

You're lucky to have been asked to be a chronicler of almost a quarter of a century of Australian society.

Yes. It went by very fast.

My Brilliant Career was a landmark film and important for you. How do you see it in retrospect?

I find all my films are very painful for me to look at, because I just see either my creative or technical inadequacies. Certainly in all the films there are moments, and all the actors' performance that are a joy. If they're ever on TV and I'm walking by I may stop because I remember that wonderful moment with Ruth or with Judy or Claudia. I don't think I've seen My Brilliant Career for ten or twelve years. I think it was on Australian television maybe about ten years ago and I thought, I'll just have a look at the beginning to see the quality and whether the print looks all right, and I did get caught up in watching the story again. And you say, "Oh, look at Judy, she's so young, so beautiful. It's sad." For me, it's like watching old home movies.

There are a lot of things that came together. I was very lucky to have Don McAlpine? as cinematographer and Luciana Arrighi as the designer, and finding Judy and Sam. But all the cast were great. Robert Grubb and Aileen Britten and Patricia Kennedy and Wendy Hughes - they're a wonderful cast and that's what I enjoyed when I watched again, watching them, and also remembering how much humour was in it.

After Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Getting of Wisdom a criticism started to emerge that our cinema was going back too much to stories of our past. But we have to do this, otherwise who are we?

Yes. You don't say we mustn't ever study history. At the time Margaret Fink had a hard time raising the money because they said Australians don't want to see another film set in the past. She fought and we all fought and said, "We think it's not the same as the others. It's got something very contemporary to say." I've done interviews in recent years with American journalists who were probably still at primary school when it opened, and it sounds pathetic when you say at the time, it was actually extremely radical that at the end a heroine did not end up in the arms of the hero, riding off into the sunset together; that was considered to be so brave and outrageous.

It probably did a lot for the independence of women.

I have met women journalists in America who started their career because of that film. You feel humbled. At the time I had letters from people saying, "I was so affected by it and I went home, talked to my mother and then took my mother to see the film." A woman interviewed me on the set of Little Women and she had a high quality Victoriana antique magazine and she said, "I opened this magazine after seeing My Brilliant Career. It was so beautiful and I've always loved Victoriana."

When you make a film, you hope that it will work, that it will touch people, but it's certainly even more wonderful if it has had effect on people's lives.

There was a message in the middle that says you've got to find what you love and what you're passionate about and you should search it out. It has had that effect on a lot of people. It's also had an effect that everyone has thought for the last twenty years that that character is me and that that character is Judy! She finds it a greater chain around her neck than I do, but they think that we are Sybilla.

Your three Australian-made films, from 1982 to 1992, have contemporary settings.

I went looking for something that was contemporary after My Brilliant Career because I was showered with scripts from America and everywhere and I realised how easy it was to be categorised - endless scripts of the first woman to fly a plane, the first woman to ride a camel, the first woman to climb a mountain. I was suddenly the director who does women achievers in the past. Really My Brilliant Career was a book that Margaret Fink found. It was her passion and she brought it to me, then I read it and fell in love with it and wanted to do it. But I always thought that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life doing films that were only about young women battling to achieve. There are a lot of other parts of me and there are a lot of other types of cinema that I like.

I think I was developing something that was set in the near future or a futuristic world when I heard through friends about Stephen McLean's script for Starstruck and they all said, "You've got to read it, it's great." We chased after David Elfick and his reaction was, "Oh, she's that director that does lace." It was very lucky that I met Stephen McLean? separately found out he was the writer. I told him how much I loved his script and then he spoke to David and put in a good word for me.

But I did see Starstruck only two months ago on Los Angeles TV on a Sunday morning. I was flicking channels, there was Jo Kennedy doing She's Got Body, She's Got Soul. I was so thrilled. I didn't know who I could ring to tell them because it was Sunday morning in Los Angeles. It looked good, it was a good print and sounded good.

So it was in the inner city and battlers, family and joy?

I always thought Stephen wrote with great love of his characters. He actually grew up in a pub in Port Melbourne and his mother was a barmaid, so in some ways it was a tongue-in-cheek take-off of Mickey Rooney and Judy, "Let's put on a show," but it was also a sweet story of a brother and sister and how the brother was the brains and the sister had the talent, how they had been an inseparable duo who then, finally, will be pulled apart. And it's funny because all the people who wanted to categorise me, that my only focus was women achieving, immediately said, "Oh, now she's done this film with another redhead; she only likes redheads who are trying to achieve." I related to the brother-sister story. It's Angus's story. Jackie's certainly the star, but it's Angus's story. But I suppose it's very loving about fighting to get there - in a show business sense, yes - as they do.

Is High Tide about a non-achieving woman?

Yes, definitely, and she hasn't got red hair.

What brought you to High Tide?

I went to America, did Mrs Soffel, which was the first American script that was sent to me where I was hooked and really felt connected to the story. I knew it was based on a true story about a middle-aged woman who fell in love with a prisoner, left her husband who was the warder of the jail, and helped two prisoners escape. The thing that fascinated me in that story was why? Why would she do something that was so immoral at that time?

And she was such a biblical person.

Such a biblical person, and it was the fascination with that sort of great passion that they had for each other that the writer and I felt. We read all the research. After the breakout, the press all thought that they would find them separately, that she was obviously used and would have been dumped. The thing that was incredible and that attracted both Ron Nysweinner and myself was that they stuck together. This was the suicidal thing to do, because she slowed him down, and they were much more easy targets. So it was the fascination of what happened between these two people who were so disparate, a very conservative, God-fearing woman and this terribly handsome, charismatic and a poetry writer that Mel played.

Then I came back to have my first child. Even though I had a lot of other offers from America, I thought it was a whole new world dealing with the studio system, a much more stressful one, suddenly having ten bosses and a committee and all the politics that are involved with a film with a higher budget, working with the studio system that just doesn't happen here when you've got an independent film and one or two producers to answer to.

I didn't know how I was going to manage to still make films and be a mother, and I thought the number one thing is to try to do it with a team of close friends in an unstressful environment. Film-making in any case is stressful because nothing ever goes right, you never get the right weather and so on - it's battling the compromises every day. I'd met Laura Jones - she and I had worked on developing Clean Straw for Nothing which was never made because it was deemed too expensive. It was around the 10BA time. Producers like Margaret Fink and Pat Lovell were having a really hard time raising the budgets. Suddenly the money-raising had moved into the hands of the stockbrokers and the accountants. They would listen to anyone who had a suit and a briefcase. It was a complete change from a lot of the visionaries who had started the film industry. They were actually the ones finding it hard to raise money. It was the business types who could come in with the facade of raising the money but were not making very good films.

We went to Sandra Levy who had been our script editor and said, "We want to get something made and we're going to try and make it a very small film to keep the budget as low as possible." It's very hard starting from nothing, thinking you're going to write the great film, because by the end of two weeks you feel like all you're doing is, "That's not good enough, that's not good enough." So we said let's pretend we're writing a tiny, tiny film, it's just going to be very small and doesn't really matter.

I had stayed at a caravan park years ago, driving between Sydney and Melbourne with my sister. It was in the Eden area and I thought it would be a wonderful setting for a film, the people who are permanent dwellers in caravan parks. I had also, as a teenager, been quite interested and followed the surfing culture and always thought it would be great to do a story there. At that time the adoption laws had just been opened up in Australia and there were a lot of stories about people finding their birth mothers. I remembered I had cut out one article which was about a woman in her sixties who had found her mother in her eighties and how much it meant to her. I was intrigued by that, the strength of that blood tie.

So, juggling all these things with Laura, she went off and came up with this idea. It was originally written for a man, a surfer who came to a small south coast town and in the water he got to know this young girl who's surfing. She turns out to be his daughter. We had raised the money with Hemdale and we'd started casting and looked at a list of twenty men's names. Then that night I saw Wrong World at the Chauvel. I rang Laura and Sandra and said, "You know, it really worries me about about the alienated drifting man being affected by the truth and honesty of a young girl. I feel we've seen it before and I just saw it last night in Wrong World." It was my husband who said, "Why don't you just change it to a woman?" And I was saying, "No, no, everyone thinks we're going to do something about women because it's a woman producer and a woman writer. We don't want to do something with women. We're going to do something with a man."

So I rang Laura. I talked to Sandra. Then we went in the next day to cast with Liz Mullinar and I said, "You know the man in his early thirties? Well, that's now a woman in her early thirties." And she said, "Oh, well! Then you know who there is. There's our four best leading actresses and one of them is Judy, and if you want Judy, I know that she's been offered a play at the National Theatre in London and she has to decide by tomorrow." They all looked at me and said, "So, do you want Judy?" And I went, "Well, I suppose there's nobody better." So we had to send Judy the script and say that the main character called John is the one we want you to play, but we will rewrite it around you." Laura and I went to meet with her, "Look, it's totally open. Do you want her to be a working-class girl or middle-class or whatever?" And she said, "Well, actually I've never played middle-class, close to myself." I knew she had been a back-up singer after she left high school and went around Asia with a tacky little band. Because we needed a reason for her to be drifting, going from town to town to run into the daughter, I said, "Why don't we make her a back-up singer? Wouldn't that be great?" So that's how we wrote the script.

When I was doing Little Women and when you're working with crew and props people and they are going out trying to buy props or get a location, they have to tell people what the film is and who they're working with. A lot of them said to me, "I told them about High Tide, everyone knows High Tide. They all saw it on cable." So even though we all wish our films would be shown on the big screen, you feel thankful for cable and for video, that at least they're found.

The Last Days of Chez Nous and working with Helen Garner?

Jan Chapman approached me because she'd had a relationship with Helen for the play they did for TV, Two Friends, with Jane Campion. It was Helen's first screenplay. She wrote it as a film. I really loved it because I love Helen's writing. I think she has incredibly acute observation of people and wonderful poetry in her writing. I did think the biggest challenge was that so much was in one house, but I took that on board and thought, well, we'll just have to do everything possible to make people still feel they're watching a movie. After all, the house is also a character in the story.

You could see up the street, the spire in the distance.

And it was a house where there were comings and goings. You saw people walking by in the street, in through the front door and so on. We did a couple of drafts, Jan and Helen and I together, then I went off to America to do Fires Within and then came back and, because Fires Within went on and on - it was actually recut for almost six months and what they basically did was take a lot of the politics out - when I came back, I had to literally get off the plane and start location surveys for The Last Days of Chez Nous, which in a lot of ways was very good for me because it had been such a horrendous experience with the film being recut and all the fighting and backstabbing.

It was wonderful just to get back and make another film because, once you go through an experience like that, you begin to think, maybe it was my fault that the film didn't work in the beginning, so it was nice that I had to sort of get back into the car after the accident and work with so many old friends again. Actually, Jan and I had never worked together. We had known each other all those years ago when she was Mrs Phillip Noyce and then, over the years I had seen her work on ABC-TV, and I was a great admirer. She was a wonderful producer to work with, very supportive and encouraging. The key thing was to cast the two sisters. Then we had to search for our Frenchman.

We actually cast Lisa Harrow from meeting her in London; she did a screen test we sent to Australia. Kerry Fox was here. I had both their tests on video and had to try and move the two TV screens together because I couldn't actually put them in the one room. We really wanted to make sure there was going to be a feeling of sisters. Then we went to France and tested for our Frenchman, and the thing was that none of the Frenchmen were likeable. We actually had a fantastic reaction. We met some wonderful French actors - you know, the man who was in Betty Blue, who is actually only 5 feet tall, Jean- Huyghes Anglade. He came in with this long coat and entourage and everything. I mean, he does have charm and he's an incredible actor, but he wouldn't be up to Lisa's kneecaps!

Helen's point was always that she felt the woman was at fault in this relationship. She really was exploring the situation she felt. Here was a woman from a generation that had to fight for freedom and had to help try to turn the tables, but from all those years of having to assert herself, she'd actually started to become too bossy for all the people around her and being a big sister with a younger sister. She had been too controlling of their lives and they were beginning to break away from her. So, even though the story is about a husband who has an affair, it was a delicate balance.

The point was not that the husband necessarily was a villain. Jan and I felt, having seen all the Frenchmen, that people would think the film was completely anti-male, because there is this thing that a lot of the French actors have, this inbuilt arrogance.

As we were in London, we thought we should perhaps widen our brief and see some of the other leading European actors. I've been a huge fan of Bruno Ganz for many years. Anyway, he came in and we both thought, here's someone who you could forgive, because he is so adorable. But, the French never forgave us for casting him. We were not invited to any French film festivals. It didn't get a release in France. They were very upset that Bruno was playing a Frenchman.

The journey with Lisa Harrow and Bill Hunter in the desert was very strong.

Yes, I thought Bill did a fantastic job. I'd never worked with him. I think he's really underrated as an actor. He had to age himself 20 years for us. I can remember he put the wardrobe on and just walked into the rehearsal. I thought it was my grandfather walking into the room for a second. Once he had those clothes, he just became that man.

You enjoyed making Little Women?

I had a wonderful time on Little Women. I was very nervous about going back to America again because I'd had that bad experience. It's a different system and you have to accept it if you go and make a film in an American studio. It is going to be a whole different system and there are going to be a lot more people who are going to give you notes and make comments. I realise that I was very lucky on Mrs Soffel with Edgar Sherrick, my producer, who fought for and supported me in my vision of the film. What went wrong on Fires Within was that I had inexperienced producers who panicked.

So, when I was approached about Little Women, I said, "Well, I'll come over and I want to meet with the studio." A key thing that I learnt from my bad experience was that you have to make sure the film you want to make is the film the studio wants to make, otherwise you're kidding yourself - it's that "I'll marry him and change him"! With Fires Within, I always loved the political and moral dilemma of this triangle, but the studio in their mind thought, "This can be a hot sexy story set in sexy Miami." The two were never going to meet.

The female executive at Columbia who had developed Little Women had actually been trying to make it for many years and was very passionate about it. I met and talked to her and I felt that she was both very bright, and other people said so, and had very good taste and didn't want to over-sentimentalise it, didn't want it to be a Color Purple Little Women. The the producer Denise De Novi had been Tim Burton's producer for a number of years, I also felt that she was very experienced and knew the game. Anyway, we all seemed to be very much in sync.

The final thing - because Winona was attached - was whether or not I thought Winona was right as Jo, and I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't felt she was right. When I met her, I felt there was a whole side of her that we hadn't seen on screen, that, as a person, she was very passionate and alive and quite strong and, because she has a sort of haunting beauty, that had been the side of her that had most often been shown. Because of her pale skin and dark eyes and hair, she has quite often played poetic, enigmatic characters. And my instincts about that were right.

Actually, it was a very tight budget Hollywood film. They allowed me to bring my Australian team, Nick Bowman the editor, Geoffrey Simpson came over and shot it. We finally did get it through the studio. Amy, whose project it was, had by then gone. By the time we finished the film, she had moved on to head Turner's company and we had a whole lot of boys, but I have to say our one argument was that they kept saying, "This is a kids' film and we'll put it out at Christmas for families," and they made this really corny poster. But after they saw the film, actually they all cried and I was thrilled. Not only did they cry, they turned around and said, "You're right, grown-ups like this, but how are we ever going to get them into the film, especially men?" But they worked very hard to do it and we got fantastic reviews. And it was a box-office hit for a film of its size, so everyone was very happy with that.

Oscar and Lucinda was a very ambitious project.

Yes, very ambitious. Peter Carey used to live in Birchgrove and I was in Balmain. He and I had known each other for a number of years because I tried to do one of his short stories, and we'd sort of kept up a friendship because I was the young film-maker, he was the young writer, then I did my first film, then he did his first novel...

When he gave it to me to read, I really did think this is too ambitious. We'll never ever raise the money for this in Australia. I said, "Peter, I love it, but I don't see how you can ever make it." We'd spent three years with Pat Lovell on Clean Straw for Nothing and, in the end, they said to us, "It's so expensive shooting in two countries." That's why the budget was so high.

Then Oscar and Lucinda was published and I read in the paper that Robyn Dalton had bought it for John Schlesinger and I was very pissed off and thought what a fool I was. Of course, it can be a co-production. Why should I be thinking about how to raise the money, it's not my job anyway.

I've told this story before in print, but because Luciana Arrighi, who designed Mrs Soffel, My Brilliant Career and Starstruck for me is an old friend and she also does a lot of Schlesinger's films, I really just said as a joke, "How's my Oscar and Lucinda going?" I didn't know Robyn at all, but I said, "If you're ever talking to Robyn Dalton, please tell her if John changes his mind, I'm waiting in the wings." And lo and behold, 18 months later, I got this call from Robyn Dalton, "They've done a number of drafts and they feel it's beaten them, the adaptation, and the budget and John Schlesinger's booked up for three years of operas and things now and he's let it go and said good luck." She was coming out to see family here, so I said, "Let me introduce you to Laura Jones, who I think would be fantastic and who loves it as much as I do."

So we started work on it. This was way before Little Women. We were writing that script for five years on and off.

You're back in the 19th century again. You also explored many aspects of Australian Christianity.

Yes, Peter does. It's there in the book.

The Plymouth Brethren sequences were striking.

I had to study it. We all had to do our crash course in theology. There's still the Brethren movement and one of them came to speak to us, to the cast, in rehearsals. Peter did actually based it on a famous naturalist Brethren whose son wrote a book called 'Father and Son', about his life growing up in Cornwall with his father and the division - on one hand there's scientific interest and on the other hand there's complete belief in a faith that's absolutely based on the Bible and the facts of the Bible. He took this as his inspiration for the relationship with the father and the son.
But Peter's real inspiration is - that this person becomes a gambler.

Even Oscar's decision to become an Anglican rather than something else was a gamble. But that ingrained, very strong puritanical streak underlies it - the Christmas cake, being cut off by his father, the fear of the sea. Then the transition to an Anglican tradition, the priest who takes Oscar in and his destructive gambling, Oxford...

The tragedy for us was how much we had to leave out. Peter's insight into those characters - there's a terrible cynicism: this boy with his Puritan faith, moving into a house where really all that man thinks about is money; they are very, very poor thought Betty came from a wealthier family, so he feels the burden of their poverty, that they're completely hopeless as farmers; everything goes wrong, and they're losing the congregation to Oscar's father, who's such an impassioned preacher; they're losing their livelihood as well. It's wonderful writing.

The great black irony is that when Oscar really feels such guilt about his sinning and he feels he must go away and start afresh and he wants to be pure and save his faith and he'll go and save the aborigines, he gets put in a church at Randwick, next to the racecourse. I mean, that's the wickedness of Peter Carey's storytelling which is so wonderful.

Oscar goes to this land where he thinks he can get away from the evils of gambling and, of course, Mr Carey brings him to the country where gambling is like a national pastime. Even the bishop is gambling.

And the elegant lady, Lucinda, is also gambling. Oscar's confession sequence, his sitting, praying in the glass church, is a powerful confession sequence.

It's interesting that the people who didn't like the film - the main criticism - said it was cold. But when Ralph did that confession, which I thought was so simple and so true, we were crying standing there. The boom-holder, the entire crew, we had tears in our eyes because it was so effective. Also his final word was "To my father" and a couple of members of the crew had actually lost their fathers in the last year or so, so they found it particularly devastating. So it just amazes me when somebody says it was cold.

And then at the end, with the contract in the box, to think that this whole folly, transporting the glass church was a gamble and these two people who were certainly so right for each other, destroyed everything with their weakness, that one devilish weakness they shared. It was the thing that brought them together and the thing which finally killed Oscar. I thought Cate was completely devastating in that scene.

In terms of religion on screen - there's the beginning of Carey's Bliss, of course, but Oscar and Lucinda has the Brethren and the atmosphere of 19th century Anglicanism. With the symbol of the glass church, there is a spirituality that Australians acknowledge, even if they're not religious.

Yes. It was interesting here because, I suppose, because there's so much baggage about the film: Peter's book and then it was going to be made into a film and what's she going to do with it and so on, and Ralph Fiennes was here - somehow or other, no-one actually talked about the content. Even the reviewers talked about whether or not they thought Ralph was any good. No-one talked about the content. It really disappointed me.

Both in England and America we had incredible reviews and articles. I remember talking to one journalist for hours and so did Ralph. He said it's so wonderful because you're not seeing this in films any more, films that are actually dealing with faith and with spirituality. Peter's story works on so many levels. It was a huge challenge to bring off. My biggest regret is that we couldn't have had even a little bit more of Oscar's childhood, but it was already a very long film.

It's interesting, it became quite a cult film in America. It was appallingly released - actually both here and there. Here there was very little respect for it, and I have to say particularly in Melbourne. All my family are in Melbourne and Neil Jillett has hated all my films. So I arrive home for Christmas and I run into relatives and they go, "We're sorry about your film." I'm like, "Well, everyone else all around the world likes it. I can't help if I get bad reviews in Melbourne." I mean, I did an interview with him with High Tide before I read the review, and he said something about, "I don't get it with Judy Davis. I don't understand the fuss." And I was, "What do you mean?" Then the next day I saw the review. He didn't say he didn't like Judy. I think all right, if you're going to review something and you really have a strong like or dislike for the main character, you should state that in your review because - there are certain actors that I would never find appealing, too, and so the film won't work for me. So I think you should be honest, and he wasn't about Judy. So Hemdale made all their money back with the Australian release and American Cable sale and their tax scheme. I mean, they were begged by, for instance, Germany wanting to release it because Judy has such a following there. They didn't want to release it anywhere. And it had a short release in America in a cinema where it had a cut-off date - it was only on for like three weeks in New York and LA, and Judy won the New York Critics' Award for best performance of the year, which is pretty amazing for something that had such a short release.

People who went to see it loved it. I mean, it was really - unfortunately David Stratton didn't like Ralph, so he didn't like the film, and Paul Byrnes gave us a very strange review in Sydney as well. He said it was too big a book for a movie. Then he said he hadn't read the book.

Interview: 4th September 1998

BILL BENNETT







You have said that you always have a serious intention in taking on any film project.

I guess I look on film-making not as being a job, but as having a specific role in society; that if you get to the very privileged position of being able to make a film, then along with it come certain responsibilities.

For me, mere entertainment is not enough to warrant making a film, because the whole process is so difficult, so time-consuming and requiring such a sacrifice - not only from me, but from the people around me - that there has to be something deeper if you're prepared to devote years of your life, especially if you're writing and directing. It's probably a minimum of three years of your life.

Would you have spent three years on your early films, like A Street to Die and Backlash?

A Street to Die was probably about two and a half years, from picking up the story through to financing. Probably longer if you take into account the marketing of the film. Backlash took a similar period. Spider and Rose was four years from writing the first treatment through to the completion of the film. It seems that as I progress, my development period gets longer.

Do you prefer to do the writing, the producing and the directing as you did in your earlier films?

I did, yes. I guess as my ambitions get higher - and by that I mean as my need to work on larger budgets gets greater, because you need money to realise the things that you want to achieve - producing becomes much more difficult. Initially I was going to produce Spider and Rose, but I relinquished that.
To be a good producer is a full-time job in itself and sometimes - often in fact - the roles of producer and director are contradictory. Really, for a producer to be doing his or her job well, that person needs to be in conflict at times with the director, and similarly for the director with the producer. The best producer-director collaborations are where there is a point of harmony between the two conflicting needs of those roles.

At the moment I'm reading a book about the making of Lawrence of Arabia, Sam Spiegel and David Lean, some of the rows that they used to have. But the result was, I think, a truly magnificent film.

What films did you make before A Street to Die?

As an independent film-maker, I had done two dramatised documentaries. One was called Cattle King, about Sir Sidney Kidman, and the other was called Shipwrecked, which was about a lone sailor coming across the Tasman in a race. Shipwrecked won the Sydney Film Festival award for best documentary. In many ways it was consistent with the themes of all my subsequent work.

It did, in fact, have quite a strong religious theme because this fellow who got shipwrecked - his name was Bill Belcher, a New Zealander, in his seventies - was stranded on a reef. His wife firmly believed that he was alive. When he'd been missing for 30 days, she was walking past a church, went in, knelt down and prayed, and - at this point everybody had given him up for dead - she suddenly knew that he would be all right. She walked home and the phone was ringing. She answered it and he had been picked up. But the story was really about a commitment between these two, the fact that she never gave up, she never lost faith.

A Street to Die was a very impressive first movie.

There have only been two films that I've made where I've cried during the making of the film. That was one and Malpractice was the other. Both I found to be very, very emotional experiences.

What led you to the story of A Street to Die?

I had seen it in a newspaper, the `Weekend Australian', a story with an aerial photograph of the street. It had all the Vietnam veterans on one side, I think, with the Korean veterans on the other. On the Vietnam side of the street in the photograph they had put all these little bubbles - with everything that was going wrong. The story was about a man called Simpson and his claims that Agent Orange was causing his problems.

I was astonished by this story and was expecting a series of follow-ups, but I looked through all the papers and there were no follow-ups at all. I thought, `This is crazy. This is a great story and it should be out there'. So I contacted the people and got a researcher to spend a few weeks in the street, to check it out, really, before I committed to it.

How much did you fictionalise the story? Did you stay with the facts?

It was hardly fictional at all. I actually worked very closely with the widow, writing a script. Once the script was written, I gave her a copy and she went through it and sanctioned it. She gave her stamp of approval before we went into production, so it was pretty accurate.

There was a scene with the doctor to whom the Chris Haywood character had been going and who had been consistently misdiagnosing his condition. He went to get a second opinion and was diagnosed as having lymphoma. This female doctor, rather than tell this man the news face-to-face, went into another room and phoned from there. I filmed that virtually word-for-word. It's exactly what happened. When it screened to audiences, people laughed. They couldn't believe it.

In making the documentaries and films like A Street to Die and Backlash, Malpractice and Mortgage, how did you see yourself as making
a serious contribution to Australian film-making?

I don't know that I really saw myself as anything other than I just having a very strong desire to tell these stories. Before I did A Street to Die, people said, `You can't write, produce and direct'. But I had written and produced and directed the two dramatised documentaries, so I thought, well, why can't I? And so I did.

A funny thing happened: A Street to Die was invited to all these film festivals overseas and I remember it was invited to the London Film Festival. I was a bit anxious about how it was going to be received and I didn't want to sit in the audience. But they asked me to introduce the film, which I did, and then I stayed outside. But then, part-way through, I went into the projection room. I don't know why I went into the projection room, maybe just to make sure that everything was going okay. Whenever the film's playing, I always do that, I always check with the projectionist first. I remember standing beside the projector and looking out through the little porthole to see the film on the screen, and I had this most curious sensation - as though I had not made the film. I was looking at it as though I was seeing it for the first time.

It started me thinking about what it is that a true film-maker does, the fact that really you are just a conduit. I think the best film-makers are merely a conduit for these stories and that the more you try to clog the channels with things like ego or ambition, or greed or whatever, the more the film becomes corrupted.

How was A Street to Die received in Australia?

It got a limited release. It seems that with a lot of my work, it always seems to be received better after the fact than during its time. That particular year it was nominated for the major AFI awards and I think it got a good response critically.

And Chris Haywood won the best actor award. Did you bring a particular perception of the Vietnam war to the film and try to communicate
some stance on war via the film?

I tried not to, actually, because I didn't see that as being what the film was about. I really saw it as being about the blindness of authorities to accept culpability. To that extent, I suppose, it is an anti-war film, but it was more to do with anti-bureaucracy and a very, very strong sense of injustice, that ultimately what was at work here was the possibility that, if a precedent was established, then huge amounts of money would have to be paid out.

The anti-bureaucracy theme is a link with Backlash.

It's interesting because, as a writer-director, when I start to think about a film, I don't think about it in terms of plot, I think about it in terms of theme. Then I often contrive a plot to explore a theme. In Backlash the theme that I really wanted to explore was, in broad terms, racism, but, specifically, people who are different. That was really what I wanted to explore.

I was also interested in the Aboriginal spirituality, which I tried to get across in the Brian Syron character and the sense of the spiritual aspect of the man.

The transition from city to land was important. How much of Backlash was improvised or did you write a screenplay?

It was totally improvised. I wrote it in the sense that I wrote, as with Malpractice, a scene by scene breakdown and, within that, I knew what dialogue needed to be spoken. But the actual words themselves were improvised. I went through quite a rigorous rehearsal process with the actors prior to shooting. We shot the picture in 18 days. It was very highly structured. I also wanted to shoot as closely as possible the chronology of the film.

The budget was low - $200,000 (and even in 1986 that was very little money) - but again I just had a very strong desire to tell a story. I gave no thought about how it was going to be received, because I figured that it was made on such a low budget that, if it bombed, if nobody ever saw it, then it wouldn't really matter. At least I'd be able to get some money from somewhere to pay the investors back. But as it turned out, the film was probably, per dollar spent, the most successful film I've done.

Brian Syron contributed an understanding of the deepening of the spirituality and the land. David Argue is such an eccentric screen presence so that, with his ability to improvise, the bigotry and the lack of understanding were very strong.

Yes, that really was what the film was about. And again, it was fuelled within myself by a very strong sense of injustice.

Jilted has been screened on television and Dear Cardholder is available on video.

Dear Cardholder was about how credit can really get you into trouble. Jilted explored the notion that people who have had a bad time in relationships sometimes have a distrust of going into other relationships. I look back on those two films and see that they were good attempts, but I think I went into them too quickly and I don't think the ideas were realised as well as they could have been. That's why, after those two, I didn't make another film for quite a long time.

Dear Cardholder was trying to be satirical and comic.

I was playing with that a little. I guess one of the reasons why I moved out of documentaries was because I do think that documentaries preach to the converted. In other words, if you're interested in exploring social themes for a wide audience and hoping to introduce new ideas to an audience that wouldn't necessarily accept them, then I do think that drama is the best way to go. Documentaries can be artfully done and can be very provocative, very profound and very powerful. But the fact is that people who watch documentaries normally go to them with a point of view consistent with that of the film-maker. You're not reaching people who perhaps haven't thought about these issues or are undecided. That's really the reason that I moved into drama, because I figured that I would be able to explore such themes but put them out to a larger audience. And I guess as part of that, I started dabbling in comedy, with Dear Cardholder in particular, which I don't think was very successful.

It was a touch black, with disaster coming at the end, whereas Jilted was more straightforward in terms of exploring relationships.

Yes, it was. Again I think that script could have done with another 12 months' work. After those two films I decided I'd go back and reskill myself and I took myself out of the market for a while and started to concentrate more on developing the skills that I thought I needed to tell stories.

Malpractice and Mortgage come next. Malpractice was certainly very striking. And audiences could empathise with the couple in Mortgage,
their frustration and the smooth sales talk.

I look back on both Mortgage and Malpractice with an honest affection. They were important films for me because I think they brought me back to my roots, to that sort of social realist form that I really love, and they also took me back to improvisation. I'd actually left Backlash vowing that I'd never do another improvised film because I found it very difficult. But I'm very proud of both films. That's not to say that I don't look at them now and know how I could improve them enormously, but Malpractice, in particular, was a very emotional experience for me and for everybody involved.

Film Australia produced them?

Yes, they financed them totally.

And they recur on television?

Yes, they do. Interestingly, Mortgage I've since been told has become something of a cult film in Canada. For some reason or other it just keeps on playing there and they love it. I don't know why.

In the late 80s you made other documentaries, The Chelmsford Scream and You Have No Secrets.

Both of those I did as a hired gun. The first was fronted by Ray Martin and I directed the dramatic story, which was all about Chelmsford hospital. The other was about information technology, about the use of computers and how they can affect us. It was a two hour special. I took it on because it enabled me to learn so much more about that side of a world that I knew nothing about.

You produced two documentaries written and directed by Lewis Fitz Gerald. There was Gadfly, about Francis James, The Last Man Hanged,
about Ronald Ryan.

I'd worked with Lewis on a documentary called The Banjo and the Bard, about the relationship between Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, and Lewis had always wanted to direct. My attitude to Lewis had been, `Nobody's going to give it to you on a platter. If you want to do something, then come up with an idea. If it's a good idea, then I'll help you'. And he came up with The Last Man Hanged which, perversely, was very, very close to my sensibility. Apart from the fact that I wanted to help Lewis get his first runs on the board as a director, the story was consistent with things that I'd done to that point. I certainly had a strong hand in the development of the project.

It is a particularly Catholic film.

Lewis Fitz Gerald is not a Catholic, but that's certainly a theme that came through very strongly. Interestingly, I've only seen one other film that I think has had a similar tone and theme and that's Eternity, which I think is a sensational film.

Ronald Ryan's death and the scenes with the chaplain, Fr Brosnan are striking. They are in the vein of Dead Man Walking. The whole feel is right.

Yes, you can almost smell it. I think Lewis did a wonderful job and it's certainly a film that I was very proud to have my name on.

Your worked for four years on Spider and Rose. You have spoken about comedy with Dear Cardholder. Did you see Spider and Rose
as comic or comic-serious?

No, I never really did. I always thought of it as being a drama that would have some funny bits in it. Right at the outset, in fact, in my discussions with the producers, I told everybody that this was not a comedy. I don't know how it's perceived now, as to whether or not it's perceived as a comedy. But even now I don't see the film as a comedy. I regard it as quite a serious treatise on the way we treat the aged.

This is the case when the focus is on Ruth Cracknell's character and on Max Cullen's. But you wrote Spider's role strongly as well, a kind of
flip style. Publicists and reviewers gave the impression of comedy. But it's certainly more serious when the audience is focussing on Ruth Cracknell's, Rose.

Yes, that's what the film was about. Spider had to be a young man who undergoes a journey, and there had to be conflict between the two of them. I don't know if I have a natural predilection to write characters like that but I know that, in fact, there's a lot of cruelty within Spider in those early scenes. A lot of the humour comes because he is so cruel.

Ruth Cracknell is a strong screen presence.

I kept a pretty tight rein on Ruth. I had a very clear picture of how that character had to be at any given moment. That's not to say that Ruth is not a wonderful actress. The purpose of the Max Cullen character was to show this woman that things were possible, that you can suffer tragedy but you don't need to succumb to it. The irony with his character, of course, is that when the crunch comes, he doesn't have the courage to go with her. It's a feminist film, if you like, in the sense that the men ultimately let this woman down and she has to act on her own.

Which means that the justice background seems very important when you look back on all your films, a strong sense of justice and
a strong humanity. Does the word `humanity' do justice to your films?

Yes, I think that humanity is critical to me, absolutely critical. It's fundamental. I can't go to a film unless there is a basic humanity and I get very tired of seeing films that don't treat people with intelligence or humanity or with respect. Justice, I guess, comes from my early days as a journalist when I saw so many things that seemed to me unfair. What probably rankles with me more than anything is an intransigent bureaucratic system that follows rules mindlessly and doesn't give any cognisance to the human factor. That, probably more than anything, is what gets me going.

Like the hospital scenes at the beginning of Spider and Rose?

Yes, very much so. Hospitals are a particular case in point. That's why Malpractice was made. When I was working as a television journalist for Mike Willesee, I was involved in a very bad car accident and I broke my back. I was in hospital for three months in the spinal unit at Royal North Shore. Probably my antipathy to the hospital system stems from that period. Mind you, I do think there are some extraordinary doctors working in the hospital system, in the public hospital system, but there is also a structure in place that is often mindless and intransigent.

Two If By Sea. What interested you in that project?

From Backlash on, I've been consistently approached by Hollywood. I don't think that's anything out of the ordinary because I think any Australian director who gets even a semblance of profile is approached at some point. I read a lot of scripts and I had rejected all of them. I've rejected some great scripts, some films that have made huge amounts of money.

But this one really appealed to me because it was ultimately about the core relationship between Sandra Bullock and the Dennis Leary character and about this man's dinosaur approach to relationships, the fact that he regarded his role as a male as providing an income - and that's basically where it ended. Because he did provide an income that allowed him then to virtually ignore his partner.

Recently I've noticed a lot of relationships breaking down - and it's the women in fact that are instigating separation - because they're just fed up with the fact that men aren't changing. Women have changed over the last 20 years, they've changed enormously, but men aren't keeping up. That's really what I wanted to explore in this: the fact that men have to lift their game if they want to keep any sort of relationship that's going to mean something to them. That is really the heart of the movie.

The title sounds solemn. But the basic plot of the robberies has the light touch. And Denis Leary has an odd screen presence.

Yes. Denis is a prickly character on and off camera. He himself is an enormously intelligent and a wonderfully contradictory character. He is, in fact, a very kind man. He's a very strong family man. In many ways he's the antithesis of his screen persona. But the characters he wrote are the people that he grew up with. He came from that part of Boston, that Irish part of Boston, and he knows those people. I think that when I got the script Denis didn't really know what he wanted to say. I worked for a long time with him and with the other writer to structure the script to explore the themes that I was really interested in.

The reality is that when you do a Hollywood movie on a budget of $20 million, as that was, and with a big star like Sandra Bullock, the film has to operate on an entertainment level. There were a couple of key scenes in the film - there's one at a dinner party where the Denis Leary talks about how, `We're not going to change. You're a cashier, I'm a thief. Get used to it. We're not like these people around here with these big houses and these fancy cars'. That, to me, was the essence of the film. It was this man saying, `Look, I can't change'.

But I do believe that as a society we can't really move into the next millenium unless we do change and unless there is a mutual sense of respect between the sexes.

I think as far as Sandra is concerned, the response in America might have had something to do, as well, with the question, `what's Sandra doing in a film with Denis Leary where he's swearing at her?', and things like that.

None of the critics have actually discussed what the film is about, and that's what annoys me. No-one has ever mentioned what I have attempted to do, other than Anna Maria Dell' Orsa in the Sydney Morning Herald. The Melbourne critics just crucified me.

So I won't be doing another comedy in Hollywood in a hurry. I want to go back now and do another social realist piece.

Interview: 11th April 1996

BRUCE BERESFORD



What appealed to you in Brian Moore's novel and its themes to make you agree to direct Black Robe?

It was my idea to make the movie. No one approached me about the film. I read the novel when I was passing through Los Angeles in 1985. I had always been a great admirer of Brian Moore's novels. This is a historical novel quite unlike his others. It struck me for a lot of reasons. One was simply the novelty of it. I knew nothing whatever about pioneer life in Canada in the 17th century and suddenly to read this story about these insanely savage Indians and these brave, courageous French voyagers trying to colonise them was very striking. In particular the priest, Laforgue, was significant, trying to convert the Indians to Christianity and baptise them. He travelled right across the known world to try to convince the Indians that they're living their lives all wrong because they've got to go to this place, heaven, which doesn't even exist.

Looking back from the 20th century, this seems, in many ways, a mad thing to do. But they had their own approach to the world worked out and in terms of 17th century views, they thought they were doing the Indians a great favour. It is fascinating that someone's faith could be so strong.

What interested me really about Black Robe, apart from the fact that it's a great story, is that clash between the European and the native American cultures. Period films are always hard to do. The further back in history you go, the harder it is. Everything changes - the look, the manners, the thinking, everything. You have to understand the way someone like Laforgue thought. He had an obsession with getting everyone into heaven, a concept which few people these days take seriously. My job is to convince the audience that this is important.

In Australia, your films had comparatively little explicit religious material. But, you went to the United States and made Tender Mercies, a fine portrait of Southern Baptists.

I think I can tell you why this is. Religion plays a much bigger part in the life of the average American than it does in the life of the average Australian. When I met people like Horton Foote who wrote Tender Mercies and Brian Moore, I found religion was a fundamental part of their lives. Horton Foote grew up in the American south where everybody goes to Church on Sunday. Everybody goes. In fact, if you are arranging to meet people on Sunday, you always arrange to meet them on Sudnay because everyone assumes you go to Church. Brian Moore had a Catholic background in Ireland. Religion was part of his life. In Australia it's not - and it does not come in so strongly to our films.

And King David?

Some time ago I was in Los Angeles, having dinner with Barry Humphries, and he said, `you know that film of yours, King David, it is nowhere near as bad as anyone would have you believe. There are many, many good things in it. I think the fact that it was a disaster has been somewhat self-perpetuating'.

I had a look at it again on video and I think there are a few things in it that are interesting. But, I think there are so many things that are wrong. We never licked the script, whereas I think we basically got the script of Black Robe right.

In King David we never really caught the friendship between David and Jonathan. There weren't enough scenes between them. And David, himself - I think Richard Gere was miscast. He is a wonderful actor but he is much better in contemporary pieces.

The screenplay's use of the Psalms of David for voiceover seemed to get to the spirit of the times and the religious development of the characters?

That's interesting to hear because that was something I added quite apart from the scriptwriter.

You tackled aboriginal themes in The Fringe Dwellers.

A number of people told me: `nobody wants to watch a film about a bunch of aborigines'. So I dropped the project until I had enough clout to do it.

It's about a group of very recognisable human beings. It is not political, dogmatic or didactic and it is free of all the usual cliches and political posturing. The treatment of aborigines over the years by successive governments and by whites with whom they came into contact is something that has moulded the aboriginal character and is largely responsible for the way they present themselves today, but the past - colour, racism, mistreatment and all the rest of it, is not a central theme of the film. It is implicit, but to me the story is one of a family, their relationships, struggles, aspirations.

At the end of Breaker Morant, Peter Handcock declares that he is a `pagan'. Perhaps many Australians would identify with that stance. How do Australians respond to Black Robe?

Perhaps Australians not being so religious will make it more attractive to audiences. I'm not particularly religious myself, in fact, and I think my philosophy agrees more with that of the Indians in the film, especially the dying Indian who says, `Look, the world is a cruel place, but it is the sunlight - and that's all there is'. This is my feeling too. But, at the same time, it's impossible to research a film like Black Robe and not come out without immensely admiring the Jesuits and their beliefs.

I read thousands of the `Relations', the letters the Jesuits wrote back to France. These men were extraordinary. They were courageous, and then did everything they could to understand the Indians. They wanted to help. They were so well-intentioned.

The film is a critique of the missionary methods of the past, methods that were taken for granted even thirty years ago but are now being re-assessed in terms of `inculturation' of Christianity; not just going out like Fr Laforgue and speaking `the truth'. Black Robe seems to be a helpful and respectful critique of the past.

Yes, I think it is. I was chatting to a publicist and she said, `What they were doing was cool, wasn't it?' Yes, but not by the standards of the times. We have only started to re-evaluate this kind of society in the last twenty or thirty years. To the people of those times it did not seem like that; this was not an issue.

At the press preview, some reviewers breathed in audibly or laughed at some of the expressions of faith by Fr Laforgue. Some people these days seem somewhat embarrassed that he was so intellectually convinced of the truth that he spoke and that the Indians had to believe this truth and, if they were not baptised, they would not go to paradise. This would not be a Catholic approach these days although some of the fundamentalist churches would still take these stances.

Certainly some of the Churches I saw in the American south would. But it was part of the way Laforgue and those like him thought. A number of times in the film he says to the Indians. `let me baptise you and you can go to paradise' - and there is another point, a lovely line, when Laforgue says to the Indian, `when I die I'll go to paradise; let me baptise you and you will go there also'. And he fervently believes this. That is why I was so keen to get Lothaire Bluteau to play the role, to get an actor who can convincingly portray faith, the hardest thing to portray on the screen. You can portray anything, but religious faith is very difficult to fake. Unless I could get an actor with Lothaire's conviction, the film would have been a farce; people would have laughed at it.

He was impressive in Jesus of Montreal. One of the difficulties is that, while we can admire his absolute conviction, he is very hard to empathise with as a person, Perhaps it's a reaction to the old-style missionary effort. But you took us on his journey of faith, from an utter intellectual conviction of truth to a love and service where Laforgue remained with the Indians. This is impressive.

Yes. But the audience would not have noticed this at all had Laforgue been a different sort of person at the beginning.


I think it was purely a business thing. When I was trying to raise the money with the help of the Canadian company, Alliance, who owned the rights to the project, the head said to me one day, `are you aware that there is an Australian/Canadian co-production deal? so that we can make films collaboratively that neither of us could afford by orselves?'. So, I contacted Sue Millikan, who, in fact, had produced The Fringe Dwellers, and she investigated the arrangement.

So, we sent a copy of the script of Black Robe. After a lot of discusssion, the Australian Film Development Corporation said, `yes, we'll put money in on the basis that we use a number of Australian technicians and two Australian actors'. There was employment for Australians, otherwise the film would not have been made at all. I think that any wider ramifications, like the similarities between the Indians and positions on Aborigines - and there are some - were really not an issue at this stage.

How do you think Australians respond to Black Robe, given your earlier comments about our religious attitudes? Will audiences be drawn in by the plot, the characters, faith, the Indians?

I think that, even if you have no religious faith whatever or, even if you despised the Jesuits, you would still find it an interesting story. It's a wonderful study of obsession and love. And it is a wonderful adventure of the spirit and of the body. What those people did, going to a country where winters were far more severe than anything they had known in Europe, meeting people who were far more fierce than anyone they had ever encountered... Having to deal with these people shows us something of humanity at its greatest. It's the equivalent of today's people getting into space shuttles and going off into space. It takes unbelievable courage to do this.

When Laforgue farewelled his mother, he knew he would probably never see her again. And missionaries died young. They were full of zeal and faith.

Yes, it's obvious from reading the Jesuits' letters that the fervour they had was colossal. When I was in Africa making Mister Johnson, I met an American missionary who was a Baptist. His group had been going out to Africa for many, many years. He himself had been there for 27 years. He told me that, of course, in West Africa everyone can have anti-malaria tablets now, but he told me that in his Church records, the average life of a missionary in the past was under six months.

Many have commented on the violence of Black Robe. In fact, at the preview one radio commentator stood up during the torture scene and proclaimed loudly that she had seen enough and walked out. Catholics in the past were brought up with the stories of the martyrdom of Jesuits, Isaac Jogues and Jean de Brebeuf, (contemporaries of Laforgue). Words have their impact but to see the torture on screen, however briefly, is much more frightening.

Well, of course, you're right. The story of de Breboeuf and the other martyrs is so famous in north America that to try to tell the story of this period and not to convey a sense of the violence that was part of it would have been a travesty.

People make comparisons with The Mission.

It's years since I've seen The Mission now. I think that the main difference between Black Robe and The Mission is that in Black Robe the Indians are major characters, have a large proportion of the dialogue and are the main focus of the drama. In The Mission, they are a group of people being argued about by the whites. My Indians play leading roles. When I read Brian Moore's book, I thought `this is what it was like in 1634' and I believe it, absolutely believe it.

Interview: 7th December 1991



SECOND INTERVIEW


When you worked in Nigeria in the 60s, did you ever dream that there would be an Australian film industry?

You know, I don't think I gave it any thought. No, I always assumed there wouldn't be because no one had shown any kind of interest. When I was at university I felt that I was almost alone screaming that there should be a local film industry, with local movies and directors. No, I don't think I thought it was ever going to happen.

But The Adventures of Barry Mc Kenzie was one of the first breakthrough films. How did that happen?

It's so long ago. I was working in London and I read in one of the English papers about the film commission being set up in Australia. I said to Barry Humphries that we should do a script from the comic strip because they had money available to make films but it hadn't occurred to them that they had no one to make them. I said, 'I don't think they've thought about that but if we whip back to Australia with a script, with you starring in it and we're all set to go, we have a good chance of getting the money. There wouldn't be all that many going for it'. And that's more or less what happened. When I came back, I remember I had a meeting with the Film Commission and they said, 'we can't give you the money because you haven't directed a feature'. And I said, 'Well who has? Nobody.' Except, I think, Tim Burstall had. I'd done a lot of short films and I'd had about twelve years in the film industry. But somehow it happened. I loved working with Barry and we're still close friends.

What influence did it have on the way people saw Australian films and Australian comedies?

I'm not sure what influence it had. Personally, it was a massive mistake for me to do it, a massive mistake, because the film was so badly received critically. Instead of getting me work, even though it was successful commercially, it put me out of work.

But the sequel?

That was an even bigger mistake. I couldn't find anything else to make because the films were so reviled critically that I thought that, with these two films, I'll never work again. Luckily Phillip Adams saved my life by offering me Don's Party. But that was a couple of years later. I thought the Barry Mc Kenzie films were very funny but the reaction was so hostile that I realised very quickly that I had made a massive mistake. They were the wrong films to do. What I should have done was something that was going to get better critical reviews.

You did it with Don's Party.

Yes, Don's Party saved my life. The play was extremely acute and perceptive and the film didn't do anything the play didn't do. It analysed the groups of friends at the party who were an interesting cross-section. The film worked because it was lively and very well-cast.

The Club?

The Club was nowhere near as successful. Football movies are hard to do. In fact, sports' movies are hard to do unless you're doing boxing because then everyone understands what's going on. Other games are very difficult.

The best way to look at The Club seems to be to see it as a political comedy with a struggle for power.

It was and, on that level, it quite worked. People went to it, if they went at all - certainly people who weren't AFL fans - went expecting that they were never going to understand the football game or that they would hate the game. But the game itself wasn't that important.

The Getting of Wisdom was a quite a different film.

Well, that was actually the film I wanted to do first. I had read the book when I was about fourteen and I always thought it would make a wonderful film. When the Film Commission got going, it was the film I wanted to do. But I thought that maybe it would be better to do a popular comedy, something that makes some money and gets me some credibility and then I can make a film like The Getting of Wisdom which would be a much harder film to make and to sell. But I miscalculated terribly. My whole line of reasoning was totally wrong. It would have been better to do the artistic film, even if nobody saw it. And got good reviews.

Germaine Greer, when asked to contribute to a series in the Daily Telegraph in London about the most influential novels of the 20th century, chose The Getting of Wisdom.

Well, I think it's a great novel. I don't know if anyone reads Henry Handel Richardson these days, but I thought she was a great writer. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a complete masterpiece.

The film is a fascinating look at religion and education in the 19th century.

I think it was fairly accurate. I based the script, not just on the novel, but on her autobiography, Myself When Young. She covered the same ground. There were things not in the novel that I put in the film. I always thought it would be fascinating to make a film with virtually an all female cast. It turns out now I've done a whole lot of them.

In Leonard Maltin's TV Guide, you are listed among the directors but Money Movers is left out. Has it been overlooked?

Well, it's a pretty terrible film. Perhaps that's why it's overlooked. It was a kind of stop-gap thing. When I signed a contract to do some work with the South Australian Film Corporation, I originally signed to do a film that I never actually made for them, the Ferryman, a script I'd written. Then, after I'd signed, they said they didn't want to do that. I said that I understood that that's what we were going to do. They told me to have another look at my contract. They said they were going to do a film with me but not The Ferryman. I re-read it and saw that this was in fact true. They had a number of other projects, none of which I liked, and we finished up with Money Movers as a sort of compromise.

It worked as a thriller?

No, nobody went to see it. I went on the opening night in Melbourne and there were three people there and me. I was sitting up the back wondering what time the session started and then the film came on. I thought, 'this is going to be a disaster'. And it was.

Breaker Morant was a significant film.

Yes, but, again, it was a film that nobody went to see. But it was an important film. In terms of actual audiences, nobody saw it. Critically, it was important, which is a key factor, and it has kept being shown over the years. Whenever I am in Los Angeles, it's always on TV. I get phone calls from people who say, 'I saw your movie, could you do something for us?' But, they're looking at a twenty year old movie. At the time it never had an audience. Nobody went anywhere in the world. It opened and closed in America in less than a week. And in London, I remember it had four days in the West end. Commercially, a disaster, but... It's a film that people talk about to me all the time.

What do they talk about, the war situation, the character of Breaker Morant, the trial?

I think it's the moral conflict. It's a good story. I read an article about it recently in the LA times and the writer said it's the story of these guys who were railroaded by the British. But that's not what it's about at all. The film never pretended for a moment that they weren't guilty. It said they are guilty. But what was interesting about it was that it analysed why men in this situation would behave as they had never behaved before in their lives. It's the pressures that are put to bear on people in war time. Look at the atrocities in Yugoslavia. Look at all the things that happen in these countries committed by people who appear to be quite normal. That was what I was interested in examining. I always get amazed when people say to me that this is a film about poor Australians who were framed by the Brits. That was not what the film was about for me. And I never said that.

And Puberty Blues?

Well, I'd almost forgotten it, actually. It was quite a popular film. I was very taken with the novel when I read it. It was written by the two girls when they were at school, one of those privately printed things or printed by one of those small presses. I bought it while I was waiting for a bus in North Sydney. I went to get a chocolate or something and I saw a pile of these things sitting on the counter. I thought I'd buy one and read it on the bus going home. It was remarkable, a very well-expressed book. And the girls were only fifteen. It was a sort of insight into the way of life of those kids, which was a revelation to me. I've no idea what that film would look like now, probably not very good. Kathy Lette was a real livewire and so was the other girl, Gabrielle Carey.

From a religious point of view, Black Robe was quite significant. What appealed to you in Brian Moore's novel and its themes that led you to direct it?

It was my idea to make the movie. No one approached me about the film. I read the novel when I was passing through Los Angeles in 1985. I had always been a great admirer of Brian Moore's novels. This is a historical novel quite unlike his others. It struck me for a lot of reasons. One was simply the novelty of it. I knew nothing whatever about pioneer life in Canada in the 17th century and suddenly to read this story about these insanely savage Indians and these brave, courageous French voyagers trying to colonise them was very striking. In particular the priest, Laforgue, was significant, trying to convert the Indians to Christianity and baptise them. He travelled right across the known world to try to convince the Indians that they were living their lives all wrong because they've got to go to this place, heaven, which doesn't even exist.

Looking back from the 20th century, this seems, in many ways, a mad thing to do. But they had their own approach to the world worked out and in terms of 17th century views, they thought they were doing the Indians a great favour. It is fascinating that someone's faith could be so strong.

What interested me really about Black Robe, apart from the fact that it's a great story, is that clash between the European and the native American cultures. Period films are always hard to do. The further back in history you go, the harder it is. Everything changes - the look, the manners, the thinking, everything. You have to understand the way someone like Laforgue thought. He had an obsession with getting everyone into heaven, a concept which few people these days take seriously. My job is to convince the audience that this is important.

More recently Paradise Road took up the themes of war and women.

Paradise Road was the most disastrous film I ever made.

But it did well in Australia.

No, not really. A little bit. It was one of the worst reviewed films of my career, including Barry Mc Kenzie. The American reviews and the Australian reviews were dreadful - a few good ones but mostly they were terrible. And the worst of all were the English reviews. They were just lethal.

But I liked it. When it was finished, I thought this was actually pretty good. But I was quite taken aback by the reviews. They were the worst I have ever had.

You wrote the screenplay yourself?

Yes. The original idea was brought to me by a couple of guys in Western Australia who had actually written a script. In retrospect, I probably should have filmed it. But they hadn't done any research, didn't know anything about it. They based it on old movies, which was pretty silly. So, I went and read a lot of diaries. A lot of women in the camps kept diaries. They're now in the war museum at Lambeth. You can read them up in the dome and I spent some time there reading and making notes. That's where I got the information. There were also some published diaries as well.

It was a great idea to have the women's memories of the wars and the camps. So much had been presented from the men's perspective.

That was one of the key things that made me want to do it.

Your cast was excellent, Glenn Close portraying goodness in a credible way.

Yes, and Pauline Collins was marvellous. Johanna Ter Stege was also a wonderful actress, really down to earth. Yes, that's what they were like. The music was great.

Speaking of music you directed a segment of Aria, but you also direct many operas. What is your special love for opera?

Well, I've always loved opera. I first heard it when I was about sixteen, I think, and I just became completely fascinated by it. It's enormously dramatic and you have, or you should have, good stories mixed up with fabulous music, sweeping everything along, and this great wall of emotion. I find them terribly powerful. They affect me and I could watch them over and over and over and never get sick of them.

The Imax film on Sydney?

Well, I didn't actually direct that one because I was working on a film in America and it went way over schedule and I couldn't get back to do the Imax. It was directed by Geoff Burton. All I did was come in and help with the cutting and the voiceover. I worked on the script with a couple of other people but it was very difficult, actually. It's about forty minutes.

A history of Sydney?

It's meant to be a history of Sydney but it's not really. It's very slight. One of the problems was the council who were putting up some of the money. In fact, there were some of things in the history of Sydney that they didn't want in it. Well, you can't mention convicts - but it's pretty hard to make a history of Sydney without mentioning convicts. They said convicts aren't important. They had a whole list of things. So, by the time you got in things they OKd, there wasn't much time for anything else. They really only wanted aerial shots of the harbour. They didn't want mention of anything that was unpleasant. They didn't want mentioned the fact that people came out in chains, that the aborigines around the harbour died, anything that looked to be rather ghastly. The result is rather bland.

A nice little film for the year 2000?

Yes. It's quite a pleasant little tourist film.

Of your American films, do you have a favourite?

You know I've never seen any of them again. In fact, I never watch any of the films I've ever done again. Just my memories of them. My guess would be Driving Miss Daisy and Black Robe. People do like Driving Miss Daisy. I think I get as many comments on that as I do on Breaker Morant.

Part of the problem with Last Dance was that just before it came out there was Dead Man Walking with the same story. I was pushing the studio to release our film before that one and they didn't want to because there was another Sharon Stone film and they said they didn't want two Sharon Stone films out at the same time. I said that I hadn't seen Dead Man Walking but I had read the script and it seemed identical. If we were to come out after that everyone was going to say we pinched it. And that's exactly what happened.

Phone interview: 15th May 1999

JAMES BOGLE


You come from Western Australia and you have spoken about nature and the sense of isolation and remoteness. What influence has that had on your films?

Massive.

I read Tim Winton's That Eye the Sky and thought, wow, this is a film I want to make. I got in touch with Tim and realised that the option had already gone. I started to read all his other work and came across In the Winter Dark and I recognised it as being his darkest book.

It's not an easy story to tell. The more I spoke to him about telling the story, the more I realised that it had quite a lot of elements that I could relate to on a very personal level and from my background, because I grew up on a sheep station in outback Western Australia.

My mother was a city girl who married a bushie and finished up in the backblocks of Western Australia. She didn't see another woman for three or four months, back in the '50s, and the woman that she came across was toothless, had a face like an old boot and was in her late seventies. This was a girl who wanted to be a ballet dancer and was interested in music and there she was, stuck out in the middle of nowhere.

Certainly in that aspect of Ida, who Brenda Blethyn plays in the film, a person who actually finds herself in the wrong world, I related very strongly to my mother. There's also that sense where, when you're that far out in isolation, you have to be so resourceful that in a lot of ways you consider any sort of help from outside as a weakness. There's a lot of that in Tim's book: that sense of - if they get help to solve their problems from outside, it's considered a weakness. You deal with your problems.

Not only that. On an emotional level, if you have emotional problems, you deal with them yourself, to the point where you almost don't even talk to your partner about them. Ida and Maurice's relationship is very like that. And it's internal and very difficult to bring to the screen. But that's what attracted me to the story.

Before going back to In the Winter Dark, could we consider your short films. You made them in the West?

I won the Young Filmmakers Festival in 1981 in Perth, a documentary about the concept of shearing. That was a long time ago and I shot it on Super 8. I was interested in showing the concept of shearing and the whole sense of what goes into shearing as being a beautiful, a natural thing. I'm not sure how else to explain it. Part of the Young Filmmakers Festival was to study at the Film School, an open program, so I got to study there for a week. But I just cashed in my return ticket and stayed in Sydney and finished up working on documentaries for Michael Willesee. Then I started shooting rock clips, video clips and making short films, and one thing led to another.

The first big project I did was a film called Kadaicha, which was made for David Hannay, a producer who was doing low-budget horror-thriller flicks - just very commercial stuff. I did that in the late '80s.

There was a great deal of interest in aboriginal themes at the time. In the mid-'80s there were quite a lot of films, like The Fringe Dwellers, Short Changed and Crocodile Dundee. Then there were thrillers like Kadaicha and The Dreaming.

That was, I suppose, the trend of the late '80s. Then there was an economic recession in the early '90s and not a lot was happening. I finished up making Mad Bomber in Love, which was a no-budget video feature. That was more like an event than a film, just to make the statement that, if you really wanted to, you could actually make a film for nothing. It took about a year to complete, as it turned out, even though we only shot it for 14 days.

But, looking at all the films I've made, I've been interested in some kind of sense of primal fear, and that's something I found in the book that Tim offered me. Certainly Tim's The Rider is about that. Tim's religious and I think he tends to have a great interest in the fact that some people in life are begotten by tragedy. He has a great interest in how they deal with that - but it's all part of life, the way we live. In some ways, even with something as recent as The Riders, there's this foreboding feeling: perhaps everything isn't right; perhaps things are going to go wrong. He's interested in situations where people are put to the test.

I love that about his characters. I love it, because Tim's characters are good people and they're trying to find a way, they're really trying to find a way. It doesn't matter how lost they are, they're trying to find a way to deal with themselves and with the world. They're not, as I see it, evil.

The screenplay uses the language of redemption but by the end, with the tragedy, were any of them saved or redeemed with Ida's death, the couple disappearing and Maurice sitting on his verandah wondering why the police did not come for him. It's a very pessimistic and tragic perspective.

It is, isn't it? In fact, I think the book In the Winter Dark is a lot darker than the film. When Peter Rasmussen and I were writing the script, we were fully aware that there was the mirror image between the older couple and the younger couple, in much the same way as in, say, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, where, as an audience, you can see contrasts and comparisons in how the two worlds are shaping. We wanted to get that into the text even though it is not necessarily part of the book.

I think that at the end of the day we wanted to allow the younger couple to escape, for there to be some hope whereas, in the book, Ronnie gives birth at the site of the accident, loses the baby and goes mad. And Jacob stays in the valley. Everything's a bit more insane. But I think it's important cinematically to give hope to people. Certainly with a story that's as serious as In the Winter Dark, there's also a great sense of humour in it. And there's the ability, with just minor shifts, to give some sense of hope that maybe you don't need out of a novel, but maybe you do need out of a cinematic experience.

You have said that the landscape and the season almost became a character, the weather itself.

We always imagined that the country and the weather would combine to be a fifth character. That works when you are telling a story about people's incapacity to communicate about important things and how that incapacity after many years just implodes.

Because I grew up in the country. It's very hard to do, but I think it's important, certainly in this story, that the country has a sense of power about it: if you don't respect it, it could actually take your life. I mean, it can drive you to things that you wouldn't necessarily do. Tim's interested in that. Tim's interested in the idea that white Australians tend to gravitate to the edges of the continent and, if you look one way you've got the ocean and it will take you if you aren't careful, and look the other way, in Western Australia and you've got the desert right behind you, at your back.

You've chosen mountains and valleys for the film?

Yes. The book is set in the south-west of Western Australia where there's very big jarrah and karri, probably the biggest timber in Australia. I went down there and did a recce. I looked around to see whether it was suitable for filming down there, but all the country around there is very much dairy country, quite rich and very green in winter. Tim's taken poetic licence, I suppose, in establishing that there's big timber in hard country, which never happens. They don't go together.

So I finished up shooting in the Blue Mountains, on the other side in the Megalong Valley, where the country is very tough. And, instead of using big timber, I used the escarpments to close the valley in to give it that dead-end valley, cul-de-sac feel.

Tim Winton has a religious perspective. Would you share that specifically religious perspective?

I've never actually spoken to Tim directly about this. It feels to me like there's a spirituality about the book that we share. I'm not religious myself, but there's a spirit about the book and, I think, in all his work, where you get a sense that you need to respect who you are and what you are, what you're doing and how life is in its particular way.

I think one of the things that makes his literature popular is that it doesn't matter who the characters are, you can always understand them. Because even though he writes very honestly about characters, there's always a sense - which I would love to believe and I'm not sure that I do - but there's always a sense that people are actually trying to find their way in life. That's the way I am, so I can relate to that. But I'm not sure I believe everyone's like that.

On the psychological interpretation, since you mentioned Virginia Woolf, what about such films as Forbidden Planet, where the destructive Id of some of the characters surfaces, so that in In the Winter Dark, they are themselves symbolically/realisticaly creating the creature that is killing the animals?

Yes, indeed, and I think in some ways Tim grappled with that in the novel but never actually sorted it out.

The book didn't sell as well as some of his other novels which means that it was slightly ill-conceived. It's as if he thought about the Nanup Tiger. There is this whole mythology - and you find it in every state - that there is a big cat out there. The Nanup Tiger is famous in the south-west of Western Australia, a mythological idea that there is a tiger out there. It's like the Loch Ness Monster. But, when it came down to it, when he was writing, I think he was interested in adventuring into different territory. This is my opinion. He usually writes idiosyncratic and sprawling character-based stuff that is colourful in its own way, but accurate in an incredible way about characters who are finding life difficult. And that's what we relate to.

In the Winter Dark is like a thriller, and it is only a hundred pages long. In fact it's probably the best of his books to translate to the screen. He has that capacity to write about the fear within but he was also writing about the fear out there. What we had to sort out as screenwriters was, it's got to be either one or the other: are we going to make a genre pic about a big monster out there or are we going to make a psychological drama about the internal struggles of the pain of life.

You visualise the dreams and the mingling of identities. We wonder just what the dreams are expressing of the characters. Once you moved into identifying one person with the other, the mythological and dream aspect came to the fore.

When you read a book, it's very easy for a novelist, I suppose, to jump around into dreams and memories, flashbacks and time-frame jumps and all sorts of things whereas, cinematically, you have to be very careful about that because you confuse the hell out of people.

We had to work out a formula. We didn't want to use morphing or opticals in any sort of normal way; Peter Rasmussen and I decided, when we were writing the script, that we should try and design reality shoots where people don't change in their age but visit a different time. So, it all happens in the art direction, shot for shot. You go through these montages where a character doesn't change in age, but visits the different time then comes back. There's not a lot of camera movement. Most of the shots are locked on - and then they come back.

Having grown up in the country, I think you have so much time to think about things that dreams and memories tend to invade your presence on a very personal level, in a very personal space. You allow that to happen and to some degree give them disproportionate elevation in importance. We were interested in that form and there's one basically every ten minutes. That was the way we decided to deal with Tim's magic realism.

Having become involved with the characters, I think the audience will look at the choices the characters made and wonder if they would have done the same thing in those circumstances. It is about fear overtaking love and I think that makes the sensibility of the film unique.

You're working in the tradition of films with the bush as a place of mystery and the bush as destructive - Picnic at Hanging Rock, Bliss, The Well.

In the Winter Dark is definitely not a fashionable film. It's not a trendy film. It's the sort of film that will still be read the same way in 10 or 20 years time. That's the film I was trying to make. So the fact that it isn't as popular at the moment as some other films doesn't really bother me.

Winter is in the title of another project? Are you fascinated with winter?

I'm not sure about that, but it just so happens that the book is called Closed for Winter!


Interview: 7th October 1998

TIM BURSTALL

Your background to film-making in the sixties - what started you on the path to being a director?

Really, I started out wanting to write. I remember it being in the old university days where we all used to think in terms of what we called 'the big vehicle'. The big vehicle was the 250-page novel, the three-hour play or the 90-minute film. In those days it was thought very difficult to get up a 90 minute film from Australia. Somehow or other that was something that was done by the Yanks.

I tried a novel, that's how it began, though at the same time I was always very interested in film and I was a foundation member in the Melbourne University Film Society. We were all trying to get hold of 16mm equipment and so forth at that point. My first job after university was at the National Film Library, which I thought might lead into getting into the Commonwealth Film Unit as a writer. But they were all doing nothing but docos, so I got out of that fairly rapidly.

I did found a film society out at Eltham, but I really began by making a film on the weekends. I'd seen a film by Lamorisse, Le Crin Blanc, about a boy and a horse and how he tames the stallion. I lived out in Eltham, which was almost rural in those days, and I had a few goats and geese and my kids were young. The lead in my film was six and the girl next door was five, so I made the story about a boy and a goat. We put it into an overseas film festival, Venice, got a prize with it, and distributed it through Screen Gems. It got a release here through British Empire Films as a support. That floated me and I got some backing from an old school friend and we formed a company called Eltham Films and away we went.

You made documentaries in those years as well?

When you say 'documentaries', I really was not interested in documentary. I remember hating the very idea of documentary - this is perhaps from my period in the National Film Library. The Grierson-type documentary is my idea of total boredom. It was nearly always from forest to newspaper print or you followed some industrial process. It also had that dreary socialist colour, too. It was always collective Man, never a story. So, after The Prize I made a set of art films because Arthur Boyd was a very close friend and I knew people like Nolan and Charlie Blackman fairly well. They belonged to the same bohemia we all lived in.

I sold them to the ABC and some of them won prizes. Of course, when I say art films, they weren't documentary in the style of the usual art film; they didn't say, 'Here is the painter. What are his great thoughts?' They just looked at his pictures. I eliminated the painter. I just took the thematic material. In other words, I wrote a ballad, say, about Ned Kelly and fitted that to the pictures. They were like mini-cartoons almost.

In the case of Arthur Boyd, he did a series and I called it The Black Man and his Bride, which was really about aboriginal integration, an aboriginal shearer wanting to marry a half-caste bride. But I turned it into a narrative or into a mini-narrative. The thing I was interested in was drama, fiction material. I was interested in the theme business.

The other things I did were kids' films. We were just trying to find a market, trying to find a niche. The series of kids' films was called Sebastian and the Fox made with a man called Peter Scriven who had done The Tintookies. That was a puppet film, one puppet and the real world. They were like early Chaplins. It was meant to be comedy for kids but we used the same principles that Chaplin was practising.

After that I a Harkness Fellowships, one of those wealthy American fellowships that took you to America for a couple of years. You could study where you liked and that made it possible for me to work with professional actors at the Actors Studio and work on a couple of feature films. I came back, then, ready to make some features.

I did see 2000 Weeks when it first came out. It seems a long time ago.

It sure is. It's about 30 years ago. I actually still look on that as part of my apprenticeship. It's written up in the histories as if it was an important breakthrough picture, but to my mind it wasn't. It was based on something when I was in the States. The current wisdom was that nobody could compete with Hollywood except countries with a language of their own, like Sweden or France. They could have small industries of their own but nobody else could, and if you were English-speaking, you were really in a problem situation competing with Hollywood.

Anyway, this fellow from United Artists said, 'But you could still make adult pictures, say in Sweden or France or Australia. What does it matter? You know, there's a hundred thousand in the art-house market. You should be able to make a picture for that,' and so on. So the intent was really to make a sort of universal art-house film, something that would work globally in a small way for the art-house circuit.

I didn't know enough about writing. I didn't know a lot about a lot of things and I personally think the picture didn't work. I look on my professional career as starting with Stork.

I think the themes were interesting. It took a theme which I dealt with later on in Petersen. Whereas 2000 Weeks was about a journalist who wanted to be a writer and who felt that Australia was in a colonial situation and somebody was making a series and he doesn't get the chance to do it, by the time I got to Petersen three years later, he was converted to an electrician who aspired to go to university. I was able to make much more use of the class element in Petersen. Anyway, it didn't work for the audience in 2000 Weeks and for me that was pretty important. I didn't think it was any use making pictures that didn't work commercially and work for an audience.

Stork is considered your breakthrough film.

Well, it was the breakthrough historically. First of all, I took exactly the opposite advice that I'd been given in the States, the advice which led to 2000 Weeks, which was to take, as it were, a kind of universal theme - it's safer - and aim it at a market that is art-house. With Stork, it was unashamedly, very heavily, Australian and was based on a play written, of course, by David Williamson. One of the points you have to make is that it was the first thing that the public heard of from him.

This play was put on at La Mama. I saw it and thought, 'We can convert that to a film.' And it had a kind of gaiety and brio. It was good-natured and it celebrated our own lives in a very straightforward way. It wasn't the precious or arty. It was Australian comedy of a pretty straightforward sort, but also of a pretty well-observed and accurate sort. And David has emerged over the last thirty years as a very prolific comic writer and a very shrewd observer of the Australian scene, I think.

You wrote an article in The Bulletin in 1977 in which you categorised our films and you talked about the ocker comedy. Did Stork herald the emergence of the ocker comedy?

I don't think it did. It preceded the Barry MacKenzie? stuff, which is much more condescending; it is both more brutal and is genuinely ocker - I mean ocker in a very cartoony style. But it's also seen through the prism of Humphries' idea of what's funny. I mean, Barry was a Camberwell boy looking down on Moonee Ponds, which is a different colour from what Stork was trying to do. Although there are parts of Stork that are ocker, the general feeling is robust. Stork is a virgin and he's also a hypochondriac. There are characters in Stork, whereas the characters and the colours in Bazza MacKenzie?, well, they're poster colours and they're much more caricatures than genuine characters.

A distinction I've found useful is the difference between a larrikin and a hooligan: the larrikins are attractive and hooligans are brutal.

Yes, I could buy that distinction.

In that vein, how does Alvin Purple fit?

After Stork I formed a company called Hexagon with Roadshow. The deal was that our production company and their distribution company could have a veto on any sort of project. In other words, they wanted a say in what kind of pictures we made, and we wanted a say in what sort of pictures we made. So if either party, the creator or the distributor disagreed, then the project was vetoed.

My next film was, in fact, Petersen. That's the one I commissioned from David and which we were working on, but I couldn't get it up in time for Roadshow - they wanted a picture straightaway for that Christmas. The R Certificate had just come in and they'd run a very successful Danish picture called Bedroom Mazurka. Now, I'd never seen a sex comedy in my life, literally, and Graham Bourke, in charge at Roadshow, said have a look at it. So I had a look at it and said, 'Well, if we couldn't do something better than that...'. It didn't seem to me a particularly difficult thing to do.

I then wrote off to a vast number of Australian writers, asking whether they had any ideas for a sex comedy. I got ideas back from people like Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis, probably thirty ideas. But one of them was a fully-written screenplay which had been written originally in England by Alan Hopgood for Tigon Films. Anyway, I read this thing and I thought what it was getting at was really the joke of sexual therapy, where the therapist gets off with the patient.

It started off as comedy then, halfway through, it turned into a serious sort of Four Corners: 'What is the nature of this? This isn't really so funny, is it, chaps?'.

I thought the Hopgood thing was a one-joke idea, but if our film was to be a comedy, then this was clearly the story that had more mileage in it than any others. But all the serious part, I thought we've got to throw that out. I tried to get Hoppy to do certain things with it but, in the end, I wrote quite a lot of it, using almost every schoolboy joke that one could remember. I suspect it was because we were seeing our Australian girls in the nude for the first time and it was R-certificate - actually I haven't seen it for so long, for probably 25 years, so I don't really know how it would seem now - but it was intended to be good-natured.

I would imagine you'd feel rather odd seeing it in the days of AIDS because it's suggesting full liberation. But it was phenomenally successful. We took, I think, $4,000,000 in the days when it was $2.50 a seat. It was seen by something like one in ten Australians. I think it was the business of getting your rocks off and it being okay, the end of puritanism, something like that. But it was laughing at liberation more than urging it upon us, I hope.

Graeme Blundell's Alvin was good-natured.

I remember Bourkie saying, 'You've got to cast somebody like Jack Thompson.' I said, 'Absolutely not. You've got to cast somebody who wouldn't, on the surface, seem a stud or even particularly attractive'. I actually thought that Alvin wasn't, that the comic element was connected with having a Woody Allen or a Dustin Hoffman figure who is not very obviously sexually attractive, and the girls rushing him. This becomes much funnier than if he was a stud figure. Anyway, that's history.

And Alvin Rides Again?

I didn't direct that. We wanted to make a follow-up Stork but Roadshow wanted, for commercial reasons, the follow-up Alvin. It was directed jointly by my cameraman Rob Copping and David Bilcock, the editor. And, really, I don't think Graeme Blundell wanted to do it except on terms which to some extent endangered the premise, a double identity thing. There was the real Alvin and then there was a figure called Balls McGee?, a sort of horrible crim. Part of the joke - again it's a sort of Woody Allenish idea - was him being mistaken for one and having to front as the other.

But when it came to the crunch, Graeme didn't distinguish between Alvin pretending to be Balls, and Balls. I think the comedy was lost and the audience identification with Alvin didn't work properly. But Alvin Purple had been so successful that it still worked commercially.

You also directed the short segment, The Child, for Libido.

Actually I made that straight after Stork. The producer, Christopher Muir, had a year off from the ABC. He was in a mid-life crisis and wanted to do something else. At the Producers and Directors Guild of Melbourne we cooked up the idea of a portmanteau film with different themes. I suggested, together with the committee, that we bring in the writing talents of people who normally never worked for film. The idea was to get somebody from the Patrick White, Randolph Stowe area, the mythic, epic side of Australian writing, and we'd throw in somebody from the new theatre, David Williamson. Hal Porter came in. I recommended him very strongly, but I must say when I was given his story, I had problems with it.

Hal was very cross with me because I changed the nature of the story fairly radically. I've got the original story and my shooting script and a piece in Overland on it with my comments on how I did it and why I made the changes I did.

Your company was successful?

Well, all those films were. Stork made money, both the Alvins made money, Libido made money. The first six pictures all returned their money and gave a return to the investors. They didn't make that much money for me because we had our arrangement with Village that we put up half the money. So, in actual fact, we were taxed on what the films had made and then we had to put up the next chunk of money. Stork provided me with enough money to put up my share on Alvin, then Alvin provided enough to do the next. Unlike the bulk of the early Australian film-makers, we were actually financing our operation. We were protected in the sense that we had a distributor, but we were penalised by being the entrepreneur as well.

Then Petersen.

I was surprised by how heavily attacked it was on the grounds that it was pornographic, but when I saw it again recently, I wasn't that surprised. It was very much more of a commercial for sexual liberation than Alvin ever was.

When David and I were talking about it, I can remember saying it was important for us to kick him off showing a warm domestic side, the marriage relationship. We then show him on with his mistress, Wendy Hughes, the lecturer. Most romantics say, 'Well, it's fine to have a wife and a mistress.' But the next move was to show him in what I described as 'the public fuck', which was the deal at the university where he's performing as a political act.

However, we then follow him up with a pass or a pseudo-pass being made at the wife of his best friend. That's when they go off on the holiday. The girl in question says, 'I've had this dream about you'. And Johnny Ewart finishes up saying, 'To make a pass at your best friend's wife is pretty crummy'. But the last we see of him, he's putting in power points in somebody's bedroom and it's quite clear he's going to get off with her, and now he's become a kind of sad case. But it really hammers the notion. It surprised me that in the States they retitled the picture Jock Petersen. That wasn't what I chose.

This is again pre-AIDS. But for my money, when I saw it again I thought it really is more of a sexual affront than I thought it was at the time we were making it. I thought that we were striking a blow for all the things that should be said. I really wanted to say that there was every range of colour sexually. There was the romantic love of the girlfriend as against the one-night stand. Most people know all the different colours, and sex can be as deep and meaningful as you like at one end of the spectrum and it can be as shallow at the other. But it's all human.

I was also surprised when I saw it again because I thought, one, we were making a point about class and, two, I thought we were making a point about examinations. At the time they'd done experiments with various examiners and discovered that there were huge discrepancies, certainly in arts subjects, in the results being given. That also seemed rather important to be saying, that there was a sort of corruption in academia.

I think I probably would take a very different line now. I'm pro-examination and I also think ranking is terribly important. I think there's a discipline - but, heaven knows, I shouldn't go into that.

However, I still think that Petersen was about an important subject and also it was about - irrespective of whatever Jack did with the role - the idea of somebody who had been an electrician and did think there was more in life than putting in powerpoints and crawling around underneath people's houses putting in wires. It was about the aspirations of a working-class hero for more, for knowledge, for making more of his life, finding more meaning in it. I think some of that came through, anyway.

Bud Tingwell is Petersen's father, the minister, standing in his pulpit, groping for faith or meaning in the 70s.

We thought that was a very critical thing. My preamble should be that, when I was at Geelong Grammar, we had Manning Clark, who had all sorts of odd mannerisms. He was an interesting mentor figure. I wanted the Bud figure to be robust but exactly where he'd gone...? I knew a man called Father Coldrey. He used to be at the Brotherhood of St Laurence. He was active and strong and rather impressive. But I myself am an atheist and, in fact, that figure says, 'I don't know if I believe in him.' Well, that sort of priest interests me a lot.

Keneally and Fred Schepisi did interesting things with that kind of struggle in their Libido story, The Priest.

Yes. I thought it was interesting but I thought it was more despairing than I would have wanted, and it was sort of morbid. It seemed as if it was anti-body, anti-sex, anti-things. Do you remember him looking in the bowl as he washed his things in the washbasin? I think it was a little bit despairing for me. See, Tom is not despairing at all; he's the opposite of that. Schepisi's not - the great thing about Fred's contribution on the Catholic stuff, to me, is that it comes out of Italy, so you don't have this awful Irish Puritan thing. There's a sort of robust thing about the Catholicism of Fred. Fred's given it up, but you get the feeling that it's central. I may be misjudging the Irish thing, but I've always had the feeling that the Irish priesthood - perhaps I'm judging by Joyce, by my perception of Mannix - to some extent had something morbid and hellfirish.

Look, I'm ignorant on the church, but I know in terms of my own experience, one of my closest friends is a man called Brian O'Shaughanassy. He was brought up as a Catholic. Although I went to an Anglican school, I probably had more Catholic friends than anyone else. And if I was ever to be religious, I suspect that, in fact, that would be the only one I'd go for. But since I can't come at the very notion of God, it's a problem. I'm one of the very few people I know who was actually brought up an atheist. My parents were English. My father was a scientist, an engineer, professor at Melbourne University, and my mother was a biologist. I've never had a religious phase in my life. But I've always thought it's all much more mysterious than religion suggests.

End Play, was it just a thriller?

After all the ocker criticisms, I certainly didn't want to be locked into doing only ocker stuff and I also wanted to see whether the public would buy a whole range of other things. I suppose everybody else was trying to do the same thing at that time - we're speaking of 1974. That was when Peter was embarking on Hanging Rock; we were all trying to widen the scope of what the public would come at.

Russell Braddon's a good writer. I have always been a consumer of detective stories and that sort of thing, murder thrillers ... though I suppose Macbeth or The Brothers Karamazov are thrillers. The brothers' struggle was part of End Play, but it really was just something that was midway between one film and the next. We were doing two a year at the time.

Do you look back on Eliza Frazer affectionately?

I had originally written a version back in the 60s. The first film I wanted to do was something called Man in Iron, which was Ned Kelly. The next one was Eliza Frazer. I don't know whether that was the influence of Nolan, who'd done versions of both those stories, but they struck me as connected to our mythology. I would have seen Ned Kelly as a sort of Viva Zapata rather than a psychopath or anything like that. The magical thing is that mad armour, which visually and in terms of what it's saying, looks backwards towards knights in armour and forwards towards robots and space stuff. Visually it's so weird. It's a fairytale - to make a set of armour out of ploughshares is a very funny and curious idea.

What interested me about the Mrs Frazer story was the different accounts that had been given of it. So the original screenplay that I wrote in the late 60s was really a kind of Rashomon, each person telling a different story, because two different convicts claimed to have saved her. And her own story. When she went back to England, she performed in a sideshow tent describing, 'I was nearly raped by an aboriginal chieftain,' all that sort of thing, a highly sensationalist account. She was a younger woman married to a much older sea captain, but it made you feel that she was a totally unreliable witness.

Then there was the story that Bracewell gave. Bracewell was an escaped convict from Moreton Bay and who was living, like Buckley, with the natives. He is supposed to have saved her. She promised to get him a pardon. They walked back. When they arrived at Moreton Bay - he led her back there - she then said, 'Out dog, out cur!'. He then has to fade back into the bush and she goes back to England to tell her absurd stories.

Now, in fact, it was Graham rather than Bracewell who did do the rescuing. So it's the different accounts. I was sure, and certainly David Williamson was, that the aborigines were given a very bad press and, of course, we wanted to correct that. I think the account of the aborigines in Eliza Fraser was probably something new in Australian film.

People talk about Australians as being ocker. The Brits now feel we are sort of vulgar. There's a way in which, when I go to Britain, I have the feeling they can't actually place you properly. They certainly feel our directness is crude. I think the ocker thing is just the John Bull Englishman of the 18th century. We are descendants of the John Bull Englishman. Think of Tom Jones - the ocker characteristics are the characteristics of an Englishman in the 18th century: very vulgar, very straightforward, very robust, very direct. And the wenching and the drinking. Any society is strongly influenced by its first founders. The Yanks are descended from the 17th century. Really the Roundheads were the ones who won in America, whereas the cavaliers won in England. And I think that the parts of America that I'm continuously reminded of and feel strange about are the 17th century parts, whereas I think we are the 18th century. I certainly had in mind Tony Richardson's Tom Jones when we were doing it. I wanted it to have some elements of a romp. The story itself is an extraordinary story.

Did the audience respond to the satiric interpretation?

I don't think they did. I think the real problem was the story wasn't well-known. It would have been known amongst a few people. Sid Nolan and Patrick White knew it and a few historians might have known it, but the general public really had never heard of it. To work a satirical angle on something which is well known is fine, but if it's not well-known enough, then the satire is to some extent lost.

A lot of people complained that they didn't know whether the picture was a drama or a comedy. But when they accept what the mix is, they like it. The picture did quite well, but the reason it didn't do very well was the cost. It cost $1,300,000. Interestingly enough, it was not my company. I wanted to do it with Wendy Hughes and Frank Thring. My theory in those days was that you couldn't get more than $300,000 back from the Australian market. All the other pictures had been under $300,000. But Roadshow really saw it as very big. They had what we call in the business 'a touch of the Hollywoods'. They insisted on overseas stars and all that sort of thing.

You went back to a smaller budget for The Last of the Knucklemen. And the ocker thing.

One of the funny things is that again it was pretty misunderstood in Australia - or maybe they just thought it was ocker stuff. I was trying to take the ocker stuff and cross it, as I think John Powers' play was, with anthropology. Before I rehearsed the cast, I got them to read 'The Territorial Imparity of the Native Aid'. I wanted it to be seen not just as ockerism but as anthropology. But the only people who got that were the French. It was bought in France and it's done terribly well there - much better than it ever did in Australia.

There are a couple of pictures which haven't worked here but which have worked elsewhere. I'm sure the French aren't missing something, but what they're getting is something which was never got here. Mind you, it never had a decent run. I don't think they knew how to market it. A lot of women said to me, 'I'd never go to a picture that had the title The Last of the Knucklemen'. But nobody ever looked at it as an analysis of the way men work. It's a right-wing view of unionism.

After that, there was Duet for Four.

That was a script I commissioned straight after Petersen. Roadshow didn't want to make it and I was left with the script. Later we talked about it. I was going through a mid-life crisis of some sort and thought - 'What is the nature of work? Have I wasted my time? Am I doing the right thing?' That sort of thing. And toys was the industry we decided to use because it was being taken over by the Yanks. It was a sort of image of what was happening in film at the time. I don't think the picture works very well.

And Morris West and The Naked Country?

I was a hired gun there; I didn't choose the material. He wrote it in 1945 and it really was a potboiler. It had the rudiments, the beginnings of land rights issues, but I took this and converted it absolutely into a land rights thing. To me the problem was I thought the business of Stanton versus the aborigines was okay. But there were indigestible lumps in the script like the adultery. And the Ivar Kants character was too melodramatic. I had to make him a mercenary from South Africa.

You took over Attack Force Z after it had gone into production?

The picture was made by Fauna, Lee Robinson and John Mc Callum. It was the first co-production in the East that we'd done, and the Australian Film Commission was very keen on seeing it happen, even though the director - in this case Phil Noyce - had fallen out with the production company. He wanted to make it a sort of national liberation film. It was a story set in the Second World War and, although we shot it in Taiwan, it was really meant to be Dutch East Indies but with a Chinese population, obviously.

The man who wrote the original screenplay was an Englishman who had done The Avengers. It was competent, like a mini Guns of Navarone, people sent off on a very difficult mission. I was very interested in this Z Force. I'd known some of the people who were in it. It's all very well going off and being a spy in a European war. But if we are in the Second World War here, those people who were sent off to operate within enemy territory were so obviously European and stuck out so hideously that, for the most part, they were nearly all wiped out. Those missions were highly dangerous. Some of them worked but, although we sent lots of people off, a vast number of missions were aborted and a lot of the people were beheaded in rather horrific circumstances.

I was talking to Lee about it when I first got there and he said, 'Well, the guys were given a number on each other - that is, if there were four in the party, if so-and-so gets hurt, you have to shoot him.' Each person had the job of shooting one other of the group if they came to grief in any way. So I said, 'Let's put that on the nose of the picture, let's have five instead of four and let's bring in somebody who's almost a star.' So we brought in Johnny Waters and I shot him in the first ten minutes of the film. Mel has to shoot him because his knee is buggered which, of course, used to happen. That was our real attention grabber in the first ten minutes of the picture.

