CHASING AMY

US, 1997, 195 minutes, Colour.
Ben Affleck, Jason Lee, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Joey Lauren Adams, Matt Damon.
Directed by Kevin Smith.

Kevin Smith, writer and director, has become something of a cult figure with his Clerks and Mallrats. These are irreverent slices of life and, especially, slices of conversation where, in a flip four-letter kind of way, the off-hand characters discuss serious and peripheral issues with post-modern intensity. Smith refers to himself as a `persisting Catholic'. He doesn't immediately sound like one, but he is concerned with values and the search for values and identity.

This has come to the fore in Chasing Amy, a more elaborate film than the previous two but with more defined characters who embody a variety of stances and searches as well who are able to discuss all issues in a Smith kind of way. Relationships, gender, sexuality, love and betrayal are to the fore here. Chasing Amy has become one of the box-office successes of the year here and abroad. Its topics and tone seem to communicate with the 30s (plus or minus). Older audiences might be bewildered and/or offended. Well acted, funny, raucous and challenging - and that is Smith himself in each film as Silent Bob. Talking to the modern generation.

1.The significance of the title? Silent Bob's story and the explanation to Holden? The final comic and the elaboration of the Chasing Amy story? The lost opportunity, futility, not accepting Amy because of fears? The impact of the story?

2.Kevin Smith, age and experience, New Jersey background, his writing, directing? His perceptions on his characters? On the thirty-somethings and their experiences, clashes, relationships, searching and questioning? His performance as Silent Bob and his contributing the story of Chasing Amy?

3.The New York opening, the comics' convention? The stalls, the people, the signings of the comics? The American city bars, the parks and gardens? New Jersey and the office? Homes? An authentic, realistic atmosphere?

4.The style of the musical score, its appeal to its younger audience? The range of songs used? Alyssa's song in the bar?

5.The target audience for the film? Their age and experience? Identifying with their own stories and issues and questions?

6.The world of comic books, the credits and the drawings, Holden and Banks's comic? Alyssa's? The significance of character and situation drawing in bold style and panels (and the comments on tracings)? Creating a comic-strip world? Its relationship to the real world? The ideas behind the comics, the characters? The perspective of the men, Banks and Holden? The black African? The perspective of Alyssa? The comic-strip fans and their world - with the touch of obsession and weirdness, unreality? Holden and the finale with his Chasing Amy comic and his having personal to say?

7.The men's world of comics, goodies and baddies, heroics? Work, experience, sex, relationships? The bond between Holden and Banks? Twenty years? Going to clubs, their way of talking, sex jokes, discussion of experiences, crassness? The reaction to Alyssa, the lesbian club? Their prospects, the contract for making a movie from their comic strip? The intrusion of the woman into the men's world and its consequences?

8.The convention, the fans, the criticism of Banks for being merely a tracer, the autographs? The black African and his elaborate performance, his analysis of Star Wars from a white supremacist viewpoint, Luke Skywalker as the Nazi youth, Darth Vader being exposed as white rather than black? The interruptions by Holden and Banks? The humour of the whole thing being a performance? The gun and people clearing the room, Alyssa's reaction? The introduction, Holden's immediate attraction? The invitation to come to the nightclub and Holden being over the moon? The nightclub, his not realising it was lesbian, the encounter with Alyssa, the dancing, her going to sing, her response to her girlfriend and it dawning on him what was happening? His sitting with Banks with Alyssa, the discussions? His detachment? Banks and his rapport with Alyssa, the elaborate memoirs of their sexual experiences and the body keeping the experiences especially with wounds (and the intimations with the flashbacks)? The discussion between Banks and the black African about Archie and Jughead and homosexual implications? The sequences setting up a mood, the style of conversation, the issues? Holden and his listening to the song, yet his being affected by Alyssa?

