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