It was an exotic war picture of a small size. It sold everywhere, sold all over the world, and it got its money back. And it did perform the task of getting some co-productions going with the East, which was useful and very important. But it's always awful when you take over from somebody else - and Phil is a friend - but he really wanted to do something quite different and I was regarded as much more of a whore, I suppose.

But you had your own control?

Well, I work half the time as a hired gun on other people's projects and the other half I try and do my own work, but in either case you're working through narrative that has to be intelligible pretty well first-up with an audience. It seems to me that it's an art which you can't be too precious about. I'm very interested in making a picture as professionally and as well as I can, but I think you've got to work within what your audience can absorb.

That's why, in one sense, films that you see forty years later seem so odd; it's because you and the audience have moved on - the battlefield's somewhere else. So you often wonder, 'What was it? why was it so important?' Of course, it doesn't mean it wasn't important, but its importance was connected to when it was made, the people who made it then, the people who saw it then.

You had planned Kangaroo with Helen Mirren and Leo Mc Kern.

Originally we were going to make Kangaroo with the New South Wales Film Corporation. Their bankers had all the money and they were prepared to make it - the budget in those days was $4,500,000. But in 1981 there was a slump and their bankers could not deliver and the picture collapsed halfway. We were making it at that stage. I'd already hired and we'd begun on pre-production with the people I had. I had Leo Mc Kern for Kangaroo. He would have been marvellous, though a little bit old. But by the time we finally did make it, which was four years later, he would definitely have been too old. It would have been hard to see him getting on a horse, I think. But he would have been absolutely perfect ten years before that.

I finished up with Hugh Keys- Byrne who was a very good Kangaroo. I had originally seen and met Hugh when he came out here with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But I discovered that his father had been a general or a brigadier, quite high up anyway, and was rather contemptuous of Hugh becoming an actor. So Hugh had some understanding of certain sides of Kangaroo, and I think his English background gave him that extra colour.

I didn't want an Australian writer for the picture. I wanted somebody who was seeing Australia for the first time, in the same way that Lawrence did, so I hired the writer of the screenplay for Wake in Fright. His name is Evan Jones and he's Jamaican, not English. He also did a lot of screenplays for Losey like King and Country, a terrific screenwriter. Anyway, he was the one I fixed on to do that job, and I think he did it very well.

The novel is a shambles as a structure, but once you compress it, it can work. But the real difficulty, the indigestible credibility problem is the nature of the Kangaroo figure. It stands or falls by whether you pull that off. And I'm still unsure. I know a lot of people think it's impossible to pull off. I think Hugh did very well in it.

I think the dramatic initiative is between Kangaroo and the Judy Davis character, Harriet, that is, Lawrence's wife. She kept opposing the private life to the meddling with politics and getting into social questions. But she has all the dramatic initiative and I think the best sequences of the film are really her encounters, her arguments with the Lawrence figure.

I like what Colin Friels did. It's difficult to do what he did. Certain people did criticise. Colin's people come from Glasgow. His notion of the sort of accent to use was a bit wavy now and then. He's supposed to be Midlands. Lawrence came from somewhere near Nottingham. But in arguments and when he was getting angry, Colin still finished up with a sort of miner's dialect: 'tha', a version of thou - 'Tha shalt not,' that sort of stuff. But you'd have to be a real nitpicker, I think, to worry about what Colin did. His is a recessive role but it's very important. We see the whole picture through him.

The D.H. Lawrence Society sent me a long thing saying that they had decided it was the best version of Lawrence as a film, apart from Women in Love. They thought Women in Love and Kangaroo were miles better than any of the other versions, which is interesting.

Fascism in Australia and the origins of the colonies and Australian attitudes towards authority?

Yes, alongside the democratic egalitarian tradition there does exist a Nietszchean tradition which you can see as early as Henry Handel Richardson. If you think of Henry Handel Richardson and, certainly, Patrick White, they are interested, and always have been, in the individual alone, the great individual, the great leader figure. I think there's an authoritarian streak amongst most of the organisations, in the trade unions and in the Labor Party, a very strongly authoritarian streak.

If we ever got a fascist movement in Australia, it's much more likely to come out of a Labor Party. Remember Hitler was a national socialist and a great populist. I think it would be national and I think the emphasis would be on the collective as against the individual.

The idea for Great Expectations and to make the mini-series was your son's idea?

We were talking one day, he and I, about Great Expectations and the idea of making it. Because we're Australians, obviously the person who interests us, and the only figure who was an Australian in the whole of Dickens, is Magwitch - although Dickens does send Micawber to New South Wales and he sent a couple of his sons to Australia. I think of Dickens as the greatest 19th century novelist. I suppose you've got to put in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but I think Dickens is up there with the greatest. With Magwitch, the interesting thing is that, as soon as you start saying, 'What did happen to Magwitch and why was he fixated on this kid? Why did he want to turn him into a gentleman?', you get into that class stuff, into certain sides of Australia which I think are interesting. When Tom made the suggestion, I immediately thought of all the business of emancipist versus colonist, what he must have gone through, this figure.

Although the novel was written in 1862, Dickens seems to have based it on family. There's a fair amount of evidence that Dickens's grandfather - his father was a rather feckless figure - is supposed to have actually embezzled some money and was on the run and lived in the Isle of Man. And it has been suggested that perhaps this crazy old grandfather, the wanted man, is a memory of Dickens's childhood, this figure visiting him, visiting the family. It's a possibility, anyway.

The other thing was the premise of the story that had a convict return to England where he would have been hung, killed or disposed of. But that was no longer true in 1862. There are a number of indications that Dickens set it much further back, in the 1830s. So that meant that we had to think where did Magwitch go, what happened to him. When I started reading around it, the most interesting book was Price Waring's, 'Tales of the Old Convict System'. I used, for instance, the part where Magwitch becomes the hangman. That's taken directly from Price Waring.

Of course, one of the things that interested me a lot was Dickens's descriptions of convicts in England, then the descriptions of the convict experience in Price Waring. One realised that they were all part of one system. And you also realise from reading Price Waring that what we think of as Dickensian, melodramatic, a moralistic way of looking at things was in fact the 19th century, the world they all lived in. It was quite seamless.

As soon as you say, 'The hero is not Pip, the hero is Magwitch', it does turn everything around. I originally had the same ending as the novel. I made the rules that I worked on, that I could write anything provided it fitted with what Dickens had written, but I couldn't cheat and alter what had happened. So, even if Magwitch survived, he had to appear to die in the hospital, but he would have to go.

As soon as one investigated the novel in any detail, it was interesting how complexly and how intricately developed Dickens's plots and subplots are. For instance, Compeyson was was the lover of Miss Haversham and jilted her. Miss Haversham's ward is the daughter of Magwitch - that is, Estella is the daughter of Magwitch and Jaggers's housekeeper.

That's in the novel, it's all true. And she is supposed to have been a murderer; to have murdered somebody on Houndside Heath. Miss Haversham's brother is, I think, ruined by Compeyson, and Compeyson has to go to Australia with Magwitch. Anyway, to me, it was a very interesting exercise. It's lovely working with great writers. I mean, a writer like Dickens or a writer like Lawrence, so enormously rich. They were great.


Interview: 30th March 1998

DAVID CAESAR

David Caesar is a Sydney-based director who made a number of acclaimed documentaries, Bodywork, and then moved into feature films with Greenkeeping(1992). Caesar has also directed television, including telefeatures in the Hallifax, pf series. His second feature film was The Idiot Box (1997). His most recent film was Mullet, released in Australia in mid-2001.


You made a transition from documentaries to feature films. Is this something permanent or will you move between the two?

It's actually become easier for me to make feature films than it is to make documentaries. Because I had such a distinctive style in my documentaries - they all had a particular look - I have been associated with that style and, at the moment, there is a very different sort of documentary movement in Australia. It uses a sort of home video technology and lots of, not necessarily filmic techniques, but recording a lot of material and community-based work and so on. I think these things go in stages and the sort of work I do is currently out of favour with the documentary community. That's just a stylistic thing. In the early 90s everyone was making films in that style. I mean, it wasn't just influenced by my work. When I started making documentaries in the late 80s, there were a number of people doing similar things to what I do.

How would you characterise your documentary style?

Very contrived, probably; very cinematic and very controlled. It's not just recording what happens. It's essentially interview-based, created and lit, often with tracking shots and so on in between the interviews. That isn't traditional documentary. The idea is a sort of `fly on the wall' tradition. It was very strange, because a number of films all came out at once, so I assume that a lot of people around the world were thinking about these things - The Thin Blue Line came out about the same time that Body Work did, Cane Toads was around that time, and there were some other films from Europe that Peter Greenaway did, documentaries that he made in the mid-'80s.

So I guess a lot of people were thinking the same. For whatever reasons, whether they were reacting, whether I was reacting - to some extent I was reacting against the notion of truth in the other films, because I'd been involved in making some of them, I found that they weren't very truthful at all. The fact that you're there is artificial. So I was reacting against what I thought was a bit of the fakery, the pretence that it's truthful. So my attitude was that I wanted to make sure the audience was 100 per cent clear that the whole thing was artifice.

So, for me, to make the transition from documentary to fiction wasn't that difficult, because a lot of what I did was using fictional film techniques. It happened very suddenly. I hadn't really done much fiction - I'd done a few little films, 10 minute long films - and then all of a sudden I did a feature, which wasn't really what I wanted to do. I didn't really want to make a feature. I wanted to make a 50 minute film. But, as most people will tell you in a common-sense way, you can't actually do anything with a 50-minute film. There's no market for it. You can't get it on in the cinema. You can't sell it to television. You can't put it on video. No-one's interested. I can understand that but, by the same token, as a film-maker I believe in the process of development on the craft level. I tried out more and more things with my documentaries as I went on, and the same thing's happening with my drama.

But the problem is that when you make a feature the knives come out. Which is fair enough, because they're not cheap things to make. Greenkeeping was relatively cheap. But relatively cheap is $800,000, and people could argue that that $800,000 could have been better spent on Aboriginal health care and, at the end of the day, that is a valid argument.
I don't accept the argument of the difference between private and public money. Money's money and whether someone's wasting money that comes from Rupert Murdoch or money that comes directly from taxpayers, I think waste is waste. It is the same thing, whether it's private or public money. So when you do spend a lot of money like that, I think your responsibility is to do the best job you can. That craft thing was a real problem because there's always the push on to find the next hot young thing in a country like Australia. So the push on is to make a feature.

Your choices of subject for the documentaries and your attitudes towards truth and fiction: they seem to be essays. Would that be a useful analogy?

I guess so. I wouldn't say they're essays in the sense of a commentary. What I was trying to do, in a sense, was capture something, capture some ideas that weren't necessarily my ideas. Even though I manipulated the people and got them to say things again and again in slightly different ways, at the end of the day all the stories in all the documentaries I've done have been the stories of the people who were in the film. It's been their stories. It hasn't been my stories. Often I have very clear things I want to say, but I feel uncomfortable about just getting out there and putting wall-to-wall voice over and saying, `David Caesar thinks this about car culture,' or, `David Caesar thinks this about personal space,' or, `David Caesar thinks this about the funeral industry.' I feel much more confident in having people tell their stories.

I wouldn't mind making some very clear essay films that were very much my point of view. But, at the end of the day, I don't know how many people would be interested in seeing them because I think what I have to say in that way is probably not as interesting to a large group of people as what I have to say in other ways, in more interpretive ways, about other people's lives and other people's work. I think my life and my opinions are just not as interesting as those of someone who comes from the western suburbs or from a particular industry, just because by the very nature of what I do.

I don't actually have real life experiences any more. The very nature of what I do means that I live in a very limited area. I mean, I could talk with great experience about the film-making process, about what that involves on a human level; I could talk about going to film festivals and I can talk about negotiating profit-sharing relationships and stuff but, I don't think they're particularly common human experiences. I think it's more important to talk about larger things than that. There are film-makers who make films about film-making and I think, well, who cares?

Greenkeeping - where did the story come from?

For better or worse, all the scripts I've written - and I don't even know why this is - are all about being a man and what that actually means. With Greenkeeping, I had previously written a script called Prime Mover about a truck driver in the outback. It's a very male, macho sort of script. It's about a guy trying to find his way in that world and not doing very well at all. I still hope I'll make Prime Mover. With Greenkeeping, I tried to do something about a character who was trying to go for a far less masculine lifestyle, a character who was literally doing the best he could within a domestic world; about trying to make his relationship, a very difficult relationship, with his wife work; about trying to do a job that he wasn't very good at as best he could; about trying to deal with problems like that. I think it's important to tell more stories like that. So it's about a guy who's doing the best he can. And I'm interested in telling stories like that, but on different levels.

I think that Idiot Box is about two young men who are doing the best they can with the resources available to them. Now, the fact that the resource available, as far as they're concerned, is robbing a bank doesn't change the fact that it's still about them trying, basically not giving up. I'm surprised that people haven't come down on me for saying, `Oh, this is going to promote people robbing banks.' The issue with the film, from my point of view, is that it was about people who hadn't given in to their circumstances.

The suburban settings are very important?

Well, it's a funny thing, the suburbia thing. With all my stuff like Prime Mover... I grew up in the country and what I was writing was set in the country, and all the ideas I had for documentaries were in the country. But the reality was that, when I was at film school, the things I started making were set in the city. And the people I related to most on a social level were people from the western suburbs. They had similar value systems, similar sorts of childhood, similar relationships with sport.

So all the stuff I was doing was about the country, but the most direct relationship I could find to that was the suburban thing. At home, we lived in a fibro house on a large block of land in the country. That was the sort of lifestyle I led. It wasn't in a terrace house and it wasn't in a block of flats. A lot of the culture I grew up with was about cars, and getting to and from places, and it was about drinking, it was about Rugby League, all those sorts of things. The more I made out in the suburbs, the more I got the sense of that actually being a more important thing to talk about, purely on the demographic level. That's where most people live and, for better or worse, the suburban experience is that of the vast majority of Australians. It's very important that, as a culture, we actually record the experiences of ordinary people, make films about people who basically keep things going. If all the lawyers and politicians and judges and bankers and academics and economists all died tomorrow, I don't think it would make a great deal of difference to the vast majority of people's experiences.

My father literally worked in the sewerage industry - he worked on the council and they run the sewerage industry in the country. If he stopped doing what he did, people would die. It wasn't a glamorous job; it wasn't a particularly nice job, even. But he didn't have a problem with it. He thought it was an important job and he took it very seriously. So I think it's important that those people are actually talked about. And I also think that the real cultures of any society are the cultures of the ordinary people. Middle class Australian culture in Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane and Perth and wherever is probably 95 per cent the same as this culture in America and Europe and, probably now, Japan. They have the same value systems, the same associations to education and money.

So, at the end of the day, if I see myself as an Australian film-maker, I have to make films about ordinary people, because I think that's the only place where Australian culture exists.

Your characters? You seem to like them in Greenkeeping and in Idiot Box as well.

I write essentially from character and then try and build a plot around the characters. It's a terrible thing the way the industry is set up, people desperately wanting plot-based material. Essentially the American film industry is plot-based. It's something that you can describe in one line. That's what everyone wants. I'm more interested in character-based material. That makes it harder to make films. I make characters who are amalgamations of people I've known in the past, parts of my personality.

Your past is important for you?

Yes. You can't grow up somewhere and grow up with people and not remember them. I don't know if `strong' is the right word, but the relationships with people I had in my teenage years have been much stronger, or I remember them more vividly, than the ones I had in my twenties. I don't know why that is, I don't know whether it's because they're your formative years, establishing who you are as a human being.

Anyway, it's a funny thing, but I do like my characters and, when I'm writing them, I often actually have conversations in my head between the characters. I often have them outside my head, too, and I think some people sometimes see me talking away to myself. Because I hear them, they become real to me, hearing their voices.

Idiot Box's Mick and his poems?

I'm a great believer in the idea of poetry, not necessarily in a more formalised sense, but in the music of language, the poetry of language. I find that really exciting. I'm a great believer in the poetry of language per se. I try to write the dialogue in general in a poetic way, using a lot of repetition and alliteration. I like the sounds of the words. I like the sound of slang. It was always a big deal to me, the poetry of language, and I just decided that I'd take that one step further and actually have a character saying that he was a poet. I wanted to make it clear in the audience's mind what the relationship to the language in the film was.

The macho theme that you spoke of before - how did you dramatise it in Kevin and Mick?

Well, I have this belief that the domestic world is essentially a feminine one. The things that make it work are conflict resolution and all the sorts of things that I think women are pretty good at, for whatever reasons, whether it's stereotypes or cultural loading or whatever, I don't know. Most things that men have been good at or did were active, they do things.

One of the things I wanted to have in the film, part of the central core of the film, was about how the character of Mick is torn between the completely male, masculine, active character of Kev, who doesn't do anything that is feminine in the sense of being compliant or being understanding, being sympathetic to other people's needs or wants. Everything was about what he wants and how he's going to get it. Mick's attracted to that, but he's also attracted to Lani, the female character. She is actually much more in control of her life. There's a whole subtext in the film that's not on the screen. She has a job, for starters, but what she's actually doing at her job is that she's studying. She's doing a tech course during the day. She's actively controlling her life in that way. It's possible for Mick to go that way as well. He is in a position, throughout the film, of making choices, choosing between the two.

Part of the subtext of the film as well is the idea that Kev, in a tribal sense, is worried about losing Mick, who was a member of his tribe, to the woman. Part of the reason why he pushes things forward throughout the film is that by action, he keeps Mick in the tribe, the male tribe. For me, the core of the film is the moment at the end where Kev's standing outside the door of the bank and the girl's on the other side of the road and Mick's in the middle, choosing whether he goes back or not. In a sense you do a futile - what I call a Celtic - gesture. Lani is on the other side of the road. Mick, essentially leaving Kev behind, goes to her, probably to having some sort of domestic relationship.

Previously, on the freeway bridge, Mick and Lani looked at the cars and speculated on where they were going.

Yes. I see a lot of those masculine images in Australian culture as essentially Celtic - Celtic in the sense of Culloden, of futile heroic gestures. There's dozens of them. The main moments that define Australian character in history have all been futile heroic gestures, Gallipoli or Ned Kelly or Bon Scott in rock music - any number of things, but the heroic futile gestures. The Eureka Stockade. They're all heroic and they're pointless and they're unwinnable situations, but they're the things that define our self-image. I wanted Kev to be part of that. There's all this talk about Ned Kelly. He wears Bon Scott shirts. And his relationship to the world is aggressively active in a negative way in that sort of environment. There's no real place for him. There'd be a place for him running over the top of the trenches in the Somme or in Gallipoli or on the Kokoda Trail - he'd be a hero - but there isn't really a place for him in the world that exists today.

Did you actually have him crucified on the footpath at the end?

I wanted to have a sort of spiritual dimension to it. It ended up with him being crucified. But the idea of his arms up was, for him, his spiritual Epiphany (or whatever it is) through action. When they set off the car alarms, steal the car and it's spinning around, his ecstasy is like reaching up to the heavens. That's what I was trying to do with that scene. But there was also the reference to that photo, that famous photo from the Spanish Civil War of the person being shot. I wasn't trying to do a crucifixion image. It's almost like a surrender, if you know what I mean, a surrender, giving up life.

When I saw those images at the end, he's lying on the ground with the arms outstretched, but it's upside down as well, I thought: I hope people don't read too much into that, because I was concerned that people might misconstrue that as being a Christ image and I didn't want him to be a martyr in that sense, because I don't think that what he did is good. I don't think he was really heroic in a good way, in a positive way. I think he was heroic in a pointless way.

You gave Kev some telling lines, for instance about his being angry and Mick saying that he ought to get a hobby and he replies that being angry is his hobby, a revelation of the macho attitudes and the frustration of the suburbs. Is it accurate to call Idiot Box a `moral fable'?


No. I believe it is a moral fable. In a sort of an Old Testament sense, though. It's very much cause and result. You do something good and something good happens to you. You do something bad and something bad happens to you. It's very Old Testament in that way - and I was very conscious of that when I was writing it. A lot of people have compared the film to those of directors like Quentin Tarantino. I have a big problem with his work because I think it's essentially amoral. I think the film-maker should say, `I think this is right,' or, `I think this is wrong,' and I think he doesn't do that. A romp is fine. I think cartoon film-making is fine. But at the end of the day they're should be a moral code in what you do, because film is the most powerful medium in the world.

I would stand by the morality behind what Idiot Box says. If you do something bad, something bad will happen to you. I mean that in the larger social sense of the film as well, that the reason these guys are so angry and destructive on a social level is because of how society has treated them. I don't mean the bleeding heart notion of giving them more money. It's much more and on a larger level, the fact that there isn't a conscious understanding of masculine energy, except in a negative way. That is a real social problem. Until we start to acknowledge the fact that young men have a lot of energy, whether it's sexual or hormonal or whatever, that if it isn't channelled into something positive, like sport or a job that involves a lot of physical labour. But if it isn't channelled, it often has to come out. Whether it's in small countries falling apart or riots at soccer games, we see that happen, because the energy isn't channelled. And I see that as part of the larger morality of the film.

But yes, I'm a great believer in a film actually having morality. I believe it's the responsibility of the film-maker, especially when you're having characters doing things that are anti-social. It's a problem if there isn't a morality that says if you do this, something will happen to you, or if you do that, your relationships with people will not be as good, or if you do this within a relationship with a person that you're intimate with, then it will fall apart too, and it won't be as good as it potentially could be. So I believe in the morality within a film. It's essentially simplistic, most of the morality, it's quite black and white.

I'm not afraid to have Kev doing sexist or saying racist things because in reality those characters would. To homogenise them and make them cute, fluffy working-class guys out in the suburbs who, if someone gave them a chance, they'd be all right. That's not the reality. A lot of the worst things about them are ingrained because of the social conditioning. I wanted them to be sympathetic to an audience and I wanted people to understand why they were the way they were, but I didn't want to hide the more negative parts. The humour is a big part of their character, the way the characters rib each other, make fun of each other and make fun of other people all the time is very much part of that sort of culture. Obviously it's heightened. Obviously the action is slightly bigger, the jokes slightly cruder, the ribbing slightly more exaggerated, but it all comes from the reality of that world.

The reason for Idiot Box as your title and the highlighting of the role of the TV and TV violence contributing to the macho ethos?

Yes, basically. I'm not essentially a Luddite. I don't actually have a problem with television per se. I watched the series on SBS about the history of the American west. That is what television can do if it's used properly and creatively. And as an entertainment tool, it can be fantastic. I mean, the same way that a bit of paper is just a bit of paper and it might have an important piece of medical information or it might have child pornography on it - it's still exactly the same technology. And I don't believe in censorship per se. I don't believe in technology as evil. I think that television is just a machine and it has no morality at all. I think the problem is the amount of money that people can make by just producing crap - and if that's all you offer, that's what people are going to watch. It's as simple as that. I mean, their attitude is, `Why would we make something that's better? Why would we bother? It will cost us more money, so we don't make as much money.' I think that's a real problem.

The whole debate about public versus private, say, ABC and SBS and commercial networks, that's never part of the argument. People seem to be afraid of things like the public good or larger social and moral issues. People seem to think that if you say something like that their being prescriptive for society. If you don't have some form of talking about those ideas, then you end up in a moral vacuum socially. And that's part of what Idiot Box is about, in that these guys would never watch ABC or SBS. If you watch Mc Gyver and - I forget all the other bad actiony shows they have on television - all within a moral vacuum where violence resolves all problems.... In the world they live in, there aren't tangible real male figures, there aren't fathers, they don't have people they can look up to at work because they don't have jobs, so all their male role models, even if they're aware that that's where they're getting their information from, comes from characters on television.

The film had big sound. We tried to get all the layers of the information overlay the characters get: the television soundtrack and radios going, talkback radio and the music, rock and roll and game shows, old TV shows and old movies, the layer upon layer of information, just to get the sense of overlaid information that's quite useless to them.

Television could be an incredibly positive force in society. But people are afraid to look at those issues. Often when they talk about morality, they talk about it in the sense of Little House on the Prairie, which is pointless. It has no relationship to our world. There isn't much of a sense, often, in those films about real moral issues. The moral issues they raise and resolve or don't resolve - they're usually resolved, I think - are small fry. Very few people want to tackle the real issues.

A few films get made and they slip through the net but no-one ever sees them. A film I saw that I found incredibly moving, was The Saint of Fort Washington. If only more people could make films like that - well, if only people saw more films like that. I'm not really sure what it says on a moral level, but I think Breaking the Waves is an incredible film. I don't really know what it's saying morally, but I think it's important that films actually take moral stands. I think that it's far better for someone to have a moral stand, even if it's a moral stand that's based on racism and sexism as long as people have a morality they believe in that they're putting forward. I think there's a real emptiness to most popular culture that says morality is like a commodity that's traded for whatever and as long as you've got a nice smile and as long as you do this and that, you can exploit people. You can do anything as long as you do it in a nice way.

Idiot Box, Black Rock and The Castle were the first Australian films to receive release in 1997 and all had suburban settings, all with a moral viewpoint.

I hope it's not just a feature of 1997. I hope it's a feature of Australian film-making, that we do go forward and do make films that actually talk about moral issues, because - I don't want to sound like Fred Nile or Call to Austrlian - but I do think that morality should be discussed. There isn't one morality that's right, but I think that the power of film is incredibly important.

Do you think your Kevs and Micks actually went to see Idiot Box? And if they did, what impact did it have on them?

I don't think they did.

On video?

I think they will see it on video. I think they'll go to the video shop and someone will tell them, `Oh, yeah, that's all right, that one.'

We filmed at a house out in the western suburbs - Kev's house, I think it was. There was a bunch of guys living there, three of them living in this house. We got them to come in and look at the film when it was finished. They weren't really keen to. But afterwards they said, `Oh, no, it was really good. I thought it would be like an Australian movie.' And I thought, it's like an Australian movie? I see. `No, it was good. It had action in it and stuff.' I don't know how you get around the idea of what an Australian movie is. I don't know if it's possible, because I think the vast majority of films we will continue to make will be essentially art house films. Maybe that's all you can do in a culture like Australia's where you're up against Jerry Maguire and The Long Kiss Goodnight and all those sorts of films, where you're up against a massive level of free publicity just because of star power that you can't compete with. So I don't know. I don't know if it's a lost cause, but I certainly don't have any answers. I thought Idiot Box would work with that audience. I just don't think they went to see it in the first place.

But they might appreciate it when they look at it on video.

I hope so. Fingers crossed.

Interview: 4th April 1997

FRANCES CALVERT

Cracks in the Mask, a 57 minute documentary film about Torres Strait Islanders, their traditional masks and their artefacts which are now found in European museums, was screened at the second Ethnographic Festival in Berlin where it won two awards; it then went to the Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane Film Festivals. From a special screening in Adelaide, it went on to the Cork Film Festival. Frances Calvert is an Australian documentary maker living in Berlin. Talking Broken, 1990, was her first film, also on the Torres Strait Islands.

Why has the film appealed to Australian audiences?

I'm very interested in the way Australian audiences have responded. Most people have gone straight for the content, for the strong political message which everybody sees as repatriation: why are these artifacts not back in Australia? how can people try to negotiate to get them back? I've always been pessimistic about the return, especially of works of art, but I think it's because in Australia at this time we're thinking very much about the rights of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. We're thinking about a whole range of issues, from land rights to art. Torres Strait Islanders want to separate and have their own authority rather than being a small part of ATSIC. So it's all very much in the news: Wik and the Stolen Children, the lot.

This response would be quite different from the appeal to Germans that would lead to awards at Berlin?

They look at the second level of the film, my attempt to offer some rather avant garde reflections upon museums as such. The film was screened in the very museum where I filmed in Berlin. They actually called a conference afterwards to discuss the way that they appeared to the public, some of the problems they have in dealing with visitorss from the Pacific. In the film, the director speaks almost a baby-talk, telling the Torres Strait Islander about skulls and headhunting, as if he didn't know. I find Europeans see Torres Strait Islanders as representative of any small indigenous minority, somewhat marginalised, that has lost all its material culture and now wants to reclaim it - even after years of missionary presence and a lot of bureaucratic activity that led people to become good Australian citizens and disregard their own art for a long time.

Was that the appeal of the Torres Strait Islanders for yourself in making Talking Broken as well as Cracks in the Mask?

Yes, the great question of why a white person makes a film about Torres Strait Islanders and aborigines! It's a very sensitive issue in Australia. Germans would never worry about how a white person looks at black people. I did not want to make a film about Torres Strait art, a normal television documentary, say; I always knew that my films would have a sense of collaboration. In fact, Ephraim Bani, the Torres Strait Islander in the film, felt free enough to act exactly as he wanted to and to say what he wanted. He knew the whole time that my interest was in museums and that he could direct his part of the film as he wanted. Of course, I found which museums had the greatest collections of Torres Strait Island artefacts. I got to know their curators, asked for permissions and so on. Basically, the interviews are all straight, there are no set ups, there are no retakes.

And why I came to Torres Strait? It's an old story. I was helping a German film-maker with his research in northern Australia and I asked, who are these people with fuzzy hair. I think a lot of Australians - this was the mid-80s - didn't realise how Torres Strait Islanders differed from Aborigines. I think a lot of people didn't know what Melanesian art was. So the films gradually grew out of this, about not really knowing a lot about one's own country's indigenous minorities. Then when I went there - I went back many times - people said to me, `Tell this story'. There was this longing to have their story known, their longing to actually see objects which they knew existed but which they knew had been lost from the islands.

I find that in Australia people use very strong verbs about this loss - they say `stolen', `plundered', `robbed'. We're not necessarily talking about things that were stolen; it's about a kind of accident of history that anthropologists collected these things. We know that people paid. There are receipts. But, in a sense, what does it matter if there's a receipt for five pounds in Cambridge? It's more that it's a sad loss over the years and, especially, that people stopped making these beautiful, elaborate turtle-shell masks.

The islanders would like to revive the art because they are now allowed to catch turtles, so they could use turtle shell again. There's one artist operating there, doing scrimshaw work on turtle shell, in fact using the catalogue of black and white photographs from the 1898 Haddon Collection for his inspiration. I don't know when people stopped making the masks, but it seems to be somewhere around 1920. There wasn't the same demand for big elaborate ceremonies. Making a 6 or 7 feet long mask - the longest is a 7 feet crocodile - sewing them together, putting the turtle shell in hot water, bending it etc., is a lot of work. There is still fantastic dancing in Torres Strait, but you see things not made out of turtle shell but made out of cardboard, fretwork or wooden nose-clips.

How does Talking Broken connect with Cracks in the Mask?

My first film, Talking Broken, came out in 1990. It hasn't the same linear argument as Cracks in the Mask; it's much more of a mosaic. The theme is social change and the question was always: how do these people who are Melanesians and who see themselves as separate from the Aborigines and the Papuans just across the water - living, in fact, in a First World country - see their development and their future. I interviewed many people and became friends with many. Talking Broken is about the encounter and the way they talked about what they hope for.

In Cracks in the Mask you began with your own voice-over. You sounded as if you were on a quest. Then, afterwards, for the bulk of the film, Ephraim Bani and his wife were on their quest. What was your quest? The museum quest?

I knew that my quest was not to find Torres Strait art and to hold it up to them and to say, `Look, isn't this beautiful?' That is not fair in any way. You don't go to Europe, find things and say, `Nice stuff they've got over here'. I felt, as an Australian who lives in Europe - and I say this in the commentary - I have access to so many museums. I could study a thousand different cultures in all the ethnographic museums if I wanted to, but I ask myself why? I think it's much more important to say, when we go into those museums, how do we look at this material? What's going on in our heads? We can't ever hope to imagine what those people felt, the people who made these things, or even to understand how they feel about how they're represented.

I wanted to cast a more philosophical light on museums as such. I've met so many people in Europe who don't reflect. They say, `Aren't we lucky to have all this stuff?' And I say, `Well, do you understand it? Does it mean anything? When was the last time you went to an ethnographic museum?' So the film is about people making other people's heritage into their own commodities.

Ephraim and his quest?

He was always working on this film. I showed him photos of the new collections I'd seen, and he kept saying, `It's wonderful that we were the subject of a major expedition in 1898, because a lot has remained, thank goodness, and we have been closely studied. But it doesn't matter any more. We donn't have any of this stuff. We haven't had any access to it but it's wonderful that we can travel over there.' He confided to me at the beginning that he felt that the force of his personality and his knowledge would somehow convince the curators to look kindly upon his longing to have things back. He said to me once, `I don't even have the language to talk to these people, we are not even speaking the same idiom, we're not on the same wavelength. All I can do is be nice and grateful that they've allowed us to come in between 9.00 and 5.00. The debate has not even begun.'

There was quite a range of responses from the curators.

I certainly chose elements of each encounter that reflected something different. I thought there was a certain similarity among the British curators - very friendly, very welcoming, very open, but basically just showing him the stuff.

Speaking of `stuff', the Scots commentator had a great deal to say about `stuff'.

I liked Charles Hunt. A lot of people think he's a spoof in the film, but I chose him because he has some very interesting ideas about representation. He says in the film, `Whatever happens in the museum doesn't happen because people are there; it happens because the objects are there.' And when you think about it, they are just bits of stuff: feathers, grass, whatever. He says the Torres Strait Islanders have a very close relationship to stuff. It is unmediated.

While western Europeans have become word-conscious?

He says we got hung up on words. We started analysing and cataloguing and classifying and lost that relationship with the `stuff'. Maybe museums are the thin silken cord that ties us back to a time when we had a relationship to stuff - and he means a very direct knowing, not having to verbalise what it is, but just knowing. So, now he asks, `How can we in the west try to say something about that in our exhibits?" He uses words. He's a great lover of treating words as importantly as objects in his glass cases.

His approach was a contrast to the woman who commanded Ephraim, off-screen, `Don't touch the exhibits'.

She was just the woman who brings the material in and out, but she certainly felt she was in authority.

That sequence had a great impact on the audience. It seemed to crystallise a lot of their thinking and emotions about Ephraim's quest and the treatment he received.

I think so. It was not a set-up and, in a way, I was at a fairly low point. I had had a lot of trouble getting access to the British Museum's collection. I was very pleased that they finally waived the fee of two hundred pounds an hour, because they said, `Well, if his people hadn't made this stuff, we wouldn't have it'. I thought that was a good enough excuse. And I felt, damn it, this interchange actually happened. I think it was the culmination of the experiences that we both had, really.

Another point you make, as do the curators and even Ephraim himself, is that the artefacts have moved from being part of the heritage to being considered as part of world art. And who has rights to this art?

In Australia we are not buying a lot. We are not really rich enough. We're not really working a lot on the international auction market. Every now and again we do but, in general, we are not seen as a country like the United States which has a huge market thirsty for new objects. I didn't have time in the film to go into the question of art theft. I just touched on it briefly, but we know it's been happening for a long time. There have always been self-appointed dealers attaching themselves to museums, especially those that were behind the Iron Curtain before 1989. We know that there's theft and resale going on. It's an open secret that stolen art resides in Switzerland for 20 years and then it becomes the property of the person who has bought it.

So I wanted to say that the emotional arguments about the Torres Strait Islanders having a legitimate right to see this material or to have it back almost don't count when these objects have become art and they are now collateral, commodities, and they will go on being passed from hand to hand for huge sums of money.

I often tried to find out what people thought a turtle-shell mask, say, might sell for. I heard of one magnificent example that was estimated at 250,000 Swiss francs. These are big bickies. The Australian Museum would not be in a position, I'm sure, to buy back one mask for a quarter of a million. Or to set up a museum on of the Torres Strait islands.

Ephraim and his background?

I always knew that Ephraim knew more than anyone else about his stories and traditions. He comes from the western islands of the Torres Strait. It was always very difficult to know whether the word `king' - `I am descended from the King Bari' - means the same as in our culture, but there is a strong sense, despite the kind of democratisation that took place with the entry of the Australian government, forcing people to take surnames and all that kind of thing, of his being a leader. He received a good education, went to Brisbane University, started an MA there - I think he might have finished it, but I'm not sure - and then he had a chance to go to Canada to study how people write about their own language, towards creating a dictionary with spelling, procedures and so on. I've met other Islanders who have gone to university, but there's something about Ephraim. He really does know his traditions.

His reading from his diary was certainly a very effective way of structuring the journey.

I saw him writing this diary and I was longing to know what was in it. When we did the long interview, I asked him about every aspect of the journey. I said, `Could you tell us what's in your diary?' And he said, `Oh, just a few things here and there'. I was, in fact, honourable enough not to steal this diary, I've never read it. But when we made the rough cut of the film, I also realised that Ephraim and his wife, Petharie Bani, were exhausted at the end of the shoot - although he said that,in many ways, it had been like a holiday. I realised that he was not in a position to do his commentary. He hadn't really mulled over it thoroughly, so I left it for about six months. We did the rough cut - I take a long time to edit films - and when I looked at this rough cut, I knew it was not strong enough for Ephraim. It wasn't working strongly enough for him. So I rang him up and invited him back to Berlin. He liked the rough cut, used his diary and he recorded it over weeks. So it's not a set-up. He probably is the most philosophical Australian indigenous person you've ever heard.

Very articulate and a strong presence. Somebody remarked that the usual thing is for Europeans to come out to the Pacific, but this time it was the Pacific going to Europe and that was a different mindset for us to watch.

Yes, I think it is time we heard thoughts from the people actually affected by it.

Your musical score was distinctive.

It's very new music. I didn't want to use any classical music and I don't believe that the whole of the soundtrack should be Torres Strait songs because that's not our culture. I wanted this kind of tension all the time between them and us: them looking at us looking at them. and I also wanted ironic music. I knew that I hoped to make points every now and again, so I've taken John Cage and I took Edgar Varese for the percussion piece at the end which is quite powerful because it's actually quite small. It's not bombastic music. When the masks recur during the film, that's Brett Dean and Simon Hunt's new music. I know Brett from Berlin, he plays with the Philharmonie. I decided not to use the wax cylinder chants from 100 years ago under Haddon's film, because I thought they speak only to the islanders. It also might upset them because apparently these words, while the translation of them seems to be meaningless, they do belong to a ceremony that people are trying to revive. So I used western music instead.

You commented that you went bankrupt blowing the film up to 35mm. It looks beautiful, especially the photography of the pieces themselves.

That was a conscious decision. I hope that the beauty of the film will actually persuade some Australian museums to mount an exhibition one day. It's only they who can get them to Australia.

My cameraman did not know anything about Torres Strait, but after a while he kept saying, `But this is fantastic, these are so beautiful'. He sensed how lost to public gaze they were and he wanted to do justice to these objects. So we worked for a long time in the British Museum. We were not allowed to touch, so he decided to give them life and beauty by using dimmers rather than the bright lights you use for an interviews.

The lighting reminds us of paintings.

I had made the intellectual decision to see these artefacts as art, because I think a western viewer does. In the interviews the style is much more verite: things are moved and turned and talked about and they come in and out of focus and so on. And you see Ephraim's direct connection to them. I felt this would challenge the western viewer to say, `But this is art', and then to listen to these people talking about museums and, like the man in Neufchatel, question the way we look at all these objects. Is it because we need other people's heritage or is it to give us a good conscience in case the culture disappears? We have all their material culture in our storerooms.

I thought these challenges, these quite extreme, almost surrealistic ways of looking at a museum were the kind of challenges that make the film, I think, an experience.


Interview: 31st July 1997

TAHIR CAMBIS



What was your journey towards film-making?

I think my journey started as a child born in a refugee camp. When you're a child in circumstances that are deprived or impoverished in some way, you're struggling to survive before you even get to first base; you're struggling just to exist. I was fortunate enough to not end up in jail like a lot of my contemporaries and got into the arts world. So, obviously, a sense of struggle pervaded everything I did, a sense of quest, whether it was working in theatre or in films. Often this is the making of somebody who doesn't seek a career but who seeks.

For a few years I worked as a playwright or a director of a theatre group. That's the medium through which I seek certain answers and issues, and the next minute it's documentary film, as it was with Exile in Sarajevo, because that was the medium which was most affecting, to a surprising degree, the outcome of that war. But documentary was also the most guilty of screening or blurring issues that concerned the outside world. So that was the medium I had to work in.

Is Exile in Sarajevo theatrical? It seems quite an open, cinematic and stylistic experience.

Exile in Sarajevo actually has dramatic structure based on a screenplay or theatre script, a structure of introduction of characters and situations, the dramatic background and resolution for a lot of the characters in their situation. It's quite influenced by drama and opera in that sense.

In theatre as a writer and a director, I was fortunate enough to be exposed to some people who, when taking on a project, would say, "Well, I know this method worked in the last project, but this project requires its own parameters." So when I approached Exile in Sarajevo, I was looking at maybe a dozen requirements: what is the problem with documentaries in television in the '90s; what are the issues trying to attack; how best to convey this; what is the city of Sarajevo and how best to convey that; how do you convey a whole city - and you must convey it through all its aspects, its cultural life; how do you imbue a film with all these issues, with a sense of history as well as the immediacy of the events in an hour and a half?

What you do then is go out there and immerse yourself in the subject matter or the experience in the case of documentary. You don't know. The worst mistake you can make on any creative project is to know how you can end up before you start, because then you're finished. You're going to make a cliched package formula-type project. The journey of exploration in any creative project should be just that, certainly with something as real-life as a siege of war in Sarajevo. I was asked to write a script.

Who initiated it?

The Australian Film Commission.

Your idea or theirs?

It was totally my idea. I'd gone there in 1992, unfunded, with just a video camera - I was wounded there the first time. So I'd already made the effort. But, instinctively, I also understood that Sarajevo was going to become an important city of the '90s because it was a city that was being attacked. Cities mean certain things, present certain things in civilisation. And how do a city's occupants fight back if they haven't got guns? It frustrated me enormously the reporting as well as the lack of understanding of anybody outside of there, apart from certain prominent individuals who obviously made Sarajevo their cause - Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sontag and many others.

I would never do another film like that. The project required that style. The coverage of the war in Bosnia was video, so I wanted to re-create that look. I wanted to create a war aesthetic, because war is, in its own strange way, aesthetically interesting and beautiful. The other prime effects of television and documentaries is to sanitise and distance audiences from suffering. I wanted to introduce to the audience of the '90s the notion of redemption through suffering, which meant that they had to learn an old habit that they've tried to spend a lot of time getting away from, to introduce them to their own suffering.

That means making a film that brings them into the story. It makes the quest of the protagonist the quest for the audience as well. That also meant applying a certain style of editing, filming and structuring that brought the audience along for the ride, rather than their simply being passive observers.

The film is your quest, a journey of personal exploration.

I always knew the film was going to be radically different. I spoke on the phone from Sarajevo to the editor, Bill Murphy - he edited Romper Stomper - 'Bill, I don't know exactly what it's going to be, but I just want you to understand, when we get back and work together, music, editing styles, cinematic styles, everything goes, everything's an option, everything's a possibility, so before you and I even meet, you should know that's my attitude. There are no limits and no rules.' Of course, by the time we went into post-production, Bill essentially became the third director.

I know there are all these habits where you put together rushes and a sub-editor or an assistant editor puts together a series of shots, then the editor comes along and puts them together according to the script. The three of us sat there hour after hour during every session. We were never apart. And we negotiated and we would know, as a unit, which shot fitted into each sequence, and each sequence was edited to music. Narration was the very last thing to go in on the very last day of post-production. The whole film was edited to music, the change from one shot to another was basically on a downbeat or upbeat of the song. We were even toying with not having any narration at all, just having music and dialogue and imagery.

You also used poetry as part of the artistic communication.

Throughout the film we actually showed the arts in action. When we had soundtrack music or score, we always showed performers performing intercut with the action. This was to show, firstly the cultural life of the city going on regardless, a sense of dignity of the city rather than just a group of people you saw, just the main protagonists. But if you're trying to convey the soul, the spirit of the city, how do you do that? Well, music is a universal language. It also is something everybody can relate to, Brazilians, Dutch, Australians. There are many subliminal effects, and I really do believe that everybody sees different stories in different films.

So I think it's right to cram in lots of elements because then you have twelve people in a room going on twelve different journeys and, if they watch the film repeatedly, it's a dense film, they will see a different story each time as well. That's always true of any good literature or any good cinema. You'll go back and see it again and find something new.

This is the other aspect of the film. We had a simple theme of the quest of the individuals for, say, truth or understanding. But along the way there are all these other things happening, issues of European history, all sorts of other elements are brought in until we had a weaving mass of issues, instigated by certain events or just simply reinforced by certain events once they're introduced.

Could you expand on the cultural and religious traditions there, Moslem and Christian?

Bosnia was a geographical freak because it was a mountain country in between the Byzantine and Roman worlds in medieval times, evolving its own kind of style. By the time it became Christianised, it had evolved its own form of Christianity and its own church, a breakaway from the Catholic church but having close ties with it all the time. But it was forever going its own way - you could say for reasons of geography or history or whatever. It was always doing that. And it wasn't as rabid about rejection of the Ottomans' Islam that was brought there as some of the other Balkan countries, but it never quite lost its Christian identity as well. Most Bosnian Moslems have a very strong awareness of their Christian heritage and hold it quite dear. So, as European Moslems, they're quite unique.

The country is quite unique in its heritage and identity, religiously and nationally. There was never the word 'multiculturalism', but for a thousand years these influences were acknowledged rather than feared, celebrated rather than suppressed, and it's why the Jews, when they were expelled from Spain in the 1490s, were welcomed in Sarajevo. Rather than ghettos, they were absorbed and integrated into society there, always a proud place there.

So when the war began, the phraseology both of people who had vested interests - and that includes the UN and western governments who wanted an excuse not to act - phrases like, 'Historical inevitability', like 'the old enmities rearing their heads now that Communism is gone' - all this stuff was used, and this had nothing to do with Bosnia.

In the case of Bosnia it was Serbia with its expansionist agenda; you can't create the greater Serbia without taking from other people or exterminating them in some cases. The other thing was that a miracle was happening there: that those religious and cultural bonds between all the various communities in Sarajevo stayed solid throughout the war. Not one Serb was ever killed, you know, when a shell landed and people were massacred; nobody ever picked up a gun and walked down the road and killed a Serb neighbour in retaliation, because Serbs died in those massacres and Serbs were defending the city and Serbs were married to their sisters or their brothers, or they were part Serb themselves.

It was actually the outside world with its religious and racial bigotry that imposed these notions on this small country because they couldn't understand it. They had never heard of Bosnia before the war, and all they could do - in terms of trying to describe it, was categorise according to their own definitions. If you're a Muslim, you must be someone who is either a fundamentalist or anti-Christian and have these certain attitudes. If you're a Christian, then, of course, you two mustn't get on together because by nature Islam and Christian can't get on together, never did, which is another myth, of course.

But this is the danger of modern journalism, of ignorant people that have a lot of power, who think they're informed because they have powerful positions in the information revolution. That's not information. They don't know anything often, are quite ignorant. And Bosnia's little media can't cope with CNN, can't compete with CNN, it can't set the record straight. Someone is being labelled, being this or that, 'ancient ethnic hatred', 'they will hate each other', 'neighbour killing neighbour', all these phrases that were used. What could they do? They would say, 'Please don't say that about us. Look, here's my wife, she's a Serb. What are you saying about us?' And that would be edited out.

Of course, it's contradictory, too complicated. The audience can't cope with complications, keep it simple. It's a religious war. What are you going to say about Moslems a lot of whom are communists, a lot of them love their brandy, like bacon for breakfast. I mean, what sort of Moslems are these that they're talking about? That puts pressure on them then it is reinforced. For the Catholics and Orthodox in Bosnia, Bosnia is a lost cause. Nobody in the world supports it, nobody in the world supports the idea of a multicultural, multi-religious society any more. Why should we try?

That's the tragedy and that was the driving force behind the film, because I thought in the next century there are going to be articles and books, maybe small mentions in military history or the history of Europe, about how Bosnia was riven by ancient ethnic hatreds and they all hated each other. Somewhere there should be a document that says no, it wasn't true. But the other thing that could be said in the next century is we could have a major global war based on race and religion, if things start to go along the lines that have been evolving the last couple of years, and people will remember Bosnia as the place it started and the place they could have stopped it. Either way, we who have any access to expression in the arts or the media have an obligation now to say certain things, because it's not just our careers or our futures or our principles on the line, it's people's futures, people's lives.

People are going to write a history of Australian documentaries. There's going to be Damien Parer, there's going to be Neil Davis and there's going to be yourself and Exile in Sarajevo, so you are actually in a tradition but you are continuing a tradition. The influence of Damien Parer or a Neil Davis and what they mean to you in terms of what you've done?

Both those men, without thinking about it, were artists. There was artistry in their work and there was humanity in their work. The thing about war anywhere is that it affects you. The minute you start in any way sharing time with people who are dying, you take on certain things, you just can't get away from it. Anybody who has been in any war for any length of time, any correspondent, anybody who has worked in anything, they often come back to their societies feeling that their own society is somehow spiritually impoverished and in fact real spirituality, intellectual stimulation and all the issues that they care about are to be experienced and thought about and are active where they've just come from, while their friends look at them and say, 'How can you say that? We're all so civilised here, we've got peace and stability.'

In fact, it's not quite that. People like Neil Davis and Damien Parer obviously had these experiences. I know when I was filming in '92 on a front line with soldiers, there was a strange chemistry, there's a strange something - when you're looking through your viewfinder and you're panning back from a battlefield across to a line of soldiers laying on their bellies and you suddenly come across a young face and the face is staring at the viewfinder, and the face is terrified and he's looking at you, and he's so terrified, he's not even aware that his terror is showing, he's just looking at you. You pull back and you're thinking all sorts of things - will he die tomorrow, will he die today - or sitting on a bus going to the front and everybody's singing, and you pull your camera across and someone turns to the camera and says, 'We're singing because we know a lot of us aren't coming back'. What do you say to those? And you pull your camera across again and there's one boy who isn't singing, he's looking out the window quietly and the tears are running down his cheeks, and he died that day. Of course, these things affect you because you have grabs of humanity, you know a person for a little while and they're gone.

Or in my case that day, I met my cousin, we had a little chat round the fire, we found out we were cousins coming from the same village, my father and his father, and two hours later I'm carrying him across an open field, running at full pelt to avoid snipers because he'd been hit in the chest by shrapnel and he was bleeding all over the place, and he's aware of my camera filming him at the same time - he's performing for the camera, he's not that badly wounded that he can't put on his good profile for the camera. So I think with Parer and Davis, who I read about and saw their work years before I went to Bosnia, I was just inspired by their experiences and I always knew one day I wanted to film a war. I never in my life thought that it would be the country I came from. I never thought that.

I did entertain ideas of going to Irian Jaya, places like that. At one stage I even purchased a 16mm camera and had been ready to go. But I decided to finish writing my play instead. So years before Bosnia, I was inspired by these people. Of course, they were legends. Neil Davis probably helped change the course of the war in the west with some of the key footage he filmed, in terms of swaying opinions. He filmed entire stories with his little three minutes of footage that went to air each night - the Vietnamese colonel that shot the guy in the head in the street - so many shots, but he was always smart, he was always intelligent and very conscious of his obligations and yet ethical. And he thought that this war was the Vietnameses' war and they should be in the picture, which was quite extraordinary.

You've used the word spirituality and you also spoke about redemption through suffering. More and more people these days rely on the word 'spirituality' as a universal theme of human values and aspirations. So, in a sense, you have experienced a spirituality of war.

Yes, I have. But I suppose I've experienced spirituality in my life long before that. There's a Bosnian word called 'dohar', which means soul, which is used often in everyday conversation when discussing people, 'my soul connects with your soul', and they use this openly as a way of trying to say, 'We talk to each other with words, but many things are happening between us at other levels.' That's what that really means. In Anglo-Celtic? society this is often looked upon as a bit sentimental, but in a Slavic society this is an open thing.

It's not a question of does it happen - of course it happens, of course we're exchanging with each other on many levels. Sometimes it's in fear. And even the person you hate is in some way part of you, you have a connection together. It's a different sense of humanity and how humanity works. It's based, I guess, on my cultural origins. But also having suffered terribly in my life as a child and watched my mother suffer and commit suicide, long before the war came, this notion of, if you can just get through the suffering and make something of it, it becomes a strength, it becomes a valuable asset. You draw upon it to understand, and not only to understand, to act rather than merely to complain.

So in war it's just one extreme version of suffering where you get to see the true nature of the human condition - extreme cowardice, extreme courage, extreme stinginess and extreme generosity. And none of it is predictable. You don't know what you're going to be on that day, because I have been an extreme coward, I have been extremely brave, I've been very stingy with my cup of coffee - I didn't want anybody else to know I had coffee that day, I wasn't going to share it. At other times I just gave everything I had. And fear of death - I mean, I nearly died. The day I was wounded, I was left by the soldiers who I thought had abandoned me, but they got out of the way of the bullets that were coming in. Nobody could get near me. And I looked down at my leg and I realised I couldn't do anything, it was shattered. I watched the blood going into the ground. The thought struck me for a second, oddly, 'My God, for a thousand years people's blood has gone into this soil'.

It's a strange thought. You think, this has gone on for so many centuries, everywhere. People lie on the ground, their blood flowing into the soil and, for the first time, I understood why people have a connection to land or soil. Before that I had no interest. Then I thought, 'How do you prepare for death? I'm going to bleed slowly. Can I get away from the path so that the Serbs don't find me and maybe torture me. I want to die peacefully.'

Then I looked up at the canopy of the forest and I saw - perhaps hallucinated - the faces of my friends in Melbourne, all smiling at me and seeming to be saying, 'You fool, what are you doing here, because you're an idiot'. So I just lay there. I just waited to die and I was very much at ease. I was very peaceful. After the initial pain and screaming, I waited to die. I was quite prepared to die. Then the shelling stopped and they came and got me. But what happened? They put me in a car and five minutes later the car plunged off a cliff into a river. And when I regained consciousness, I was trapped up to my neck in mountain water. Then my spirituality came forth and I really was thinking God is after my arse today. I just thought he's not going to let me go. I really thought that. I thought he wants me and, if I get out of this, he's going to get me another way.

A postscript. Michael Winterbottom made Welcome to Sarajevo. There was Angelopolous' Ulysses' Gaze and Before the Rain. How do these films compare with yours, since these are fiction feature films communicating with a wide audience. There was also the Serbian film, Pretty Village, Pretty Flame.

I think modern society doesn't quite know how to be intellectually critical of films. It's geared towards entertainment, so when something has political connotations, they're often susceptible to being fooled. Pretty Village, Pretty Flame was the second film that came out of Belgrade during the war. Underground, the first, was made by a Emir Kusterika, a Bosnian director who more or less was a defector. So, as long as it's clever and arty, which is what the language of sophisticated cinema in Europe is today, it's about being clever and being arty and being artistic but not actually daring to say anything.

Pretty Village, Pretty Flame was a clever film that pressed all the right buttons in the film industry. It was actually pushing the same propaganda message that Serbia had used to declare war in the first place, that war was inevitable, these people hated each other and that, once you got to know the Serbs, really they're quite cute, the international Serbs, and they're quite harmless. It was just propaganda. Of course, the shocking thing about that particular film was that it was about Serbians under siege by Bosnians in 1992. But they had no weapons. The whole Bosnian war was based on Serbs either rounding up Bosnians for extermination in death camps or besieging cities and just pounding the hell out of them.

It was supposed to be based on a true story. A lot of things are based on a true story "loosely". That particular story took place when Bosnia was being siege by Serbian forces with vastly superior tanks and jets and artillery. But what was more offensive was the notion that the hatred was just natural when it wasn't. That was really more offensive than anything else. But to an audience who decided that Bosnia was confusing and "what's it got to do with us?", it's just entertainment.

And Welcome to Sarajevo, unfortunately, probably has the same problems. People still haven't identified why this war important. Exile in Sarajevo reached people and made them think that it was important, though the issue there was about them. But the one crucial achievement of that film was that everybody felt they were participating in it somehow. But what you're dealing with in the '90s is people who are politically illiterate. Audiences and critics know nothing other than the standard knowledge of symbols past and present of what fascism means. And fascism is a scary word. We didn't dare use that word about the Balkan crisis earlier. Now it's starting to creep into the language again, because it's the most extreme expression. But even now, people still refer to Germany in the '30s as a model when it is happening now. It's still happening now. But if they ever, as an audience or as a collective community in the western sphere, acknowledge that this is what it was, then the question arises, "why didn't we try to stop it?" So they mustn't say that word. There's a guilt thing attached here, a conspiracy of silence. "Let's call this the Balkan thing where everybody hated each other..."


Interview: 23rd July 1998

KEN CAMERON



You were a teacher for some time and then moved to film, making short features with an education theme, Temperament Unsuited and Sailing to Brooklyn.

Yes, I was a teacher for a couple of years and the first films I made were in that world. They were not autobiographical, but semi-autobiographical, works about a student teacher, a young teacher. Then the first feature film I wrote was Fast Talking. I didn't make it first (Monkey Grip was first), but it was set in that world as well.

Did you enjoy being a teacher?

I did. I wouldn't have enjoyed it had I remained a teacher, but I did enjoy the two years that I taught. It was immensely stimulating. I might not have even been a film-maker if I hadn't been a teacher, because I met Albert Moran. He was a friend then and a really big influence on me, in looking at film in the way he looked at literature. That's when I first started to think I could do it myself, and school certainly gave me a subject.

Temperament Unsuited was autobiographical only in certain anecdotes, certain scenes. It was actually about a teacher that I was interested in, a person that I saw go through all those experiences. These films were all sponsored by the Australian government. Sailing to Brooklyn was an experimental film made for a few thousand dollars, and Temperament Unsuited was a Creative Development Branch film. There were loans given for larger works. Amazingly cheap for those days, about $30,000 or so. It seemed a lot then, but of course it would hardly buy you a minute of film now. Fast Talking was a 10BA film.

Fast Talking received a very good response in the '80s.

It's a very '80s film.

What were you trying to dramatise?

I think I was playing around with an idea of a Ginger Meggs, Junior Ned Kelly, character who was in a state of flight and rebellion from, I suppose, his school as prison. It's a strange work in the sense that it's never really resolved, his story. He remains on the run at the end just as he was at the beginning. I guess that comes from 400 Blows. I think I was very influenced by 400 Blows, by Ken Loach's work. It was an amalgam of all those things. I think at that stage in my career I was trying to graft the things that had influenced me onto the things that I saw in my own world.

Was it well received at the time?

It was well received - it got very good reviews. Probably the reviews were as good as any I have ever had, but it did terrible box office. It was a film like Kes, a film that wasn't a film for kids. It didn't have a big rock 'n roll soundtrack and it wasn't for teenagers. It was about teenagers. It probably was a film that was too problematic to simply be an entertainment. It raised a lot of unsettling questions. When you look at the kid's life, it was awful. The kid's parents had split up and his father was an alcoholic. It was a litany of woes, really, yet it was seen with an ironical comic eye. So I think it was slightly problematic. It wasn't just an untroubled ride. It wasn't a fun picture. And yet it didn't work for adults either, because it was about kids. So it fell into a category: not commercial at all.

But a realistic portrait of Sydney at that time?

I wouldn't say realistic. I'd just say irreverent and, probably, picaresque. It wasn't a realist work. It wasn't rigorously realist like, say, Ken Loach's work. It was more lighthearted than that, and it certainly wasn't a searing and poignantly personal film as 400 Blows. No, it was just an unrepeatable kind of movie that we made in that era. We did a lot of unusual things then - I'm not saying good things or great things, but unusual things that are very hard to do now.

You collaborated in a portmanteau film on education with Jane Oehr?

Yes, Jane's my wife. On the Loose. There were two stories and I wrote a segment.

At a seminar an Irish nun was really angry with Fast Talking because she found it too pessimistic and she wanted the problems resolved. But the younger people argued her down.

A lot of people expect cinema and drama to be cathartic, to offer resolution and to leave a character in a different place from where we first found that character - and I guess that's the recipe for good drama. But some stories are not amenable to that kind of dramatic model. Some people are where they always were and that, probably, is a pessimistic view. I couldn't have grafted a happy ending or some sort of civic lesson on to it because it wasn't in the character to respond like that.

I'm very fond of that film, but it's with a certain sadness because it marked a downturn in my career. It was the end of the 10BA era, the beginning of another era where you really had to do more rigorously commercial work to survive and so it was seen as a failure. It really created difficulties for me for a while.

To go back to success - the reasons that you took on Monkey Grip?

I just did it because I liked it. I had no idea that it would be successful - there wasn't the pressure then that there is now. You wouldn't take on anything now if you didn't think it had a chance of being seen or being distributed widely, but that wasn't an issue then. I just did the film because I liked it. It was about things that I had seen at second-hand. And it was about a whole lot of things that I was interested in and struggling with in my own life. It had such a long gestation; it's terribly hard to remember the precise moment when I committed to it. I was aware of it. I had talked about it for a long time - it must have taken years to do. I got involved with it when the book first came out, but it didn't get made until 1982. Four years is a long time - or it seemed a long time then.

Monkey Grip as a picture of the '70s - realistic, accurate or heightened?

I don't think it is realistic. It was a personal story and the fact that we shot it in Sydney blurred this somewhat. We shot a little bit in Melbourne. I never saw myself, when I was making it, trying to reproduce Loach, but I thought I should be trying to tell that woman's story. I was in another phase then. I was more interested in a cinema that would allow you to do those kinds of things rather than just reproduce something. I was more interested in Bergman's films about women or Truffaut's films about women than I was in simply reproducing the world. No, it's not realistic. It's heightened to some degree, although not heightened to the degree that a film like that would be nowadays. The films of that era look very pure compared to a lot of cinema now, which is much more strident, trying to look as if it belongs on George Street.

One of the strong features of Monkey Grip is Alice Garner's character and how it was the children who were able to guide the parent generation of that particular era.

Yes. It's funny because the book was very hard to adapt and, while Helen didn't actually do it, I have an enormous collection of Helen's letters in which she used to suggest scenes and suggest solutions. So she was very closely involved. I don't know whether she has a credit or not - I think she has some sort of partial credit. She certainly helped me a lot in doing it. But, for her, it was an exercise in rethinking the book. No-one would ever accuse the book of being a slick novel. It was diary-like, impressionistic, a fragmented experience. Trying to make a film from the novel was trying to draw from it things that I could use and which suited the purpose of telling her story coherently. It had none of the shape of a movie at all, not the normal movie. Nowadays I think you would have trouble in doing it. I think anyone who had read the book would say, `there's no film there'. So I don't know why I've taken on these things, but...

Was it well received?

Yes, it was. It largely got very good reviews. It had a nice reception in Cannes in a modest way. It was in the Un Certain Regard section. And it did quite reasonable business. It played in the cities for a very long time, many, many weeks. In those days they didn't mass release pictures; they tended to just run them longer. I can't recall, but it must have run 20-odd weeks or so. It didn't make anyone rich, but it did respectable business for a film of that type.

After Fast Talking things went down, but The Umbrella Woman was your next feature film?

Yes, The Umbrella Woman was some time after Fast Talking. I went off and worked in television to make a living, did series television for a while at Crawfords, things like that - all the time trying to do another feature film. I wanted to do a film that I couldn't do, based on Nigel Kraut's book Matilda, My Darling, a wonderful book. It was about a trip that Banjo Paterson took up north to Winton during the shearers' strikes, and while he's writing `Once a jolly swagman camped by a Billabong', the shearers' strikes are in progress, barns are being burnt and the man who ends up at the bottom of the billabong didn't jump, he was pushed. He was, in fact, the shearers' leader.

The central character wasn't Paterson. The central character was a private detective hired by the shearers to investigate the disappearance of their leader. So it was set at the beginning of the era of the scientific detective, like a disciple of Sherlock Holmes who goes to investigate this missing union leader who has been murdered and dumped in the billabong. Banjo Paterson was there pursuing a woman who didn't want anything to do with him - this is true - and writes nothing about the shearers' strikes, almost wasn't looking. You would have to guess he was there. But, out of it comes this one poem which becomes more famous than any other and yet, in fact, misses the point.

So it was another doomed work, I suppose. I think it's a very clever work, a terrific book, but a black view of Australian history. It was really saying that Australians prefer not to know. They prefer the legend to the truth. It's not a film that you can imagine ever having an easy reception in any era at any time - not in this era, no. So I didn't do it. I tried for a long time.

Umbrella Woman was something that was offered to me when Philip Noyce pulled out. I was very happy to do it but it was a picture that I think would always be hard to do. It's terribly hard to do Madame Bovary in Australia and it's very hard to graft, say, that European style of melodrama or melodramatically intense view of family and sexual relations on to the Australian landscape. There's something there that refuses to play the game about the Australian country town.

I've said this before, but I think the reason that it didn't work was that there was something very difficult to understand about the relationship between Bryan and Rachel. They were at the height of their public relationship, very well known as a happy couple. It was terribly hard to cast them as a couple who had some unstated problem in their marriage because everything in fact denied that. So it was hard to understand why she would run after the barman when Bryan was there, because Bryan is quite iconic and quite wonderful as an Australian country man. So that didn't work at all.

It might have worked - without wishing Sam Neill away, because I think he's terrific - it might have worked better had Bryan been the barman and if she had been married to somebody like - well, you could name half a dozen Australian actors who could have played the husband that she would throw over, who didn't give her the fulfilment that she was dreaming of. So I think that this was an example of how you can cast a film with great excitement, get all these wonderful actors but, at the same time, in the very act of casting, you're blighting it or preventing the drama from emerging successfully. Like most directors, you really throw yourself into it, you try to make it work with the ingredients that you have, and you silence the voices that say this is not working or it can't be done.

It had some success on American television.

The Americans actually quite liked it because it looked very good. Jim Barker lit it very nicely and Sally Campbell did a lovely job designing it - it looks good, it has a very handsome look to it. It was a terrible disappointment to me that it didn't work. It got very nasty reviews. I can remember reviews were quite pernicious. It came out at a time when everyone had had enough of period movies. I think it was the period movie that no one wanted. Had it been made five years earlier, it might have been dismissed but not so cruelly, but it was really pilloried: `Why are we still doing this kind of thing?'. There was a dislike because Judy Davis hadn't starred in it. She had been originally cast. When Philip Noyce was doing it, Judy Davis and Colin Friels were the couple. It was an unhappy experience because I had such high expectations and hopes for it.

As it turned out, it was actually much better received in America than it was here and, had I known, I probably would have gone to America straight afterwards, because it certainly heralded the beginning of a real drought for me here. I think I was only rescued about a year later by Kennedy Miller when they offered me a telemovie called The Clean Machine and that was the start of the television career. So it didn't open any doors but it closed a few.

The work that you've done with Kennedy Miller has probably been some of the most acclaimed work that you have done, especially, The Bangkok Hilton?

It wasn't acclaimed. It was certainly the most watched, I suppose. It got the highest ratings, exceptional figures. It rated as high as the Melbourne Cup when it was shown, 40 or something like that, extraordinary figures. You couldn't get those figures nowadays. But the most acclaimed work or the most celebrated was, I suppose, Brides of Christ. Bangkok Hilton was certainly the most remembered work. If I meet somebody who doesn't really know me and I mention my work and nothing rings a bell, usually when I get to Bangkok Hilton...

Does the work that Kennedy Miller has offered you, in terms of police detection, crime, law and order, contain themes that appeal to you?

Yes, very much. If we could make genre pictures here, I would be very happy to. Over the years I've dabbled with different scripts, different ideas of crime pictures, but one of the great difficulties with doing those pictures is they depend on stars - genre pictures always do - and we don't really have a robust star system. We don't have any longer any of the male leads that you can simply put into a movie. As soon as we get them, they disappear - Mel went years ago and Russell Crowe went almost before anyone realised he'd arrived. There's nobody that you could cast. You couldn't cast two cops in a cop story here commercially for cinema. You could for television but not for cinema, because there aren't stars. It really it stops us making genre pictures.

You had Steve Bisley for The Clean Machine on television where he's known...

Yes, but had it been a movie... In fact it was offered as an option, but that telemovie was one of a package along with John Duigan's The Year My Voice Broke and they asked me did I want to make it on 35mm. Now, I've always wondered whether I made a big mistake by not doing it on 35mm. But I don't think it would have been a success in the cinema. It wouldn't have had the density that it had on television. In terms of big screen, I could not have had the production values; the money wouldn't have stretched that far. So I don't know. There's a turning point. You never know what these turning points mean. But I knew one of the factors was that we didn't have Mel Gibson in the lead. I think Steve's terrific in it, but to release it as a movie in that genre, you almost needed Mel or a star.

It's still relevant, given what's happened in the 90s Royal Commission in New South Wales and the investigation of the police.

I guess it is. It was loosely based on real events then, but those events don't seem to change very much, do they? It just seems to get more sordid - it seems to become less colourful and more grubby.

Anyway, Bangkok Hilton was something I was very happy to do. I was very excited to make a film overseas and to do something on that scale and with Nicole Kidman and Denholm Elliott. They were all big steps for me. That was a period of consolidation and I was very excited doing that, but it was something that was done at the end of an era for Kennedy Miller too. It came at the end of a very long period of doing Australian mini-series and there was a turning away from them. There was a turning towards America or turning towards the international genres. I didn't do anything after that, I didn't make any more mini-series. In fact, after Dead Calm Kennedy Miller almost didn't do anything until Babe. George went overseas and made Lorenzo's Oil, but it was the end of an era.

Brides of Christ and the ABC. What attracted you to this project?

Well, I think I probably tried to say no for quite a while because I'm not Catholic. I didn't even have a religious education or upbringing. I admit I had the usual Australian Protestant kind of benign upbringing - Christian but not assertively so. At first I couldn't understand why they were wanting me to do it. I thought it was just because I had done some quite interesting work with women - that I was known as a director who could work with women and get good performances from actresses, but the rest of it was a mystery to me. I remember taking a long time. I could see it was well written. I had no problem with it on that level. I couldn't quite see myself directing nuns or getting into that world.

I was offered it about January, 1990, and we didn't make it until about September. So I had a very long period to investigate it and research it. I had the help of some nuns and a priest who was very helpful and gradually it started to become a world that I thought I could understand.

Fr Tony Doherty who acted as an adviser said that he thought that you were the best-read person in Australia on theology and spirituality of religious orders.

Films set in closed worlds and unique worlds are always interesting. One of the things I love about film-making is that it does take you into other worlds and it does extend you - this is true of documentary film-making too - it gives you an entree into other people's lives that you wouldn't push yourself to investigate. So, in that respect, it was good. But it was also my past as well, in the sense that we grew up alongside that Catholic world - it was certainly not my world but I was always aware of it - all through the '60s and it was an era I knew well. I think one of the reasons why I was probably a good person to do it was because I didn't have any axe to grind, I didn't have any negative preconceptions - and I think they had offered it to one or two other directors, at least one I know who was Catholic and he just said, `Look, basically I hate them, I can't'.

Tony used to talk about the stages of disenchantment that Catholics went through and I can remember him saying to me once, `Of course, these writers are still at the rejection of the icon stage', but he talked about the stages that you have to move through in order to reincorporate religion back in your life, and it's quite a journey. And I could see that while I couldn't say I'd arrived at the other end, at least I wasn't stuck back at those stages.

It was hard to believe the writers were so young and that they could have re-created that period so accurately.

John may have been at school in a slightly later era but, like Alan Bennett - he always reminds me of Alan Bennett - he has that wry, very, very observant orientation wherever he is. He's always taking everything in. So he wouldn't have missed a thing from those years. He wouldn't have missed a thing.
He might be a decade out of sync at times, but the school world that he grew up in would've resembled that one. I don't think schools changed radically in that era.

Brides of Christ was one of those big experiences that you have that you wish you could go on having. But, unfortunately, that's another era that's gone. I seem to feel like somebody who has been present at every party just as it was folding. But that was the end of an era for the ABC. We all knew at the time that the ABC would never again be able to do anything on that scale, partly because it was never going to be possible to go overseas and get that kind of resale money again. Britain was, at that point, in a stage of embracing the European Union, so that Channel 4 and the BBC were going to co-production partners in Europe rather than Australia. So that was the end of a very fruitful era because it was a very natural partnership.

You notice in ABC drama now they've just had to go it alone. Some programs have an English organisation wanting to do something here, as opposed to a genuine co-production.

I think Brides of Christ brought the best out of everybody, because it was pitched very high and it was a very nice blend of art and entertainment. It was mythic. I didn't want to make it too real because I thought the trap was that, if it had been too excruciatingly real, it would have turned off a lot of people, including Catholics who might have not felt free to enter a dreaming phase. Brides of Christ may not have been your life but you could connect your life with it because it was both representative and mythic. There was a lot of generalisation with it. It had detail but it generalised issues. It was like memory, old photographs, and it romanticised it as well.

It certainly portrayed a world that you could be nostalgic about as well as opposed to, `Well, I'm glad we're not back there any more'. If it had been tougher and nastier, I don't think it would have worked. It would have been fairly pointless because it would have been like bashing a horse that had died a long time ago, or putting the blowtorch to that era way back then as opposed to inviting people to - as Tony Doherty used to put it - grieve for the loss of that way of life, which a lot of people did. It was a way of allowing that past back into life in a fairly robust way, where the audience could see this way of life at its height or in its last hour of glory.

It enabled audiences to see the transition that had to happen and was happening. The third episode is one of the best single hours of television drama.

The episode with Sandy Gore as Ambrose, the superior. It is very good and she's wonderful in it. It's terribly moving, isn't it?

It captured almost everything of what you were saying about that era, the role of a mother superior, the changing of the nun's habit, the lay teachers now coming to the schools, the nun who just couldn't accept the changes and wept, asking Ambrose, `Tell me what to do'. That struck many chords in the religious communities watching it. They were able to go back to what it was like then and remember people that they knew.

People in America love it too. It gained me work in America. It's quite universal. And it was that episode in particular that people like. If you're going to show them anything, you show them that. In fact the Americans screened a stripped-down version. They put it to air as four hours. I've never seen that version but I presume that it uses the first hour, the last hour, that episode and the fifth one about Paul, the priest. It probably discards the two stories about the kids, which you could imagine you could do without and just stay with the nuns.

You were quoted as saying that when you were auditioning the actresses you could tell who was a Catholic or who had been to a Catholic school when they came in.

Yes, you could really tell because non-Catholics were nervous and couldn't relax and gave these strangely stiff, uncomfortable performances, faintly embarrassed and certainly not able to feel emotional about it all, whereas the ones that had obviously lived through it or knew what it was all about just had no difficulty at all in revealing themselves through the work.

Brenda Fricker spoke with hostility about Irish nuns. At the end of filming she was supposed to have said how it had been a kind of exorcising of past memories that she lived through.

Yes, she was a bad girl, she'd had terrible trouble. She had terrible stories to tell about their cruelty and she hated them. In fact on the last day of filming she took the habit, the wimple, everything, off and ground it into the dirt. She took it all off. That was her way of ending the whole thing - put it on the ground and stamp on it. She had had a tough time doing her performance.

The ratings were very high for the ABC and it had people all over Australia discussing the Catholic church and its issues.

Well, I'm very proud of the work. I'm very pleased that it was useful work too. I really believe in the dictum of Van Gogh, who wanted to go to live a religious life before he became a painter, that the cart that one draws has to be useful to others. In other words, what I create in my art has to be useful to other people. Now, you can say that art doesn't have to be useful, but it's useful in the sense that it explains the world to you or it reveals the world to you or it reveals delight - even if it's the awe in an iris growing - whatever it is, it has to be useful to others. I suppose that Brides of Christ is the work that I've done that most answers that. It was was useful to a lot of people.

In terms of Catholicism, Fred Schepisi with The Devil's Playground and then yourself with Brides of Christ have made an enormous contribution compared, say, with dramatising stories of other mainstream churches.

Yes, I don't think anyone knows how to dramatise the Protestant experience of Australia because it hasn't been vivid or it doesn't seem to have a struggle or something that connects it or allows it to be dramatised.

There was the double colonialism of the Australian experience, Irish orders that were now distant from Rome and the fact that the Catholic regime had such difficulty being established in the country during such a long period of Protestant ascendancy.

The 90s?

After Brides of Christ I did a mini-series in America for CBS based on a novel called Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which was a very successful book in America, about the devastation to southern family life caused by the Civil War, really. It was about the way southern women would never forgive their men for going off and fighting and losing that stupid war that destroyed southern society. It had a wonderful cast. It starred Diane Lane as the younger woman and Anne Bancroft in the most extraordinary makeup as the 90 year-old oldest living Confederate widow. It was like a cross between Fried Green Tomatoes and Little Big Man. She was Lucy Marsden, this 99-year-old widow, the oldest living survivor, and she talked like Dustin Hoffmann in Little Big Man. It told the story through four generations of her family, of the way the war never stopped being fought. So it began with the Civil War in the 1860s and ends with Donald Sutherland, her husband, as a complete madman. He was a man who just never stopped fighting the Civil War and he inflicted it on the family all through his life. It's quite a wonderful piece of pure Americana. It's four hours. It's quite a rich work. It was a wonderful experience. We made it in Georgia, in Atlanta.

I made another in California, a Movie of the Week. It's called Daldo. It's based on a Jim Harrison book. It's not like Legends of the Fall. It's not a big book.

But I like working in America. It's just difficult to decide whether to go and live there or whether to stay here. I keep hoping things will happen here.


Interview: 12th April 1996

PAULINE CHAN



You were born in Vietnam?

Yes, I was born in Vietnam and I lived there for the first 15 years of my life. My mother went to Vietnam from China via Hong Kong via North Vietnam, and when North Vietnam became communist, she went to South Vietnam and she married my father, who is Vietnamese but educated in France. But my mother was, like many Chinese women, patriotic - there was the Chinese culture that she really wanted us to maintain. I went to a Mandarin school in Saigon and, because of the education situation there, we were allowed to learn a foreign language and went to a foreign school, provided we took the same subjects in Vietnamese as well and passed the Vietnamese normal school exams. So I had to study everything twice. I never had a childhood, really!

But it helped me that, when I was old enough to travel, I got a scholarship, an exchange student to Hong Kong. Because of the war, my parents wanted us to have a more normal teenage life so, when we were old enough, we were sent away. When I was living in Hong Kong with my younger brother, going to school there, the war ended and we found ourselves in hardship overnight, that we were persona non grata, we were refugees, we were persons without a country.

It was difficult in Hong Kong in those days?

It was really difficult because, as you know, Hong Kong is such a commercial state and there's no social welfare, there's no system at all to help people in need. We found ourselves for a week or so having to sleep in the street.

But it was by chance that we were aware that there was a film school or drama school being set up in Hong Kong. That was the first training for film and television in those days, and my brother and myself were both lucky enough that we applied and got accepted as actors in the drama school - I guess partly because my mother was an actor as well and we grew up in the back of the theatre where acting seems to be part of your life.

We were supported by the school and given a certain allowance. But we were allowed to study four days in the week and work two days a week for the school, being hired out by the school as extras on film sets to pay for the tuition. There was quite a bit of criticism in those days, that the school was exploiting the students and turning them into little slaves because whatever we made, we weren't allowed to keep. But, at the same time, I felt there was advantage in that system because, by the time we graduated after two years of a diploma course, we were actually quite familiar with the film sets. We also knew directors and cinematographers and people we could call and be part of that industry.

But you didn't see your future there?

No. But I was extremely fortunate. Upon graduation, my first job was to be cast as a leading actress in a film and I was so excited. But when I read the script, I realised that it was such a small part even though it was for the leading actress. In those days in Hong Kong there was the boom of the kung-fu genre with Bruce Lee and other leads, The One-Armed? Swordsman, Enter the Dragon and films like that. Basically, there's no memorable parts for any female actors. Either you play the part of the love interest and you die young, so that the hero can go off to avenge you, or else you would be the dragon lady, the femme fatale, undermining the hero on his way to achieving his goals, that kind of thing.

I felt quite frustrated after a few years working there. I didn't feel that we were treated very well as actors. I wanted to have better control of my work so I went to UCLA and I studied Communications thinking I would go back to Hong Kong and, maybe, write or produce. But I felt an urge, a need, that I actually wanted to have a say in what kind of work I did, instead of waiting at home for the phone to call to play the same role over and over again.

But, instead, you migrated to Australia?

Yes. Shortly after I came back to Hong Kong, my family decided to migrate to Australia for a more stable life. In Hong Kong 1997 was looming over everyone's head, that it was going to become communist, and my parents had escaped Communism twice.

Your mother seems to have had a very hard life in moving from China to Vietnam to Hong Kong.

Yes, that's right. It's really something I feel strongly about, that only when I was an adult did I realise that she was like a refugee - her whole life was a refugee's life, going from China to Hong Kong because of the Japanese invasion, then from Hong Kong being occupied by the Japanese and that she had to escape down south to Hanoi and, then, when it became communist, leaving again to South Vietnam. Then, when the South became communist, because my father was a businessman, he was thrown into jail and charged as a capitalist. So we had to go to Hong Kong. But my mum wasn't going to be hanging around for 1997 because - it's not anything against communism, because I'm quite leftist myself - it's basically the uncertainty of the political future, where as a family, as an individual, you cannot plan and you don't feel safe. The human rights issue in China is a huge issue and it's about your rights as an individual and that you feel threatened. Australia promised to offer us the kind of security and freedom that my parents spent all their lives looking for.

But it didn't offer you enough in the early '80s in terms of acting?

No, it didn't. I spent the first couple of years learning in Australia, even with a diploma and a degree, that I couldn't get a job. Even offering to work for nothing as a volunteer was not an easy task. It took me two years to actually be accepted to work for nothing. People kept telling me that I should go back to where I came from if I was serious about my work. And I had a really difficult time and struggle with myself - you know, every six months I would look at the state of the war and say, maybe people are right, I should go back to where I came from if I want to have a career at all - or, of course, I could go and sell shoes or something like that.

But the struggle was that family unity is extremely important to us, that if my family is here - my brother and sisters are here, my mum's here - it would be too painful for me, in pursuit of my own career, to go back to Hong Kong. I may have done better. I don't know. It might have been more profitable or productive living in Hong Kong in my job, but I would have to break the ties of my family and that wasn't something I was willing to do.

The roles you were offered in Australia don't seem to be all that much different from those in Hong Kong.

No. That was the ironic part. I think there are plenty of exciting, wonderful roles for Australian actresses, but not for someone with my physique or for an Asian actor. All the roles I've managed to get are similar to what the Hong Kong system was offering in the '70s, which was you're either the love interest that died of TB, a refugee, a peasant that could hardly speak English. You know, I've been to casting or audition situations where a director says, "Oh, you speak English too well. Could you speak with a stronger accent?" I do have an accent, but the roles are usually ignorant peasants or else they are tyrants who usually die in the film as well. So either way, you die many times over.

One of your best roles was in Paradise Road.

Yes, I enjoyed working on Paradise Road, even though I was a bit of a peasant and I die as well, but I was rewarded by the experience of working with thrilling, excellent international actors, people like Glenn Close and Jennifer Ehle and, of course, the director, Bruce Beresford, is great to work with. So that was very enjoyable.

But your acting career has given you an empathy with actors in your own directing?

Yes. I think I probably took it for granted, when I was an actor wanting to make films, but I've now been working as a director for five or more years now, and I realise more and more that I have to rely sometimes on the techniques I have as an actor to communicate with actors. My approach to drama, a lot of it comes from the actor's background, where I relate to the characters emotionally instead of intellectually. And I guess when I see something not working for the actors, I usually can relate to it before they say to me that it's not working. I usually can help in that way.

You spent some time with Kennedy- Miller which also contributed to your development?

As I said, I got my first job as a volunteer and that was in documentary at Film Australia. Because it was documentary with lower budget and less resources, that was the only reason that I was able to get some volunteer's work. They couldn't afford to hire someone for the job. So that was my first break in Australia and I was really grateful for it. And I learned a lot because, if you're willing to learn, there are plenty of jobs people give you, once they know you and know they can trust you. So I did all sorts of things, from film researching to assisting director and production assistant and runner, everything to co-directing a documentary at Film Australia within a couple of years, so I was very busy and I learned a lot there.

But then I had a chance to work as a film researcher and director's assistant for Kennedy-Miller? on a series, a ten-hour mini-series, Vietnam. I played quite a few roles within the series and it took me eighteen months to two years to do it. I was the researcher, I was the director's assistant, I was technical adviser, I also played one of the lead roles in the series. And I had the great fortune to work with Chris Noonan and John Duigan. They gave me quite a bit of room to stretch out, to try things out, and they allowed me to workshop with actors, because it was such a big show that they couldn't be there every minute, so they would rehearse and workshop the major things and they gave me minor things to do.
That's when I realised that, actually, that's what I wanted to do, that's what I was most interested in, drama. I'm still interested in documentary - I would like to do some in the future - but I think drama is something that gets me really excited. You can be much more creative in the sense that there's no limit to your imagination. Everything is fiction and you don't have any kind of ethics to worry about in story-telling.

Between Kennedy- Miller and Traps?

So then I applied to the Film School, and most people I knew at that stage, people from Kennedy Miller, including John Duigan, said, "Don't go to the Film School because what you are doing now is what graduates from the Film School wish to do." And, in some ways, that's probably right. I was earning a good living and I had people that I really liked working with and I thought, yes, that's true, if I graduate from the Film School, I'll be applying for the same job as I've got now. But what I really wanted was to be able to tell stories from my own view. When you're supporting someone else, that's a different role, as enjoyable and satisfying as it was for me at that stage. But I really wanted to tell some stories, maybe from my own background, something that says that I can express my feeling.

And you did?

So I went and applied to the Film School and was accepted, doing double majors, film directing and film editing. It's a three-year course but when you do double majors, you've got to take some time off to fulfil the requirements. But I deferred because I made a short film, but it was a bigger and more ambitious project than the school curriculum allowed and I was forced to take the time off.

What was the film?

That was The Space Vision. I had quite a bit of criticism from my teaching heads at the time saying that it didn't work and I should shelve it and move on with my studies. But I just wouldn't let go and I finished it. About six months later it was accepted to for Cannes and so it paid off, the persistence. It was also nominated for five AFI awards for my fellow students who participated in the project. I had felt that maybe it was wrong for me to be ambitious, to mount something that was bigger than a five-minute piece as I was expected to do. What I did was, I combined the effort with four other students, five minutes for each of us. The story was 25 minutes long. I felt that I'd worked in the industry for a few years so I wasn't satisfied making a five-minute piece. I also thought that surely my colleagues would like to stretch themselves to make something bigger as well. And it paid off for them because they won awards as well.

What was its theme?

The theme was alienation, I guess. It's about a man who was so afraid of the outside world that he isolated himself bit by bit by disconnecting from the relationships he had, but deep down he's really needing to have the contact and the connections. But he was frightened to be hurt.

Were there other short films before Traps?

There were other short films but they were like documentaries. Then I made another film called Hang Up, which is also about the relationship that people chose when a situation forced them to alienate themselves from other people, other relationships. It's a journey in search of the relationship. Then I made my graduation film called Dusty Hearts which is, again, about someone who is in search of a relationship with the outside world.

I guess there's something there, probably through those years with my own isolation. I felt isolated for being in the Australian community. I spent the first couple of years making phone calls and trying to make contact with the industry or with the community, but I didn't know where to go, and that sort of feeling is still quite strong for me. I think I'll always be looked at as an outsider, no matter how long I've lived here.

Those themes are there in Traps as well. It's interesting that you took an Australian novel set in Europe and transferred it to Vietnam and made it work.

Yes. Kate Grenville says that we took the accents of the story and changed the form. She was really gracious and generous and said that the film is not the book, so we have to go with the vision. I could see that and I felt you could do that in your first piece of work. You've got so much you want to say in where you come from and what you yourself are about. It's that the outsider feeling I felt so strongly about. I felt for the western woman going to Tuscany, it's not such an alienation for her. If she went somewhere where she couldn't even speak the language and she would feel more pressured by the strangeness of the society and the people and that would make her re-examine herself, her beliefs and her values. And that's what the story is in Kate's book, why did they go to Tuscany? So I thought, let's make a bigger leap and take her to Vietnam. I also wanted to have another layer of political undercurrent within the story, because I like layers in my work. That woman who is the Saskia Reeves character in the film is looking for her own voice as a woman, just as Vietnam was looking for its own voice as a nation from the French domination. So I thought that would work quite well.

You changed the setting to the early 50s. Is the novel set at that time?

No, the novel was in the present. The novel was three months by the lake, the English couple going to Tuscany and writing - he was writing his thesis, I think, and she was helping him there as his typist. They encounter the strange Italian host and his family, his children. And for everyone some kind of strange sexual affair was happening. There's a lot sexual tension within the story. But I thought, well, Italy and England, even though they're different countries, different languages, it's still the same European region. So for her to go somewhere even further away with the pressure from without makes for a reflection between the couples coming from within.