9.Holden, his background, his talk about his Catholic schooling, altar boy, the jokes? The references to classes on the Trinity? The importance of this Catholic parochial school background? His friendship with Banks for 20 years? Their working together, taking each other for granted? His manner, his attraction to Alyssa, having to cope? Realising and saying to Banks that he was in love? Alyssa and her coming to see him, their talking together, the discussion about friendship, the sequence where they were sitting in the park on the swings, Holden invited to ask her questions freely? His questions about lesbianism, standard nature of relationships, definition of sexuality? Her responses and opening up his horizons? The collage of their being together in the studio, in the parks, hanging out together? Her asking him not to go to the conference and his staying with her? In love, the sexual encounter, the effect on each? Being discovered by Banks?

10.Alyssa in herself, her background, working with the comics, singing in the club, making the date with Holden to let him know her gay orientation? The discussions with Banks and her experiences of sex? The visit to the office, her falling in love with Holden? Her changing? Holden's declaration of love to her and her resentment at not wanting to be burdened with this - but her returning and kissing him? The effect of the relationship with Holden? Her going to the lesbian group, her avoiding telling them about her relationship with Holden, their disgusted reaction and her being ostracised from the group? Her response to being told about the Finger Cuffs name in the year book and the stories? (The device of having the man who had the sexual encounter with her talking straight from screen to the audience?) Her being hurt by Holden's attitudes? Going to the hockey, Holden's interrogation and her reaction (and the man sitting next to him saying that he knew where the conversation was heading)?

11.Holden and his being affected by Banks, the information about Alyssa? His not being able to cope, his saying that he was imagining what had happened? The contrast between his declaration of love and its authenticity and her response compared with the obsession and the needling interrogation of her at the hockey? Her explanation of her behaviour to Holden, the strong explanation, the past, being experimental, not knowing, it being a phase, the times? Her not apologising but her accepting responsibility? His inability to appreciate her?

12.Banks and his reaction, his shock at seeing them on the couch, undermining Holden with the information about Finger Cuffs? His own expectations and not understanding his own reactions?

13.Holden and his disillusionment, in the cafe with Silent Bob and his friend, doing the deal with the drugs? The two and their contrasting advice, good spirit, bad spirit? Silent Bob being quiet, his friend and his callow attitude towards women, his blunt talk about sex and the reaction of the waitress (comparing with Banks and his callow attitudes and the receptionist at the company raising her eyebrows)? Silent Bob and his eventually speaking, disagreeing with his friend, telling the Chasing Amy story? Holden's reaction and learning from it?

14.The build-up to Holden's plan, getting Alyssa and Banks to the apartment? His long speech and rationale for his proposal, the declaration? His talking about Banks and his intimacy - and the kiss? Banks's reaction? The proposal and Banks agreeing? Alyssa and her deeper reaction, her revulsion at Holden's suggestion (and Banks's relief)? Holden not being able to understand, his rationalisation of wanting to get wider experience, be equal to Alyssa? Her explanation that she had gone beyond this, her being hurt by what he had asked, his assuming that she was a whore, slapping him and telling him the truth?

15.Holden's reaction, his disillusionment? Uncertainty?

16.The ending - one year later: Banks doing the comic alone, the fans coming, the seeing of Holden, the signalling, the bond between them, yet alone? Alyssa and her partner at the comics table, signing the autographs? Holden alone and bringing his comic, giving it to Alyssa to read? Their conversation, the regrets about the past? His apologies - in word and in the comic?

17.The wry ending, relationships of people in their twenties and thirties, not able to be sustained, varying stages of maturity and immaturity, regrets for lost opportunities? An exploration of issues of people in their thirties, questions and values? Mirroring life, the film with its visuals, its story, its characters, the debates in the dialogue as a challenge for its audience?

CHAPLIN

UK, 1992, 145 minutes, Colour.
Robert Downey Jr, Anthony Hopkins, Kevin Kline, Dan Aykroyd, Geraldine Chaplin, Milla Jovovich, Penelope Ann Miller, Diane Lane, Nancy Travis, Moira Kelly, John Thaw, Marisa Tomei, Paul Rhys, James Woods.
Directed by Richard Attenborough.

Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin, the little tramp who delighted audiences the world over. Richard Attenborough's biopic is frank but respectful, large-scale, star-studded, quite straightforward. It traces Chaplin's whole life, from the poverty of London and the music halls to his rapid rise to popularity in Hollywood, through his personal turmoil and the hostility to his acclamation at the 1972 Academy Awards. Robert Downey Jnr's impersonation is very good indeed and worth seeing. Downey has appeared in such films as Less Than Zero, The Pick- Up Artist, Air America. Downey makes you feel that you are watching Chaplin and appreciating the development of his skills. The history of early Hollywood is fascinating, with Kevin Cline as Douglas Fairbanks. Of interest, Geraldine Chaplin portrays her grandmother and her mental deterioration. Moira Kelly appears as the actress who was the early love of Chaplin's life, and reappears as Oona O'Neill, Chaplin's last wife.

In real life Chaplin was a sad clown with a strong social conscience, leading to his expulsion from the US in 1952. Richard Attenborough, maker of such films as Young Winston, Gandhi, A Bridge Too Far, A Chorus Line, holds the interest even though the film is more bland than it might have been. There are glimpses of the comic genius and the film touches on most of Chaplin's major films.

1.Interesting and entertaining biopic? Portrait of Chaplin, portrait of Hollywood, the beginnings and history of cinema?

2.The credits: the focus on Chaplin, the silhouette of the clown, the taking off of the mask and makeup?

3.The title and expectations?

4.Re-creation of period: Britain in the 1890s and early 20th century, the early years of Hollywood and the studios, the American background, Switzerland in the '60s? The re-creation of the period? The musical score - and the range of Chaplin's own music compositions?

5.The finale and the selection of film clips for the 1972 Oscars? A tribute to Chaplin and his comic skills? Robert Downey's skill in impersonation, the routines that he absorbed and their influence on his films?

6.Chaplin as a clown, skills, humour, acrobatic talent, social observation? Skills on stage, on screen? Physical comedy, pratfalls? Stories - sad, sentiment? An artist of the sound era? The transition to sound (and his clash with the visiting sound engineer)? The City Lights sequence and the discussion about sounds suggesting themes without dialogue? The social crises of his times - the First World War and conscription, the Depression, Nazism and Hitler? The span of his career, his popularity, audience response to his comedy?

7.Chaplin as English, the background of Britain, Chaplin as a Londoner, of the 1890s, poverty, the music hall? His homes? The music hall and stage? The transition to Hollywood - and part of the British colony? His accent? Not participating for Britain in World War I, his return and the experience of hostility? Hoover and his hostility, bringing his mother and Sidney to Hollywood? The exile from the United States? His return for the Oscars - and yet a British subject, knighted by the Queen?

8.The picture of his mother, of Sidney? The poverty of family life? The influence throughout his life? The love for Hetty - and Moira Kelly appearing as Hetty and then as Oona O'Neill? His attraction for the girls, backstage at the music hall, the young girls, his wives? The episode with Joan Barry, marrying Oona O'Neill and settling down?

9.Chaplin's contribution to comedy, to cinema, to music, to humanity?

10.The flashback technique: the writing of the biography, George the interviewer in the '60s, Chaplin and his retrospect, his ability to talk, his being reserved? Anthony Hopkins' style as the biographer, the interviews and questions? Chaplin's responses? The Swiss background, the house, walking? The framework for the memories and the episodic build-up of Chaplin's life?

11.The introduction to Chaplin, the mirror and the makeup - the ending with Chaplin on screen, his comic skills as a young man, the old man and a sense of satisfaction with his life?

12.Chaplin's mother, her singing, booed from the stage? Charlie and his going on stage, successful, the coins, the popularity? Life in the London streets, the kids? Sidney? The poverty at home, the lack of food, his mother and the fish heads? Hungry? His mother and her madness, the deterioration, being taken away to the institution? Her being brought to the United States, the sense of freedom, the sea? The crushing of the biscuits and the hiding of the food so that her children would never go hungry? The dramatic impact of Geraldine Chaplin performing this role?

13.Charlie growing up, his skills with pratfalls, the entrepreneur and performing for him, falling into the river? On stage, the performance as the interrupting drunk and his success? The entrepreneur, support of him? Hetty and the attraction, the girls and their changing in the back rooms? The date with Hetty, being snubbed in the restaurant? The portrait of the entrepreneur - support of Chaplin, friendship? Receiving him when he came back to England?