With the French in Vietnam and the collapse, there's a sense of decadence which colours the sexual relationships as well: power, politics, decadence and the collapse of a culture, so it has many layers.

Yes, that's right. When the society is collapsing, you care less about the facade and you become more ruthless and your colour shows a bit more. Growing up in Vietnam, I have strong feeling about the French people there, even though they were our rulers. But I feel a certain amount of empathy towards them because I felt they were just trapped as the Vietnamese themselves were. Like the Frenchman and his daughter in Traps - he was born there and she was born there, and yet they were outsiders, not accepted by the Vietnamese, just because they were white. And no matter how long they stay there, they are still foreigners as far as everyone is concerned. But they didn't fit, either, in their own society any more. And I felt that about myself in some sense, that I couldn't go back and live in Hong Kong any more and I certainly couldn't live in Vietnam any more. But, at the same time, while I feel at home and comfortable in Australia, I still feel that people don't accept me as part of the society or the industry. I'm the tokenistic foreigner who works in Australia, the tokenistic Asian.

You brought the Australian and the English theme together in the character of the reporter. For the Australian audience there was the extra element which made us pay attention.

Yes, and I don't know if anyone picked it up, that everywhere he goes, people say, "Oh, you're English?" and he would say, "No, I'm Australian," and they just dismissed it. I felt that Australia, as a small country, has had that kind of identity problem on the world stage for many years until now. People still believe Australians are a certain type of larrikin when they go travelling abroad - the ones that are drunk or loud are Australians. But Australians are like everyone else, they're different forms and different types of people everywhere.

They were very naive, the English and the Australians, compared with the worldly wisdom of the French, and so easily seduced.

Yes, that's right.

What about the presentation of the Vietnamese, of the violence and the military skirmishes and the effect, especially on the two women?

For years I've watched so many American films about the Vietnam war, and Vietnamese characters have always been painted as these expressionless human beings in black pyjamas running through the woods, killing people at night. And they never have any feelings. It's as if they were like aliens - and I'm sure that Americans mean them to be like aliens. They are aliens to the Americans. But I just wanted for once to present them as ordinary folks. In Traps there was the opportunity where my co-writer and I had a sequence of the Vietnamese attacking the villa. They were peasants, they were uneducated, they were naive and they weren't these cold-blooded calculated killers like in The Killing Fields or other films. And they were not mad killers, either. They were just peasants and farmers and fishermen who wanted their own country back.

I pulled back the violence a great deal. I wanted to restrain the violence on the screen. Not one shot was fired in the whole attack sequence. There was a young boy who was strangled by the Frenchman and the Englishwoman for their own survival, and that was something really risky to do. My co-writer and myself debated for days and days. To have your heroine killing, strangling a young innocent boy is really against the convention of commercial films. But I really wanted to take that risk because I think that's what humanity is about. We all do horrible things when it's our own life on the line, and can we excuse ourselves or say we become part of that violence. In this case it was a really traumatic moment for the English woman and she says, "I can't take this any more." Basically she has to take a stand after the death of the boy and say, "I can no longer exist within this community, in this world." That was an important moment for us.

I think by having it before the American war, it made it more striming because as you say, we were used to American films. So this showed, I suppose as The Scent of the Green Papaya, going back into the '50s - it makes us look - the whole world audience, universal audience, look at the whole situation I suppose more realistically, with more sympathy.

Yes. There were some moments in that sequence of the Vietnamese, the communists overrunning the French villa. There were a couple of the guerrillas, fighters, picking up some French figurines and objets d'art and admiring them. One picked up a General's jacket with French decoration and the red coat, and he said, "Oh, this is beautiful. I like it." So what I'm trying to say is something about human nature. These are not well-trained fighting machines to kill capitalists. Basically they're naive - innocent, I guess - innocent people who get caught up in the war, and it is their country. They could still admire the French culture like I do, but still demand liberation from the French.

You've made a strong contribution to Australian cinema in dramatising aspects of Vietnamese history. You had a very good international cast.

Yes, they were good to work with. I was very fortunate for my first film to have such a big cast, such a calibre of actors to work with.

White Lies. What interested you in saying directing a telemovie?

A number of reasons. One is I knew that I could work with Mimi Rogers. Another reason was I really wanted the challenge of the technical side of film-making. It sounds a bit silly, but I think women film-makers are often typecast into doing relationship films, and this was something that I felt I would like try. Maybe I could do it, maybe I couldn't, but it was like a taboo that I wanted to test. I was challenged by the producers and distributors: what made me think that I could do the technical stuff of stunts and car-chases, gunfighting and that kind of thing. I felt that if I was a man, those questions would not be asked. And that was more reason for me to be more determined that I wanted to give it a crack. It sounds a bit childish.

It sounds like a healthy defiance. Did you enjoy making it?

Yes, I did. I learned quite a lot and I think the best thing that I got out of it was I'm no longer afraid of stunt work or the more male-dominated gunfighting themes, things like that.

But you still had your themes of relationships and alienation, even with the action and betrayal.

Yes, that's right.

Since then?

I've been developing a couple of projects, a couple of feature films, and it is still about being an outsider, alienation.


Interview: 10th November 1998

SANTO CILAURO



How long did The Castle take from agreement on the idea to the final cut?

From the original idea to the final cut would have been about five weeks. We decided to keep everything in proportion. We decided to make a film very simply, so we thought we can't deviate from that idea - and we're very resolute when it comes to that. That's an advantage of having a group of four people as the creators, because there's always somebody to round you up and say, `Hey, you're heading off on a tangent'. So we said if we're going to do this the way we want to do it, we write it in two weeks and shoot it in ten days, then do a rough cut in about five days and then we'd do all the fine cut to fix it all up. We stuck to that.

The fact that we were putting in our own money meant that we had to stick to that timetable. If we were going to do it on our own terms, then we had to do it with our own money. So, we worked backwards: how much money do we have? There are four of us, so we pooled as much money as we could. Basically we were told by our fifth, silent and non-creative partner (who's just as creative when it comes to money), `you can shoot for ten days, probably eleven, and that's when the catering runs out!'.

And Village/Roadshow came in?

We'd been dealing with Village/Roadshow for a little while about various other ideas. We'd been sending memos to each other and whatnot; there was a memo about a particular idea that we'd written, quite a detailed memo; but we thought that rather than answering this memo, why can't our response be, `We'd like to invite you to the screening of a completely different film?'. They came, saw it and immediately signed us up for a three film deal. We hadn't been sitting on this film for seven years; in fact we'd been sitting on the film for four weeks at the time. So we're so glad to be able to do it in three steps and we thought, `well, we don't want to create the greatest film in the world in our first film, we want to build to it, and the best way to do it is just get it done, just do it, just get your film done and don't look back'.

The collaboration, then, whose basic idea was it?

We have a sort of a strange dynamic. There's four of us. We decided never to have four people write the same script. We think that's too many. So what we do is we sit around a table and set a limit on the discussion. We decide we won't talk for more than two or three hours and throw up various ideas - In the end we thought the best idea was that about a family that lives near an airport. Then two people put their hands up and say, `Leave it to us, we'll go away and write it'.

The others don't even hear about what's going on, so that they can listen to the first draft with completely fresh ears. Then they'll say, `Maybe it goes off in the wrong direction here; it needs to be that.' The two people then go back, fix that up and then basically take it from there. Then there's the fine tuning to be done.

Then everybody breaks up into certain roles: whoever feels closest to the performance side of it will say, `I'll direct it,' someone will say, `I'll shoot it,' and the others will say, `Look, I think I can cast it, I can edit it,' whatever.

You did the shooting?

You can call it the shooting. It was basically holding the camera and getting the action... so, yes, if you call that doing the shooting. I don't know what style it was. It was a storytelling style. The only thing that was important was the story. Therefore, what is the simplest way to tell a story? I don't think there was a tracking shot. There wasn't anything, probably about two panning shots, a couple of tilts or something like that. That was about as much as the camera moved.

Rob Sitch felt closer to the performance, so he directed?

We all take it in turns in directing Frontline. I think in the time constraints we had - we had to film it in that limited amount of time - Rob is a very good and very fast communicator and has also got a good eye for the clock, has a good overview on things, so he knows when things are getting too long. It's like, `Guys, one take on this because it's not important. Let's get on to that.' He's not pedantic. He's not as pedantic as possibly I am - not that I'm very pedantic, but he's the least pedantic in that sense - so therefore it was the perfect thing for him to direct.

The one-liners, do they come from you all?

Yes.

There were so many, and little jokes that could be hit and miss with the audience.

You do get surprised. Sometimes, maybe because you're close to the film, you're think, `Gee, that was a funny line, it didn't get a cracker from anybody.' But it's one of those things and I think we're used to it now. We've been doing comedy on television and radio for such a long time that we do realise that you're not going to make everybody laugh at the same time all the time.

It's difficult in a film like The Castle because our task was actually pulling out jokes. You have to give a sense of the story - unless people follow the story, they're actually not going to laugh at the jokes. You have to believe the characters. You have to believe the situation is there in order for you to laugh at the jokes, so if you throw in too many jokes, suddenly people start removing themselves from the story and that becomes counterproductive to the jokes. They'll stop laughing at certain jokes. They'll say, `No, I don't believe that this guy would actually do that.'

By portraying the average family at Tullamarine, there is the dilemma of whether the audience is laughing at the family or with them.

It's a difficult thing, a fine line. Sometimes I look at the film and think, `I hope people don't think that we're laughing at the family'.

People say this, that and the other about the comedy in Frontline, but we like to think we're all very mainstream in our senses of humour and our sensibilities. It doesn't concern me whether we are sitting at a preview in South Yarra watching the film and wondering whether we are a bit judgmental. I'm more concerned about what we do in the film and I think it's not that at all. Even if, at the beginning of the film you think you are laughing at the Kerrigans, `look at this, look at the house...', by the middle, you are barracking for them. It doesn't matter where they come from. They happen to be a family from the northern suburbs near the airport. But they are a family who have principles and who are judged in those terms.

An audience which was tempted to laugh at the family or automatically reacted that way without realising it, would identify with Bud Tingwell's character, the QC. Then the audience is with the family. By contrast, the characters in Frontline are into self-deception without realising it, whereas the Kerrigans weren't. Would that be a reasonable interpretation?

Absolutely. I think the characters in Frontline believe their own promos, they believe their own image, they've drunk too much of their own bathwater. These people, they have simple pleasures. It's just like I enjoy going out on the boat and fishing, I enjoy going fast and smelling two-stroke engine fuel. I love putting stuff in the poolroom, I love my kids, and there's no sense of an image of yourself. It's very, very sincere.

As regards Australian humour, it's in the tradition of suburban comedy with the appeal to the majority of Australians: Strictly Ballroom, Muriel's Wedding, Death in Brunswick, The Big Steal, Mr Reliable... It's the formula for surefire success in Australia: the lovable larrikin rebel who wins out over authority. Would you see that as one of the major themes that Australian audiences like to see?

I guess, because I like to see it. I've seen The Castle a lot of times and I still love it when Dad wins. Mind you, I love the wrestling, so I love guys getting thumped and, just when you think they're about to go, they come up and start thumping you back. I don't know whether it's specifically Australian. I presume it's a universal feeling. People like to barrack, people go mad at the footy because they just like to barrack in a group.

The fact that it was set in the suburbs - there was no conscious effort made. The only conscious decision we made about the subject-matter of the film was that we had to keep it simple because of the money we had to spend. Therefore, we wanted to keep the story about home and family, which were the simplest things we could possibly think of. That's as basic as it gets, we think. So we thought, okay, how does someone protect their home and love their family, really. `Well, why don't we set it next door to an airport?' `Oh, that means we're in the suburbs.' `Okay, there are neighbours.'

When Jane Kennedy's friends watch the film they go, `How did you get away with putting so much of your dad and your mum in there?' When Rob's parents watch the film they go, `How did you get away with it? That's about your dad, isn't it?' Unfortunately, my parents don't speak English very well, so they go, `What's it about,' that kind of thing. But my parents do know - they look at certain things and they go, `I've told you that about our next-door neighbour and you've put that in, haven't you?' And I said, `Yes, I have.' So it's drawing from each of our own experiences, which all comes from that quite mundane sort of lower to middle-class background.

A lot of it had to actually do with the setting. We wanted a place right next door to the airport, so we shot there. We knocked on someone's door and said, `Would you like to stay at the local motel while we shoot at your house?' So we kept on going in there with the set designer, saying, `This is where we could have a poolroom,' and while Rob and I were in there, we'd be saying, `This is another scene. How about this? He does this? How about in the backyard? That looks like a kids' cubbyhouse that used to be a granny flat.' Things get formed by actually being out there at the place.

You've drawn, visually and verbally, on a lot of Australian detail. While much of it might be universal, it's still distinctively Australian, say, the discussions about the flight to Thailand and the meals and movies, the kinds of souvenirs they bring back from Thailand, Dad's treasures in the poolroom or the things that Mum makes with her craft. It's the same with Denis Denuto's office. Where was it filmed?

My father is a lawyer in Sydney Rd, Brunswick, so we used his office for Denis Denuto's legal office. In fact, we used his office once, then the sun got in the way and it was too bright. I knew the chemist a couple of doors down so I asked Rocky if we could move the sign on top of his window. So, if you watch, you'll see it's not the same place. When he crosses the road, it's a different place. So, depending where the sun was, we kept moving down the road.

Michael Caton was a very convincing Dad.

I think Michael was just sensational. It wasn't just the performance. It was a very difficult task. He was in almost every single scene, a pressure shoot because we had to do it in such a short time. It was important that the person who was there all the time got on well with everybody and was patient. He was inspirational. It wasn't as if it were a two month shoot and he was really stretched. But he was stretched on the days and they were long days. He was still chatting with people at the end of the day. If he had been one of those actors who kept saying `I can't do this' or `this is not what I want to do', the film wouldn't have been made.

It was interesting with the casting. Jane did a fantastic job. I remember she saw a picture of Michael - we had to actually cast Michael in about a day or two because there was some problem - and she flew up to Sydney, met him and came back smiling, `This is the guy'.

There is so much optimism. You've touched on whatever it is in the niceness of the `Average Australian': lovable ocker, rebel individualist. But you also take shots at the law, as enemy, but law can also be ally, as with the Constitution. Once you focus on the Constitution, it gives a depth to the comedy. The phrase `on just terms', stands out. But there seems to be a touch of preach with Dad's speech about how he begins to understand the aborigines and the references to Mabo.

That's a bit of an Achilles' heel there. But, we decided from the start to be unashamed. It was a test of nerve whether we kept that speech about the aborigines in or not. We're not concerned whether it works or not. We wanted to be unashamed about the emotion and what we think about a home. We didn't want to pull back and say, `that's a bit cute'. We knew we were going to come out of the film and say that we went a bit too far there. The aboriginal speech is not the only place where we have gone too preachy. In retrospect there are a few other places where we should have pulled out.

On the other hand, in terms of political correctness, you have Dad make some very funny wog remarks where it didn't dawn on him that he might be considered racist.

No, that's what pops into his mind. That's interesting because I can't even remember when I saw the film yet, for some reason it's been the biggest influence on the film, and that was They're a Weird Mob. It was so candid and straight, absolutely plain. I remember seeing plain shots of houses and people saying simples jokes, `Kings Bloody Cross' and that kind of thing. It felt like, `this is just a plain painting, not cubism, it's not anything. And when I think of Australianism, I think of Ned Kelly, not because of his rebelling and becoming a hero, but because of the words,`stand and deliver'. I like the fact that the film is simple: here it is, and there's nothing more complicated than that. You either take it or you don't take it - and, as an audience member, I appreciate having that choice.

In terms of economic rationalism and government, there are probably a lot of sympathetic audiences. Corporations and government are taking over as in the film.

It's pathetic because a couple of us studied law but now we know nothing about the law. We completely forgot it a long time ago. So I had to speak to a couple of barristers that I used to go to uni with about the legal side of the film. And they said, `Yes, there's actually a clause in the Constitution about all this'. They told me about cases like this. There's a Greek guy who doesn't want to sell his house in Burnley because of the City Link. It's a horrible house, columns and all that. And he says, `But you don't understand. I've got my family that lives around here. It's the house that I want. I don't care what you think of the house. But, for me to build this house somewhere else and then gather my family around me, it's going to cost over a million dollars if you want me to do it'.

The lawyer told me that there are two acts in Victoria, the Grand Prix Act and the City Link Act, which actually exonerate - it's the first time in Australia, I think - individual companies from being sued for damages. The government says, `For you to do this, we'll take the blame for anything.' I think they've ended up moving the guy out, but it took them ages. It happened over a period of about two or three years.

When you think about it, okay, in a film it's a bit simple. The guy just doesn't want to move out. But think about it. If you are happy in your own home and it means something to you, there is too much going on. But there is really an element of, `Hang on, this place is an asset to all Victorians. Therefore you don't have an argument'. You actually can't have an argument about whether we're allowed to do this to the beach or allowed to build this sized shopping centre, because `it's an asset to all Victorians'. It's just, too easy to say that. You've got to be sensitive to people's values. People's values are real. I think it's a good thing psychologically to get back on track economically, but there's a limit.

Is the phrase `on just terms' in the Constitution?

Yes, in section 51.31. Had we had more time, we would have done a shot - perhaps that would have been our only tracking shot - actually showing the words, showing that it's actually a real quote. But we just didn't have time.


Interview: 6th February 1997

TOM COWAN



You haven't directed a feature since Sweet Dreamers in 1980?

That's right, yes. I just haven't had the overpowering desire to break down the resistance that there is to my sort of films. I've had some projects: I wanted to make a film in India, and that was just about to come off when the government was voted out, and so all the bureaucrats changed who had given me permission. I had to give the money I had raised here back to the investors. Partly it's because there are not too many good producers in Australia that have got the guts to go with something that's nonconformist - or the power. Perhaps my ideas were too ambitious at some stages - I just didn't really find the right connection.

So it's partly me not having the sort of overpowering desire which you need to get a film through. - not only me - and I also got interested in all sorts of other things. I got very interested in IMAX. I've pursued that since Antarctica and I'll be directing an IMAX film about the Barrier Reef next, so that's distracted me from making a feature - although at the moment there's one in the works which looks like it will be financed. It's a personal film.

I wouldn't mind going back over the four that you did, although from reading yesterday, there was mention of Wild Wind in India.

Yes, that's a film I also directed and co-wrote.

Would you reflect on how each of your films, from The Office Picnic to Sweet Dreamers, embodies some of your more personal vision? The Office Picnic was released fairly early in the revival of the industry.

Yes, it was the first year. It came out at the same time as Barry Mc Kenzie and Stork - I suppose they were the first three. I had just come back from my stay overseas and got together the people that I'd known. It was made with a grant from what was the Film School Committee or something like that. The film fund at that stage was being administered by Erwin Rado in Melbourne. We shot it on 35mm black and white and that's how it was distributed. Michael Edols had been my assistant at Film Australia and the Commonwealth Film Unit. It was just a lot of people pitching in and doing it.

It was made really on the model of the film that I had shot in India and a bit to do with a film that I shot in London. The first feature film I ever had anything to do with was Sanskara, the Indian film, and the second one was, I think, Trouble in Melopolis, which was a Philipe Mora film, a musical which we shot in London.

So I knew how to make films and I had always been a director. My first films had been as a director rather than as a cinematographer. The Commonwealth Film Unit offered me a job and I came up from Melbourne assuming that it was a director's job, because that's all I had ever done, but they offered me a cinematography position, which was great because I got to travel and work constantly. And, as they weren't really making real movies, it didn't matter too much to me, although they allowed me to direct a couple of films which I shot as well, so I wasn't excluded from directing. The major one was called Helen of Sydney, about a Greek girl living in Sydney. It was the precursor of Promised Woman, my second feature.

The Office Picnic, its plot and ideas from the early '70s?

It's got a bit of Patrick White and a bit of this and that, I guess, and a bit of Antonioni. I had got back to Australia and was quite delighted and enthralled with what I saw in the bush. The first film I think I shot was a wildlife film for a friend in Melbourne. I was working in the bush and one day, while we were doing this film, I got the idea, fully fledged - beginning, middle and end - and put it down on paper straight away. And it seemed like the film just happened. The money was there. It was based on my experiences of the bureaucracy in Australia and what it was like to go out on a picnic when people sort of let their hair down.

So to that extent it does link in a bit with Stork and that side of Australia.

Yes. It's based on real observation of people. It's stylised, of course, but I came back to Australia to make Australian films. We had been prevented for so long, by British Empire Films and the whole distribution thing that Menzies had allowed to happen and strangle the industry here, and I was fairly militant. One of the first things I did was set up a cinema - it became The Film-makers' Cinema. It was called The Picture Palace to start off with and it was above Bob Gould's book shop. I found the place, set it up and then the co-op became part of it. It was in Goulburn Street, just off George Street. And I think it was part of the breakdown of the resistance of the distributors because people came.

The Office Picnic screened at the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne? The same kind of distribution?

Well, I distributed it myself. It started here at the Union Theatre. I was actually offered a contract by British Empire Films, the enemy. I looked at it and showed it to Lloyd Hart(?)XXXXXX of what was the Australian Film Commission. He said, "Yeah, this is a standard sort of thing. It means you won't get anything back." So I decided to pursue the distribution myself and do it myself. It showed in every city but I think it showed a couple of times at the Playbox. It was reviewed twice by Colin Bennett, who initially didn't like it but, the second time it played, he saw it again and wrote another review on reflection, which was much more favourable.

At the time we weren't used to that kind of Australian film. It was different, challenging. What did it mean? You've mentioned Patrick White and referred to Antonioni and mysterious nature. That have been all right for Italians, but in our bush it seemed a strange kind of experience. It wasn't lucid and linear. But now, I presume, audiences could say, "Yes, that makes sense".

It actually stands up very well. It's still quite powerful. I must say I'm totally pleased that it hasn't dated, although there's the different type of dress and all that. But it's not without power.

You have mentioned Helen of Sydney and your next feature film was Promised Woman.

It was much more of a professional job; it wasn't so personal because it was based on a play that this Greek writer, XXXXXXXXXXXXX, who had helped me on Helen of Sydney had written about a boarding house. Although I changed it radically and put in memory flashbacks, I felt that I had a little bit more objectivity and it was more like other films that were being made. I haven't actually seen it for a long time.

It preceded Caddie and Kostas. But at that stage of the mid-'70s there was some focus on migrant groups.

Yes. Initially it was based on the fact that there was a Greek circuit of cinemas. It got made very easily because of that distribution chain. I was going to make it in black and white - Greek films were still being made in black and white. When I went to the AFDC, they said, "No, we want it in colour and in English, so we'll just double the budget. Is that all right?" So I said okay and got Richard Brennan to do the production work.

You were tackling what was an important subject then - multiculturalism still is - so it's obviously something dear to you.

I suppose it's got the outsider point of view and it's a way of looking at things freshly, too. I was seeing Sydney through her eyes. In Helen of Sydney the Opera House was still being built, so it was easy to make a metaphor or a simile to compare the stone sweep of the seating with the Acropolis. It was just very similar. But with Promised Woman, what drove it and formed it was that I was very interested in Jung: the unconscious and thoughts and how they control us, how we're connected to the past and sometimes enmeshed in it. So I used the fisherman and his nets, dragging them up from the sea in Greece, it's her lover and how she's caught in those dreams and how they do not allow her to really be here. I explored those ideas. And seeing Sydney with the eyes of a newly-arrived, seeing it afresh, seeing it like a child.

Was there anything significant about Orthodox Christianity in the story?

I don't know - the film was still very much influenced by European cinema, I think, even though visually it was very much how I saw things. But the richness of Greek Orthodox symbols and music and ritual were very much part of the whole mosaic of it.

Journey Among Women was a very striking film. Even if it wasn't a polished Hollywood production, it was arresting. You are listed amongst the writers with Dorothy Hewett and others and with the cast all contributing. What was it like, this process of making Journey Among Women?

Well, it was pretty wild, the whole thing. The idea again came from the bush. I was living in the bush, in Berowra Waters, and it was so powerful. I happened to read this French science-fiction story called Les Guerrieres about a future society of women - like an Amazon society - who were at war with the rest of society. Somehow in the combination of the wildness and strangeness and beauty of the bush and this story of wild women, I saw a parallel in how we perceived the bush and how the British first saw the bush as ugly. Well, we now see it as beautiful. And how the sort of excesses of radical feminism, when it began, were seen as ugly - ranting and raving and being abusive and so on. But, in fact, behind it were very beautiful things - not just the women, but the humanist ideas.

So you dramatised that. Whose idea was it to transpose it into the early days of the settlement?

I got that all in another flash. Most of my good ideas came that way. Because I was still a bit nationalistic, I suppose, I took the Irish side. The way the British saw the female, the convicts, the women - a good percentage of them were Irish anyway and this fitted into the theme and the parallel.

It fitted in terms of the film's concept, the process by which it was made and the structure. It all fitted together fairly neatly. The process of workshopping and involving people's own lives in it - that was the contemporary expression, how it was paralleled in our history. I guess visually the transformation of the women from being fairly ugly and dirty and raucous to becoming extraordinarily beautiful at the end came through that process of transformation.

You have shown the British as oppressors with sexual violence and rape, very strong oppression.

It was originally called Five Acts of Violence and the violence was to do with breaking of oppression. It was pretty heady stuff.

The first act is prison and how they break out.

The second act is a refined society, basically, and how the main female character breaks out of that - the strictures because of the way she's meant to behave as a lady, how she's not meant to associate herself with these dirty women; she had to break out of that.

The third act is anarchy and how you have to actually break out of that as well to something more structured but organic at the same time. The final act is a revolution where things do change their state. That's symbolised in the fire. You don't actually emerge into a new life until you're born again through fire.

And you have the aboriginal theme with the introduction of the aboriginal woman.

I don't know if that's really as well integrated and worked out, but it does provide a bridge from anarchy to a more organically ordered social responsibility.

Which, thematically in the last twenty years and with Reconciliation, is now more significant than it might have been even in the '70s.

Yes. The same figure appears in The Office Picnic when the guy is totally freaked out about his whole value system not working any more. He's lost something, but he doesn't even know what he's lost. He comes face to face with his own loneliness and he's observed very dispassionately but almost sympathetically by the old aborigine who's watching this totally strictured, poor unfortunate guy alone in the rain in the bush, not knowing what to do.

It received an R, Restricted, certificate.

It got an R, yes. I haven't got anything radical to say about that. I think it probably would have been an R, really. I think they over-reacted perhaps to the fact that it was women involved in violence, more than anything else.

Critically it was received well?

Pretty much so. I don't think it was taken as seriously as it might. Having explained these ideas, they weren't really dealt with or engaged with in terms of critical response. People loved the wildness of it and the visual daring, and it was hard to deny that it had these amazing uncontrolled performances.

Was it at this time that you went to India?

I know I went to India just before I made Journey Among Women. I was invited to a film festival. I actually directed the Indian film in '75 - there was still a state of emergency. It was fairly dicey because it also dealt with revolution. So that was actually my third film, then Journey Among Women was the fourth. It is still around, but it's not shown - not in the same way that Sanskara is shown. It's regarded as a classic in India, and most of the graduates that come here from India always seek me out. I'm still somewhat of a figure there because it was the first modern film from the south of India and it's very strikingly photographed. Yes, Sanskara is a notable film because of the marvellous story that it was based on, a wonderful novel. And all the people who worked on it, although they weren't professionals, were extraordinary people. The guy who took the main role is himself one of the best theatre writers in India, I think, and he also headed the National Film School and the National Drama School. And the artist who did the art direction - it's a remarkable film, just one of those freaks, and I happened to be chosen to work on it. I did work on the script too - it was quite an amazing experience. I am still in contact with the producer's family. He's quite old now, but I spent time in Los Angeles with his son, a musician - quite a remarkable family. But the film I did was suppressed because it was still the time of the emergency. It's a notable film.

The producer and all his family were arrested not long afterwards and the actress who was in it, his wife, died as a result of being put in jail and it became a big election issue in the south and just one of many similar reasons why Mrs Ghandi was voted out in the next democratic elections. So it's a notable film, but it wasn't a good film. It didn't have the quality of the original book. The story was artificial. It could have been good, but I actually don't think I was ready to do a film like that, and it was made under tremendous hardship, almost secretly and with very limited resources.

That brings us to Sweet Dreamers which David Stratton said was too personal to be filmed.

I don't know if it was too personal. It is personal and I'm not sure that I'm that objective about it. I fear that he's probably right in terms of success or failure at the box office. Probably we just weren't ready for it. I had a lot of trouble getting the film made - strangely enough, after my Australian films had been successful in their own right: The Office Picnic was commercially successful at film festivals as well; Promised Woman was highly regarded at film festivals and sold more territories than any other Australian film that year; Journey Among Women was obviously commercially successful and still is. Bureaucracy took a stand against Sweet Dreamers, made my life very difficult and delayed the film enormously.

All my films have really been very visual and they're based on visual ideas, things that can be explored filmicly rather than that strand of Australian film that comes from the ABC, where the script conforms to a certain script correctness. I suppose it's just a tradition. I'd always tried to explore things through a freer visual approach, documenting people's relationship to ideas more than illustrating a text that was written down and corrected. I rather think the films I really like are made by visual artists like Fellini, rather than the other strand - which I love too - the marvellously worked out literary pieces like those of Bergman. The scripts themselves are equal to his films in some ways. Well, that never interested me. I wanted to work things out like a painter, go out and do something and say, "The next I've obviously got to do is this," when you look at it and see it.

So that's one of the reasons why it's been very hard for me to get films up, because financing a film lends itself to something that's locked off, has no dynamism in it. In fact there was a stage where you had to sign each page of the script to get it through the New South Wales Film Corporation. So that was why most of the films are so deadly. But I think now people are breaking through that stultifying sort of system again.

And IMAX provides you with a literally huger scope?

Yes, strangely enough. You've got to set up each shot very, very carefully. There's always that tension between control and ecstasy and that's the sort of thing I wanted to explore in my films.

That's not a bad way to finish, control and ecstasy.



Interview: 12th November 1998

PAUL COX


In Golden Braid you played a priest hearing Chris Haywood's confession. Did you identify, in some way, with your Catholic past in choosing to do that cameo role?

As the years go on, I actually appreciate my background much more than I did in the past. But it was pretty grim. We came straight out of the Middle Ages.

What were some of the characteristics of growing up in Holland and of the Catholic background you describe as grim?

Well, when I was 17 or 18, I still didn't know anything about sex, never heard of it. We were so suppressed that even when I left home at 23, I had no idea about the world. My mother had put zippers on all my pockets. She thought I would get robbed when I went out of the house. I really came from the Middle Ages and I was a very unhappy, miserable, cold youth. In the last few years I realise that there is an incredible wealth in having had that background because I'm getting a lot of inspiration from it now.

I was an altar boy, choirboy and I studied to become a priest. I went away to study for six months. I did a lot in a way. That all somehow rubs off. But I don't regret it. I used to regret all that - and all the guilt nonsense. See, my mother was a very loving women and an incredibly giving person who never said one word wrong about another human being, and always taught us to seek right every day of her life. She had a terrible life but she always taught us to keep loving, no matter what. In German they say, grosse geist, a big spirit. You must always have a bigger spirit than the other so that nothing can really crush you. That was her fairly simple sort of philosophy, but I thought for many years that that was it, you must keep loving. The human race was very important to me.

These last few years I'm not so sure. I'm terribly disappointed in people. That includes me; I'm not any better, and really disappointed. I think people are not a good lot. I used to think, like Anne Frank, we must believe that people are basically good, and maybe that's still true, but I think they behave very badly - stomp upon the face of the earth as if they own it and have no idea about their own mortality. We don't die anymore - you know, death has disappeared. Somebody has cancer and there is a great legal breakthrough - and the person gets $450,000. How can you possibly compensate life and death with money? This is all very strange to me.

Do these more pessimistic reflections influence the stories you're choosing to tell on screen now?

No, what becomes increasingly clearer to me is that whatever you have done, whatever you have achieved, doesn't mean anything. You know, once you come to terms with your own ego and all that and you return to your own humble self - because film is a deluding thing - and you don't project yourself around, then you suddenly realise that it all means nothing. You have to start the good fight every time you make a film. The administration is virtually against you - you know, `Oh, Cox with another film, you know, so what? We've seen his films'. There's this incredible, almost-hatred when you arise from the ashes a little. You find a lot of rapport when you leave the country. But within the country it gets worse all the time and it's very difficult to start the next film. I might be sitting in an office here that's heavily mortgaged, but for my own freedom I've paid very dearly. There's very little room in Australia for films like mine.

You see yourself as a film artist. Audiences aren't always responsive to film artists. Do you they just want popular storytellers?

That's okay, there's room for all of us. If I can't make films with the full backing of my instinct, I can't perform, I can't do it. I've tried; I can't do it. Everything within me rejects any sort of compromise. I know it sounds a bit pretentious but I cannot treat it as anything but giving form and shape to something that I feel very strongly about.

Your portrait of Vincent and your growing up in Holland. Did that influence your perspective on Van Gogh? and did the film enable you to assess your Dutch background better?

I don't think it had much to do with my Dutch background. It was only when I started to read a lot and when I read Van Gogh's letters. Of course, there is something about the Dutch mist and the meadows and the willow trees that all made it a bit more nostalgic with the journey. But I found him such a compassionate, wonderful human being. That attracted me above all. I found him always honest, always real, always doing his utmost, and I related very much to his type of loneliness. It's the loneliness, the dreadful loneliness that I've known all my life. That was still much stronger for me when I tried to become a film-maker - you know, up to 30, 35, I was terribly alone. I was not equipped for the world at all, and, at that level, that is a very similar background to Vincent.

My parents weren't really Dutch. My father was half German and my mother was French-German-Polish?, and she never even spoke Dutch properly, so it wasn't really such a very strong Dutch background, but very European.

Are you pleased with Vincent?

Yes, but even within the short time it has been in existence... I mean, Vincent almost sent me to jail. We had terrible times making that film. And the very first time it was screened, everybody walked out... not everybody, but a lot. And after two years of hard work that's very shattering. It was a very difficult film to make, with little means, little money but, you know, with simple help from my friends. It was a gigantic effort at the time. Yes, I am pleased with that film. I think that it's nothing to do with me, that film. It's a homage to a great soul and also it's a film of the way Van Gogh speaks - I have only very humbly tried to put it together and give people a flavour of his soul. In the whole history of art there's no artist like him - where writing and painting travel so closely together.

We always try to find out the creative process and how people do operate. I don't know... but I do know that Vincent had a magnificent way of expressing what he felt. So most people, when they use language, express only conditioned thought but very little heart. Not Vincent, nor Nijinsky in his diary - they're both people that fascinate me very much because they both manage to express their hearts.

Another area of Europe that seems to have attracted you is Greece: Kostas and, especially, Island. What attracted you to those stories?

The first time I went to Greece I realised I had been homesick and I never knew where it was for. In Germany they have a word called fernweh, sickness for the distance. Once I had left Holland, there was no home for me. There was no home here; I was always drifting between places. When I got to Greece the first time and met these people... a Greek is a Greek and every day is the first and last day of their lives, as has been said, `Wherever I travel, Greece wounds me'. There's incredible belonging and I envy that very much. I love Greece for that.

Also everything has a lot to do with music. All creativity is based on music and the Greeks still have their own musical language. It might have been bastardised by the Turks and others, but out of Greece comes an extraordinary melody and on every street corner stands a man who can sing a hundred times better than Frank Sinatra and on every village street there are wonderful musicians who have had no schooling but play with the heart and soul. These people are ignored in the world. They don't speak English. But even Greek pop music is much more exciting and more schooled and more civilised than anything this Anglo-Saxon? civilisation can offer.

I loved all that very much. I got to know some very fine people there and even bought a house for a few thousand dollars which I lost consequently after 20 years. But they make me feel at home.

There is the contrast between the Greek Orthodox Church and whatever influence it has had and Catholic and Protestant traditions in Northern Europe.

Yes, I had an uncle who was a Benedictine monk. He died in 1994. And I have an aunt who's a nun. Every large family had to have members of religious orders. It's remarkable and I have much more sympathy now for the Catholic church than I had before. You really have to reject it at some stage, because it was all wrong, the way it was embedded in us. We were poor, poor sheep. That was just unbelievable.

One of the interesting things about Island is the placing of a Sri Lankan woman in that culture. What influenced that part of the plot?

I think the two countries I love most are India and Greece - Alexander the Great went right up to Nepal - and there are a lot of similarities in the character of the people. It's in the songs and the music as well. I spent a long time, maybe three years in India. After I had been here in Australia and grown up, I was 27, 28, and around that time I went to India, Nepal and Indonesia, but spent a lot of time in India and Bangladesh.

Isn't it strange that, as life goes on, you become automatically more religious. People say that. Organised religion I'm still very suspicious about, but I feel an extraordinary, overwhelming force that I cannot fight any more. It becomes part of my whole being now. So I've become a very religious person. It's very strange because I can hardly talk about this within my own environment. I have kind of really let go.

When Man of Flowers was released in the early 80s, it seemed very strong. You rely on music but you have also used visual art, paintings, and their religious motifs. An exploration of art and religion and sexuality?

Yes, and also a continuous exploration, the juxtaposition of traditional art and modern art, traditional love and modern love, traditional religion in a way, too. But, of course, it always puzzles me - anything modern I shy away from these days. It started with Man of Flowers. We tend to embrace any advancement automatically, any technical advancement, any new product, anything hideous we embrace straight away as if this is advancement. I prefer to progress in my head. I don't need any more. What have we actually achieved with science and reason has really brought us to the brink of extinction - science and reason. It's a very troublesome situation. I find I am almost sounding like my father, which I hate very much. But I'm hanging on very desperately to any type of tradition, and also trying to bring up our children in a world that does not in any way acknowledge that we have an inner and an outer world that must constantly be interacting.

There's the celebration of the outer world and nothing but, but there's no more celebration of the eye. We need to be surrounded by things that please the eye or intrigue the eye, because everywhere we look we see ugliness. Everything we build is ugly because greed and common sense have taken over. They cannot build anything any more which you can look at, sit and admire. I'm doing a tiny bit of renovation now. At night-time after being busy, I can sit for hours just looking at it, thinking, `This is marvellous. I did this'. I'm as clumsy as they come. But I'm very determined, so I get it done.

So we are bringing up our children in a world where the actual image of that world is so wrong. That troubles me greatly. Man of Flowers was very much about not only the search for beauty, but the inner search. It was very much about the inner search for beauty and a deep longing that travels with all of us. Anyone who has seen things and feels about the world longs, because the longing is not satisfied any longer. I find no satisfaction in anything that this world's had to offer. I hardly go out now. What is it I see? People standing in queues to get into a disco? They stand there waiting in the queues, and when they get to the door they might not even be allowed in, into a hell-hole. What sort of nonsense is this? It's an absolute hell-hole. I don't understand that. I don't understand this world anymore at all.

Man of Flowers was very religiously explicit as Norman Kaye went from house to church, played the organ and returned home. The religious motifs were clear. But what was the Orthodox background of the husband in My First Wife?

Well, he was Russian Orthodox. You need a variety of characters. I believe that when you look at people who have had no religious background at all, they are always lacking something, there is something missing. So if I want to give somebody a bit more substance, I give them a religion. That's the simple explanation. I do feel that this is true - look at most Jewish people. Because of their so-called religion, they always have another dimension to them.

My daughter goes to an Anglican school, St Michaels, although I would prefer it to be Catholic. Now, this is because I was brought up myself in the Catholic way. But if it were a Catholic school, I would keep a very close eye on the school. I would prefer that because I don't believe in this religion either. Anglican - what does it mean? At least the Catholic church had a bit more meaning.

Also I like to give people a multicultural, multinational, multi-whatever background. I think, despite everything, I find this country still very racist. There is a lot of hidden antagonism, hidden racism, because the Anglo-Saxon? soul is very cold, very calculating. It is one big enormous lie, actually, because within the Anglo-Saxon? world people are not really allowed to speak their hearts. So when they are racist, they do this quite brilliantly. I found this, too, as a so-called migrant with a big mouth. I found an enormous amount of opposition. If I had been Australian, it would have been a totally different story with me.

I have nothing against Australia but there is something within the psyche of this country that is not very healthy. Honestly, I'm not a very vindictive person. I don't really know what hatred is. I don't hate. I forgive very easily. I'm very loyal and very honest. I've never not paid my gas bill. I do all the right things on that level. But what actually is the reason for so many people being against me? I don't know? Why are they against me? I don't understand that.

But you have generally been well treated in the press?

That brings me to another thing, reviewing. It's quite extraordinary how they treated one of my favourite films, A Woman's Tale. In a way the film has very little to do with me. It's a homage to a very great and wonderful human being, Sheila Florance. It's very much a film about life, but using death. It's a very daring movie, because you're not allowed to make films like this, playing with a million dollars, making a film about an old woman. That's pretty tricky. All the sentiments are really against it. I didn't have insurance so everything I had was at stake, making this film.

I always knew it would work - I had great faith in Sheila and in what we were doing. I judge people by this film, you see. When people cannot understand or appreciate it or the process of making it, I judge them by that. From the film you can only become a more thinking and feeling human being. When I see A Woman's Tale basically being ignored here, that's disgusting, absolutely disgusting. The only bad crits I get are in Australia but the whole world raves about A Woman's Tale, the whole world. Why not be proud of it?

You included Salvation Army characters in Golden Braid. What drew you to them?

I knew somebody who had gone into the Salvation Army. Often when people are embracing a religion or an ideal, they become very blind to all other things, a blindness about belonging to any particular group. That's why I've never belonged to anything. I've never voted in my life, I don't belong anywhere. The Salvation Army character in Golden Braid is a dear person but very pathetic. I love these people very much, but at the same time they've got to look at themselves clearly, and they usually don't. They have found their right pathway but it's so minute; their thinking is so small. To make fun of them - and I don't do it maliciously - I think it's quite gentle ...

Paul Chubb is a good comedian. I suppose you can't help liking him. The film has many comic moments: the naivety of the Salvation Army man, Chris Haywood hurrying off to confession (with you as the priest).

I think you have to have a particular sense of humour, but I think Golden Braid is quite a funny film, but very few people get it.

A priest commentator hated it and considered it appallingly immoral. But it is a fascinating look at obsessions and longings. The same longings that you spoke of were present in Cactus and Lonely Hearts.

They're basically all the same stories. You always make the same film.

The Nun and the Bandit?

It's minimal filming. It is a very religious journey, an overtly religious thing. It's the very first time I read a book that I wanted to film, because I normally don't believe the film has much to do with the novel. I wasn't at the screening at the Melbourne Film Festival but I never want to screen a film at a festival again. That screening actually killed the release. It got bad reviews in a few places, so Roadshow wouldn't even release it. I think that as an Australian bush film, it is a very, very original film, a highly original piece. The forest, the beauty of the land, that's the altar, and the sacrifice is the innocence and youth. You have a sacrifice on an altar.

But it gave me enormous satisfaction because the finished film is very nicely tuned, minimal when you look at the way it's crafted. I think it's a very fine film. But that's not what the reviewers want, a bush film like this. That's not very Australian, is it?

The character of the nun was one of the most striking nuns on screen. She was well situated in the context of religious life of the 40s and 50s. She is made more convincing by the device of the lessening of her outer dialogue and the use of her voice-over commentary, especially the prayer.

It's strange. I was invited to sit on a jury in Turkey and I went into the Grand Mosque in Istanbul. Next to me suddenly somebody was praying from within - but there was still a voice coming out. And suddenly I went right back to my youth. We always did this. It was part of the whole religious culture: pray to this, pray to everything. But it was a person actually next to me, praying. Suddenly I thought, yes, of course, that's right, and I went back and straight away and changed the film.

It sounded authentic, just right, the words that you chose. The moral dilemma involving sexuality and vows was presented very interestingly. The Age reviewer expressed shock saying that it was not sound, theologically. The nun had made a vow of chastity so there was no way she could consider sex with the bandit as a self-sacrificing means for the release of her niece.

The review was insensitive to anything that has a bit of spirit. There was no generosity of heart or spirit. It's a very Catholic film, yes, absolutely. We had it running in Germany and the Catholics and the Catholic church totally accepted it. It's a modern Catholic film.

Exile?

Actually, it's a very religious film. Because of that, it is not very commercial, is not very successful. I think it's a very good film. It had really marvellous write-ups in Germany. They really understood that it's a very spiritual film. The Nun and the Bandit is about the land. Exile is about the sea. It's also about society, how it always destroys the individual: that we're not the end product of that society, we're just there to be manipulated and used. It's about a man kicked out of society who really becomes himself. He shines, burns through all the rubbish of the mind and the body. He has to somehow survive physically as well, and he does it quite brilliantly. People even get jealous of him. They ban him and exile him.

Anyway, it has similar themes but it's a more accessible film, I think. Then again, what am I going to do with it? Why do we have a Film Financing Corporation here that's put $16,000,000 into our films and then does nothing about them - if you're a painter you can go to a gallery with your painting. I can't get release any more. Exile has been invited to festivals around the world but so what? I can't travel everywhere any more. As usual, I'm very much appreciated whenever I get off the plane anywhere else, and here I can't get release for this film. I premiered it at the Phillip Island Film Society weekend festival, quietly. I find it pretty grim that I have to go and promote my own film.

Other projects?

I've had rejections one after the other - so I must be mad to keep going. It's a great pity that I can't cash in on whatever - I can't do American films where I get a million dollars and then tell people to go to hell and use that money to make what I like - I couldn't do it. That's my Catholic soul, I think. I feel I've sinned.

I did an episode for a collection film for German television. It was easy to do and it was a bit silly - and they left me alone, but I still did not feel good about it. It's slightly erotic ... then when the film was finished, I said to everybody, `Well, we've been to the brothel. Now we enter the cathedral'. `Bloody Catholic', they said. But it's true. I didn't feel very right about it. So is it guilt? What is it?

I find it much more exciting, in a way, to read a book than to go to the movies. I find most films disgusting. Sometimes you hear about these films, like Die Hard 2. I forced myself to sit down and watch it on television because I couldn't possibly go into a cinema to see anything like that. What sort of world do I live in, when this is celebrated and this is the most popular film of a particular year? And these people get six, seven, eight million dollars for their hideous contribution to the human race. These people are at the forefront of what is happening within humanity - and the product was so disgusting, I just couldn't believe it. I was so hurt - not angry, hurt. How is this possible?

It's not straightforward storytelling because there's no story. Nothing that happens in it is believable, nothing can happen like this. Blowing somebody's head off has to be applauded? I just don't understand this at all. And most films are based upon these sorts of totally unbelievable stories that have no bearing on our own reality. I can't escape in a film because I find most of those films are too disgusting. I find this very strange.

We had the big scandal with Romper Stomper. I made a comment - aren't I allowed to say I don't like this film? I was in Berlin and invited to come to the opening of a little new cinema - this is where I'd started - and the cross-point at the wall where people crossed from the East to the West and vice versa. I know that area. I know my mother had to part from her sister there and they never saw one another again. People went through the most amazing agony. Some were taken out and shot.

Now the wall has been taken down, we are getting somewhere. At the opening of that cinema, they said, `We have an Australian film', I can't remember the name, a German name, nothing to do with Romper Stomper. So I went, the film started. And it was Romper Stomper. I thought it was an appalling piece. And I got up in the cinema, I got so angry, and screamed and stormed out.

Of course, there was a journalist there who made a big scandal about it, came back here, and I had all the press running after me. I refused to comment any further. The only thing I said - and I will say it again - that it was very well done, but so was the Second World War. What is the point? Like Die Hard 2, it's a very well made film. So was the Second World War. Well directed - so was the Second World War. Well acted - so was the Second World War. What is the point?

I still have this belief that we are hopefully designed for bigger and better things than this. That's basically all I'm saying. This director grew up in a boring Melbourne suburb - what does he fucking well know about Nazis? Where I grew up, in the first five years of my life, everybody in the town where I lived was killed. 80 per cent of the population was murdered. You know, in the next five years after I was five, I walked through the rubble and the ruins of our city - and my memories are unbelievable. The screams and the agony - I had ten years of my life in the most unbelievable situation. So what is this person who comes from a boring little suburb where they've always had Vegemite on their toast and they're making a film with no fucking idea what really happens, what really goes through people's mind, what is suffering really about? And he has a film that's celebrated. Compare that film with A Woman's Tale on all levels, on any level, even technically, and in terms of passion and vision and love - just love. It's disgusting to me.

It makes me so angry, and not only that, this film really got to me because wherever this person goes now, he still attacks me.

We are travelling to somehow make other people's lives more bearable, especially within the arts. As they say, love is joy in another person and, within the arts, I think art is a mixture of vision and kindness, must be vision and kindness - kindness because it's close to children, close to God; and vision - it's from vision we find divine origin in every simple thing. It's the easiest the thing in the world to do something nasty. Isn't it much easier than doing something good and beautiful. But to create beauty is very hard, but the world is not without beauty.

Next?

If we can get it together, I'll make a film called Suicide of a Gentleman. I'm getting slowly ready - but I think I might have to leave Australia. I can't see much future from here. In one way it's because here I have so many financial problems, I've moved out of my house and going into a flat - this is all so ludicrous but it's my own fault. Then I'm making a film about Nijinsky. Did you ever read his diary? It's the most brilliant expose of a tortured soul ever. It was a wonderful thing. It changed my life when I read it at 19, 20. It really had an enormous impact. It has always travelled with me. I did an interview in New York and Nijinsky's daughter heard of it or saw it and wrote to me and now I have the whole Nijinsky family helping, which is really great, so it will happen with the help of the Russians, quite a large film.


Interview 19th May 1994


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PAUL COX, SECOND INTERVIEW


Is Lust and Revenge a film you're happy with?

No, I'm not happy with any of the films.

I should rephrase that.

No, I should've gone much further. But by the time you film these things, then all lust and all revenge evaporates. There's no point in clinging to hatreds and dislikes. I don't want to continue a life with a heart full of hatred towards certain people. Now and then I blow up, but that's my temperament. Then it all goes back to a calm ocean. I don't want to live with all that.

Lust and Revenge is often very funny. The first few minutes with Pamela Rabe's performance, for instance. It's very short but very incisive and funny. And it stands up well even if the audience doesn't know anything about arts and politics in Australia.

Yes. I think it should have been much more popular in Australia, actually, because it is quite accurate about the whole operation here.

A film like The Dish people relate to.

I find it quite extraordinary. It's not a very well-made film. Nothing against it. At least I wish them well, these people, because they're harmless films, they're gentle, they have a degree of philosophy and wisdom, but I do not understand how this film can be so hugely successful here. I don't understand that. If you compare The Dish and, for instance, Lust and Revenge or even Innocence, then you would think Innocence and Lust and Revenge are much more competent pieces of filmmaking on all levels. But in this country they have such a small audience.

But people are not that stupid. I'm quite pleased with the reaction to Innocence. It is quite huge for a film of mine. I have always maintained that people are starving for this sort of thing, especially more mature people. It's pathetic. They can't really go to the cinema any more because there's nothing much to see. You know, you cannot continuously be patronised by some nonsensical stuff. I see all these films that are popular in planes, and it's utterly pathetic. They come out in planes before they are actually being released, so I see them all as part of my duty, and they're just horror in the air, horror.

Innocence did very well.

They did a very good publicity campaign. People at Sharmill had faith and they believed. It had very good word of mouth, you know, they can't put it down. It somehow makes people feel guilty. A lot of people do feel this because they ring their grandparents and suddenly they show interest again in people that matter. So I think that's part of it.

And you put in a little quote from A Woman's Tale during that continuity of that theme.

Well, I always do, you know.
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I've heard quite a number of people who have seen it - I hadn't seen it by that stage; I saw it the other day - but people were pleased. And I think the reviewers seem to be favourable.__

Not in Melbourne. Don't forget, Australia has a very small, narrow, mean heart - large country with a mean little heart - and especially the so-called academics, the people who know. They do fuck-all and they have no idea of the rest of the world. Well, in Melbourne they don't favour people like me, who finally, at this point in my life, just starting to see the mountain. In Australia these people are usually put out in the paddock by forty. It takes a long time to grow up, to start seeing the light, you know. But then before you actually can get your so-called shit together, in this country they put them out, especially people like me, because I've been outspoken and I fought the system. Within this little community here is a very mean spirit. In other countries, at least you would find some generosity of spirit. Not here.

I have to tell you, going to the reviews every Monday and Tuesday in London, I find those British reviewers far more mean-spirited than the reviewers here.

Yes, that might be true, but not towards a person like myself.

They're very mean to British films. Some of them will start their column: "What is the British disaster of this week?" That was the Sunday Telegraph. I was very surprised - I did read somewhere that - is it true that Adrian Martin said Innocence was appalling, was it?

Yes. Now, Innocence gets rewards everywhere, amazing awards. It even got the audience award in Las Vegas, the capital of bad taste. That really threw me. I thought, is this possible? So there's an audience starving to do something with all their accumulated guilt in Las Vegas, and celebrating Innocence, which depressed me, actually, very much, because I thought, what is going on? What have I done wrong? But to get here an idiot writing idiotic things, that is very annoying. I don't even live here any more. I have nothing to do with this town. But they still have to put you down. And what a fool. Read his film reviews. One of his ten favourite films of the year was Space Cowboys. For heaven's sake.

He always defends it on - that he loves genre films.

Genre? There's no genre here. What is genre?

That's what he says. And he doesn't like more classic-style filmmaking.

But he knows nothing about filmmaking. He should go and see some Russian films, understand what the cinema can do. But to call Innocence appalling - that is pretty appalling.

Yes. But other comments I've seen seem to be much more favourable.

Most people raved about the film. It's neither here nor there, doesn't interest me. If people say - it's something that has a very big heart, it's made under enormously difficult circumstances with the help of very dedicated, wonderful people. It somehow tries to treat the human condition in reasonable depth about us, about our future and about our spirit and about our God. And if a local idiot can say this is appalling, well, that is indeed appalling. And when this film goes around the world, it gets rave reviews everywhere. The same thing happened to me with A Woman's Tale. Not one bad review, but rave reviews right around the world, from every country except here, this mean little city.

With Innocence - I couldn't quite see on the screenplay - did you write it all?

Yes.

I missed that credit. I was looking for it.

No, I didn't give myself a credit. It's bad enough to call it a film by ...

So it's the story and the issues of lost love and finding lost love.

Well, they're all important to me, in all the films. It doesn't matter whether I'm writing with somebody else, but they're all about the same things. We're all travelling with the same hopes. There's always the search for the God within and respect for beauty and what actually it means to be alive. I mean, I would like to ask George Bush, "What actually do you think it means to be alive? What actually is this nonsense about - what's the most important thing in your life." He says, "Oh, I believe in God." Well, fuck you, George Bush. You are an arsehole. Believe in God - that's his defence. That's what I can't stand about anybody that professes to be a great believer in a particular God, the way they condemn all the other Gods; and the way they start one war after the other because of the other Gods. That's the big evil in the world. And this man hangs three people a month - Hispanics and blacks,and he has reversed the gun laws in Texas, so they can again have concealed weapons. America must be fucking mad. How can they do this?


Interview: 13th January 2001


to be edited with further material.

JERZY DOMARADSKI



Why were you drawn to Lilian's Story?

There are not many stories which could be so involving emotionally. I found, reading one of the first drafts a few years ago, a fantastic universal story about a woman who was, at the end, victorious over oppression and horrible experiences from her childhood and adolescent years. And I said, `wherever it was written doesn't matter, but there's a story here which I want to see on the screen'. And each time I asked myself whether it was worth it to make the movie, was it the right movie for me to make at this moment, I also asked myself if I really wanted to see this story on the screen. And I was absolutely sure that it was worthwhile doing it. The next stage was when Ruth Cracknell came in as a lead. Then I was a hundred per cent sure it was the right choice.

Sydney people remember stories about Bea Miles. Were you interested in the question of what is normal, what is sane and how do people judge? This seems to be a strong theme emerging from the film.

Yes, I think I would agree with this. Pascal said that we are half angels and half pigs, there are two parts to our nature. At the same time, it is difficult to say, `Well, we are normal', when there is a crossing of these borders. All of us have some kind of schizophrenia, our mind is in some state of schizophrenia. Only social control keeps us within a framework and very few of us are ready to cross these borders.

And Lilian - why is she so fascinating? Because she is sad at the end. Mediocrity? Mediocrity is something which some people can't stand. They have the courage to cross the borders - not in the wrong sense, moving against other people, but moving against the rules, against social conventions. For Lilian the conventions are what she grew up in. She grew up in a rich family. In most cases like this, her life would be probably have been easy at age 20-something - she would find a husband, have children and so on. But she wanted something more. Of course, what she wanted was a desperate acceptance, acceptance by her father.

She sought acceptance by a looking for love, which is like a motif for the film. You have people looking for love, even prostitutes. For Lilian, this looking for love and finding love is like a necessity of life. But it is love, not in the physical sense, but in a much more metaphorical sense, an acceptance of why we are here, what we have to do. This life must be terminated sooner or later, so why are we here? So Lilian's story is a more general story, universal. It doesn't matter if she's living in the street or is living in a rich house. She's trying to understand the why of life, the reason for life - because when she was young she couldn't follow her ideas or her destiny in any way because she was stopped by her father. She was rejected by her father.

When, finally, she is older, she still has the chance for that experience. She tries, in a short period of time, to get everything. She finds a lover. She is like a surrogate mother to her young friend from institution. Finally she finds the acceptance she wants.

A very important element we wanted to show was that she is capable of forgiveness. She is the one who could forgive her father. Her father is never able to forgive her. She's also completely opposite to her brother, John, who is always around the home without being comfortable, present at home from the beginning. But the only time when he is really himself is when he is playing the tuba.

While there is isolation for Lilian, it is as if she wasn't really exiled because she found Shakespeare and Shakespeare is real life, because in Shakespeare you can find character, the big crime, emotion, love, hate, everything. That's why, even if Kate Grenville does not use Shakespeare in her novel, not direct quotations, we decided to do so because in Shakespeare you can find answers for many questions. And Lilian's emotional life is expressed by Shakespeare and his lines. It would be great if some people after seeing the film came back to Shakespeare and read him, it would be fantastic.

Where was Lilian going in the taxi at the end of the film? Realistically? Symbolically?

There must always be some ambiguity because we cannot expect that, at her age, Lilian would have a bright future. I think it is, as Dostoyevsky said, that a man is equal to the gods when he is not afraid to die. Lilian is ready for the final leap, to die -, but without necessarily dying tomorrow or a week later nor, necessarily, after months or after years. She is ready for a new experience. She is not afraid. That's why the metaphorical black angel with very different, smiling Bob Maza eyes is the taxi driver. I wanted to find somebody who is from a different culture, from a different perspective. Aborigines aren't afraid so much to die because they have lived through generations and now through the period of white culture. Death is something scary. Not for them. Physically, maybe they're scared, but there's a different build-up in the rhythm of nature. So the struggle is through the desert, through the endless landscape. This was intended to be more symbolic but it's difficult in a film to use strongly symbolic language because it could be very pretentious. But in some way something is opening for her, a new horizon is opening up. She speaks a line about the past, future and the present - and now she is somebody who is ready for everything, for whatever comes next, for what's happening around the next corner. Or something like this.

The film treats a theme which has come up so much in recent years, that under the surface respectability of families is an extraordinary amount of abuse. This is one of the striking, even shocking parts of the film, especially the portrait of Lilian's father.

That was a problem from the beginning for us because we didn't want to deal with child abuse. We knew it's the fashion and it is hard to know how much is true and how much an exaggeration. I don't know if it really happens so often now, maybe more in the past. But it is a real subject so we couldn't completely cut it away. Each time we tried to tell the story without the sequence, we couldn't. It happened. We have to make the connection. Something horrible happened, and if you can't talk about it for forty years...

It's not that she was really an intellectually disabled person with schizophrenia or a similar mental illness. She found a place where she was secure. It's not that she chose this mental institution. But it was locked and she locked herself away.

I asked for some advice on what the law is in Australia. Since the beginning of the 70s, you can't lock somebody up against their will. It is difficult, even if the family very much wanted this to happen. We had an example a few days before the film was released, the young man who committed the massacre at Port Arthur. There are too many mad people out there. But Lilian is not a lunatic at all. She simply chose to leave home in order to be safe from her father. So it's not a story about some experience of abuse - but we couldn't reject, completely remove this. We tried, but if there were to be some conflict and she was simply locked away - then we would be starting a completely different problem: how is it possible to keep somebody enclosed for so many years without a court decision or something official. It was a completely different issue. But, for dramatic effect, it's important something horrible happen between two people, otherwise why they are in such opposite worlds, why does she want his acceptance so desperately?

Forgiveness was another element which was very important for me: she could stand on her father's grave, giving him back this Lilian, the Lilian in the photo, her past - but without any hate. She wants to say sorry. She is very happy to say, `Sorry father', because his behaviour towards her was not simply the act of a person who had a normal sexual desire; it was the act of a dominant, authoritarian father. He was pressing her in order to control her. And, probably, behind this was a very strange but great love. It was not just a love and hate relationship. This gave some kind of dramatic edge to the whole story.

It came out completely independently, not our intention. Otherwise we would have tried to make the film about sexual abuse. I would prefer such a film to be really confronting. I have seen stories between brothers and sisters, love stories. But to show the story of a relationship between father and daughter, I have never seen this kind of film. It would be probably such a taboo that it would be rejected.

A few days ago, I read a story that in Japan it's not so unusual in fact. More often than we imagine, there is a sexual relationship between mothers and sons. This is a really strong taboo and probably we are not ready for this theme yet. I remember a dramatic story about this relationship; home becomes a madhouse for both of them because their bond is so close, so strong. It's very easy to cross the line but it is irreversible later. You can't forget it. But it was not our intention to make something extremely confronting. It was like the logic of Kate Grenville's book and in our treatment it helps for the characters in finding some kind of better understanding of why Lilian was like she was.

A quite different question - your vision of Sydney? It is not a Sydney that we immediately recognise as in more realistic films or series. But your cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, worked with Kzrystof Kieslowski on The Double Life of Veronique and Three Colours: Blue. In Lilian's Story, Sydney is filmed through filters. Fractured images of Sydney are offered which made the film different to look at and very striking.

There are two reasons. First, Sydney is connected with many features which are well-known from the many photographs, so it's like a tourist attraction. It's not only the Opera House, but Sydney has this very popular look. I didn't want to make the picture in a place which has been seen so many times. At the same time, Sydney is a unique city for me. This kind of story has a fantastic background and the city is high-rising, it is buildings in the background. So we tried to find a location which could help us more for the inner story, given the life of this big city, a 20th century city, of the new becoming older. There is something about Sydney and Lilian not being in this place which is for everybody. So we looked at Syndey from a different point of view.

Second, I wanted to make a picture this way, that it be recognised, as I said, but, at the same time, for people from outside, there would be a more universal story. This story could happen in any big city and probably in most of the big cities they have this kind of bag lady living on the streets. When you look closer at her life, why she was like this, you can discover very strange things.

I remember seeing a documentary on television about a woman who was living in Central Park, an incredible woman. She was a hippy in the '60s and she was quite successful living where they made this strip through the Park for the horses, this riding path. At one stage she fell in love with another hippy. She got pregnant. One day he left her one day and she lost her mind, simply. But she decided to stay and she lives in this place under the bridges because there's such a lot of them. It is a really dangerous place, Central Park. But she never left and she is building a completely imaginary world, that she is connected to the family of the Kennedys. In part it is true, but at the same time it's her fantasy story. I said look, that could be Lilian in New York, Lilian in Paris. You have these kind of people living along the Seine River in Paris. A few months ago I met a lot of beggars living under Waterloo Bridge in London. Nowadays more and more people are living on the street. I remember in New York, downtown, I met a man and we started talking. He was a professor at a university. Now he is living on the street. So it can happen that some tragic events trigger this and that's why I think Lilian's story is a universal story.

With regard to universality, your Polish background and that of your cinematographer seem to indicate that, along with the universality, you are bringing a European- Polish sensibility to an Australian experience.

Yes, but it's not for me to judge. It's as if I am growing up. Slawomir and I, we started together in film school. Slawomir, in recent years, has been working with many leading directors. He worked with John Duigan, with Kieslovski before that and with many, many others. He's not working now in Poland, he's working mostly in America. So, properly, his background is from Poland. His attitude to film-making is different. It's less commercial. It's more - and the industry loves to say it but hates to use it - `arty'.

I remember when I went to New York at the beginning of the 80s with one of my movies. There was a screening in the New York Museum of Modern Art. I was praised and everyone said, `Oh, it's a fantastic art movie'. I was so proud. Then a friend of mine who had been much longer in the States said, `You have no chance in Hollywood', because 'arty' is not commercial success.

Now, it's changing - you can be arty and make money if you can. So it's not so bad. But at the beginning of the 80s still, arty was not really a compliment from an American point of view. He was a fantastic collaborator because each time he said, 'Don't worry about these images. We'll find them. You have to know exactly what you want to say through the scene.' He's not the kind of cinematographer who wants to make a beautiful picture. It's nothing that he has made more than 40 feature movies - for him just having a nice look doesn't matter. He wants some intensity and if I, as a director, gave him the chance with actors acting with some emotion, he said, 'For me it's very easy to find the equivalent with the light, with the colours'.

The worst is when the scene is about nothing. In those cases he was lost. He said, "I don't know how to do it." He was very honest; he admitted it. Because he's a very sensitive person and he could react to the scene, watching it, very often he would change the decision we planned and did it in a different way, 'Have this different light, or use the sun', because we were shooting a lot of it in the streets. It was difficult to predict some events. There can be different weather, like today or tomorrow it can be rain and we have to shoot because there's no option in eight weeks' shooting. So that's why when somebody told me, 'Oh, you have a European way of filming,' I said, 'No, we have simply a way of filming by reacting to what we have around us'. It would be stupid if I planned shooting this way and planned that there would be rain. I could do it with a Hollywood production because they could cover the scene with rain or whatever. They can make it up in the studio.

But it's not the same with the actors. If the actors are giving me something I didn't expect, something new, my task as a director - and I tried to work this way with Barry Otto and Toni Collette - is to give them a free hand and say, 'Show me whatever you feel. If it is too much, I will tell you when'. The worst thing is an actor trying to keep too rigidly to what is written. It doesn't matter what is written. It is what you feel - you have to create a character. So it's more difficult to improvise but, as Milos Foreman said, to improvise, you have to be very well prepared, because improvisation is very dangerous if you take the first idea as the best one. Improvisation should be as a result of many ideas. Finally, you are taking something which became new because of all this work around.

Some reflections on Struck by Lightning?

It was my first film in Australia and I made it less than two years after I arrived. I came to Australia as director in residence at the Sydney Film School. When I read the script, written by Trevor Farrant, I said to him, `Look, I don't know how to do it, how to work with those kinds of actors'. I had worked with professional actors, but how to combine professional actors with non-professional? I didn't know how to do it.

But it isn't a really great task. I think Trevor has, as a writer, an enormous sense of humour. What I like is that we tried to make this a bittersweet comedy. I don't know if we succeeded at the end because of many factors, because it was low budget, shooting in South Australia. Unfortunately, I hadn't the chance to invite the best actors, to choose whoever I wanted. I had to work with whatever cast was available in Sydney and Melbourne. I was also limited because I had the Downs Syndrome amateurs. They can't act in the same way. It was difficult. I didn't want to risk manipulating them because that would not be fair. But I had Garry Mc Donald and that was a great experience for me.

Secondly, I was probably a little at a distance from the culture - not now, as I understand it more after nine years in Australia. But it was a fantastic experience for me and it took great courage from the producer to risk this. Finally, I think, we didn't do badly. It was a small film, but in some way it was different. I know people are very often surprised when they watch this film on video. It's a different kind of movie.

Very humane.

Humane, yes. There was a different factor and it's coincidental, people from the fringe. This was the script they gave me and I preferred this script to a different one. As you know, sometimes it takes many years before a film comes to fruition. But I think the fruition this year, 1996, already means that there are too many films that are similar in some way. But I think the distributors are ready to take the risk because most of the films could have been done five or six years ago. I can imagine that Lilian's Story could have been done four years ago - Shine, Cosi, Lilian's Story, Angel Baby - but probably there was a time when the distributors decided they wanted to take the risk. And, accidentally, they came from different companies - from Miramax, from Fox, from Beyond and from South Australia. Maybe Rain Man, My Left Foot were the movies which gave us more encouragement to risk. We're all always looking for the theme which has a different emotional expression when we focus on some extreme situation that characters are put in. Because a movie is not about life, it's something more, in some way it's compensating life.

So having a character like Lilian, immediately you can exercise your imagination. And, for actors, the play is much richer. It's very difficult to make a film about a very average life. There is a flaw like in the water, but you have to take a magnifying glass and look at it. And, taking a magnifying glass, everything is bigger.

One of the reasons why more and more film-makers are trying to explore this kind of territory: what is normality, what is abnormal, what is schizophrenic?, is that society, and we, are under pressure from all sides. We are not as we were. Normality is a very different category, especially after the events of Sunday, the Port Arthur massacre. It's not about who has the right to have a gun - that's the wrong question, that's not the subject. What is the difference? They should reduce possession of guns to a pistol or rifle with only a small magazine with bullets. I say, 'So what?'. He could have a few magazines. He could do it with the one revolver because he was shooting from a very close range.

So the issue is not 'how?', but what created the mechanism that he could do this? That's the question. And it could be fantastic and a great movie, not that he is schizophrenic, but why this schizophrenic is goes in this way. We have to be positive and explore how this person has tried to cope with this very traumatic experience from his earliest years.

Bea Miles and religion?

I didn't introduce religious themes, not even once was the name of God mentioned. But that was a real question, especially with Bea Miles at the end of her life. She was close to religion, to the Catholic church. She was in St Vincents. But, at the same time, maybe there was a reason that she was older and she was simply being taken care of, so I couldn't find a deeper reason except that, for her, Shakespeare is like looking for God and looking for love is her life at this stage and looking for love is looking for God.


Interview: May 1st 1996

DONALD CROMBIE

We never thought or I never thought - I imagine I wasn't alone - that there would ever be a feature film industry in this country. I never thought I would ever make a feature film. I always thought it would be nice. Through the '60s, I was working at Film Australia doing documentaries. The only reason I started doing drama was that I had been to NIDA - not as an actor - it was a technical course and it fitted you for stage management and for directing plays. But it demystified the actor, so when there was a demand for dramatised documentaries - and they were public service training films - Stanley Hawser, who was then running Film Australia, thought I could do it because I'd been to NIDA. So I got to direct, along with others. Peter Weir did one too, and a couple of other directors who went on to do feature films.

So, when the renaissance occurred in the '70s and I got my chance with Caddie, I never thought I would ever make another one. In fact, making one was almost enough. I thought, oh, well, that's fine, and I'd done it. When it was successful and it actually worked and people went to it, Tony Buckley, the producer, said, "We've got to make another one." I said, "How do we do that?" I mean, we were very naive.

The other thing that was amazing, it never occurred to me to go and work in America. Today directors seem to make one film and they're off to Hollywood. Of course, the reverse is true. The Hollywood industry is very, very interested in looking for new talent wherever it comes. But in that era I don't think they were so interested in taking on Australian directors, because it was quite some years before even people like Peter Weir got offered a Hollywood film as opposed to going there. I think we were seen as an exotic species, although it was fascinating. I remember once we went to a man - he was an agent, I think, in America but he represented Warner Bros here - and he had the box-office returns for every day and he could just look and say, "Oh, yes, such-and-such did so-and-so in Melbourne." So they were watching us and they knew about us, but they didn't rush to us with offers. It was strange. Then I think they realised subsequently down the track that the best thing to do is just hire Australians and away you go.

Do I Have to Kill My Child? and Who Killed Jenny Langby? What attracted you to these docu-dramas?

Jenny Langby was for Community Welfare in Adelaide. Basically what they wanted was a film that said, "Look over the fence. The person who's living next door to you could be in trouble," a la Jenny Langby, who was obviously going under with a multitude of personal and social problems and no-one knew. The message in the film is with the neighbour coming and lookinging after the kids, after the event, of course; it's all too late to save the woman.

That's where I met Anne Deveson and we first worked together. We brought her in to front it, because it was written by myself and Greg Barker, and Anne came in because we were sort of faking it as a documentary, a dramatised documentary which presented as a genuine story. At that time Anne had the profile of being a front person.

I think we instigated Do I Have to Kill My Child?, Anne Deveson and I. Anne Deveson came up with the idea because she had a personal interest in child abuse, baby-bashing we should call it, as opposed to sexual abuse. That was just being discovered. It was really creepy that there was virtually nothing written about it, it didn't happen. I don't think I'm revealing a confidence here, but I think with her third child she had felt the impulse to injure the child. She was a young mother with three kids and it was all too much. So being Anne Deveson, she started to explore and discovered there was this hidden syndrome in society. The research that Anne did was quite extraordinary: women admitting that they would literally lock themselves in a room to stop them getting to the kid. Pretty horrific stuff. And you realise when you get out into the suburbs, or not even the suburbs, there are people with immense loneliness and huge problems that no-one knows about.
Around the time the film was made, it was just starting to come into medical literature, so it really was ground-breaking thing and so she and I decided we would try and do a dramatised film. We went to Film Australia and they put up some money and our friends at Channel 9 put up the rest, which is amazing when you think of Channel 9 today - they wouldn't touch a film like that with a barge pole, being a one-off for a start and an hour-long drama. Anyway, we made the film and it was hugely successful. I think it rated 40 in Sydney and something similar in Melbourne. It did numbers you only get with Test Matches and one-off big sporting events today! Anne received hugee mail from that one film. She said the people rang in and wrote that they thought they were unique, that they were monsters, and then they realised. So that was an extraordinarily satisfying experience. It really worked.

We tried to do another one after it. Anne wasn't involved in this one. I was asked by the Tasmanian Community Welfare to make a film which we called Slippery Slide, basically showing how, if you send a kid to boys' prison, the slippery slide means he will end up in jail, or a very strong likelihood. I went down and read copiously. I was given access, which is apparently pretty rare, to the Community Welfare files on these kids, and some of them are just shocking. You could start at the back of the file and go forward and it would end with the kid at 18 in Risden Jail.

We made the film and, again, Channel 9 took it. But it didn't rate nearly as well because we realised that, with Slippery Slide, you tend to say it's somebody else's problem, that wouldn't happen to me. So it didn't have a wide appeal.

These films were significant and you have often stayed in the suburbs with your feature films. How does Caddie seem in retrospect?

A long way away! What can you say about Caddie? It was fascinating because it was a period of Australia I didn't know about. I didn't realise what went on. I suppose there are similar themes: a woman who was left on her own had to make do with two kids before the era of Social Services. It's so long ago, I suppose I should look at it again one day.

You created an atmosphere of inner Sydney suburbs, the pub atmosphere.

Yes, we got that right, apparently. I think the nearest I ever went to that was in Adelaide, where they still had six o'clock closing. I never saw the six o'clock swill here. By the time I was able to have a drink, it was back to ten o'clock. But I remember going to Adelaide with Film Australia and experiencing something of it, but perhaps not quite as frenetic. We did the research and talked to plenty of people who remembered it. We got the whole craziness of men ordering ten beers and then drinking them as they were shouting, "Time, gentlemen, please," and the girls behind the bar, what they went through. We spoke to barmaids who gave us quite a bit of background.

You got a real feel for the women and the rapport between them.

With Helen Morse and Jackie Weaver again, Melissa Jaffer.

And the Greek connection.

Yes, this was based on the book. The Greek was killed in real life. I'm not quite sure where he was killed, whether it was here or in Greece, but Caddie's life was very sad, a battler story.

You said you weren't expecting to make another feature film, but you directed The Irishman.

That's because, as I say, we were naive and just thought, that's nice, we've done that, and then Tony Buckley's saying, "you've got to get out and, what will we do next?" We didn't have anything. I had read The Irishman some years before and I had liked it. Because my family came from western Queensland, I've always found the Australian outback very evocative. I really like working in the outback and I love those sorts of stories and people. Tony read the book and we wrote the script and away we went and raised the money.

Strangely, it wasn't easy. I remember saying Matt Carroll saying to us, "You'll be able to write your own ticket," because of Caddie being successful. "You'll be right, you can make anything you want." Well, that wasn't true. It was as hard to raise the money for The Irishman as it was for Caddie. But people didn't rush forward with money and investors didn't come out of the woodwork to give us money. But I think it was a film that was pretty true to the era that it was set in, and to the characters. Again we researched fairly carefully what life was like in that particular era.

I went up to north Queensland. The Irishman is a true story, that's what actually interested me about it. It's based on Elizabeth O'Connor's husband's father. She wrote it at a place called Forest Home Station, in the Gulf just out of Georgetown. I went to the place where she wrote the book and sat on the verandah. She had just sat there and wrote what she could see. I can't remember the fictional name of the station, but it was actually Forest Home, and her husband, Phil, was the manager and his father was the teamster.

I found out later that it had a better ending in real life, but I suspect it wouldn't have been satisfying in the cinema. He had the fight with the boy. Since horses were coming to an end, motor transport was running him out of the Gulf. He went down and started working in the timber, which was in the movie, but he ended up pulling cane trains. The last use of a horse team in north Queensland was pulling cane wagons, and the old man ended up there.

Phil, the son, who was Michael in the story, when he was a man, 24 or 25, I think, went to look for his father. He found him somewhere around Tully and they went and had a drink. They had the one drink and the father said to him, "Well, I suppose you've got something to do." He interpreted this as meaning don't wait around and go, so he went and never saw him again. He died in Brisbane. It wouldn't have been a very good ending in a movie; it's probably better he fell over a cliff. But it was, I thought, a very human story where they actually did meet up and the old man cut all his ties with the family.

And family ties in Cathy's Child?

I was commissioned to make it. The producers came to me with a script, so I didn't have anything to do with the writing or the evolving of the project; it was just a directing job. But I actually liked that. I think of my feature films, it's probably my favourite. It was probably the most successful for me, mainly because I think we were extraordinarily successful in creating that character, Cathy Bikos. Michelle Fawdon is obviously not Maltese, but she pulled that off brilliantly, I thought. The accent, I'm told, is perfect. She lived with a family and that's how she achieved it. That was a very good project to work on.

Based on newspaper stories?

Yes, Dick Wordley was still alive. It's an absolutely true story. I think that was his first, but he made a bit of a profession out of chasing runaway kids around the world after that. He never gave up. He was a typical journalist, a drink problem and a few other problems. I did meet him.

It raised issues of post-war migration and intercultural and multicultural problems, such a contrast between Australia and Greece.

It was that Greek patriarchy thing, wasn't it? The father believed he had the absolute right to take the child and go wherever he wanted. She was a strong woman in the sense that, once she went, she had to do it all on her own.

The Greek focus is in The Heartbreak Kid, patriarchal Greek dominance sanctified by the Orthodox Church, and Head On, the same kind of strong Greek family focus. It would be an interesting study to look at those films and see what they're telling the Australian audience about multiculturalism. So Cathy's Child would be significant in that development.

I hadn't thought about that, but you're right. A Greek in Caddie, a Greek in Cathy's Child.

Then you went back to social questions in The Killing of Angel Street?

That was a labour of love. That was the film we really cared about and wanted to make. Ii was very difficult to get going, to raise the money. We went through several writers. Michael Craig ended up writing - he and Evan Jones, the West Indian writer who wrote Kangaroo and Wake in Fright. He came in in the end. I went to England. I wanted Julie Christie to play the lead and, by this stage, we thought with Caddie behind us and The Irishman, we had a bit of a chance to attract a star. And sure enough we did, we got Julie Christie, but unfortunately she came at a price that the market wouldn't wear. We went to America. We actually did the whole waltz through the studios and I discovered for the first and only time the expression "vehicle dependent", which described Julie Christie - unless Spielberg was directing or she had a big male star with her, they wouldn't back her, so the money that her agent was asking was just too rich, so we eventually had to let her go.

Then we offered it to Helen Morse and she said she would do it, but she didn't like the script and wanted it changed, so that's why we brought Evan Jones out. We sat up in a motel unit somewhere on the North Shore for weeks, getting the script right and, then, on Christmas Eve she withdrew. It has never been explained why she withdrew. Helen, I think, had her own demons about film, so she pulled out. But, of course, with her went the money. So we then had to start all over again.

I think Elizabeth Alexander did a good job, but you just lose your judgment. Originally, Bill Hunter was going to be in it and, for some reason, I felt that Bill and Elizabeth didn't work as a combination, so we had to let Bill go, and he's never spoken to me since. And maybe he was right, maybe he could have worked, but I felt John Hargraves and Elizabeth worked, but Bill was designed for Julie Christie.

John Hargraves was always very good with the larrikin side of things.

Yes, he was terrific in the film. I'm quite pleased with the film. I think it worked and it did what we set out to do.

The background of Sydney politics?

Again we researched it pretty thoroughly and we got fairly close to the beast, I think. We were peculiarly warned off by none other a person than John Dowd, who's a judge now, I believe. He rang Tony Buckley and said that this film was a bit close to the bone and - talking about me - he said, "He's got young children and he should be thinking a bit about what he's doing." It didn't put us off, but you did look under the car for about two days afterwards because you thought, hang on a minute, what's all this about... And the nexus between government and big business and crime. They're very comfortable together.

Did Heatwave have the same problem?

Yes, Heatwave and Angel Street came out at the same time - a bit unfortunate because I think they're quite different films. I remember having almost a physical altercation with a character in Berlin because Angel Street got taken to Berlin. I was bailed up at a party by a journalist who had a few wines too many and he started abusing me because the wrong film was in competition, and I was saying, "Well, I'm sorry. What can I do?" And he lambasted it, said how dreadful it was, that it was a disgrace, that Heatwave was a masterpiece and hadn't been recognised. And I thought, "Talk to the festival director, not me." This bloke was pushing me and being very aggressive and I thought, this is all crazy. But Heatwave is very different. Some people prefer it to Angel Street and other people don't.

So then it was Kitty and the Bagman?

That probably shouldn't have been made. It was a bit of an aberration. That only got made because we were flush with funds. That was when it became ridiculously easy to make films. Kitty probably didn't deserve to be made. There were better things we should have been doing with our time. I don't have any great brief for it now. What was interesting about Kitty was that it was our own particular crime scene. I was very annoyed to hear that the American distributor had put on a frontpiece to the film, a card or something, that said that it was a homage to the Warner Bros gangster films of the '30s. And I thought, absolute bullshit! How dare they? Again, what they were really saying was we didn't have a crime culture of our own in Australia, therefore they were trying to put it into - and I suppose in some sort of weird way they were trying to make it more palatable to American audiences, which didn't work, so it didn't do any good in America.

.......... it had a touch of the Damon Runyans as well, I suppose.

Yes, but it was again - Phil Cornford, he's a writer whose byline you see a lot in - he works for the Herald now, but when we were doing that, he worked for Mr Murdoch. He's a journalist and he and the other fellow, John Birney I think, were both sort of hardboiled old newspapermen - John Birney was older than Phil. Phil Cornford was a man who shouldn't have been born in this century. He was a buccaneer. He really should have been born a hundred years ago. He did things like dressing as an Afghan and crossing into Afghanistan and he used to do crazy things to write about. He just loved that era and he loved the way those women ran their crime empires and they were at each other's throat, so it was probably a valid dramatic thing, but I don't think the film was all that good. We didn't quite capture - - -

Well, crime of the last century in Robbery Under Arms?

We all knew that we were making a giant western and we would never have another opportunity like that in Australia. I mean, the budget was huge by contemporary standards. I think it was $7,000,000 then which was probably about 12 or more today. It was a very big enterprise. Ken Hannam was the other director, so we just shared it. I did the first three hours and he did the last three. I had never done a mini-series.

It was a great opportunity to actually experience - probably the closest I would ever get to the experience of what it would be like making a big western in the United States. I mean, if you wanted 500,000 head of cattle, you got them. It was all there. It's a great book, great characters and bringing them to life - and I think we cast it well. Ken and I did the casting and we found these young actors just out of NIDA, Stephen Vidler particularly, who has gone on to be quite a name in the industry. The girl I thought was terrific in it was Jane Menelaus. She's now Mrs Rush. She was very, very good in that and she has gone on to make quite a career as a stage actress in Australia, but now of course she's probably looking after Geoffrey.

She was in a play just recently in Melbourne. And Sam Neill, I suppose, has that kind of flair for being the Captain Starlight?

Yes. You read some criticisms about why he did that. I don't know, I suppose it depends how you see - I mean, I obviously saw the Finch style. I thought he and Finch were somewhat similar. I didn't think they were a mile apart. And I mean, when you read the book, I think the way Sam portrayed the character was pretty right as far as that book.

At least it's there as a visualising.

Yes. I think the choice of locations - doing it in South Australia was interesting, because I think it was set around Goulburn originally, and the Wilpena area of the Flinders Ranges was a very spectacular backdrop for that. Actually, they did the other one down there too, didn't they, I think.

The Finch one?

Yes, I think that was done there.

There are two more films, then I will ask you about mini-series and telemovies. Playing Beatty Bow.

I think that worked all right. I'm amazed now, when I'm still working and I meet young actors and actresses who were all brought up on it. I mean, they have never heard of Caddie, but if you say Playing Beatty Bow, "Oh, yes, we saw that when we were in year - whatever." So I think they would have made quite a lot of money out of that, the producers, because the cassette runs were huge. It was helped by being in the curriculum too, which is a great start for a film.

It was a fun thing to make.

It was a nice imagination of Sydney in the last century and re-creation.

Yes. There was an example of having a very good designer, George Liddell. He designed that whole set, which was again based loosely on what The Rocks were like back in that period, and he just imagined the rest. I always remember the snakes. That's one thing Imogen didn't have to act about; she was terrified of snakes. And when that woman pushed her into the - and the snake struck the glass, Imogen wasn't acting. That was for real.

I haven't seen Rough Diamonds.

Nor have I. I mean, Rough Diamonds is something I never talk about. Actually, I should have taken my name off it because there was a case where the distributor came in and altered the film without my agreement. See, one of the things that really annoyed me about it was that - the history of Rough Diamonds was that I was in north Queensland, it must have been when we were doing The Irishman, and we were going around doing the location survey, and the chap who was showing us around said - we had passed a road gang and there's a character leaning on a shovel or something, and he said, "That's Bill Bloggs and he owns - some station that was 60,000 hectares of prime grazing country," and I said, "What's he doing in a road gang?" He said, "He's broke." So then I went into this and found that in the rural crises that come every now and again, the people who own these huge properties can actually be cash-strapped.

So I thought this was the subject for a film, so I came up with a storyline which was Rough Diamonds basically, and took it to Film Australia. It was too rich for them. It wasn't a feature, it was an hour - this is in the same era as we're doing Do I Have To Kill My Child - and originally it was going to have Michelle Fawdon in the lead. Anyway, it went into the bottom drawer.

Then some years ago Damien Parer came to me and said, "Have you got a feature?" He was going to Queensland and they have a scheme where they would help producers, give them money, if they had a couple of feature scripts. I said, "I've got this thing," so I showed it to him and he read and thought it was terrific, but it needed to be developed. Then we introduced - I mean, it was a very serious story. It was about a chap who's going to lose his property because the banks were coming in on him. Then we introduced an element that he was an untrained but good singer, and he meets a girl who's a singer who's fleeing from a bad marriage, and they have a romance and he ends up - I can't remember how it ends now, but anyway they end up together and he starts making some money in the country and western circuit, which helps keep the bank off his back and saves his property, that's right.

We were originally going to have Craig Mc Lachlan, then he got a job in London, so we went for Jason Donovan. We had six or seven songs in it and away we went, and anyway when the distributor - the distributor, I believe, sold it as a musical and sold it very well to Rank in England, and when they saw it, the went, "It's not a musical. It's actually a very real social realist drama with some songs." So what they did then, they cut out all the bit that mattered to me, which was the whole story about this bloke losing a property. So the whole reason for the film, the reason I got involved in it and evolved the whole thing, was taken away by the distributor. The FFC in their wisdom backed the distributors and said, "If they think it's got to be like this, it's got to be like this." So I said "Fine," and we parted company. I've never seen the film and I never will, I don't think. It's terrible, I believe, because it doesn't have any heart; there's nothing there. It's never been released, thank God. But I wanted to take my name off it and I was talked out of it, and I now regret that because I realise I should have taken my name off it, because otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned it, and they're the reasons.

And he's got it in his book.