14.The American tour, the trip over, the music halls? Out in the western states and his discovery of the movies, watching the movies over and over? The cable to come to Hollywood? Train ride, arrival, Hollywood of the time? Meeting Mack Sennett and his disbelief? Performing the drunken act on this road? His acting, the comedy routines - the first film? Confidence, diffidence? Success? His wanting to direct? Their clashes with Mabel Normand and her wanting to direct? His diplomacy? His directing films, the clashes, the success, the studios? Sidney coming and working with him?

15.The rapidity of his success, the billboards? The outbreak of the war - his return to England? The hostility at the hotel? Meeting the entrepreneur? The discovery of Hetty's death? His return and making the United States his home?

16.Life in Hollywood, the friendship and support of Sidney, bringing his mother? The movies and the routines: the war film (and Chaplin as a tree)? The making of The Kid? The end of the war, the meal and the discussion with Hoover? His doing his gold rush bread rolls routine while Hoover spoke?

17.Hoover, his ambitions, hopes? Americanism? His assistants and their keeping files? The investigations into Chaplin, their ultimate success?

18.Chaplin and his relationship with women: Mildred, young, going out, at Hoover's dinner? Her behaviour, lack of intelligence? The sexual response? The false pregnancy? The break-up of the marriage? His second wife, her age? Having children? The sequence on the beach, distant from his wife, love for his sons? The meeting with Paulette Goddard, blonde, changing her, his acting with her, Modern Times? The separation, yet the presence of the parties? The significant party with the Nazi - and Chaplin taking a strong stance? Joan Barry and her attractions, the affair? The pregnancy, the tension, the blood tests? The trial and the prosecuting counsel and his abuse of Chaplin? The blood test as inadmissible evidence? His reputation?

19.The background of the Depression, City Lights and sound? The changing fascist times of the '30s, the antagonism towards Hitler - and his decision to mock Hitler? His war experience? The friendships in Hollywood - especially Douglas Fairbanks, the sequences of Fairbanks performing, the parties with Mary Pickford? Fairbanks and his advice about Chaplin's marriages? His illness and death?

20.Leaving the United States, the boat sequence, his being ousted? Limelight and his achievement (and the screenplay ignoring A King from New York and The Countess from Hong Kong)? The meeting with Oona O'Neill, the bond between them, her support during the trial, marriage, children?

21.The film's contribution to Chaplin's sense of achievement, dynamic presence, his not being satisfied with his performances, always wanting perfection? Yet his contribution to comedy?

CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD

US, 1986, 110 minutes, Colour.
William Hurt, Marlee Matlin, Piper Laurie, Philip Bosco.
Directed by Randa Haines.

Children of a Lesser God is an impressive drama about the hearing-impaired. It was nominated for the Oscar for best film, director, actor William Hurt - and won Best Actress award for Marly Matlin. (Marly Matlin was to appear in films Walker and, especially, the telemovie Bridge to Silence with Lee Remick.)

The film is adapted from the play by Mark Medov (writer of such dramas as Apology). The film is set in a school in Maine, focuses on the attempts at teacher Hurt in influencing the children, teenagers, with different educational methods. He clashes with the head of the institute, Philip Bosco. He is involved with Marly Matlin, resistant to attempts to make her speak. He also encounters her mother, Piper Laurie (also Oscar nominated) - bringing the film to hard-fought, emotional resolution.

1.A moving film? The title, favouritism and handicap in human beings? The meaning of the God who creates handicapped people? The hearing-impaired?

2.The American settings, the island, the school, the town, homes? Authentic atmosphere? Musical score?

3.The importance of sound, hearing? Silence? Music and the vibrations, the beat and the hearing-impaired perceiving the music?

4.Sign-language, the responses? Attention, lip-reading? The hearing-impaired learning to voice sounds? The dramatic effect of signing? - and James repeating for the hearing audience the sign communication?

5.The film based on a play, the opening-out of the play - locations, characters, situations and interactions?

6.The audience going to the island with James, sharing his experience? The hearing audience, encountering the hearing-impaired, education, policies, creativity, change, disappointment?

7.The head of the school, his vision, stereotyping, mockery of James? The importance of the money grants and his concern? Interfering? The limitations in education? The classes? The students and their range of backgrounds, disability, ability? The methods? The styles of behaviour, clothing, groupies? The ethos of the students? Of the staff? The domestic staff?

8.James in himself, his experience, the director's attitude towards him, his initial meeting of the class, the lip-reading, tricking them? The group, getting to know them, using sign language, using words? Their isolation, his use of music, the vibrations, boomerang, clothes, favourites? The build-up to the singing, the miming, performing? His achievement?

9.Meeting Sarah, discovering her? Rejected? Puzzled? Her surly attitude towards him in the laboratory? Her swimming? The confrontation, misunderstandings, communication? The dinner? His self-assertion towards her, her rebuffing him? The search for her? Going to her mother? Meeting her again? The story of her anger? His changed attitude? Going out with her, the beach, sexual affair, responses to her, the dancing? Angers? Her going to the concert and going away? James's going to her mother, the search, hopes? His own achievement with the students and their performance? His being challenged in his attitudes, letting people be, the confrontation for the educator, for the human being?

10.Sarah and Marly Matlin's Oscar-winning performance? Verve and vitality? The first glimpse of her, at work, settled in as a domestic? Her talents? The story of her childhood, her sister, her mother and father, the boys, her sexual abuse? Friendship with James, clash with him? Change of attitude, the dinner, the dancing, her dancing by herself? Her self-assertion? The sexual liaison? Changing? Her attitude towards her mother? Her anger at speeches being made? Her owning her silence, choosing not to speak? The clash with James, going to her mother? The reconciliation with her mother, the blame concerning her father? Hairdressing, going to college? Her return, her jealousy, reconciliation? A future with James? Hearing disability and its effect on her, her personality, affirming herself, being herself?

11.The portrait of Sarah's mother, not seeing her daughter for many years, the effect of her father's attitude? As a baby, her mother's care, the growing daughter, the daughters and their going out with boys, Sarah being used? James's visit and her unwillingness to see her daughter? Sarah's return, the bond between the two, sign language communication, empathy? The mother helping James to find Sarah?

12.The director of the school, his style, vision, concern about money, attitudes towards the students, his staff? To Sarah, harshness, critique? His stereotyping James and mocking him, turning off the loud music, the playing of the sport? His being changed by James's success?

13.The range of students, behaviour in class, not wanting to lip-read, the various types, the silent, the speaking? Learning the vibes for the music? The sports matches and mouthing abuse? The miming and the concert? The reaction of the parents?

14.The staff, their concern, education?

15.Attitudes towards the hearing-impaired, the contrast with the hearing world, the non-hearing world? Criteria for normality? Affirmation for the handicapped?

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

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

KAY PAVLOU



What drew you to make Mary, to write and direct it?

It's an interesting question because my background is Greek Orthodox. I found looking at Mary Mac Killop and looking at her as a Catholic nun was a little bit alienating. This is not my background. I felt quite distant from her. I had tried to dramatise something of the Greek Orthodox background (and its supersitions as well as religion) in Loulla (one of the Six Pack collection shown on SBS).

I think what happened was that I started reading about her as an individual and got very attracted to her determination. Her drive and the way that she was able to deal with the obstacles in her life - and there were a lot of obstacles - was quite unique. I thought what was interesting about her, apart from her being a very principled and uncompromising person (which is always attractive when you agree with the principles) and what was different about Mary was the way she did everything because of her spiritual beliefs, because of that incredible calm that she had within her.

She had an ability to really see the big picture beyond the immediate conflict or problem that she might be involved in. Her image of God and of her own spirituality was really large; it was larger even than her own Catholic church. I think that's what makes her accessible to somebody like me.

Are there similarities between your Greek Orthodox background and her Catholic background? and contrasts?

Greek Orthodoxy introduced me to the idea and the power of saints. There's a strong sense of saints in our culture and my parents are very much part of that. My family comes from the island of Cyprus. The patron saint there is St Andrew and I grew up with Mum telling me stories about St Andrew's healing power, so that was familiar to me. Apart from that, when I got very sick as a child, we went back to Cyprus and prayed at St Andrew's monastery. There were all sorts of rituals that were familiar to me.