Yes, I noticed that and I thought, "Oh, my God." It was interesting because I remember years ago Tony Buckley, Anne Deveson and I wanted to make a film about the Ingham rapes. You might wonder why anybody would want to make a film about the Ingham rapes, but we thought there was a good story there and Anne was very keen. It certainly was a very dramatic story - I don't know whether you knew about it. I won't bore you with the details of it. It was ritualised rape. Basically, these men in Ingham were raping the women, and because they didn't know it wasn't like this in the rest of the world, they just accepted it. It went on over a period of years.

Anne and I actually went up to Ingham and interviewed people about it and there was a script written. Olivia Newton-John? and I got together and we were going to do a film in America. Anyway, that fell through, so we thought, Olivia Newton-John?, terrific idea. She'll be good. And she was looking to do a straight drama. So we went to Dave Ling(?) and said, "Would you like to be involved in this?" and he said, "No. That would be completely wrong because it's a straight drama and the audience will walk into the cinema expecting seven songs, because we've got Olivia." And of course the same thing with Jason Donovan. I should have realised that, and that's what happened, I think. The distributors all went, "Jason, he's going to sing, that's good. It will be a light entertainment." It was a romance, but ...

Just a word about the fact that you made a lot of mini-series and some telemovies now. You found that satisfying?

Yes. What happened was it became increasingly difficult to finance films and easier, conversely, to do television. I really like the mini-series form; I think being given four hours to tell a story as opposed to 90 minutes is actually terrific, and the few that I've done that I like, I think have been good. The Two Heroes were, I think, terrific. I think they're some of my most memorable and pleasurable experiences making film, because I thought that story was terrific, a really very strong story, and I was quite pleased with the results.

The other one that - because as you can probably see, with the theme - if I have a philosophy about what I do, I like it to have some meaning. That's why I've never gone to America. I just couldn't go over there and work on - I mean, you look at some of my colleagues like Phil Noyce, who's gone to America - fine, that's his bag. But I've no interest in going over there and making Clear and Present Danger or one of those sorts of stories.

I suppose the most successful mini-series I did was a film called The Alien Years, which was done - Peter Yeldham wrote the story and it was done for the ABC. It was basically the story of the World War One Germans in the Barossa Valley, and it was actually true of the whole of that period all over Australia, where they were persecuted because they were Germans - even though they might have come to Australia in 1840 when the first settlers came to the Barossa from Germany to escape persecution. These people - if your name was Muller, you didn't have a very good time. A lot of it was economic bastardry - there were two bakers in town, one English, one German. Well, it didn't take a lot to suddenly say, "Well, I heard old Hans down the road saying that the Kaiser is great." And the enmities that had flowed from that period were still in existence in the mid-'80s - that's when that show was made, '87 I think it was.

When it was screened - I mean, it did quite well; I think it was one of the highest-rating ABC mini-series of that period - but of course, they all watched it down in the Barossa and the result was extraordinary. For a start, in Adelaide the talkback radio, the one they have at about 9.00 in the morning, for three days was just people ringing in with their own stories. A huge healing went on. Families who hadn't spoken to each other for three generations buried the hatchet, and I was invited - and I regret not going - to have lunch with the patriarch of the Grant family, the Orlando winemakers, they came out here in 1840, and he wanted to have lunch with me because he thought the film was so significant, and what it had done for that community.

And one of the ABC commissioners in South Australia is Peter Lemann's wife, Margaret - Peter Lemann, the famous winemaker. I think she was a commissioner. She reported back what this film had done for that community, and I imagine for other German-English? communities. So I thought that was well worth making. That was a terrific film to do.

You also made some of the ..........

I did that for money .......... See, unfortunately what has happened is that it's got harder and harder to make what I would call meaningful television. In fact, conversely, it's now come round the other way: it's easier now to get a film up, or it seems to be, than to get a television drama up. And what you're seeing now - I think it's becoming more and more just entertainment, if you have a message or you want to make something with a bit of soul to it and get it on television, it's Very difficult.

Well, you're not seeing very much, are you? The ABC may be your only port now. The commercials seem to be - for a start they only seem interested in long-form series. You don't see many mini-series. I know there's one being made, Channel 7 is doing something that Tony Buckley is producing from one of Bryce Courtenay's books, Potato(?)(?) Factory, which is a four-hour mini-series, but there seems to be very little of that sort of work, because mostly the prices went up. But you couldn't make a Heroes today or an Alien Years - I just don't think they would be interested. I don't think they would buy anything period - although Potato Factory is, so I'm probably wrong there.

Then you have this terrible trouble with casting, where the networks, for putting in a third of budget - probably not even that, insist on casting control, and then they want Ray Martin or somebody to play the lead because it's the only way they think the audience will watch it. So the directors - I mean, the last thing I did, that Feds thing you mentioned, that was a nightmare, absolute nightmare, the casting, dealing with television network executives. They have never heard of half the actors in Australia and they're not interested. They say unless you can get them on the cover of TV Week, that's it, that's the way you cast them.

It's an uphill battle. Looking at the .......... especially, say, between '75 and '85 - that's a very good body of material with a very strong humane Australian streak, it seems to me.

Yes, well, as I say, I'm quite pleased - and there's a couple of films you've probably never even heard of - I think one of my best films was a film I made in Adelaide called Parents, which was about parenting, which was made for Community Welfare. It was just made on tape, it was a very cheap production but it was dramatised. We've had four kids and we had probably the usual problems, and I wrote this from the heart and it was designed to show to parents, when their kids go into teens, what they're likely to expect. I think it's one of the best films I've ever made, because of course no-one has ever seen it, apart from - it's shown in community groups in South Australia.

We did another one down there which was about sexual abuse. It was again designed for teachers - how they could recognise in their classroom a kid who may or not be being abused. They were quite worthwhile films to get involved in. There's no money in it, you just do it for love, but I would rather do that than make a Movie of the Week in Los Angeles.


Interview: 18th December 1998

JOHN CURRAN



You grew up in the United States but you have become part of the Australian film world.

I went to art school. I was always interested in drawing and primarily wanted to write and illustrate children's books. That's what I thought I was going to do. Then I got a scholarship to Syracuse University and studied illustration there. But, during that time, I realised that it wasn't what I was going to do for a living. I had that profound feeling that I liked doing this but I moved to be being more of a graphic designer when I got out of school. And through that I got into working in advertising, to making small films. I got exposed. Film-making was what I wanted to do and I felt an affinity for it.

I moved to Australia when I was 25 in an effort to get into film. It meant reinventing myself to a degree by moving and by changing careers rapidly. I thought this would be easier to do in a place where nobody had any expectations of me.

Why Australia rather than some other destination?

Because I knew I was going to go through a period of suffering, that I was going to start at the bottom of something. I come from a big family, eight kids, and had gone to New York City where some of my family are still based. I just felt the need to wipe the slate and start again and I did not want the pressure of hearing why are you doing that, not doing something you're successful at. Which is probably self-perceived, but I wanted a break, wanted some distance and I wanted to live a climate that was warm. I was sick of the east coast of the States. I didn't know anyone from Australia but, from what I'd heard about it, it seemed an ideal place. I came and visited and fell in love with it, especially Sydney.

And you found film and films in Sydney?

Coming from America, particularly in the early 80s, I was never really exposed, in the circles I ran in, to any truly independent cinema. In moving to Australia I quickly became aware of the early works of Bruce Beresford and Peter Weir. I was directed to see films, like Puberty Blues because they would help me understand the culture. Seeing these films was like hearing a totally different voice of film-making and, because it's a small town - and I was still working in advertising at this point and had access to people who had worked with these directors - all the crews worked with everyone else. I quickly started directing. That was my way into film, by directing commercials and music videos, and then developing ideas with the producer Martha Coleman who was working with me at the time.

What emerged from these ideas?

We made a short film called Down, Rusty, Down which did very well in the circuit. It starred Noah Taylor, Bob Ellis, Jonathan Hardy and Tex Perkins, and was shot in black and white, by Dion Beebe, the same cinematographer who shot Praise. It was based on events that led up to my dog being neutered, and I filmed it with humans. It's a 50 minute film, but it's about three minutes in when you realise that these guys are playing dogs, it's a gang of dogs. It's not so overtly done, more subtly handled, and that was the point. We draw the parallel between men and beasts. It did quite well and has a cult following. Noah Taylor says that he is recognised in England more from that film than any other, people saying to him, 'Hey, your'e that dog guy'.

It's at the other end of the spectrum stylistically from Praise, dealing with the same themes but they are two very opposite films.

You have said that their films say a lot about film-makers and their choices.

I think that the genesis of any film, or of any filmmaker, is the realisation that it's a love affair and you choose your ideas accordingly. Sometimes you fluke an idea but the reality is that, if you commit to an idea, you realise that it's going to take up two years of your life. For a person to view it, its $11 and two hours of their time. But the film is funded so it's also committing the company's money. It's much more of a commitment than it would be for the punter.

As you have more experience, maybe you develop more of a commercial sensibility about an idea: I like this idea because it satisfies something personal but, also, I think it will be a marketable commodity. It becomes a natural instinct that you develop. But I've been really fortunate that my exposure and my desire to become a film-maker came because of the kind of film that I was talking about, like the early works of Jane Campion. There was a tradition in the country of pursuing more personal types of themes and I was inspired more to become an Australian filmmaker than just a filmmaker. I didn't want to be an American filmmaker. I have a view of American films, as everybody does. You tend to lump them into the Hollywood-style, that neat sense of closure, the spoon-fed formula. A lot of films you see you know how they're going to end but you let them take you on this happy little ride.

What drew you to Praise?

Praise was written by Andrew Mc Gahan. Martha Coleman got the option and she developed it. I read the book and loved it. I just loved the characters. What I also liked was that it represented a view of Australian youth that I could relate to. It was probably a reaction to the last project I'd done. You know the way the last project determines the next thing you do, you tend to react. With Praise, I couldn't hide behind a lot of tricks I'd been developing as a director, absurd comedy, satire.

With Praise, the quality that I reacted to was its honesty. There was tone and style, humour and pace that comes from the character of Gordon himself, a subjective film. What I liked was the inherent style of the film, the pace of the film and the dialogue. It came from him and so had to be handled in a realist fashion and in a very honest way. That frightened me quite a bit. But, as a creative person, I am always attracted to things that scare me. Deep down there's always a reason why and it probably says something to me as a person. A lot of people who knew me and my work for whom I had written scripts were confused as to why I wanted to pursue it. It didn't have the neat closure of a thing that I would write or develop in something of my own. They didn't see the humour in it that I saw. I saw that it was into comedy, that it was really a romantic comedy. It was the kind of romantic comedy that I could live with. I don't think I'll ever do a broad romantic comedy.

I also liked the fact that it did not have a lot of easy answers to it. As a human being I recognise in myself a lot of weakness that I'm constantly coming to terms with, fighting. Most of the inner battles I have are about coming to grips with weakness, either overcoming it or accepting it, that kind of conflict.

Praise, I think, is essentially about that inner dichotomy where, on the one hand, you have the logic of knowing this pursuit could be damaging but, on the other, you're compelled to pursue it. I think, Andrew ended the film in a really clever way. He painted this love story which, at all levels, had people pursuing things that they know aren't good for them but they are compelled to pursue. The story works in that way on the level of love, of Cynthia's approach to sex, of the approach to drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. All the things that are bad for them they still pursue.

I like this view of love as a potentially dangerous thing. Because it is. You're putting yourself at risk. I like the fact that it's a sex and drugs story but the drugs are handled in a way that they support the theme of weakness. It's not gratuitous drug use and it's not romanticised. It's saying that here is something that everybody dabbles in - but why, when they know that it's all potentially harmful? Drugs are not glorified and the characters don't become addicted to drugs in a way that it drives the narrative.

The world of Praise: the old men's home which is so enclosed, Gordon allowing himself to be enclosed. When he went to the wedding, it surprises you that he goes out into the world. What drew you to these characters?

The character of Vas was in the book, an old emphesemic man who is Gordon's closest friend in the home. In the book there are more men of varying ages but in the film I pushed all the ages up. The man next door is fairly young, the wife beater, but I wanted there to be a clear delineation between Gordon and what's outside the walls of his room.

For the designer and for the cinematographer, we stripped back the room and made it very stark and like the character of Gordon, very simple. To me it was an extension of his head space.

Outside his head was the potential of his future: the old emphasemic who plays this love song and smokes too much and tends to mourn the loss of some love; we never really know but we sense a failed love in his life; on the other side, the other wall we have a Latin lover who pretends to be a lover, but it's a violent love and that's where love can go as well. In no way does Gordon have a representation of a healthy love. And that's Gordon's search. Is there an idea of a gentle love out there? The potential for that in the book and in the way we treated it in the film is Rachel, a fantasy. She is not real. This love is not something that eventuates or ever could eventuate. It's simply an idea, an ideal of perfect love. That's what keeps him going in some way. He will find that but he will not be happy until he finds it. Essentially, that is his journey. His collision with Cynthia enables him to works through that. He divests himself of the ideal and moves forward, not in any outrageous way, but just enough. He's still living in the building, he's still stuck in that environment but he's moved.

He looks out his door at the end...

Yes, there's the potential for something else coming by.

You spoke of a healthy love. In a sense, his collision with Cynthia is learning about a healthy love from someone who is, literally, an unhealthy person. It is an unusual idea visualising it and having Gordon and the audience transcend the eczema. You succeeded in taking us beyond appearances.

With a love story you can look objectively and make a judgment about these people. But, if you are going to make a judgement about their love, you have to respond to how they are together and how they feel. I think it's beautiful how Gordon and Cynthia together are non-judgmental. They accept each other's faults and weaknesses. The very important scene is when she is asleep and he looks at her skin. For me that's an opportunity for him to wince or look disgusted yet he's very tender and curious about it. That's very revealing about Gordon and we, as viewers, always have to see her through Gordon's eyes.

We threw continuity out the window from scene to scene as regards how bad her skin was going to be. It's more an emotional gauge. If her skin was bad it was because there was something intense happening in the drama. We were very careful. We shot the film very wide for the first three quarters, not a lot of close-ups of Cynthia. I only show the skin when I have to, to make a point. The point was not to make her grotesque, but to see her as Gordon sees her. So we were very careful about being real. It's evident but it's not in your face so that you're wincing. That would be completely the wrong handling of the disease.

Cynthia is such a strong personality, especially the directness with which she speaks and acts, that you're moved beyond her condition. But Gordon, how did he get to that building and why did he stay there? His comments about being a bottleboy indicate something: lack of education, not fitting in with the rest of the family. And why was the audience still interested in him after Cynthia had gone?

As a film-maker you have to have an inner logical system that has to work for you - and you can't get everything on the screen. As you get more experienced you probably do a better job of fleshing these things out. Praise is an autobiographical novel and it's an autobiographical film. To me the secret of Gordon is that he comes from a big family. I come from a big family. What I related to with Gordon is that in a big family you have older people and you have younger people and sometimes you get stuck in the middle and you get taken care of. You don't have a sense of identity. The scene where Gordon is playing cricket after the wedding defines Gordon's role in life up to that point. He's put in the outfield where he can't do any damage. You don't expect him to help. And they cover for him...

And he actually misses the ball.

He doesn't have a sense of his purpose yet and I think that everybody goes through that at some point of their life. In this country, if there's anything inherently Australian I have recognised in coming here it is in terms of youth experience, that it is easier to get a job without going to school and university is not mandatory as it is in America. Therefore, when you're 18 you have this opportunity to float for a couple of years and find yourself. And it's easier to get on the dole, or it was when Praise was written, particularly in Brisabe. There is a period of self-exploration and you go through a period where you hang in there. But you could hang in there for too long in that phase. Gordon is not propelled forward in life. He's just treading water. And this true to his character. It would have been false to end the film with him getting a job. I just wanted to see him swim a little bit, to see him moving forward a bit. It does frustrate certain people, his character.

He wasn't self-propelling, even sexually. He found Cynthia very demanding and was even glad when she was away. Yet, something was slowly happening to him. The film was stronger as regards older Australian traditions of more respectful relationships between men and women. But, the title and the religious dimensions?

Andrew's not a self-analytical person at all. Essentially, he's like Gordon. He is what he is. I've tried to call him on some of these things and I read into the book and into the script and the character of Gordon probably a lot more than he does. He just understands the character and the way he speaks, what he would do and wouldn't do. But he couldn't tell you why. I related to Andrew very quickly as a fellow-artist, Catholic, from a big family. I can pick them because they're a dying breed - you don't find many families that have eight kids any more. I think there are eleven in his, a big family. When I meet Irish Catholics from a big family, I immediately feel that there's an understanding there.

In terms of the story, Praise, I recognised in it these themes. Inherently in the way I was brought up the first exposure to myths and storytelling would have been through Sunday school. You're aware of the Christian myth structure and it develops in your sensibilities. They're all little parables, and they're all lessons. There's a journey for the character, then a payoff and a moral or lesson. You get used to that kind of storytelling and that's your experience. If I came from a family that was not religious at all, it might have been TV shows that gave me that kind of narrative grounding.

But, for me, my father was a very devout Catholic and worked with the Church. It was a big part of my youth. I do think that in my storytelling I have that kind of structure to archetypal myths and characters. I don't think I manipulated Praise into being like this but I saw that there was a spine in there so that I followed Gordon through his sense of confusion to his ultimately making a decision for self-preservation, but then a period of guilt and self-flagellation - I think Catholics do have a tendency to beat themselves up. But he worked through it. My logic system has to work for me although someone else might be saying 'I didn't see anything of that in it'. But it works for me. I didn't have an agenda for the film but I do recognise in myself my way of storytelling.

I made Vas a specific kind of character. I made the man next door a specific kind of character because they each offered opposite points of view and those potentials for darkness, tragedy. I rarely try to develop ambiguous characters. I tend to develop characters more towards an archetype, to represent good or bad, even though I might soften it so that it's not heavy-handed. I think Spielberg tends to go overboard, almost cliches in his characters.

What drove you away from the Catholic Church?

It was more the question of how did it fit into my life. There was a time when it ceased being relevant for me. For a while I was very anti-Catholic because it separated me from really relating to my father. He was so into it that he did not understand my differences with it, that there was a difference. I've come a circle now with it. I feel that I really appreciate the moral underpinning that it provided me when I was growing up and I appreciate it now as a person. I think it's more a being cynic about anything being too organised, too specific. If I could find a way for it to be relevant to me and now to my child... I do have some issues with the Church's approach to homosexuality and birth-control. There are certain things I can't come to grips with like people using the Bible and interpreting it the wrong way as opposed to what I see it as, parables and lessons and as fictitious. To be honest with you, I've come a circle where I don't have the kind of differences that I did and there's not that animosity or anger that there once was when I was a teenager

And Andrew Mc Gahan comes from this kind of background. What was he thinking when he chose the title?

Well, it works for me, the tone of the word: it has a colour and a sound and a flavour that works for the film. It's ambiguous and I like that. Essentially it could be about self-praise, or praise for a character like Cynthia. My underpinning of that word is that it does come from that kind of background for Andrew. If you're going to write a subjective story, who are you talking to? It's a confession. That's my logic for a subjective film, if you're going to be talking to an audience, telling them a story and being honest about it, what is it?

I said from the beginning in my initial director's note, 'Praise is a confession and that's the way I'm going to develop this. It's going to be honest, not pulling any punches, but it's going to come from a point of view of an essentially decent, harmless person who does not want to hurt anyone and is aware that he's hurting himself - but he's fine with that'. And there should be something noble in that. We should feel sad for him that he's self-destructive in that overt but very common human way where we tend to eat too much cholesterol, smoke too many cigarettes, drink too much. Love is self-destructive behaviour amongst all of us even in the cleanest living people. I don't know where that comes from. I don't know why it is but that is what I was curious about.

Interview: 13th February 1999

ROLF DE HEER






Bad Boy Bubby received a number of awards at the 1993 Venice Film Festival, including the Special Jury Prize and the International
Critics' Prize (shared with Robert Altman's Short Cuts).

Each one of the awards surprised me. We had no real expectations when we went because we thought that just getting into competition at Venice was already beyond our expectations. We liked the film immensely but had no idea how an audience would react to it.

You received the OCIC, International Catholic award?

That surprised us no less than any of the others and probably a little more - certainly at first. But, with a little bit of reflection, for me personally as a film-maker, I appreciated that one more than the others. It was the clearest message that the film was speaking to audiences in the way that I wanted it to speak.

How can Bad Boy Bubby be seen in continuity with your other films?

Bad Boy Bubby and my first film, Tail of a Tiger, were the most personal films that I had made. And the two that I had written independently. The second film I wrote, Incident at Raven's Gate, is, for me, a little bit of an aberration. This had more to do with when it came, at a particular stage of my career, of what was possible and what was not.

I am attracted to material that is positive. There are a number of things that I care a lot about - one of them is childhood. The preciousness of childhood for me is important, above almost anything else. I can refer all other themes to childhood. If a plot has no bearing on childhood, for some reason it's less interesting for me. Dingo refers to childhood. Tail of a Tiger is clearly very much concerned with childhood. Bad Boy Bubby is very much about childhood, more, in fact, than any of the other films. So, in the broadest sense, all the issues of the world today can be related to childhood, `What does this do to children?' Perhaps the single most important thing we can do is to love our children without abuse. The film became, for me, a plea for childhood.

What Tail of the Tiger and Dingo seem to have in common is a sense of identity and some sense of vision: the young boy with the planes
in Tiger; Dingo has his boyhood dreams, the vision of Miles Davis coming down from the plane onto the tarmac and the boy's wanting to
be a trumpeter. Bad Boy Bubby highlights identity and growth. What was the genesis of Bad Boy Bubby?

Its evolution is very peculiar. I was writing down thoughts, writing down ideas. I was writing them down for a very low-budget film more than ten years before I actually wrote the script of Bad Boy Bubby. You can imagine how over ten years the film evolves and changes, particularly in the way I work. There are elements in Bubby that are very much part of earlier ideas. But then other things developed - look, I had children, so that changed me very much as a human being.

Some things in the film are consciously constructed in so far as I say, `Well, I want to do this or I want to do that', but so many more of the parameters of the film are subconscious and come from who I am as a human being and what I think is important. You tend to like certain things; you don't question why you like that scene or why you want to put it in a particular place, because it's simply a function of who you are yourself. It may be taking a view opposite of your own, but it still has a function of relating to how I live my life as a human being.

One of the things I want to do is move people. Now, that can be done in a cynical way or it can be done, I guess, in an optimistic way. My sensibilities are in the more optimistic way, so that would tend to lead me into looking at the world through more innocent eyes.

The idea of a child-man emerging at age 35 - where did that come from?

A number of influences. One is quite simple: in some way I wanted to make a film about childhood, about the preciousness of childhood. But, ultimately, I ended up with a decision to explore this through the dark side, if you like, wanting to deal with certain aspects of child abuse and associated issues. I was thinking that if I really wanted to deal with it in a confronting way in a really low-budget film, then it might be better to do it somehow with an adult rather than with an actual child. I was concerned about the process of doing the film with a child - I hadn't worked out what would happen to that child. I had worries about involving children in that sort of confrontational material. So that's one way that it came about.

The other way is quite peculiar, that the very first time I began to think about making this film was as a consequence of seeing a Sam Sheppard play, in which a close friend of mine, an actor, played the part of the character, Dodge, a 70-year-old man. It was an extraordinary performance and I wanted to make a film with him. We wanted to capitalise on that extraordinary performance of his being an old man. But we realised that a younger actor playing an old man on stage is one thing, doing it in the cinema is quite different. It is much more difficult and much harder to get away with. So, in a sense, the first image for the film was an old man in a room, being played by this friend of mine. But, of course, that couldn't be. So then he became a younger man playing an older man. That was some kind of development - and that's where the character of Pop coming back home came into it.

Have people asked you about Being There and the Peter Sellers' character, Chance, the gardener?

A couple of people have asked about the script and a few about the film itself. I haven't actually seen Being There and I read the book only well after the film was finished. Somebody said, `You should read it', and I said, `Yes, I know I should'. But now I can because, when I was working on Bad Boy Bubby and Being There existed as a film, I knew I shouldn't see it because I didn't want to be influenced by it. The same with Kaspar Hauser. A lot of people have asked me about it. I've had the tape for six or seven years because somebody gave it to me and said, `Look, you know, it's a bit like what you're doing'. Right, fine. I put it away and didn't look at it.

The religious dimensions of Bad Boy Bubby, especially with the opening sequences - the mother seemed very slatternly, but she had a
crucifix on the wall? It seems to be broken and have no head.

That's right. It doesn't have a head. It's a flaw in the film-making that we don't actually see quite clearly that it has no head. So the mother saying `God can see everything you do. Jesus will tell me' has been added. This somehow empowers the image: the strength of what he feels, the fact that the crucifix doesn't have a head, and he's told that despite that, it can see everything he does.

This makes an audience ask, `Where is this film going?'. It introduces the God language that recurs during the film. What do you bring personally
to the film in terms of God language and Christianity?

I was not brought up particularly religiously. At various times in my life, in some senses I was. When we were refugees from Indonesia back to Holland, I was farmed out to a family which was particularly religious. Every mealtime there were Bible readings and so on. I remember that quite well. My father was, I guess it would be fair to say, anti-religious, although `anti' is a bit strong - anti-religious in the broadest sense. Whereas my mother was much more tolerant. She didn't actually encourage religion, but was more tolerant than my father. I don't want to paint them as extremes because they're not.

When we came out to Australia we lived in a migrant camp for eight months, not the best of circumstances, and various things happened. I think I was eight at the time. My brother and I did a whole series of things for which we had ultimate cause to feel regret. I don't know what my parents said to me, to either of us at the time, but what happened was that when we eventually moved out of the migrant camp, my brother and I independently of each other decided to go to church. We did this for two years, I think. It was almost a question of sneaking out on Sunday mornings and Mum would give us threepence in the corner of our handkerchiefs. We had decided this was the thing to do. I guess religion faded for me after that as I began to question lots of things.

Then, through my late teens, I had three particular friends, two of whom were Catholic. So there was a sort of religious mix between the two groups. It was the subject of a great deal of discussion as we tested our theories of life, religion and other issues. At one point during this time, almost in deference to one of the friends particularly, I made a serious attempt to see if I could get myself to believe in God. Ultimately that didn't work for me either.

The next major thing that happened to me in the development of where I stand with religion was that I did a year of philosophy at Sydney University. That influenced my way of thinking about all things more than anything else I've done. Since then I've been more an interested observer in seeing how religion affects different people and its place in what people are and how they live their lives.

You tend to see what I might call good people and there seems to me to be no differentiation according to their goodness as to whether they have faith or whether they don't have faith. And you see what one might call bad people overall, at the lower end - I hesitate to make judgments like this but it's hard to talk about it in any other way - of what are considered by society to be bad people. There's a greater number of them who have no connection with faith at all. Then you have all the people in between. And what I find is that of the people in between who have faith, the thing that characterises them most for me is hypocrisy. But if they are people with faith who are not characterised by that hypocrisy, then they're almost always, to me, in the good category.

That explains a great deal about your characters in Bad Boy Bubby. Is Bubby's mother evil? She uses religion and God as threats.

Yes she does, but I don't see her as being evil. I see her as a product of her upbringing, a sadly damaged product of her upbringing. She might have been 17 and brought up in a rigorous household, protected from the outside world to a great degree. Then, somehow, she was seduced by the Pop character. And he disappeared, of course. She found herself pregnant and unable, in the society that she lived in, to reveal that she was pregnant.

She was naive and really incapable of dealing with the outside world. So she hid in that place, that cellar, effectively, and as she got more and more disconnected from society, the things that she had been taught as a child became more and more fractured. She used them and became more distant from how she used to be but she became, in another sense, a lot more focused on the little bits and pieces that she retained from her past. And in her own way, with all her difficulties which, I think, are quite severe, not only is she in this terrible situation, but she's also quite disconnected from other people, trying to bring up this child who has nearly killed her. She has no armory at all to deal with her problems. And, as life goes on... there's one bed in the place, Bubby was a little baby and she probably loved him a great deal and she probably still does - but the basic situation never changes. Then as he grows up, the situation develops and she's completely out of touch. I say this because I don't feel her to be evil in any way. But once again, because of her past history, she is to be seen within the theme of childhood.

Bubby himself?

The film is about the way we judge people, usually by superficial appearances, almost always by arbitrary standards, often wrongly and unfairly.

Bubby has no way of judging people. He has met only one other person in his life, his mother, on whom he is completely dependent. He has no real basis for comparisons (no television or radio or books), so no bases for making judgments about people. He is uncorrupted by any pressure to conform. He is the complete innocent.

Using Bubby's non-judgmental view of the world, the film begins to explore parts of that world, wandering through random aspects of people and society. Bubby can begin to form some picture of the whole. And so the world is funny and tragic. It is ugly and beautiful. It is spiteful and forgiving, loving and hateful, honest and hypocritical. That is how Bubby finds it and how the world deals with him. The people in this world teach Bubby how to be. He learns how to behave.

A complete contrast: Angel's parents - when Bubby goes to their house for a meal, their walls and their sideboard are covered with religious
pictures, statues and holy cards, full of religious icons?

I don't want to say that all products of a rigidly religious upbringing - whether it be one religion or another or even non-church - have severe problems. Angel herself has found her way out. One of the themes in the film is personal responsibility: how much personal responsibility do we have? You get into discussions with people about responsibility and they thump the table and say, `Of course we have total individual responsibility'. And I say, `Yes, right, I agree with you'. But it's a little bit too easy to say. You can say it and I can say it, but when you consider that the overwhelming majority of serial killers were abused as children, it forces you to think. It's not just a coincidence, is it? No, it's not. Individual responsibility: how responsible are serial killers for their own actions? To a degree they are. But there are virtually no serial killers around who haven't been abused as children. And that says a lot to me about individual responsibility.

But then again, not all children who are abused turn into serial killers. Angel's upbringing is fundamentally different from Bubby's, although there are many similarities. But she comes out of it one way and he comes out of it in a quite different way.

The other thing about that particular dinner scene is that, while the language differs, it's based directly on a scene that I actually experienced. It was not about religion. It was about racism. The mother is the major protagonist in that scene from Bubby; in the reality I experienced she was a self-professed, churchgoing Christian.

When that experience happened to me, it took me a long time to recover. I mean, I wasn't the Bubby character. I was just there. It unfolded in front of me and there was nothing I could do to change anything. It was just a most extraordinary experience.

What you have said about philosophy and your questioning seems to be dramatised in the Norman Kaye character.

Yes. Norman's character and the sequence itself highlights for me the schizophrenia that one can feel about religion. His music basically represents for me what is absolutely the best possible thing. Of course, the best thing about Christianity is not its music, but the music in the film represents what a force of good it can be.

The first sounds that Bubby hears when he emerges from the cellar is the harmonised choral singing of the Salvation Army group - and a hymn continues while he is making love with the Salvation Army singer.

They are the first people who treat him with kindness. At the same time I didn't want them to be ciphers in the way that we often see the Salvation Army in the street. We don't think of them as real people. And they are and they should be seen as real people. They shouldn't be judged as puppet people who walk around in uniforms.

The second section of music, during the love scene, says the same thing. If a person is going to have a God, the relationship between that person and that God needs to change continually.

Norman Kaye's music was played on a great organ in a church in a state of disrepair that was being rebuilt, but dominated by a huge crucifix.
The theme was brought back into focus when Bubby buried the dead cat. Bubby uses the organist's words as part of the service of the cat.

Yes, but the essence of the sequence is the music and how it affects Bubby and what that can mean for Bubby. But then you get the other side of it in the plant sequence. The engineer says to Bubby at the very end of his long speech about arguing God out of existence, `Look, you have to shed yourself of being a subject, in a sense, and make your own decisions'. That's the area that interests me most, especially for the people in the middle ground. But there can be some excusing of one's own behaviour. In fact we're taught to do that to some degree in different aspects of various religions: that we are not always in control of our own actions. But there is also the refusal to take control of our own lives and be responsible for what we do. I know things are changing in the churches and, really, they're changing quite significantly, but you know the old way: you can do anything you like, as long as you go to confession and you'll be okay. That, to me, is the most appalling thing and it teaches us that we have no responsibility.

Bubby became a film about belief systems: spiritual, religious, scientific, interpersonal and how, by clinging to them in order to try to make sense of the world, we are actually prevented from making sense of it. But mostly it became a film about questions rather than answers.

Epsilon. It screened for the Australian Film Institute Awards in 1995. Was that before you did extra work on it?

That was before we did extra work on it.

Are we going to see the reworked version in ?

I doubt it. It was on in Sydney briefly. I'm grateful for the experience of Epsilon, an extraordinary experience for me.

Is it much different from what the AFI screenings version?

It plays a little differently in that it's contextualised differently. It now starts 40 or 50 years further on from when the action actually takes place. There's an old woman around a campfire talking to two kids about it. Then you go back in time. At the end you find out that the old woman was the woman whose campfire the alien walked into. There's been some narration by the old woman through the film. So there's been new stuff shot and there's been some stuff reduced and cut. It actually plays differently. It somehow plays a little easier, a little less intriguing, but I still like it. I like it as much as I did before. It's just a marginally different film, that's all.

There was a touch of the essay about it.

That's still there. You can't get rid of that completely.

What inspired you for Epsilon?

It was an inspiration. That's the only one I can say - it came out of nowhere. I was in post production on Bubby, working by myself on a Sunday, late, at the studio in the cutting room and I started to think, right, here was a chance, the only chance I'll probably ever have, of making a film where I can do anything I want, say anything that I want in any way that I want to say it, and I haven't said any of the really important things. I'd seen some motion-controlled star footage in the previous weeks and it had really affected me, fairly profoundly. It was like a sort of a longing, a beauty but a longing and a tragedy about its beauty.

I guess it was about the earth, and that is a disappearing view. It was just filed away in the back of my mind. Then when I was driving to a friend's place that evening to have dinner, only a 5 or 10-minute drive, and it just hit me. It was like I knew everything, how to do this film. I didn't know its absolute detail through it, but I was like a man possessed. I was making phone calls and by the end of the night I knew it was going to take about a year to shoot, what its budget was going to be, roughly what the content, the set-up, was going to be, the characters and lots of things about it. Then I put it away.

Then Bad Boy Bubby happened in Venice. I was in Rome for a week after that because I missed my plane. I'd started to work on it a bit because I had to do something. Then and there I convinced Domenico Profacci to put up half the money. I came back to Australia. The Film Finance Corporation put up the other half and away we went.

So it's a plea for the earth? A plea for humanity?

Yes. It's not a film about childhood, but it's the one film I decided to make for my children. We stormed around the world with great resolution, all of us, the tiny crew and then the cast, feeling that we should do it. It didn't matter how hard it was; we should do it.

Then it was an epic history of stuff which was quite extraordinary. I'll write the book one of these days because of what has happened. It's just staggering, but it happened. The whole thing was shot with this motion-control rig and I didn't know what they could do. In that sense the film was also about me finding out how this thing worked in order to be able to use it properly in the film that we were already shooting. In places it works, in other places, it's a deeply flawed but, for me, a very interesting film.

It screened in Cannes in the marketplace in 1995 and the boss of the American company that had bought it was at that screening. It was jam-packed with people being turned away. He walked out after eight minutes. He's a big man. Since that day it hasn't sold a single territory in the world anywhere.

The transition from Bad Boy Bubby and its children's themes to The Quiet Room?

It was very much via Epsilon. Epsilon is not a film about childhood or children but making it was a long and difficult process, 157 shooting days, all exteriors and all around Australia, especially in the desert, with some overseas shooting as well. When it was finished and bought, there was supposedly more work to be done on it. In the contract with the Americans, they'd set aside a large amount of money for more work if that's what I desired - not anything I had to do. I thought it was a good idea, yes, great. I wanted their suggestions. They wanted to make some suggestions and it was all fine.

But then it was a long time waiting for the money to come through and I needed to keep the crew together. In one sense that's how The Quiet Room was born: to make a film in this block of time, a limited block of time. We needed to be shooting in about six or seven weeks. So, we set a shooting date. What do we make the film about?

I'd been thinking about the way children think for quite some time and I'd been casting around for a project to work with children in an adult context for some time. So here was an opportunity to make a film that didn't particularly have to be about anything, but it could be about anything. And I thought, all right, let's do it. So that's really how it came about.

And this brought you to imagining the parents via the child's perspective?

Well, that was interesting. The marriage breakdown was imposed on the project part of the way through, after I'd begun to work on the ideas, because I needed various things - I needed narrative drive, I needed conflict, I needed a reason. It was about children thinking. That was my primary concern and, well, how do I do that? Every film is about the way people think. So how do I do that more intensely? I've got to enter the girl's mind, understand what her mind says. I didn't have it worked out exactly how I was going to do that, but I figured that if we heard what her mind said and we heard what she said as well, it could get confusing. And it's a bit of an easy contrivance, in a way.

So I thought, maybe the thing is just that she doesn't speak, and the only way we can access her is through her mind. And that then became what I decided. Okay, now, why doesn't she speak? That was then the issue: why doesn't she speak? I had to find a good dramatic reason, and that's how the marriage breakdown came into it. I thought, I'll do that. That makes sense.

It was finding the plot rather than the plot finding you. And finding the child's point of view cinematically with the points of view of the camera?

Yes, it's part of the evolution of what is cinema and what makes it worth people spending ten bucks to go and see a film. What do they need to get out of it in order for that money to have been well spent? It's a constant question for me. It could have become less focused on the child and been more of an ensemble piece. That would have removed the pressure on the child as an actor and on us to get the child right. But I thought, no, you see that sort of stuff on television. This has to be all or nothing; this has to be so completely and utterly all or nothing, that either we fail gloriously or we succeed. The chances are we'll fail gloriously, but only in trying to do that can we succeed. So everything I could think of was to focus it on the child and to make it her perspective, her perspective of adulthood, because that ultimately is the thing that makes it different and interesting.

You're touching into the experience of parents of children of that age.

I thought that might be the case. But in fact what surprises me is the number of people who respond to it in terms of their own childhood. That's not something I'd expected. I mean, I should have because a lot of it comes from my own childhood and how I used to think. But I never once thought that on that level people would respond to it. It was first evident with a couple of people on the crew. They didn't say anything to me, but one day I heard some comment between two crew people and I thought, of course!

These days, with so much surfacing of violence and abuse in families, a lot of people are going to respond to it in that way - more than they
would have ten years ago.

Yes, I think so.

It's a contribution to adults really focusing on themselves and on children now.

Hopefully it is. In the end one hopes to not just entertain people.

How typical of Australian experience do you think this is?

I don't know and I can't know that. Obviously, I was very careful to not make it specific. What are the problems in the marriage? The little girl woudn't have a clue. What's important is not why they fight, but that they do. I remember standing in a yard at someone's place and hearing the people next door go at it, and being quite interested in this until I heard a child. Then it was not interesting any more; it was terrible. Yes, so the `that' rather than the `why'.

Was it received well at Cannes?

Fantastic. We had no expectations for anything like that at all. I mean, competition at Cannes - a ludicrous concept when we were making it. It was just a lovely film to make, because there were no pressures involved. It was just a film and us who were making it. It was great. Then, of course, it gets selected to go to Cannes. It was completely crazy. It turned the world upside down for a bit, but we coped with that. Then we actually went to Cannes and the response was really wonderful. I mean, what's good about it is that it sold very quickly on that day of the screening. The first sale was made on the red carpet on the way out of the cinema, the first deal was closed.

What that means, of course, is that those people who risked the money in the first place on the basis of an idea - I said, `Look, I want to make this film. It's going to be sort of about a 7-year-old child's perception of adulthood. Can I have the money, please?' And they said, `Oh, well, okay then.' And then I could make it with complete freedom. And because I could make it with complete freedom, it could be as focused as it is. People can like it or dislike it, but that's what it is.

You produced The Sound of One Hand Clapping?

I was sent the script years ago and I read it and liked it a lot, but it was very wrong for me at the time. It was just one of those scripts that you like a lot and you write back and say, `Look, very nice. I liked it for these reasons. However, it's not for me at the moment; I'm busy with this, this, this and that.' Then a couple of years later it was sent to me again, saying, `Please reconsider.' It had been rewritten in the meantime and worked on further, and I had this intensely strong emotional reaction to it - so strong that I thought, `I can't direct this. It's going to destroy me if I try, because I have to be really involved with the material in order to do it justice, and if I get really involved with this, I'm gone. I can't do it.'

It was one of the most clearly visualised scripts that I've ever read. I thought, `Well, whoever has written this can clearly communicate what they want to see. And if they can put two words together with their mouth rather than just with their fingers, they ought to be able to direct it.' So I rang Richard Flanagan up and said, `Look, you should think about doing it yourself. I can't do it because of these reasons. Think about doing it yourself.' He rang back a few days later and said, `Well, I've thought about it and I suppose I could. I've never really thought about it because I don't know one end of a camera from another, never been on a film set.'

It's the only screenplay he'd ever written. I said, `Well, okay, you decide to give it a go and I'll stick with you. I'll give you a hand.' And that's where it started. Then in the end that has to be formalised because people start to talk about the budget and everything else, and okay, he's a first-time director who's never been on a film set, doesn't know anything about film. Okay, someone like me being involved makes a difference, but then suddenly, okay, you become the director's mentor. That's where it started. Then in the end I ended up being the producer. And you basically go along for the ride once you've said, `Okay, I'll stick with you.' You either do or you don't. In this particular case, it means I had to produce it, and it was a long and difficult and wonderful process.

And then Dance Me to my Song?

It's sort of a love triangle in a way. I wrote a script based on scripts by two people who are complete amateurs in scriptwriting terms, but some of the material they wrote is incredibly powerful and I worked with them over a period of years to try and help them knock it into shape. But ultimately the task beyond them art the time. One of the problems is time because Heather Rose is severely afflicted with cerebral palsy, so it was a very slow process for them to write a script. She can't talk, she can only use a voice machine. They worked on it gradually. Then the opportunity came that we could do it, but the only way was if I rewrote the script or wrote a script based on some of their material, which is what I did. They were both perfectly happy with that because the spirit of their material was not changed.

The poster says 'a film by Heather Rose', directed by yourself.

Heather originated the project. By her persistence and sheer will, she made it happen. If she had at any stage pulled back from it, it just would never have happened.

Normally you try and create an environment for actors to give of their best. But because acting is such a difficult thing for her, in that the very nature of her disability mitigates against her being able to do the sorts of things that actors can normally do, to do with timing and accuracy. There are most difficult things for her to do.

The set became focused around Heather in a way that's not usual, really, for it to be focused around one person to such a degree. But that was the way the film was going to get made best. In the end everybody felt that we were there to allow Heather to do the best she could. Then it went a step further. We realised that what we were there for was to be Heather's mouthpiece, to interpret for Heather what she'd started. I was sitting on set and talking to Heather and I just looked around and thought I know what's going to happen, they're going to want to put "a film by Rolf De Heer". To me, that was completely inappropriate. It felt absolutely like a Heather Rose film. So I said to her then and there, "This is what we're going to do". They did argue because I was just going to put "a film by Heather Rose"; a number of people in the distribution area got very irritated with me and said, "Okay, well the compromise is, 'directed by Rolf de Heer.'"

Heather Rose's co-writer suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

When we did Bad Boy Bubby, I tracked down Fred Stahl, a laser scientist who specialised in miniaturising electronics. He effectively built Nick's electronic wig for us. Then, because it had some teething problems, he came onto the shoot as an assistant in the sound department. He worked on that entire shoot and had an extraordinary time because it was so liberating to him, having worked in the areas that he worked in, to work in this completely different way with different people. But shortly after he got Chronic Fatigue Syndrome quite badly. Heather had a featured extra role in Bad Boy Bubby and she saw film-making from the inside in a way that she had never had the chance before, and it was an area she had always been interested in.

Some months later she was browsing on the common ground bulletin board that had been set up by the state government here, and she was talking to a bloke called Fred. After a while they discovered that they had both worked on Bad Boy Bubby and suddenly they had this real connection, this event in their lives that had been important to both of them. And that's where they began to work on the script.

Eventually Fred was able to visit her every now and then - they lived about 20 or 30 kilometers apart. But without that bulletin board, there's no way they could have got as far as they did. They wrote numbers of drafts together. I became script editor. I started to help them because they were just doing it, then I became script editor so we could apply for some money - they were both broke at the time. Then, suddenly, I had the opportunity to make a film in terms of timing. I said, "Look, I need to do another draft of it because it's not quite ready, but shall we make this film, shooting in eight weeks' time?" They both said yes, of course. And, in the end, the final script is a complete synthesis of three people's work.

It's an extraordinary experience which most people find fairly confronting. She literally bares herself, her soul and body, an extraordinary self-revelation.

It is that, but it really needs to be seen as a performance and, if you knew Heather well enough, you would see precisely that it is. You have to put it down to shots because with cutting you can do anything. But you look within a shot and you can see what a performance it is, how precise it is in the end and how much she understood precisely what we were doing. The character is not Heather. I mean, I encouraged them to draw upon themselves in the writing because with new writers it's always a much better way to go, but no more than many writers do draw on their own stuff. It is in part self-revealing but, in a sense, she is using herself as a prototype of people who have cerebral palsy or other such conditions, to provide that window into their lives.

You didn't shirk anything even in terms of sexual relationships, a very graphic revelation of what is possible for someone who is so disabled.

Yes, and again those things are not in any way directly autobiographical, but the thoughts behind this and the wish to express it are from Heather.

And Madeleine?

You are intended to have some empathy, sympathy, I'm not sure which. It was never my intention to make Madeleine unremittingly evil. I know some people will see her like that but I'm always pleased when people find they have some feelings towards Madeleine which aren't entirely hostile.

She was self-absorbed a lot of the time, but handling a range of moods in the person you're caring for, the exasperation quotient can be very
high. Since Bad Boy Bubby you've portrayed people on the margin, people who experience loneliness and isolation in a way that is not usual in cinema.

Yes, just happened like that. I don't think I've set out to do that. In fact, I haven't. With film-making being so capital-intensive and business-oriented, it's often simply the luck of the draw. Like Dance Me To My Song, when I became involved, it was never my intention to make the film, because I was working on a number of other things that I thought would be happening. Then, when I produced The Sound of One Hand Clapping and we got towards the end of the post-production process, it had been a long and interesting and difficult process but quite rewarding. But I just needed to come up and breathe and do something of my own, because the whole process of producing for someone else is so different - your sensitivities have to be so different. And this was the one project that was close by and achievable quickly, which was like a parameter. But it may just as well have been one or two of the other things I was doing, which are not remotely like this at all.

I'm doing a film based on a Tagore short story and it's just a lovely story, a lovely film. It's a lot more open than the previous few. In the end it's about fatherhood, I think. It's a relationship between a six-year-old English girl and a a giant Afghan trader. And it's a lovely story.


Interviews: 12th December 1996, 30th October 1998.

JOHN DUIGAN

It's not so much film per se that's interesting to me, it's film as a vehicle for ideas, and for exploring human psychology and personality, and love and political oppression or whatever it is. (On the wall under John Duigan's photo in Parliament House, Canberra.)


Mouth to Mouth, Winter of Our Dreams and One Night Stand - do they have a spiritual dimension?

I hope so. Certainly by implication I think they do. They're all dealing with the complexities of human interactions and often the complexities posed by the tension between the individual and society, between people who find themselves on the fringes of society. But I hope that the human beings in them are treated with dignity. I try always to give due complexity to the various aspects of the characterisations.

Mouth to Mouth was probably, in my early period of film-making in Melbourne, the film that I value most. I feel it is closest to what I set out for - and probably was the first film that I got close to achieving what I set out to do.

Comments you made indicated that you had been impressed by some of the nuns and the Catholic layworkers you met in Manila, that their work was part of the genesis of Far East. You were quite benign towards the Catholic Church, with the priest who gave information to the reporter and the layworker, her room with the crucifix and the portrait of the Pope, her total commitment and her decision to stay in the Philippines. There seems to be some anticipation of Romero.

Yes, there's a connection between the two films in that both of them portray characters with strong Christian beliefs. The beliefs take a humanist form and the characters fight in whatever way they can against very repressive regimes. I've always been impressed by those people like the nuns in Far East and the radical priests around Romero who risk their lives for essentially political and humanist - or political ideals that are always fundamentally humanist in their nature, and that are really independent of any specifically ecclesiastical aspect. I think that individuals of this kind are strengthened by their beliefs, but they're not attempting to impose their beliefs as part of their political expression.

The layworker is invited to go to Australia for talks with the universities, the churches and the unions.

Some of the trade unionists that I met when I was over in Manila doing research for the film had very strong ties within the church. So I was, yes, quite struck by that.

In 1987 and 1988 you made two films, Fragments of War, the Damien Parer Story and Romero which, for a Catholic audience, especially an audience comfortable with the nuances of things Catholic, they can immediately identify with. The opening of Fragments of War with Cesar Franck's Panis Angelicus is particularly Catholic. Some of the conversations that Damien Parer had about his sexual morality sounded authentic - and the scenes of him kneeling down at his bed and making signs of the cross and saying his night prayers as people did so readily in those days. The discussion you included about God's will and the permitting of suffering rather than the willing of it seemed to come straight out of the philosophy texts studied at the time. You seemed to have absorbed that ethos very well and communicate it, along with the whole range of his life and activity at that period, the world war and his reporting. Catholic audiences like it a lot.

It's interesting that you say that. It's a television film, not a cinema feature, but I actually regard it as one of the pieces that I'm most pleased with. Damien Parer was an intensely religious man, so one couldn't really deal with anything that was going to approach accuracy without facing that head-on. His beliefs inhabited all of his relationships. In some ways he was, to me, quite a conservative Christian. But again he was someone who, coming from that position, saw the opportunity of working with his camera to get as close as possible to observing and recording human courage and human suffering because he felt this was the contribution he could make to spreading the gospel of the frightfulness of war. And, of course, that meant he had to risk his life, in the end fatally, to get those graphic shots. Perhaps he was the first of the great documentarists to take those risks that sadly have led to so many others falling along the way in more recent conflicts.

I found when I was developing the character and when Nick Eadie was playing it that it was very moving, the portrayal of his beliefs and commitment. I found myself quite affected, listening to him expressing those views with such disarming conviction.

You talked with Damien Parer's widow to get detailed information. What about those philosophical/theological elements as the conversation about God's will and permitting evil? You see yourself as a philosopher. Was that an important part of your research?

Yes, it was. I have found that particular question of God's will and evil always a difficult one so I thought it was a good opportunity to face it and to try and get at what I thought Damian's attitude would be. I think I took a lot of the dialogue in that scene from a letter of his since I had access to a few of his letters. I also had conversations with Maslyn Williams, who was a friend of his - he's depicted in the film also - and both he and Damien's widow were very helpful in the evolution of the screenplay.

Romero and your career - its effect on you and the subsequent history of the film?

Congress had a special screening of Romero in the United States - and I like to think that it played a small part at least in the relaxation in American policy towards that part of the world. It was shown to the Salvadorean bishops. Some of them who were very close friends of Archbishop Romero reported back to the producer that they felt that we had got quite close to him in our portrayal and they liked the film very much. The civil war has come to at least a temporary halt there and the film hopefully will have a theatrical release. However, the conservatives have been returned in elections and some of those conservatives were very, very active supporters of the army during the long reign of terror of which Romero's death was a small and tragic part.

The same dimensions seem to be present in The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting - what drew you to exploring the character of Danny Embling and in that particular period?

I suppose I use the character of Danny Embling to a degree as a sort of partial alter-ego in that I think his behaviour and the evolution of his sensibility are parallel to my own - although I often give him very different experiences. So it's not autobiographical in any strict way. I like the opportunity of being able to follow through characters that I've come to really like - characters that are played with the kind of accessibility and complexity which Noah Taylor has brought to the role. I like the idea of being able to follow through that character's journey perhaps over several more films and maybe in conjunction, sometimes, with some of the other characters that we have got to know.

Starting the series at that point of adolescence seemed right to me because adolescence is always a conjunction of the most massive degrees of change that an individual has to face. We can confront change at any time in our lives, but the freshness that we have at that time, the fact that we haven't been bruised too much or jaundiced by life's traumas, gives a particular piquancy to that particular time of life.

A country town with its small population was a helpful setting to bring the character alive.

Yes, in The Year My Voice Broke and in Flirting there are two miniature societies: one is the isolated country town with its secrets, with its bullies, with its peer group pressures, and the three principal characters are all on the edge symbolically, but they're literally on the edge because their outpost is this little beautiful curved range of hills where Loene's and Noah's characters always liked to stay. In particular, The Year My Voice Broke is dealing with a sense of their pantheistic relationship to nature and to the land. They both have it - in particular, Loene's character has an almost primal connection with the physical environment. As Noah puts it, it's almost like, to her, the rocks and the trees are living things. This is something which I believe in. This is our kinship with the land, which is something so strong in Aboriginal beliefs and in the beliefs of North American Indians.

It is something which is eroded by our immersion into society, so it's something which Danny is fighting to retain as he becomes more and more embedded in the second society that he encounters (in Flirting), which is the society of the boarding school. I think that the whole tapestry of rural life had the ability to put us in touch with nature, with the currents of the wind and the changing of the seas - it's something that's much harder to retain when one is constantly surrounded by concrete.

People have railed against this since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The followers of the notorious Captain Ludd, the Luddites, in England were doing this when they destroyed farm and factory machinery. This was a very strong primal reaction. But I think that they could see that the life of having to go and work in the dark satanic mills of the early factories in England was going to crush a part of their nature. I would like to do a film about the Luddites at some stage.

You brought in Aboriginal themes explicitly with Jonah, the Bruce Spence character, in The Year My Voice Broke.

Yes, Bruce Spence's character, Jonah, was writing Australia's first erotic novel and living in a railway carriage, but I gave him some of the philosophical views that I ascribe to myself, and he was able to play those moments very, very well. His is also a character that I would quite like to see revisited.

In Flirting, the next step was to genuine relationships and an intensity in first love for Danny Embling's development? You also introduced international racial overtones with the African student played by Thandie Newton.

The relationship that developed between Noah's character and Thandie's character was the relationship that he would have liked to have had with Loene's character in The Year My Voice Broke. More than anything else, these two characters are misfits and the fact that they can find in one another mutual recognition from someone they respect is an incredibly strengthening, fortifying thing for both of them. They don't really need to have their peers acknowledging them once they have actually found each other because their very differences are valued by each other, and for anybody to encounter a relationship like that, to suddenly feel that they're not as peculiar, as odd, as separated from everyone as they've been taught to think and as they've been belittled by the pettiness of others - that's what makes the relationship so amazing for both of them.

You have been successfully subversive with the character of Danny Embling in presenting your alter-ego as an alternative to the standard ocker image of the Australian hero. Here is someone who doesn't go in for sport, who likes to read and who lives in a different kind of world, an imaginative world. It is surprising how Australian audiences responded so well to this unlikely hero - and each film won the Best Film Award from the Australian Film Institute.

The peculiar thing about Australian culture is that one of its strongest dimensions is its anti-authoritarian nature and its celebration of the nonconformist, and yet the peer pressures that have occurred, particularly towards masculine stereotyping, have been as strong in this country as, probably, in any other country in the world. It seems a peculiar dichotomy because what the culture has celebrated is somebody without any reverence for authority, but the challenges to authority have become stereotyped in themselves. So we have the larrikin ocker. It's that kind of thumbing the nose at authority which has become institutionalised since last century. It's not a particularly interesting or wide-ranging form of rebellion or a particularly interesting type of outsider. So, yes, Noah's character is definitely presenting something which is a marked departure.

When speaking about your writing and directing the telemovie, Fragments of War, The Damien Parer Story, as well as your decision to direct Romero, you said you thought Christians asked the most interesting questions.

Yes, very much so, and I find the discussion of religious issues very stimulating. I think that the whole spiritual dimension of life has been diminished, to our cost, in recent decades of the second half of the 20th century and we really do need an active and rich and searching spirituality in our lives, maybe now more than ever. I think that we're still probably spiritually reeling from the terrors of the first half of the century, the world wars.

There was a brief glimmer of hope at the end of the Cold War, but then again the reminders of the constant savagery in places like Bosnia, in South Africa, in Northern Ireland returns people to this overwhelming sense of pessimism, that humanity seems to be fatally flawed, and a spirituality that can give us optimism and can renew our endeavours to face the problems posed by human imperfections remains constantly a desperate need.

Sirens has quite explicit religious and Church issues in its portrait of Norman Lindsay and his art. What drew you to this story and its Australian setting?

The starting point was the idea of doing something on the tension between the church's teaching and the sensual side of life. I have always felt that the church's actual teachings on this issue - since I experienced it first-hand as a boy at school - reflected some biases, particularly against the place and role of women in the church, and the place of women's sensuality.

I wanted to deal with these sorts of issues but I also wanted to explore them in a comic context. It's a film about sensuality but if you don't have a humorous aspect, then I think you're missing out on a particular dimension of the sensuality.

Your context highlighted the fauna of the Blue Mountains, not in any realistic way, so the koala, wombat and snakes were all part of that humour?

Yes, they were. The joke is that Australia, as far as the English couple, Anthony and Estella Campion can see, seems to be peopled by all kinds of creepy crawlies and threatening mysterious animals, serpents and spiders and the like - plus, Lindsay's models, these rather Amazonian women. But in fact this country house world is a very benign world and the snakes go about their business without disturbing anybody, except pulling over cups of tea.

There is a reference made by Norman Lindsay to `wowsers and Wesleyans'.

It's a direct quote from him, The whole big speech where he talks about how his mother used to tell him about the sad story of Jesus - a direct quote from an interview that Lindsay did in the latter part of his life. We got it from the ABC. Sam Neill was particularly keen to speak his precise words so we put it in verbatim. I think the specific reference to Wesleyans was simply Lindsay's choice of alliteration.

Was the Church of England the target?

Yes, well... kind of. It is more broadly tipped at the Christian churches' teachings on this area. As Lindsay says, ever since Eve was seen to be responsible for the downfall of the human race in the Garden of Eden, women have been taught by the church to feel guilty about their sexual nature and men have been taught to fear it, to fear women's sexuality. I believe that there is a link between this guilt and fear that can be traced right back to early disputes about women actually taking office in the church hierarchy.

It seems to me to be quite preposterous that women are not allowed to become priests in the Catholic church and in some other Churches. This seems an utterly indefensible position to take, to discriminate against 50 per cent of the population - and these issues remain just as pertinent today as they were in those days.

You actually have Elle Mac Pherson speaking a line about there being a woman Pope.

Yes, `Why can't we be priests or popes?' she says.

The Anglican priest played by Hugh Grant sounds very prim on the one hand and yet tries to be open-minded on the other. Is he meant to be a realistic open-minded Anglican of those days or is this the kind of dialogue that would be more comfortable on the lips of contemporary church men?

As in any other occupation, there are people who are on the conservative side and people who are very enlightened - and there are some marvellously enlightened members of the clergy. Archbishop Oscar Romero, the assassinated Archbishop of San Salvador, an extraordinarily erudite and passionately humanist individual and an inspiring member of the church.

As regards Hugh's character, he begins by appearing to be a somewhat arrogant and superficial individual who, in Hugh's own words, thinks of himself as being rather groovy and able to talk about the avant garde with just as much acumen as the practitioners, but he suddenly finds himself in a world that he finds very confronting. In spite of those early impressions, he actually does have some, quote, `tangible victories' in his debates. I didn't want to make him completely one-sided.

I think that one of his very potent moments in the film is where, in a conversation with his wife, he says he thinks they should have some secrets between them because, if everybody is completely frank with their partner about every aspect of their life, almost no relationship could survive. The film, amongst other things, is a plea for mutual tolerance of one another, including tolerance of a fantasy life, and I think all of us, men and women alike, need to have and need to be allowed a sort of mental space for our imaginations. Yet we have always been taught to feel guilty about that. And I think that's the incredibly damaging thing that Lindsay was constantly railing about - and I have him doing so in the film.

Tara Fitzgerald is strong as the priest's wife. Audience sympathy lay with her, sharing her journey from British primness to experiencing the sensual and the sensuous in the Australian bush, leading to the fantasy life you spoke of. She arrived at a kind of honesty which her husband, as a minister, couldn't face. He wanted to keep the secrets. But she had, in those couple of days, gone through the journey of tolerance, understanding and self-acceptance that you were advocating.

She is the emotional centre of the film. She is the person who takes the audience on a journey with her. Tara Fitzgerald is a very fine actress in being able to take an audience with her into her world and into her feelings. But I believe what I was attempting to achieve with her and her husband was that the film should actually end quite optimistically. A part of Hugh's achievement in playing the clergyman is that about two-thirds of the way through, he suddenly reveals himself to be very vulnerable and very deeply in love with his wife. All of the brittle facade has dropped away and the transparency with which he plays those emotional scenes is really very telling and very moving. His wife responds to that. He is trying to struggle with opening himself up to change, as she is changing. The atmosphere of their final scene together in the train carriage is very playful and humorous. It is rather a wonderful moment between them. The film ends with the optimistic expectation that perhaps they both will be able to accommodate one another's changes and the relationship will flourish.

All the kids in Springwood (where, in fact, the Catholic archdiocese of Sydney had its seminary) had Irish names or Catholic names.

That was a little joke about them all being Irish, yes, with all the Irish names coming out. I really wanted Siren's references to the church to be across the board, so there are references to Wesleyans, there is the Anglican priest, there are references to the Pope and specifically to some of the contemporary Catholic policies towards the admission of women priests. So there is no particular comment which says that any one part of the church is more enlightened or less enlightened than any other. For myself, I would just like to see more members of the clergy grappling with some of the issues that the film raises.

You chose to play the part of the preaching minister yourself?

Actually, the decision to do this role was more a pragmatic one initially because the person who was going to play the part suddenly became unavailable. I could have certainly cast someone else. We were already shooting; it would have been a little bit difficult for me to do auditions at that stage, so it seemed easier for me to play him. I used to be an actor and I've always intended, in fact, to go back to acting and to do some more acting as the years pass, so I enjoyed it. I tried to play the character fairly straight. I didn't embellish him too much. Interestingly enough, when I was coming back into the church after the lunch break, I was following some of the women who were playing the part of extras, just locals living in the area, and one of them was saying to the other, `Well, if we had a minister who spoke as well as he did, the church would be a lot fuller than it is'. I was delighted to hear that. I thought, well, maybe I've got another occupation that I could move to if the film industry dries up.

Then you moved overseas. Wide Sargasso Sea?

It was probably the only really unsatisfying interaction that I've had with a production company and I found that I had major disagreements with them and with the producers. It was unfortunate. Jan Sharp, the producer of the film, had the tenacity to get the film made, but she and I had differences of opinion. She was very well informed on the book, and I'm sure her opinions were arguable, as I like to think mine were, but when you have a situation like that, I think the overall project can suffer. I think the film did suffer from that division. But curiously enough, it got quite wonderful reviews from most of the heavyweight American reviewers like the New York Times and the New Yorker. So there were some people who felt that it worked very well. I felt that it had some major flaws so I wasn't particularly happy with it.

As a PS: the clergy in Dimboola - any comment, or was it just a chance to be funny?

Well, I was attempting to be, I suppose, true to Jack Hibberd's vision, but the priest who's the celebrant of the wedding is a stereotype. He's very funny and whimsical and rather an attractive man in his own right.

August King?

The Journey of August King, with a script by John Ely, is about a man who lives in a cabin in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Ely is a man in his seventies who has written about five novels of different generations of people in that part of the world, and it's a very beautiful script. It's basically the story of a friendship between a runaway slave girl, played by Thandie Newton, and the actor is Jason Patric, who plays the part of a rather shy and retiring farmer whose wife died a year before. It's a very, very deeply felt and tightly written two-hander. It's a sort of road movie, as well, a road movie set in 1815 as these two travel along the mountain roads of North Carolina.

I'm very pleased with it. It's a small film in terms of its perceived commercial appeal, but it's an intensely moral story, the story of a deeply wounded man ultimately finding himself through an act of helping another person. Through this he regains his dignity and probably regains the possibility of continuing his life. The reciprocal part of the transaction comes from the girl's point of view. She is wounded for quite different reasons. At the beginning of the film, she has an abiding suspicion of everyone but, through contact with somebody who, for once, treats her as a human being with respect, she, likewise, will be opened up to a life with some optimistic possibilities.

Is The Leading Man a small-scale film?

I like to imagine that it's a big film, a film which can entertain a lot of people! It's a character-based piece. I think that it offers a rich and surprising plot. There are delicious ironies running all the way through. I think it also speaks about relationships in the last part of the 20th century in a quite telling way.

Your sister, Virginia, wrote the story?

It's not particularly from the London experience. In fact, originally she set it in New York. It needed to be one of the two big theatre centres of the world. I loved the screenplay, so I thought about it for a while and I said, `Look, if we can reset it in London, I think I can get the finance for it.' She agreed, so that's what we did.

I think it was a good choice. The theatre scene there and the Broadway theatre scene are of similar size but the sensibilities of the story probably work better with the outsider coming in from America, rather than the idea of a British actor going into the American scene. It's marvellous being able to get such terrific actors in the smaller roles, David Warner, Patricia Hodge, Diana Quick and Harriet Walter, people like that - wonderful actors who play leading roles in film and television - to get them to do a few lines. It adds a terrific sense of verisimilitude to it.

And Barry Humphries?

A lot of people don't remember that before he created Dame Edna and her entourage of characters he did a lot of straight acting, particularly in London. In fact, he was telling me how he in fact acted on the stage at Stratford East in the 60s, which is the main theatre we used as the theatre set. I think he enjoyed the opportunity of playing a straight role, so he was quite eager to do it. He's always quite busy, so the difficulty is to catch him at a moment when he can fit it in. He is a remarkably fine companion. He's a very erudite man, remarkably well read.

It's a terrific cast. Lambert Wilson is not known widely outside France, but he's very well respected in England. He trained there. He had auditioned for me for a film several years ago which didn't get off the ground and I always remembered meeting him. I asked him if he would audition for me again, which he did, and he just did the best audition for the role. He's tremendously sympathetic, in spite of doing this quite frightful act of betrayal and, in that respect, he makes the film something of a tragedy. It is the story of an essentially decent man who, in one single act, undermines the credibility of his life. Anna Galiena is somebody whose work I'd admired very much from films like The Hairdresser's Husband and Jamon Jamon, so I went across to Paris, where she lives most of the time, and met with her and she liked the script.

The theme of betrayal is very strong.

It's one of the things that I think the film speaks of. These days there are so many temptations that are thrust down our throats by contemporary imagery in films, television and magazines that I think we do make those sorts of choices. It's very difficult for people to believe that the relationships that they're in match up to these other relationships portrayed all around us that seem more glamorous and more sexy and all the rest of it.

Jon Bon Jovi's plan for seduction and betrayal gets to the audience.

It becomes very unnerving and increasingly hard to bear because Anna's character is so completely desperate for affection. So she grasps it. But the assiduous detail that he employs seems so cold-blooded. But then in another layer of irony, it may be the case that he actually genuinely falls in love with her. The audience is left to decide that for themselves.

But she is transformed. Of all the characters, hers is the biggest arc, in that she really does blossom and regain her self-respect and her latent writing abilities. She is strong and vigorous and, actually, the only person in the story to deny Bon Jovi's character when she declares that he is completely unsuited for the role in her script. Perhaps that's a part of imagining that he could finally be turned into a genuine partner for her.

The ending for the other couple was, as you say, tragic.

Yes, it's a truly appalling moment, that moment where Thandie Newton is left stranded outside Lambert's door. That was one of the images that I'm happiest with. It is a very simple image, just the door between them and the tapping away of the typewriter.

The episode with the gun is highly theatrical.

I think that I'm attempting to play around, structurally, with the merging of the theatrical reality and `reality' all through the film. It begins with Lambert's embracing of the deal because, as a writer, he is used to controlling the characters he creates. When he starts to try to control the characters in the world around him, he is starting to cease to recognise the distinction between the two realities. That becomes more and more apparent until the final point where it's tantamount to a complete breakdown where he is no longer thinking rationally and attempts to kill Bon Jovi. So, for me, it's exactly appropriate that that moment has to embrace the two realities. It has to be theatrical. It's important that the audience thinks as he does, that he's killed him.


Interviews: 28th April 1994, 16th May 1997.

PETER DUNCAN



Does the basic plot of Children of the Revolution come from your grandfather?

Yes, in part. Well, not from him, but I it came through thinking about him. I wanted to write something about blind faith. I had contemplated this after an argument I'd had with a friend, a born-again Christian, wondering how he would respond if the existence of God had been disproven. I didn't actually set out to make a film - and I hope the film doesn't appear to be bashing communism. It's about people who have really good hearts and good minds and are really well-intentioned, but they take their idea just a bit too far - and what are the ramifications of that.

My grandfather was born in 1900, was a communist, I think, from his early twenties. He was a card-carrying Communist and he never recanted - he died in 1979 - despite the fact that he was an intelligent man and the writing was on the wall. When I was thinking about this, I said to myself, `I can understand this. But, how do you, at the age of 60 or whenever it was when Kruschev's denunciations started filtering through - how do you cope with someone saying not only was the ideology to which you devoted your life incorrect, but that it was actually pernicious? Do you say, `All right, it was all wrong. I'm sorry', as some people did? Or do you stick to your guns and cling on to your personal history? In his case that's what he chose to do. I hope there's some empathy for Joan Fraser in terms of her even becoming more vehement, as she gets older.

You have used the language of faith, `blind faith' and even your grandfather keeping the faith. Do you think Communism in Australia substituted in some ways for religion and used that kind of religious language, for instance, referring to the awe and dedication to the ideology.

I think there's a direct correlation. Was it Marx who said, `Religion is the opiate of the masses', or was it Lenin?

It was Marx.

Well, at least in the Soviet experience, they created their own deities and they created their own adherents, devotees and disciples as well as the Communist cant and the rhetoric, particularly when they were big after the war, even big in Australia. People would fire out quotes just as people fire out quotes from the Bible, firing out quotes from Marx. I guess it's something that I've been critical of with certain religious institutions in the past and it's good to see that ceremonies stopped being in Latin. Much as I love the theatre and all of that atmosphere, it makes it too mysterious and too inaccessible. And when you have something like Communism, which was preaching to the proletariat, the working class, and Communists crying out incomprehensible Marxist dogma at them, there's a disjuncture there.

It formed a creed that people could recite.

That's right.

You worked on Children of the Revolution when you were a film student?

In 1989 I decided to apply for film school, and most of the work I'd done in terms of film-making or writing had been for revues at university. I was putting on shows - probably the best fun I'll ever have in my life, doing that sort of thing. But I decided I needed something a bit more meaty and that line of thought we were discussing earlier about blind faith came to me. I thought of my grandfather and I conceived this story. This was pretty much what got me into film school because they weren't very interested in discussing anything else I'd done. They were much more interested in discussing this script.

But I more or less left it in the drawer throughout film school, but just before graduation I thought I should have something to go out and peddle when I finished. So I whipped up this 203-page draft, a ridiculously unshootable thing. I met Tristram Miall at graduation and he said, `Come on over, let's have a chat', and I dropped this draft on his desk. He loved it, and it started from there.

It seems a particularly Australian story in its quality of imagination and its irony. Do you see it as distinctively Australian?

For me, a very important part of it, in terms of the structure of the film, was the idiosyncratic nature of our communistic spirits. The fact that we were so removed from Europe where the realities of it were prevailing, so removed from America so that we didn't have a Mc Carthyist movement of any substance - Menzies tried the anti-Communist referendum and failed. We had a broad but not deep band of Australians, academics and miners, nurses and business people, and they were all embracing the faith. But at the same time most people had a job and life was pretty comfortable. One of the ironies for Joan Fraser is that everyone's a bit laid-back - she can't see how the revolution's ever going to get going with 6 o'clock closing. She looks around herself in such frustration. She can't get these people really motivated. You wonder, if they got the call, would these people actually get out of their beds and, say, storm the opera house.

The Balmain Pub was nice and cosy, even with 6 o'clock closing.

Yes, exactly. It gave people something to believe in that I think for many didn't necessarily have to be tangible.

Welsh, the Geoffrey Rush character, believed in it only because he loved Joan. At least it gave him motivation for a while. But the humour of the film - we are always saying Australian films are quirky. Here we have a kind of quirkiness that is even more quirky.

Out-quirks the quirks.

How did you come to imagine Stalin as you did?

There were two things: one was casting Stalin, and I thought we needed an icon. Stalin is an icon. Judy Davis is playing the kitchen-sink communist. We needed someone big out there and preferably foreign. I unashamedly say that, someone who comes from another culture. Any culture will do, so long as he can put on the accent - and Murray agreed to play the part. That enlarged the scope. It was my idea to cast someone of that stature.

Secondly, I thought that there's a traditional expectation of the Kremlin and I didn't want to give that. That would not be Joan's point of view. If you follow Joan's ideology right through, she probably was expecting a reasonably austere bunch of guys living life through books and speeches and trying to work. But whilst it's got this Speerian architecture - which isn't how the Kremlin is at all, it's much more ornate - there's a great deal of opulence. So, what is bizarre about that? The irony is that Stalin loves American films, smokes French tobacco and sings Cole Porter. It had to be bizarre. I think it was a Czech who wrote a book about the three meetings he had with Stalin, and each meeting was more bizarre than the previous one. Even normal things were bizarre. So, I thought, we've got to go down that line. And instead of singing The Internationale, which Joan sings back in Sydney, in Moscow they're singing, I Get a Kick Out of You.

That certainly prepared for the plausibility of Joan having Stalin's son and then coming back to Australia. Children of the Revolution is, in some ways, reminiscent of Forrest Gump.

A couple of people have said that.

It's the possibility of doing an overview of 40 years of history as Forrest Gump did of 25 years of American history. It depends on how old one is, checking out what one thought at that time, for instance the late 60s and early 70s with the anti-Vietnam moratoriums... Did I agree with that? Did I think that? What do I think now? For Australia the film offers a great opportunity to review all kinds of attitudes, a kind of examination of conscience in an ironic way. Is that reading too much into the film?

No. That's a tremendous thing if people do take that from the film. I'd like to think of it as Forrest Gump with a bit of edge. Forrest Gump was just happy accident after happy accident and I found that got a bit repetitive.

You have the opposite of the idiot savant. Joan is too wise for her own good. But you reviewed history with the disign and lighting of the film.

The colours too. Working with Roger Ford and Terry Ryan as the production designer and costume designer and Martin Mc Grath, who is the DOP, it was really important to us that the film started in a very bright, warm way, and you may or may not notice that the film has more reds and oranges and browns at the beginning but it ends quite cold. And, for me, that is how the experience, the metaphor works.

That's why the film always had - for me, irrespective of what anyone said at script stage - it had to end sad, it had to end with Joan's death, because that's the metaphor. It was all over then. It ends in a sad way on a Balmain Street. And you cast your mind back to the 40s and 50s and you have all these wonderfully bright, dedicated, passionate people and, you know, for a lot of them it ended in watching the collapse, of seeing the statue of Lenin being torn down on the television screen.

And Gorbachev and Reagan are indistinguishable.

Gorbachev is Ronald Mc Donald, yes.

Some audiences have had difficulty with Joan's death. Perhaps too stark for what they were expecting, but it makes sense in the context of the whole metaphor of the film.

As I've just implied, we did discuss it a lot. But for me it always had to be like this. And if some people have a problem with that, there's nothing I can do about it because I was never going to finish this film in a happy family sort of way.

It is very strking how Stalinist Joe becomes, especially in the Australia of the '80s and '90s. How were you commenting on 80s' and 90s' politics, the possibility of revolution or not, ppolitical and police cover-ups and the role of spies?

One of the things that has always fascinated me is not so much whether in our history we could have had something else in terms of our past, but the question of whether we actually did have something else in our past. I was taught that Captain Cook discovered Australia in 1770 and that was day one of history for me. I was shocked and horrified to hear at the age of nine about a fellow called Dirk Hartog - it was very confusing for me and I didn't get it. And at this stage the Aborigines still hadn't been mentioned, apart from a few references to Bennelong.

There are obvious statements, particularly about the 80s, about factories and Reaganism, the grand plans to make super ministries of government and super unions, areas that seemed to me, at the time at least, to reflect what I think we're discussing now in terms of media, which is concentration of ownership and, really, how many people are now holding the cards of this country, or indeed any other country. All it takes, as you see in different examples that litter history, is for a reasonably strong charismatic figure to seize a moment and an opportunity and a wave can break.

Joe's problem is, of course, that no ideas were planted in him. For me, part of the question of the film is the socialised versus innate nature of human beings. As Joe says to Stalin, `How does someone become a monster?' It can't be as simple as poverty and child abuse, surely. Joe's problem is that he doesn't know whether his path was chosen for him or he chose his path. Joe's story is a bit like Macbeth for me, that the prophecy is made and it's all too terrible but he can't escape it. And you wonder if he'd never heard those things or if Anna had never known, whether his life would have been different.

It's a very bleak picture of post-communism. But if Communism was pernicious, is there much difference with Thatcherism, the media control, cover-ups - and the death of Joan? What is the difference?

But the other difference, of course, is that you can make a buck out of it. Everyone's selling their story, even the historian. That was important to me, to tongue-in-cheek start something with a historian who says, `Well, this is it', because when you put historians in documentaries, everyone thinks it's true, `He's a historian, he's going to give us the true perspective'. The reality is that he turned out to be selling a book and he's been in prison for fraud - he had his own angle.

You offer a lot of ambiguity as well as inventiveness in your characters: Sam Neill as Nine and being on both sides, Rachel Griffith's policewoman Anna carrying on with and marrying Joe and then marrying Nine... It's actually a very funny collection of odd characters. Do you enjoy that kind of humour?

Yes, I think it makes things interesting. I do think that if you look at human lives, there is a lot of the unexpected that happens, people trying to promote themselves as one thing, but they may be something else; and they themselves may not know what they really are, and later on in life there could be a big left or right-hand turn and they could end up in bed with someone who was a distant relation or worse.

That comes with Nine and the massacre of Anna's family, and the ironic connections there, as well as the arrangments for Joan's murder. How did you expect audiences to come out of the cinema - with Joe's final remark about selling the rights to his book? A tongue-in-cheek chuckle?

Yes, that's right, because it does get a bit bleak. I very much wanted people to experience a bit of a sting in the tail. That's also part of the reason why I had the scene with nine and Anna at the end, the sense of irony and satire is slightly reintroduced at the end, so that it's not a total weepy.

Welsh seems to be the most normal of the characters. Did you see him that way - whatever normal means?

I guess he is. We always thought Geoffrey's character was the glue, the one who doesn't participate in the fights but goes to make the cup of tea, anything for a peaceful world. But of course history conspired against him, as it conspired against everyone. History is very much the enemy of these characters, hence Welsh becomes a sort of traitor in the end. He is someone who doesn't really care about history. He loves his wife, he loves his `son', but still history conspires against him in a most unbelievable arcane way. What are the ramifications? It's the old saying, you know, the butterfly flaps its wings and there are tidal waves in Japan.

If that's the case, would you see yourself as optimistic or pessimistic?

I think I'm optimistic with a heavy dose of cynicism about our institutions. I'm a bit Jeffersonian. I believe that every hundred years or every couple of generations all the major institutions, be they legal or governmental or indeed religious and media, anything that has great power, we should be looking at it and asking, is it still relevant? is it still working? how can we improve it? I think by being a little critical, you can, hopefully, provoke people to think about these institutions.

I'd like to make films that are funny - not always, but I think my bent is to make funny films that have something to say about something.


Interview: 18th December 1996

DAVID ELFICK

The major distributors did not take up No Worries. It was left to independent theatres in the country or like the small Lumiere cinema in Melbourne to give the film some exhibition.
Well, I mean, that's life. Perhaps the major distributors couldn't work out its market, but it came to the Lumiere in Melbourne and it found a very good market. Perhaps there was some sort of justice that someone like manager, Paul Coulter, took on a film which is at this moment in its 15th week and still bringing the crowds in. So I'm not unhappy about that. I was always for the little guy, anyway.

No Worries: what was it in the screenplay that appealed to you and drew you, an experienced producer and director, to direct this film?

It began by my actually reading the play. The play was written to be performed by a very small ensemble of actors, playing many parts - including the sheep as well as the humans. What I thought was interesting was the humanity of the piece. I realised that while, for the play, the audience is required to use its imagination to set the scene, if you made a movie of it, you could take the cinema audience out there and enable them to experience what it was really like to go through this cathartic experience, sharing it with the young girl, Matilda.

Even though the play was written in the 80s, it very much a 90s film. What does it mirror about the situation, both in country and in city, for the Australian audience?

First of all the difference between the 80s and the 90s: we seem to be forever plagued by droughts or floods or pestilence or famine, whatever. But I think the difference in terms of transition from play to movie is that so many people are being forced off the land and it's really destroying the communities in the country.

The rural councillor, played by John Hargreaves, is a character who was not in the play. But this kind of councillor has taken on a very important role in the rural community. In the past and now, the men of religion would help a community find its footing and assist families in times of crisis. The good thing about the rural councillor is that he not only gives the family some sort of psychological background and something to fall back on, but he also has the advantage of being a tough economic manager. He can go in and fight the banks and try to get as fair a deal as he can for the people in the country.

But in terms of the 90s, I think that we are still faced with the stances and policies of the economic rationalists. I think we are still faced with the problem that we have two societies in Australia: we have a rural Anglo-Saxon? country society and we have a multicultural city society. They are very, very different, and I think that any government running Australia has to face the difficulty that the votes are in the city but the country is, in fact, our heritage. It's something that I would hate to think we would lose. It distresses me because I finished shooting the film in April 1992 and yet the plight of the people on the land hasn't improved since then. It has probably deteriorated. And I feel when you go to the country - I'm a person from the city - you are struck with the nobility of country people, the way they are hardworking, that they are honest, decent people.

Something that really struck me was that I thought I knew a lot of things that country people didn't know. And, in terms of city life, I certainly do. But I realise that country people are not ignorant; they just have different knowledge; and I felt very ignorant in their presence when I saw how much they knew about things that I had no idea of. So I came away quite humbled by the experience of working very closely with people over a six month period in the Gilgandra area. I think it's very sad that farms that have been in families for generations, that are part of our Anzac spirit, our heritage, are being lost. Australia is very light on heritage in many ways and, while traditions, I think, can be stultifying, they can also give people something to hang on to.

It's a shame that so many of those farms are just going to rack and ruin and that people are walking off the land. It's also well worthwhile keeping in mind that their produce is the best in the world. They're not inefficient, bad farmers. Our farmers work bloody hard. They're very efficient. And, yet, because of the way the world is working, with the economic managers of the world, trade and tariff conditions and all the different elements that are working against people who are earning an honest living, the farmers are just losing their livelihood. And I think that's very sad.

There's another significant thing that really struck me as I worked in the country and that was the role of women. I always knew that women in the country basically managed the farm, in other words, ran the household. But I was surprised to see that women, in fact, have roles on three other levels. One level is that they are mothers and they manage the family. Secondly, they also help on the farm. At shearing time they're not only cooking the food but helping with the actual shearing, rounding the sheep up, branding them... And, of course, the third area is their being the economic managers of these vast businesses which are quite often changing in terms of the conditions and the saleability of product and new ways of dealing with the way their crops are sown, marketed. And all this is done on a home computer late at night. They're extraordinary women and modest about their achievements, but I was so impressed with what they do and how hard they work and how uncomplaining they were. I felt, I must say, very humble after making No Worries.

You created quite a different atmosphere when the family got to the city. They began to realise that not only was their country knowledge not so helpful in the city, but that the multicultural city was almost overwhelming. This was especially true for Matilda herself.

One thing I didn't want to say was, `Country good, city bad. I think that if the film has a message of hope - and I believe it does - it is that they can overcome the bewildering differences in the city, these people from their very organised rural Anglo-Saxon? background moving to the multicultural city. It's bewildering and frightening to Matilda at first, for Ellen as well and also for Ben, the father.

Ellen doesn't even know the difference between a Chinese person and a Vietnamese. They're all just strange, foreign people to her. But by the end of the film I think there is a message of hope not only for Matilda but for the rest of the family, in that there are rich rewards, cultural rewards, personal rewards to be gained in our multicultural cities.

And one would hope that the friendship which Matilda is forging with Vin, the little Vietnamese girl, in the final minutes of the film, is a friendship which will benefit Vin, who is an orphan and desperately wants to have people to love her and to relate to her, and also benefit Matilda in so far as her outlook on the world will be broadened by having a friend from Vietnam. Two small girls who have both undergone enormously cathartic experiences in their short lives can probably draw on their friendship to go forward and become well balanced and productive citizens of Australia.

In your comments on John Hargreaves' rural counsellor character you mentioned the word `religious'. Is he supplying what churches used to supply in service and support to country people? The film presents the family as traditionally religious.

I felt the Bells were like many country people; for them the church forms a meeting place. People work every day and quite often they work when they get back from church. But going to church is offering a time to get together, to sing together (which is a thing which helps one emotionally). So Matilda is brought up in basically a Christian household and she is taught, as most kids want to believe, that there is right and wrong, good and bad and, if you do the right thing, you will somehow be rewarded. She finds it so confusing that she has never done the wrong thing; she can't see her parents doing the wrong thing; and yet they lose their livelihood, their history, their whole lifestyle - and that is what she finds so bewildering.

Life is like that. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do the right thing all the time, but you shouldn't expect necessarily that you will be rewarded for doing it. You should do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. I think it's very important that when she comes to the city and she runs away from home, she's running through Central Railway Station - and she sees these tall, fuzzy-haired black people with a Christian banner, singing one of the hymns that she knows from church. But they are singing in a foreign language, in an island language from the Pacific. Again it's a confusing thing for her as she sees her religion being celebrated by people that are so strange to her. But that's all a learning experience.

I think that it's hard to say to kids, `Do the right thing and be honest and play your part in society'. But we don't necessarily think it through - I mean, our whole society now is all about winning. If we turn on the television and if it's sports coverage, it's not about playing the game, it's about winning. The fact is that in any game that's played, 50 per cent of the players are going to lose. Now, shouldn't we be teaching them more about playing the game rather than winning?

In Love in Limbo there is a satiric comment on some of the traditional attitudes towards religion in Australia through the Russell Crowe character, with his Welsh Chapel background, his experience of going to Kalgoorlie with his mates from work, going to the brothel, getting drunk and his return home to his strait-laced parents.

Love in Limbo is a comedy. It's meant to show young men with a strong libido but completely inept with the opposite sex. It shows how they stagger forward into their first sexual encounter. Russell, who's a wonderful actor, took up the challenge and played his part of an anally-retentive Welsh Baptist virgin. Of course, it is caricature. But we wanted to show his parents as being so out of touch with what was happening in the '50s with rock and roll music and fashion. He had been cocooned in their lifestyle like so many immigrants - the film also showed the immigrant experience - then suddenly there are two of the boys from work with an old car, a sense of adventure and a few bottles of the demon beer. We see how easily he was seduced into having some fun because his parents' idea of fun wasn't really fun. It's his birthday and yet it's such a boring, old person's celebration that he's going home to.

But we also wanted to show that, at the last minute he really didn't want to go into the brothel. He was terrified, but he wanted to know all about it. I thought that the film was also an examination of adult love. It's a story about love, the story of a widow who was like many widows after the Second World War. They were young attractive women deprived of a man because the men had been killed in the war, but with children and all that parental responsibility. The film wanted to show the difference between the kind of sexual experience or love that young Ken has in his first sexual encounter in the brothel and how his mother, who has been denied love for the previous ten to fifteen years, bringing her twins up, could still love. That's why we intercut the two strands of the plot.

I would hope that it was a film that had some amusing and endearing qualities and that people could have a laugh with it without finding it offensive. I don't mean that I tried to pussyfoot in the making of the movie. It has got a bit of bad language in it and it's a bit sexually explicit at times, but I hope that it has an endearing quality. When it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section, people really enjoyed it. People in there 30s, 40s and 50s came up to me after the screening and said, `Gosh, that brought back some memories', and, `Isn't it better now that we're more honest with our children in the way we talk to them about things?'. So I was pleased. And they enjoyed all the clothes and the cars and the music of the period - that was all part of it. And, of course, all the songs are about unrequited love, songs that are always on the hit parade.

Newsfront and your participation in it along with Bob Ellis and with director, Philip Noyce. It offered a very striking picture of the Catholic Church in the '50s, especially in the character played by Angela Punch Mc Gregor, her personal shift from absolute strictness to her divorce. There was the atmosphere of The Split and the anti-communist attitudes of the Menzies era.

What Newsfront did was give Australians some great characters of the period. Philip Noyce as director can take enormous credit for the film; it's his film but I felt very privileged to be its producer and the instigator of the original project. We had, with Angela's character, someone whose life wasn't working out, the exploration of how she struggles to cope with it, a strict Catholic, who by the end of the film had moved away from her church. I feel that we see in the Bill Hunter character a flawed man, but a man of integrity, who wondered why he was on earth.

I like the idea of his being a man of integrity but with personal flaws. I think of the central character in Schindler's List, a man who's a womaniser, a member of the Nazi Party, who thinks it's completely wrong to waste human resources and to waste the talent of intelligent, talented people, that that is the crime, and will go against the system, risking his own life because he believes that every person is worthwhile preserving. I liked the fact that in Newsfront, Bill had integrity in terms of his work ethic, his loyalty to his country, but felt that religion had deserted him because it hadn't moved with the times. And yet the times had moved him into being an anachronism.

What I hoped with Newsfront and with any films of quality - and I certainly think Newsfront is one of those - is that it raises questions for the audience to talk about rather than come to finite conclusions. We were not making a diatribe; we were not making a political statement; we were trying to show in all those films our society and the foibles of the human beings in that society.

But I have made a lot of quintessentially Australian films and I hope that the films I've made, as a body of work, reflect something aboutg Australia.

Even looking at a little film like Emoh Ruo, which is about the hazards for the first home buyer, of someone moving away from their idealised life in a caravan park where they can go fishing and have quite an interesting lifestyle, albeit in very modest accommodation, to a more lavish house where there are no facilities, where it's boring and culturally and emotionally sterile, and how that tears a family apart. It's also a comedy, but I think it has something to say about the way we're going in contemporary Australia.

Starstruck?

Starstruck is the classic example of two quite crazy children whose loyalty is to their family. At the end when Jo Kennedy wants to get some money and goes in the concert, she wants to win the money to save the pub. The family sticks together in the end, although it's a pretty eccentric family. So Starstuck is almost a celebration of the family. It highlights another aspect of family - we've all seen where kids often relate to their grandparents more than to their parents. Here you have the eccentric grandmother, played by Pat Everson, doing the fortune-telling and living in the twilight zone. Then the kids, quite crazy in their own way, and mum and dad in the middle, trying to run the pub.

So it was great fun doing Starstruck and it says something about ordinary people. A Frenchwoman was doing a doctorate at the Sorbonne University and she came to me and said, `I'm doing my doctorate on the working-class heroes in the films you've made'. I thought, `My God, I've never thought about this', and she rattled off all the films. And it was absolutely true!


Interview: 29th March 1995

BOB ELLIS


How do you see your contribution to Australian cinema - as writer, director, commentator or all of the above?

Well, not as vast as it might have been. I've got about 33 scripts in drawers that weren't made and films that were made that irritate me a bit in how they differed from what was intended: Man of Flowers; there's a shocking film called Winds of Jarrah which, would you believe, started out as a very good script and only about one sentence of it survived; another similar one which was eventually called Ebb Tide, which was a really terrific Chandleresque film noir that bears no resemblance to the eventual film.

I'm putting together a book of writings on film which I hope will be formidable and telling and impressive, in hopefully more than one volume, structuring it around the years of my life from when I ran a threepenny cinema in our garage at the age of 10, through university, kind of half-making campus films and working in the ABC and ending with me as a director sort of auteur and so on, a long love affair with the medium.

I'm lucky to have come from that generation that was not Cecil Holmes' generation and those people who really had it hard, who would have been very fine film directors had they had opportunities. But I'm unlucky in not being of the present very young generation where, apparently at 22, they write a good script, are given the money to make it and immediately go to Hollywood and sell themselves, make a lot of money and ruin their promise.

On an Australia Talks Back program on Australian film you lamented the directors who have left Australia to work in Hollywood and overseas.

Yes. I said at the time it's like ringing up Fellini and saying, `I really liked Juliet of the Spirits. We're going to offer you a lot of money to come here and direct A Country Practice.' That's precisely what happens to Australians who go to Hollywood. From Newsfront to Sliver is not a career path, you know. From Gallipoli to Green Card is not a career path. From The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith to Mr Baseball is not a career path. There's a career path of a certain kind - which is selling out, winding up as a really competent hack in a system which shouldn't be there.

Your contribution to Newsfront and what interested you in the theme?

On the very day that I decided I would henceforth work only on my own ideas, I was rung by Elfick and offered the best idea I'd ever heard, which was the lifestyles and work habits of newsreel cameramen in the 1940s and 1950s, structured around existing newsreels with a hit-list of events. I wrote the first draft in collaboration with Howard Rubie, who was a newsreel cameraman at Cinesound at the same time, and it was understood that he would direct it. Somehow Noyce played meaningful ping-pong with Elfick and was able to displace Howard from the thing.

There was some nonsense about how long it was; we'd set it out, one short scene per page and it finally came out about 300 pages or so but, in fact, it was maybe two and a quarter hours long, which wasn't too bad then or now for something that covered 10 years. But a legend started about how huge it was. When I saw it, I was appalled. I could only see what was missing and abruptly took my name off it. Then when it won all the prizes, I sort of shamefacedly put my name back on it.

It was a quite painful experience and I think a very good film, but not as good a film as might have been made. One of the models for it was the film, Yanks, which was a moment in history in particular culture perfectly captured. It had a lot more than the politics in it but, partly because of the budget and partly because of the length, it was pruned back to the politics. Now, the politics was all there in the original but it was surrounding other things, such as the way people spent their Christmases. That was removed.

And it was round about that time I became known as a contentious person who takes his name off the credits but has never really gone away.

But I've become more philosophical and more Chandleresque about it since. Chandler said, correctly, that you have to be wearing your second-best suit, professionally speaking, to write screenplays. You must learn to care but not too much.

Another aspect of Newsfront is the religious theme in the context of the 50s and the Cold War. Angela Punch McGregor's character, the righteous Catholic wife who gives up her faith, had not been seen before on our screens. Was that your contribution?

That was mine, and my wife wrote a bit of it, too. You needed the Catholic thing because of the politics of the time. The overwhelming event of the 50s among those who remember it was the Communist Dissolution Bill and the threat and, to some extent, the actuality of McCarthyism? in Australia. So you needed the Catholic thing and the soft option was to make the central character a Catholic and to have an unyielding Catholic wife. Then you needed the characters to do something more than stay and simply posture over the 10 years. That's roughly what happened.

Newsfront was also true to the newsreel men of the time - that their marriages were wrecked by their sexual opportunities while travelling. But they were an interesting bunch. We had a phrase for them, `buccaneers on mortgages'. They didn't get much money but they had great jobs and they saw the best of it. But the other side of it was that they were just men who, when they got home, didn't mow the lawn or go into the garage and build something in the usual way or go to the 6 o'clock swill with their mates. And that was interesting. They were, in a way, a peacetime version of the wartime Australian ordinary man who saw tremendous events and was changed by them.

In my memory there was no particular model for the wife. It was written particularly for Angela Punch McGregor?, who at the time was acting stark naked in our theatre and impressing us a great deal thereby from many angles. All the parts were written, more or less, for the people who played them. They were given the roles a bit reluctantly by Noyce after finding that they did the best auditions - the Haywood role was for Haywood and the Lorna Leslie role was for Lorna Leslie. The Hunter role wasn't initially for him, but once I saw him in Backroads, I thought it's got to be him because he had that interesting thing of a ferocious clerk, the way you describe that character.

But it was not a work of passion, it was a work of research, casting, history and filling in between the existing bits of newsreel which we knew we were going to use and bits that weren't used but were intended to be used, like Bradman's last Test and the Queen's first visit, the locust plagues. They were all originally written in. I'm really fond of the original script. It's been a slow acceptance of what you can't do.

It was also the first Australian film of overt political content and, therefore, it was a groundbreaker and, I think, gave permission for the eventual films of The Dismissal, which went at it head-on, and True Believers which I co-wrote, which dealt with the politics of precisely the same 1945-1955 period.

True Believers gave you a chance to come back at the politics more satisfactorily?

Well, I don't know. I've never seen True Believers because they changed lots of it and I've never looked at it. For some reason I think I live in the time about October 1951. That's the place where I'm most comfortable. I've lately written a musical called Man the Musical, set in the offices of Man Magazine in 1951 and 1952. And it wasn't until I lately saw, for the first time, Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum, that I thought, `This is my country. This is my country town. Those are my remembered women and school friends and heroes.' So, somewhere in a country town in the 1950s is where I feel at home, so any subject set there suits me - like that very good film The Settlement.

Howard Rubie directed it.

Yes, it's a wonderful film. It's a great film. It's like a film that Lawson never wrote but might have. It's sort of a menage a trois outside a country town. I like, particularly, the man played by Tony Barry. He waits for his wife outside while she goes to church. That's what my father did to my mother.

Unfinished Business and Warm Nights on a Slow- Moving Train? Was making Unfinished Business a satisfying experience?

Well, it was a strange thing. What happened was I was asked, for no good reason, to direct a film, a very cheap film, and to write it. And I said, `Well, why don't we do a film like My Dinner With Andre, in which we have a guided but improvised conversation between two interesting people who shall be John Clarke and Patrick Cook, and we'll call it Business Lunch'. They reckoned this was a good idea and the money, which was about $60,000, was raised. All we basically had to do was set aside about three days and shoot it.

Then Clarke became iffy and wouldn't turn up and we found that there was no time in the calendar when he was actually available to do it. The time to spend the money under 10 BA was running out and the producer, Rebel Penfold- Russell, said to me, `Can you write a script that's basically a two-hander that contains in the title either the word Business or Lunch?' So I thought of Unfinished Business, then remembered this idea I'd had for a long time about the deliberate impregnation of a woman. And I thought, `Well, I'll shoot it here'.

We were in fact in transition from here to a place in Wahroonga; so we had the use of a place in Wahroonga and a place here in Palm Beach and a flat in Bellevue Hill. We used all three locations and wrote it for them. We thought of having this older husband, played by Norman Kaye, and asked Norman to write and to perform the music as well, for a total of $1000 or something. And so it was confected - and it's one of the most enjoyable experiences I ever had. Although the actor and the actress were both acting on stage - one was rehearsing in the daytime and the other was performing at night. The net result was that we'd sometimes converge at midnight and begin shooting, which is about the worst thing you can do.

But it was wonderful. It took 11 days and I wish it had taken 13. We would have got some more close-ups. But it was written in three days and the time between the beginning of the writing and the world premiere was three and a quarter months, which may be a world record. I've always been very fond of it, particularly that lovely kind of marriage with those two gumnut babies, Michelle Fawdon and John Clayton. They have this marsupial, cuddly quality. Neither of them are particularly good-looking but they're very warm and, therefore, the effect, I think and believe, was very sexy and very sad. It was also to some extent a self-indulgence. I always loved Peter Dawson singing I'll Walk Beside You.

So it was just a happy convergence of preferences arrived at very suddenly under a whole lot of pressure, which is often the best way to work - as a lot of people will tell you, including the makers of Casablanca.

It wasn't the same with Warm Nights on a Slow- Moving Train?

It was one of the best scripts I've ever written. We made the grave error of agreeing to let Dimsey produce it and then the worse error of moving the whole thing to Melbourne. So I was away from home. And there was this whole 10 BA set-up with shifty lawyers who, I didn't know, had kind of agreed to fire me at a certain point if I fulfilled certain expectations. Which I didn't. But I got fired quite late in the day and then 64 laughs, by my count, were removed. It wasn't meant to be funny, but it was a viable experience.

I had Yuri Sokol shooting it. He's a wonderful cameraman but he's an awful bastard and he would sometimes light with candles... It was a nasty experience, as nasty as I've experienced. So it really ditched me as a director. Because it would have been - had my cut, which fortunately several people like Al Finney and Bob Weiss saw and said it would have been the best Australian film - had my cut survived and been shown (but it was burnt with our house), I would have then had a directing career not unlike that of, say, Simon Wincer where I would have had some credibility overseas and so on.

The Nostradamus Kid?

Nostradamus Kid was pitched to me as an idea by David Putnam. He sold me the idea of my own life. It was quite an amazing experience, written against his impatience in 11 days in a shed that I rented two houses up, written out of memory and written with a great deal of anguish because I realised what a fool I'd been all my life and I was continuing to be the same kind of fool in the same kind of ways. Various people were going to direct it. Cox was going to direct at one point. Duigan was going to direct it. Carl Schultz was going to direct it. Chris McGill? was going to direct it and didn't. And by the time 1990 rolled around I was already a director and determined to do it myself. I put it in one chook raffle where it was narrowly knocked back and, then, a subsequent chook raffle where it was narrowly knocked back on the grounds that it didn't have an acceptable producer who would sit on me. Then the next time around it was narrowly accepted - when I provided for the producer.

I didn't know Noah Taylor at the time and assumed he was wrong for the film until we auditioned a lot of kids and cast one. And then, correctly, the Film Finance Commission said, `Look, he's okay but he probably won't last in the difficult business of charming the audience for the 98 minutes or whatever. Please look further'. And we called on Noah. He was much less the sort of soft wimp that I'd assumed, and it was one of the happiest experiences I've ever had, working with him and those wonderful young actors.

The cut was less pleasant because we were deceived by the continuity girl and the long cut, which we fully expected to be 125 minutes, was 148 minutes. I thought I'd have to kill myself but the editor said, `No, let's make the best film we can and then defend it'. It was very good advice. We did, and we had a wonderful film at about 124 minutes and an even better film at 122 minutes. Then I pushed my luck, `Let's get it down under 2 hours'. I didn't exactly stuff it but really hurt it in those last two and a half minutes that went. Then a couple more shots were removed by the producer, and one of them, which involved the transition from the young Noah to the old one, really hurt the ultimate effect.

Then odd things happened. We had very bad distributors, Beyond International, who insisted it go to Cannes, which was ridiculous once it wasn't accepted for competition. Then it was going to open in August, which was fine; then, somehow, it ended up opening in October when all the kids who might have otherwise gone to see it were studying for exams and so on. So it didn't quite break out

It was dogged at every turn by The Piano, which I both detest and resent because it is a conscienceless piece of American betrayal of a story that wasn't very good in the first place.

Your treatment of Adventism in the 50s? How much is filtered by your memory? Is the treatment realistic or filtered?

It was a little heightened, a little Norman Rockwellised, I think, but it reflected accurately my feelings of enduring affection and exasperation with the religion. They're quite wonderful people and they were right about many things like roughage, lung cancer, health foods and so on but so stupendously wrong about their central tenet, which was the imminent arrival of the vengeful Christ. It ventilated those memories.

I think that all of us, perhaps, have the girl that's our first love (in a way that's unendurably painful and romantic),
in one's early teens. I think mine dated from when I was either 13 or 14 - and there's that weird feeling you have of being entrapped in a moral system that's not only wrong but a little zany.

If it hadn't been written so ferociously fast and painfully, it wouldn't have been as good as it is. And if it hadn't been written in 1979 but had been written in, say, 1989, a lot of the memory and a lot of the emotional recall would have been gone. The idea of mixing the two stories, which she knew of, was my wife's. I had never actually thought it. But she obviously picked on the notion that I wait impatiently in attendance on the end of the world.

It should've been a nightmare. There were 192 scenes and we shot 194. There were eight weeks and we used eight and a half. There were 50 different locations and a young cast, shooting desperately at all hours and magically warding off the rain. We had about an hour of rain during the whole shoot. If we'd had three hours, there probably wouldn't have been enough strands to put the story together.

Did the Adventists themselves welcome the film?

I sent up a copy to Avondale. I was invited up to lecture them, and I did, on why I am an atheist. And it went down pretty well. Then I sent up the film. I had a notion of either premiering it or having a special screening there or in an adjacent town, and they were horrified - or the principal of Avondale College was - but an amazing number of ex-Adventists and present Adventists came up to me and expressed they were able to imagine their own youth and childhood. A lot of people of other religions, fundamentalist religions, Salvation Army, people like that, did much the same thing. The campground scenes really got to them for some reason. Apparently everybody has been through that kind of organised outdoor hypocrisy.

Adventism has changed a great deal in the last 40 years.

Apparently. In my days you couldn't go to the pictures and couldn't watch television unless it was a factual program. Now it's all different. I don't know if you can dance, maybe you can. They used to say, `Ye are God's peculiar people' - that's a terrible phrase. And the way you were barred from ordinary events, like playing cricket on Saturday because it was Saturday, going to the Saturday afternoon matinees and dancing... it was quite awful. You knew you were special and you knew you were serving God's purpose and doing his work, but you just wanted to be with the others.

And the apocalyptic anticipation which is very strong in the film?

Yes, and very persuasive. I still have dreams where the Adventists are right and Christ comes. The dream always ceases at the point where I'm about to be condemned to eternal hellfire, but it's very persuasive and very sad. I'm moved by the extent to which people wish unhappiness on themselves and on others. I do think masochism is a genuine human and universal emotion in a way that, say, gratitude is not. Actual gratitude doesn't exist. I'm sure guilt exists. I'm sure gratitude is a manufactured emotion. But masochism is a very strong thing and it afflicts the current generation of vegetarians and bodybuilders and people who won't lose their temper for any cause, and all these new ethics.

In view of the changes or non-changes in Adventism and of Fred Schepisi's presentation in Evil Angels, how has Advetnism impacted on the Australian psyche?

Well, I knew she was innocent from the start because Adventists don't tell lies like that. There's almost an edict in the mind to own up to something you've done wrong and, when she decided rather to go to jail for 20 years than to admit guilt and get off with a warning - which is what she did - it's clear that she was innocent. But what it unleashed was a kind of witch-hunting, a Witches of Salem kind of thing, which was very ugly. It showed how the desire to persecute the out group is very strong in any society.

My interpretation of it was that the fiercest pursuers of Lindy were women who themselves had had abortions. They were projecting their guilt on to her, truly wanting to hang her. I think that's perceptive. I wanted to write the film, obviously, and Schepisi talked to me. But he then felt I'd be too close and went, perhaps correctly, to Caswell. But it was a very good film, I thought, and it was Schepisi's greatest grief that he had to cut 15 minutes out of it. Those dinner party scenes were much longer and her time in jail was much longer. It looks like she went to jail for the weekend. But he had the choice of not getting a release and cutting out 15 minutes and he mourned - I'd love to have seen the longer version. It's one of the very few projects that was a much more natural mini-series than a film. Judy Davis rejected the role of Lindy, would you believe - she's a fool on the grounds that she'd already played an Adventist in Hoodwink. She would have been superb. Not that Streep wasn't fine, as she always is, but on the other hand Judy has that manic intensity of Lindy.

Your collaborations with Paul Cox?

Oh, he's a swine. Well, in brief, we wrote Man of Flowers in nine hours, My First Wife in a day and a half. I mean, he wouldn't tolerate working for any longer. I'd write scenes in the dialogue form and he'd take them away and that was it. Then he would, in his view, improvise magnificently on the set, go through sleepless agonies and all that and I'd say, `You don't have to do it like this, Cox. We could spend four weeks writing a film and it would be really good, believe me it would be really good'. No, no, he never believes me. Of course, the insufficiency of many of his subsequent films has shown this insane process of his. The best film he made was Lonely Hearts and it had a producer, a director, a script editor, you know, the usual apparatus and, of course, it's a full and wonderful film. His other ones are like brief, infinitely prolonged screams or sonatas or something...

There has been a large and substantial amount of Catholic material from Fred Schepisi and Devil's Playground to films like The Settlement and Newsfront. What influence has Catholicism had?

There was a point in Australian history when half the population were Irish and that must mean that something close to half the population is of Irish or part Irish descent. I mean, they multiply so thoroughly. It's not till I got to Ireland itself and saw Australian faces staring from behind every bar and down every street corner and all these names which I thought were restricted to Australian politicians up and down the streets that I realised how Irish we are. I think it's probably true to say that Australia is something close to being the first agnostic society on earth, with the expectation of Catholicism which was, as it were, the loyal opposition to the agnosticism which prevailed.

So you've got these strange marriages like the Labor Party and the Catholic Church and Caucus meetings which were delayed until after early Mass on Sunday and so on. It's very endemic and very deep. Some of the best writing has been on Catholic themes, in particular Peter Kenna's A Hard God and Kennealy's early work. I've got the highest esteem for The Devil's Playground, which I thought a formidable act of bravery which, say, Brides of Christ was not. Like Nostradamus Kid, I think, Schepisi got it about right, that mixture of absolute affection and absolute terror that was felt by the central character for the overarching authority figures of that school.

That amazing sequence where the boys go out and mutually masturbate in the dark - in its day it had an incredible shock effect. It's interesting what comes out of that sort of upbringing. It is almost best expressed in that wonderful play The Christian Brother by Ron Blair.

It's a country of the mind that - it's a country in the way that Australia never was. Australia falls a bit short of being a country, I think. It doesn't have enough ritual or enough history and enough tradition and when you go to any European town, watch people promenade at twilight around the town square that's been there for 1500 years, you realise part of what we lack, but the Catholicism supplies a lot of those deficiencies, I think, to such people and the goodness of intention is very upsetting and the imprecision of method, particularly relating to the sexuality of women and so on is very upsetting and you watch it with interest.

My best friend is Les Murray, the poet, and he's a Catholic convert and we have really ferocious arguments on the subject, but he is an only child out of a fundamentalist religion out on a farm on a lonely hill who found that missing country of the mind in (a) university and (b) the Catholic Church and (c) the study of foreign languages and foreign cultures and travelled thereto and therefrom. It's not an overwhelming insight but I think that country of the mind is; what is experienced and what is missed by people who have grown up as Catholics in Australia.



Interview: 13th August 1996

RICHARD FLANAGAN


You wrote The Sound of One Hand Clapping, novel and screenplay at the same time. What was that process like?

It's very difficult to explain to people that it's neither a film of the book nor a book of the film, because they arose together more or less simultaneously. I did start writing the screenplay first but, as I wrote it, I used to write it up as prose notes and translating it back into a screenplay, because I understood prose; I didn't really understand screenplays. So, when I finished the screenplay, I had a basis for a novel but not a very good basis, because I came to realise when the screenplay was finished, there was no actual interest in its being made into a film.

People really liked it but they thought it was too difficult a project, would cost too much money. When I finished it, it was that period when Australia was enjoying great success with all those quirky comedies, Strictly Ballroom, Muriel's Wedding, Priscilla, so it wasn't a project that found favour with financiers. Also, nobody could say what it was like. It wasn't like any film that had been done in Australia. It wasn't really European. Investors like being able to say it's a cross between Priscilla and The Terminator! Nobody could precis it in those terms. I wasn't too fussed because I'd learnt to write a script, which is a different form of the craft of writing, so that had interested me.

Then I thought, well, I like the story and I want to take it further, so I'll write it as a novel. I spent about the next two and a half years of my life writing it as a novel. And what I thought would be relatively simple, seeing I had all the characters and plotting worked out, was actually more difficult than writing a novel anew because a film, at the end of the day, is simply a short story. I think that, structurally, a film is a cross between a short story and a poem, whereas a novel is an entire cosmology which you must invent. It's difficult to turn a short story into a novel; you have to turn the thing upside down and start again. So I finished the novel about two days before the film news. I literally sent off the novel to my agent on a Wednesday and on the Friday they rang me and said they had actually got the money for the movie. We were helter-skelter into making the movie. Then, in the editing of the movie, I rewrote the entire novel.

Although they informed each other somewhat, I came to realise they were entirely different forms and must be respected as such. You must try and understand what it is that works and doesn't work in each. Each has its own possibilities and its own limitations. The novel in some ways was liberating for me, because I never felt a need, it never worried me, chopping things out, and I never felt a great fidelity to the script. What I felt a need to do was to try and make the strongest and best film I could, which I may have failed at doing, but that was the ambition.

It was good because I never attempted to turn the film into a novel. Perhaps if I had just written the script and not the novel, I would have had novelistic aspirations which, I think, destroy a lot of films. Films are a very taut form of storytelling and if you introduce too many characters, if you try to introduce too many themes, they're unsteady and frail edifices and they're easily broken.

You then wrote for television?

After I did the script, I was asked to do a treatment for a TV drama series, which I did, and I really disliked doing it because it's very directive. You get told, 'We want this and this because German television are buying that at the moment and we want this element and that'. But again I don't think it ever does to be snobbish and you are always learning something - but I would never go back into TV. As Kieszlowski said, there is nothing wrong with television as a medium. I really dislike people who think that it's an inferior medium to cinema, because it isn't. It's just that the way it's run is even worse than the way film is run because, essentially, every creative decision is made by executives.

Your book about John Friedrich - an interesting project?

Yes, it was a terrific project. A friend of mine was working as Friedrich's bodyguard. It's a long story, it's a great story but, in essence, they had to get the book written because he was about to go off to jail for a very long time and he wouldn't work with other people. They told him to get someone and he got me because he didn't know any writers and his bodyguard did. I had to write it very quickly. I had about six weeks with him in this executive's office at what was then Heinemann Australia. For no reason I can ever think of, it was a huge secret and no-one was to know except the managing director and the publisher and one editor. To everyone else, myself and this strange little man who used to wear a baseball cap and sunglasses because he was obsessed with secrecy, we were editing an anthology of medieval folk verse. That's what everyone else was told. Why on earth it was a secret, I don't know.

It did a number of very good things for me as a writer because I had to write a book in the first person about someone I disliked profoundly and who had such a profoundly different view of life. He actually believed life was evil.

He was very influenced by Nietsche - what I think was a misreading of Nietsche. He would quote Nietsche and we would argue about that. His belief was hard to argue against. One could merely take a position for or against it, really. I had a position against it, but his was possibly more coherent philosophically than my position: that the evidence is that the world is evil and that, therefore, you can either seek to ally yourself with that evil - he put this to me as baldly as I am to you - you can seek to ally yourself with that evil and take what advantages accrue along the way and what pleasures can be had from it, knowing it will destroy you, or you can pretend, as he would put to me, 'Pretend like you that there's no evil and you will be destroyed without even getting the few small pleasures and benefits that you could accrue by being honest.' So his argument with me was that I was simply dishonest in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, and that's difficult to argue against.

So I had to try to write a book trying to take in this madness. Here was a person who would talk - whether through simple bravado or not, I still don't quite know - but he would talk about how he was going to get someone blown away, as he put it, and get a contract out on them. A lot of that was bluster, but I think he was sufficiently cowardly that this had a sort of appeal, to actually use the cash nexus to kill people. He was an awful, sad, tortured soul and he shot himself in the middle of it, at which point I had to finish writing the book. And then big headlines - Friedrich has left manuscript of life, tell-all manuscript with publishers, publishers refuse to divulge any details. As well they wouldn't, because I was making them up here in Hobart. So that was a potboiler, but it was actually - as Gabriel Marquez said when he took to writing soap operas after he won the Nobel Prize, 'The medium is an invitation'. All different forms are an invitation that we must explore, I suppose.

That potboiler, I got $10,000 for writing it. Which allowed me to write full-time for a year. That's when I started writing Death of a River God, which was my first novel. It changed how I wrote and how I thought about writing. As a work, it's a potboiler.

But you still enjoy your writing?

I do like writing. The thing about writing is that all I've got to do is try and make it the best possible work that I can. I don't have to, each day, make ten phone calls just to keep the last sentence I wrote. I don't have someone standing over me quoting Pam Ayres and asking me to write the next chapter in her style. With film you have an industry that wants to produce product, as they so ingloriously call it, in the manner that Walkmans and McDonalds' hamburgers are made. It frustrates them enormously that you can't make things that might mean something to other people in that way. It's infinitely mysterious and difficult. You simply have to trust the people who are doing it to do it. That gives you your best chance and, even then, it will probably be a failure, but you must allow them to take that risk.

Film people have a very odd attitude. They have an idea of art that if you can work out what all the weaknesses are and eliminate them - that's the whole idea of test screenings - if we can just eliminate all the weaknesses, then we have something good. But I have an opposite idea which is that somewhere between your ambition and your failure is your achievement and, somehow, in what is weak in what you do and what is flawed lies the kernel of what actually moves people and might mean something to them. You can carefully fillet every weakness out of something, then what are you left with? But unfortunately that's the mentality that's brought to bear.

Your decision to direct The Sound of One Hand Clapping, directing your first film?

I asked Rolf de Heer if he would direct it - I didn't know him - and he read the script and very generously said that he felt he couldn't direct it, that there was a very singular voice in the script and that the only person who could direct it was me and that, if I would direct it, he would produce it. I've got no background in film-making whatsoever; my wife takes the family snaps. I don't even do that. But as Carlos Fuentes once wrote, 'you cannot act without the horizon of failure constantly in view' so, in spite of my terror, I was interested. It was too interesting a thing to turn down and I've always liked doing different things. I've worked with architects in the past, designing things. I always like experimenting with different forms, so I agreed but was very frightened about it.

What I loved about film was the process of film-making. It's a great joy and when you do have those great collaborations with people, with my composer and people like Kerry Fox and John Scott, to me that's joyous because my work is largely solitary as a writer. The bad side of film-making, the extraordinarily ugly side, is the politics and the extent to which a director must be party to that because, in the end, you must fight every day simply to be allowed to keep on making the film. I think that's profoundly wrong because it doesn't allow the best work. More than half your energy each day goes into fighting for the right to continue to make the film. That's utterly destructive and stupid. The problem with film is that at the end of the day it's a totalitarian society in which the tyrant is money and it leads to a lot of people, who in other situations are good and decent people, behaving quite badly. I very much admire people who make good films in spite of it and now I understand why most films are so compromised.

The other thing is that to concentrate on individuals is to miss why people do what they do. It is an industry which, because of the sums of money involved, morally compromises a lot of people very easily - they start off decent, but without being aware of it, they've sold their soul for a mess of pottage. You can't get it back, and I think it's immensely sad.

What about the location work, finding the locations, the logistics of getting everthing and everyone there?

I loved all that. It's like the circus coming to town and you're allowed to play with it. It's a lot of fun. Making a film is odd because you summon this cyclone into existence and then you exist in the eye of the cyclone. It has these great creative powers and also these great destructive powers and you just hope you're not dashed to pieces with it. The process of shooting - it's like that description of war that gets quoted: it's long moments of boredom interspersed with the occasional moment of terror and exhilaration. I can see why people are seduced by that, why they spend years and years for that short time on the set.

Your Tasmanian experience and your Tasmanian perspective? It's very strong in your early writing and your interest in the wilderness and the Greens. Did I hear trees being chopped down during the final credits of the film?

I don't know what that is. Now you've got me worried.

I thought, 'He's done this deliberately,' the sound of the wilderness being destroyed, and a touch of message.

Oh, God. I like the idea. I wish I'd had it. No, there's not meant to be any message. It's the sound designer, Jim Currie. It's a very unusual sound design. Specifically, we did lots of wild recordings up in the mountains and that's one of them which we felt worked at the end. And it could be anything. We used all sorts of odd sounds. We used sounds of little rapids in creeks and things like that instead of more conventional sound effects. It was all recorded on radio mikes to give it a much more intense feel and then it was all mixed. I wanted to mix it in a very spare way and constantly drop out any extraneous sounds because the convention is you put atmospheric tracks all the way through and locate people's movement with sound, through music. Whereas, here, the music was meant to be one of the fundamental characters in the movie. Cezary Skubiszewski, the composer, was brought in months before we started pre-production. I worked with him a lot then and his music influenced how I was shooting and vice versa. I'd be altering things from the demos he was producing.

The style of the film is very 'European' and reminiscent of The Tale of Ruby Rose, with its rugged wintry mountain locations and isolation. But the accent of many of the characters - Julie Forsyth's neighbour and family sequences - had such an Australian accent and tone (and Vegemite) that it was a strong combination of what the migrants to Tasmania experienced: the European background, the new place, a homely Vegemite kind of culture and accent.

I'm glad you liked that because, for me, there was a short moment in my childhood when I realised there was this meeting of Old Europe and Old Australia and both worlds had a certain grace and both worlds no longer exist. There was something about them that I have a great affection for and both of them met strangely. The point about Tasmania - I obviously have deep feelings about the place, but in essence I grew up in a world that I knew to be profoundly different and I think Tasmania is a different country and I think Australia is composed of a number of different countries. And this is no argument for secession, it's not a political argument! I think it's just an acknowledgment of a cultural fact. I mean, blackfellas don't have a problem knowing that to grow up in the Kimberley is a different experience from growing up in south-west Tasmania. I grew up in this world and I have always found it quite magical.

I suppose I came out of an Australian Irish Catholic peasantry, really, all convict people who kept on marrying each other. They had a very rich oral culture. But then, as I got a bit older, I realised that we were despised and that we were seen to be less and if you wanted to write or paint or do any of those things, then you were expected to leave. Our experience was forever the most marginal and we were the most marginal of people. I don't think Tasmanian experience is better than growing up in Sunshine or Bankstown or wherever. I just don't think it's less, that's all. What attracted me in writing was that I realised the history of great writing is the history of people of regional culture - that is, of Joyce writing about Dublin in Trieste, of Marquez writing about little towns on the coast of Colombia and Mexico City, of Flaubert writing about Madame Bovary in Normandy. And the films I've liked have always done that sort of thing, too.

So I suppose I both wanted to honour that world and also, as Faulkner, who I love, once wrote, when he was asked why he wrote only about Mississippi, 'Well, I have all these books I want to write and I have only one lifetime to write them, and I don't have another lifetime to know another country.' No less and no more here than anywhere else, I understand this place a little. I don't understand anywhere else at all, so this is the field I suppose I'm condemned to plough - but it's not a bad field.

You've brought post-war migrants with their world into this Tasmanian world that your family had lived in such a long time. A commentator referred to the migration issues and the theme of dislocation in the context hydro work there in the '50s.

At the end of my first novel, Death of a River God, you realise everybody's related to one another. That's the point, everybody's related. I always feel that there is an intense connection with people and I always hate politics or art that tries, like European culture for all its great brilliance, posits a position of utter despair, which is that we are alone. I don't believe that, that we are alone in life and at death. It recurs again and again in their books and their films. But my experience and the fundamental feeling I have is that we are inescapably connected to each other and to the earth, and that's our answer to European culture; that is the answer to Australian experience, and that's what I've wanted to represent most fundamentally in my work.

So the experience of migrants coming here was, to me, not much different. It's the same experience my own people would have had. My great grandfather lived through the famine and came out here as a convict. His experience must have been the same.

With Sonia's father and the mother, especially at the beginning of the film which I did not appreciate until later, knowing what actually happened - and then it was more devastating - you show the dislocation. You wanted us to know what Maria had experienced. But she came to Tasmania and died alone. And the father, unless Sonia had come back to him, may well have died alone after living so many decades here. I wondered what this says about that post-war generation coming to Tasmania and seeming unable to be part of it.

It always struck me as extraordinary that you would meet people in a place like this, which is so often dismissed as the end of the world, who had lives that were so often dismissed as utterly ordinary and insignificant, yet impressed upon their souls were the great epic movements of our age: the experience of Fascism, Bolshevism, total war, the loss of languages, countries, homes, families, and they'd ended up living - they might be living across the road from you. And it still goes on.

I was living just a few streets away a couple of years ago and a Vietnamese family moved in. They had little children who were about four or five years old. The father said, 'G'day, mate,' and they started telling me about being on the boat and the people who'd got washed off and were never seen again. The things they'd seen! And that's Australia. This seemed to me to be almost unbearable that people live with such horror and try to find meaning in their life. What I wanted it to be about in the end was the redemptive power of love. This is very unfashionable because the idea of love itself is profoundly unfashionable and the idea that love can redeem people is seen as both naive and ridiculous.

Not hard-hitting enough?

Yes. I get annoyed because I think too much art these days deals in the shadows of existence, sex and violence. There's very much a place for that, but to me there are only three great stories: birth, love and death. They are the only real stories that have ever mattered and people are terrified of them. It's because they're so hard to actually deal with in a way that isn't either pathetic or comic. I knew when I made the film - and I've got no idea whether the film's good or bad - I knew the risk that it would run was that it would be melodramatic or even comic. It's very difficult material, I suppose.

You've made it moving, birth, love and death. What you've actually given us is death, then love and birth.

That's right, it does end with the birth.

You've given us new life, Sonia deciding whether she wanted to abort the baby or not and the way her decision was made, the support that she got and, then, the her father's ability to come alive after so many decades of going slowly to his death. The redemptive power of love did give life. The same with your producer, Rolf de Heer. Critics said that the end of Bad Boy Bubby was just too nice.

... when he's got the sprinkler out in the garden, yes.

In real life, nobody wants to have gloom and doom. They actually do want to have the sprinkler out.

It's very odd when you think about it. Everyone used to despise the Hollywood happy ending because it became such a cliche that was untrue; but we have the Hollywood unhappy ending now, which is an equal cliche. I would hope that the film finishes on a tentative note. There is, for people who have known only despair and anguish, simply hope. It's an ambiguous hope, but there's hope. That's as much as you can ask for in life, I think, and it's a very powerful and good thing.

When I was writing the script, I was influenced by what was going on in Bosnia and the rape of women there. It interested me how rape has been too often interpreted in the narrow sense - a very modern Western idea - simply being a crime against the individual woman, and it most definitely is that. But it was also understood and used there in its military capacity as a crime against a community. By destroying that person's worth in the community, you also destroy the family and the community.

One of the things that interested me about the whole rise of violence in films was how, as Clint Eastwood said most memorably, 'Violence has consequences, but films don't deal with them'. And that's true. The central act of violence in the movie is the rape of the mother, which you don't see at all. The whole film was about the consequences of an act that would have taken two or three minutes, and how that shoots like a bullet through a wound through generations of people. It is about how difficult it is, but how it was also possible to overcome a great act of evil intent.

And the abuse of Sonia as a child when she went to stay with the Picotti family?

There was a lot of debate at the scripting stage because people said she should be abused. But the thing is she won't let it happen. You must never forget that people have an agency. Again a lot of modern drama and fiction is about people as victims. But people can be placed in positions of great powerlessness, even children, instead of power. That's not to deny a lot of people in those situations have no choice, but it seemed important to me that at that moment when Picotti tries to touch her up, she actually asserts herself and gets away. It seemed to me that all of us must remember, no matter how powerless we feel, that we have a dignity that can manifest itself as a power if we have courage.

Sonia also acted when she finally left her father and his brutality. And she decided to come back. So she took initiatives, even if they were a long time apart and she felt tentative about them.

Yes, I'm glad if you thought that. I worried some people might find her too passive, but for me her decisions are the most momentous and the most difficult to arrive at.

Kerry Fox looks at times as if she's passive. She has a kind of quiet presence. Then, after a while, you realise that she's working on every issue.

Quite steely, yes. It was a really difficult role for Kerry because the film's not dialogue-driven at all. She knew it was difficult because I could tell her what it was about, but it was something that had to be communicated by nuance and gesture and look. There's nothing much else and that's hugely demanding upon an actor.

The rest of the cast was very strong, especially Evelyn Krape.

Yes, Evelyn and Kerry together were just magic. She was here for a week, and each night at rushes everyone's going, 'My God'. The Australian film industry, it's so conventional in a lot of its choices and in its casting. It just casts the same people again and again. Evelyn is somebody who is an extraordinary actor and she's been overlooked because she was seen to be a comedian. Kristof Kaczmarek came from Poland and is a terrific actor. Melita Jurisic had a very difficult role because she doesn't do anything much except break down and walk out. Yet she had to give those few short moments such weight. Most of the time she was acting to either me or to little taped crosses on the camera because little Arabella, the three-year-old Sonia, we'd just put her on for her singles and then whip off because she was a three-year-old

Religious themes? You gave Sonia's father strong dialogue about God and belief in God. Sonia reacted to that in a puzzled kind of way wanting her First Communion dress and the Rosary. Then the strictness of the women, that old-style Catholicism.

There were a number of influences there. I don't carry a great candle for organised religion, but I do believe that what afflicts us at the moment is a profound spiritual crisis. As we've become ever more materially prosperous, there is an equivalent spiritual yearning that is not answered. I think a lot of our art, unfortunately, is also frightened of addressing spiritual issues. It's difficult country to traverse, but we must set out through it.

The women - that actually comes much more from my own experience because I grew up in that. Parts of my family were that very old-style church, just like that, sitting around doing the decades of the Rosary, and it made no sense to me. So I grew up in an ultra-orthodox church and I also grew up in a very heterodox church, which was much more the religion of my mother and father, which would have had them burnt at the stake some centuries back. It is much more a religion about love and openness and that I admire greatly.

Boyan makes a point with the woman about the SS. There have always been two types of European migrants to Australia: those who are fiercely of the faith, be it Catholic or orthodox or whatever, and those who are fiercely anti-clerical, which of course is the other great peasant tradition of belief since the 18th century in Europe. And the church's record in the occupied countries was very bad, particularly in Slovenia where, as he said, the church was an active party to the rounding up of people who worked with the partisans.

But I think you have to clear some of that away and then address things more fundamentally and say, well, that's the nonsense and clutter that can accrue, but that's not what genuine spiritual belief is about.

I'm that most hopeless of fallen Catholics, the Catholic agnostic. Irredeemably Catholic. You can't grow up in the world I grew up in and lose it. I always disagree with people who say, 'I'm no longer Catholic,' because culturally you are, forever. I'm always interested in reading secular Islamic writers because it's more profoundly Islamic than the work of fundamentalist Islamic writers. Somehow, by getting rid of the clutter, they see how much it has actually shaped them. And they have time-honoured ways of trying to understand the human condition. These things are difficult and mysterious, aren't they? I don't like making any claims for anything I do and, most particularly, I get very frightened of making claims about spiritual intent, because I think you can look very foolish.

The title itself, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, where did it came from? What were you highlighting? Or were you leaving it for us to ponder on?

It's very funny. At a certain point it had to have a title, and I'd come across that phrase when I was at Oxford, in an essay about the history of the influence of early feminism on the British co-operative movement. Nothing else of that essay remains in my mind except this phrase, and I thought it seemed right. There are always things that are enigmatic and art, in essence, is always a journey into things you don't really fully comprehend. And I never worry. It's when I do comprehend them I think that it's becoming too obvious. So it had to have a title and it seemed right. So that was it. Then, when the book came out, we did this huge tour around the country promoting it. Everyone would always ask me this question, which is quite legitimate. But then they would normally say, 'For me it means...' and they would offer this very clever sort of interpretation of the novel in terms of the title, to which I can only agree. But I liked it myself - and there have been a lot better reasons propounded for why it is a good title - but I liked it simply because I think there is a lie that has taken almost universal hold within the mentality of our age, that salvation lies within us individually, that if there is any hope for us, that it lies within us individually, and this takes all forms of madness from step-aerobics to self-help books to the liver-cleansing diet to psychiatry to - you know. But the idea is that somehow we are all afflicted with a certain anguish and we think that somehow we can answer it ourselves. But I think if there is any answer, any meaning, it lies with other people. It doesn't lie with us. We don't exist as individuals, we exist socially. The way modern capitalism is, it encourages us only to be individuals. It is no wonder that the spiritual reflex of that has been to search for this individual salvation. But it's a lie. The truth is that it's very difficult to try and find what meaning there is in other people, because other people, like us, are flawed and difficult... it's our family, it's our friends and they have as many faults as we do. But that's where it exists for me, the film, the book - and they were both purposefully constructed with that idea in mind, that you have two people whose lives are actually deaths until the point at which they both recognise that, without each other, they are the sound of one hand clapping. So that, for me, was why it worked. But there were many and much more eloquent interpretations.


Interview: 3rd February 1998

RICHARD FRANKLIN



How easy or difficult is it to adapt a play for the screen?

If you choose the right play, it's very easy. So far I have done it twice and it has been relatively easy because we had a basic approach. I wouldn't take a play that I didn't think was suitable to film. But then I happen to think that modern cinema - or at least modern commercial cinema - has taken a wrong turning and that there are many more things to recommend to discerning, intelligent adults in modern theatre than in modern commercial cinema and, so, I would rather adapt almost any theatre for the screen. I'm not going to say I've got anything against adapting a novel or any other form, but original works of commercial cinema - well, it would want to be a very special script for me to be convinced it was comparable.

Were you satisfied with the popular response in Australia to Hotel Sorrento?

Delighted. I have not seen the play, so I had no sense necessarily of how an audience would respond. Of course I had read it, but I was highly delighted and particularly surprised to discover how many people who would have been attracted to the material, one would have thought, in the theatre, hadn't seen it in the theatre - hadn't even heard of it in the theatre. They went to see the film and said, `What a wonderful thing', which made me realise how many more people go to movies and the extent to which movies can, perhaps, disseminate ideas more broadly than theatre.

The critical response? The film received ten AFI nominations.

I didn't have any problems. One always takes the negative comments to heart and acts magnanimously about the positive ones. I don't think any director who said they didn't read reviews would be telling the truth. But, in general, in the past the good have balanced the bad for me and I've persuaded myself, with a few exceptions, that they've come out on the good side of the ledger. In this case they were predominantly good.

Was it your choice to make a film of Hotel Sorrento or were you asked to direct?

No, it was my choice, but it was recommended to me by my brother-in-law, Peter Fitzpatrick. Peter co-wrote the screenplay.

You retained much of Hannie Rayson's dialogue.

Yes, and if there have been any criticisms of the film - and I suspect more so in the case of Brilliant Lies - the fact that I was pretty faithful to the original and tried to retain the dialogue was a problem. The criticism was ` this is too wordy'. To those who say that modern theatre is worthy by comparison to modern cinema, I can only cite Schwarzenegger movies. I'm sick of films with people grunting and bombs exploding. I enjoy language and I enjoy intelligent dialogue. I like heightened reality and people speaking a little more articulately than perhaps they do in real life. The idea of a Jules Furthman or a William Faulkner being a thing of the past just makes me sick.

You stayed very close to David Williamson's text in Brilliant Lies?

I stayed fairly close but the film has come out a little shorter than I had expected. I cut lines because of David's urging and I'm not quite sure now that I should have done that. But on the other hand, within reason, I think it's arguable that there's no such thing as a film that's too short, just as there's no such thing as a film that's too quick; there are only films that are too long or too slow.

What you cut, was it action or was it discussion?

I cut dialogue.

The film version of David Williamson's Sanctuary, is a two-hander. It was interesting to listen to, but raises questions as to how audiences respond to such amounts of dialogue. The characters kept moving, the camera kept moving...

It's not necessary to keep the characters moving. I saw David Mamet's film of Oleanna. He thought that by moving the two characters between three rooms it would be more filmic than having it all take place in one room. I don't think that's necessarily true. It's very difficult to make broad prescriptive comments about what can and can't be adapted from the theatre. One just has to use one's instincts and intelligence.

Since you actually filmed in Sorrento, what do you think Sorrento itself symbolises of Australia in terms of a place, in terms of the past and the present - a setting for the characters to explore ideas.

I would be presuming if I said that it was my idea, given that Hannie Rayson had written a play set in Sorrento about cultural values and family and old Australia versus various permutations of new Australia. To suggest these were my ideas would be a little unfair - except to say that as I read the play and remembered my childhood and my experiences with Sorrento, I responded positively, got in the car, drove down to Sorrento and read Marge's opening speech on the jetty, sitting on the jetty. I thought, yes, it would feel very good in this setting. Beyond that, all I can say is we went to a lot of trouble to make the town and the foreshore look good.

Funnily enough, I had a discussion yesterday with my editor, who was arguing about whether or not we gained anything by having painted backdrops outside the house as opposed to filming in a real house and I said, `Well, what would the effect of wind have been anywhere other than on the back beach?' He said, `What do you mean?'. And I said, `I recall four or five occasions that we went down to the pier to shoot the opening narration with Marge and Dick and it was too windy'. I mean, any wind was too windy. There had to be something terribly still about the Sorrento of our film. It was a setting in which I felt I could mythologise our culture.

Before going on to aspects of mythologising the culture, what of your sensibility from the years in America and your coming back home? Did your experience resonate with that of your film characters?

Had I made the film from the perspective of a person who had never been abroad, it might have been xenophobic; but then again Hannie conceived the play when she was living in London, so it might not have been. Had I done a faithful adaptation of her play, it might have been xenophobic to the degree in which a director influences the written material. But my concern was not so much about the Meg character or the Pippa character and the expatriates coming home. I was more interested in Hilary's assertion of the rights of people not to go away. Yet I might not have felt that way if I hadn't been away.

A key question following on from that - especially your interest in Hilary - is the theme of life stories and who actually owns them, the sense of privacy and invasion of privacy, interpretation of stories and treasuring or violating the stories. That seemed very significant, perhaps part of the mythology.

Yes, I think it was significant to me, but I only realised to what extent it was significant when I discovered late in the piece that we were working from a published version of the play as it had been performed in Sydney and that when my brother-in-law had first brought the play to my attention, he had given me another published version of the play as it had been performed in Melbourne in its original season, which included the issue of plagiarism. In the current version of the play as published and in the version that was performed other than in Melbourne, the debate about plagiarism was cut. I thought it was a fascinating debate - that is, if this was autobiographical, how on earth could it be plagiarism, unless one went to some broad notion of the collective consciousness. But that fascinated me, the idea of to what extent one owns one's life, to what extent the artist owns what he or she depicts.

I think that was an idea that I had been exposed to first when I saw Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. That's not to say it hadn't been depicted much earlier. Keats' `Ode on a Grecian Urn' is about a similar idea, it seems to me. But yes, that idea did interest me.

These are Australian stories and they have been lived out in Sorrento - what impact did it have on Hilary and the others hearing their story from the outside, so to speak.

Dick was the one who took more umbrage at that than anyone. He said, `How dare you think because you have stepped outside of it, that you are in a better position to encapsulate it'. Some people have said to me, `It sounds very much as if you identify with Dick'.

I don't, but neither do I identify with Meg. If one sees them as the two adversaries at the lunch, then I don't identify with either. I think they are each putting an interesting point of view. But I identify with Hilary, but that's because I'm a romantic and because her life in no way resembles my own.

With reference to Dick and Meg at the lunch - was it a 90s conversation: that we Australians have arrived in our understanding of ourselves, of cultural cringe, of our mythologies? Was Meg doing a personal exploration in her novel, then coming back and wanting it validated in some way, whereas her sisters didn't give her any response? And yet Dick was right insofar as we have moved to a different stage - that we're not lacking in our own culture?

There's no doubt the film and the play do not in any way approach multicultural Australia. So, in one way, perhaps it's not a '90s discussion. In another way it was suggested to me that all of those debates about Australian culture went on at the time of the bicentenary - and haven't we come past that? Well, all I can say is that if we have, how come we don't have a better sense of ourselves? And if we have, why has the film had the impact that it has? People like my mother have started to consider the issues of Australian culture and to feel unselfconscious about their nationality as a consequence. It seems to have had real impact on people of her generation who perhaps had a little more cultural cringe than those of us who grew up in the era of Bob Hawke and the Australian vernacular - you know, the post-Barry Mc Kenzie years. If the film was stimulating, then the argument is not old-hat or dead.

There certainly was a huge build-up to 1988 and the bicentenary but during the following years it went rather flat. But interest began to increase during the 90s.

I had this discussion at length with both Hannie Rayson and Peter Fitzpatrick because I anticipated a lot of debate at a journalistic level and that I would be asked to define the culture. That came about because, while we were shooting, I did a 7.30 Report for the ABC and the journalist kicked off with the question: `What is Australian culture and what, if anything, is worth preserving?'. That gave me the heebie jeebies, to quote one of our negative reviews, and I sort of steeled myself for that sort of debate but, fortunately, the only time it happened to me after the release of the film was on a radio program, again on the ABC, when I was told that these issues were passe. Hannie was with me and bore most of the brunt. As the director, I just said, `Well, look at the film'. It's not a cultural debate. It's not an intellectual treatise. It hopefully has some emotional resonance and it's about other things as well. I would have written a paper if I had wanted to do an intellectual treatise on Australian culture. I think one uses imagery, characters, weather and all of those elements in a way that dry intellectual debate isn't able to do.

Marge was from an older generation...?

Yes, that was added, of course. `You have said something to us' - I'm paraphrasing now - `not just to those of you who grew up here but to those of us who came along later'. Well, in Marge's case, in Joan Plowright's case, she came along about one week before we shot that scene and left, I think, in some ignorance of exactly what the culture was. But that's not to say that she couldn't be a conduit...

Marge's ability to have conversations with Dick, her resonance with the book, that it seemed real, and her empathy with Hilary on the back beach made her a very strong emotional link between audience and characters.

The scene on the back beach still - I'm trying to think of the right word - vexes, yes, vexes me. I asked Hannie halfway through shooting the scene, `Is Marge saying all this oblivious to Hilary's basic pain and angst and dilemma or is she talking in parables to try to teach Hilary something?'. Hannie drew a complete blank on the question and said to me weeks later that having re-examined the scene after seeing it - because I sent her a tape early on - she was at a loss to know whether Marge was totally oblivious and just indulging herself or whether she was trying to say something that would have meaning for Hilary. It's nonetheless my favourite scene in the film, I think - that and the scene with Hilary and her son.

Ray Barrett seemed to embody whatever it was of his particular generation that shows us the absolutely complete Australian ocker attitude...

Yes, he certainly reminded me of my father - a kind of `inscrutability' is how I would put it, a sense that he was a self-contained unit but that you didn't have a real feel for what made him tick. But he had a sense of what was right and wrong yet had no understanding of where the modern world was going. And he was incapable of or unwilling to communicate this to anyone else.

That is also saying something about cultural cringe. It's the next generation that wants to break through some of that inscrutability and can't quite do it.

Yes, I think they had a strong sense of what it was - I was going to say of what mateship was, but I learnt recently that `mate' was a word that came into common use much later, that words like `cobber' were common then - so we define this thing in terms of mateship, at least on a male level, and they didn't even call it that. But I think that's the point we're making, that it didn't matter what they called it. They had a clear sense of where they were and what they were and maybe they didn't have to evaluate it in the international arena.

And yet, conversely, if The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was the first play in the Australian vernacular (but I don't imagine it was - Peter Fitzpatrick has just written a book on Louis Esson so I imagine it wasn't), but it was certainly the first of our era that reached the modern audience - then, if they defined their culture entirely in terms of British and, to a lesser extent American frames of reference, then what was that culture? And yet one has a sense that the Dave Sullivans of the world - my father, my grandfather - knew exactly what Australia was about.

One small thing: a media student, second generation Italian, went to review the film and liked it and didn't like it, especially because it wasn't multicultural in the broader sense. He noticed the Italian fruiterer in the main street of Sorrento as Marge and Dick walked along and he got a bit irritated that that's how this group sees the Italians, simply as the fruiterer.

Well, of course he was right, but then I did add the line about fennel on the railway tracks. I thought it was important to remind the audience that that quintessential Aussie, the Wal character, was also a xenophobic bigot.

Brilliant Lies is about sexual harassment?

I suppose you would have to say that that was the issue one would hang one's hat on, but I think the title would give you a clue that it's about something other than just harassment and that it's about constructs of reality, male and female constructs of reality. And, in the case of Brilliant Lies, not just male and female constructs of reality in sexual politics and/or office setting, but sexual politics and hierarchical politics within a family - and in this case a very dysfunctional family by comparison to the Moynihans of Sorrento.

Ray Barrett plays the patriarch again. Indeed, my desire to use him for Wal was a consequence of seeing him play Brian, the father, in Brilliant Lies, in the theatre. I hadn't seen Hotel Sorrento on stage, but I thought, `what a wonderful father'.

Does Brilliant Lies have something to say on Australian cultural and identity?

No, it's not an issue here. I in no way modified the accents. Indeed Anthony La Paglia had to work very hard to remember his Australian accent. But at the same time I made no specific references to Australian culture. There were a few in the play, about three - you know, `This used to be a great country and what happened?', and things like that. I removed the specific quotes because I felt that sexual politics was a pretty universal thing and that I shouldn't localise it, but at the same time neither did I want to make a film that was mid-Pacific.

Your first film was in The True Story of Eskimo Nell.

That's pretty early. Yes, it was very much of its time and its time was the era of the R certificate - with films like Mc Cabe and Mrs Miller and Australian films like The Adventures of Barry Mc Kenzie and Alvin Purple. There was the desire to assert the Australian vernacular and thereby have a bit of lavatory humour in it, but at the same time I think, as opposed to Alvin and Barry Mc Kenzie, to give a sense of our culture and history in terms of mateship. But basically it was designed to shock and, in retrospect, it's probably a bit tame.

We shot the ice-floe sequence in Canada. We don't have ice floes here, of course. I remember thinking at the time about the idea of people mythologising their culture without being able to avoid inventing iconography from other cultures. So I would say that Hotel Sorrento was my second attempt to say something about Australian culture, hopefully a little more articulately.

And, in retrospect, the thrillers - Patrick and Road Games?

Patrick was really an exercise in homage or pastiche, if you like, as was Psycho 2. Patrick spiritually led to Psycho 2. Indeed, even the logo of Patrick was a rip-off of Psycho.

Road Games came about when I gave a copy of the Rear Window screenplay to Everett De Roche, who was writing Patrick for me, as a pro forma and I said, `Look, if we could set the scripts out this way, we would know how many pages they should be'. This is a system that's universally used now - that if you use the right format, page numbers have meaning. And Everett came up with the idea of doing the story in a truck.

Indeed he did an episode of an ABC show called Truckies which was derived from that idea, and when I came back to him after Patrick and after co-producing Blue Lagoon, I said, `Now, what about that Rear Window in a Truck idea?' He said, `I already wrote that for the ABC'. I looked at the ABC show and thought, well, it doesn't resemble what I thought we would have done with that idea, so we went off and did a different film and I was pretty pleased with the end result. But both Patrick and Road Games were attempts at mid-Pacific cinema, except that in the case of Road Games I made real use of the Australian landscape in a way I think it can be used, without necessarily restricting my casting. Actors Equity had some ideas about the approach we took to casting that film. I would happily have made it with Stacy Keach and an Australian woman, but my US distributors had other ideas and I ended up as the meat in the sandwich.

I looked at it again on television recently and actually called Everett and said, `God, do you think we could do something that good now?' You know, sometimes you get far enough away from something that you're surprised you did it yourself. I mostly remember being the meat in the sandwich between offshore American money and the Australian unions.

Yet it came out as a very entertaining show.

I think it did, yes. It's of no substance, of course. It was made in an era when I used to teach film courses and talk about film entirely in terms of form, which was something I think I really took from studying Hitchcock. It was all about form and not about content. While that can be a lot of fun, after a certain point and a few pretty mediocre thrillers like FX2, at least in my terms, I thought, well I'm sick of making souffles at best and silk purses out of sows' ears at worst. I'd like to do something with a bit of substance and go a little easy on the form and a little heavier on the content - a bit of meat and potatoes film-making.

Link, does not seem to have had much circulation at all except for video release.

It's hard to know what happened in Australia. My impression is that because EMI went out of business and because Greater Union was EMI's distributor and had actually paid money to EMI for the rights, and then Cannon took over EMI and tried to give the film to Hoyts, my guess is that Village tried to heavy Hoyts because they had paid money and Hoyts tried to heavy Village because they had the rights to it, and one way or another everyone decided it was too hard and then it ended up on video but somewhere at the back of the shelves of horror films. I set out to make a film for the company that made A Passage to India and ended up making it for Cannon - I can't think of what they made, but nothing good.

A number of Charles Bronson movies.

Yes. So on almost every level Link was an unsatisfying experience, but I still regale dinner guests with stories about directing apes. It was an interesting experience and made me understand why anthropologists study the behaviour of the other apes in order to understand us, because it taught me a lot.

Was the making of Psycho 2 a satisfying opportunity to pay homage to Hitchcock and his influence on you?

I'd sort of done it before, but it was a chance to do it in Hollywood. From my perspective it was the chance to play centre court at Wimbledon, you know, to actually work on the Universal lot. In retrospect, it was an incredible experience that was perhaps clouded because it was my first Hollywood directing experience. To go on to those sets and direct original cast members of a classic film - I mean, it was really extraordinary. Norman Bates has to be one of the great icons of modern cinema and to actually direct Tony on those sets was a film buff's dream. It was extraordinary.

You also directed the pilot of Beauty and the Beast.

In the States my first feature directing experience was Psycho 2, and my first television pilot the Beauty and the Beast pilot. They were both marvellous experiences. I don't know what one can infer from that - maybe just luck or maybe that they stay well back when you're doing something for the first time and then they help you after that. I mean the executives. But Beauty and the Beast I was very happy with. I was reading Cocteau's book when I was doing it and he said something about how you can't shoot fantasy as if it is fantasy, that is, you can't pretend you are working with gossamer. You have to think of yourself as making something as functional as a table and chair. If you thought, `I'm dealing with something ephemeral, of smoke', you would create nothing. So I had no hesitation in imagining this whole other civilisation living in the underbelly of New York and living a better life than those above the surface. I simply did that as if it were real.

It must have worked, because they continued the series and it was popular. The fairy tale and basic mythology of the Beauty and the Beast seemed to touch the imagination of the television audience.

Yes, it worked very well, although Beauty and the Beast is a transformation story. And the transformation never happened. I kept wondering how much longer they could sustain the piece. It's always a letdown, of course, when the beast turns into a prince, but how long can he stay a beast? There always has to be that possibility. I think it probably wore a bit thin after a while, but I didn't watch every episode and it wasn't my problem, fortunately.

You will continue to adapt plays for the screen?

I think most modern theatre is better than most modern film, but, if it's good, it should be filmed.


Interview: 15th September 1995

YORAM GROSS



It's thirty years since you came to Australia?

That's correct. Thirty years on the 1st of May, 1968. It's an easy date to remember.

You worked in film in Poland and Israel?

I started the profession in Poland. I changed from music to film. I really wanted to be a big composer - if not a big composer, at least a big pianist, but it didn't work. After three years studying musicology and music, I decided I wouldn't be able to give anything to people as a musician. Then Jersy Terplitz opened the film school in Krakow, and I jumped to the film business and I found it is very interesting.

For about twenty years I was working in live action, not in animation. In live action and in making features, I started as assistant director and then worked as a cameraman. I was working a little bit in the laboratory and then a little bit on editing, and finally my son was born and I decided rather to make animation, to stay at home and not to go away for shooting, shooting for three months away was very, very hard.

We started in Paddington in Australia, when I arrived with my wife, and I found this even more interesting, having a public of children, not of adults. I prefer children as audience than adults.

I was making features for children and the features had been going into the cinema. Then I was looking at my little audience - if a lot of them, during this film, had been going to the toilet, I understood that the film is not so good. If they stayed all the time in the cinema, this meant I was very happy.

The first feature we have done in Australia was Dot and the Kangaroo. Maybe the film wasn't so good, but it was a big success and children love it. And from this we progressed to another film, The Little Convict with Rolf Harris. It was another success. Slowly, slowly we have been doing over ten full-length features, specialising with such competition from Disney. We wanted to be a little bit different, and we've been doing films on live action background - not drawn background but live action background - coming to the conclusion with the Blue Mountains, our biggest location, that they were so beautiful we had rather better film them as they are, not to draw.

After these few live action films, we had seen, unfortunately, that the cinema is not good enough for us because the children are going only during the school holidays, which is a very limited time, and therefore we switched to television. The last full-length feature we have done was Blinky Bill - that was a success and was a big success in Europe - before we decided to make a television series. And today, really, in Germany, where I visit, every child knows who is Blinky Bill. Every child in Germany knows Blinky Bill.

Then after Blinky Bill we have done Tabaluga which is today the biggest success in Germany and in France. We finish now Skippy and now we are working on a big production, again 26 episodes for television - it's Flipper. Flipper is maybe not such a typical Australian production, it was an American film with live action, but it is international with plenty of those Flippers jumping. And we enjoy, we are very, very lucky because all these seventy people who are working with us in the studio, they enjoy because all those people they are doing what they wanted to do, to make drawings. Not every profession can say this. I was today visiting my dentist and I don't believe he enjoys his profession, but he has to do it because he has a family and has to make the few dollars to spend.

Could I go back to some of the themes that you have treated. I noticed in an article that you had won some prizes for short films at the Sydney Film Festival after you arrived.

That's correct. Really the animation I mentioned that was my first was Dot and the Kangaroo, but it's not true. Before this, I was making a lot of experimental films. Experimental films means just for my pleasure, to satisfy my ego rather than my pocket. But I believe it was such a big pleasure when I was getting a prize in the festival, was a bigger pleasure than to earn a million dollars.

Unfortunately, now I don't have time to make those experimental films, but this I am dreaming about experimental films. And those experimental films have been animated, a lot of them have been animated. Not a lot of prizes and unfortunately today I can't do this.

What were the subjects of those experimental films?

I would call them very general and exaggerating way - a lot of people talk philosophy about life - they're experimental films really not for adults. When I was screening, because from time to time I had screenings for audience invited by all kinds of organisations, usually I was studying those experimental films - part of the audience understood what it was all about and part didn't, and those people who didn't understand what it's all about, I asked them to ask those who answered they understood. The subject was light.

With Dot, what made you choose Dot in the first place and then continue with Dot for so many features?

I had a very clever mother. She was teaching me a lot of very, very clever things. One of them is your country is where you have your bread - in Australia, when you are eating Australian bread, you're supposed to give something to this country. And coming to Australia, I wanted to make Australian films. I didn't see any reason to make international films or Polish films, being in Australia, or Israeli films. And looking in libraries, I found this Dot and the Kangaroo, which wasn't very popular in those days, because it was written over 100 years ago, and the mothers remembered Dot and the Kangaroo, but the little kids didn't know anything because the language wasn't really language that we generate today; the original book is written in a completely different way and the aborigines are not portrayed in a very positive way. And we jumped onto Dot and the Kangaroo, especially that we had a chance to put words in the kangaroo's mouth. Usually they are not talking. This kangaroo was communicating with Dot. Really I prefer to make animated films using animals than humans, because humans we can have a live action and good actors can do the job. But kangaroos or dolphins or another animal can't do the job properly. Skippy in live action, which was a series on television, the only word was a "tsk-tsk-tsk". It is not enough to understand. Our Skippy is talking, and talking a lot about kangaroos and about a kangaroo's life, etc.

So with the Dot films and making them so Australian, you're able to focus a lot on Australian themes, as you mentioned, the aborigines and the animals, so that in a way your films have provided a lot of education about things Australian, while enjoyable.

Yes. All our films, if you watch them, they have some moral. They are not educational films in the sense of school .......... because they are entertaining films. Nevertheless, they always have some moral. This I believe I learn in Poland in Polish films, which Polish films weren't based on a business because it was a government. They had enough money for this. And therefore this was my school, really, until today when I am doing a thing, I really first of all would like to say what I want to say and not thinking about how much money we can get from the film. And we're lucky, those films are sold overseas in a lot of countries and we can survive. We've survived already thirty years in this business.

So you have done a lot, really, to help children understand the environment of Australia, with the kangaroos and the whale, if I remember, and also the other thing - seeing The Little Convict, you also went back into Australian history.

Yes. The Little Convict was our second full-length feature made in Australia. We had been lucky to convince Rolf Harris, who is a very good actor, to join us and to help us and he has done a really magnificent job. In the time when The Little Convict was done, or before, I visited Old Sydney Town. Such a magnificent location, and as I mentioned before, we had been doing animated films on live action background, and we used Old Sydney Town as a background and it was really part of the history of Australia - as the title says, The Little Convict.

The film recently I have seen after so many years again. I must say it's not so nice, but I still like it, I like it very much. I have seen this film because our Australian Embassy in Washington is asking me to make a tour in America, to different countries to show parts of those films. I have seen The Little Convict again; I would like to take the best parts, of course, of the films to introduce to the American audience. The Australian Embassy in Washington tried to make screenings for media people, films critics, radio, education departments. I'm very excited and probably next year it will happen.

Just some comments on Camel Boy, Epic and Sarah - that again with Epic and Camel Boy, again you're taking us into aspects of Australian history.

Not so much. Sarah, which was Mia Farrow, it is really my personal film, wartime, not very good for children, nevertheless it was good for me, as I mentioned before, I said what I wanted to say. A little bit of my personal history during the Second World War. Epic, it is a rather Australian film - I can't say very successful, a little bit too much experimental film, too much abstract story.

That's an interesting thing, I suppose with Sarah, that you've focused - one of the commentators, Rafael Caputo, has the article in Scott Murray's book, the two pages, it was in Cinema Papers - and I notice he picks out three themes and the Australian was one, and the social and political comment the other. But the third was displaced people. He says that somehow or other, with the convicts, I suppose, and with Sarah and even with Epic, people who somehow or other are moved away from where they belong and have to find a new home, so he was saying that was one of your major themes. I don't know whether you agree with that or not.

Yes, I agree. Australia is my third country. I was born in Poland, as a kid lived in Poland, then jumped to Israel, another country, another language, another culture, and for the last thirty years in Australia.

Something on, say, The Magic Riddle, which was a bit different. It didn't have the live background.

Magic Riddle is another, I have to tell you, personal story. The last film before Magic Riddle - I can't remember, but we produced an Australian film, probably it was Epic, which wasn't welcomed by the special committee in Australia, not good for children, bad for children. And Epic wasn't accepted as a film good for children. It was very, very not clever argument or - for example, one of the comments was that the music is too loud. The music was Tchaikovsky, which was quite known and quite a composer. These kind of comments - and finally the film wasn't accepted. I was extremely angry and I said, "Okay, if so, I won't make any more Australian films. I will make international films." In such a way The Magic Riddle was written, taking all kinds of Grimm Brothers fairy tale stories and we put them together. We succeeded to put to cinemas in Sydney, it was a big success, but unfortunately during the two weeks holidays only, which is not good enough. Then we had a nice sale to the United States, and this was a really international film which has nothing to do with Australia and without any big morals and without any indication - it was just I was angry to do something against this committee, which I didn't appreciate very much.

But then you went back to Australia with Blinky Bill, and he was a success.

Yes.

Some of the writers about your work link you in two directions: with visual artists and film-makers, and also then with people who experimented in the 19th century with cameras and animation. Do you see yourself as developing those traditions - do you see yourself as an artist?

I think so. Anyway, if I don't see myself as an artist, those critics see me as an artist. Now I'm quite proud. It was a film festival in Rome, in Italy, which my two very old films have been invited, which was a festival of films that brought something new to cinema. They were We Shall Never Die and Chansons en Parol - Song Without Words - which I have done a long, long time ago, but they found it and any day we should get the program of the festival. I'm happy. My grandchildren will say their grandfather brought something new to cinema. Those are two experimental films.

Those animated films, the Blinky Bills, the Tabalugas or Flippers, they are traditional animated films, not in the high standard of Disney, but we don't have the high standard budgets.

That's true. But you have experimented over the decades, then, especially with the live action and the animation together, and you've developed your very distinctive style.

Unfortunately, I am not progressing with the style any more. As I told you, time, time - the days are too short now.

It's quite an achievement the thirty years in Australia, because you have added something distinctive to the Australian film industry. So thank you for that.

Thank you. Thank you very much.


Interview: 6th November 1998

JOHN HEWITT


Your first film had a graphically direct title, Bloodlust.

It's a purpose-made, market-driven, crass, exploitation film. It isn't particularly good but, for me, it was really my film school. It's where I taught myself how to make a feature film and made a lot of mistakes on it - but I tried to learn from them. It was a film made in the context of not really being able to get any support for anything I was trying to do, then just going out and making something that I thought would have a back-end market, would be a safe bet, a sort of straight-to-video schlock film.

And in fact that ended up being a correct evaluation. It was called Bloodlust. It's a delirious horror vampire film and it's gone on to become a bit of a cult movie. It was very profitable as a commercial undertaking for the investors but, as a calling card, which I also hoped it would be, it was a big mistake because in Australia it closed doors for me. When people watched it, they thought I was a complete nut-case for making such a horrible, crass film. They couldn't see beyond that surface idiocy and actually see, 'well, of course it's like that, but actually - he can make a movie'. So that was a misjudgment that I made.

You co-directed it?

Yes, it was really a two-person job. Richard Wolstonecroft and myself are good friends and we basically did everything on that film: from the catering and acting (in about ten different roles each when people didn't turn up) to directing, writing and producing. It was a living nightmare making that film. It was an intense six-week shoot and we just sort of threw ourselves off a cliff. Somehow it ended up getting finished - God know's how. There's some real legends behind it - one of the stars was actually put in prison on drug charges for three weeks in the middle of the shoot. It was a miracle it ever got made.

It's a leap from Bloodlust to Redball.

After finishing Blood Lust in 1991 and then writing numerous substantial high-quality (I thought) scripts but still not being able to get them made, I wrote Redball to be shot as a very, very light-budget, do-it-yourself feature film. I wrote it for plainclothes police officers in Melbourne so, basically, I knew I could get actors to come in their street clothes, that whole aesthetic. And I wrote it in very focused little scenes that I knew I could shoot in a few hours each - and we could do it over weekends. The script actually did end up going through a funding process but eventually fell on its arse. It couldn't get funding, for obvious reasons. It was always a fairly contentious and controversial script.

What was the contribution of Film Victoria?

Film Victoria ended up giving Redball $100,000 from their low-budget feature film fund. But that was after the film was cut - finished all bar the sound mix - with international and domestic distribution and fairly substantial advances secured. So Film Vic gave me the $100,000 they had to give me. If they didn't give me that money, that whole low-budget accord would have been seen as ludicrous, because Redball is the ultimate low-budget Melbourne film. So they gave me the money they had to give me, but they wouldn't give me any more. I mean, I'm very grateful for what they gave me but, ultimately, the budget of Redball has 17.37% investment from a government agency. The rest has come from the private sector. So I still had to go out and make it in the private sector. It was a bloody struggle. I had a fine cut of this film in July 97. I delivered the film at the beginning of August 98, so it took me a year to take it from fine cut to get the money together to transfer it to 35mm.

It's not a fairytale film like Love and Other Catastrophes. They shot that and the AFC gave them $600,000 to do everything they had to do with it. Hopefully I'm not bitter about it, but I always found it absolutely extraordinary that the AFC would not give Redball any money at all. I went back to them three or four times and each time they knocked me back. I can only assume they did it because it was just inherently controversial. Even with domestic and international distribution attached, they wouldn't even give me ten dollars, let alone ten thousand. But anyhow I got it finished, so that's okay.

It has a very distinctive visual style.

We shot it on mini-DV, which is a domestic video format. Digital video is a very new technology. Three years ago it was science-fiction and now you can go to Brash's and buy one for a grand. It's incredible. I've shot on all video formats and it's just extraordinary the difference between digital and analogue, and it's extraordinarily inexpensive. So basically we shot Redball on a $2000 camera on tapes that cost $45 for 90 minutes.

We shot it on weekends over a period of six weeks, but we shot it in ten days. It was a ten-day shoot spread across about six weeks and we shot it very quickly and painlessly. It was a remarkable experience for me, because my first film was a living nightmare and this one was just a terrific experience, mainly because I had great actors and a supportive crew - actors who could just turn it on when you said "action" and all you have to do is capture them in the frame and they do the rest. That was the big lesson I learned on my first film, and it was a big revelation, a discovery for me. The thing I loved about the whole process was the actors turning the script into something. I thought I loved art direction and composition and special effects. That's what I thought I loved about the cinema. But I actually discovered I loved the raw performance, just the actor and the lens.

The opening with Belinda Mc Clory is very striking, the interrogation and the power of her presence, the close-up of her face and the way she spoke.

Well, all those one-takers! All I had to do was just hit "on" and let her do the rest. The script was structured - I call it a scattergun narrative. There's all these seemingly self-contained scenes, self-contained in their own right, nice little nuggets of drama, but they do actually knit together to tell a sort of broad story. A female Homicide D from Melbourne is going through some sort of breakdown to do with an ongoing case that they can't solve. It tells the sort of stories that I always wanted to tell and heard from friends of mine who were police officers.

A variation on Homicide?

A little bit. I wrote the script from a position of real love for the cops and real sympathy for the sort of lives they have. Unfortunately a lot of people see Redball as this scathing indictment of the most appalling police corruption - which it sort of is - but I would hope that the film actually has a lot of sympathy for the characters because I really do see police as people who are right in the middle of it - it's the thin blue line. I mean, my sympathies are with the cops, not the other elements.

You show the pressure on the police. But you also set up an ethical framework right at the beginning, with Jane's comments on good and evil, right and wrong,especially when she was young. You've led the audience into this ethical perspective from the very beginning of the film.

Yes. I'm obsessed with the grand old themes like loyalty, good and evil, what is the truth and what is fiction. They're the sort of things, like obscure literary references, make films really interesting for me.

And in-jokes about films?

In-jokes about films. The video store scene comes from a friend of mine who's very powerful in the video industry. He told me, "If you ever make another movie, you've got to have a scene in a video store in it, because the shops will love it." From going to lots of festivals and watching movies where there are film references, I know it always goes down a treat with film-lovers, so I thought I've got to get a film reference in there as well, plus some contentious speculating on the video culture and what damage that sort of stuff might do, without actually finding any answers. But at least I said it.

And you picked on Brian de Palma and Body Double?

Body Double is one of my top ten favourite films. It all seemed to fall together as I wrote it. I love Brian de Palma. Film-makers that I really love and who perhaps influence me are those delirious film-makers where people often have dual feelings about them, like Oliver Stone and Abel Ferrara and Lars Von Trier. Sometimes people see their films as having a confused morality. I like films or words that absolutely challenge the way I think the world should be. For me, say, a great critique of Nazism or a great examination of Nazism would be a work that had an interior logic that was a critique, but also had the excitement of that ideology in there as well. I love the razor edge of ideology where it doesn't just stand there and shake its finger at what it wants to criticise, it actually shows the excitement of it all. and that's what I want. When I was shooting those scenes where the cops abuse their power and get those beautiful young girls to do all sorts of things, I wanted there to be a grain of, "Wouldn't it be great." It was important for that to be there.

You got it there in that episode. The young girl was particularly good.

Yes, Sharon Stewart. She was absolutely terrific. She looked so pure then, at the end, she looked so damaged. It's frightening. That phenomenon, from my experience with the police, is one of the major perks of the job as far as cops are concerned, that ability to just casually use their power to coerce lots of things, but sexual favours is very high up on the list.

The theme of coercion and power within the force was also strong when the officers told the junior police not to bother with the floating corpse: power, the older and the younger, rank and the chain of command.

I wanted all the constables to be really as young as they could be along with these world-weary older police. But I also wanted it to be a twentysomething movie, all the police are in their twenties or thirties. A lot of things like Blue Murder and Phoenix, which were very influential on Redball had a downside in that they were all set in the past and all the cops were just too old, all in their late forties and fifties. And, certainly in Phoenix, everybody was squeaky-clean whereas in Blue Murder, well, that's what it used to be like back in the '70s and '80s. I think the cops are more corrupt now than they've ever been, and it doesn't matter what you do, it will always be part of the system. My quote is, "The system isn't corrupt, corruption is the system. That's what keeps it all going." So I've got that ambivalence there. It was important for me to have that.

You mentioned references to favourite directors. Visually, Redball is in the vein of Lars Von Trier.

Absolutely. I showed the cast and crew Breaking the Waves. We went to a special preview about four days before we started shooting and I said, "Listen, here's a guy with a big budget at his disposal, but what he's said is, 'I've made all those perfect movies like The Element of Crime and Zentropa. Now I'm going to make a real grungy film,'" and he shot it hand-held concentrating on performance. And those scenes where it was completely out of focus, he kept them because the performance was there. That gave me the guts to think that's what I'm going to do. I shot the film completely hand-held - except for those monologues. We didn't use the sticks at all in the film. It was all hand-held, just like that. So Lars Von Trier definitely.

Thematically, of the directors you listed, it's probably Abel Ferrara that struck as the most apt comparison.

Yes, Abel Ferrara and Lars Von Trier are the two big influences on this film. I always say this whenever I can - for me, Andre Tarkovsky is the great artist of cinema. He's like the Bach or the Mozart or the Leonardo da Vinci of the cinema. But I couldn't say that his films influence me as a film-maker, because that's the Holy Grail - I mean, you don't go there. That's his realm. I'm just squirreling away here.



Interview: 27th August 1998

SCOTT HICKS


Retracing your film journey from Freedom to Shine, what are your memories of Freedom?

Freedom was a very mixed experience. On the one hand, it was heady and exciting and intoxicating to be making your first feature film but, on the other, there were difficulties in the way the production was organised. The writer, John Emery, and I were kept separate from each other. In retrospect this was a huge blunder because the film was never totally focused in its vision, and I think that's reflected a little in the sort of schizophrenic nature of the film.

Of course, it received very mixed reviews and it didn't do much at the box office. But there were elements about it of which I'm still extremely proud. And then there are things which, if we had worked this material better as writer and director together, we could have done something more substantial. So it was a mixed experience and a little scarifying in the end that it didn't work. And, you know, the director really cops it for good or ill.

You mentioned the word `vision'. What was your vision of the film and what themes did you want to explore in the early '80s?

It's such a long time ago now. I think at the heart of it there was a character that I liked and that I recognised, someone with enormous frustration - not unintelligent, but obsessed with cars and in some ways constrained by the unemployment experience that was so rife then and indeed is, of course, now. So it was about someone trying to break free and trying to define himself. It had shades of Walter Mitty about it as well.

I used the word `schizophrenic' before. Freedom was a story that fell into two parts: one was about the whole environment, the whole milieu that Ron had grown up in; the second was about his hitting the road. When he tried to realise his dream, stole the Porsche, found the girl and did hit the road, it became another movie and I don't think those two elements were ever fully reconciled. So you had some people who loved the first half and hated the second and vice versa. When you have that happening with an audience, it's hard for it to jell.

This may be irrelevant, but I was looking for locations for Sebastian and the Sparrow; I drove across the Nullarbor and I stopped at various petrol stations along the way, and twice people said to me as they were pumping petrol into the car, `So, what are you doing?' I said, `I'm looking for locations for a film'. `What have you made before?' `I made this film called Freedom.' `Oh, my favourite film!' So there were people out there who really got something from it but, in broad terms, it simply didn't work. Sometimes that happens.

With Sebastian and the Sparrow you moved from themes of freedom and frustration to something for children and the family?

That really came about as my own son entered his teens, my elder son, and I became so forcibly aware, as you do as a parent, that your kids have a life that is quite separate from yours. It's like a secret life in a way, because there's the life they live with you and then there's the life they live with their friends. So the encounter between the rich kid and the street kid had something of that expressed in it. I wanted to explore the idea - it was a kind of junior buddy movie with the theme of two people who envied each other's life. To Sebastian, Sparrow has the perfect life: nobody's on his back, he can do what he likes. It looks like glorious freedom. But to Sparrow the constraints of that life are very real. There is Sebastian with the luxury of a home, a family and a very well-to-do existence which was Nirvana to him. I love the way those thoughts could jostle together.

In part the film becomes a road movie too, because they go and search for the street kid's mother. So, probably, it was the first expression for me of the theme of family, relationship, defining who you are and how you become yourself and how you establish your own identity.

One of the things I wanted to do with Sebastian and the Sparrow was make the kind of film I felt I could go and see with my own son, because I felt that as an early teenager, he was neither in the Rambo category or the Bambi category. There had to be something in between and there wasn't anything filling that niche. I think there was potentially a huge audience for the film, but I simply couldn't get distributors to commit to it and to pick it up properly. Where it played, it received fantastic reactions and at film festivals overseas it won several major prizes for a children's film. I distributed it personally in Adelaide and on its first weekend it out-performed Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours and Tango and Cash. If only we could've parlayed that into a broader distribution, it would have been a different story, but the fact was that people didn't want to know about what they saw simply as a children's film. That was that.

The impact that David Helfgott had on you?

Well, David is quite simply one of the most extraordinary people that I've ever met. When I saw him first that night in Adelaide in 1986, I was so struck by the contradiction that was presented in him. There was this shambling, awkward, confused exterior coupled with the brilliant virtuoso who was making thousands of decisions a second about what was happening in his music. And I thought that somewhere in this gap must lie an incredible story. So it became a journey, really, to find out what that story was and, also, to develop a relationship of trust with David and Gillian that would enable me to make that story. Naturally they had concerns about the sensitivity of the material and how it would be handled. So it was the start of a long process. I had no idea how long it would actually be, but it was the beginning and it really took possession of me in a way which was very, very powerful and continuously re-motivating through the long process of trying to get Shine made.

In Shine, you show David having that kind of effect on several characters, Sylvia and her fellow worker as well as Gillian herself.

David seems to have this effect on people. He does sort of `possess' you in a strange way. It's quite a phenomenon, but you can't fail to be moved by the experience that he's been through. This was what first fascinated me about the story, this extraordinary, unique character, and the gap that lies between this and the incredibly focused piano virtuoso that he is. Much of the dialogue is derived from conversations with David, and everything that is performed by both Noah Taylor and Geoffrey Rush is scripted. There's no improvisation. Every last word is on the page.

I think people tend to recognise elements of themselves that they've long suppressed or have repressed in the process of growing up. We bury those childlike elements. David seems to me like a person who has never really grown up, so what you're responding to is this eternal child. Part of the story, for me, was about failed rites of passage, as it were, of someone who is not allowed to grow up but, having been created by this father who decides he wants to make his son a little genius, he's then broken because this father doesn't want to share him with the rest of the world. That's the struggle at the heart of the story.

The amazing legacy, though, for David is his music. As the father says, the music will be his only friend and, for David, it is. It's what ultimately sustains him until he finds a relationship to give him stability.

While the story of Shine is inspired by David Helfgott's life, in telling a story of a life in cinema, it's obviously necessary to select very carefully the fragments of that life through which you tell the whole story. Naturally there is a lot of compression. You don't have the luxury of 600 pages to tell a story, as in a biography, so you compress and you select and you condense. What I've tried to keep are what I saw as the important themes and find the fragments of that life which best express those themes: the power of the father-son relationship, the problem of growing up, letting your children go, and find a way to express this cinematically. Having said that, everything in the film has some basis in reality that derives from some incident or some situation that David has experienced. The film is very much David's point of view.

The music and mental collapse?

Actually trying to play Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto would drive anybody nuts, but what I was trying to show in these scenes is far more than someone simply playing the piano extraordinarily well. This is somebody undergoing a process of psychological disintegration. What it's expressing is an artist really going so far out on the edge that he simply topples over. He is consumed by the very music that he's trying to express. I deliberately did not want to become too clinical or diagnostic or psychiatric in my interpretation of David's situation. That was too limiting a way to look at the subject. I wanted it to be much more expressive and ambiguous, to show piano-playing as it's never been seen before that, in a way, it's a dangerous thing - to express yourself like this is not a simple, dainty thing which you do in a salon or a drawing-room. It's very demanding, potentially damaging and some people get hurt.

There are not many Australian films with Jewish themes. What did you want to communicate in terms of Jewish culture, Jewish secularism and Jewish religion?

I was fascinated by that part of the story because it was a whole culture that was alien to my own. I was fascinated by the idea of this Polish Jewish father, with his family in the Australian suburbs in the 50s and 60s, who had actually rejected Judaism and embraced a sort of Stalinist dream and ideal and was somehow wrestling with these different forces. It's a powerful element of the story because it's so unusual. We don't hear a lot of these stories in Australia. This was an area of the story which I was terrified of, because the cultural references are so deep and so pervasive that I felt I had to be so careful not to put a foot wrong. I had to get this right.

And the tremendous response that Shine has had from the Jewish audiences, particularly in America, has been very rewarding because I feel that they would have been very quick to reject it if it had put a foot wrong in their cultural domain.

I have had letters from people in the film community who are Jewish saying how moved they were at the attention to detail, like the Mazutska on the door of Rosen's house and the importance of its being there, this kind of detail that is so important to any cultural or any religious belief.

David was born in Melbourne and grew up in Perth, so he's an Australian, but his father's very much the Polish Jew and his mother's very much the Polish Jew, very much a background figure. I think that's a very broad cultural experience in Australia - not specifically the Polish Jews, but people growing up as young Australians from a family whose first language isn't English and whose first culture is not Anglo-Saxon? in the way that the majority predominantly are.

The socialist background of the film is very interesting, especially with novelist, Katherine Susannah Pritchard.

Yes, Red Kate from the West. That was a touching relationship. Here was this elderly artist in the twilight of her career embracing a young man about to embark on his. Katherine, the writer, speaks of David Helfgott in her letters and he's referred to in her biography as being someone who really moved her with his talent and his ability. She tried to nurture that and give him some warmth in an otherwise difficult experience of growing up. So she becomes something of an icon to David.

As with many of the characters in the screenplay, the character of Katherine embraces other people, actual people who had an impact upon David's life. You can never show everybody, so you have to draw together the themes and try to dramatise them through individuals. That's why there are a number of fictional characters in the film who are essentially condensations of a number of different real people - plus a little bit of fiction thrown in. It's a creative process, all the time searching for an emotional truth, while being very much aware of where the reality occurs and how that has had its impact on the story. This is part of the challenge of telling a story inspired by a real life.