The thing about Orthodoxy is that the church service is in ancient Greek. It's not accessible or even comprehensible to me. What I see about the Catholic church these days is that liturgy is much more accessible - everyone can at least understand what they're all saying. But for me the Catholic church, particularly in Australia, has always been not so much Anglo-Saxon?, but much more Irish - and very much part of the Establishment compared to our position as Greeks, viewing ourselves still as New Australians, (although I was born here). That was a considerable difference.

But you see, - and I say this to people of the church - I'm not actually a practising Christian. I'm a very spiritual person but I'm eclectic in my spiritual beliefs, and I guess what I found in Mary was that she would accept people. It did not matter what their beliefs were. Because she was generous like that and could accept people for what they were, I was very attracted to her.

The style of the film itself? Did you have the genre and the conventions of films about saints in mind or did you try for your own distinctive style?

I saw quite a few very different religious films. They are a sort of a genre, although they're all quite different. I really used them as negative examples, because I often found that spiritual people, whether they be Jesus Christ or a saint, were often depicted as a kind of ethereal being with glazed eyes, looking up to the heavens and not really connecting with earth. I knew from my research that Mary Mac Killop was not like that. She was very earthbound, very much in the here and now of the circumstances of her reality. But at the same time she was incredibly spiritual. So it was a challenge and a struggle to find that balance.

Are there any particular films that you watched?

One of the strongest influences, I guess, was The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. It actually made a big impression on me. But that was a long time ago. In recent times I saw The Last Temptation of Christ. I saw a French film called Therese which was the life of St Therese of Lisieux. I even watched Pasolini's Gospel According to Matthew. I tried to see a wide range not just the commercial films. These were some of the offbeat ones.

With Therese, some Catholics, especially nuns, found it very difficult to watch. They could admire the style of the film with its austere sequences, photographed in a very stylised way on the sound stages, but the spirituality tended to move towards the ethereal and the over-ascetical, something similar to they way you focus on Fr Tennyson Woods and the sisters with `mystical' experiences. Mary was so different in this regard.

Absolutely. And Tennyson Woods was influenced by another mystic saint, Teresa of Avila. I wanted people to have a spiritual experience during the film. I didn't want them to stay at arm's length from someone who was having a spiritual experience, for them to be seen to be having spiritual experiences by themselves without the audience travelling with them. So that was really challenging: how do you represent on screen something so elusive both visually and aurally? I spent a lot of time thinking particularly about, say, the moment when Mary was excommunicated. She said she felt nearer to God than she had ever felt before. I wanted to find ways in which that would work.

Again with the music, we worked really hard with the composer to write music that was very uplifting and ethereal but, at the same time, for it to offer a freeing, liberating experience rather than dominating. The history of church music shows that some of it can be quite dominating; it pushes its ideology upon listeners, whereas I think truly spiritual music is uplifting and open.

What audience did you have in mind when you were making the film? Who you were expecting to go and see it?

That's a good question because Rosemary Blight, the producer, and I always wanted to go for as general an audience as possible, because we felt that Mary's story was for Australians generally. We always wanted to remain accessible. There were times when, because the story was so vast, we tried to tell things quickly or in a slightly more experimental way. But we decided no, we want this to be accessible to, first of all, the Catholic audience for them to get what they want out of it. We knew that they would want to see the story. But we wanted to make the film something that, no matter what their belief system, audiences would be attracted to come along and satisfy their curiosity.

What we have found is that it actually got that sort of response from cinemas across the country - many of the suburban cinemas too. We think this is amazing. We have reached people who would not normally have much in common with this kind of film-making. And we have reached beyond our peers and our own network of people that we normally communicate with. That is what we were trying do as film-makers, to communicate to a wide range of people.

Your decision to include the sequences with the interviewees and intercut them with dramatic re-enactments? What did you want to achieve through this structure?