Armin Mueller Stuhl's performance was very persuasive in terms of a father living through his son. It contrasted beautifully with the warmth in the performances of Googie Withers, John Gielgud, Sonia Todd and Lynn Redgrave. Working with Armin Mueller Stuhl to create such a portrait of a father?

When I first met with Armin to talk about the character and the role, he said, `This is a very dark character,' and I said, `Yes, there are very dark passages'. He said, `I think he's a monster,' and I said, `No, no, he's not, and it's vital that we don't see him that way'. I said, `Look, the writing is very dark and some of the things he does are dark, but the way you're going to play it is that we're going to read his own pain in your eyes. It's not just in the words, it's how you communicate,' and I think he really took to that. You do read such a depth in his performance where we feel for him enormously. I sense him as his own victim. You have compassion, I think, for the life he has come through and the confusion in his nature: he loves this boy desperately but really loves him too much and that's as destructive as not loving him at all.

The father was absolutely vital to the film, a man who has indeed lost one family in the war, in the Holocaust and is determined that he will not lose this family that he has created. He simply would not let them go. He loves them all too much. When I watch this performance, I feel for him and read his pain. I see his dilemma.

So Armin was an absolute find for the film and for the character. His explosive power as an actor was tremendous. He's like watching a fuse burning. A lot of the time he likes to keep it like that, but I said, `Look, Armin, there have to be a couple of explosions; you can't just be a fuse'. I don't think that Hollywood has yet discovered that tremendous power he has or, perhaps, is a little reluctant to explore it. So in his Hollywood pictures he tends to be a rather genial, amiable, grandfatherly or avuncular sort of figure. But there's a darkness in there which is fantastic and he was able to bring so much of that to bear on the character as it was scripted by Jan Sardi.

The fact that the father didn't visit David during all those years in the institution was harrowing. Then when he came to David's flat, gave him his medal and disappeared, this was very powerful.

Actually, that part of the chronology is another example of the jostling of reality that one does. While that kind of encounter did take place, in reality it didn't happen at that particular time. I always felt that it was vital that there was an attempt by Peter Helfgott to try come to terms with what had happened or as nearly as possible try to convey his sense of regret and loss as to what has happened. But he can't find the words to express it, so you have this extraordinary scene which is, on the surface, about nothing. He comes, he opens a tin, he gives David a medal and he leaves. But in it is written the loss of these years and when he dredges up again the old story about the violin and what happened to him as a child with his father, it is tragic, absolutely tragic. And in that moment, I found it hard to retain my composure, watching Armin while shooting the scene, sitting next to the camera. This is very unusual - you're normally very much focused on the technicalities of what you're doing, but I was close to tears when he did it at the time. I found it astonishing.

And, of course, with Geoffrey Rush opposite him, the scene has great tension between the two. It's one of the huge rewards of directing when you get actors who just play scenes like that so brilliantly. One of the strange things was that this was a huge scene in terms of pages and pages of script. We really had only a little bit of time in which to shoot it. And the production office kept saying to me, `You're never going to finish this scene on that day. Look at it, it's four pages of dialogue. You're not going to be able to do it in three hours'. And I said, `Look, if the actors are good, we won't have a problem, and look who we've got. We've got Geoffrey, we've got Armin, we know where we're going. Don't worry about it'. And in the event, it was one of the most painless scenes to do. I wanted to keep it very simple because it was about what the actors were going to do, not about how clever I could be with the camera, just getting the camera where it was going to read those faces. And that was going to tell the story. It's probably the simplest piece of direction that I've ever done, and yet, at the same time, one of the most rewarding moments.

Noah Taylor's performance is one of his best. His playing of the Rachmaninoff and what he communicated about genius and stress was particularly powerful. There was continuity of performance between Noah Taylor and Geoffrey Rush, with the speech patterns, the verbal play and the puns.

Noah has become something of an icon in the Australian cinema as carrying our collective male dream of growing up. I think he's probably sick of that now because he's a mature man in his mid-twenties, but here he was playing another teenager through to early adulthood. But the point I made was, `Noah, you carry the transition. You are the one who charts the disintegration. So it's very much a transitional role but it's not just another rites of passage story. It's a failed rites of passage, which is a whole new experience to explore, and he embraced that challenge enormously.

We have a character - and this is often true of a prodigy in any endeavour, be it chess or mathematics or music - we have someone who has developed one small slice of their personality to an enormous degree, the talent to play music, but almost at the expense of everything else. And ironically, that is both their making and their undoing. Out of this you're going to create a highly competent human being, a social human being. You create, maybe, a great artist, not a social human being. But at the end, the music has a redemptive quality for David. There's a scene which is dear to me in the film: the older David is playing the piano in the lodge where he's living; he's playing almost literally for his life because he has nothing else. As his father said to him, `Music will always be your friend. Everything else will let you down. Everything'. We see that enacted in the frenzied piano playing with Geoffrey Rush doing all his own stunts at the keyboard. Yes, I think music can be both the making and the undoing of a prodigy.

Noah is an instinctive performer, but like any performer he's a part of a bigger picture and I found him very responsive to ideas, often very simply expressed. I think he's an actor who's probably in some ways too used to taking care of himself on film. It's very difficult for actors: they've got to come and do all this stuff. Nobody wants to be made a fool of and yet they have to do very difficult things. And sometimes it takes a while to build the trust with an actor where they realise you are not going to let them down, so when you ask for more, they're willing to give it, and I found that with Noah. If you pushed him for some more, it was there. He was going to give it, but he needed to feel confident, like anyone, that he wasn't going to end up making a fool of himself. There was no way I was going to let that happen.

Working with actors is what I enjoy, so it's always a learning process for me with each personality I deal with.

In 1995-1996, Australians saw Angel Baby, Cosi, Lilian's Story and Shine, all with themes of mental breakdown and institutions.

Well, you can go back to Bad Boy Bubby and it goes on and on. It's a curious thing, isn't it? I don't know what it's to do with, but you could point to things like the Collective Unconscious, the Jungian notion that somehow these ideas are present and somehow they get discharged through different forms of expression. I feel that Shine is exploring a different part of that territory.

A word that I always use about Shine came from talking with Geoffrey Rush early on when he asked me, `What is it about in the end? I mean, what is it really about?' And I said, `Well, it's about redemption. It's about someone who can go through terrible experiences in his life but emerge on the other side in love, playing music and accepted for who he is.' That sparked something with Geoffrey. He felt there was a big theme behind this, not just the playing out of an everyday story.

Cosi was looking for the comedy, I think. It was an utterly different kind of expression. I also felt that we were dealing not so much with madness, which seems such or too much of a generic idea but, to me, David is an eccentric, is a glorious eccentric who doesn't have to be moulded into anything approaching what we call normality. If you take another line, you can say he's another manifestation of the Australian innocent abroad. You can look at Crocodile Dundee, you can look right back to Barry McKenzie? and look at the fact that in our cinema we've often dealt with incompetent males struggling in the broad seas. So there are all sorts of different ways you can look at the thematic elements.

In Lilian's Story, Lilian finally goes to her father's grave. Jerzy Domaradski says there is a kind of reconciliation. Shine also has David go to his father's grave and there is a kind of reconciliation. Part of the Collective Unconscious may be that there is some need in children, if parents have oppressed and abused them, that they experience a reconciliation. Lilian's Story and Shine show the possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness, where you might think it could never be.

It's interesting because, when we shot the film, that wasn't the final scene. That scene came about 10 or 12 minutes before the end. There was a whole other story element which ultimately I removed in the editing, but when I removed this story strand we had shot, the film had no ending. It then occurred to me that the cemetery absolutely was the right place for the story to conclude. It was like the coda to the piece.

Many people said, `Finish it with the concert, with David taking a bow', and I thought, `Well, that's the obvious place to finish it, we'll freeze on it' - in fact I ended Sebastian and the Sparrow that way. It's like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, `Let's put on a show', and that then is end of the picture. But no, it was important that there be that moment where everybody gets a pay-off in the concert. You see Rosen, you see the mother, you see the family, but where's the father? Well, the answer is that he's in the soil and David has to move on. So you have this lovely moment between these two, in their own way, wonderfully eccentric people who have found each other and they're moving through the graveyard into the future.

I loved the ironies that jostled in that. It was like having a film called Shine which was all about rain.

Shine seems to have spoken to the Australian psyche and contributed to our understanding of identity and the resilience of the human spirit.

Look, I hope so. It's beyond a dream, really, as a film maker to imagine that that kind of thing can happen, but it would be enormously fulfilling to have a sense that you have contributed something simply by trying to tell a story that presented itself as being so powerful. I just wanted to share that with people and, in a way, it's been a dream ride - not without its difficulties but, you know, that's not really the point. It could've been as difficult as it was and not had this kind of effect. So yes, I hope there's something in there because I found the story inspirational.


Interviews: 5th August 1996, 7th September 1996

JOHN HILLCOAT



You have spent a lot of your career in making video clips. How did you become involved in the world of movie-making?

That came first, actually, in that I went to Swinburne, the film school in Melbourne, always with the idea of getting involved in feature drama. It was hard to survive there. There were very limited resources, so you really had to learn the hard way. I did specialise, through Swinburne, in editing. My first editing job was Nick the Stripper for the Birthday Party, which was Nick Cave's second band. That was just a way of making a bread and butter living as well working in film, and I developed scripts as I moved into music videos.

What was the impact of Papua- New Guinea on you and its influence on your making To Have and To Hold.

I travelled there with my sister about ten years ago. It was an incredible experience, sailing along the Sepik River and coming into the villages. There is an atmosphere in Papua New Guinea and the climate..., the heat and the landscape. It's very, very rich, a naturally rich, diverse country and a wide diversity among the people. To work there, it's very difficult, especially because of the climate. It affects everyone in some way. Everything is heightened. Each area conjures up various images of its own. It's stunningly beautiful. But it can be extremely ugly.

We did a lot of preparation for the film but the setting came first and then the story out of that. It was initially based on meeting expatriates in these situations and it grew from there.

To Have and to Hold is reminiscent of the stories of Somerset Maugham with their stories of expatriates and their experiences - and of going troppo.

Yes. There are parallels and some of the cast and crew did read some of his stories. But we wanted to portray that sort of thing in a contemporary setting. The expatriates are living a different way of life because, fundamentally, they are living a radical contradiction. This drives them to drink because it is such a different climate and culture. But they have set themselves up in a rigid kind of way while they are surrounded by a different culture that causes great friction and heightens and exaggerates everything.

And Jack brings in videos and video technology.

Yes, that is one of the difficulties, people bringing in their own culture and setting up dynamics that contradict the Papua New Guinea culture - and then they start handing out tee-shirts... It's a last frontier. Papua New Guinea has not had such a long exposure to outside influences but now there is a rapid infiltration.

Is Papua New Guinea presented in the film as seen through the eyes of your central character?

That's true to a degree but we also tried to get a bit of distance. We deliberately had the character of Luther seem dangerous but then change. He was seen through Jack's preconceptions. These are also the audience preconceptions which have come through the media and television. And that accentuates Luther and his role in the village. He is like many young males today, caught between two cultures and rejected by both. He is also the scapegoat. They're bombarded with western influences and wealth and the things that everyone tries to get, that play on our fantasies: we would like that car, or whatever... And the young men come to the big towns and, naturally, they can't get any of these things, because it's all riddled with corruption - and unemployment. And it's the expatriates that are driving those cars, so they get caught up into other means of getting what they want.

The expatriates live in this kind of compound fantasy world, surrounded by a very different world. And it is this very strange setting that triggered off the idea of romantic obsession as well. Because what Jack does to Kate is very similar to what the First World does to the Third World. This is what people do. They act out fantasies of power and control and impose them. It is projecting their own ideals on to a culture that is radically different and dominating it.

Why was the original title `The Small Man'?

That was really a cultural thing that did not come out in the finished film. There's a term up there about `big men'. These are the villagers who achieve great deeds. Jack wants to be a big man but emotionally he's a small man.

You refer to the film as a `romance noir'.

It is a romance - but there is a darkness in the destruction that occurs. It delves into the darker side of romantic love and the myths about it. Some people in love are attracted to the darker qualities in the other, on a subconscious level. This becomes part of their obsessive relationship.

You refer to `mythic qualities' of romantic love.

Yes. Romantic love can be romantic obsession, one projecting their own fantasy on to the other and the other projecting their fantasy back. Fantasy then rules reality. In this way, love is blind, idealising the illusion. In that sense it becomes a distortion because it believes that it can be perfect. Romance, in many cultures, is a form of insanity, even a sacred form of insanity. Jack's is a journey into madness.

Jack has his wife Rose's red dress and makes Kate wear it. With his French background, the red dress is a classic symbol of his idealising his wife. But because Jack is French, he seems the handsome foreigner or the equivalent of a brooding Heathcliff figure. Jack is a classic mythic Heathcliff character. His passion is genuine but he is doomed to repeat the pattern with each woman he meets.

Kate writes romantic fiction and she moves easily from the real world into the fictional romantic world. But she pays a tragic price for it.

Critics have noted the Hitchcock reference, especially Rebecca and Vertigo. Others mention the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, florid melodramas.

The basic plot comes from Rebecca and Vertigo. But I have always loved the melodramas of the 40s and 50s with their raw power, the films of Douglas Sirk and the films of Michael Powell like Gone to Earth. I have drawn on this cinematic language, the movement, colours and emotion which embody the inner struggles of the characters. We can see their world as they perceive it.

What impact would this kind of story and film treatment have on an audience of the 90s?

I hope that it brings up those issues of feelings and love and obsession. I hope that they see those issues in a contemporary setting. I think it's one of those stories of desire and fantasy which are still very much a part of the cinema, but I think it's good to express these stories in heightened, expressionistic ways.

Going back to Ghosts of the Civil Dead: what were the origins of the film? what decided you to make it at that particular stage of your career?

It came, really, from a book that I read, In the Belly of the Beast. It was basically dealing with characters who were non-innocent - in the sense that they were at the end of the line, in a very extreme situation and where they had crossed over from what is deemed as correct behaviour in society. They had been singled out and raised in a different world, the world of the criminal. I found that intriguing because I thought there were a lot of parallels, in heightened, exaggerated ways, to our own world: the way that fear and social institutions impact upon us. All these take quite a major role in our thinking and our behaviour without our really questioning or thinking about them.

So, it was looking at a group of people who were at the end of the line and seeing how society deals with them. I felt that most prison films that I'd seen usually had `the innocent prisoner who was framed' type of thing. This is a kind of safety valve, to say: well, really, he's not bad and he hasn't done anything bad. The film was a kind of playing with those sorts of notions, of the way a criminal class is actually created.

I actually wrote a letter to a prisoner wanting to obtain the rights to the book. That didn't work out, so then it went into further research and just talking. I came across an inmate who had recently got out, and it kept growing. The research just grew and grew, and after three and a half years of full-time exploration of prisons, out came Ghosts of the Civil Dead.

You also visualised the technology of the prisons of the future.

Yes. That was another major part of the film, the way the technology is affecting us.

In fact, that continues through To Have And To Hold and to the role the media has over us and the alienating effects of media and technology. Then the extremes that we go to with technology, how we use it and how it can then turn our minds. Those are both extreme examples.


Interview: 24th October 1996

JOHN HUGHES



Documentaries and features - do you make both or are you more of a documentary film-maker?

Most of the work I've done has been in documentary, but I'm not particularly persuaded of a radical difference, from the point of view of making the work and of gauging the work. In many ways the radical difference between documentary and drama, it seems to me, is a function of the market, so the kind of creative issues that are confronted in both realms are more similar than they are different.

Following that through with some of your documentaries: the film about Walter Benjamin.

Benjamin was a German- Jewish philosopher and critic of the '20s and '30s, and with that project and others, a lot of the documentary work I've done has had a drama component but, normally, in the context of documentary. The drama has been highly stylised in one way or another in relation to whatever the kind of themes of the work. Whereas in What I Have Written, the feature drama, the performance style was much more in the traditions of realism, much more naturalistic than in those other works where performance style is part of a different kind of creative treatment. They're quite different deployment of the skills of acting and performance.

Staying with the documentaries and the creative treatment: Walter Benjamin was a philosopher. You seem to have taken more intellectual subjects. (And, in a sense, What I Have Written is an intellectual, intelligent drama as well.) So, early in your career, you seem to have favoured "intellectual topics". Are these subjects that appeal to you?

It's a difficult question really, because it presumes, in a way, a distinction between, let's say "intellectual topics" and "social topics", whereas my documentary work is really in a tradition of a political-social documentary film. But it seems to have had a connection with cultural practices. I'm thinking of the film Film Work, which is the beginning of a certain theme that's continued through in my work. Film Work was about that Waterside Workers' Federation film unit of the '50s, where a group of filmmakers made a commitment to work in collaboration with the Trade Union movement at the height of the Cold War when it was not possible to speak outside a very rigid orthodoxy of mainstream press. In a way the work that I've been doing identifies with that desire to make commentary from the outside of the mainstream orthodox elements of the dominant culture.

The film on Benjamin is consistent with that general idea, in that it's about recognising the philosopher whose work was insightful and critical in a very unorthodox kind of way.

That's probably the word I should have used, "insightful" instead of "intellectual". It's mentally stimulating to think about the themes you've pursued but there is a need to appreciate the social dimension. Since you've raised it, "political" is also the word. Traps comes from the mid-'80s. It seems to have that insightful, social and political agenda that you speak of.

Yes. It's hard, isn't it, to come up with the key word? Maybe "critical" is the key word. "Reflective" might be another one. One way of looking at it is to think in terms of the genres that are in play in documentary traditions. Not so long ago we used to think about documentary as a kind of monolithic category. Then we started to realise that there was a whole range of different traditions that were in dialogue in most documentaries, while some documentaries were very comfortable in one sub-category of documentary. My work has probably been more consistently part of an essay tradition than, say, an observatory tradition - not that they're mutually exclusive.

Traps was an exploration of a kind of play with genre. Its artistic project was to explore the borders between narrative drama and documentary. It was trying to develop a loose narrative framework within which to raise documentary questions about that present moment. It was trying to reflect on the Zeitgeist of that first period of the Hawke Labor Government from 1983-85.

The film was trying to explore, in an imaginative rather than a didactic way, what were the qualities of the political culture that was being developed in Australia at that time and to consider that political culture might be something that was not only determined by the actions of politicians, but it was something that had an input from the activities of artists and writers and from a whole range of cultural practices that somehow or other entered into a dialogue that constituted a political culture.

So that was the project. One of the things it seemed to throw up was how one might work with traditions of documentary itself: how could you open up the discourse of documentary in a way that would lay out space for a discussion about political culture to take place inside the form of documentary.

In retrospect, how does that particular period seem now?

It's very interesting. Traps was screened at the VCA relatively recently. I looked at it again over ten years later and it's actually quite weird. It's got quite a prophetic quality, because it was made during that period when, in many ways, the Labor Party's commitment to economic rationalism and the rejection of the traditions of its own Left were being fought out. Traps has an eerie kind of quality looking at it today.

What I Have Written. What drew you to the novel?

I saw an excerpt from the novel in Scripsi. That was the first point of contact, and I was quite stunned by it. I thought it was an extraordinary piece of writing. The two themes that drew me to it, I think, were the critique of masculinity and masculine sexuality that I thought was really rigorous in the excerpt that I read, which was something I felt was not being taken on anywhere, really, with that kind of intensity that John Scott had brought to the task. The other element was that it was an intense critique of aspects of academic culture. It was a mix of those two things that initially drew me to it.

Then I saw the full novel and the way John was working with points of view and with - almost - the re-purposing of texts, the interplay of texts and their meanings. That was the element I found most interesting to try and deal with.

The film's complexities seem to arise from the ambiguities of a literary text combined with the ambiguities of cinematic points of view. How much of a challenge was it to develop a cinematic objectification of literary texts?

There's a huge common ground that's been elaborated in what's called reception theory, where there is, in both cases, in literature and in the cinema, the role of the reader. In some ways What I Have Written is all about that. So to try and translate that to the experience of the spectator in the cinema is not so difficult. One of the bridges to that is the interesting connection that's made in the book between the fascination of the art connoisseur on the one hand and the fascination of the pornographic imagination with the pornographic image on the other. So the whole issue is like a bridge that leads directly to the fascination we have with the image in cinema.

The film also contains religious iconography, sacred and the profane, sacred iconography and pornography. Leonardo da Vinci's painting of St Anne and the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist portrays a manipulation theme.

One way of looking at it is to talk about it in terms of Freud's essay on Leonardo's painting. What you've got there is a whole series of reflected readings where you've got Freud psychoanalytically reading the unconscious motivations of the artist Leonardo. Then you've got, in this case, a lecturer then re-reading that material for a contemporary student audience. In each case there's a series of mis-translations that are actually at the core of that reading. The whole issue relates to the larger themes that are in play in the narrative of the film, so that the story of Freud's reading of Leonardo's painting becomes a microcosm of all the central issues that the film is dealing with across its whole narrative.

On the other hand it's possible to see a kind of parallel between the behaviour of the characters in the film and the story with which Leonardo's painting is concerned. It is the relationship between Freud's reading of a manipulative St Anne and Jeremy becoming St Anne and Angie Milliken's character becoming the Virgin while Christopher becomes the sacrificed innocent. There's any number of ways of going.

So using those images as you did, and the Paris setting as well as Melbourne, you offer an extraordinary look at the Australian psyche, Australian sexuality and Australian masculinity, but with an international context and the cultural traditions of Europe. This gives the film many layers as you worked on several levels at once, which is not the usual thing in Australian films.

Well, the book is incredibly rich, and John Scott, who wrote the original novel, also wrote the screenplay, so the whole process was one of working very closely with John. I think that's the privilege of the filmmaker's job. You get to examine a particular text over a long period of time. The more work I did on the What I Have Written project, the more I came to admire the skill of John's work.

My contribution was to have ideas about treatments, about visual styles and some structural suggestions. Some of the speeches are exquisite, the interactions complex and layered.

It was important to give audiences the opportunity to recognise that there were three characters who have different ways of seeing, experiencing and assigning meaning to things. So it was important to come up with a way of allowing audiences to distniguish meaningfully betwen the difference narrative voices, one of which is a book - a 'contemplated text' - within the film. The visual styles flow from that necessity.

What I Have Written - is that the Gospel reference to Pontius Pilate?

Yes, that's right. It's a matter of interpretation and it's a beautiful formulation. What I have written, I have written, and it throws the matter back onto the reader.

Going back to reception theory, did the reviews and the public respond to the many layers? In retrospect, what is your impression of how the audience responded at the time?

I was surprised, basically, how widely the film circulated, because it was also going to be a "difficult" project and it was always going to be a minority audience project. And - this is the case with most of my work - when it encounters journalism a crisis erupts, but when it encounters its own audiences, it's usually quite well received and generates interesting discussion. I think that's what took place in the case of What I Have Written. It found theatrical release quite widely; it was quite well received in international context; it sold well. I recently discovered that it screened in Korea theatrically for three months, and God knows what a Korean audience made of it. I've got no idea. It was very nicely written about here, particularly in Metro. There were a couple of pieces in Metro that were really quite thoughtful.

After Mabo was screened on television at the end of 1997.

Yes, it was broadcast on the eve of the Senate debate, it was something like 27th November 1997. That came about because Richard Frankland, a Melbourne-based indigenous filmmaker who made No Way to Forget on which I'd worked as a script editor, was the chief executive, at the time, of an organisation called Mirrembeak(?) Nations Aboriginal Corporation, which is the indigenous organisation in Victoria responsible for native title issues, the representative body in Victoria for native title. He called me up in August 1996 and asked me if I would help him with a film project he was interested in developing on the amendments to the Native Title Act. I kind of knew that amendments to the Native Title Act were on the agenda of the government that had been elected earlier that year, but I hadn't paid close attention to what they were about up to that point. I'd been interested in the Native Title Act as it had come into play following the High Court's judgment a couple of years before, so I knew something about it. The project just grew, really, from my initial response to Richard's request.

It was very cinematic, the devices used. You gave a lot of thought to the editing and the structuring, the speeches, the visuals, the different perspectives.

Yes, it was a very interesting project. The thing that I find most interesting when I'm confronted with having to make a film is trying to work out what are appropriate or productive creative concepts that can animate the work. Apart from communicating the ideas on the level of content, it's always interesting to me to try and work out how one might make the work also speak to the traditions of documentary. In this case, how might you be able to make a work that can make a contribution formally? How can you build a dialogue between the creative, imaginative decisions about the treatment concept and the material that it's working with?

So, in all of the films there's a relationship between the creative ideas that are driving the work and the material that it's trying to deal with. In the case of After Mabo, the central problem was how to address the tradition of advocacy films, which is where it really sits. It's a film that's quite clearly, explicitly putting a position that represents the interests of indigenous people who are supporting the maintenance of native title in a context where the dominant political power wants to do its damnedest to destroy the real implications of native title.

So the idea arose that one way to mediate the tendency of the advocacy film, which is a tendency to didacticism - advocacy almost requires a didactic speech, a singular speech - was to employ a screen design and create a collage in the frame itself, as well as have a process of montage between sequences. It was about trying to articulate the possibility of a complexity of dialogue, of non-monolithic speech. Maybe it's possible to graphically represent a public sphere in crisis by exploring the possibilities of collage in concert with the traditions of montage.

And your work at SBS?

SBS is another matter altogether. All I'm doing here is trying to support the work of colleagues. I suppose I have resist the temptation to want to intervene too much in other people's creative judgment. But it's fantastic because I'm getting to see much more of the work that other people are doing than I would normally. That's great. There's so much really interesting work being done. But the other terrific thing about this job is that I get to see a lot of the work that's being done by the emerging filmmakers.

A particular project of your own?

I'm halfway through a film called River of Dreams which is looking at issues around the variety of futures that are planned for the Fitzroy River in the Kimberley where, on the one hand, some developers would like to see the Fitzroy River dammed and the water redeployed to the development of the cotton industry in the West Kimberley, whereas the people who live there don't see the Fitzroy River as wasted water. They see it as an invaluable moment of Creation that ought to be respected. And certainly the indigenous people, who have been systematically dispossessed there as everywhere, experience this as a final dispossession. It's been possible for people to keep in contact with traditional country while the country has been under pastoral leases with beef cattle - which is no longer economically viable - as soon as the land is irrigated and primary production takes place on the basis of irrigated agriculture, the land itself is completely transformed. You might as well build a city. It's a destruction. So that's the issue there, really, the way that landscape is lived in with a variety of values.

Somebody wrote of you, "Cinema thinking, the manufacture of meaning." Is your filmmaking manufacture of meaning?

It is a phrase that could have come out of discussions around Traps, because there's a strong theme in Traps about media that's really about what we now call spin doctors. The spin doctors are the... - I was trying to think whether they are the factory workers or the architects. They're the production managers of meaning.

Religious, even theological dimensions in your films?

An interesting book to write would be a book that tried to explore what the theological themes, the streams or the lines through what the cinema tells us about fundamental beliefs. You could get at this either through the way that characters' actions were explored, or else you could get at it in terms of the way the cinema seeks to make its connections with its audiences, its spectators. While What I Have Written has an explicit discourse in relation to that reference in the title of the film - I guess the theological moment in the film, as it is in that original statement, has to do with the extent to which language provides us access to a final reference and the extent to which human language simply creates a sphere in which the meanings that are available are determined by its borders. And I suppose that the film and the book, What I Have Written are an exercise in that latter exposition.


Interview: 28th October 1998

TOM JEFFREY



You haven't directed a feature film since The Odd Angry Shot?

That's correct, 1978, twenty years ago now.

Your background is television, in the 60s and 70s?

I came out of television. I was directing for ABC Television and, in parallel, working with others to get the film industry started. When we did, an opportunity arose to direct The Removalist and I persuaded Margaret Fink that I was the right person for that job and that kicked things off. About a year later I was able to go into full-time activity with a company that I had set up in 1968 in anticipation of one day leaving the ABC and being able to be my own boss.

We managed Harness Fever in Australia, which was retitled Born to Run, managed it for Walt Disney Productions, and that enabled Sue Milliken, my partner then, and myself to concentrate on our own productions.

Why did you say yes to The Removalist at that particular stage? Was it David Williamson, the ideas in the play?

I saw it performed as a stage play at the Stables and, in fact, tried to acquire the film rights to it. But in their wisdom, David and his agent decided to allow Margaret Fink to take up the rights. So I had a keen interest in it from the moment I saw the play, the reason being, I suppose, that it was about power and manipulation of power, of people abusing their positions of power. And that kind of theme interests me very much. I tried to say that with some scenes which no longer are part of the film - or certainly aren't part of the original stuff that I shot - but the film still works, I think. I saw it recently and the performances certinaly hold up very well. I was quite pleased with the late John Hargreaves - it was his first major role as the young policeman - and Peter Cummins and Jackie Weaver and Kate Fitzpatrick and Martin Harris, of course, as Kenny - just a terrific performance. And the wonderful Chris Hayward as the removalist.

That was one of his first films?

I don't think it was his first, but certainly it attracted a deal of attention. And as a director, I just loved working with him because of the preparation that he gave to his part. He came absolutely prepared and came on the set as the removalist, dressed that way - even to rehearsals - and that was just fantastic.

It's interesting in retrospect that it was a small theatre piece early in David Williamson's career and was rather sombre. What impact did it have on the Australian audiences of the time?

I think the stage play had quite an impact for those that saw it. I don't think the film had such an impact because I don't think it was given proper release. I think the marketing and distribution of The Removalist left a lot to be desired, and I don't think I particularly want to discuss that in much more detail. It rankles with me a little bit because I think that the film itself at the time deserved a better airing and I don't believe it got it.

David Williamson is regarded as one of those who playwrights who picks up the spirit of the times.

I think he does. I think he's got this ability to feed off what the current issues and concerns are and society's mores rather than necessarily scoiety's morals; he's very astute in that way. He's got a keen ear and a keen eye to what's going on, and if you look at all his plays, say, The Club, the early plays like that and, indeed, The Removalist, where, if you recall back in the very early '70s and coming out of the late '60s, there was concern about police violence. But that's in the narrow view; there was concern about the power of the media domination by the increasing multinational companies and so on. I think thematically that's what I was seeing in the film, whereas the ordinary person has very little ability to influence the course of history.

In terms of the films of the time and of people commenting on the nostalgia films of the '70s, The Removalist was released i 1975, the same year as Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Yes, quite a different film.

The films that were contemporary did not get as much notice from the critics?

That's right. You had to be trendy, I think, to be noticed. I've never been a trendy sort of guy. I just like to get on and do what I can. I mean, I say that with my tongue in my cheek, but yes, I think it wasn't until we got to The Odd Angry Shot that they actually started taking account of us.

At the time, Weekend of Shadows was said to have worked very well as a morality play.

That's quite right. It was adapted from Hugh Atkinson's book called The Reckoning. Now, I wanted to use that title but we couldn't because Warner Bros had shot a film in the late '60s called The Reckoning. It was based in Ireland or Northern Ireland. So we had to avoid that title. We actually had a number of titles and we settled on Weekend of Shadows but I still feel uncomfortable about that title. I don't think it's really strong enough.

However, I screened the film to Hugh Atkinson, the writer of the novel, after we had finished it and he came up to me afterwards and I remember him saying quite clearly, "You've got it." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You understand the ending." And I still didn't know whether I had it right, whether I was on his wavelength, and I said, "Please explain, Hugh." And he said, "It's about the Crucifixion." And I said, "Yes, well, I didn't really realise that, but if you can see that in the ending and if that's what your original intention was and I've unwittingly achieved that for you, I'm very pleased."

It was a powerful film, its atmosphere of the country town and its tensions, far removed from The Removalist in the city. Again there were the police and power.

The film was actually looking at the power of the group and how it can get out of hand. Reflecting now, twenty years on, I seem to recall that I used to get terribly upset in the school playground when I was a boy, about how one can be bullied or can see bullying. I didn't suffer from being bullied myself because I was fairly well able to look after myself, but it really used to annoy me and upset when I would see groups of other boys bullying somebody else less able to defend themselves or because they might have been outsiders in some way, outsiders from the main group of the school - perhaps they didn't play sport or they wrote poetry, or something of that nature, which made them outsiders.

I think that to a certain extent I was commenting on that in Weekend of Shadows where these people just took it upon themselves and decided that the Pole had committed the murder. They were going to get him and that was going to be their bit of weekend fun, weekend activity, and Rabbit, played by John Waters, who gets pushed against his will into this group, sees the other side of the story, sees what they're doing, reacts against it and prevents them. It's quite a tough end, actually. He, in a sense, protects the Pole from a vicious and cruel death by killing him cleanly. I liked the images. We had great help there. Richard Morris was the cinematographer. Those Adelaide hills - we found some really nice areas there. I love the green hills. You may recall that we had a hymn at one stage with the people in church whilst the hunt is on. The people go to church and I played "There is a Green Hill Far Away" which is, again, something I remembered from my youth, a hymn that I was rather fond of. It also has connections with the Crucifixion, of course.

The theme of the Crucifixion includes the contrast between the Palm Sunday cheering on of Jesus and then the same crowd persecuting him at Calvary. Was Hugh Atkinson wanting to emphasise the xenophobic attitudes of the crowd?

I guess so. I think he wrote his book in the late '40s or early '50s when we had the so-called 'reffos' and all of that. Underlying that book, I think, is the commentary about the New Australians, as they were then called, being outsiders and not being accepted and, if something happened within a community, they would look for a scapegoat and the odd person out was always accused of the misdemeanour or crime.

You don't see it much these days.

It's still around. It used to get a bit of an airing on television. I don't handle the rights to it. It's still looked after by the South Australian Film Corporation. The French seem to like it, amazingly, and they seem to screen it over there every so often. A little cheque arrives.

And so back to The Odd Angry Shot.

We did that almost exactly a year after after we filmed Weekend of Shadows. It was an attempt to have a look at the Vietnam War and the soldiers in it, telling it from the soldier's point of view. When it came out, it wasn't well received by some reviewers because they felt we should have been critical of Australia's participation in the Vietnam War, that we didn't show much of the other side - we didn't show Vietnamese people being killed with napalm bombs and all that sort of stuff.

Well, my answer to them at the time was that it wasn't that kind of film. Our intention was to show how the men survived in that environment. Again it's interesting, isn't it - you've got a group of men and we are looking at the dynamic within the group and how they survived. There was a statement about their loyalty and commitment. They're permanent officers; they weren't National Service people - the main characters - so they had no recourse but to go, no other alternative but to go, because they were professional soldiers. But once there, their concern was about survival.

Now, it took the Australian community ten years after that film was made to actually welcome the veterans home and I have found, since the film was made twenty years ago, that it is still highly regarded by people who had a connection with Vietnam. They remember it well and remember it fondly - or with affection, I should say - and I'm very, very grateful about that.

The other interesting thing is that the actors and I were talking about Vietnam during the course of rehearsal and during the shooting and at some stage we were just commenting on what we ourselves were doing at the time that there was all that social tension within Australia about our participation. And all of us were actively against the war in one way or another. I suppose John Hargreaves was probably the most active in the sense that he participated in that march down Collins Street, 70,000-strong anti-Vietnam protesters. Dr Jim Cairns led it, as I recall, but John was somewhere up near the front. Then, ten years on from that in 1978, we make a film where we're actually examining that war, that action, from the soldier's point of view. I'm pleased that I had the opportunity of making that film.

The other comment I would make from a director's point of view is that there was a certain criticism about the structure of the film itself, that it was very episodic and there didn't seem to be an obvious narrative plotline. Well, in my view there was. We looked at the journeys, over the course of the year, of each of the six main characters. It's not your traditional structure for a film. There was no Holy Grail at the end. The Holy Grail, if there is one, is the fact that they survived. But even in surviving, they weren't happy. They weren't happy they had lost mates, they had lost friends and they wondered what it had all been about.

One of the difficulties was that it was released in the same year as The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, which means we were rather overwhelmed by the American examination of conscience or whatever they were doing in those films. It came out before Gallipoli, but it seems to go back to 40,000 Horsemen with the larrikin style personalities of the Australians troops overseas, with that ironic humour as well. So that was one of the Australian angles on the experience of Vietnam.

Yes. I think you're quite right. The structure of the film in that sense was that you would have a black moment and then there would be relief through, as you describe it, the larrikin humour or the larrikin activities of a group of Aussie soldiers. Yes, we're like that as people and, if it came through, I'm pleased about that. The other thing which I've always been conscious of is that in the tradition of the English, Australians, when times are tough, get through it by having a laugh. That's typical of Cockney humour and we poke fun at ourselves or find something to humour us, to get ourselves through.

But I'm pleased and grateful that the film did work, notwithstanding The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. There were a couple of other films just prior to that - the Americans made The Boys of Company C, which worried me greatly, and I went and saw it and I thought it was a load of old cods. So after seeing it, it didn't bother me. But The Deer Hunter was actually the one that gave us a bit of difficulty in the marketplace. We released The Odd Angry Shot in Melbourne in March 1979 and already there were posters up all over the place for The Deer Hunter. It did take away a little bit from the release of The Odd Angry Shot. Notwithstanding, over the years it has done moderately well. It went into profit early on and is still making money for the investors even as we speak. They have re-released it on video here this year, a very good deal. I understand that already - it's about five months into the deal - a lot of the units have been sold. So yes, it will keep on keeping on, I think.

It seems a pity then that you stopped directing.

Every so often I keep thinking it would be nice to direct again, but it is twenty years, as you mentioned, since I have directed. But what happened? I directed something for television in about 1982, but we'll pass over that, a pilot for Channel 7. I found that the producing side of things took over because I co-produced The Odd Angry Shot with Sue Milliken and then we had a number of other projects in development. The first one we got off the ground and financed was a film which became known as Fighting Back, based on a book called Tom by John Embling, about a traumatised boy in Melbourne and John's work with him.

I had been working on the script with Michael Cove and when we came to finance it, it was really demanding. The financing situation was changing and becoming quite difficult. I couldn't find a director that I could feel confident in, and I did consider for a brief - like a couple of months - that I might direct it myself. I have worked with children before, but I felt a little bit ill at ease with it because I didn't feel prepared enough for that journey as a director.

Anyway, Michael Caulfield walked in the door, just coming in to say hello and congratulations. He knew the book. He had been working in theatre, doing theatre for children. We started talking about it and I realised that this person, Michael Caulfield, would be absolutely fantastic to give a go to as director. So it was Michael's first film. You will realise that the performance of Paul Smith as young Tom was absolutely electrifying. I certainly believe that there was no person, in my book, available at the time who could have got that performance. I know of no other director around at that time who could have done that. So I was very grateful and very pleased, and so was Sue, that we found Michael.

It was one of those fortuitous things. Within twenty minutes of talking with Michael, I thought, "He's great." I cut into the conversation and I said, "Michael, would you mind - I just want to say something to Sue," and he went out, not knowing what was going on, of course, and I said to Sue, "I think he's right, I think he would be great for the film." She said, "Yes, yes." So we called him back in and then I said, "Hey, how would you feel about directing this?"

So that's how it started. I then went on and other people asked me to produce things for them, like The Best of Friends, for Michael Robertson. I was also developing my own projects - I did a miniseries called Five Times Dizzy, a children's miniseries, in 1985-86. Producing that took about three years out of my life.

Then I eventually ended up at the Film School for four and a half years, from '89 to '93, the beginning of '94, as head of training. Then coming back into the industry and getting projects off the ground, I realised that there are certainly better-known people around that can direct, and distributors and financiers are looking for the new kid on the block. I'm a very old person on the block, so now I prefer to encourage and work with younger talent. Maybe I can give them a hand to realise their aspirations.


Interview: 12th November 1998

MICHAEL JENKINS



Are there personal criteria for your choices for film and television work?

To some extent it's haphazard in the Australian industry, especially for someone coming up as I did - I started directing on Bellbird when I was 25. A lot of people these days don't even remember Bellbird, but it was our first long running soap, I think. In those days there were no film schools, no media departments in universities. It was much more learning the craft of film-making or television production - more of an on-the-job learning situation.

The theoretical learning that I acquired was through production courses at the ABC. They were quite extensive in those days; they would select, say, twelve students throughout the ABC in Australia and spend three or four months and tens of thousands of dollars per student, providing studios, cameras, actors and programs for them to learn throughout that period. I don't think the ABC does that now but, of course, we have all the other institutes doing it.

I suppose all I'm doing is harking back to a time when the industry was more haphazard. So, coming up through that period, quite a lot of projects that you ended up doing were those that landed in front of you. But, of course, you do seek out those that interest you intellectually.

Rebel was your first feature film?

Yes. I have to think back now. It's a while, isn't it? Yes, Rebel was. I thought it was a really good story. It was a very ambitious attempt to make something of Rebel because of the era in which the film was set. It was a difficult film to make. It had a lot of music in it.

A stylised film and stylised musical numbers. Debra Byrne singing `Your are my hero' was a special moment.

Yes. Peter Best wrote it for the movie. It's funny, Rebel has attracted some fierce critiques from intellectuals who subsequently liked other things that I've done. But it also won five AFI awards and was the most nominated film of its year. It was a curious piece; it didn't altogether work. I was interested in it because of the basic story about the American boy who wants to desert. It said something about Australia and Sydney in World War II. Bob Herbert's play, No Names No Pack Drill, which it was based on, was a good and popular play, so it inherently had some interesting content.

What appealed in Emerald City?

Emerald City was based on one of David Williamson's plays. It's often publicised as being about the competition between two cities, but it's not really about that at all. It's about the survival of Australian culture in the face of a much more powerful cultural wave such as the American wave which is enveloping the world filmicly. Emerald City is about how you survive in the face of this. The play is quite a moving and poignant statement of this issue.

Chris Hayward's Mike Molloy is the embodiment of all that Australians dislike in the American takeover.

Yes. And John Hargreaves' role as the writer, which was pretty much based on David himself, shows the face of that dilemma - how does it start and how do you survive the process? That's what attracted me to the film.

The film is witty, with David Williamson's one-liners. The dialogue is delivered with great speed.

Yes, we sat down with the piece when it was in script form and we thought, `This is not going to survive if we approach it too politely', so with John Hargreaves and Chris Hayward and with David himself, we decided we would do it as we did - we were a bit inspired by some of the Cary Grant movies of the '40s when they talked so quickly. So we thought we would pursue that line and feed the information to an audience at a fairly fast rate so that it keeps happening for them. There were mixed critiques. We had some friends and some foes. Those that loved it loved it - those that hated it were very angry about how fast we spoke.

In terms of American culture, we could do our own literal fast talking?

Yes. We liked the end result and David's quite fond of the film.

Sweet Talker?

Sweet Talker is a film written by Tony Morphett starring Bryan Brown, what I would describe as a real general audience film, a fairly gentle film about some relationships, almost father-son relationships, single mum relationship with her son. It's not what I would call a film that has major clout to it. It's an entertainment film, but what it says is not bad. It's a soft film - it doesn't really go out there pretending it's saying anything world-shattering.

When you look at a sequence like Rebel, Emerald City and Sweet Talker in terms of your original question about criteria for choosing films, the point I was trying to make was that in this industry quite a few things are haphazard. Sweet Talker is one of the more haphazard projects that has come along. But Emerald City had some content that appealed to me strongly. I think that, if anything, there's probably a more deliberate progression through my television work than through films as such.

Heartbreak Kid?

Heartbreak Kid has some very direct cultural implications. There are some similarities, though on a much different plane from Emerald City, but it's very much about the multicultural community and a couple of younger members of this community struggling to deal with a problem that comes up in the face of attitudes from their fairly conservative backgrounds. This is particularly true for the young schoolteacher played by Claudia Karvan, who's engaged to be married and finds herself attracted, almost despite herself, to a young boy who persists in chasing after her. So this is a fundamental situation that can be found throughout Australia today. However, I think that the old cultures are gradually becoming more flexible.

The choice of a Greek Orthodox family is particularly interesting for Australian cinema. You portrayed them more graphically and realistically than is usually the case, especially in looking at Greek Orthodox families. Did you have technical advice from the church?

We did. We went into the background quite a bit. You're thinking of the parents?

The parents and their having the priest in the house like a chaplain, giving them advice - and the absolute strictness of the parents' moral code.

Yes, a number of people said to us, `that's going too far', or, `that's not necessarily the case any more', but we ran into so many examples of it that were very, very close to these characters, as did the writer of the play, so we decided in the end to stay with it.

They seem a very tight, inward-looking community.

Yes. We thought the father of the boy, played by Nick Lathouris, broke that down a bit. He was a more broad and tolerant person.

Steve Bastoni, playing the fiancee, was influenced strongly by the tightness.

He was very stitched up.

Shaped by that ethos, even to the violence that erupts when he doesn't get his way?

Striking the girl. We didn't actually `sling off' at that background lightly. Richard Barrett, in particular, who based this play on real people that he knew, felt that this reality was the true one, that the situation was true. We tried to counterbalance it, particularly with the boy's father. The two young characters also show that there is a generational thing going on. Claudia Karvan's character is caught in the middle of that.

While the film and its themes were interesting, that kind of explicitly religious background, which we don't often see, offers valuable awareness of the ethnic theme as well.

Sure. It's interesting, isn't it? A lot of Australians don't understand how intensely multicultural we've now become. We walked into schools in Melbourne when we were doing the film, inner city schools - I think this one was in the Brunswick area - where there was only one Anglo kid in the whole school. I don't think it was because Anglo parents wouldn't send their kids there. I think it was the area itself, so populated now by families other than Anglo families.

So the film and the subsequent TV series are probably contributing to this kind of awareness in a more popular way than other ventures?

Well, I hope so. By the end of 1996 they had done 120 hours of Heartbreak High. This is a lot for an all-film series. Certainly in its original form, the first 40 or 50 hours, it had a strong ethnic feel to it. The boy from the film, Alex Dimitriadis, was in the series for quite a long time. `Ethnic' is not a term I even like; `multicultural' is better. It had a multicultural feel to it. That got whittled down a little for a period when certain commercial pressures came to bear from the television channel where, I think, inherently they wanted to see more Anglos. But now it has come back. This show is, if anything, as strongly multicultural as ever.

The curious irony is that the hours filmed in 1996 were made because they had been bought around the world - but not in Australia. But The Heartbreak Kid spawned the series and, to my knowledge, it's the only time - and this is not related to the quality of the film - that this has happened with an Australian film.

The film of The Heartbreak Kid was commercially successful?

Yes, it was successful in the moderate terms that most Australian films are successful. There's only a very few that actually go out and coin lots of money, but I think its earnings are up to nearly $3,000,000. It must have hit a bit of a note. It did quite well on TV screenings.

Television and The Leaving of Liverpool?

I think that the television projects are probably those that I feel personally closest to. I'm trying to change this at the moment with a couple of films in development. My most successful projects have turned out to be television films, in particular Scales of Justice, which was shot in 1983, The Leaving Of Liverpool, shot in 1992, and in 1995, Blue Murder. They're all multi-part projects: Scales was three by two-hours; Liverpool was four hours and Blue Murder four hours. But in terms of content and filmic achievement, those three projects are my favourite things.

I'm currently trying to take some of that feeling to the film world, but I feel that a film script hasn't arrived at the right time for me to go as far in film as I have probably managed to go in television, but hopefully ...

Catholics audiences reacted to The Leaving of Liverpool, some very favourably because you had dramatised a situation that needed attention; others, of course, were alarmed or offended.
We certainly knew that it would cause indignation, but we approached it in a way that we thought was not overall geared to bashing the Roman Catholic church. There were many institutes involved in bringing young kids from England to Australia and to other parts of the world, not just the Catholic church. We ran into flak from the English front, from people who thought we were actually attacking the English system. No, we didn't see it as being specifically aimed at the Catholic church.

However, as the writers researched the project, they went towards and selected examples that they thought were the most precocious for telling the story. Brother Keaney in Western Australia was one character who leapt out at them; he was hard to ignore. That became the basis of telling quite a lot of the story of The Leaving of Liverpool. And we really did try to say in the program that this was not the only story. So, yes, we knew it would cause some offence, but there are some good people in the story too, with the kids.

Bill Hunter, portraying a character the equivalent of Brother Keaney, was so striking that he commanded our attention.

Yes. But we were hoping and the writers were hoping that what happened would be recognised as having happened.

Television storytelling is a way of educating people. When we see a personal story rather than merely read a headline, then the issue becomes real. Whatever the dramatic licence for The Leaving of Liverpool, it made something of the lives of the children real.

The writers researched at vast length. We also talked at vast length to people. My contact with some of the actual grown up kids made me feel that there's no overstatement in Liverpool. Many of them feel that we understated what happened.

You highlighted the tough work, the brutalising side of life and work as well as the harshness of the living; you merely suggested aspects of sexual abuse which, in fact, have been documented by some of the brothers. The sexual issues seem to be underplayed.

Yes, I think that's true. I think it was probably much worse than that. In fact, it was.

The series seems to have had an impact on the Australian audience. It won awards and solid ratings.

It did. We kept getting letters and responses to it for two years. The writers believe and the producer believes, as well, that it has actually had quite a bit to do with a new wave of these people trying to reconnect and seek some justice. It was also some acknowledgement that Brother Keaney was not deserving of being put on a pedestal.

Had you had much or any contact with the Catholic church or did you come cold to this project?

No, not extensive contact. But I was once involved in a series the ABC did about Catholic priests, a positive series, I can't think of the name of it offhand. We did quite a few hours of it and it was set in a Catholic seminary. So, at that time, I did quite a lot of reading about the Catholic church. But, no, I'm not steeped in Catholicism. I've read a lot of Catholic writers and I think it's a very complex culture. I hope we weren't seeming to be oversimplify issues with Liverpool.

And Blue Murder? It screened on ABC television but it wasn't shown in New South Wales for legal reasons. It was a very vivid dramatisation. It looked real - showing us real characters and events.

Yes. Ian David, who wrote it, is a very thorough researcher. We went into it as extensively as we possibly could. He spent about 18 months just on research before writing it. I've been interested in the police criminal culture for quite a long time. Scales of Justice was related to it. But Ian put a huge amount of time into it and we had to be very circumspect about what we said because we were using real people's names.

There are two things that need to be said: there was the legal problem; but there was also a moral obligation on us not to say things that we thought were debatable, because in Blue Murder things were attributed to people that they hadn't necessarily been charged with. You need to be awfully careful when you do that, that you have got it right. So, to that extent, we left a lot of things out that we could have put in but, given those parameters, we went as far as we thought was okay to do.

It was certainly strong stuff. Reviewers in Victoria recommended audiences to watch it. Talkback radio had a number of sessions on it afterwards. Some people said they wanted to turn it off. But, given the Royal Commission in New South Wales and inquiries in other states, the series actually contributed a great deal to Australian consciousness that justice needs to be investigated.

Well, I hope so. What we were trying to do with Blue Murder was not be too didactic or say to audiences, `You must know all this stuff'. We tried to present the two lead characters, Neddy Smith and Roger Rogerson, as fully rounded characters. In fact, a curious thing happened for all of us in making the series and in being close to it, particularly the actors who feel a necessary obligation to fall in love with the character they're portraying, as bad as that character might actually be. But we were all drawn in some way into those characters, to see their positive side, their sense of humour, their sense of loyalty. We had to try and understand that somewhere way back in the distant past, things went wrong for them and they ended up going down the wrong track. But we tried to be not too judgmental, just to portray them in, if you like, as attractive a way as their life histories would allow us to. And I don't think either of those men, despite what is attributed to them, are totally bleak as people. There's a richness to them which you can't deny.

And the thing we liked about Blue Murder was that we felt it had a sense of humour.

Australian writers and directors make docu-dramas like this very successfully.

It's nice to make something strong, but something that's not too leaden. You can turn on the news at night and get the leaden stuff. Of course, they had a good time, those guys. But the interesting thing is they mostly killed people for one reason, which was informing. They wouldn't kill people for pleasure. In fact I don't think they got pleasure out of killing anyone.

A code of protection, of self-protection?

Yes, it's the same sort of code that a lot of people have followed in the world. But if someone was informing on them, about to turn them in, betray them, that's when they tended to move against them. As I say, I don't think they slavered around in it or got a big kick out of killing.

From Scales of Justice to Blue Murder, television and film - you have done a fair amount of Australian storytelling. We have to tell our stories.

I suppose that's true. Interestingly enough, that's at the heart of David Williamson's writing in Emerald City, the need for Australians to tell our stories. There's a classic speech in there from Williamson's main character on exactly that point. For our cultures to survive, we have to tell our own stories.

Your films and series are moralising without being moralistic or didactic. You have been able to take on moral issues.

They're commenting, anyway. But you have to be so careful not to be solely judgmental, particularly in drama documentaries. If you go back to Scales of Justice, the achievement of the writer and the actors was that you actually liked the characters. The sergeant who went and stole the fur coat from a shop that had been broken into, and stole one for the young constable so that he could put it in his locker and compromise him. That same sergeant you see pulling the bleeding bodies of half a dozen kids out of a huge traffic smash.

Their lives are multidimensional and it's a very hard, shattering job at times, I'm sure. That's all I mean by judgmental. We hoped that Scales of Justice was never judgmental. It's very easy to be judgmental.

But it's so easy for things to get mis-stated. I opened the paper the other day and it was reporting on Rogerson's testimony. A journalist - perhaps she was young, maybe inexperienced - but she credited Rogerson with having been convicted of a conspiracy to murder Drury in conjunction with Flannery. He was never convicted, never. He went to gaol only for having money in a bank account that he couldn't account for. But, there in the press, he's given a credit as a murderer. So you've got to be a bit cautious.


Interview: 25th March 1996

STEVE JODDRELL


I find things written about the films I've made to be much more interesting than what I could ever put into words myself. I don't consider myself to be particularly articulate. Is it a cop-out to say that I work for myself, the way I see things, and from my own background, which, of course, every director does. I sometimes listen to directors talk and I think, 'God, you're so articulate, to be so clear about it,' because to me, life is a morass of conflicting ideas and conflicting thoughts and, the older one gets, the less black and white one sees the world. It's a lot easier, in the arrogance of youth, to have a position, whereas the longer in the tooth you get, you get to understand the other point of view - I may not agree with it, but I can understand where they're coming from. So it's very difficult sometimes... if that is an apology for my inarticulateness, I'm sorry.

You came to wider attention with Shame and Tudawali, which were both screened in 1988. What were you doing before this?

My history is in theatre. This sounds a little bit Reader's Digest - I've always wanted to be a director. But I wanted to be a theatre director, not a film director. Film wasn't very strong at all. I managed to get into theatre mainly because I wanted to be a theatre director but I studied all the other aspects of theatre. I was a pretty good set construction man and lighting designer and stage manager etc. I did a little bit of acting in between but it was very minor. Then I fell more and more into acting and I was an actor all of a sudden.

I became involved with what is now Curtin University, invited there as a tutor. I played Hamlet in their first production and then I started directing.

They had a very embryonic film school which was led by Peter Jeffrey who is now at Murdoch University. That was in the old days where you worked in Super 8 and black and white, monstrous half-inch porta-packs that you lugged around the place. We were blessed by being in the time of Whitlam where a lot of money was being poured into the arts and tertiary schools and the film school built up very, very quickly. I literally stayed about half a page ahead of my students for at least the first four years, teaching film as well as drama.

I got funding for the first film I ever made, a 45-50 minute film called The Bucks Party. I remember that at the time I got to double-head stage the AFC came out to have a look at it and they were aghast. They thought it was everything about the Australian image that they were trying not to portray in the '70s: you know, brash men, ocker, chauvinistic - well, what a bucks party is about. A few people managed to fight for me and showed it to the Greater Union Organisation. Greater Union loved it and decided to blow it up to 35mm and show it as a support feature. It was combined with some very strange choices, like The Man Who Fell to Earth. They never quite worked out whether it was one of your trenchcoat kind of films or whether it was something esoteric and a statement about Australian men.

In fact, I remember one leading reviewer saying that 'this is either an indictment of Australian culture or a textbook on how to run a buck's party'. They couldn't ever work it out. That really surprised me because I thought I'd been quite overtly soapbox-thumping in terms of what I was attacking about the Australian male.

I would have thought it was an indictment.

It used to get rented out a lot for bucks' parties. Then it got adopted by the gay female movement, so it became, in a sense, an indication of everything that they had held about men. So I don't know whether I ever actually reached the kind of men I really wanted to reach. That was my first film and that did reasonably well. Then I started experimenting with television. So I did everything the wrong way. I did a reasonably biggish film first up. I did a little bit of television, then I did Shame, then I did Tudawali, then I did a lot of television - I came over here to Victoria and I've been really kind of practising and developing my art. So I consider I've done everything completely the wrong way around.

You came on the scene with Shame very strongly, although there was some difficulty about its release, I understand. Cinema Papers took up the cause and printed the screenplay.

It was very curious because the financiers, we finally discovered, thought they were making a completely different film to the film that we were making. I had read the script fairly early on and I thought it was very powerful. I was doing some work with Paul Barron at the time and I encouraged him to read it. We really liked it and we decided to go ahead with it. No-one really wanted to touch it because they couldn't work out what it was about. It was not quite entertaining; it was a little bit too art-house; it was a message film, and yet Michael B.......... and Beverly Blenkinship had always designed the film as a kind of B grade drive-in movie. They did not want it to end up in an art-house circuit. They wanted it to be an action flick that had some things to say in it, so that they get to the kind of demographic that they were appealing to, which was young teenagers and people in their twenties - and actually hoping the girls would drag the men along and, therefore, get across what they wanted to say.

We had lots of arguments with the financiers to the point where, unknown to me, about three weeks prior to shooting we discovered they had actually commissioned a new draft to be written in L.A. The draft was brought out and they said, 'No, this is the script we want you to do.' I remember there was one particular scene where the grandmother had been captured by the boys. It was down under the bridge and the boys were threatening the grandmother. I remember the scene as written by the writer from L.A.: Asta draws a 45 Magnum from her belt and points it at the boys and tells them, something along the lines of, 'Get away from her, you motherfuckers or I'll blow your head off', that kind of thing. In one moment it summed up their whole attitude to what the film was about.

Fortunately we told them to get knotted and we went on with it, but there was that kind of pressure all along - a kind of basic misunderstanding of what we were trying to say and what they felt would be an interesting film. For instance the scene where Aster and Lizzie go swimming, after she's taken her on a bike-ride, the kind of baptism sequence... They wanted us to play the two women naked. Now, they had a fundamental misunderstanding of how a woman feels about her body after she's been raped. We actually played that sequence without the T shirt on, the audiene looking at Asta seeing the bruises, but a woman does not go bathing naked with another woman and not bathing naked with her lawyer - I mean, Asta would not even suggest such a thing.

We had that kind of interface constantly going on, so that by the time we finished, they were willing to shelve the film or give it a video release. Paul Barron, bless his heart, fought very strongly for us and managed to find somebody else who was willing to take over and buy out the film from these people and, finally, the film got onto the screens. It was a hard battle. If there's a lesson to be learned, it's just make sure that your bedfellows are all involved in the same dream as you are when you start.

When it was reviewed, writers looked at the genre and made comments on the use of the western and the bikie film. Was that consciously intended?

Very conscious that it was a western format. We had actually used the genre very strongly. Again, that was how Michael and Beverley saw it in terms of playing it out. I think the major criticisms we got - and I ended up touring with it when we went to the States and we also took it to a few film festivals like the London and it was invited to the New York Film Festival as well - the criticism we got was the fact that we had actually shot ourselves in the foot by having Asta become an action hero and the women had actually resorted to the same techniques that we were criticising the men for, which is a valid point. But I wanted people to walk away feeling angry. And I wanted them to walk away feeling - and hopefully that's what the last image meant - that the community can make a difference, that one person can only make so much of a difference. And Asta had actually caused, if you want to say it that way, the death of Lizzie. But the hope is that, if the community itself takes responsibility for its actions and the actions of its members, then we have a chance of actually changing the attitude of members of the community.

But I wanted people to walk away with a sense of rage. It bothers me most when people walk out of the film with a sense of impotence. I've failed if that's what they walk away with. But it certainly touched a lot of chords in people's hearts.

I was in an unfortunate position because I'm not a sexual assault counsellor and I don't even pretend that I know very much about it. I certainly did a lot of research for the film and we got to meet with people. The actors met with victims and the fathers of victims. I got to confront what it would be for me, as a father with two daughters, to actually go through the same situation. But wherever we went, women would come up to me and tell me their own stories, and I found that the most desperately agonising part of what I was doing, because they felt they could talk to me, was starting to see how rife sexual assault really is in the community.

But I remember in the London Film Festival after we showed the film, - we had a question time and the first question was from a young bespectacled guy in the front who said, 'Where do you get off making B-grade schlock movies?' I don't know how to answer that question. I'm always interested in films that manage to plug people into their psyche somehow, because the level of anger and the level of pain means that the film's tapping into something. I suppose the worst thing one can say about a movie is that people walk away not giving a shit anyway.

Somebody has written that Asta is more of a superwoman coming in, able to solve things, whereas if she'd been ordinary, more women would have identified with her.

There's certainly the element of the hero, the leather-clad bikie, the cowboy who comes into town and leaves the community at the end, but we tried to include elements in there that showed the fact that she didn't know everything. When she's teaching Lizzie how to fight and Lizzie says, 'What if there's six of them?' she says, 'I don't know.' The fact that things go wrong for her; the fact that she reacts with terror when five or so teenage boys attack her - there is that element of the kind of flawed human being in there. But she was certainly the action hero. She became a kind of role model for a lot of women.

I notice you referred to some religious imagery when you were talking about the swimming sequence and baptism. Does that kind of broad religious thematic symbolism appeal to you or is that just something that you draw on?

I think it must be there. I may have articulated that, but in the script, that's immediately what it was. I had a very strong religious upbringing as a Methodist, which is probably one of the harder religions to survive, and I was strongly religious till I was about 15 or 16 and then I renounced it completely, but I remember I was always surprised, when I was studying literature at university, how no-one else seemed to get the gag when the gag was quite clearly there in the poem or whatever. So I'm very thankful that I had that kind of upbringing.

The American telemovie version of Shame with Amanda Donohoe?

I haven't seen it. A lot of my friends have seen it. I think it would cause me a lot of pain to see it. One of these days when I'm feeling really strong in myself, I'll go and have a look at it.

Was it flattering that they remade it.

Well, no. I mean, the Americans remake everything. It's like they take the best of French comedies and turn them into not so good American comedies. No, I don't think it's particularly flattering.

The location scenery was magnificent, the Rockies as an American Outback, Amanda Donohue is a strong screen presence, but it's not so much the western of Shane, it's more the community of The Wild One community. In crossing the Pacific it lost some of the urgency of Australia. It was made for TV, which puts certain limitations on the strength that you can bring to it.

Yes and no. Our shooting was fraught with difficulties all the way down the line. Again it's one of those things where I look back now with what I know about production logistics and, hopefully, a little more skill as a director, and I wonder how the hell I ever managed to survive the making of Shame. It was mostly through ignorance. I just didn't know what I was doing, so we just kept moving.

But I remember shooting on one particular night the death of Lizzie, the whole last part of the film where they find Lizzie's body, take it up to the top and the accusations are made; then Asta is left with the community as the body is taken away. That was originally supposed to be a two-night shoot. Because we'd lost a bit of time, it became a one-night shoot. Then our generator broke down. We were shooting a substantial distance out of Perth and I think we actually started shooting that whole last sequence about 2.00 am and that last sequence with Asta and the community behind them was actually shot at dawn. We had to grade it down to make it dark and you'll notice it's not quite the same as everything else. So we ended up shooting that whole sequence in four hours and that was hell.

But we had such a fabulous ensemble, in terms of the actors, that I could virtually point a camera at them and know that it was going to work. We had built up a very strong feeling, amongst the women especially. Again - and this is an aside - but one of the great things about shooting in Perth was the fact that what people were exposed to across Australia was a whole lot of faces they had never seen before, and that worked strongly because they didn't have to disassociate themselves from the previous role this person had played or, 'I saw them in..', you know. These people were more 'real'. I think there was a great benefit shooting that way, but there were a lot of problems in shooting so far away from the film community.

I remember the atmosphere of the Bicentenary and the aboriginal protest and that same week Tudawali was shown on television. We all remember Alan Seymour from The One Day of the Year. He wrote the screenplay and you did some myth-making with him.

Tudawali had a very interesting start to it because, originally, another director was supposed to be doing it, and that director had written the script and had done a lot of the research on it. I can't tell you the reason why he pulled out. He had another project or something like that, so it was offered to me. I had had very little to do with the project at all. I'd seen it go through the office, but I'd had very little to do with it directly. So I came on board with an extant script and was told that I had to go over and work with Alan Seymour to rewrite the script, so to speak. Alan and I had a fabulous time together. It was very concentrated; it was one of those situations where you fly a long way to be in a house and work five days and fly a long way back. I could have been in another house next door in Perth.

We rewrote the script, no, we didn't rewrite it, we developed the script and worked out what we wanted to say. I then arranged to go up to Melville Island and Darwin to meet with some of Tudawali's friends and colleagues and, especially, his daughter.

She was mentioned in the credits.

The script was originally written around the fact that Tudawali's death was caused over his daughter; that he wanted to take his daughter down to Sydney and give her a convent education or whatever, to raise her and give her some of the advantages of white education that she hadn't got. She was actually betrothed and he had a fight with a member of the family to whom she was betrothed and that's how he died. The whole script was written about that; it was written about the great love this man had for his daughter and how it impacted on everyone's life. It was in a sense a kind of bedrock to which we always came back.

Now, when I got there and started talking to people, the story emerged as patently untrue and the whole spine of our story was busted. We had huge problems. We were three weeks off pre-production and the whole spine of the story was gone. We also picked up a lot of other things along the line, that Tudawali found it difficult to get citizenship when in fact that wasn't true. He was a member of the football club and as a football hero, he immediately was up there for citizenship.

So there were a lot of phone calls to Alan. There was a story of a man, a very powerful story of a man and yet the spine of the story was gone, and that shows in the film. I don't think we ever quite managed to solve that. I think that if you actually look at the film with that in mind, you see the problems that we were up against.

Yes, it was a film about him as an actor and the making of Jedda and all the consequences of that in the '50s and '60s and all that he meant - but what impressed was involvement in rights for aborigines at that time.

Exactly. This was fascinating to me and what happened afterwards - the fact that he was in a boxing troupe for so long, that he a man without roots anymore, trying to straddle two different cultures unsuccessfully. It's true of so many actors today. I've done a lot of children's television and I've seen young children looked after and touted for 16, 26 weeks - make-up, wardrobe people, everyone - they're kings. At the end of the show, they're gone. I think there's a program on television at the moment about what's happened to television soap heroes in Australia who were so good, who used to get tens of thousands of fan mail letters a week and now can't get a job.

The other part of the story which of course wasn't true, was the story of the white journalist with whom he had the friendship. This had been designed originally to provide an entree for the white community into the story. We got into more and more trouble with that relationship, trying to make it work. Probably it doesn't seem particularly sophisticated now in the way we handled it, because we were constantly writing while we were shooting, trying to make things work.

It finally came to a juxtaposition of themes rather than an interweaving.

Yes, it did. But what I'm really proud about is that we got as close as we possibly could to a sense of what his life may have been, and that was largely through Ernie Dingo. Ernie was fabulous. As an ambassador who allowed us into communities - we couldn't shoot in Darwin, so we shot in Derby and Broome - and Ernie's entree into that community and his willingness to actually gather people around and form a supportive team was fantastic helped us enormously.

I remember when we first started making the film, we had to go and see Gary Foley to talk to him because, at this time, the aboriginal community in Australia, its arts community were getting very anxious about their stories being taken by whites and being made into dramas. I sat at a table in a restaurant with Gary Foley and Ernie Dingo, and Gary's doing this, "I don't want any more fucking white people making any more fucking films..." and Ernie's talking and I'm talking and saying what my vision is. And then finally after about an hour and a half he turned to me and said, "All right, you look fucking all right. Okay. But you make a fuck-up of this and you're dead." I mean, I was very conscious about wanting to give it as much integrity as I could, and also have a story that was a drama and that was entertaining.

The audition and the making of Jedda worked very well, then his appearing in Whiplash and Dust and the Sun. With the friendship theme there's some edge like the scene on the beach in Sydney when the journalist's wife is unconsciously patronising towards Tudawali. I had forgotten that Tudawali rants against the whites at the end, so you leave the audience with some rage.

We didn't want to follow the same stream as Jedda. But there was a lot of anger. Obviously, as I got to witness the communities during the shoot, my anger started mounting. And when I went to see Rose, his daughter, and started to see how... I don't want to go into that. Yes, my anger was mounting but there had to be something about the fact that you learnt something. There's still a lot of work to be done and we are still trying to - by rubbing against each other, we will become smooth finally. I don't know whether the film ended up being too overt, too histrionic, but I wanted to have that rough edge to the end of it - Alan, too, of course.

The opening was clever, dramatising the audition and explaining the Chauvels and their film as wellas Robert's situation very quickly.

That was largely true. It was that dance sequence that actually got him the role and it was really quite profound. We had some Tiwi advisers who allowed us into the culture and the community a little, so I started to get a sense of the Tiwi culture. We brought them down from Melville Island to Broome and recorded a whole lot of traditional songs with them, which were used in the film. The sense of the contact with the water was very important, and the sense of the water going to another place, so that's why we used the canoe.

You really did turn Tudawali into a symbolic figure, a mythical aboriginal, with the overtones of Jedda as well as the fight for aboriginal rights. You also symbolise the previous fifty years of white changes of consciousness.

I must see it again. Most films I've made, I have enormous difficulty watching again. I would say this is probably not unusual, that most directors would tell you that there's a little bit of their life implanted in each film they make and it's a reminder of a particular stage in my life that I was at, making those different films. So, in a sense, it's painful to watch them because all that was involved in that bet or your prejudices or your ignorance or your lack of understanding is actually embedded in that film at that point. So, sometimes it's difficult to watch.

I would love to know from a member of the aboriginal community what they really thought about the film. I know we showed it to a lot of the communities. But then again I guess they're going to be wide in their subjective reaction to the film as any other member of the film-making community is.

It would be different from the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys compared with the urban aborigine.

Yes. Like the differences between the people who think Shame is a piece of shock-horror, cut-and-thrust type of blood film and some people who think it's an art-house film that's preaching to the converted. I mean, you can only do what you can do.

Your television work, especially the Halifax fp telemovie, The Feeding, that you did with Frances O' Connor.

That was the first Halifax I did. I really loved that. I'd gone through a stage of directing a lot of children's material, because I was the series director of Leapfrog and I did Around the Twist, a couple of series of that. I was just starting to work in "adult drama" again when the offer of this came along. It was probably one of the most polished scripts I've read in a long, long time - by Mac Gudgeon.

It was a very interesting film, a very interesting story. It managed to touch every bit of our dark side. And yet I was having trouble with the community attitude towards serial killers. A network executive actually said to me, "That's a very sexy story, serial killers", and that bothers me enormously. I'm still not quite sure why people like serial killers and why they romanticise them. That was the aspect that bothered me a little. But the film just happened, everything seemed to fall into place with a very powerful cast and a very lovely shooting period, a strong music score. It was one of those ones where you go, "Wow, it worked."

You created a sinister atmosphere which is interesting because criticism of some of the Halifax films is that she's too nice to be true, so to speak.

Yes, she's a princess.

It's interesting that Australian audiences have responded to both aspects; they seem to like her as the princess, but there is also that fascination with the dark side.

Well, life's about light and shade, isn't it? So maybe it takes somebody from the light to take us into the darker casual side. I don't know. I'm fascinated by the whole aspect of our shadow side, the unexpressed and repressed shadow side in all of us. I found as an actor I always loved playing bad guys - loved it - because I can actually break away from anything that had to do with me. My past and upbringing had me as a kind of a practising good guy, which meant I never had any real expression of my dark side, so I got to do it in acting and now get to do it in directing as well. I can play with all that kind of thing.

Whilst it attracts me and I feel that it's necessary for us to actually explore our dark side, it also scares the shit out of me because I don't have a strong spiritual base. So the possibility of looking at and throwing into relief the dark side fills me with despair sometimes.

That would be an aspect of the Good Guys, Bad Guys series, wouldn't it?

I did the pilot for Good Guys, Bad Guys. I also did a substantial amount of the first series and a block of the second series. That's fun. There's nothing in that. That's fun to do. It's hard but it's fun. The Halifaxes I like because I can get my teeth stuck into them. I've actually done three Halifaxes now. The second Halifax, which was called Sweet Dreams, followed on reintroducing the Steve Bisley character, something we've never done before. And that was quite interesting.

I did a Halifax which is about a mass killing. That was very difficult because we're actually tapping into something that was very much a part of the community psyche. Even the fact that we were willing to attack it ...It is very difficult because you're dealing with very raw and immediate emotions. It's very, very hard for me to imagine anything prior to Port Arthur that galvanised the Australian community. Probably the only thing since has been Princess Diana's death... all the personal emotional energy in terms of reaction to that death. I found it very surprising (I'm talking about Diana).

It's interesting, I suppose, keeping the Nine Network audience in mind, what you can do and what you can't do.

Absolutely. And that's partly the princess creation of Jane Halifax.

The project that you're hoping to get made?

I will tell you one thing: it's that film reviewers are going to say, "He has got an obsession with female lawyers. He's always making films about causes." It's about a female lawyer in the '50s who defends a murder trial at a time when capital punishment hasn't been used for 15 or 20 years and the incoming government decides they're going to use capital punishment, so it becomes an issue. It's a film about capital punishment. But it's been written in a kind of gentle, ironic, whimsical style, a little bit of black humour but it gets pretty tough at times.

Do you want the audience leaving in a rage this time?

No, I don't. I think what needs to be said is said within the film. The audience might say, 'give me a few things to think about, but I think I'll still have a smile on my face when I walk out'. Yes, I think table-thumping days are over.

Are you hopeful of making more films? Have you got that kind of energy?

Yes. Unfortunately in the Australian community, the older you get, the tougher it is to make feature films. There's a lot of young people making films and a lot of young writers, but I think I'm just starting to hit my straps. Now, as against Shame and The Bucks Party, when I'm absolutely clear I didn't know what I was doing, I now feel that I probably know enough about what I'm doing to give it another shot.


Interview: 30th March 1998

MARK JOFFE



You were born in Russia. At what age did you come to Australia?

I was nearly five.

So you grew up here.

Yes.

But there seems to be a trend in Australian films from the mid-80s to the mid-90s where the image of the male hero is changing. We had Jack Thompson in the '70s and then Paul Hogan. But, with The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting, John Duigan has written a 'hero' for Australians to admire. He often looks and sounds 'nerdish', I suppose, but he has a lot more substance. Ben Mendelssohn in Spotswood and again in Cosi is very much in that line of the more unassuming, sensitive Australian rather than the macho Jack Thompson tradition.

Well, it's interesting you say that. You just do certain stories at certain times and see how they work out. But I think it is the maturity in our storytelling, telling whatever stories we want to tell. It's part of my hate but people say that it's part of the sort of quirky genre of Australian films. And I say, "Well, it's not. It just happens to be a good story that's come out now". It goes in waves of certain leading actors and I think that's fine. It's just the way it is. There's a lot of films coming out. But there'll be fewer action heroes. I would hope there's more dimension and more substance put into the characters. People aren't necessarily simple, so the more complicated they are, maybe they're more interesting.

Your films, your feature films and mini series, are quite diverse. Do you see any thread running through them besides the fact that you have chosen to make them?

I think the only consistent thing is one or two actors in the cast and my doing them. I'm guided by a good story and finding something that I could contribute to the story in the way I direct. It's not necessarily any genre that appeals to me. I'm like actors. I don't want to be typecast as a director. If there's a good story and it will work well in a film, then that's what influences me.

Cosi has a particularly Australian flavour. With Grievous Bodily Harm, Spotswood and Cosi, you are telling diverse but Australian stories. Or is that reading too much into them?

No. I think they can't help but be Australian stories. However, I was born in Russia. But I am Australian and it's just my natural perspective on things. Grievous Bodily Harm was an attempt at a film noir, a hard-edged thriller. It wasn't totally successful in its attempt but it tried to give a stylish rather than stylised view of that genre.

Spotswood was a different sort of film and, again, it was there to do. It wasn't a deliberate ploy to make it like an Ealing comedy or any particular kind of comedy. It just had the natural elements to it from the story.

Cosi is different yet again. I'm happy that they're different enough. I'd hate for them all to be so obvious, that there's some clear thread through the three films and people say, `oh yeah, well, there it is, another one of his films'.

Grievous Bodily Harm was quite grim in the subjects tackled, the madness of the John Waters character, the corruption of Colin Friels character and of the police. In 1988, when the film was released, Australians discussed these issues, the Queensland Royal Commission was in session. But in the 90s, especially with the New South Wales Royal Commission into police corruption and issues like paedophilia, a film like Grievous Bodily Harm could come into its own.

Well, look at New South Wales. There are horrific revelations every day. People are suspected. It's the culture being revealed that's stunning everybody. It's in the courts. But if you're doing a film about police corruption, well, there are very few places in the world where it doesn't exist. It's being exhibited here and now, but corruption is an aspect that is part and parcel of film noir. You've always got the tough cop or the corrupt cop. And, in the mid-90s, it was happening on a fairly grand scale in New South Wales.

Spotswood came out in the era of economic rationalism. It seemed to be such an antidote to the economic rationalism that it must have hit a spot for its audience.

Yes, that was a conscious thing. Not that we could ever make a political movie. It's not a political movie, but it talked about the manufacturing industry in this country and the economic rationalism of the government - which is still there. So, I suppose, in a gentle way - although I don't really like that term - it shows the human side of the economy and that is the side that probably appealed to the people who saw it. But yes, that was a deliberate thing.

Which makes Grievous Bodily Harm and Spotswood diverse but quite relevant. With Cosi, what were the particular characteristics that appealed to you? and their relevance to Australia in the mid-'90s?

I think their relevance is that as we move on, there's more awareness of people who don't have as many opportunities as other people. This is this case with mental patients. What's happening all around Australia and all around the world is that a lot of these patients are being analysed quite quickly and, if authorities think they're not a great menace to society, they'll be out on the street or in halfway houses.

Now, we don't touch on that greatly in Cosi, the film is not a forum for the issue. But it is a relevant part of it. I know there have been a lot of problems in Victoria. This is something not to be ignored. The social connotations are something that we did consider and we used, albeit not in a grand way because our primary task was to be funny and poignant. But they are relevant issues and that's one of the key reasons why we made this film contemporary, as different from the play which was set in the '70s.

One of the appealing aspects of Cosi is that there's a tradition in theatre of the fools speaking the truth. What you say about the humour and the poignancy coming through the six characters who perform Cosi, as well as all the others, patients and staff, enabled you to make many depth-true comments about the human condition.

Well, Louis Nowra being a writer, and a playwright, did want to put a lot of profound things in the script - and they are there, hopefully hidden quite nicely under the realistic base. It's not someone pontificating about this, that or the other. So I was on pretty safe ground because these characters could really say anything and, if it fitted into their character, they could comment. Barry Otto's character says some wonderful things about love and hate and humanity. And he does it so well that not only does he get away with it, it makes sense the way he says it.

It's just their perspective on things. They don't come from a blinkered view, they can be totally rational one minute, abusive the next and quite calm after that. I mean, it's just the way - you know, whatever psychoses they have - they manipulated themselves if they wanted, or we just treat it from certain perspectives.

Pamela Rabe has stated that on stage she thought she interpreted her character more angrily, but in the film there was greater sadness and pain.

I think that one of the most heartening things about the film is her pain, her performance of her pain, the way she acts that out. I haven't seen an audience not touched by that. I've seen the film forty or fifty times. You can feel the hush or hear the hush. You could hear something, the silence and the attention paid by the audience to her most tragic moments. That's a credit to her performance and, in some ways, it's a lovely contrast to everybody else. That's what's interesting about making a film like this: that all of a sudden, while they are a group, they're all physically different, and then you see that nice psychological, emotional difference between them as well. They all have their own neuroses - as we all do.

People ask me what's the difference between madness and normality and I say I don't know, a couple of pills perhaps. You can't be glib about this kind of thing and I'm not an expert. I've simply made some films.

The scene where Toni Collette sings `Stand By Me' is a very moving moment.

It's wonderful, very touching. It was planned that she would do something, sing a song probably. We were working out what we were going to do. We didn't want to be too hokey. We certainly wanted to make it realistic. What happened when Louis actually worked with these patients years ago - he was doing Trial By Jury - they would break into a vegie song or something. That triggered something for me - to change the whole notion: of course, something goes wrong! And it is a funny balance of a magical moment. I know people are quite amused by everyone getting into the sparklers and stuff. So it's a hokey moment and it's a very touching moment. It's quite genuine and I think that's what is appealing about it.

A character who does not receive much comment is Aden Young's director. Did he come from yours and Louis Nowra's experience?

I think he comes from Louis Nowra's experience. I couldn't knock back too many director jokes because I would have been labelled a bad sport, so we have a few jokes at the director's expense. Also the actors' expense - but not too many at writers' expense, actually, when I think about it. The only thing I did was to give Aden's character the second name Ward. I knew Vincent Ward very well and Louis had worked with him on Map of the Human Heart, so Aden became Nick Ward. I told him but I don't know if he was particularly impressed by that.

Was the performance of Gogol's Diary of a Madman in the play or was that something devised for the film?

Something for the film, because in the original play, as I said before, which was set in the 70s, there was more a social awareness. I can't remember - there might've been another play, I honestly can't remember. It may be a little heavy handed in its parallel between that and the characters' madness. I think it was good because it showed that this has been done before but in a caricature sort of way of what mad people are like. I think Paul Chubb's character does it very nicely where he just leans over and says, "You know, there's nothing about madness ...". So it was a nice sort of forum to us to say those things as well.

The Colin Friels character was interesting in that way. You assume at the beginning that he is simply going to be the wardsman. But then he becomes supportive of the whole enterprise. So, in a way, Cosi is really affirming those kinds of men and the Aden Young type of director literally gets knocked out.

Yes, that's a nice transition and Colin deserves the credit because he didn't have a lot of screen time to portray that. Speaking of that last moment between him and Ben, it's a really touching moment when he tells him, "You did all right, fella..." - it's the good old Australian thing, don't elaborate too much, don't get too emotional, but you're all right, fella. And that ........ and also ............ this or preconceptions change and that's a great thing.

I hate it when people say, "Oh, we know what's going to happen." In a lot of what we've done in this film, we've thrown a few things in there, but it's about putting on a performance. No one is really telling me that it's predictable - these things happen, but it's all the little touches that have made it believable and that's a good thing.

As well as The Great Bookie Robbery you made a telemovie, Watch the Shadows Dance?

I've got an AFI award nomination for it somewhere, but it was part of a bunch of telemovies that was made at that time. Nicole Kidman was in it and she was great. You know, there was a stage where I wanted to work and I wanted to get more experience. I came to Sydney from Melbourne and this telemovie was a sort of hybrid of fantasy and kids movie. It was a bit cheap, not so much in its production but in its notions, and I wasn't experienced enough to deal with it. But, you know, people have liked it. It's a strange little film. I haven't seen it for ten years and I'm not that keen to see it.



Interview: 21st March 1996

LAWRENCE JOHNSTONE

How did you move into film-making?

I left school when I was 15 and worked for 20th Century Fox distribution in Brisbane. I used to repair films, standing at a bench all day repairing prints. That was just before video came in. The great thing about it was that we were encouraged to take prints home, and I saw not only 20th Century Fox films, but MGM, United Artists, Columbia, an amazing amount of films, really. So it was through leisure and being entertained by films that I started to appreciate them more. It wasn't till years later that I went to film school at Swinburne, maybe the last or the second last year out of the Hawthorn campus - and that was in 1990.

Night Out was your graduation film?

Yes. I had read a series of newspaper articles about street violence and, in particular, violence that was aimed at men who were gay. So, I guess that was the jumping-off point. But for me it had to be much more. I thought it was interesting to marry the issue of guilt with its association with something that's out of one's control, say, being bashed on the street. That was an underlying factor, but the film was really about monogamy and commitment between two people. The second half of the film explores this. Night Out went to Cannes. It was the film that really helped me be able to go on and make the other films. You know, once you have a success, it helps you develop more scripts and get more work.

Did Night Out reflect more of the '80s than the '90s? Is Australian society still homophobic and violent?

Underneath it's a very violent society. It manifests itself in actual physical violence, but I think there's a lot of emotional violence as well, and every so often it comes out. I personally believe that, no matter how much laws change, there will always be struggles of power and control. You could be alone on the street one night and simply be the victim of a group of people hurting you. It's really circumstantial. That may sound cynical, but power and control have been around since the beginning of time. I think that people can be educated. But so many young people can be drugged or they can be on alcohol, high on whatever it is and, through these circumstances, anything can happen.

The black and white photography, light and shadow, highlight this.

Each of the films I've made is very carefully constructed. Night Out is a contemporary film noir. It's about two men supposedly on the underbelly of society, gay or homosexual, however you want to term them. But the issues were not only about literal black and white; there was a whole complexity underlying the story. I guess the black and white added a stylistic starkness to the story that also made the violence even stronger. I knew if that aspect of the film didn't work, then the whole plot wasn't really going to work. So it was going for something that was bold in terms of, say, the sections at night where the man was actually bashed and taken to the front of the bank in the car. But there's also a romanticism about the black and white that I quite liked. It enhanced the story as well, and the same with Eternity.

From Night Out to Eternity seems an extraordinary leap in theme.

It's funny for me as a film-maker - people always think that you're only interested in one sort of film. Even now people think I'm interested only in very serious, heavy subjects. Eternity has some humour - it's not hilarious, but there's a little bit of humour in its style, but it's affection, it's not derogatory.

Eternity came out of the whole thing about mortality. I have friends who have died in the last few years, died early. And that makes you think, well, how long are you going to be around. Film is such a frozen medium and so photographic - you photograph it and that's the end of the process. But film is also such a wonderful way to be able to tell a story. I was drawn to the Eternity story in that it was an amazing way for someone to spend their life. So, from a story point of view, I thought it was a wonderful yarn. Even though it occurred in the city, it was like the Chinese whispers or the village folk tale in a contemporary sense.

When I first heard the story I thought that it was like a story of London New York in the 30s, because we don't usually sort of celebrate our eccentrics or these kinds of phenomena in our cities. I wanted to bring all that together as well as the influence that the person who wrote `Eternity' had. The word appeared for 20 years and nobody knew who wrote it. It would appear overnight like frost. His name was Arthur Stace and he was dubbed by the Sydney press and known from then till the end of his life as Mr Eternity. He still quietly went around and did what he did after he was discovered.

I was also amazed that it was a story that was of our culture, from here. It seemed as if it should have been a European story. So all of that went into my wanting to make the film, as well as imbuing it with a visual style that was mysterious, hence the black and white.

The visual style is extraordinary, some of the light and shadow in the archival footage, glimpses of Sydney and the re-enactments of Arthur Stace's life.

I guess `Eternity' became an icon around the city, part of Sydney's folklore, really, so what we wanted to do was imbue the film with as many solid icons of Sydney as possible, like the harbour bridge, but photograph them in a way that you could look at them today and say, `Well, the bridge is still there the way it is', but you could also say, `My God, that photography where he's walking past the bridge, it looks like it was shot in 1930'. So it was playing around with the way we perceived the city, playing around with time as well. As human beings we move through spaces, we die, we pass away - but things live on, they are be still bridges, buildings. All of that underlies my story as well.

Other icons include the Moreton Bay Fig tree on the corner of Parramatta Road and City Road where Arthur Stace had his religious experience and, especially, the war memorial in Hyde Park, the night shots, the angles, tracking over the body sculpture, the epitaph.

Yes. We had some night-shoot stuff of the exterior of the Hyde Park memorial. We had some friezes of soldiers that are above the doorway, which are really beautiful, that I wanted to use. We'd photographed them, but through the editing we had to end up dropping them. There was a very beautiful shot of Stace because he had been involved in the war - I found it very poignant when I researched it - he had gone to be a drummer but ended up as a stretcher-bearer. I thought there was great sadness in that. What I wanted to do was have him come back at the end of the film and write his `Eternity' at the base of the war memorial. But with the editing, the music and the scheme of the film, it just didn't quite fit in.

The archival footage?

The archival was not so much to say that this is a particular year or era, but to use it for more of an emotional effect. Arthur Stace came from a pretty low background and there was a period where he was on the drink, and there's one clip of him as a drunk coming out of a bar, which was taken from a 20s film called The Painted Daughters. I wanted to tell the story in documentary form because I felt that if it was told as a drama, people would not believe it if they'd never heard of it before. So it was to be fairly stylised, but also to have talking heads as well, to punctuate the re-creations. It's certainly not a straight realist documentary.

But the thing that the film brings together is the influence that he had on people who saw the word - Dorothy Hewitt has him as a figure in her first novel in 1959; Martin Sharp perpetuated `Eternity' as a pop icon and is now sold through stores in Sydney as greeting cards, bathing caps and T shirts. The Christian Television Association have been using clips from the film for their TV spots.

So, there's a mixture of different things. There's a Movietone newsreel which underscores Reverend Ridley's sermon about eternity. There's also the clip from The Painted Daughters, where a man who's intoxicated comes out of a pub and pigeons fly up, which I found completely surreal. It was slowed up a little in the real film, but then we slowed it up a little bit more.

In telling this kind of story, there were so many aspects to it that were not inherent in my lifestyle but one has to appreciate them and be able to interpret them. I felt that there were ways to give inferences visually of what was happening: when Ridley is giving his sermon, it would be quite easy to just have still photographs of him, which we had, but I felt I wanted a much more poetic, bigger way of showing it. The sermon was about our existence here and about water and land. We had two small figures on rocks with waves. The same with a man out of control, drinking, like in Night Out, with dramatic points like the bashing and the knifing in the car, that. For Arthur Stace we had to make sure that the audience felt that this was someone who had gone down to a point where, if he didn't do what he did, then he wasn't at the right place at the right time, and he would probably have died.

It's a very Australian story with his harsh Balmain upbringing, then the drink, the war and his transformation.

Yes, the little Aussie battler.

Another aspect is the Sydney footage from the 50s, colour material which was very effective, contrasting with the photographic style for the witnesses to Stace's life.

I did quite an amazing amount of research for that because I love archival film, particularly if it's in colour. It's great. Some of it came from a woman called Zina Oliver who donated it to us. We only had to pay the costs for transferring it. Some of it is beautiful, of Sydney and the streets.

There's one piece of archival film in the film that actually has the real Mr Eternity in it. It occurs in the middle of the film where Mrs May - she's in the film briefly - talks about Arthur travelling everywhere to write the word. There's a shot outside Wynyard station and he crosses the frame. Somebody said, `You should have a circle and pick him out', but I quite like the fact that it's just in there.

He was an anonymous kind of person.

Well, that was another thing. I never wanted the actor ever to speak or to naturalistically read his words or have that kind of re enactment. I wanted to just have images.

Your choices of music? Eternity has a solemn, sometimes majestic pace. And then you finish with the Lord's Prayer. These more classical choices have a strong feel to them. It is the same with Life.

I grow impatient with Australian films that are very ordinary - they look like television and there's not much style to them. When I worked at Fox I would see a lot of Hollywood films, a lot of MGM films from the studio period of the 30s, 40s and 50s and I loved big scores and emotional films. I felt that when you go to the movies, it's not like just going down the street. You're going in for a different journey. I think that music, photography and design, particularly, can really come together to produce something very powerful. And so I felt that what I wanted was in some ways to have this incredibly small, very eccentric story, but have the visuals and the sound score to be much bigger.

So I guess my vision for the film was very big. Music can be so powerful, just listening to it and, combined with a good, solid story with good performances, it really solidifies everything.

Even sequences like the moment when he goes up under the fig tree - there are so many references there but for me one is Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind going up under the tree and saying, `As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again'. It's very different, but it's the tree and the small figure.

Is Eternity a religious film?

Is Eternity a religious film? I think I would say it's religious, but I'm not sure, personally, whether it's religious in a Christian sense. What I tried to do was to imbue it with what I felt Arthur Stace was trying to do. I probably sound like I'm contradicting myself or being insincere, but I just feel that as a film-maker you have to tell the story the way that serves it best. Some people said to me, `Oh, the Lord's Prayer is at the end of the film!' and so on. But I said, `Well, that's what he did, that's what he was about. That's what the whole reason for his existence'. I think it's a knockout, the end. I love it. And I love the way the music builds and there's a majesty where the camera slowly moves over the footpath and discovers `Eternity' one last time on the street.

You have been quoted as saying it was archetypal. Is the presentation of such a man, his conversion experience and his subsequent sense of vocation and mission religious and/or archetypal?

It's very classical. I must admit I'm not Christian in the religious sense of being Christian. I think I would be religious and I believe in certain things, but all I can say, is that I was aware of the elements of his life and tried to construct them as finely as I could.

I think it's very rarely allowed to have a voice in films in Australia unless it's, say, for television or documentary. But they were integral parts to that story. The one thing I wanted to get across not only to people who were religious, but to non-religious, was that there was something incredible and passionate to be recognised in his achievement, something unusual and wonderful. It depends on the way you look at it, but I think you can tell that everyone who speaks in Eternity has been affected by seeing Stace and eternity in some way.

The conversation with Blake Prize artist, George Gittoes, about his religious art and his memories of death and the funeral highlight the transcendent.

It's beautiful the way that this theme is planted early on and then the discussion occurs later in the film.

Robyn Ravlich said that she wasn't a believer that she knew that Stace was driven by a Christian imperative. You dramatised how he was driven.

To me he was driven by a Christian imperative, but I think what Robyn is saying is that it is probably a bit more - and I would agree with her in some ways - that there was a survival thing because of his having gone so low. I think many people have things in their lives that help them get through. It was a combination of elements, I think, with him.

She referred to his life and writing as a Christian song line.

Yes, I guess the idea about the song line in our urban society is a contemporary kind of idea. It's usually true to Aboriginals and the country. I don't know of any other culture that actually uses the term `song line'.

Eternity received a great many awards.

Yes. It's amazing how many people have responded to it, particularly Americans, but Europeans less so, which surprised me because it's such a European-looking film. We actually found it hard to distribute the film in Europe. I thought it would go to the London Film Festival or to Edinburgh. There was something about its folkloric nature that I thought would be surely of interest. But it hasn't played there, no.

Moving to Life. John Brompton said he wanted to make a beautiful film. Is that your phrase as well?

No, he said that. I think he would have probably meant by that an affecting film. We wanted to make a film that was issue based but which was also just about human beings and the way they feel about the world.

It was something of a shock to see you making a film in colour. You have commented on the use of red especially...

Because the film was about men who are HIV positive, which is about a person's blood being infected in a certain way - which in this day and age cuts down their chances for a normal life span - that's what's flowing through them. We painted the floors red. In prisons the floors are either brand new modern tiles or, in the older ones, they're painted green or blue. I said to the production designer that we could use red sparingly, so that it is underflowing those men's lives. If you see it you, see it. And the doors are red as well, because the doors are the entrances into spaces. In the final sequence the door opens and it's like an invasion of the prisoners' space and the prison officer comes through. It was a dynamic production design.

There is also the use of grey and red with the uniforms and also with the design of the cells which harks back to a Nazi kind of colouring. It was having what people know of that colour configuration but not hitting them over the head with it. I never ever wanted to make a black and white pretty prison drama. The whole thing was about power and control. You've got the completely separate world of the men's emotions and their own lives outside prison.

You used the device of the dictionary entry in both Eternity and Life. It looks like a signature device. Again the two titles, Life and Eternity are so close. Was Life your title?

The film was actually called Out of the Blue when we were writing it. We were writing it through the time when I was making Eternity and, as the script progressed from the play to what you saw on the screen, I wasn't happy with the title. We were thinking of other ones and, because this film was about so many elements, I just thought of Life as a good strong title. I was very self conscious, having made a film called Eternity and then making one called Life. I thought people would ask, `Well, what's he going to do next?' and think it was a bit pretentious.

But I felt that the title Life, even though it's so simple, really is the regular term of people's lives; but it's also a jail sentence, how long you spend in there, the whole thing of `in for life'. So it just seemed perfect.

And the life sentence of some of these men with HIV?

Yes. The connotations of life can be positive or negative. I think it just depends on the character.

In focusing on these men, you make us realise that they are victims of a `leper mentality' in society. Night Out highlighted the violence against gay men. Marginalised people are part of the underlying texture of life. We know who these men are in Life. It is not a matter of their sexual orientation, but they are infected and we see how they are treated.

Yes. Again, talking with John about developing the work, I never really wanted to make a film where people were thin and dying as we've seen so many telemovies about AIDS. I wanted to blur the edges a bit; there are so many things that people can be sick with, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be dying next week. They could be quite healthy. But once people have the knowledge of something that seems anti social, whether they have cancer or whatever, people treat them differently. So what I wanted people to do was to look at the film and see that these men in fact are basically a healthy-looking bunch but, psychologically, their territories were very mixed. Then it got darker and darker and more complex as the film progressed.

You have spoken about the thematic and visual influences of Sirk and Genet.

I haven't seen a lot of Sirk's films but I've seen a few. I guess it comes back again to heightening the emotions as a cinematic experience. It's like the use of that image which is from the archival film, The Broken Melody, which is in Life, and people ask, `Well, what's that about?' It's quite unnaturalistic but it's about rescuing and there's a series of rescues through Life that are either fulfilled or unfulfilled. It's the power play between men and women or men and men. The young woman in that sequence runs up to throw herself down, but the man comes out to save her. Earlier in the film Des and his girlfriend are in a car, having a tete a tete and then it goes wrong because he gets out of control when he has a fit. And there's a moment where she jumps out of the car and has to decide if she is going to help him or not. She could quite easily have run off and left him alone, but she goes back. I guess I'm a humanist and life's all about whether we help each other or whether we don't. And the same occurs with other relationships through the film.

Ralph has the dream of people disappearing and he's left on his own.

Yes, that speech actually occurred in the original play, and when we were writing it, we talked about where it could occur. The bastion of Australian suburbia is the backyard - it's where we have parties, barbecues, all sorts of things happen - so I said, `Why not have it at a barbecue?' We looked around for a house where we could get the camera far enough back so that we had an icon of the steeple of the house, and then Ralph stands before his friends and gives a soliloquy. We build on it as much as we could: the use of the string of the light that comes from near the camera that kind of anchors the house. And then there's the ephemeral experience of where the people disappear.

There are quite a number of sequences outside the prison.

It's funny, because when people say with Eternity that it's a documentary, I think it is and it isn't. And when they say Life is a prison film, I go, `Well, it is and it isn't', as well.

You say that you did want to make a realist drama but you wanted to explore the psychological territory of HIV.

Yes, because people deal with that sort of thing in different ways, and it was interesting to me because we've seen so many medical films about it on television. It was like people seeing other people dying. I felt there's a lot more to our lives than just that part of it. It could have been very easy to make that kind of film, but it would have been another one on the shelf like a lot of others.

Prison life is a bit like a fantasy so that all the rest of life is unreal.

Yes, it's that whole thing about being in prison. I've never been in prison, I've only visited. To me it was amazing to be able to walk out the door in the afternoon, but then to realise other people have to stay there for 6 months or 2 years, 10 years and people come and see them. It must be very weird to not be able to have that freedom. Having interviewed some men there, I realise the things that they find important and what their lives are made up of are memories and dreams and aspirations.

Religious icons again. There is a striking use at the end with Ralph's death when Des signs, like an anointing, Ralph's forehead with a cross. Was that your idea or John Brompton's?

I think it was John's idea. Again it's one of those things in society that people have reverence for, whether or not they are religious in a Christian sense. It's a ritual. I think we felt that it was the sort of thing that Des would do, even though he would not see himself in any way, shape or form as Christian, but it was something that he did.

Some kind of blessing.

Yes.

You highlighted the cross in Eternity, especially on the war graves. You would have focused on it for the same reasons. It's interesting that it has recurred, unexpectedly, at the end of Life. It's interesting that, in the secularised society that Australia claims it is, you rely on the symbol of the cross to make some kind of transcendent sense.

Yes.


Interview: 30th October 1998

ANA KOKKINOS



Have movies always been part of your life?

Very much so. I started to go to see serious films at about fourteen or fifteen and fell totally in love with European arthouse cinema. And that was really a revelation to me. Obviously I'd seen TV and Hollywood films but it wasn't until that time in my life that I started to see films that were actually trying to say something or that were expressing ideas and doing it in a cinematically interesting way.

The very first serious film that, at fourteen, was pretty amazing to handle was Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers. I remember coming out of the film and having no idea what it was really about but I was just struck by an incredible emotional sense. I remember the richness of the colours, the extraordinary performances and thinking this is so new and so different. It set me on a course of avidly watching a whole lot of films. Being a working class girl from the western suburbs of Melbourne, the idea of becoming a film-maker at that point was very remote. I had no access to how to become a film-maker and the idea that I would go to film school never really occurred to me.

So I went off and did law but kept up my passion for film at the Melbourne Film Festival every year, seeking out interesting films, reading cinema magazines and papers. But I got to a point in my law career where I realised that I should make the break, either I committed myself to the law or said I really want to become a film-maker, I really want to become a director. I'll give it a go and see what happens. And that's virtually what I did. I threw everything in and applied to film school, got in and did a year there. We then made Only the Brave and Head On.

Only the Brave was very well received.

It's a one-hour film that deals with two young working-class girls growing up in the outer Western suburbs of Melbourne. It's very much about their friendship and the way they betray each other, tragic consequences for one of the characters. At that time I felt it was a film that said something about my own personal experiences, of growing up in a more marginal community, growing up with a sense of feeling that you were an outsider. And I very much wanted to use the landscape in the film to show that.

There are a whole lot of kids who live in these areas who don't have access to ideas, to books or to other cultural pursuits. And living in those areas often seems like living in a cultural desert. Young kinds are out there struggling, trying to make things happen for themselves, often in very difficult circumstances. And, being someone who came from that background and who was able to get out of it and move on, I felt a really strong sense that I wanted to make a film dealing with that stuff, dealing with what it's like to be young and confused and yearning for things, yearning for something else.

Did you feel that marginalisation at home? Was your family isolated or marginalised?

I was lucky in that I had parents who came to Australia in the 50s. Obviously they were marginalised to the extent that they were Greek and had to learn the language. They both spoke broken English. In the 60s and 70s when I was growing up, the reality was that there was a level of racism, there was hostility towards people with Southern European backgrounds. As a child growing up, I felt that acutely. I didn't personally experience a lot of racism towards me but it's a more subtle thing. I do know that for mum and dad it was quite acute. Luckily, they were two people who were interested in ideas, did bring books into the house, were very political and did imbue us with the sense of independence and believing that it that it was possible in Australia to do anything we wanted to do, really believe in ourselves and really believe in the possibility that we could go out and achieve things.

I feel, on the other hand that, even though there was a sense of racism and intolerance, on the other hand, I also feel very blessed about growing up in Australia and that anything was possible. I feel that at all kinds of levels it was a freer place to grow up.

And your experience at school?

I was lucky that I went to a fantastic state school. That gave me great grounding. Then I went to St Alban's High (it's now St Alban's Secondary College). It was a very large multicultural school. There were hardly any Anglo- Australian kids there. It was a very rough, very tough, very difficult school. It was a school starved of resources. It was a school very much on the edge. It was a pretty tough time for kids and most of them did not get beyond a certain level. Kids dropped out by the time they were fourteen, fifteen. They would go to work in factories. The boys would get jobs in factories and the girls would go and become seamstresses or work as checkout chicks in supermarkets. Over all it was not an academic school. But, for someone like me, I was very lucky to have that input from my family and, though I was as rough and tough as the rest of them, I was also very keen to learn, very interested in books, ideas, music. I had this other part of my life that I was developing as well. I was academically bright and managed to break through.

It is important to know this because it makes watching your films richer, knowing that the films' background is your background. In Only the Brave, there is an atmosphere of secrecy and repression and the dominance of the father. Would that be typical of that generation of Greek migrants?

Two things about that: the Greek community is not homogeneous so in Only the Brave, or even in Head On, I'm not saying this is the typical Greek family or this is typical of the way all families in the community operate. But, at the same time, it's true to say that what I wanted to show in Only the Brave is that there is an oppressive, patriarchal quality to the community. The community can be very difficult; it can be very repressive for younger people who are wanting to assimilate - be Australian, if you like. That creates an enormous amount of conflict because you still have a community, a Greek community that is quite socially conservative.

And there are all kinds of other problems, incest, for instance, in Only the Brave. Incest occurs across all communities. It just happened that the film focused on this issue because that was the story I wanted to tell. You see that strand also in Head On: the father, the patriarch, the one who places an enormous amount of pressure on the younger kids on ways to behave, to conform, to do the right thing, to marry, to have children. And what this does to the kids is that it really pushes them away. They have to develop a secret life, a life separate from their parents, away from family, away from the community, in order to express themselves, in order to find themselves.

One of the great responses we've had to the films is that a lot of young people can really relate to them. It's about saying I want to live my own life and choose how to live my life in all kinds of ways. But, the more oppressive the family is, the more extreme the reaction will be. I was very pleased and heartened that many people, especially young Greek Australians, felt that. Because Head On had been made, all of a sudden, they had the license to talk to their parents about these issues. All of a sudden, there was a film out there that meant they could talk to their parents about these things in a more honest way, in a more open way.

It is interesting too that the father in Only the Brave and even the father in Head On go down to the club and that they also have a kind of repressed secret life.

Absolutely.

And the repercussions in a patriarchal society concerning sexuality foster, I presume, what you are showing through the incest issue in Only the Brave.

As I said and again I reiterate that it's not just a Greek problem. Not all Greek fathers are like that, obviously, but certainly that sort of very strong patriarchal strain that still dominates does create a weird dichotomy. I guess what I'm trying to say is that for men, in Greek culture, as long as you marry, as long as you do the right thing, as long as you conform to the outside world, then what you do behind closed doors is your own business.

Another very strong strain within the Greek community is the question of shame. It's really a pivotal moment when Vicki's and Alex's eyes meet in that scene in Only the Brave; the shame that Vicki feels is so overwhelming that it then catapults the story into its very tragic and dramatic conclusion. So the notion of shame is very, very strong within the communities because of this hypocritical view about the way things are done. It's a highly secretive sort of world. The constraints of family and tradition are so great that people then find other ways of expressing it, often in very unattractive ways or inappropriate ways. So yes, I think it flows out of that repressive kind of patriarchy - masculinity playing itself out in very ugly ways.

Another dimension in Only the Brave is the religious one, the Greek Orthodox tradition and the effect it would have had on, say, those who came to Australia in the 50s and 60s compared with the next generations. In The Heartbreak Kid the priest was present with the parents but the younger ones were ignoring him. Is that your experience? How has the influence of the Greek Orthodox church changed in the last 30 or 40 years?

I think it's interesting. This is only a personal response. I can't speak with any great deal of certainty about it. My impression is that the church has certainly played a very dominating role within the community at large. It has maintained a very strong presence within the older Greek community's life. On the one hand it has been very supportive of the community. Obviously the church has done all kinds of things which have been integral and important for the community. But, on the other hand, I suspect that in the next generation there is a dilution of that feeling. Younger Greek people don't feel such a strong connection to the church because ultimately it's not there to provide the kinds of services that the older generation needed because of migration. So I think we will see to a large degree that the church will no longer play such a pivotal role in younger people's lives.

Having said that, I still think that younger Greek kids do still want to be connected to family, still want to be connected to community, and so to that extent the church will continue to play some role. It will be in a different way, and it will need to change if it's going to stay relevant.

In Australia, some Orthodox don't really mix very much at all. A lot of Greek girls go to Catholic schools, for instance in Oakleigh in Melbourne, and teachers having to get permissions for girls to go on school camps but parents are reluctant and want tighter chaperoning.

Tight, yes, and very restrictive. It's so difficult for young kids to say, 'All my Anglo- Australian friends can go out and have a good time. Why can't I?' That is such a difficult burden for kids. It's interesting because with Head On, one of the things that really struck me is that Ari's absolutely going to the edge; he's exploring things in a totally full-on way; but lots of young Greek kids, whether they're straight, gay or bi, still identify with him because what they identify with is the fact that the Greek community and the Orthodox church impose the view that you must marry, that the convention is that you marry and have children.

A young woman, a friend of mine, rang me after she had seen the film and said, 'I just thought the film was fantastic'. Here was a young woman who, in her twenties, wanted to live with a man. Her family was so ashamed that she actually went off and did that that they ostracised her. She was virtually thrown out. Now, imagine that her mother, over this last decade, still maintains her bedroom as if she still lives there, so that when family come, she can actually pretend that her daughter still lives there. A lot of the Anglo- Australian community don't understand that. They're not aware that it is a tragedy for young people who want to live their lives independently and freely. They just want to be able to do that.

If they make life choices outside of heterosexual marriage, then they run the risk of being ostracised from their family, being ostracised from their community. And my view is that this is a very high price to pay and it's very unfair, both on the younger generation and the older generation because everybody's missing out. That whole question of tolerating difference, of being able to come to a place of understanding, is really what needs to happen between the generations.

In terms of Head On, leaving aside the sexual issues, it is one of the best pictures of the Greek experience in Australia. The stills at the beginning and the end remind us of this history. You have done a great deal for the Greek- Australian film with Head On and Only the Brave. With the very large Greek population in Melbourne, it's a wonder there haven't been more films.

Exactly. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's obviously taken a while for the new generation to find its way into the arts. What's exciting now is that we're suddenly seeing Greek directors, artists, architects. All kinds of people are now starting to percolate and bubble up to the surface. That always takes one or two generations to happen. Like me. I went and did law when I first started off. There was an enormous amount of pressure to get a good job, to become a lawyer or a doctor. You didn't go out and become a film-maker, because that was considered not to be a real job, how ridiculous. There was an enormous amount of pressure on young people to get an education, to get good jobs, to climb out of the lower rungs of society.

Our parents would actually say to us, 'We sacrificed everything for this next generation. We have sacrificed. We have moved halfway across the world to give our children an opportunity to get an education and do the right thing'. So imagine the incredible pressure on us as the next generation to fulfil our parents' dreams, to fulfil their wishes. That's why, in a film like Head On, when Ari is dancing at the end on the wharf, I juxtaposed the images of our parents coming off the boats - that's very much, for me, about us needing to reinvent ourselves and to give ourselves the freedom to be more independent in the way we view things, but at the same time we do that utterly from a place of being connected to our families and our communities and our Greek heritage.

The sexual orientation issues symbolised that?

Well, no, it doesn't. It just so happens that Ari is gay. I hope the film is a very human story. The point is that this young man is confused, he is searching for his place in the world. The fact that he happens to be gay in reality should be irrelevant because it's a human story. It's about this young man who is really struggling with these questions. I think it's a tragedy that young people have to be put in situations where they have to struggle so intensely when, if there was a bit more understanding and compassion and tolerance, then perhaps Ari wouldn't have to go to the extremes that he does.

Somebody said sadly at the end of Head On, 'That was very nihilistic'. But I remembered that Ari said, 'Whatever I do' - even if he prostitutes himself - 'well, I'm still alive and breathing.' You were expressing a kind of hope. It was disappointing to hear somebody think the film was non-redemptive and nihilistic.

I think it's a very life-affirming ending. Some people read it in that very nihilistic way, but for me it's about this young man saying, 'I'm a survivor and I will stay true to myself'. We know, of course, as an older audience, that this young man is on the verge of adulthood, he's on the precipice of something new for himself. But as a 19, 20-year-old, given what's gone before, to have him saying, 'Life's wonderful and I've sorted myself out', would have been a very false way to end the film. The whole point is that as a 19, 20-year-old at that moment he's going to reassert his own pigheaded notions of an energised nihilism, as I would call it. But we know this young man is a survivor, he'll move on and he will find himself.

And there's the symbol of Ari as somebody who has gone through those struggles.

Yes.

People were commenting - I read the book and found it very drab, one of those Helen Demidenko kind of "this happened, this happened, this happened," and I don't remember what was in the film so much and not, but it seemed to me that the value of a film is that while the text of the novel was fairly plain, drab even, or grunge or whatever, when you have colour images, light, sound, music, you actually brought the whole thing alive. So I wanted to say that, that I enjoyed it. Don't tell the author that. Different experiences. But I did enjoy the film far more than the book.

Thank you. Well, look, the book is one thing and obviously a film is another thing, and obviously film is about an aural, sensual, visceral experience, which is something I always felt was inherent in the book and very much wanted to re-create and capture, if you like, on screen. So yes, they're different experiences.

In a way, you're the film-maker of Melbourne's western suburbs. Geoffrey Wright portrayed them in Metal Skin and Romper Stomper. In fact both of you tackled the migrant issues. These films have brought Melbourne alive, and its western suburbs landscapes, in a way that the Sydney films haven't.

Yes, I agree. It's true, and I think it's great. It's great that Geoffrey has done it and that I've done it. Certainly speaking personally for myself, that's where I grew up. That's the landscape I know so intimately, so well. I felt that both my films expressed something of this. It had been a relatively neglected point of view, the way we've tackled the Greek- Australian questions in both Only the Brave and Head On. So it was very important, as a film-maker, starting off creatively, that this is naturally the place I went back to. I thought, 'I have got things to say about this. I've got something to express that's quite different, quite unique. I can bring my own perspective to this landscape and to the people I grew up with and know so well'.


Interview: 8th July 1999.

CHRIS KENNEDY



We are doing this interview in your dental surgery. I's still difficult for you to work full-time in the film industry?

It's difficult for almost everybody to work full-time in the film industry. There are very few practitioners in Australia who don't have something else to their bow - very few producers that don't work out of a back room of their house or are desperate, working from job to job. Most actors have to work at taxi-driving or something like that. For some reason, people think that being a dentist is extraordinary. I don't know why.

It's certainly a necessary service.

That's right, someone has got to do it.

But what drew you to film-making?

I started writing in England when I was working as a dentist there. The work was very tough. I would drive for hours to work in the morning, drive through the snow and ice, and see a patient every ten minutes and then come home late at night and find I was virtually shaking by the time there. And I thought that, essentially, there must be more to life than this. I found the job a little bit repetitive and soul-destroying. At school my best subjects had been English and Economics -dentistry I still enjoy - but I felt I needed a little bit of something else, so I started writing. I just told the boss I was going to take a couple of days off a week to write. He thought I had gone mad.

Then, when I came back to Australia, the Film and Television School was just getting into full gear and the 10BA legislation was funding films that I didn't know a great deal about. So I went to the Film and Television School. I set up a practice in Drummoyne and had another branch practice in Dulwich Hill. It was reasonably quiet at the time, only just starting the places, so I took the opportunity of going to the Film and Television School where I did some writing courses. You had to be accepted on the strength of the bits of work that you had done in the past, so I did that. I found it quite inspirational because I was amongst like-minded people. But I suddenly found that they can't really teach you a lot about writing; they can inspire you to go on and keep your nose to the grindstone.

I wrote a couple of scripts. I wrote a script that actually won an Annual Writers' Guild Award in the early 80s for the best unproduced script of the year. I was flush with thoughts that my media career was on the way. But I found that wasn't the case at all. The rights to the film were picked up by various small production companies who in turn paid me a small amount of money before going broke. In the end I found it just impossible to make a movie.

In that time I had also done short directing and producing courses at the Film and Television School and then went on to do a directing course in Paddington, a part-time theatrical thing which I wrote and directed for. Then, in the end, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The Western Australian Production Company was the final one to pick up the rights to this film that I had written and they rang me up one day and said, "Well, we think we've cracked it, we've made the big-time. We have just got into bed with a fellow called Laurie Connell and I think this film is finally going to get made." And, of course, the film went the way of Laurie Connell.

In the end I just went to the bank. I had an Irish friend who considered himself a bit of a film producer and I considered myself a film writer and director and producer, so I went to the bank and talked them into giving us the money to make Glass, on the understanding that we would be able to recoup the money. It was a bit of a naive prospect, but I sort of talked the bank into it. They didn't know any better and I didn't know any better. So we went ahead and made the film.

Essentially Glass was made with a view to selling it effectively. It was made to be something that you could turn the sound off in Iceland and still get a pretty good idea of what's going on. Apart from other things, apart from being a terrific learning curve for me, it was really making movies on the job without ever having made a movie. No-one at the top end of the cast or crew had ever made a feature film before, and I was the blind leading the blind. But in the end it was quite a presentable little movie. Channel 9 bought it and Foxtel bought it and it sold to an unbelievable number of countries, so it served its purpose in a way. It was a calling card, to some degree, that I could go with and a film that had done reasonably well in recouping a good deal of its budget. It was a very small budget but people within the industry were quite impressed because very few Australian films make any money. Virtually none. Even the big blockbusters have awful difficulty getting the money back.

It was screened on Channel 9.

I have a bit of difficulty watching it myself. It's a bit like eating your own cooking, to some degree, although the two films I made after that I quite enjoy, if I ever get the opportunity of watching a bit of them. Glass was a bit of a raw and amateurish effort, but there are bits and pieces of it I quite like.

This Won't Hurt a Bit is worth seeing again.

Yes, it's a film that I like. I mean, it was close to my heart and I still find it very amusing - some of the performances and my understanding of dentistry. And certainly dentists like it. They take it and show it at the New South Wales Dental Conference. It's on video, but it's not everywhere - small releases. The big chains don't buy many Australian films. It was a good opportunity for a lot of actors, too.

HG before he was HG?

No, HG was already HG. HG was probably the least experienced of the cast in the film, actually. People like Jackie McKenzie?, she was a terrific little actress even at that stage, and Gordon Chater and Colleen Clifford and Alwyn Kurtz, people like that had all had long histories in the Australian film industry. HG really had never played a role in a movie before.

With his kind of deadpan delivery he was going to be seen as people's caricature of a dentist.-

It was funny in a way. Most people went along expecting to see HG ranting and raving, which he didn't - which was a little counterproductive. Casting him in that role, which is almost a non-existent personality - he was to be a mysterious so that everyone reacted around him but no-one really knew who he was or what his motives were - meant that everyone was expecting any minute that HG was going to stand on a soapbox and say his piece. That's a bit problematical, but I think it's still funny. People who had never seen HG before thought he was great.

A non-character?

Yes, he was almost the non-character. People like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz, for example, although they both liked the film, Margaret thought it was great but David was whingeing about the fact that the love relationship was virtually non-existent and the character was virtually non-existent - which was really the idea of it! People get locked into an idea and try to massage a movie into what they think it should be.

You drew on your experience in England as background?

Well, I would be bashful to say it's autobiographical, but I did draw on my English experience, sure. And there have been all sorts of colourful characters that have been through the English dental scene, some of the most colourful I have known. There was a fellow in England called Hugh Hourigan who went on the run from Interpol in much the same way that HG did in the film. They all came through his front door and he went out the back door and they only caught him years later. He left everything, left his fleet of cars, his big house and his wife and family, and everything and he disappeared. They eventually grabbed him in South Africa. I think he went into one of the Homelands to play a game of golf. They were waiting for him, and they brought him back. It was on the front page of the newspapers - George, they called him - they brought George back to try him in the Old Bailey. There were various other people like that in the '50s and the '60s, in the early days of the National Health, an awful lot of funny people over there!

Glass is a thriller and This Won't Hurt a Bit is comedy and Doing Time for Patsy Cline has something of both.

It has a bit of both, yes. I have trouble drifting away from comedy entirely. I've had some ideas for deep and dark psychological dramas and that type of thing, but I think I'd probably do better to leave someone else to do that because whatever I start out with, it starts to wander back towards something that I find amusing. I think Glass was intended to some degree to be slightly tongue-in-cheek too. It was a little bit silly; it wasn't intended to be taken absolutely seriously.

Patsy Cline is a different sort of a movie in that you're expecting a little bit more of the audience. I had two streams of the story, intended not to be immediately obvious what they were, and intended to resonate off one another to some degree, so that if at the end of the movie you had done your sums right, you were repaid by understanding what had happened. It's a dangerous thing in that distributors and exhibitors don't really like it. If you're Pasolini or somebody it's all right, but they want a movie to be pretty obvious.

Where did the Nashville Dream come from? Is it something you were interested in yourself or did it become a symbol for that kind of hopeful young man?

It's a little bit symbolic of everyone's dreams. You have your ideas in your own life. You pick up people from your own life and put them into your dreams: you know someone who does you down in real life and you'll get back at him in your dreams, or vice versa; the unattainable love in real life will be someone who's not so unattainable in your dreams. So it was a way of putting those two things together. The interesting thing about it was that a lot of the critics, particularly in Australia, didn't twig to it or put all sorts of strange interpretations on it.

David Stratton said how he found it difficult to interpret whether it was real or whether it was a dream.

He came out and admitted to me later that he just didn't get it. A lot of people didn't get it. People like Bob Ellis couldn't get it. There's a few funny things I've said about Bob Ellis. I don't know whether it's got something to do with country music, which they consider to be lowbrow, something that doesn't deserve thought and they don't switch into that mode. Bob Ellis is the sort of person who will sit down and discuss Fellini's 8 1/2 till the cows come home, but you pose a simple conundrum like that and it just went straight over his head. I think it's got a lot to do with the music. A lot of the subtext of the movie was to some degree carried in the music and the lyrics. You have to lock into that in order to understand what was happening in the story. So, if you didn't like the music and put it to one side, the whole thing would be a long haul and you wouldn't bother to sit down and try to work it out.

With Matt Day's character, you had the nice, naive Australian from the land, good-natured. That's the Candide kind of experience, I suppose. And he meets up with Richard Roxburgh and experiences all the adventures but finishes up in prison and where is his dream? Interesting symbols of Australian young men in the '90s.

Yes, they were supposed to be mirror images of each other. Boyd was intended to be the sort of person who could have been anything, who had the talent and the ability but didn't have the raw guts and determination or the perseverance to weather it out. He was jumping from relationship to relationship. He'd jump from every easy opportunity to the next to make money, whereas poor old Ralph didn't have the talent, didn't have the same sort of golden-haired good looks or the talent that Boyd had, but he had all the guts and determination in the world. They were in there to teach each other something about loyalty. Boyd was there to teach Ralph that you can only follow your dream so far and make him understand or come to realise that certain other things are as important, if not more important, in life. And Ralph was there to teach Boyd at least some glimmer of loyalty and respect for other people.

And Patsy?

She was to float between them, really. She was to be available to both. Helen Garner, for example, wrote a scathing critique of the film, obviously from a political perspective. Clearly, she doesn't think that we should make movies where women are compliant in that way, or dominated by men in that way. I've never spoken to her about it, but I was startled to read her review. She said Patsy should have stayed well away from it all and waited until a decent male came along. So it's interesting when you're in a position like this and you feel that 99.9 percent of comment is positive, but occasionally you will find someone who just thinks it's a load of old cobblers.

Patsy had a certain independence. She was dependent on Boyd, but she had her own dreams. And with the illness, she seemed to make her own decisions.

Well, she did but in the end, of course, Boyd's personality overwhelmed her and she was going along with him. But, to be honest, I didn't even give any thought to the political correctness. I just based it on characters that you dream up or people that you know.

Actually, I based that pretty much on the relationship of a couple that I know and who have long since split up. She was in and out of psychiatric institutions, and this particular fellow has only just got out of jail himself. But despite that, the scrapes he's got himself into, he's a very, very charismatic character. If you came up to him and said, "I've just run out of money; can you help me," he would give you all his money and then he would turn around and say, "Hang on, I've got no money. I'm going to have to go and get some money," and he might not find the best way of getting it. So it was that contradictory element in the character that I was looking for with Boyd and I think Richard played it so well that he managed in the end to make you sympathise with him despite how terrible he really was.

With Ralph's parents, the prisoners in the jail and the police, you created quite an entertaining gallery of Australian offbeat characters.

Yes, it worked out very well. You go into a movie in the hope that you will do that. You do what you can to cast it in a way that will provide this, but I was delighted in the end with what we came up with, for instance, the policeman coming in with his little photo album of his wedding (and Tom Long did that very, very well. In the script development stages people say that this type of relationship is totally unbelievable and there's no way this can ever work on screen. It's interesting and amusing to look back and say, "Well, for me anyway, it works really well and I'm delighted with the way it works." And the father was such an archetypical sort of farmer, hanging in there till the son gets back, and the poor mother...

You had very entertainingly nice larrikin aspects of the Australian character, even the odd group of prisoners and the way they interacted with Ralph.

The characters in the cell next door, I think were terrific. I remember little Kiri Paramor, the young little fellow in the cell next door. I saw him first in Flirting, the kid with the braces on his teeth and he really stole the show.

I remember when we were working on it, almost shooting and he was umming and ahing about this character and the business of the picture of Marilyn Monroe - he would pull it out and say, "This is my girlfriend, she's American, but a great woman." I remember him coming to me and asking, "Do I really believe this?" And I said, "Yes, you believe it." And he said, "The minute I knew I believed it, it was easy for me. The minute I knew that I wasn't kidding, I believed it," little things like that, and they fitted so well. Lawrence Coy, with the big tattoos on his arm and the cigarette and Tony Barry too, of course. He's a terrific actor. It was only a tiny role for him, but I think he got a great kick out of it - he had to have his head shaved off and swastikas tatooed on the side of his head!

Anything in process?

I've just written another script. It's probably something I shouldn't talk about too much, but it's called Made in Australia. It's a sports-related story, once again a comedy drama - you'll laugh and you'll cry, I hope. It's to the point of doing something about it. I've got a studio sweating on making it but, of course, all the guns are fired elsewhere, not by me, unfortunately!


Interview: 12th November 1998

CRAIG LAHIFF



Was Heaven's Burning well received by audiences?

Every audience that I've seen it with has reacted slightly differently, so I'm still coming to terms with it but, generally, it's always been favourable; we tried to gauge how audiences reacted to humour in different parts of the world.

Your background was not originally in film-making. You worked in a computer company?

Yes, I went from university, where I did a science degree in physics and computing, straight into a computing company called ICL, an English company, and I worked there for about five years as a sort of consultant and salesperson, systems engineer in project management and critical path analysis. I'd travel quite a bit and consult on different sorts of industries and apply computerised production planning to projects, including shipbuilding. We set up a project with the ABC when they converted from black and white to colour television. I think that was useful in giving me certain skills to go out and actually approach people and raise finance for films. It was a roundabout way of getting some producer skills.

What triggered the move into films?

I always wanted to be in films. During the last couple of years in school, a friend had a 16mm camera and we'd go out and shoot bits of footage. I did a bit while I was at university as well. Then, when I finished, I thought I'd just spend five years in computing - not many people last longer than that. I was getting a bit itchy to have a go at doing what I really wanted to do and I was getting a bit worried that if I didn't have a go, I'd miss out. So I started trying to get work with the South Australian Film Corporation when they were doing films like Picnic at Hanging Rock. At the same time I was doing an MA in film at Flinders University. So I did those together and then started making short films.

Your first feature was Coda?

It's very much a telefilm. I suppose it's very Hitchcocky - and de Palma inspired. I co-wrote it with Terry Jennings who produced it. It took a while to work out the mechanisms of how to finance it, but that was the first full-length film.

You moved on to Fever.

I actually raised the money for three films and basically did them one after the other. We started shooting Fever almost immediately after we finished Coda.

Fever had quite an amount of tension as a thriller, but it was also interesting on the psychological level.

I think it's quite a good little film. A few people have asked about remaking it. It has a very good structure. Where it probably needs some improvement is in the characterisations and the dialogue. It was done on a very low budget but it sold extremely well and was selected for a couple of international film festivals, including Montreal and did really well. But we didn't get a release in Australia.
It had a couple of AFI nominations

Is Strangers in the same vein?

Yes, it's very much inspired by Strangers on a Train and, again, a very low budget. It's basically a video movie, I suppose - no cast to mention. It's actually the first film the FFC financed that recouped its budget back in sales. We got a letter from John Morris congratulating us. It sold very well. It's a suspense film and that's all there was.

You seem to have liked the thrillers and the suspense and the Hitchcock influence.

I enjoy the actual process of film-making. I like the visual and editing side of it, the actual form. So, if you want to do something stylistic, thrillers are a good way of doing it. Also, when you're working in the low-budget area and you're trying to make films, it is difficult to get good writers and get the funds to use good writers. So, it's somewhat easier to do a thriller, which doesn't rely quite as much on characterisation. So that was a choice to pick the thriller pathway to make films which were commercial and had a ready market because they were in a recognisable genre, and to keep making them. Yes, that was an intentional pathway to learning the craft of making films.

Between Strangers and Ebb Tide were there any films?

There was a film called The Dreaming which I financed and co produced. I didn't direct that; I got somebody else to direct that, Mario Andreacchio. It was something that got changed a lot, so in the end I decided not to do it because I'd got the deals in place and followed through to produce it. Tony Ginnane came on board and there were quite a few differences of opinion on what should be in the script. It got changed so much I wasn't interested in doing it.

Ebb Tide has a writing credit which refers to Robert Ellis. That's a very dignified way of referring to him.

Yes. That's what he wanted on the credit. Maybe that's a way of saying he disapproved.

He doesn't speak enthusiastically about it.

Bob did a script and it was very difficult to raise money it. It was more of a personal film. It had a particular style to it which might have been better if Bob had shot and directed. But in the end, because I'd spent a lot of money and time on it, we tried to give it a different approach and got another writer, Peter Goldsworthy.

The novelist?

Yes. He's working on another script we're doing and he's also co-writing a script with Rob George on Percy and Rose, on Percy Grainger.

Ebb Tide had political implications as well as the suspense of the thriller?

Yes, it we attempted to give it an air of a political thriller. It was the first film that I think had been done with the American Broadcasting Company, the ABC in America, to capture their interest and get involved. The unfortunate thing was that they had a fair bit of script involvement and also casting, so I ended up with Harry Hamlin as lead. He wasn't my choice of actor, and while he was very good to get on with, it changed the feel of the film, whereas I would probably have done it in quite a different style and cast other people differently as well. It was just a matter of completing the film and doing the best I could and trying a few stylistic things.

You had a freer hand with Heaven's Burning.

Yes. We got the actors we wanted - I think part of this comes out of having a good script that people want to do.

It's not the kind of script one associates with Louis Nowra.

No. There's another side to Louis that likes to get out, I think, and maybe he hasn't found any film-makers in Sydney who want to do that. That side probably came out of our discussions that we had in trying to find projects that would suit both our temperaments and interests.

You speak about its operatic style. Was that your choice?

Because it was part of the way of handling the material and because it covered quite a range of different genres and was over the top, it seemed to work with giving it an operatic style.

How well do Australian audiences respond to the operatic style of the home-grown film? We can accept spagghetti westerns or a director like Robert Rodriguez doing Desperado. We are not quite used to operatic styles done here.

From people we've had so far at screenings response has been really good.

The cross-cultural themes are important, Australian audiences responding to Japanese protagonists.

Yes, I think that's one of its main features. We had a bit of criticism saying it could be seen as being racist because there are some racist characters in the film, but at the very heart of the film is a love story between a Japanese girl and an Australian and there's certainly no cultural barrier that gets in the way of that. That's the central focus of the film, so I think it's the opposite of racism.

It's the redneck type of Australians who make the racist remarks. What of the family of villains with their Islamic background?

If you want to have a theme with somebody who was a torturer, unfortunately you have to seek some sort of character who's going to be immediately believable and whose background will lend itself to brief development or exposition in explaining how he got there. That criticism could be levelled at the film, but at the same time I suppose a lot of films are made here and,perhaps, not enough different cultures are used in them. I mean, one might say as to that criticism, `Well, why not?' The thing is with the film, it's not a social document, it's not a realist film, so I feel you can have a bit more life in how you tackle the material and casting.

A scene with Ray Barrett talking to the Japanese husband about the war and Japan has been omitted in the Australian version.

Yes, but it will remain in the other version which has been sold all round the world, so it's only the Australian version which we will probably leave in a shortened form.

What did Ray Barrett actually say to the husband. He initially seemed a bit hostile to the wife, but at the end he was quite affectionate when they went to the beach.

What actually happens is that the Japanese husband tries to get to where the lovers have gone and Barrett refuses to tell them. So he starts shooting Barrett, shoots him in the arm first and then asks him again and he refuses to tell - he's not going to give away the whereabouts of the lovers - and he shoots him in the leg. He knows he's going to die, so he rubs it in by giving an account of karma, trying to explain it to the Japanese who doesn't have much of a grasp of English, how he's going to get his karma. There's a reference to Japan starting a world war and then becoming a world economic power and that being unfair. But Japan will get its karma. He says this in the knowledge that he's going to be shot anyway, and he's just trying to have one last go at the person who's going to shoot him before he dies.

It sounds very interesting for the characters, but dramatically, cutting Ray Barrett altogether and having the husband simply discover the information from the photo on the wall and then go on with his pursuit kept the plot moving.

The film is very strong on environment, the various environments of Australia so that the landscapes and the countryside become a character as well. The Japanese see Australia as a land of freedom.

It was quite intentional to try and shoot figures in the landscape. That's partly the reason I chose wide-angled lenses a lot of the time. I remember the Japanese actress Yuki Kuno saying to me, when we were shooting at the farmhouse which is Ray Barrett's father's home - it's only an hour and a half out of Adelaide, at Port Wakefield, `This is the first time in my life that I've been able to see the horizon, 360 degrees of horizon'. These are things we take for granted. The Japanese were quite excited by it. We were in this fairly arid area and they felt that sense of freedom, the openness that this landscape gives them.

The locations presented a challenge for the filming. There were fifty speaking parts and 48 different locations, so that made it logistically very complicated. There were a lot of country locations. In some of the towns we had to use, there was no accommodation for the crew, so we would spend a lot of the time driving up and driving back every day, which cut down our shooting days. With fifty different actors, sometimes you wouldn't have the opportunity to talk to them prior to the shoot, except during the casting sessions, so it would sometimes be six weeks since you last spoke to them and you'd go to lunch and then, suddenly, you meet a couple of them, discuss a scene, then try and get it shot in the rest of the day, which is quite difficult.

How has the film has been received in Japan?

The Japanese distributors were involved during the financing, but they also had the script and they really loved the it. They saw the film and at some of the screenings in Cannes. The Japanese from the distribution company thought it was fantastic and liked the humour

Is your next project action and thriller?

No, it's more political, more film noir. It's mainly a mystery and it will have some political content in it.


Interview: 4th August 1997

SAMANTHA LANG



You did some film study in Prague?

There's a film school there and I was fortunate enough to go just as the government was being overthrown and Vaclev Havel was coming to power. I was hanging around with the film students. It seemed to me at that time that the arts community in Prague had been very politically active and crucial in helping the change of government come about. It was quite a life-changing experience really because a lot of the young people I met had been refused entry into university because of their parents' political leanings; and we don't have those sorts of problems here - or perhaps they're more covert.

Is it appropriate, therefore, to say that The Well is a European-looking and European-sounding film?

Yes, I am happy to say that. But I don't think it came purely from the Prague experience. I grew up watching European films from a very early age, then I had a fantastic French teacher who showed me French cinema and I watched a film called Hiroshima Mon Amour, which was instrumental for me, a kind of turning point. Then I went to university in France - I started to do a degree there and continued this obsession with cinema, but felt that before I could even try to make a film, I needed life experience and I should go and learn other things. So it's been a long, gradual process. Now I watch lots of American films, but it really wasn't until I went to the film school that that kind of cinema was opened up to me. Up until then it had been very dominated by watching European movies. So I think that, somehow, even without my consciously aiming for a European look, that maybe it's part of my make-up.

And the photography?

Yes. The landscape was very important for me as the visual metaphor for Hester's inner world, so very much a reflection of what was going on for her psychologically and emotionally. I've tried to make the landscape mirror what was going on with her.

Your short films?

I think they have screened at the St Kilda Festival. They're very different from The Well. The Well is quite a huge departure.

They're fiction, the short films? And the film that won the award at the Sydney Film Festival?

Yes. Audacious was my graduate film, which got me a lot of recognition. It's a story about a woman who's bored with her sex life with her husband. She works in a computer company and, through the Internet, she finds a husband and wife team who invite people to write their fantasies down and they will re-enact them on video. They start doing this as a means to work out what's going on sexually between her and her husband. Then, watching them gives her the confidence to try things out on her husband. At first he is reluctant to engage in these activities and then eventually yields - at which point he discovers all the tapes and feels deeply humiliated. So there's a kind of showdown. But all the way through the film he has been obsessed with his video camera and, at the end of the film, when she tries to make amends, she records a message on the video camera, rewinds it and finds that he's been a voyeur into her life. her showering, her putting on her stockings... I was interested to see how technology affected us and whether it actually improved relations between people, helped intimacy or prevented it.

And you wrote the screenplay?

Yes, I did.

You also directed a story in the Twisted Tales series?

Rachel Ward was in it and it was about a video-dating thing, with Marshal Napier.

A bit in the vein of Audacious.

Well, yes. They gave me the script and I thought, I'm being typecast here. But I think that what Bryan Brown did with Twisted Sales was a wonderful thing and ground-breaking for Australian television.

Is that your only television work?

Yes, it is. It's very hard to break into Australian television as a director. What he was doing was giving new directors a chance.

The process from novel to film for The Well?

The rights for the book were acquired by Sandra Levy who commissioned Laura Jones to write the screenplay. That carried on for about six years. In mid-1996, I was asked to read the screenplay, which I did, and I came back with other ideas.

Since Laura Jones was the screenplay writer, she's largely responsible for the translation from the novel to screen. It's true that in the book there is more plot and that we don't have as much time to include everything. Some of the back stories aren't there. One of the difficulties in adapting The Well is that there's a lot of interior monologue and you have to find a way of presenting that on the screen, so if it's not explained in dialogue, then we understand it from the actor. But the thing that we concentrated on was being true to the spirit of the novel rather than its form, because sometimes, I think, you can become restricted by your reverence for what is in the novel and, therefore, you restrict the potential of the film. So we had to throw the book away and say okay, we've got to make this into a film and it has to stand alone as a film.

But interestingly, at the end Elizabeth Jolley saw the film and thought that it was true to what she had written.

We had two weeks' rehearsal, going through the script, talking through the scenes, especially those that seemed more complex. There was an exercise that Pamela actually suggested and that was that on the final day of rehearsal we went through the whole script and I would call out what the scene was about and Pamela and Miranda would try and find a key image for it in terms of physically expressing it. So we did the whole film but for each scene we tried to find a key gesture or a key movement.

Laura and I collaborated on the final draft of the screenplay and the shooting script. During the shoot she was there for collaboration. Then, once I'd done part of the film, we talked about it. She's quite a generous person in the sense that she always said to me, `This is your film. You have to make it the way that you want it to be. If there's anything here that you don't agree with, it has to go', so I had the good fortune of having her support and her collaboration when I felt I needed it.

The character of Hester: what was driving her - with her father, with Harry and, then, with Katherine.

There's always a difference when you're actually making something and then when you stand back and watch what you have made. You see it much more analytically. When you're filming, it's often much more instinctive. Certainly I see the film as a sort of `states of mind' film, an exploration into the female psyche. As far as Hester is concerned, I think she is a woman who has basically lived an emotionally repressed life, bereft of any kind of warmth or physical contact and hasn't grown up. I think that when Katherine comes into her life, what happens is that Hester's emotional life starts.

She begins as very stilted and then, literally, lets her hair down and begins to `break out'.

Yes, and I guess that what is poignant about it is that Katherine evokes all these feelings in her but she hasn't learned how to articulate them. So you have their relationship shifting from a kind of employer-employee, mother-daughter, two-schoolgirls-going-through-adolescence-living-out-their-fantasies relationship. And then there is an underbelly of physical stirrings because Katherine is also discovering the potency of her sexuality and her sensuality. She can play around with it and Hester is enamoured with that kind of freedom, that physical freedom, but is scared of it at the same time. So for me, the well, as well as its narrative function, becomes a metaphor for feminine or female sexuality. Hester is scared by the danger of what sexuality will do. Katherine wants to bring the body up out of the well - it's the object of desire so she wants it up there, whereas Hester is feeling, `Go down, go down'.

She threw the man down the well.

Yes, and then she seals it because it's too potent, it's too scary and if she allows it to come up, it means their relationship is going to have to change, whatever way that may be.

How calculating is Katherine or is she just floating through life? Then what of her fantasy of the man down the well claaing to her and, finally, her stealing the money?

I'm happy for people to put whatever interpretation they choose onto the film. My own feeling is that Katherine is deeply traumatised by the accident; that when the accident occurs, it gives Hester the upper hand in that she, by throwing the man down the well, apparently saves Katherine and takes control. It's the control that Katherine is losing. Katherine's only defence is to use the power of her imagination to invent the man and make him alive. Then he is a weapon against Hester and a way of combating the tight hold that Hester has assumed over her. So I believe that Katherine believes in the man. For me, the money is - dare I say it - inconsequential in that what's most important is that Katherine chooses to leave at the end.

She left earlier but came back and now she can finally leave.

Yes.

Genevieve Lemon's character seemed to be an ordinary woman, wife and mother, but also a Mother Earth symbol contrasting with these two strange, mutually possessive women.

Yes, she's Mother Earth.

The men in the film were largely peripheral.

Yes, peripheral, but also, if you think about the intruder, the man down the well as being male, he is also central. I find it interesting about the story that they are peripheral in that you're in the inner world of the woman, but they are also central to that inner world. Even though it is not articulated, is the male presence.

Have Australian reviewers audiences responded well to these themes of the female psyche and sexuality - especially the male reviewers?

To my surprise and great joy, they've responded extremely well, which says more about them than it does about me. I've been really overwhelmed at just how well people have talked about the film and responded to it. What was interesting is that when The Well was in Cannes at the Festival, there was a great contrast between southern European men who said the film was not about anything, and southern European women who said, `Oh, you've explored taboos about female sexuality', and feted me as this pioneer talking about female sexuality. The men said no, it's not about anything. It is good to come back to Australia and have it reviewed by men and women and for them both to see it as interesting, at least. I think says a lot about our society.

Are you satisfied with The Well?

Film-making process is a process. You have an idea of what you're going to do in terms of the film. Then through each stage that idea evolves. So once it starts with the screenplay and you have an idea during production and then during shooting, you are rewriting the film. It never stops, right up until you're finishing the sound, what sounds to add, also...

Really you battle against time to do the best you can for a film and finish it to make it as good as it can possibly be, but eventually, because of time and money, you have to stop.

In a way it's dangerous to think about changes do doing things better because when you're making a film, you're doing the best you can, given the circumstances that you're surrounded by. So I content myself with, well, I did the best I could have done. I pushed myself to my limit and this is the result.


Interview: 23rd July 1997

CLARA LAW



Clara Law's most recent film, The Goddess of 1967, is awaiting release in Australia. It was selected for competition at the 2000 Venice Film Festival and its star, Rose Byrne, won the award for Best Actress. The film was also on the short list for the award from the International Catholic Organisation for Cinema (OCIC).

Macau-born Clara Law studied in England and worked in Hong Kong making such films as Farewell, China, Autumn Moon and Tempations of A Monk which featured at festivals around the world. Post-production on some of these films was done in Melbourne and in 1995 Clara Law and her husband, screenwriter, Eddie Fong, migrated to Australia. Their first film in Australia was Floating Life, selected as the official Australian entry for the Foreign Language Academy Award for 1996. The Goddess of 1967 is their second Australian film.

This 1996 interview incorporated some answers from her press conference in Venice.


Both Farewell China and Floating Life are stories of migrants, from China and Hong Kong respectively. You paint very different pictures of the fate of the migrants in each film. Your perspective on migrants to the United States seems to highlight the violence of American society whereas life in Australia is much more quiet.

There are different reasons for this. First of all, I think, it's my own development as a film-maker. Secondly, migrants from China and migrants from Hong Kong do come across quite different kinds of difficulties. If you are from Hong Kong and you're able to migrate to another country, you are more well-off. If you are form China, the language can be difficult. There are more hurdles if you do not know the language. So, for various reasons, the encounters were different.

But, at the time, there was a lot of anger and a tension between Europeans and Chinese. I think that now there is less anger and more of a process thinking things through, a kind of distancing and looking at it all from a bigger perspective rather than looking at it simply as Chinese migrant problems. I think it's more of a state of modern humanity.

You explain something of the meaning of 'floating' life in your director's statement about the film.

Floating life describes most aptly for me the world of an immigrant. An immigrant is cut off from history, both one's own personal history and the nation's history. He/she has to learn to live 'floatingly'. What does existence mean away from one's country, the non-existence of an existence when one is cut off from one's roots. Ancient Chinese philosophy teaches that there is a cosmic order to the universe. This order extends from heaven to earth to humans, from parent to child... I believe in this. This belief has given me the strength and faith in the making of this film.

In Floating Life, for the migrants to Australia, you chose to use extensively the theme of the house: houses in Australia, in Hong Kong and in Germany.

In the film, a house becomes and develops as more of a metaphor than simply being the house itself. A house signifies a home and in a home you are supposed to feel safe, secure and protected. And to find a house where you can feel at home becomes the most important thing for anybody, not just for Chinese, but for anyone in the world. Of course, as you can see in the film as it develops, the house is also illustrating the state of mind of each character, the state of mind of the character at that certain stage of his or her life. So you can feel the change as the film progresses but, you can also feel that longing to have a house, which is at the same time a home.

In Floating Life, Bing, the daughter who had already settled in Australia, can be seen as similar to the woman who migrates in Farewell China: there is such stress in trying to survive that the migration experience does, in some ways, drive them mad. Is that a correct reading of the films?

Yes, I think so. I know that is the biggest problem that faces the immigrants, especially the women. I researched that and found out that it's not a special problem just in America, as opposed to other cultures. But it is more of a problem in America. New York always gives the impression of such friendship. Even for me when I was there working, I felt so much friendship. But I suppose it's very easy to become very depressed because of that. This is especially prominent among the immigrants, especially the female immigrants, because I suppose they cannot work as much as they would like. And, if they don't come into contact with people more than, let's say, they would normally do in the place where they came from, then slowly I think they shut themselves into a kind of prison. This has become quite common among them.

The boys seem to be able to manage much better.

I think that is a little bit of a generalisation. I wouldn't say so but I think that because a lot of Chinese women, especially in America, came with their family, they would stay at home, which means they had less in contact with people.

Many people mention the impact of the abortion sequence and wonder what you had in mind. It has such emotional impact for the audience.

I think it's tied into the whole Chinese belief that posterity is one of the most important things, especially for older generations. But I think that even with younger people, because we're brought up in such a way that we know that there is a continuity between our ancestry and our posterity. For that young man, I think he came to a stage of his life where he realised that he had been into the sensual pleasures all the time and never been into the deeper issues. He always felt that he was alone, just this one, single person on earth and that this had nothing to do with his family's past nor his own past and that there was no future.

But, at a certain moment of his life, he somehow felt that he was not actually alone. He performed a casual act at a certain moment without thinking of the consequences. And... looking at it physically and having it all flash suddenly before his eyes made him realise that it is not just a casual act, that it did carry some consequences. He then experienced the feeling that he was actually part of the whole, that he was not just one individual alone in this universe. He is really part of the family.

I think this is like a special moment of realisation that can come to people sometimes. I would say it's something like that, a moment of awakening. He realises that he feels the love his parents had towards him, have always had towards him, a kind of faith and hope and never giving that up in spite of the fact that what he did was not what they hoped he would do. It's a moment of feeling that so much hope and love has been shown by his parents towards him that he is part of that home.

Was Floating Life well received in Australia?

I think it has been. Sometimes among the audiences, hearing their responses when I was watching the film with them or when I talked to them afterwards, the kind of response I got was very, very positive. And a lot of migrants said that they had never in their life been able to be part of the community. They felt their own pain and sorrow and they could see that they are like that. These are some of the best compliments I have had.

There was a background of migration themes in your ealier film, Autumn Moon. It's obviously a theme that fascinates you and your husband?

Yes, I think it is my background, given the fact that I didn't come from a place where I had stayed all my life. I was born in Macau. I went to Hong Kong to live when I was young. And there was my going to England to study. I think somehow I've never felt that anywhere is familiar. I felt I'd be totally lost, so I think that's one of the reasons.

And I suppose because when Hong Kong's future was being discussed in 1982, at the time when I was in England studying, having all my student friends around me who had either come from England or somewhere similar, very few of them were foreign students. They were, as I say, either British or from America or Canada or Switzerland and they would all talk about how they'd go back to their country after their study and work in the film industry there. And, suddenly, this was a time in my life when I realised that, maybe, Hong Kong's not going to be the same and that there may not be much of a future for me. All of that made me feel that I'm a little bit different, not having a place I can call my country, trying to find somewhere to shape my identity.

In your episode in Erotique, you had a young man from Melbourne in Hong Kong in love with a Chinese woman from the United States.

Yes, the theme of exile does come up in my work. A lot of times I have felt captive and exiled even when I was just in Hong Kong. There was not much of a cultural landscape there. But I found that I tied it to my culture through a kind of belonging to the ancient Chinese more than to contemporary China, China under the Communist government. I also think that the modern human race is caught up in a fast culture, and I don't think I appreciate that very much. I just feel that I don't belong anywhere, one of the reasons that I feel I'm still looking...

Would that be part of the reason for you making the Temptations of the Monk?

Yes, it was.

It was such a surprise, given the contemporary focus in your other films, that you should go to such a lavish re-creation of history.

I think I wanted a sense of a place and of time. The film is set in a period of history when China flourished most. It was the paradox of this emperor being one of the most respected emperors for what he did for the country and yet he got his place and his position as emperor because of a massacre. I think it's quite paradoxical and the whole drama of seeing what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, and then trying to assess it and find out about your own image of yourself: what you think your image is rather than what it actually is, that the image and the reality are different, so what you really are is honestly different. The monk's life was a spiritual journey to finding himself and finding what it is true for himself.

Which I suppose is relevant to modern searches in contemporary consumerist society?

Yes, I think so. There is some of the Buddhist tradition in the story. I think I look at that more as a philosophy than as a religion.

With The Goddess of 1967, you took your characters, a young Japanese man who found the car of his dreams, the Citroed DS, on the internet and a young blind woman who took him on a journey in the Citroen to her father and into her past, you took them into the Australian desert.

This for me is a new phase. However, with a new phase it is not that you cut off the past. I am very conscious that it is a gradual thing. Eddie and I have now lived in Australia with little experience of it. But as we went into the outback to look, to feel and to explore, slowly it worked on us and it became part of us. I found something that I can feel. I found colour. I found that there is an object and a subject but it is not that they are totally opposite. Slowly that landscape is saying to me a lot about what I have been looking for in the past. It's not as if it is a cut-off point. There is a lot that I experienced in Macau, in Hong Kong and in London and this is a continuation, a natural progress into what now, looking back, I see as a new phase.

I think that I approach a new country though the landscape. I'm always very interested in finding out what the country is like through the landscape because the landscape tells us a lot abut what the country is like and the people there, how the landscape shapes and defines the people. This is very true of the Australian landscape, it tells us a great deal about the people and why they are as they are. I found the outback inspirational because it is so primeval, so ancient, so intricate, so masterful and it reminds us of the impoverishment of the modern soul nowadays. I think this is now becoming part of the development of my creative work, a new phase and an important phase for me.

The Japanese man is a modern technological man and the car, which in fact was nicknamed DS, Deesse, the Goddess, whereas the girl was from the country and had suffered all her life.

I think technology has overwhelmed us and taken over our lives. We want everything to improve. We want everything to be visibly analysed and proved so that it becomes real. And, if that does not happen, we don't believe it.

I also think that there is a lot that cannot be seen, cannot be proved. I believe in the soul, in the spiritual and I think that it is only through that that we become more complete. It is wrong to think that science and technology is all. We think that we can be God and act like God. But I don't believe that. I think it is important to know that we are not God and we cannot be God, that there is a lot we don't know and because we don't know. It is only through knowing and finding our stories and the spiritual that we become persons.

I wanted the girl to be a physically handicapped. She is damaged but at the same time she has something very precious in her, a very positive energy and warm side. She is always ready to reach out and support and to connect. I don't believe that you need physical sight to be able to see. You can be blind but you can still have a lot of images in your head. You have imagination and imagination enables you to be inventive. So, not being able to see does not mean that you are handicapped. The Japanese man can actually see but he is stuck in his world, but he needs someone to open up his world for him in some new way. She does, and this is a total revelation to him.

The film looks very different from the average movie, different use of colour for the present - the flashbacks are in fuller colour than the present - and rear projection for the road journey.

I believe cinema is images and sounds. The visual has always been very important to me and I was trying to tell the story through the visual. I wanted to create a certain colour for the film, a colour that was very ambiguous. It is a grey tone, the grey area in people's lives because I do not believe there is ever total black and white. So, I wanted to create this colour which is ambiguous and corrupted and not primary. I think this is the way the audience can be closer to the journey of these characters.

The important thing for me at the beginning of production is to find a way to communicate to my Director of Photography what I want to see in the film. I find a lot of pictures. For The Goddess of 1967, I found a book by the photographer, Michael Kenna, beautiful photography which expresses what I wanted to express. I also look to the work of a Chinese painter I admire who embodies a perspective which is eastern but which at the same time is more than eastern. I showed these photos to Dion Beebe, my director of photography. This is the second time I have worked with him and so we have good communication and I would like to work with him again. He understand me very well.

What we were trying to do technically when I showed him all this wass to find a colour, not black and white, a colour and not a colour. So we found a 'bleach-bypass' process. We did the tests and I really liked it. I think this is how it should be. The funny thing about it is that with certain colours, the properties are totally changed. Green can become suddenly red. So we had to do a lot of tests, with costumes, with the design, the colour of the car. A lot of tests so that the colour we wanted would appear exactly as we thought. That was a very long process in pre-production, tedious and meticulous. But we did it and we got what we wanted.

I always like to choreograph within a shot, not just do a close-up or a long shot. The camera can move like a dance. Every shot can be a movement. Life is a movement: a centre, a space, action, silence. So I wanted to get it all right, the colour and the movement within the shot. What I normally do is to give Dion a list and work out the shots I want to do in a day. Some of the shots are very complicated but we had rehearsals before we started shooting the film, so I knew how the actors were going to move and to play out a scene. So, it's all in my head. But when we are on location, of course, we also have to improvise. It depends on such things as the light on the day and you have to accommodate to what happens on the day. But in preparation it is all planned out.

The rear projection for the journey was important. I didn't want to shoot in the car in a naturalistic way because the film is not an ordinary road movie. The journey is a journey into the inner road of these two people. If I had wanted to simply shoot the car naturalistically on a journey, just shooting from a car on location I would have been very much restricted with camera angles and the lighting. So, I wanted rear projection. I know it can look strange, but it turned out to be a very important experience because I think the rear projection did frame for the audience the journey in a non-naturalistic way. That helped them to enter into the journey.

In the background there are themes of dysfunctional families and their effects on children.

Nothing is easy in marriages, especially nowadays. I think a lot of our children are brought up these days not having the words to say certain things because we are brought up with a lot of technological words. We don't have the words to express our feelings, out emotions. We need the symbols in our words to express the meaning. To come from an entirely different culture is important can help in the process of our trying to understand each other. With a marriage between a Japanese man and an Australian woman, it's going to be a long hard journey for the couple in the film, but at least it's the beginning of the journey.

In all my films I have been touching on the dark side of all of us. This can surface in any form. There is always the devil but there is also the goodness - but through music, through art and through ourselves, we are able to get a little closer to the real goodness in us. In do believe that we are all good. Through upbringing people can be damaged especially these days, because I think parents don't know how to be parents but that damage can be be gradually repaired.

I like films that reach into the souls of the viewers. One of the greatest delights of film-making is to create this world in full, to visualise it to the most intimate detail, and then present that, as a whole, to an audience.



Interview: 6th December 1996

You have said that Bliss was typical of the Australian culture at that time, 1985. It was seen by many people as a very significant film?

I think it surprised a lot of people.

How did you come to it? From what you had been doing prior to Bliss?

Peter Carey and I met in advertising. He was working in an advertising agency at the time and we did a number of commercials together. I read some of his short stories and we became friends. We both talked about doing a film and we actually wrote one called Life and Death in the South Side Pavilion. That was based on his short story with that name. It ended up being called Dancing on the Water. We tried to get back together but...

Then Peter brought out Bliss, which was a big success. I gave it to Tony Buckley who was a friend. He was going to some film festival and I just gave him the book to read as a present, to read on the plane, and he came back and said, "If you want to make a film, why don't we do this?" It happened very, very quickly. We made it. And it was at a time when the enthusiasm, the energy just went into making it. We never ever considered what we would do with it afterwards. It didn't even occur to me about having an audience or selling it. I had this sort naive notion that people would like it or not.

Then before it was finished - Tony being an old hand at this sort of thing - he suggested we go into the Cannes Film Festival. I was just happy to get it done. There is a rigmarole that you go through to apply, and they saw a very rough cut - almost four hours - and they suggested it go into the Director's Fortnight. And that was fine with me, but Tony said, "No, I think we should go for something else". I hadn't even thought of going into this. So he pushed for something else and they came back with it and I said, "No, I much prefer to be in the Director's Fortnight." Tony said, "No..." In time we got it into the main competition. So there I was - I think it was with Godard, Kurosawa, people like that.

Much was made of the reaction at Cannes at the time. Was it as bad as the newspapers reported?

Well, it was bad for me because I was on the end of it. Some critic in Australia wrote, "Bliss bombs at Cannes". I'll always remember that. I was there and I saw and it was just the opposite. But everybody I knew was either happy or sorry for it. But the shocking thing was that it was the second film for this to happen. The first film was 1959 where L'Avventura, which Antonioni did, emptied the cinema in the first 10 minutes, and I only half emptied the cinema in the first 10 minutes! Actually, we were sitting there with the dignitaries and people starting getting up. I just thought the place was on fire or something. Then I realised what was happening. I don't know what it was; it was just a very strange film. I actually tried to drag some people back in!

Then, the next day they had the big press conference and I figured, well, all I've done is made a film. But they had gotten so worked up about it that I felt a bit like a criminal. One section of the press was really hositle, the other section was sort of favourable - it always split people.

The AFI Awards turned it around in Australia, at least.

Yes, that was great. I mean, if I had in fact won an Oscar, it wouldn't be as good as getting the AFI, because I didn't ever expect anything. During the making of it, it was difficult because I hadn't made a film before and, in a lot of circumstances, I just said okay. A lot of the people I was working with had made a film before, and I gave it over to their expertise. But I found that things weren't quite working out as I was wanting them to. So I sort of backtracked and there was a bit of resentment. Thinking back, half the people seemed to be on my side and the other half... it was always a battle with the film. But I always remember how it was Colorfilm that developed it, and the projectionists would try and get their shifts so they could watch the next day's rushes of the film. I always thought that was a pretty good sign.

It's a very complex film, adapting the novel, visualising ideas, visualising the satire and drawing on a whole range of cinematic styles.

Yes, people say it's complicated, but there's two sections. The section that most people remember, which is the visual side of it, and this visual side was always inspired by the words. The famous sardine scene or the cockroach scene: in the novel and I think also in the film, Harry says to Bettina - she's just been having an affair with Joel and she visits him in hospital - and he says, "Phew, you smell," and she's immediately guilty. So, really, the sardines are nothing more than a visual metaphor for it, and that's in the book. The sardines aren't, but the smell of sardines is. So all I did was to literally translate it. Then the same thing with the cockroach. They're visually more shocking than they are literally.

What of the famous near-death scene?

Well, again that's in the book, but I remember before we started shooting, I think even before I finished the screenplay, I did a little scribble. I was watching a crane one day and I figured that I could do it from that. In fact it's not in the film because it just took up too much time, but we actually went from a close-up of his cigarette burning his skin right up to heaven, so it worked.

It worked at the end as well, his real death.

That was just a big crane, an arm. But that was more of an emotional ending and that's why I say the film is in two sections. There's a very surrealistic opening half and, then, once Harry goes to the bush, everything becomes normal. Just in terms of my progress, I'm more interested in the last half of the movie now, but then I was really into the other half - and I think a lot of people still think that I'm very visual or something. In fact, short of an idea, the most other exciting thing about making a film is the performances. I've always been swept away by a good performance.

Yes, the story about Titch goes for almost 5 minutes, just a close-up of Barry Otto telling the story.

It's a combination of great performance and a great piece of writing. So for a director, if you've got those two things, all you've really got to do is make sure you don't fuck it up by getting tricky about it.

The Australian themes? In the beginning Harry seems a decent bloke and an ordinary type, so that the invitation for the average Australian
audience is to identify with him.

That's why I think it was a bit of a shock for Australians at that point seeing themselves in the cinema. They were either trying to remake American films or do period pieces. And this thing came along and it was a contemporary piece which was an unusual way of looking at things. But the thing that's always interested me is the idea of holding up a mirror to an audience so they recognise themselves.

I think what happens is that the aspirational side of cinema takes over, our culture, advertising, the pressures that television puts on people - you're not blonde enough, you're not fit enough, you're not rich enough. When this creeps into the cinema, what happens is your bum hasn't left the seat when the lights go up and you've forgotten what you've just seen. But if you're watching something that you recognise, you become a lot more involved in it. It's not very commercial. In a sense it's a very commercial idea, but in trying to raise money for films, you go into those meetings and you talk about people recognising themselves, and you see a wall come up.

I'm a great fan of Ken Loach and always have been, so even though this seemingly is a million miles away from his films, it really isn't; I'm working on something else and it will be different but yet the same, because the truth is all I'm really interested in, trying to get the truth of an idea.

Going back to your mirror image, how distorted, in an ironic black sense, did you want it to be for Bliss? How much is realism and how much is satire?

I don't ever see it as a distortion. One of the best stories is the story of a family. All the great novels, they're all about families. So, when Harry's sick, lying there, and you have an image of his family standing at the end of the bed talking about him as if he can't hear, I mean, there's nothing distorted about that. In fact, a lot of people talk about the blacknesses in our lives, but when we see it from another point of view, we recognise it as being in our lives. But there's a distance because it's portrayed as somebody else's life. It becomes funny. If this was actually in our life, it would be dramatic and too close to home. And that's the wonderful thing about cinema - it just gives you a little bit of distance to be able to recognise yourself. I guess they call that satire, but I just see it as the truth.

What about the minor characters played by Paul Chubb or Kerry Walker?

I think that's one of the great things about Peter's writing. It does give those truths, and those characters, they're there. And if you look around, I'm sure you'll find one in your life. You might even be related to one of them.

So, in a sense, we could say that Harry Joy is an Australian Everyman.

If you look at what's happening in his life and at that certain point in their life when any thinking person wonders what it's all about and whether there's any point. The wonderful thing about the story is the idea of dying and coming back to life and find that you are living in Hell.

The religious themes are present, sometimes quite explicitly about God, heaven and hell. In the discussion with the Reverend Des,
Harry asks, "Do you believe that God wants to torment us?" There is also a deal of Christian iconography. To that extent Bliss seems to be very religious.

Well, it's religious only in the sense that from a film-maker's point of view, the visual side of religion is always fun. No matter what religion it is, there's always so much ceremony. And every religion always has particular icons which all carry the weight of belief, and that's always interesting. The notion of God is more interesting when you ask people to question it, as opposed to accepting it. I think that's a problem that the church has had for a long time. They're continually asking people to accept something when the rest of the world is questioning it. In the last hundred years things have changed so quickly, and the church has hung on to a superior notion and expected people not to question, as opposed to moving with the times. In a very small way that's really what the conversation of Harry and Des is about. It's just somebody who thinks he's living in Hell. Well, if there is a Hell, there has to be a Heaven, so then does God really want to torture us? They're all good questions.

The Reverend Des seems to be moving towards a liberal trending that doesn't want to have Hell and prefers to talk about the cricket.

No, it's more of a human representation. Again getting back to the truth, all those reverends out there have a human part of their life and their feelings are continually coming into conflict with their beliefs, and they push them aside and work on their faith.

I always liken it to the different views generations have, say towards the medical profession. My mother will go to a doctor and no matter what the doctor says, she will feel intimidated by his presence. The same with a bank manager. Now, that's all changed. You stop somebody in the street and ask them about their bank and you will be lucky to get out of the conversation under an hour, because nobody likes banks, and for good reason: the banks have still got that superior attitude. So all those parts of society are still locked into those attitudes. They still want respect, but people are questioning, because as they say, there's so much more freedom. I don't know whether it started in the '60s. Maybe it did.

It would seem to be very much so. Speaking of icons and that image of church, Manning Clark was an Australian icon and you have
him acting as a minister quoting the Gospel passage about how hard it is for the rich to enter heaven, easier to pass through the eye of a needle.

Yes, but the funny thing about that was that Peter and I went to a function and Manning was there, and I didn't know who he was. He gave a speech and I said, "Gee, he's an interesting-looking guy. He'd be good in the film." Peter knew him, so we met and I said, "Would you be interested in playing a small part?" And he said yes - he was a very charming man. Just before we were filming - we only did a couple of takes - he said, "I have an agreement with you - don't you tell me how to give a speech and I won't tell you how to direct," and I said, "That's fine." He was great and it was nice to have that little bit of history in the film.

In Harry's discussions with Alex about being good - the nature of sin and guilt and being good - Bliss moved to an ethical level. It is seen in
Harry's struggles about advertising and helping Bettina or not. But, finally, with Harry's move to the bush and nature, there was almost a
kind of pantheistic faith at the end.

I don't know whether you've noticed it, but the word "seachange" has come into popular use lately. I think it's a bit like that. It happens to everybody, this set notion of being right in the middle of it all, which is the city, and then wanting to cleanse yourself, get out of it and go to the bush. I don't think it's particularly Australian, but it's easier to do here because we've got so much space. I work quite a bit in Europe and it is a beautiful place - we were shooting in the French countryside somewhere and it was so beautiful, French and summer. But I just felt that every bit of it had been walked on. There was no wilderness.

Next week I'm going up to Arnhem Land. I've been there before and I'm going up to look at some locations. But you get up there and you really do feel like a guest. So it's the idea of being in the city, being poisoned by it. At that particular point in a person's life, the city can symbolise all the bad things, so you really do want a cleansing atmosphere. I think it's easier to get it - or fool yourself that you're getting it - in this country more than any other!
Ultimately he surrendered and was one with the bush.

Yes, he just became part of nature. I really love the ending of the film, the last couple of scenes where his daughter says, "There's one more story to tell". And more so now because there's been 12 or 13 years now since the film was made, and I've changed too, so I'm more involved with the last part of the film now. In my future work, that's really the area that I want to work in. I like the other stuff but it's a bit flashy and it's not as lasting.

The audiences coming up will still find it very striking and younger audiences will find it stimulating.

I think that in the future films like Bliss will probably be re-released. It was done at a period that's gone. It wouldn't get made now. There's no way you could raise money for that. It's a hard one to sell.

Since then you've been working on commercials.

Yes, but I've been working with Robert Drewe on a number of things and with Jan Chapman. But with most of the things, they've just been difficult to talk people into. I don't know why that is. They all seem to be similar. At one point I tried for four years to get Tracks, the Robyn Davidson story, going. I came close, and it was with American money, ironically, but in the end they said, "Oh, look, I really don't know. I can't imagine who wants to see the story of a young woman finding herself in the desert." And I said, "Well, at least half the population." You come up against those commercial barriers that are difficult, and so with a film like Bliss, I look at it and wonder whether somebody could raise the money on it now.

The problem is that you go into those meetings and you really are creating such an expectation for a film, because they're so expensive to make, that you're actually lying to liars just to get the money. So the better you tell lies, the better chance you've got of getting money. But when you start talking about people recognising themselves, it's not that sort of meeting. That's an intellectual thing, and after the event it's a nice thing to discuss. Even in advertising, they do it. I try to get people to recognise themselves and that doesn't go over too well in some meetings. But after the event they appreciate it!


Interview: 30th October 1998

BAZ LUHRMAN






How did you make Romeo and Juliet, especially with the backing of a major Hollywood studio?

It was an incredibly difficult film to get made. After Strictly Ballroom we were offered all kinds of possibilities. We spent a long time not being involved in making a film. We went and did other things: operas, the 1993 Australian Labor Party election launch, a Vogue magazine layout and other things. Our philosophy has always been that we think up what we need in our life, choose something creative that will make that life fulfilling, and then follow that road. With Romeo and Juliet what I wanted to do was to look at the way in which Shakespeare might make a movie of one of his plays if he was a director. How would he make it?

We don't know a lot about Shakespeare, but we do know he would make a `movie' movie. He was a player. We know about the Elizabethan stage and that he was playing for 3000 drunken punters, from the street sweeper to the Queen of England - and his competition was bear-baiting and prostitution. So he was a relentless entertainer and a user of incredible devices and theatrical tricks to ultimately create something of meaning and convey a story.

That was what we wanted to do. We were interested in that experience. It wasn't that Fox rang up. There's this kind of story in America: `How clever. What genius at the studio rang you up and said, `Do a funky MTV-style Shakespeare and wipe the floor with all the other pictures, go to number 1 and get the kids in'?' That was not the case.

Basically it was no, no, no, but because I had made a film about ballroom dancing and it grossed $80,000,000, I was in a first-look deal, and I said, `Look, don't say yes. Give me a few thousand dollars'. I rang up Leonardo di Caprio, whom I consider to be an incredibly important part of actually getting the film made, and he agreed to fly to Sydney himself, pay his own money. I mean, this was a kid who's been offered the incomes of small countries! We did an initial workshop, did more script work. He flew down again and with local actors we created this workshop; and when they saw him (in the fight scene) get out of the car in a suit and come up and say,
Tybalt, the reason that I have to love thee
doth much excuse the appertaining rage
to such a greeting. Villain am I none;
therefore farewell; I see thou knowest me not,

they went, `Oh, yeah, I get it. They're kind of like gangs. Yeah, that could work. Gangs, that's good, that's good'.

So then the executives said, `All right, we'll give him enough money to get to production'. So it was sort of a war of attrition and, eventually, I got to a point where they said, `Look, just give him a cheque' and, you know, `See ya'!

Then we had the problems of making it. It was an enormously difficult shoot: storms, sickness and kidnappings.

In Mexico?

Pre-production was all here in Australia and all the development. Then we pre-produced in Canada. And then we shot in Mexico. We did most post-production in Australia, that is, we did all the sound here in Melbourne at Soundfilm, all the optical effects here at Complete Post. So, it's technically a Canadian-Australian? co-production distributed by 20th Century-Fox?. But, in reality, it's my team. At a certain point I was flying 16 Australians, DOP, producer, editor, costume designer, production designer, music guys, assistants, choreographer, special effects, sound, et cetera to North America.

So to answer the question: it was very hard to convince them. Once I had convinced them, they were fantastic but kind of like, `Look, you know, he does these weird things, they seem to work. This one won't, of course. But let's let him make this and when it turkeys, he'll be ready to do Jingle All The Way. He'll be begging us to let him do Arnie's next picture'!

Hollywood! People have many wrong ideas about Hollywood: firstly, it's much worse than The Player, much more bizarre. In fact it's a community in the desert, made up of people from all over the world, the best people from all over the world.
Now, what normally happens with the internationals - and most players in Hollywood are internationals - is that they are hired with their producer and they pick up American teams. One of my non-negotiables is that I work with my team - we work together, we are a team, we are an environment. Since the success of Romeo and Juliet, I now have an unprecedented deal where working with my team is actually ensconced in the deal.

Do they reject us - no, they don't. I mean, half of the best people in Hollywood are Australians! I think a huge percentage of the DPs are Australians.

The preparation?

I wanted to do Shakespeare makes a film, Romeo and Juliet. The first thing to identify was a way of conveying the notions of the piece and release the language. A device would be to set it in a particular world. You couldn't set it in the real world because it would then become a social exploration of Miami or LA or Sydney, whatever. So we decided to create a world. That world was created from meticulous research of the Elizabethan world. For example, a social reality for the Elizabethan world was that everyone carried a weapon. Then we found a way of interpreting that in the 20th century. There were schools of swordfighting; they became schools of gunfighting. Only gentlemen would carry weapons, not the poor. Suddenly you had a place that looked a bit like South America, but it also looked like Miami. We picked the dominant culture. Whatever you say, the dominant culture in the western world is American, especially through the media.
So we created a world - it's American, Latin, it looks a bit like South America, it feels a bit like Mexico, it feels somewhat like Miami but, ultimately, it's Verona Beach, which is ultimately a universal city. Now, that is not so out of keeping with what Shakespeare did. He never went to Verona. He created his mythical city. But really it was London - dressed up as a hot version of London. So that was that part of the process.

Then we spent a lot of time researching the Elizabethan stage and then we put that into cinematic ideas. We went to Miami because we chose Miami as a really good place that identified or condensed American or contemporary western images. It is both culturally mixed and also a very violent city, almost an armed society.

Then, out of that research we wrote the screenplay. We came back and did a series of workshops with actors in Sydney. Then I got Don McAlpine? in who, for free, got a video camera and, for a week, we shot scenes with Leonardo, the fight scene, the death scene.

We are noted for doing a ludicrous amount of preparation. And we are noted for ridiculous kind of research, but this is what we like to do - the act of making must make your life rich. It's got to be interesting and fulfilling and educational and take you on a journey. They're the choices we make.

The only sacrifice you have to make is fiscally. To have been very, very wealthy would have been easy after Strictly Ballroom. I'm not poor, but the kind of wealth that I know others have is not ours because we choose to do the Bard in a funky manner. That's more interesting than doing Jingle All The Way! But, also, we're not for hire; we never have been. Freedom is worth something.

So it's not just a relocation of Romeo and Juliet to a different city and it's not even an updating, bringing it into the 20th century?

I think what we are doing is William Shakespeare's play of Romeo and Juliet and interpreting it in 20th century images to release the language and to find a style for communicating it to a contemporary audience. Now, you might say, `Well, that's a bit of a mouthful', and it is. I got a card from Kenny Brannagh saying, `Look, love the film and what a great thing for our Hamlet, because it's opening up an audience too'. I love the Laurence Olivier productions and I think Kenneth Branagh is fantastic.

In fact, some critics have left the film and said, `The accent is completely wrong. How dare you do it that way. It's embarrassing'. The truth of the matter is that Shakespeare wrote these plays for an American accent. Americans speak a version of Elizabethan sound. With a rolled R in there, you would basically have the Elizabethan stage sound. I worked with Sir Peter Hall on this. He does the accent. He came to Canada and did it for me. Now, it doesn't mean we should do all Shakespeare in the Elizabethan sound. But round-vowelled English pronunciation is a fashion. It was just the right way or the right fashion or the right device for a particular time to tell or reveal the play for that time.

To have Leonardo di Caprio asking, `Is she a Capulet? in a southern Californian accent is not too far from the Elizabethan stage sound; it is just another way of revealing the language. So it's not wrong. It's not the only way, but it's not wrong. I had a great triumph when two Californian academics, after a kind of Mr Ex-English? teacher/`I've become a local critic of the Boulder Daily News' declared the film was an outrage, stood up and said, `Well, in fact, Mr Luhrman is correct about this'. A professor from the University of California said it's been in the New York Times in the critics' notes and an editorial - it makes for ticket sales really. And who cares?

I mean, the truth is this: the one thing we know is we don't know much about Shakespeare, but he was sure as hell focused on box office and he is not displeased that he's packing the houses. I know! William Shakespeare was an actor in a company that was competing with another. All they cared about was packing the house. Who is worried that we put rock music in? Oh, here's the news - he put popular songs of the time in his shows because it was a good way of telling a story!

In terms of liberating the language, the cast had a strong sense of the rhythm, the poetry. Dustin Hoffman did Shylock in The Merchant of
Venice on Broadway but he lacked a sense of the verse rhythms.

Do you know what I think that is? Dustin Hoffman is a fantastic actor, but what you get there is a brand of American actor that has this reverential attitude towards the English Shakespearian style, so you get a mid-Atlantic feel. Americans don't use their natural sound. They adjust their sound, and they try to take on a kind of subtle interpretation of what an English actor would do with the language. Leonardo and Clare, in their innocence, brought the language to themselves. Iambic pentameter is a natural rhythm for speaking and thoughts beat roughly in that iambic way. And they were able to find rhythm without it becoming a signpost.

There are different styles that the other actors use because they're such different characters. We've got clowning characters, the parental world, which is like a bizarre acid trip. Then you've got Father Laurence, who is midway. But the kids are really human and natural, so they're the most natural.

It's not right, it's not wrong. It's wonderful to hear Laurence Olivier say, `Now, is the winter of our discontent'. And it's fantastic to hear Kenny Branagh chomp it a bit more like Midlands sound. It's also great to hear Leonardo di Caprio in those soft Californian sounds say, `Tybalt, the reason I have to love you'.

The visual style helped liberate the language and break down the barriers?