That was a tricky decision. The thing about doco and drama working together is that with the drama we were able to embody Mary McKillop?. If we had just made a documentary, we would have been stuck, basically, with a dozen photographs of a dead person. With drama we can bring Mary to life, flesh and bone: she talks, she walks, you identify with her. I think you become closer to her as a human being, not just as a remote saint.

If we had just gone with the drama, then we would have lost what we gain with the documentary material. We have these people in the present speaking about Mary's life and bringing it into the relevance of our lives now. We are now able to bring Mary's story from the 19th century into the 20th century, a relevant saint. So we were able, I think, with drama and documentary to bring the past and present together.

Stylistically I didn't want the change from documentary to drama to be tricksy or reliant on technical effects. I wanted the mood to remain in the period of Mary's life so the documentary scenes were designed and lit to match the drama. The interviewees were filmed in the same locations, so that the weave between the past and the present would appear seamless.

Claire Dunne's contribution?

Claire Dunne was carefully chosen because we needed somebody outside the the Sisters of St Joseph to be able to give us a different perspective on Mary's life. I think she's terrific because, apart from her incredible intelligence - she's so well read, she knows so much about Mary - she has a comprehensive overview of Mary's life. Her own beliefs are so broad that she can help guide people to place Mary somewhere that's both inside the church and outside the church.

And the nuns themselves, the interviewees Marie Therese Foale and Margaret Mc Kenna?

They're fantastic because they live and breathe Mary every day of their lives, and they can bring something that no-one else experiences about Mary. She's their constant reference and their understanding and passion for her in their life was something that we had to get in the film. Someone like Sister Marie Foale, who is her biographer from within the order, is unique because she has the sort of gossip and little bits of information that nobody else has, and she has a way of telling them. She feels very naughty that she's telling you something nobody else knows, and we were fascinated by her. We often went to the nuns for advice and guidance on Mary's life, but there was never any sense that they were overseeing our project.

Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel?

Well, we had to get a saintmaker in there somewhere. He was great. We didn't meet Father Gumpel before we went to Rome. We were negotiating about whom we were actually going to interview and, when we finally met him, we were delighted really, because he's a highly intelligent man - he's almost like a scientist in his approach to saintmaking. He's so meticulous. At the same time he's a very spiritual man. I learnt a great deal. He does his job so seriously - and he has been there for 35 years. He's been a Relator or a Devil's Advocate. The saintmaking was fascinating but very strange, and he made it real. He made it understandable, comprehensible.

There has been some comment that Mary is very much a women's film in its subject and in its production, producer, writer-director, cast. Another comment is that the film has a 20th century perspective, even a feminist perspective, on Mary Mc Killop. Neil Jillett in The Age noted that there seemed to be a sub-conscious sub-text on women's ordination.

It's interesting people want to make those equations. We just wanted to tell the story of Mary Mc Killop and so, therefore, it is a woman's story. But I actually get quite annoyed about these comments. If the protagonist is male, it's just a film. If the protagonist is a female, suddenly it's a women's film. So I would like it not to be. That's a point that I really want to make because women are so rarely protagonists that we're treated as some kind of oddity. And I think it's dangerous saying that Mary was a feminist or even talking about women's ordination - I think Mary certainly carved a place for women in the church in Australia, but I think it's silly to say a hundred years after she lived, `Was she a feminist?' It's not a term or an idea that was familiar to her in those days. It's putting words in people's mouths. It's hypothetical to put words into people's mouths. Historically she was an incredible woman from our pioneering days who has left a huge legacy behind her.

Apart from the spiritual focus that the nun's habit gave Mary, she also spoke about about it freeing her from the normal responsibilities of the family. Mary didn't allow anyone's notion of her as a woman to stop her achieving her ends. She believed that we are all equal and she went to any lengths across this country and Europe to bring education to the poor. After all, we are talking of a period when `good' women did not catch the night train, let alone travel through Europe for two years.

Folklorically, we don't have many women in our history as significant Australians. I think it's important to retrieve Mary from the past, bring her into the present and see her work in the context of what she did at the time, but also see what we can learn from her as a human being for our lives now. So I'm uncomfortable talking about her as a feminist.

Would you be happy to see her as an Australian icon?

You bet, absolutely. We don't have enough of them and I'm really happy that I'm involved in the sort of archaeology of bringing her out of the past.

What were some of the criteria for choosing the episodes from her life that you dramatise?

That was really hard and I still look at the film and I think, `My God, we didn't do anything of her work in Bathurst and about the Black Josephites'. And I do occasionally worry about the things that I've omitted as the writer of the film. It was difficult to make those decisions because her story is just vast. I think in the end what I was trying to do - because there was one point when I wanted to say everything, and that was impossible - was to tell it simply, in a way that a scene between Mary and someone else significant would actually speak volumes about the rest of her life. At the times when I was daunted by the scale of the film, I would take out the photographs of Mary and stare at them. There's an intensity in her eyes that had me completely mesmerised. I could see peace and love, as well as strength and determination. They're the eyes of a `wise' person. So I was trying to find the quintessential Mary.

Of course, the excommunication scene is up there on the screen, certainly the alcoholism accusation is up there, but what was tricky was that there were so many conflicts in Mary's life that her life would look like a series of battlefields, which it wasn't. There were a lot of comparatively quiet years where she just did the hard slog of realising the dream of providing education and welfare for the poor. That is very tedious work. I could have included more of the arguments and problems that she had, but then I would have had to sacrifice some of the quieter moments with, say, the other nuns or with the children. A fine balance was needed.

Your budget and what you could actually film on location? Your sets looked small and sometimes confined?

Absolutely. The street scenes were two, and were small scenes. With a period film, in order to create the real period, it's very expensive - particularly the way that Sydneysiders have knocked down most of our heritage. We're stuck with a very small number of choices, really, and that did influence the writing. I could write only what we could shoot. As a director, too, I would get these ideas and my imagination would take off; and then I would think, `No, if we haven't got the money and I'm going to have to compromise so much in doing a big scene that I'm not going to be happy with it, I may as well keep it simple and be proud of what I do'.

The interviewees kept driving on your narrative momentum.

Yes. The documentary people were able to fill in sometimes in two or three sentences what visually would require a lot of time and money. I tried to treat them as storytellers without their becoming too cerebral.

And Lucy Bell's performance?

Terrific. She was just perfect. We looked at a lot of actresses. They came and gave us very interesting auditions, but no-one was right. No-one was right until Lucy walked in the door. It was amazing. You know, we often felt the presence of Mary Mc Killop when we were making this film and we just got to the point where we were pulling our hair out. There was no-one who was going to be right. And then she walked in the door. I say that because, within moments in the audition, Lucy intuitively understood all the qualities that we were looking for, that Mary needed to be very assertive in her way, but she was still a woman of the 19th century, that she wasn't aggressive or pushing of her ideas in any way. Her assertiveness came from her incredible inner peace. That's a very hard thing, a very elusive thing for us in the 20th century.

When Lucy Bell spoke as Mary, the accent brought Mary Mc Killop to life. People see her picture but probably never consider how she sounded, but the broad Australian accent seemed very real.

Mary was brought up around Scottish parents. Some people said she had a slight Scottish accent and others say she just spoke with a broad Australian accent. Mary Mc Killop was very Australian. She was Australian before other people were calling themselves Australian - when others were saying, `I've got Irish background, Scottish background', she was saying, `I am Australian'.

We wanted to include little moments where you saw how she was involved in the rest of the world and not just her own sort of concerns. The urging of the sisters to vote in the context of federation was very indicative of Mary. We used a direct quote from one of her letters to the sisters, `remember, every so-called Catholic is not always the best man for the job', which I thought was terrific because she did have a good sense of humour every now and then. I worked a great deal from Mary's words and her letters. The words put into the mouth of the Pope during her visit to Rome were from her letters, that he wanted to place his hand on the excommunicated one. During the writing process, I was often caught in the here-and-now of Mary's political struggle with the bishops and trying to expand the canvas to include Mary's notion of Eternal Love. It was an arduous journey, but I'm a much better person for it!

Ultimately it came down to a personal connection, did I want to spend several years in Mary's company? Yes. She gives me great inspiration: her fighting spirit, her `never say die' attitude to life.


Interview: 24th November 1994

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

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

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

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