It actually isn't visual style. Even on the Elizabethan stage they wore their day clothes. When it came to doing the balcony scene, they would find a usual device to free and clarify story and language.

It is true we are intensely visual, and that intense visual language has to be freeing, not oppressing. We make pictures. Cinema is like opera, strangely. That's why cinema directors do a lot of opera and vice-versa, but not necessarily plays. They are the synthesis of the visual, the plastic, the written, the acted, the audible, the audio arts, synthesising all those things into one singular statement. There is no rule. If someone says there's only one way to do it, that's the way, I've got the book', you know they're talking crap because stories do not change. But the way you tell them has to be a product of the times. I'd call my book about my work, `The Way I Tell It', but in the telling, the visual representation is a good 50% of that.

On the visuals, you have a great number of Catholic statues and images.

We shot in Mexico and Mexico is very, very, very Catholic with Catholic iconography everywhere. The giant statue in the middle of the city, that is Mexico City, with Jesus' statue put in the middle of the city. That's an electronic addition. All the iconography was about the fact of the plot point that when you marry, it is in the eyes of God. Families can't pull the couple apart. So the slightly-on-the-edge priest says, `but actually, if you do get married, the families can't do anything about it; so it's a way of forcing them to stop running around killing each other'. It's a key plot point in the play. It's very weak dramatically. So you have to have the audience believe that no-one questions religion, no-one questions the existence of God or the power of Jesus Christ. So when Juliet says, `No, if thy love be honourable, thy purpose marriage', Romeo could not say, `Look, you don't have to get married to have sex'. There's no argument about the fact that they existed in a religious context in terms of their thinking and beliefs. So it turned out like an Italian/Mexican/South American location. I mean, when you're in Mexico, religion is absolutely wrapped up with politics.

This Mediterranean, Hispanic piety is strong, as in the shrine in Juliet's room with so many statues of Mary, so many candles. Even the seedy
apothecary has holy cards on his counter.

There's a lot there and they're on the weapons as well. Now, some can say that's sacrilegious. No-one has, actually - it's been a bit of a surprise - but the truth is that's an interpretation of religion in our societies. You can have an armed society like Bosnia, where everyone's running around claiming they uphold Christian notions, or Mexico where it's all very Catholic and yet you go into a restaurant and people are holding guns.

In the Elizabethan times a lot of that iconography was put upon weapons of war - and I always think that's a very disturbing notion. So it's not a judgment or an analysis of any kind of religion; it's about saying that everyone has to have a belief in a certain set of rules.

And the cross on Father Laurence's back?

Well, Father Laurence is very important but, actually, in the play Laurence is a bit of an idiot. You remember that the Elizabethan world was slashing away at Catholicism. The good news is just because he's a priest he's not God, he's a human being. I think Father Laurence is a great character and a good person, but he's had sin himself to deal with. He's had a struggle with the human condition himself. He's not perfect.

Our scenario was that he went off to Vietnam and he was into drugs. He was tussling with his own personal dilemmas. Maybe he had a wife and a child or whatever, but he went back to the church and really he is a good person. He really wants good to be done and really believes in the ideas of Christ and God. But he's not this guy in a white caftan who says, `I have a wonderful idea. Let's marry and all will be hunky-dory'. So I was showing him to be a complex man - you know, he's a drinker. I quite like the idea - it's an old-fashioned idea - that Spencer Tracy always played priests but secretly he was a drunk, which doesn't say he's bad. I think priests that are flawed are at least more human. If you reveal it, you're therefore truthful. You're saying, `I'm a human being. I'm not a deity'. I have a slight problem with the deity version of priesthood, as I'm sure certain churches do.

Your sets? Do you ever think, `This is just too much? This is overwhelming?'

Do you mean too much in terms of its effectiveness in the storytelling or just incredibly decadent?

No, just in sheer extravagance.

Let me give you an extravagance. That pool: that entire outdoor pool is a set, interior built. It was made from concrete and it was filled with water. The day we walked off the set, in a frenzy to go up to Verona Beach, they had drained it the day before and now there were guys with jackhammers just tearing it to pieces. It was a million-dollar pool. It's a weird little world, film-making, and you do weird little things. One of the things I hate is waste, and I was not able to avoid the kind of waste I would like to avoid. Everything you see on that beach is built. There's not a palm tree or a telegraph pole on that beach that wasn't put there by us. It was a desert.

The illusion of film is fascinating and difficult but tricky. We were able to do things in Mexico that you can't do anywhere else in the world. We had this one chopper, that big white one, but it seems like a flotilla of choppers. You can tell the electronic ones, we're not trying to hide that too much. The military guy in the chopper in silhouette early on, sitting, pointing with a gun - that's me. And Don Mc Alpine, we're just in a Bell chopper, the camera chopper, and he's there with the camera, hand-holding, and I'm just strapped in. And we've got all these stunt guys dressed up and flying through Mexico City - I mean, in the middle of Mexico City - and they were hanging out of the chopper. I'm just pointing out the kind of bizarreness in what needs to happen to get a scene is always extraordinary.

I'll give you an example of the surrealness of it: flying, looking for Mantua. We're flying over the desert. We're up in a chopper. We see tiny little sheds. So we fly down, we land, and the wind blows everything. The villagers live in cardboard boxes. Our Mexican interpreter says, `Look, we want to make a film... and we're going to build some things here, but we'll leave everything for you and we're going to pay you this money'. They're over the moon. So we came back. We built the entire Mantua, everything you see in Mantua, all those shacks, the cars, everything, like a town. And they bring all their cars and they're all employed and they're all great. Then we shoot and we're always desperately behind. So all the trucks leave the next morning. We get the final shot. We leave and, as we're leaving, they're all waving. And there's a town left behind where their little shacks were, and it's their little town now. I mean, there is a surrealness about that. There's a big sign now that says Mantua.

Talking of names - why William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet?

Things are marketed very intensely in the US. Because it was modern images and because it was Romeo and Juliet, of which there are many Romeo and Juliets - even Shakespeare stole the story from other sources - with the way their minds work, it would be, `Let's just flog it as a kind of funky-looking movie called Romeo and Juliet and not mention Shakespeare'. So by forcing them to put William Shakespeare in there, no matter what they did to it, there was no question that it was the play.

Not only is it the text, but the Zefirelli version, which everyone thinks is the Elizabethan show, actually has additional dialogue and does actually change the text. From, `Do with their death bury their parents' strife', not, `Doth with their death...' I'm not criticising that, because I think it's a gorgeous production of 1968. But we are textually more accurate. We have cut about a third - under a half, which is probably normal. Zeffirelli cut half the text.

Actors love Shakespeare because it's like giving them a sports car. They have a lot to say, and actors like to talk, God knows. It was a meticulous rehearsal process, but they dug it. There's no actor on that show that's not happy. Brian Dennehy had three lines. He's a terrific stage actor. I just asked him. I said, `Look, I really need someone who could really believe he's Leonardo's father and someone with real credibility and who has good craft'.

You bring Shakespeare to the people. Was that a surprise that it's done so well and seems to have introduced many Americans, at least, to Shakespeare?

Being number 1 was a surprise to everyone. Being number 1 in America is like saying, `I don't care what it is; I want it', to the industry. It killed Sleepers. That was a $70,000,000 film with Robert de Niro, Brad Pitt and Dustin Hoffman. In a town where, `What do you mean, Shakespeare's number 1? How come you didn't tell me about it?', it means a lot. But yes, I wanted to take it back to where it began, and that was for everybody. It was for everybody.

With such box office you'd almost be subject to a deity principle now, wouldn't you?

More the alchemy principle, I think. What we've done in our two sorties is that we've turned lead to gold. To understand means gold so, therefore, we must understand something about the audience that they don't. Frankly, no-one knows anything, and those that do what we do are only paid because they have a better instinct than others. They don't know. I don't really know. I know what I'd like to see out there, and we have the audacity and the guts and, I suppose, the sort of energy to sustain the fight to get it done.

So what has that left me with? Well, I was certainly offered higher cash deals, much more wealthy deals, by other studios, but with Fox, they embraced the notion that I wanted to work from Australia and that I work with a large team in an idiosyncratic way in which we work. The truth is it's not just about film. I don't think we're film-makers or directors or whatever. We tell stories. So what we have purchased or won is the ability to think something up and do it.


Post-script: a report in the Melbourne Herald- Sun for 1 January 1997 said that for the four days after Christmas, Romeo and Juliet topped the box-office with $A 2,277,014 while Daylight took $A 2,235,000. Baz Luhrmann is quoted: We feel very proud that an idea launched in Australia has been embraced so wholeheartedly and I know Shakespeare will be happy to hear that he outgrossed Sylvester Stallone.


Interview: 19th December 1996

BRIAN McKENZIE


Do you see yourself more as a documentarist or as a feature film-maker - or as both?

I've always worked in parallel. I see myself as a film-maker - I've been a film-maker since I was a teenager. While I was at college I developed very solidly as a still photographer. That's when I became fairly focused and committed to documentary work. My still photography tended to gravitate towards situations where people were gathered in groups or where there were social functions, some sort of ceremony, or portraits of people at a particular location. I did a series called `Fitzroy Portraits', portraits of people I found in the street in Fitzroy. So that's where my documentary work sprang from.

Prior to that I had made two short drama films which I had written. They were, I suppose, quasi-experimental. Then I became pretty committed to still photography, which developed in a documentary vein, so then I returned to film-making via documentary.

There's something distinctive about your films which make them quite unlike others. Perhaps it's the photography. But it seems to be the combination of the people you're interested in and the social environment from which they come. The films are portraits, glimpses of life.

Yes. I feel I have over the years evolved a pattern of working and a way of doing things that I don't think I share with too many other people. I take the time. I think I've got faith in the people that I'm making films about, even though at various points during the production I sometimes scratch my head and wonder what it is that I'm actually trying to get at. But I don't tend to go in with a script and a very solid, premeditated plan about what the issues are. Well, actually, you do have to go in with a script because the only way you will get finance these days is with a fairly solid written document.

Pat and Eddy's Greyhound Racing Family is reminiscent of your other films, your other portraits. You seem to take the time to stay with your characters.

Sometimes, as in the case of Pat and Eddy, I had a document which talked about all the things that they do. And, of course, you realise soon enough that you're probably barking up the wrong tree and the film's really about something else and that the people's lives that you've described on paper for various administrators and executives isn't being reflected in your material. So, you sort of scratch your head and work out it for yourself, `What is coming out of this? What are the patterns? What can I catch hold of and focus on', because you can't just shoot film willy-nilly. You have to start identifying particular patterns and threads that build, almost, a narrative and, at least, a thematic continuum. That's a very interesting sort of process. It does take a lot of thinking and scratching and there are a lot of wrong moves.

What drew you to Pat and Eddy in the first place?

Well, most people I simply come across, somehow, in my life. I don't usually set out to say - in this case - I'll make a film about greyhounds. Pat and Eddy operate as cleaners. This is not shown in the film, although I did film a couple of sequences of them cleaning but subsequently got rid of them. They didn't really add anything to the portrait. They were cleaning an apartment of a friend of mine - in fact, the producer of Stan and George's New Life, Margot McDonald?. She has a snazzy apartment in Carlton - you know what young professionals are like, they work all day and all night and they get people in to cook their meals and clean their apartment. Anyway, that's what Pat and Eddy do. They clean for quite a few people in the film world - Bob Weiss and a few other people like that.

Anyway, because I was with Margot during the production, she was always telling me about her cleaners, Pat and Eddy this and Pat and Eddy that, and, `Oh, now they've discovered greyhounds and that's all I ever hear about, how this dog's going to win this weekend and how it nearly didn't', and, `Oh, they're doing New Age medicine on the greyhounds now - their whole life has been revitalised through greyhounds'. I would hear this on and off for, I don't know, maybe over a year. Then I met Pat because she came to a screening Stan and George. One thing led to another and I thought it might make a nice documentary film.

So, at that stage you had to prepare the written document for funding?

Yes. So then I do what you do: I go out there with a little tape-recorder and just record discussions, get a bit of background and write up a document. It's a sort of a pseudo- script.

How long did you spend with them? At one stage of the film a race takes place in Albury, November '93, then there's another in July '94. So you must have been with them for quite a while.

I knew them for a couple of years, really, before I got the finance for the film. It was a long time before anyone said, `Yes, you can make the film'. The Film Commission said, `that's it, we're not going to make any more films with you. Forget it'. So I languished for a few years and I made an ABC documentary A Place to Belong, which was the only film I've made that wasn't generated by myself. Film Victoria, the ABC and Film Australia had put their heads together and decided they were going to make a documentary about urban sprawl. They started off but things didn't go so well. They spent quite a bit of money researching and scripting. Then the ABC made their own documentary about urban sprawl and decided that this one was barking up the wrong tree, `Why don't we make it more about people' - because I had made a couple of films for them before. So I went and made A Place to Belong, and that got me started again.

It went very well on the ABC and subsequently they said, `All right, you can make this one about greyhounds'. But up until then I had had it sitting there for two years; and I was very worried about what I was going to do with my life because no-one would even answer my phone calls. Eventually the ABC said, `Well, if you really want to make a film about greyhounds, go ahead'.

It is interesting to try to work out whether the family were told not to acknowledge that you were there and just to be themselves or whether they were conscious of your presence. Were they improvising? At the end, when you pose them in the photograph, they acknowledge that you're there.

I knew them for two years and probably filmed over about a nine-month period altogether so, by the time I started to film, they were very used to my being there in the kitchen, chatting away. So we knew one another reasonably well. I suppose you condition people to getting used to the idea that when and if you start filming, it will be just like this and it will just be me.

Instead of a tape recorder and a still camera, I will have a camera on my shoulder and a couple of other people there. I usually use only three - myself, a camera assistant and a sound recordist. I nearly always use the same people and they work very well in people's own homes and environments. They're not intrusive and they're very friendly, humble sort of people. So, although the situation increases by an extra couple of people, we seem to manage to fit in without disturbing things too much.

Whenever you make a documentary there's always an element of adjustment but people get used to you - well, me anyway, that's the way I work. There's a degree of `presentation' in my documentaries as well because people are aware of the film. They don't want to sit there having an enormous ding-dong blue in front of you, swear and throw furniture about. But, nevertheless, if you're patient and pick your moment, soon enough, things are revealed. That's what happens, I think, in this documentary.

The hard work is in the editing?

Yes. I might say that Pat and Eddy are particularly generous people, and Eddy, in particular, seemed to be relaxed and was the same from the first moment to the last. I don't know whether it was all my own doing in conditioning him well or whether it was just in his character, but he was very generous to do what he did and very much at ease with the situation.

It seems the same with Pat, particularly when she describes the death of the boy. It is very moving. Perhaps it was the way that the sequence was finally positioned in the film. But she spoke with powerful feeling. She must have had great trust in you.

That's quite a story really. I was at a point in the making of the film where I was floundering a bit. I had shot more than half my footage and I was worrying, that there was something that I felt that I didn't know. Subsequently I went back over my research tapes. Pat had told me - not the whole story - but she had told me at some stage that they had had a child and that he had died. But I hadn't remembered it, or I hadn't listened properly to that tape - something else was on my mind or in the flurry of activity I hadn't stored it away in my memory bank.

I went out on this particular day, thinking that I was going to have a talk with her. I just took my still camera and I recorded it. I was really worried that the film wasn't adding up to anything and there was something that I wasn't party to. Anyway, we were chatting away in the backyard as normal and I was taking photographs and recording. The talk was always about families - if I could manage to get them off the dogs - always about the families and their relationships with the various children and what they're doing and what they're not, or about each other. And then, as a passing reference, Mark was mentioned.

It was just what I was looking for. I suppose it sounds a bit mercenary, but it was a sort of clue, the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle and my ears pricked up. Eddy was standing right next to me and he obviously found it quite uncomfortable for Pat to come out with it just like that and talk about it. He reeled back a bit. But she was very keen, very happy to talk about it. As she says, it's part of her life, but all the family mention how Eddy has never been able to talk about it.

By the end of the film we had a very vivid picture of the family, the way they talked about how they related to their children and the way the children said they didn't relate, especially to their father. You finished up with a detailed portrait of an ordinary Australian family - as well as the aura of the greyhounds.

What was cut for the ABC TV shorter presentation? Sections, or did you trim the whole film?

A bit of everything really - the film was sort of concertinaed. There were some sections: the first races at Albury are cut right down to only a very small portion of what there is there in the longer film. The whole opening section is gone, where Eddie talks to the camera, where you see the walking machine for the first time. That's all gone. A bit later, when Pat and Eddie are in the shed talking about the various muscles and manipulations and Pat introduces the dogs, that section has gone. Quite a bit of business in the kitchen has gone.

Also one or two of the fixing the car sections. Remember the shot panning around. It starts off with a door leaning up against a tree and it pans around all the bits of cars and engines and tools and eventually you get around to what was a motor car, and Eddie and Bradley have both got their heads down working - that section has gone.

It had to be done for TV programming time?

Yes, it did have to be done. But I tried very hard to present the case to the ABC that they should show the longer film. It's difficult because you can't actually show them a finished film.

During the screening there was a lot of laughter. Were people laughing with Pat and Eddy or at them? Have you been at screenings where people have laughed?

Yes, non-stop, yes. I think the audience is laughing at them. I think it's a bit of both. I think that's the nature of the beast. Life is funny. If you had the chance to videotape your day and look back at it at the end of the day, you would be sitting there howling at all the stupid things you did or said or - not even stupid things , but strange quirks.

That's what is valuable about the documentaries, they reveal some basic essences of life unfolding.

On the Waves of the Adriatic - was the experience of making that film more difficult, given your cast? Or were they less self-conscious?

No, it was not difficult at all, really. The three chaps, Graeme and Harold and Steve - their relationship with me was one of dedication from the moment they got used to the idea that I was going to come back more than once. I was a friend and someone they could rely upon, someone from the outside world that they could rely on to be there on a regular basis and they loved it. And, to a degree, it gave them that bit of a sense of importance and a role, a continuing role, for a few years.

Harold in particular, I think, really improved for a while. We were painting the house and doing various things and he was really able to articulate and stand up for himself if he was being picked on by the others. He really identified with the process of making the film. So in terms of my relationship with them and their commitment to it, that was never a problem.

For the first section of the film it was a bit dicky between Steve, Graeme's father, and me. Obviously he was a bit suspicious about the film and my motives - well, I suppose who wouldn't be? Whereas the three chaps, they didn't have a suspicious bone in their body, completely trusting. Steve came round after a while. I used to play chess with him. I also negotiated at one stage that I would only film inside the house if I helped to clean it up, because it was pretty bad. So we painted Graeme's room and painted the kitchen, quite a bit of work. There's a little sequence in there of us working - a still sequence, taking photographs.

Whom do you see as the audience for your films? Do you have an audience in mind? An art-house audience? or an ABC TV audience?

I've never really thought in terms of an audience at all. Where the films are shown and seen is really up to the people that have the control, distribution and exhibition. At various times I have had small cinema releases for feature documentaries. At other various times I seem to have had a good rapport with the ABC and they have been committed to giving me pre-sales and showing the documentary. Other times I have had no commitment from anyone, so they don't get screened. It doesn't mean that they have no audience, it doesn't mean that they're less interesting or less powerful or less worthy films to be communicated ... It just means that no-one cares about them, no-one who broadcasts or distributes or exhibits cares about them or wants to show them.

But overseas - you have said you can actually get a subtitled copy of On the Waves of the Adriatic in Paris.

Well, On the Waves of the Adriatic is a case in point. It's a longer film, 120 minutes, and by the time I finished it, there was less and less commitment on the part of the funding bodies and the people who were running the non-profit exhibition places like the Melbourne State Film Centre or, in Sydney the Opera House. There were exhibitors in various places around the country who, if it was a good documentary, would commit, maybe, to a two or three week season which be underwritten by the Film Commission, something like that.

People realised it wasn't going to be commercially successful - films at those places generally aren't and documentaries in a cinema aren't - but that it would get a good solid audience and it might break even if it was lucky. And it would have an airing, it would be a national release.

That's what happened with I'll Be Home For Christmas, which is really tougher, longer and technically a lot more flawed than On the Waves of the Adriatic. But by the time I finished On the Waves of the Adriatic, there was very little of that kind of exhibition going on - it was less keen. Of course, there's television, but they weren't ready at all to screen those sorts of films. They still aren't, actually. SBS will screen them if they're made overseas but they won't screen local films - they have never recognised that work here. It's real snobbery. In the case of On the Waves of the Adriatic, it's got a very strong multicultural theme running through it. SBS will often screen long, interesting and obviously, to a degree, what they term difficult documentaries that might come out of India or America, ethnographic and experimental films, but they have always turned their nose up at my films. At various times you get a bit bitter at that sort of thing.

Anyway, that film virtually didn't get screened here in Australia at all. I was so disappointed with the AFI's attitude towards the film - it didn't even get entered in the AFI awards. The AFI didn't even accept it into their documentary section so I decided that I wouldn't even let them have it, that I would distribute it myself locally - in non-theatrical venues - which is actually more hard work than anything else. You have to make videotapes and send them to libraries and ...

But it went to many festivals all around the world and it won the Grand Prix in Paris at Cinema de Reel, which is probably the major documentary festival in the world, certainly the major ethnographic festival and, subsequently, it was bought by the Pompidou Centre. They bought a subtitled print and bought the non-theatrical video rights. So they've got it. Their Biblioteque system has a French subtitled version available for all the libraries. You can go anywhere in France and punch into the computer and call it up. So it's well-known in France but it's not very well-known here.

With Love to the Person Next to Me - maybe it's Kym Gyngell and his acting style, the characters and life in St Kilda, all those people in the block of flats and Paul Chubb's screen presence, all the passengers and the conversation in the taxis - somehow or other the whole thing comes alive.

It was very much a low-budget feature fully funded by the Film Commission, $120,000 and we shot it on 16mm, in four weeks, I think, and it was pretty tough to make and we made lots of mistakes. It had a release at the Kino Cinema, Melbourne, for three weeks but it didn't make any money. It got mixed reviews. I've got mixed feelings about that film.

I think probably my biggest disappointment with it is that we never had any money to do a soundtrack properly. That particular film should live on the soundtrack. It's all about the sounds that you hear, the sounds that you replay, the various sounds that represent the different parties in the flats and how they impinge on the lead character's life. It never worked particularly well. We never really had the time or the resources to do it.

I have worked pretty much with the same group of people over the years. Ray Argall shot that film and ended up doing most of the editing. Ray was able to bring some real strength to that film and I think it scraped through with his collaboration.

It won the Ecumenical Prize at the Locarno Film Festival.

Yes, it did. I have actually won a few ecumenical prizes. I'm about the most irreligious person you would want to come across.

Is that how life has been or do you have a religious background?

I was christened into the Church of Christ. I don't know whether I was quite a teenager or a bit younger. My brother and I used to go to Sunday school and to church until I was 13, 14, something like that.

Stan and George's New Life. Stan's mother is religious. You have her listening to the religious radio program all the time?

Yes, but I think it's a very slight thing, though.

It comes through strongly as the audience focusses on her character, that's really what her life was, the radio evangelists and the hymn-singing.

I don't remember the evangelist. I only remember the hymns.

She talked evangelically .

Yes, she did. There was a degree of gibberish which came out of charismatic pentecostal speak, I think. I can barely remember. Have you seen a film that I made called Kelvin and His Friends? You should look at it. It's a portrait of a man. Kelvin went through a stage in his forties. He lived by himself in a boarding house run by a Jewish woman, an elderly German Jewish woman. It's about his life and his relationship with her, his obsessions about being in a sort of born again religion, about physical culture and the war. He was obsessed by these things, how they intersected or how he imagined they intersected. Any conspiracy theory you want to name, he would be able to babble on about it for hours.

Stan's mother is in the same vein?

The mother? That's probably where I got some of that from. I can barely remember but yes, she was a sort of strident single-dimensional sort of narrow-mind, religious, bigoted sort of a person, wasn't she? But I think it's very slight in terms of characterisation. In fact, in some ways they're easy shots. I think that's done in a lot in films, the religious maniac. I've seen it subsequently in quite a few films and regret having done it myself.

Do you see Stan and George as a good film?

Yes, but I don't think it's the greatest of stories. We tried very hard to make something out of it. I think it's a matter of having some sort of belief in your particular, not so much style, but presentation. It isn't so theatrical, and that runs through the performances, the editing style and the more classic sort of shots, style and the cast. So, in the end, if you can manage to imbue all the various parts with something that's fairly consistent, it can't be divided up or contaminated or corrupted. It's a complete thing. That's where I think that film has its worth. The script really lets the film down in the second half. It divides into two films, following a conspiracy thing. It doesn't really work. The focus on the odd couple in a workplace was working really well up until that point. Then the two elements fight each other for the rest of the film. Because of the delicate sort of storytelling and because it's slow, whatever action there is is really only in the climax. It doesn't particularly drive you along. It falls apart, I think, in the second half.

This is true of the conspiracy. The scenes in the office and Stand and George going out to lunch are very good scenes. John Bluthal as Stan's father and his scenes with Paul Chubb worked very well.

Yes. I think the actors were really carefully chosen and the concentration level on performance during the making of the film is something I can remember very well. I can't remember some of the characterisation - you point up Stan's mother - but I do remember working with all the actors to get a homogeneous style.

Whenever I'm listening to radio weather reports, I'm always reminded of Stan and his flat reading of his text and the bits of stilted conversation.

Yes, they have become personalites, haven't they, media personalities?

Comment on many films these days refers to `implicit' religion, which is basically values and humanity. If film-makers contribute to this kind of spiritual sense, it's by portraits of real people. This is a strength of your documentaries and feature films.

I think that's why they get ecumenical awards overseas. They're not looking for a film that is proposing a brand of religion or a belief or a faith. It's to do with a portrait of humanities, a humanitarian judgment. There's no ecumenical award in Australia, so I don't think it's appreciated or quite valued or at all comprehended here what ecumenical jury awards are, but in Europe they're certainly not based on religious beliefs.

You focus on people not well off, not affluent, who generally live in suburbs like Brunswick or Reservoir or St Kilda; you show us `battlers', a portrait-making of ordinary Australian battlers.

I think that's the case. I don't know whether I will live to regret that, whether I will say, `Well, I would have liked to...' I think that I have always had a bit of an ideological commitment - I don't know if I have now. Rich and famous and successful people are all you ever hear about and see and I'm not interested in them really.

The characters you choose are so dramatically or humanly interesting that they compel us to look in their direction.

Sometimes they're particularly idiosyncratic like Graeme and that little gang of three who rode their bikes, had various intellectual handicaps and couldn't read or write - they were out of the ordinary. But many are not. It's just that, by most scales, you would say they were very average and very ordinary.

And fairly decent human beings?

Yes, absolutely, but there's nothing particularly exotic or bizarre about them. I think my view is that I could, given a bit of freedom and the right amount of cash, make a documentary about anyone if they were a willing participant, and it would be just as interesting as the next one - it wouldn't really matter.


Interview: 18th September 1995

GEORGE MILLER



White Fellas' Dreaming was your overview of Australian cinema and its effect on Australian audiences. How did you begin to plan and structure it?

I think I started with the belief that, if you look at the mosaic of cinema, particularly over a long period of time, you'll see definite patterns of the cinema both reflecting and distilling a culture. The films that impacted in some way did so for a reason that was more subtle and potent than the obvious ones. Looking at that and, perhaps, at a simplistic view of aboriginal songlines, they brought their cutlure into being, creating myths and stories that ultimately also served as maps in the landscape, moral maps and cultural maps. I think our cinema does that as well. So, I just tried to test the thesis by looking at all the films and looking at films which in one way or another impinged on Australian culture or
world culture.

You mentioned that you had been alive during the second fifty years of cinema. The films that you discuss are the films of your life.

Yes, exactly. The thing that was surprising to me about the renaissance of Australian cinema - or that which people like to call the renaissance of Australian cinema, films made from the early 70s - was that everyone seemed to be obsessed with historical, period films and there was no attempt to make
contemporary films. That didn't seem to go anywhere. It wasn't until after the fact that I took a broader view that it was Australia, a newly adult Australia, after the election of the Whitlam government, really catching up with itself or post-60s Australia catching up with its history and reinterpeting its history through the only popular cultural medium as young as the country. Theatre, opera and literature pre-dated the founding of Australia.

It was necessary in those years to look at issues of Australian identity. And it still is.

There were always academics and intelligentsia who tended to do it, did it wonderfully well and embraced it. But I think cinema did it and popularised it much more than Henry Lawson or Arthur Streeton.

The chapter headings of White Fellas' Dreaming indicate some of the principal cinema 'song-lines'.

By looking, not at individual films but at the cumulative effect of several films that impinged on basic, essential themes that Australia had to deal with, it seemed to follow the history pretty well. It was a map of the evolving Australian character which was pretty clearly defined through film. Most historians or social historians would no doubt pick up the connection between the convict, the bushranger and the digger and, in between, the larrikin, 'the working-class larrikins' who went off to war and became the diggers. That was probably the most quintessentially Australian experience between the two world wars, the last time that that kind of old Australian was really seen.

You remarked that Gallipoli was the 'apotheosis of the digger'.

For me and for a lot of people it was. Gallipoli is a very interesting film for me. I was growing up in the 60s and Gallipoli was treated as a kind of joke. There was the play, The One Day of the Year, which was the only time when that generational dispute was dealt with. But, since Peter Weir's film, something was recognised and it did create some kind of catharsis. It retrieved the Australian digger for Australian culture. He somehow became acceptable again. There is something particularly Australian once again about a war where men die heroically but somewhat foolishly, heroically but innocently. They did not glorify warmongering but glorified sacrifice.

Catharsis. You have used the word in the context of 'coming to terms with our shadow past'. Do you see that in other films, including your own?

I don't think enough Australian cinema has done this and Australians don't like to see confronting cinema. There is a hankering for a more child-like view of the world. Australia is never going to be a grown-up country until it can deal with its indigenous history in a mature way. We have
a conservative government who talk about the black armband view of Australian history - and those of us who disagree call it the black blindfold view of Australian history. When others refer to the 'Stolen Generation', the government refers to it as the 'Rescued Generation'.

But black armbands are a strong symbolic reminder to people to mourn.

Exactly. It's clear that somethat has been greatly lost. It's not unique to Australia and has happened in all the continents, not the least of which is in the Americas as well as in New Zealand, our close neighbour. But, in all those cases, they have been able to confront the past, try to atone for it simply by recognising it. But, in Australian we haven't. I see New Zealand as a much healthier country for having gone through the cathartic experience of popularly celebrating Once Were Warriors (which was one of the highest-grossing films in that country).

We, when we make films like that, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Dead Heart, Blackfellas, unfortunately, not many people go to see them. It's not that difficult a thing to do and , once it's done, we heal. I love that notion 'you're only as sick as your secrets'. So long as you try to hide it, disavow it or pretend it's not our responsibility, then you are going to remain a bit sick. I think cinema is one of the means by which that can be properly celebrated. There can be a great Australian film about it, I can feel it in the air, there are so many great projects around the theme of genocide. Somebody is going to end up making the great Australian film about it.

You made the point that until we face this issue we will remain 'morally and spiritually diminished'.

I'm quite convinced that's the case. One of the things that cinema does by stealth quite often is deal with these things. The most striking example is Gallipoli. By being aware of how powerfully the Vietnam films in the US helped deal with those issues, everything from The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Apocalypse Now, that's why America, essentially, is a very powerful culture because it is able to deal with those things in its popular culture. Sure, there's a lot that's dysfunctional in America but, because of their First Amendment, they're able to bring a lot of stuff to the fore. No problem of telling stories about corrupt government or demonic big business - they're almost the cliched bad guys in the movies. But that helps the culture to be healthy.

When did you first encounter Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell?

With Jung I simply read about him at University, as part of medical studies. We had to do psychology and I came across him, read him with interest but it was just an overview along with Freud. I understood him an intellectual sense, the notion of the collective unconscious. But, really, with a lot of things, I didn't get into it too seriously. It was only when I became a film practitioner and actually had the experience with Mad Max I that was seeing this low-budget
genre film have resonances in countries that I'd never even been to and whose culture I knew nothing about. It seemed to speak to them in different ways.

Japan said Max was a Samurai and followed that sort of tradition. The French picked it up as a western on wheels and Scandinavia saw him as a Viking, as I said in the documentary. But, when these things were said to me, I thought this is a living example of what Jung was talking about. It was really through the practice of filmmaking that I had this awareness of the collective unconscious and sensed its power in some way. I realised that, as filmmakers, despite our personal vanities, as storytellers, we are the servants of the collective unconscious, serving that larger monomyth. Films like Mad Max should emerge out of Australia. To that extent they do contribute to that culture that some people call the monoculture, that broad global culture, rather than the
local, specific, regional, more national culture.

The Mad Max films could be seen as an Australian manifestation of the collective unconscious that resonates everywhere.

Yes. What I found interesting was that here it was in practice whereas, previously, it was in theory. And, if Jung described the territory, Joseph Campbell was its consummate guide.

He provided a language to guide people and, of course, popularised the hero myth.

He did two things. First of all, he had more scholarship than Jung. Jung was a practitioner but Campbell was a formidable scholar with his study of comparative religion. He spent a long time just trawling through the material and making comparisons. His other great talent was being able to synthesise and clarify, a great command of language, a great passion for his work. It's one thing to describe and another thing to make sense of its purpose. I think he described the function of mythlogy in a way that nobody else has ever done. To me, he explained most of the big questions. My life post-Campbell seemed a lot clearer. He not only explained what I did as a job, as a storyteller, but also explained to me an enormous amount about politics and about religion. So much of religion seems dysfunctional and achieves the very opposite of what it is meant to. He also explained in a way that nobody else has done for me this compulsion to understand the world through a spiritual dimension, this religious compulsion.

He had that wonderful description of mythology as being 'other people's religion' and that notion that is not only his but others, where a lot of religion loses its mystique and becomes dysfunctional. It is when we concretise the metaphor, when we take what is essentially a metaphorical expression of a powerful idea and make it an absolute. Then you're taking on a rigidity which doesn't leave much room for wonder and awe. You become brittle. What was heroic in the past now becomes tyrannical. When you read 'The Hero Myth', you see it's the face of almost every hero. They love too much the face of what they create and yesterday's hero becomes today's
tyrant. If you look at politics and, indeed, the histories of a lot of religions, those two things really seem to apply.

Some Church people so hold on to their understanding of their truth that they become overly dogmatic instead of realising that they need to appreciate the good and the beautiful, especially in the imagination and storytelling.

The other thing I learned from Campbell, and I say this with humility, not out of any arrogance - in many ways it's the opposite of arrogance - cinema has taken over from the Church. When you begin to realise that it's a bit scary if you are a film-maker. There is a responsibility. And you'd better put all your wisdom into your work. You can't treat it casually. In times gone by - and I think this was again Campbell who said it - as you approached a city and, still, some of the great cities of the world, the first thing you see is the cathedral because it reaches so high to the sky. Now you approach a city and you see the high office towers. But amongst them you will see the cinemas as bright and as lit-up and as attractive as once the cathedral was. You go into these places and undergo a kind of public dreaming. They are places of meditation. You congregate with strangers and you do have a shared experience. Often, if a film is very powerful, not empy-calory kind of stuff, but stuff that resonates and stays with you, it can have a very powerful. For me, and I dare say for most people, the greatest sense of awe I had as a kid and as an adult is in the cinema, a sense of dread, a great sense of inspiration, a great sense of love. You could argue that it's all artificial, but if you take the argument further, you can see that in fact film does work in that feedback loop with the zeitgeist and it does distil and reflect and affirm the zeitgeist, reinforces it and then spews it back - and that feedback loop keeps going on. So, it's not artificial. It's not imposed just by the filmmakers. The filmmakers are responding to what they have experienced. Storytellers respond to what they have experienced. So, in many ways, it does take some of the function of the church away, or at least it appears to. But, film has to have a moral underpinning otherwise the culture is in big trouble. That's what I'm beginning to understand.

So many cultures recognised Max in the context of their mythmaking. Someone referred to him as a 'Christ in leather'. Would you have seen him as a Christ-figure? Would you have intended biblical or gospel overtones when you were making the films?

No, not at all. Because you are dealing with the hyperbole of a future world where you can do everything, he's not a Christ-figure. He's too limited.

You referred to him as 'a lost soul who becomes an agent of renewal'.

I always think of Mad Max, especially Mad Max 2, as a closet human being. Basically, all he cares about is himself but, unwittingly, he becomes the agent of change. And that is true of the hero, whether the hero is Christ or Buddha or Moses or any of the great religious figures. With Christ, and this is one of the reasons he's so powerful, he is the one who exemplified this the most, the relinquishing of self-interest for the greater good. That's the classic in all hero mythology. And Max never quite gets to that stage. He never quite relinquishes his self-interest. And, so, he's not really a Christ-like figure. But he falls into the fairly
classic hero mould and, ultimately, he is the agent of change. That's the other thing that the hero must be. He must change the established order.

I must say that Babe is much closer to a Christ-figure than Max. Particularly in Babe, he does change the established order. In fact, in Babe, Pig in the City, he's much more of a Christ-figure because he turns the other cheek. He goes to save from drowning the one who was about to kill him. But in Babe, he relinqushes his self-interest in order to save Farmer Hoggart and to help fulful the dream for Farmer Hoggart and to show that a pig can, indeed, be a champion sheepdog. He does it in part for himself but it's mainly for the farmer. Yes, he's closer to Christ - not that a pig should be Christ but he's more Christ-like than Max!

Moving to Lorenzo's Oil, how important is that film to you?

That's my favourite. Of all the films I've worked on, it's my favourite. In the most extraordinary way, everything you saw in that film happened. We didn't have to bend the drama very much at all. It is true life and epically heroic. In fact, I would have to say Babe, Mad Max and Lorenzo's Oil are all in many ways the same story. It's the hero myth: you enter the dark, unknown landscape and, by courage, you undergo a number of trials and endure; then, in the darkest moments, where you finally realise that it's not for yourself but for the larger good, you relinquish self-interest, you come to that understanding and return with a boon for your society. And that's exactly what the Odones did.

There are children all over the world today who are alive because of Lorenzo's oil. They continue to live normal and healthy lives. For a while the medical establishment tried to say the jury's out but the jury's well and truly in on this now. Lorenzo himself is 21 and he's still in the state that you saw him in the film. They arrested his disease but he had so much loss of his myolin tissue that now they have to find a way to put that back. But, even in that, they've given thousands of people suffering from diseases so much hope. I found that to have that played out in a suburb of Washington DC and in a small suburban house, it's an epic drama in real
life and that was extraordinary to me.

As we go into the next century are you optimistic about Australian films and about Australian audiences responding?

Some things make me optimistic but in some ways I'm nervous. And I'm nervous because Australia is at a risk of becoming a skin deep culture. I think, for instance, when you look at White Fellas' Dreaming, the most interesting films came out of the times of most change or turmoil, when the national identity was being forged. So, it's not surprising to me to see films like Sons of Matthew - even though it was about cutting down big tress and taming the land - like Jedda, which is still quite impressive on the aboriginal problem, even though it was lurid in parts, it tried to deal with trying to preserve aboriginal culture and the conflict in that, like Gallipoli and other films that did impinge on the culture.

I was discussing this with David Stratton who is studying and lecturing on these developments in Australian and in world cinema. I asked what sort of patterns he picked up when cinema is most vital. 'It's always at a time when a culture's most under threat, the most interesting films arise'. I said, 'that's not so good for Australia then'. He said, 'No that's really good for Australia because people are trying to sort out and define the culture'. That's why I think films on the aboriginal question will come out and will be made pretty soon. But it's one thing to get them made, it's another for them to be seen by many, many people. So, the answer is 'I would like to be optimistic but I'm worried that Australian culture is a little skin deep'.


Phone interview: 8th July 1999

SCOTT MURRAY


I would like to start with your father and his career and influence on you.

He started at the ABC, where he was production design, set design and so forth on all sorts of operas and musicals. Then he did a series of documentaries called Alcheringa with Graham Pizzey on birds and aboriginal sites. Then another series of documentaries, Yoga Australia or This is Yoga, which was the first film Ravi Shankar ever wrote music for and which he recorded in Melbourne. Of course, my father spent an enormous time in India studying eastern philosophies and lived in ashrams in Madras and so forth.

He made a documentary on rice in Griffith and what have you!

When we were living in Camberwell, he had the room out the back where he would edit on 16mm. Then he was an associate producer on 2000 Weeks, Tim Burstall's film. What happened after that is really connected with 2000 Weeks because it was a total flop and was savaged by the critics. There was a belief that existed for quite a while that Australians would not see Australian films. So Philip Adams, with Bob Jane's support, decided to see whether Australians would go and see an Australian film, and with John they did The Naked Bunyip, the two and a half hour documentary on sexual attitudes in Australia, which John produced and directed - Philip always claims everything, so I have to be precise on that. It was a huge success, which John then roadshowed round Australia. Then, as he often did, he disappeared off to India for more quiet times. I wasn't involved in any of the productions, I was too young. Naked Bunyip was shot in 1970 when I was 19 and at uni.

What did he really want to do with The Naked Bunyip? I remember it had those famous blacking out of frames. Dean Fred Chamberlain of the Catholic Film Office also appeared in it, so that it had a rather interesting mixture of ingredients.

He wanted to talk openly and frankly about things but the censor disagreed and insisted on all these cuts. John wouldn't agree to the cuts; he just blanked them out, because the cuts were visual. He didn't think the soundtrack should be removed, and he felt that if he just made a cut, the censor was having power over you without your having any control. The censor was furious with him putting the stencil of the bunyip over the frames, but there was nothing he could do. Legally John was complying with the Act.

I just wish it had been a technique followed because in the next four or five years films were massacred, murdered, butchered in this country and people weren't aware. Point Blank, for example, was banned three times, I think, and reconstituted so often that the film that went out is so totally different to the film that Boorman made. I'm writing a study on Borowczyk. His films were cut and banned. The critics denounced films like The Beast, which had twenty minutes missing in the print released in Australia. The films bore so little resemblance to the originals the critics shouldn't have ever discussed them. I think John's technique would have been very effective - if you had had twenty minutes of black space in The Beast, it would have got home that what you were watching was not the film the director intended. I think the censor's work was insidious. I'm particularly upset with the censor because the material was always sexually related. I can see arguments about violence conditioning children in negative ways and I believe very strongly in classification, particularly of violence. But I think nudity and pubic hair corrupting people is one of the most insane notions. If it had been pointed out how ridiculous it was that one pubic hair creeping into the side of the frame could get a film banned....

The effects are still noticeable today, where nudity still is rare. It's frowned on. Mainstream American cinema doesn't go near it yet, in a film like Air Force One, you have a very long scene of a man putting a gun in a 12-year-old girl's mouth, very sexually, threatening to blow her head off - he's just blown someone else's head off, so you know he means business. The sublimating of natural sexual desires into violence has very much been increased, I believe, because of the attitudes of the censors in the '70s. I'm passionate about it.

It was all obviously significant for you at 19 and studying at the university.

I've always fought against being deprived of being able to do things which aren't demonstrably antisocial. I mean, you can't say you have a right to kill someone, but I do think you have a right to read anything or watch anything. Clearly there was great censorship in the '50s and '60s, but it was at a time when film wasn't really challenging that censorship, but the late '60s, early '70s were, the time I was brought up. I'm having great fun at the moment, probably because of a retarded adolescence, catching up with lots of films from that time that were cut and banned and that I felt deprived about. Now I've seen some of them, and some of them I shouldn't have worried that I missed them, but I want to make that judgment for myself.

One of the glories of the Internet, which I think is the Antichrist in all sorts of ways is that it's also a great tool for good. I think my being able to get films that I haven't seen, foreign films and others, tracking them down via the Internet, is a fantastic tool for me as an adult, to make my own decisions.

I've been watching Borowczyk. If I had children, I would not let them see his films, not because there's anything that I think should be censored. It's because they're so profoundly moving and powerful films, so disturbing. Each time I see one, I can't write or think about much for a couple of days. It could be a that a child would not be moved by them the way I am. But I'm very glad I can see them now, and I've been very angry that I wasn't allowed to see them then.

The last question about your father: was the only other substantial film he directed his section of Libido?

Yes, he sort of oversaw producing and he directed the last episode. The idea was to get four or five writers, novelists, to write short scripts. It was done as a very low-budget film. Fred Schepisi did one, Tim Burstall and David Baker and John. I think John got the short end of the straw. He got last pick and it was the least liked and it was savagely reviewed. The Monthly Film Bulletin described his section as being "directed with witless insipidity".

John then went overseas and Philip Adams always describes it as "John retired hurt". I never said any of this to John and he may not know of Philip's response, and he would argue that he didn't, but John has always had a love-hate relationship with film. He hates aspects of it, as we all do. He did come back and did Lonely Hearts, which was a nightmare. The account in The Avocado Plantation bears absolutely no resemblance to the truth. John was unhappy with the screenplay and got John Clarke. It was his idea and Paul threatened to resign from the project, but they ended up working together and have worked together many times since.

In post-production Paul just vanished, went off to a Greek island with Wendy Hughes, and John had to finish the film. It was massively over-length and John had to cut it down. When Paul came back, he disowned the picture. I'm told he wanted to take his name off it. Then, of course, it won the Best Picture at the Australian Film Institute Awards, which goes to the producer, and this caused even more ill will. So John and Paul have, unfortunately, never spoken to each other since. David Stratton, as he did throughout The Avocado Plantation, only ever gets one voice on any film and he got Paul's. That was incredibly damaging to my father, what was in that book.

I was around for all of that film and I know the little quirks of history. You know there are all these sorts of flashbacks that were cut out of the script - and they all turned up in My First Wife. Paul's a good recycler, as all artists are, and I think it's a great tragedy that Paul and John parted ways, because I think Paul is a very interesting person. Nothing I have said, I would see as critical of Paul, because film is a hotbed. You always have disputes and you go your ways. I think that if John and Paul could have continued... John, of course, is a director as well as a producer and I think that may be difficult for some directors. John also did We of the Never Never, but left early on when he and the director saw things differently.

It was a case of two weeks into the production and they'd got about a day's rushes, they were massively over budget. John as producer took responsibility. The director went to Philip Addams. Philip Addams took the view that the only way to get the film finished was with the director because it was the director's vision. John didn't leave the production altogether; he came back to the Melbourne office of Southern Cross and Greg Tepper went up on location and they finished the picture.

John has a different view to most Australian producers; he believes that the responsibility of the finished film, the money, everything is the producer's. It's a heretical view, but it is the correct view. Most Australian producers disown the pictures once they're shot. They do no work, they don't try and sell them, they don't keep books, they don't know where the prints are. When I did the trailer for 100 Years of Australian Cinema, most of the producers we spoke to had no idea where the negative of their film was. It's an incredible thing in Australia. Admittedly, they get paid appallingly, they've got to get on to the next project. But John takes his responsibility seriously; he believes you are responsible for the money that has been raised.

So after those two unhappy experiences, I think he was ready to go back into an ashram again. Then he decided to do, with his new partner Peter Collins, my film. So that's how we ended up together.

There seem to be two different influences on your film-making: the family and production influence, then yourself as a cinephile and your interest in and work for Cinema Papers.

I never had an interest in Hollywood films. I never wanted to see the matinees on Saturday. I like American film now more than I did, but it's mostly the '30s and '40s and finding some good things in the '50s through cable, but I've never seen Hollywood as the best cinema. I think most of the great directors are European and most of the great European directors are French.

The biggest influence on me was Erwin Rado at the Melbourne Film Festival. You had to be 16 or 18 or whatever the law was, and I started when I was 14. He knowingly let me in. We used to have endless arguments. I would walk out of the shorts all the time; he would find me sitting on the steps of the Palais and he would abuse me in his very dogmatic Hungarian way. I absolutely adored the man. I was terrified of him. I think his festivals were superb for someone interested in European cinema. Obviously he wasn't interested at that stage in independent American - not that there was much of it - or Asian to the same extent as the festival is now.

So, when I got my own car, I would go off and see European films. The fact that they were more salacious than anything else may have had something to do with it, as my father - he was a particularly puritanical man; how he made Naked Bunyip is one of the great mysteries of the world - he kept denouncing me, "You're going to see this because it's got nudity in it." It was hard to argue, but I think that's a perfectly okay reason. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But whatever reason got me into these films, I got a great love of European cinema.

Then in 1969 or 1968 I saw my first Bresson, and that was really it, that cinema could go so beyond what it traditionally does. I think he's the great creative force of the 20th century. It's a purity and a power. His films seem so flat and controlled and monotone, yet they end so powerfully. Diary of a Country Priest - I think that if anybody is ever going to create a sense of faith in cinema, that's the film. And it ends with a five or six-minute shot of a crucifix. I mean, is there any more powerful five or six minutes in cinema?

Bresson's a man who denounces Catholicism yet he makes the most profoundly Catholic films, a man who denies God's existence and yet all his films seem to be an affirmation of that existence. These are all the contradictions I love in him.

Then I wanted to become a film-maker. I ended up at Latrobe University. I met someone who said, "Go and write for the student newspaper," so I did. Then Peter Beilby, who's a film producer now, head of production at Artist Services and Philippe Mora, who's a famous Australian director overseas - they were starting up a tabloid version of Cinema Papers. It had come out once roneoed in '67. Then in '70 and '71 we put out eleven fortnightly broadsheets which I wrote for. I wasn't an editor.

After I graduated, I went to teach at an experimental school called Brinsley Road, where I did maths plus the film course. It's interesting because of the people who were in it. There was Richard Lowenstein, Ross Lander as he was then (he became Ned Lander), Sharon Connolly, who's head of Film Australia, Ray Argyll, Lisa Roberts, who made an extraordinary short film and I think is now a photographer and painter, Daniel Sharp, the producer. They never listened to a word I said, they disagreed with every opinion I uttered, so I can't take any responsibility, but it was a great year.

Then Philippe Mora had whizzed through Melbourne and said to Peter, "Why don't you start up Cinema Papers again?". This was 1973 when things were starting to bubble. Peter and I went and saw Philip Addams on a Wednesday and he said, "Get an application in by Friday," and on the Monday we got the money from the Film, Radio and Television Board, which was then run by my father - which led to all sorts of allegations in Sydney. Of course, anybody who knows Philip Addams would know that nobody has a say if Philip's around. John was thrown out of the room, Philip hadn't even told him we were applying for Cinema Papers. Philip just said, "Give them the money." People started to argue, he told them to shut up, it took about two minutes, and we were off and running. I had little idea that it would take up so much of my life.

The idea was that there were three of us and we would each take it in turns to edit for a year, go off for two years to do film. But, of course, Philippe never edited an issue. He just got on the plane again. Peter and I alternated for a while, but it was impossible to juggle and I went off and made short films, an hour-long film and some documentaries. I had done a documentary at Latrobe with a group of us which, in many ways, is the most profitable thing we have ever done.

Then I was at Cinema Papers for a long time and wrote various screenplays. I came along a bit late because the Phil Noyces and Gill Armstrongs, they were the first batch in the '70s of the new young directors and I was a bit behind them. They were the first graduates of the one-year course of the Film School, and all the money was going to them. There were the official directors like Ken Hannam, Don Crombie who just made film after film in the '70s, getting worse and worse and worse - starting really well making terrific movies like Sunday Too Far Away, but their films by the end of the '70s... Then you had this strain of Weir who was making a film a year, Noyce and Armstrong and a couple of others, Stephen Wallace, and I didn't get anywhere trying to make films.

I am told by many people who have worked at the AFC that I hold the world record - I'm up to 18 script rejections in a row - and it was clear that I would never make a feature under the government system. Then fortunately 10BA came in, which I still think is the best thing that ever happened to Australian film, because I don't think it should be decided by bureaucrats with vested interests. It's quite corrupt the way some people get to make films, friends and how there's always money just before 30th June and it gets parcelled out to certain people. Some people get five, six script developments in a row and never make a feature while other people who make features can never get money.

But, fortunately, under 10BA I was able to make Devil in the Flesh, which went to Cannes in Critics' Week - still the only Australian film there - and I've been rejected by everybody and company ever since! But we're getting closer at the moment with some Americans on a very big project. They loved the idea but had reservations about aspects of the screenplay. We're now in full agreement on all of that and we're going to the next stage, so you just don't know. I want to make more films. I left Cinema Papers to do Devil in the Flesh and I was away for five years. Then everything I tried to do didn't get anywhere. I was asked back to Cinema Papers and went back for a very brief period to try and help out - I've sort of been ensnared by its tentacles ever since.

I'm lucky in the sense that I love the writing on film and I love books and magazines and I love film-making, so I'm very blessed that I've been able to have two things because if I could only make films, it would have been harder. But at the moment I'm certainly wishing I had somehow been able to make films. I'm very proud of the books and the magazines I've done, but I still think of myself as a director and I really think I have more to contribute as a director - but this is not necessarily a view shared by all.

Devil in the Flesh - why is it the film that you actually did direct?

I had done a Thomas Hardy short story adaptation with Gordon Glenn, a very interesting director. I had read the novel by Raymond Ratigay, who was a friend if not boyfriend of Jean Cocteau. It was written when he was 16 and, unlike most coming-of-age stories, it's rock-hard. What it captures, which other books don't capture, is the cruelty of many boys at that age, when they notice that they're sexually attractive - and the power they have. Men trail women by quite a bit most of their lives - I mean, girls are so much more intelligent, sophisticated and bright than a boy the same age. It's embarrassing to watch. But there's a brief period in late teens where boys are very sexually attractive, they have a great sexual aura about them, and they're often attractive to older women. Yet they're so emotionally immature - far less mature than girls of the same age - and I think they often act quite cruelly and manipulatively. Ratigay captures that aspect. It's not dreamy and soft and romantic. It's a very tough story.

His story was set during the First World War in France, and I decided to set mine during the Second World War in Australia. In the book the husband is a French soldier at the front. Here, obviously, the husband couldn't be going to and from the front, though it could have been in Papua- New Guinea, so I decided to make him an Italian POW. I did a lot of research on that. And out of that came secondary interests about Europeanisation of Australia. We come from a European culture with the convicts, Anglo- Celtic. But, post-war, with the Italian POWs who were sent here and who, then, when they went back to Italy after the war and saw a country in ruins, in massive proportion, 90-plus percent, came back and started families here.

While they were interned here and in the absence of Australian men, many had affairs because they weren't kept in the camps all the time. They would go out farming and so they had started families in Australia. I think this had a profound effect on this country. It was the start of multiculturalism.

I grew up in the '50s and '60s and I think that middle Europeans - the French obviously, less so with the Italians and the Greeks, changed Australia profoundly and much for the better. There are aspects of pure Australianness I adore and my next story is set at the turn of the century and on the battlefields of World War I; but that's lost, that Australia's gone. There are a couple of 100-year-old men who still personify it, but there's not much left.

I think that Europeanisation was marvellous for this country, and there are aspects that I show in a very subtle way. For example, the ending. You know that the husband is away, she has an affair, she becomes pregnant. You would expect the reaction of a hot-blooded Italian if he found out would be murderous and horrible. The film actually goes beyond the end of the book, the scene where the husband comes back and has to deal with the affair and the child, and he deals with it sublimely well.

I'm not interested in someone behaving badly over this. There are people who have the strength and understanding that life presents situations where your rules and your beliefs have to be understood in the context, and there's a bigness and a generosity which I love so much in the character.

It caused some problems here. Some people said I was trying to make a French film in Australia and was trying to make Australia look like France and all that boring sort of comment. It was the height of the nationalism in cinema - you could only make films about working-class Aussies who spoke in a "G'day mate" tone at the turn of the century when no-one spoke like that. They all spoke like English people. The countryside I filmed it in was central Victoria. It's very beautiful. I love the Australian landscape. It is not all Back of Bourke, it's all sorts of things. I was just rendering lovingly what I think is some of the most beautiful country in the world. Then I was told I was trying to make it look like France. My God, it doesn't look anything like France. France I adore, but Australia looks as much like France as the Irish countryside in Saving Private Ryan looks like France!

Ratigay actually wrote six endings for the book and Cocteau threw them all out. In fact, it was an idea from one ending that I took up, so I didn't feel as if I was cheating on Ratigay. I don't necessarily believe that the ending Cocteau chose is the best ending of the book and I hope Ratigay, wherever he is, has not been upset with me, because I tried to be absolutely faithful to the book. I never saw the French version directed by Claude Autant Lara, the famous one with Gerarde Philipe. I've seen the television feature they made after mine where they copy shot after shot, but I'm told by many French people who know the Autant Lara very well that my film is very faithful to the book in a way that his is not - not that it's a criticism of his film at all; he can do whatever he likes as far as I'm concerned. But I did want to be faithful to the spirit because it was the spirit of it that I thought was interesting.


Interview: 6th November 1998

CHRIS NOONAN



Did you expect such popularity for Babe in Australia, let alone worldwide?

Well, I spent seven years on that film. That involved a great deal of faith on my part and that faith was born when I first read the book. And it was sustained all the way through trying to keep that thing that I got from the book alive and translating it into another form, and I never ever lost that faith and that sense of excitement that this was going to be something that could traverse normal boundaries.

Part of the reason for that faith in it was that I thought the story was extremely solid and very uplifting and very real - it had real things to say to people - and at the same time as a film it had a gimmick, which was talking animals. So I thought the gimmick would get people in just to see what the fuss was about, but the story itself was so solid and had the potential to get under people's skin that it would actually deliver to those people who just came for the gimmick. So I had tremendous faith in it and I would be less than honest to say that its popularity shocked me. I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been far more popular and I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been a lot less popular, because my sense in it was complete belief, I had total and utter belief in it. So in a way it's a shock that people just didn't stop making movies after it; there was no point.

A lot of that is there in the delight - for instance the mice, I must say, the chapters, and James Cromwell. The music was good, but him singing and dancing had such vitality about it that again it was those kinds of things which made it even better than it was, so to speak. Were they your inventions?

They were invented during the writing process. Actually, the mice were something that happened towards the end of the editing process - no, the mice were used about three times during it, but not for the chapter headings; there were never going to be chapter headings. The use of the mice in chapter headings occurred after a test screening in America where we had our chapter headings and it was a screening for mostly children - a mixed audience of children and adults - and we watched them watch the movie and we saw, when these chapter headings came up, which were just words, all the children would turn to their parents, asking them what the words said. And we thought, "Of course, a lot of our audience can't read." So we decided that we had to have speaking, we had to speak whatever those things were, and that sounded so boring - you have your narrator speak these words, and it all sounded like it was dragging it down, and we searched for a way of making it fun. So we ended up bringing the mice back. It was fun developing those mice.

What about the dancing and singing?

What can I tell you about that? What I love about that is that without that - see, Hoggett was always conceived, even by the writer of the original book, as this completely taciturn Easter Island statue sort of figure who never expressed anything, in complete contrast to his wife who expressed far too much most of the time. I was worried about this character and certainly the actor, James Cromwell, was very worried - in fact it takes a lot to get an actor to express nothing, I mean really nothing, not even a little grin, nothing; has to be a comic strip taciturn sort of character, which I believed was the key to making him work, because everyone would read so much into his behaviour. But without a pay-off of that withdrawal of expression somewhere - he would have worked dramatically within the story but you wouldn't have loved him as a character, and I think it's like someone who withholds affection all the time: unless you actually see them show affection once, you're not quite sure about them. We talked about this a lot and felt that he needed some moment when he could express himself, but preferably later, after we had had the opportunity to delight in the contrast between his taciturn qualities and Mrs Hoggett's expressive qualities. So the idea emerged in the writing, which was basically George and I sitting down for many, many, many months, that this was the perfect place to do it, where it provided an opportunity for Hoggett to show how much the pig meant to him and how deep was his concern for the pig. So it provided an opportunity for an expression of love which was respectable between a man and an animal.

That was carefully choreographed, that dance, and it was very much based on Celtic patterns of dance and music, that whole little incident. What did you feel about that scene?

It was, somehow or other, a moment of joy for him. I like your word "respect", I hadn't thought of that, a kind of loving respect and just the joy and him breaking out - I now realise it was really from an Easter Island kind of thing, and I think obviously now that you say it, that's what delighted me, but I couldn't believe that he did it and it just seemed so right and joyful.

That's it, it's completely out of the character that has been established for him, but because he has been so withdrawn, there is the potential of it there, and I believe that even though when the audience first sees it and they sort of go, "What? This is confronting, it's too forward and outward for this man," there's something deeply satisfying that this person who has been so withdrawn has let it go, and there's something deeply satisfying about that.

I think that's probably a lot of its success, the mice, that kind of thing, and even the villainy of the cat. And that one that I read, that when Babe sings, apparently the pig wouldn't behave, so you had to invent, but yet of course it's a wonderful moment. And it's probably such a collection of wonderful moments then which combine the whole thing that made it a success.

That's true, but without the structural backbone which is so solid, you couldn't play to the degree that I was able to play. You just couldn't allow that sort of freedom to sort of say, "Let's just have him sing here." It would just feel like another little effect; "just something else to entertain us." But I think it was integrated into it so that Babe singing in particular was a lot more than just a delight in the pig singing. It was a whole new expression of his innocence of his fate.

You wouldn't have read a book called St Paul Returns to the Movies, the chapter on Babe in that?

No.

An American evangelical writer - it's a good book - he did St Paul Goes to the Movies in about '93 and this one is '98 or '99. He's actually talking about Paul's understanding of the ethos of the Roman Empire and how Paul's letters are continually critiquing that, and he's done a terrific job on a whole lot of contemporary films. But his one for Babe is on courtesy to others.

I'm very interested.

He has chosen sections from St Paul where everything was on merits and judgment in the Roman Empire and here's this whole breakthrough that Paul has which Babe exemplifies

Which is about courtesy?

Courtesy is the particular theme was chosen.

How wonderful.

Did you enjoy Babe 2? Is that a fair question?

I didn't. I didn't like the idea of a Babe 2 because I felt the first story was complete and - in fact I was there when the idea was born, and it was born through Universal's desire to have more of it - this has been good, let's have more. I mean, I don't want to imply any motivations on the people who actually made the film, but I felt that it was born out of - you know, the reason it was made was a desire for money, for more of the same success in the financial sense. The first one was built from a desire to do something that was almost cheeky - you know, wouldn't it be incredible if we could make a film that had talking animals and people would accept that. There was this sense that we were being naughty and very cheeky in doing something that was as bold as that was. And I felt that the way it was presented to me when I was approached about it was - the motivation was all wrong for me and I said no.

In a sense the public response has been to that, though I have to say I really liked it, because I like the darker side and I was interested in Babe in the City context compared with the innocence of the country.

I actually think in some ways it's a more sophisticated film.

Yes, I think a lot of adults, if they went to see it, would find it very interesting because of those themes, whereas perhaps the children who were delighting - there wasn't enough to delight: talk about the cityscape, the different cities, the terror of the dog, not liking Mickey Rooney. Many children did enjoy it but it's entirely different process - cheekiness and delight - something quite different)

Yes. But for me it was simply that I just couldn't see the point in pushing it further, and I had put so much energy and so much of my life into that first one - in a way I was disappointed to see it - okay, now it had moved from this group of people trying to get an idea across, moved across because of its success into the realm of big business - it wasn't a cause that I wanted to fight for any more. So that's why I said no.

To go back to the '80s - working in Cowra Breakout, then Vietnam, the Joh Bjelke-Petersen? movie - that's a decade in which you were reflecting a lot on Australian identity, politics, in a sense that Babe doesn't.

Will I go back to Australia, to Australian reflection?

What do you feel that you were able to contribute to our understanding, especially by those popular series, of our self-identity, even with the bicentenary coming at the end of it?

Of what is Australian? It was the last thing on my mind during that process. For me there was no intellectual analysis of what is Australia and what am I trying to say about Australia in that process. It was much more, for me, about - just to qualify that, there was a leftist slant, there was a sort of humanitarian humanist slant on what went on during the Vietnam War, the way the war twisted people's lives up, which was really about war itself more than about the Vietnam War, and the way in which selfishness of politicians and so on and their drive for self-aggrandisement disrupted people's lives and ruined people's lives, and these people who were supposed to be there to look after people's welfare were neglecting it for their own benefit. But what drove me within those stories were the personal stories more than the sort of geopolitical ones. I don't see myself as an authority to wax lyrical and lay down the law about my views on Australia's development. I don't think it was what any of those things were about and it's not where my interests really lie. My interests lie much more in the personal and in the power(?) relationships within personal relationships. My view on the subject matter of those things was very much through that telescope, in a way through the big end of the telescope looking small, rather than the other way around.

It sounds as if you enjoy the telling of the stories drawing on your experience but not checking thematic contents or

Thematic contents are very important to me and I would hate to subscribe to something that I found politically abhorrent, but essentially I think the point of view that I've put across is a humanist one in the sense of looking after the interests of the human beings involved in the story rather than a sort of grand Machiavellian, Bonapartian sort of strategist.

Just back on The Riddle of the Stinson: when you were talking about the faith there - just a bit more about what interested you perhaps a bit more explicitly in that Green Mountain story.

I guess what it did for me was to - there's a terrible phrase that keeps being bandied about in Oscar award ceremonies and in the American media generally, which is about someone following their dream, which has become the most suspect sort of concept; it's become cliched because it has been used so much and it's been taken over by the American Dream manufacturing machine and turned into what everyone should do is follow their dream. But it still is an important thing for me that if you have faith in your destination, if you have faith in the goodness of something in its likely good results, if you feel it will bring good to the world, then for me that is what drives people. It's what drives me. And if I'm looking at ten years of work on something, then if I believe that the end result is going to bring good to people, then the work can go on; I can drive myself like a slave with a belief in the ultimate benefit to people of that work. If I feel it's purely for my own self-aggrandisement or purely that it will make a lot of money, a lot of people buy something and you'll make a lot of money, it won't drive me in the same way as if I feel something is going to bring a lot of good. And I think that's the sort of faith that Bernard O' Reilly had in that story of the Stinson. First of all he was curious and there was an intellectual curiosity that he felt that he knew what had happened to this plane and had faith in his own intuitions and his own sense of what had happened, to the degree that he would inconvenience only himself by wanting to pursue it and find out what had happened, partly because everyone else was giving up and there were real human lives at stake. I suppose it was a sense of responsibility to these people he had never met but only read about in the newspaper, but he couldn't rest as long as he felt he knew what might have happened, where they might have gone, and no-one else was finding them, so he had this sense of responsibility that only he knew, only he could solve the problem, and I loved that concept.

It sounds like you as a writer and film-maker.

In a way, perhaps. Perhaps there's a connection. But certainly I saw that in his story. I identified with him.

What are you doing at the moment?

I'm writing a story that's based on an American book which I'm not telling anyone the title of at the moment because I don't have the rights totally tied up in a contract, but it's sort of under negotiation. It's a book by Russell Banks and it's a coming-of-age story of a 15-year-old boy. It's a tough but very hopeful story set in the US and Jamaica.

Would you make it there?

Yes, I would have to. So it's not reflecting on the Australian identity very much, but...

Universal.

Yes.


Interview: 9th September 1999

CHERIE NOWLAN



Since your first film, God's Girls, was a documentary, how did you move from documentaries and short films to features?

They're all sort of documentaries in their own way, because they're all about real world issues and relationships. In fact, I think there's a weird pattern that I discovered only recently looking back at all of them. There seem to be funny parallels between them. Because I'm not a Film School graduate, I really had to make my own path and have my own sort of curriculum. I wanted to do drama after God's Girls because I felt such an enormous responsibility as a documentary film-maker. Frankly, I was troubled by it because I was dealing with real people's lives. I felt that I wanted to deal with real issues but fictionalised so that I didn't feel the weight of responsibility that you have with the docos. So I wrote short film scripts.

I did short courses at Film School. I ended up being a kind of a de facto film student as a result because I co-produced a short with Samantha Lang, Threat to the Whale. But I do things like directing attachments for the Sydney Theatre Company and I've done a bit of acting training as well. And I teamed up with Alexandra Long pretty early on at Film School, which was fantastic. We collaborated on two shorts - one a short story that she adapted, Lucinda 31, and the short that she wrote that Sam and I did together. And now, Thank god, he met Lizzie that we've been working on since it was a page synopsis.

Lucinda 31?

It's a satire of professional values. It's about a 31 year old lawyer who decides that it's time for her to get married, only she doesn't know who to, so she places an ad in a suitable magazine called Executive Business Weekly. She auditions several men and decides at the end of it that the best of all possible candidates is the man she's been living with for six years. Naturally, he's not very happy when he finds out that she's been advertising for a mate. Then he decides that he wants to have a break from the relationship and wants to date a girl who's not a professional, who's a dilettante, who has lots of careers. Really it's about how Lucinda ends up being on her own. Again it's an adaptation of one of Alexandra's short stories and those preoccupations permeate all her work. It definitely comes up again in Lizzie which, in fact, has a very similar structure - which we were quite happy to do.

You come from Singleton, New South Wales. You featured the Sister of Mercy from Singleton in God's Girls. Did they teach you at school?

Yes, and I saw the film that I quote in God's Girls, Fire on Earth, when I was 13, in Year 7. Faith Jones, who taught me in Year 7, and is still a friend, showed us the film. She features in it as a 17-year-old. She restages her family delivering her to the convent. I was so captivated and amused by and interested in this film about another world, a world that didn't exist any more.

All films are about worlds. I thought that this was a great idea for a film. I'd never directed anything before in my life, so I pitched the idea to Glenys Rowe, who's a wonderful, gutsy, innovative producer. I showed her Fire on Earth and she said, `That's great, let's do it'. So that's how that happened. Suddenly I had to be a director.

It's a creative idea, the juxtaposition of the old film with the contemporary footage, the talking heads. It is a memoir of a whole world which has virtually gone. Dead Man Walking began in a similar way, Sister Helean Prejean's receiving the religious habit which, I presume, was actual footage of Sister Helen.

Yes. It's been a while since I've seen it.

Why, in the 1990s, would an Australian audience be interested in such a group like the Sisters of Mercy as they were and as they are now? You received AFI awards and very good reviews.

It played a lot of times on the ABC and in England on the BBC. In fact The Guardian said it was better than Brides of Christ. This was because it had that ring of truth to it. But I think people will always be interested, and you know why? Because people who've lived religious life, particularly if they have been in it for a long time, are sometimes ambivalent about the past and its secrets. Things nobody has said are constantly being unearthed - and not always, obviously, for good reasons. I'm sorry I had 52 minutes. I would have loved to have 4 hours to really explore the life and history of a congregation of women. It was very rich material. I don't think anyone will lose interest in them. They may not think that's necessarily a good thing and people might be interested for all the wrong reasons. I can understand concerns about that.

Do you think, in retrospect, that the old-style Sisters of Mercy was a valuable way of being in the Catholic church?

Yes. It was a product of its time. As Sisters Maria Joseph Kerr and Dorothy Campion said in the film, they changed when the world changed. It's not as if religious people live in isolation. We all respond to one other and, clearly, their contribution to this country in the obvious areas of education and health, as well as the spiritual life of Australia, is on the record.

Sister Dorothy Campion came across as particularly genuine and insightful.

Yes. Maria Joseph Kerr and Dorothy Campion are two of the most inspiring women I have ever met. They really are extraordinary, intelligent, insightful, inspiring women. I could just have made films about them.

Is God's Girls a kind of early obituary for the Sisters of Mercy? The sisters themselves spoke about the death of the congregation?

Yes, but the chapter of the new stories is still being written. Having watched God's Girls again only recently after a number of years, I was wondering about that myself. Both Dorothy and Maria Joseph were saying that it didn't worry them if the congregation as its was died. It would only be after death that a new life could possibly emerge. So I'm not sure - I don't know about that new life yet. There's still a lot of things to be worked out. And I'm not very qualified to comment on it, either, because I only see them sparingly. But I'm very interested to see what happens. I think there is a new life to be had for women living religious lives, but I have no idea what was going to happen.

You say you like comedy. How do you see Australians responding to comedy? What do we really find funny and - how does Thank God He Met Lizzie meet Australian expectations?

I don't know. Is there such a thing as an Australian sense of humour? Some people would have believe so. I think Australians are very like the English - we like to laugh at ourselves and we like it when we don't take ourselves too seriously. We have a really good record of comedies, don't we, particularly darker comedies, bittersweet comedies or black comedies. I think Lizzie is very much a bittersweet comedy; it's a comedy that ends up, in fact, being a drama. And you can see films that are in this vein, but I think Australians do like to laugh. We watch a lot of comedies on television.

The thing about comedy is that it's fantastic because you're able to entertain but comedy is also such a subversive tool. It's often misunderstood in fact, particularly critically - and there's a history of this, not just in Australian cinema, but internationallly where people don't always think to take comedy seriously as an art form. It's regarded in some circles, I think, as what Orson Welles once said, `second-class tourist entertainment'. I think that's not too far off the mark. The films that I've probably been most influenced by are films like the Mike Nicholls films, The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, the screwball comedies, obviously, from the '30s. I could go on.

With such a strong women's team, especially director and writer, you focus on a man's problems. But, as you said, with Lucinda 31 you've made a film from the women's perspective. Alexandra Lang said she written the screenplay with Richard Roxburgh for Guy in mind. We empathise with this man and see the two women through his eyes. Are women in the audience asking, `what about the women's stories?'?

The women are very happy with the film. Lexie made an interesting choice. She could have so easily written the film from Jenny's perspective because, really, there's a protagonist, an antagonist and a hero, the three characters. And, as well, they're all quite equally balanced, which is unusual. Lexie wanted to make a film about someone who realised they'd made a mistake and had to come to terms with this. I suppose to some extent she may have been wanting to punish one of her ex-boyfriends! Actually, depending on what day it is, she'll say that, but she made a courageous choice in fact. A lot of men in the audience sometimes complain that Guy is not active enough. But passive heroes are the staple of great cinema. We really wanted to make a comment about how men think they're in control of their romantic lives, but really they're more often than not defined by the women they choose.

He was a nice man. That helped.

Yes, a lovely man, and he actually doesn't do anything wrong, which is great.

Richard Roxburgh has a sufficiently strong screen presence to be a `nice man', doing the cooking, fussy about the house.

Very fussy. Clearly that was going to be an area of conflict in the relationship, but it was really important that the actor be charismatic. On the page people were saying, `Who is he? We don't know anything about him'. But Richard also brought a lot of himself to the role. I think it's much harder for actors to play roles close to themselves sometimes; he has a lot of those traits - the cooking and the fastidiousness are not unlike Richard, the clumsiness especially. He's always tripping over. So he really filled out that role.

With the relationship and the questions of the '90s, the writer has spoken about serial monogamy, making points about how people relate in their twenties and how they relate differently in their thirties. Since we live longer these days, stages of growth and maturity are protracted compared with how we used to be.

Yes, that's exactly what she was trying to do. She was trying to make a comment about serial monogamy. As you say, we live longer, women don't die in childbirth, so the pattern of relationship now seems to be serial monogamy. And when you're not married to the love of your life in your twenties or at an earlier age, she's saying that when you get to 30, you make a decision that the next relationship will be the one where you actually marry. You realise that time's running out, you can't go on forever being a single person. There seems to be a need to have a new plot turn in the story of a relationship. Lexie's theory is that unless you've got those plot turns, the story will end because there's not something to keep you there. I don't think any other film has done that.

Lizzie, of course, is also about the mythology of falling in love. Guy is absolutely convinced that God has struck him with lightning when he meets Lizzie. There's that sequence of the slow-motion, the whole bit - the ridiculously romantic situation of a pregnant cat. The fact is that the falling in love stage is a very transient state and in some ways an illusion. An illusion can be a pleasing thing but it may also be a delusion.

So Guy slowly but surely realises that he's married a woman he doesn't know. That's not to say the marriage isn't going to work, but they're fundamentally quite different, as opposed to his relationship with Jenny. That relationship was fundamentally good but fell apart for trivial reasons. It fell apart because they became bored with each other, and in particular he became bored.

Frances O' Connor and Cate Blanchett were very good as Jenny and Lizzie. But Jenny had such vivacity that it was an unfair competition. It was hard to see why they really broke up. The structure of the film keeps the audience wondering until the end. You mentioned The Graduate as an influence so it would not have been surprising for Guy to have run away. He doesn't and the ending is quite wry.

He can't walk away. He's made his bed now. He's a conservative guy, he's done it, what can he do? He can't really walk out. And the fact is that as soon as you see the children, you realise that they've come along straight away. That's his new life now. I think that, maybe, it has a very good chance of surviving because Lizzie is so pragmatic and Guy has realised something about life: you don't realise what you have until it's gone.

It would be interesting to see them in their forties, if they are still together. But your emotional hook there was the Vietnamese orphan and the reading of the letter at the wedding reception.

Vong Hu is like Guy's conscience. He's the good part of himself. Lexie borrowed this from a real-life incident. She was really intrigued by this person who in fact was not like Guy at all. She thought he was quite objectionable, but he had this thing he did, he sponsored orphans, Vietnamese kids. She was really intrigued by this and wondered what function that served for him. So I incorporated it and, of course, it's part of the plot twist.

It gives another insight into Guy. But it was a terrible moment in an emotional sense when he read out the letter and then realised who had written it.

Yes, it was a terrible moment. It was really funny, at the end of the wedding shoot, because we actually had to do it first because Cate was going to England to start work on Oscar and Lucinda and Richard kept saying to me, `Cherie, it's really important we're going to have a good time on this next part of the shoot', and I said, `What are you talking about? I had a great time'. `Oh, it's been terrible!' He had actually had a terrible wedding whereas the rest of us had had fun. He really went through the experience and felt that forging the letter was a terrible thing to have done. But I thought Cate and Linden (Wilkinson), Cate especially, handled the scene so well - you almost could forgive her.

The class issue - there seemed to be such a strong class distinction between Jenny's family and Lizzie's. What is that saying about Australia? Jenny's family was very comfortable Lizzie's mother...

But Lizzie's mother is so funny really. Maybe Lexie's the best person to answer that question, but she was making a comment on how people sometimes make decisions for the wrong reasons; that Guy's unconsciously wanting to be with someone who he thinks is more presentable or who is superficially the goods in the suitable marriage department. Maybe it's a bit cliche, but I probably don't like to think about it too much, to be honest.

Your three central characters were very rounded, but the others had a touch of caricature and satiric edge?

It's very hard to do, to juggle those elements. There are different styles of comedy and character and characterisation in the film that Lexie wanted. The wedding characters, for example, break lots of rules. They don't contribute to the plot in any way; they're only commenting on the themes of the piece. I felt that we probably got away with it. Maybe by the end of the film, I was trying to create a feeling that you'd been at that wedding. But yes, there are different styles of comedy, and my way of dealing with that as a director was just to be as real as possible and to make sure that every person you're watching is a real person.

One last question. God came into the film, presumably in the writing, but it's interesting that you brought issues of God and nominal Catholics into this kind of film - or what that's saying about the '90s or your direction.

I think that says a lot about what preoccupied Alexandra more than anything about me. I thought that was an interesting twist because Lizzie's family were superficially not very Catholic. I had to think really hard about who we could base that family on, because I didn't know too many people like them, though being Catholic myself and Lexie's not Catholic. I guess God comes into it in the conscience that Guy's wrestling with - has he done the right thing?

It was interesting to have God language in the conversation between Guy and the priest friend of the family before the wedding. But there was a bit of a shot at the priest at the end.

That was more a comment about women, actually, and female sexuality rather than the priest. It's all about an older woman being sexually voracious, which you're not supposed to be when you're a mature woman. Yes, it was a comment about how different women's sexuality is. So yes, she took the pot shot at the priest as the aunt went off at the end.


Interview: 3rd August 1997

PHILLIP NOYCE


Clear and Present Danger is a Tom Clancy action thriller but it seems to be an ethical film or a film that takes ethical stances?

Yes, it has a very strong moral line. It's really about the rule of the law - one of the basic assumptions of the film is that human beings are imperfect and, as a result, we need protection from ourselves. That's why we codify human behaviour by erecting laws, by having moral codes that we are expected to follow. This is a film essentially about what happens when we don't follow those laws.

That's what America was doing in the '80s?

It's what the whole world has been doing. It's about the chaos that results when we ignore the laws or the moral code.

This is a film for the new political era. In the post-Cold war world, the influence of the American president has become even greater as the United States is increasingly called upon to act as a police force to the world. This is a film that asks when it is appropriate for such a powerful nation to act and how should it act. Jack Ryan has to decide whether he keeps quiet and not injure the presidency, the institution he has served for so many years or does he do something that will endanger his own career and reputation and endanger the presidency and plunge the whole country into turmoil akin to Watergate or the Iran Contra affair.

Staying with ethical issues, what do you think Backroads contributed to an Australian understanding of aboriginal issues?

I don't think it contributed a whole lot to understanding. I think it probably contributed much more to aboriginal self-awareness because, as insignificant as this might seem, it was the first film which gave them a hero or an anti-hero. And the film has been very popular - even now, 20 years later, it's still screened and shown all around Australia to aboriginal groups.

I'm not sure that it had a great effect on the rest of Australia because essentially it was preaching to the semi-converted. I don't know whether it made them any more aware.

You're pleased with it in retrospect?

I think so. I mean it was principally an artistic exercise, and part of that notion turned it into a political tract. The idea was to construct a B-movie, a road movie, and then, by inviting Gary Foley - who was a known activist and spokesperson for the then strong black movement in Australia, an emerging black movement - by inviting him to be the star, I knew that there would be a political confrontation in the making of the film and that this would appear on the screen. But that was an artistic decision and, as it turned out, the film then evolved into a political statement.

So I'm pleased with it in retrospect in as much as we achieved that confrontation. We captured it on screen so the film was a weird combination of this escapist B-movie and political tract, and somehow they sat together in the one strange document.

There are more explicitly religious themes in Newsfront. In looking at, say, the presentation of the Catholic Church in films, Newsfront offers
some significant perspectives: Angela Punch McGregor's staunch character, especially, her leaving her husband and, against the laws
of the Church, actually re-marrying and giving the Church away. There were also church sequences associated with the anti-Communist
referendum of 1951. What was your perspective on things Catholic as you dramatised them in Newsfront?

You must remember that this is not exclusively my perspective because Bob Ellis was the writer of the original piece - I adapted the screenplay but he was the original screenplay writer - so he's principally the author in that respect or it's a shared authorship in film terms, because I was then interpreting his writing and, in a sense, adapting and reinterpreting it by the characterisations and so on.

I think that Australia and the Australian character has been formed through the confrontation between Irish Catholicism and Anglicanism and, of course, these are, at least in part, seemingly irreconcilable philosophies. In my interpretation, the one philosophy, the Irish Catholic philosophy born out of the combination of the Irish experience and Catholic doctrine, is that you should not expect to inherit the earth while you're on the earth but you will later, whereas English and Scottish Protestantism says you will inherit it now and you should do everything you can to get it because it's yours. So take it and don't worry about later. We'll worry about that when we get there.

This is a film, in part, about the confrontation of those two sets of values. But it's also very much a film about Australian Catholicism, the good and the bad aspects of Australian Catholicism - the repressive aspects and the enlightening aspects. But, as we know, and as in America, the Catholic Church was also seemingly split into two extremes: one the extreme Right, the other the extreme Left. And it has always harboured these seemingly irreconcilable philosophies.

Angela Punch Mc Gregor's character, in moving from her staunch stances to her abandonment of Catholicism, seems to represent what was
actually happening with Catholics during the 50s and 60s?

Yes, the film principally describes change, and Australia has changed enormously since the Second World War. The seeds of those changes are to be found in that first decade after the war.

In Heatwave we again find ethical issues. You have used the word `confrontation' several times. Heatwave seems to be an ethical-confrontational film.

Yes. Heatwave was the story of a working-class Protestant boy who made good. I don't know whether audiences realised that, but we had always assumed that he was a working-class Protestant and that Judy Davis's character was a middle-class Catholic girl. She, in the Catholic saintly tradition, had adopted a social cause - had set herself up as the spokesperson and protector of the working class. He, as a working-class boy, of course, was now forced to confront the moral implications of his own success and how that affected other people.

In a way, the religious and ethnic backgrounds of the two characters were just a continuation of the conflicts that we had seen in Newsfront, but Australia had by this stage moved from a principally working-class and upper-class society to a principally middle-class society.

That's captured in the atmosphere of inner Sydney, its buildings and the regulations of law and government.

Obviously it's a film which deals with ethics and morals and responsibilities and just like Clear and Present Danger, the issue of right and wrong. But it seems as though so much Australian history - and I'm talking about that conflict between Irish Catholicism and English Anglicanism - was captured in those conflicts over land development. By that time, of course, it had been embraced by groups who had come to Australia after World War Two. The English seemed to have joined with any nouveau riche who presented themselves, whether they were Czechoslovakian or Hungarian or whatever.

The most interesting thing about Australia is Irish Catholicism - I mean, it's the basis of the country.
Interestingly enough, I think that it is the basis of the value system and has had much more effect - or at least it has produced the unique Australian character - much more than the English, in my opinion, simply because of its strength.

Through personalities and the public moral stances?

A great deal of that has to do with transportation, as Robert Hughes points out, as much as it does immigration. This is because of the number of radicals, whether they were political or religious or social, who were transported from the British Isles between 1788 and 1850. As Hughes points out, every single radical movement in the British Isles sent a representative to Australia.

You moved into Asia with Shadows of the Peacock (Echoes of Paradise).

Echoes of Paradise was a very different film from the one we intended to shoot, because the film was meant to be set in Bali and, at the last minute, due to an inflammatory anti-Suharto family article in the Sydney Morning Herald, all permission was withdrawn and we ended up shooting a bastardised version of the film in Thailand which we probably would have been better off not to have shot.

It might have been much more political?

Yes, the original story was very different. It was really about the Balinese character's alienation and his coming to terms with it, coming to terms with a western influence and his traditional obligations, trying to work it all out. Wendy Hughes' character went through a very similar journey in the original story. It's just that the setting and the Balinese character were very different once we moved to Thailand.

Twice in Clear and Present Danger there were references to East Timor - briefly in a news bulletin on the radio and in a remark made to the
American President by one of his advisers.

You did hear it? Actually it's not the radio, it's the TV earlier on - in fact, it prophesies a revolution. It's a little low, unfortunately. I mixed it too low, but in it the Fretilin have taken over the radio station in Dili.

It was a bit low but then the President's or his adviser says that the situation is calm.

I put it in for the Indonesians. It's symbolic really. I thought, `We'll put it in and we'll see if they pick it up. If they don't, well, that's one over them because they'll have this film out there throughout the country, a hundred prints all around Indonesia and a lot of people will hear it, will wonder about it and they will start some discussion. If they ban the film, then it will be really interesting, because they'll ban it on such a flimsy pretext. This itself will cause some discussion. Otherwise they'll have this sixth column element running around all the villages of Indonesia.

But I should have mixed the TV comments - it was a delicate thing - where the Fretilin have taken over the radio station, just a little louder. I was afraid that if I made it too loud, the authorities would hear it and they would definitely cut it out. But I now realise that it's just a little low.
It's in there for the Indonesians. It's aimed squarely at a building in Djakarta called the Department of Information, which is full of funny little men who do nothing else but listen to radio shows, television shows, read newspapers and things like this, so that they can ban whatever is considered anti-Indonesian. It's a whole building of Orwellian characters.

And your move to Hollywood?

I grew up watching and delighting in Hollywood movies. Hollywood is the Mecca for directors and I'm happy to work there while I can. I am interested in the content of a film rather than its pictorial possibilities. But I am also an outsider and can bring a `South Pacific cynicism' to a film and that is a virtue. With Clear and Present Danger, there is an opening close up on the American flag. I can force the audience to look at the kitsch and reflect on it. It is a portrait of American life slightly different from one made by an American, an involuntary filter placed over events. Czech Milos Forman's view of American life is different - and the U.S. liked it. Paul Verhoeven, with Basic Instinct, brought a combination of repression and indulgence that is Dutch. With the Jack Ryan stories, I have a combination of escapism and reality (though some believe one cancels out the other) and audiences can be entertained and enlightened simultaneously, escapism and political relevance all rolled into one. That's the best combination.

As a director?

There are ten or fifteen superstars in the United States on whom Hollywood depends. But there are three to four hundred directors waiting for a phone call from the superstar!

The director is a ringmaster in a circus. A good circus is no good without a good ringmaster. All those good acts can fail - a big pause and someone needs to bring on the clowns, and when the clowns aren't funny, you need a drum roll. The tightrope walker beings. And you need another drum roll.

But directors are also like vampires sucking the life-blood ideas out of everyone around them - and then calling them their own. A director needs to have a soft front, a strong back and allow everyone to speak up.


Interview: 8th September 1994