THE RINGER

US, 2005, 94 minutes, Colour.
Johnny Knoxville, Brian Cox, Katherine Heigl, Bill Chott, Edward Barnabell, Leonard Flowers.
Directed by Bruce W. Blaustein.

A very pleasant surprise.

Not knowing that the film was a comedy about the Special Olympics but knowing that Johnny Knoxville was the star meant that I was anticipating a cross between Jackass and The Dukes of Hazard. I was wrong. Again, I did not know that the Farrelly Brothers were the producers but as the film went along, it definitely seemed Farrelly Brothers’ material. They push the envelope, they say, in terms of subjects for their films, political correctness and good taste. They have ventured into the area of mental challenge in There’s Something About Mary and Me, Myself and Irene. They made comedy of obesity in Shallow Hal and Siamese twins in Stuck on You. These are topics that make the average audience alert to sympathy for those with physical and mental disabilities rather uncomfortable. Should these be topics of comedy? Do they exploit the challenged?

These comedies make the point that there is a danger of condescension in the concern about what is permissible for humour or not. There is the danger of a paternalistic/maternalistic superiority of ‘doing good’ for those less fortunate. The challenged (and that word raises these problems in itself) want respect (and the final credits song highlights this) not velvet glove attempts at inoffensiveness. Three of the main characters in this film are veterans of the Special Olympics and the film has the blessing and participation of the Special Olympics Association.

Johnny Knoxville plays against his screen image so far. He sees himself as a loser. But he is quite a sensitive type – which gets him into a tangle: a debt of $28,000 to help a friend for an operation to sew his mower-clipped fingers back on. He also has a lowlife uncle who gambles. What if he pretended to be mentally disabled, challenged the champion and his uncle bet a fortune on the result?

Brian Cox as the uncle gets the chance to say some appallingly funny prejudiced remarks and satirise the ignorantly insensitive. Katherine Heigl is charming as one of the workers with the Special Olympics team. The team is presented as a humorous bunch who also get the chance to say some outrageously incorrect statements.

But, the whole film is quite funny, rather sweet in the way that everything works out, including telling the truth. It proves that humour, once again, is a great means for overcoming prejudice and helping people appreciate one another as they are.

1.Impact of the film? Comic serious, good taste, political correctness? The films of the Farrelly brothers?

2.Credibility of the plot? Realistic touches? Steve’s situation, his uncle? Bets and threats? Steve’s world and the workplace? His uncle’s?

3.The world of Special Olympics? The association’s approval for the film? The organisation? The training and the games? The athletes and their bonds, rivalries? Steve entering into their world and the audience going with him – but knowing of his deceit?

4.The financial situation and Gary’s pressure on Steve? Steve being unwilling? What persuaded him?

5.The issues of paternalism and ‘doing good’ to ‘those less fortunate’? The disabled characters being able to assert themselves?


6.Steve and his sensitivity? The issue of sacking the workers? The issue of Stavi and his liking him? the accident and its effect, pain, hospital, the insurance? Steve visiting Stavi in hospital? The family, children, their financial difficulties? Their gratitude to him? Steve and his feeling guilty? Undetaking to pay all the bills?

6.Gary, a gambler, his crooked connections, his betting? Gary and his wanting money from Steve? Steve and his wanting help from Gary? Gary and his watching the television, the Special Olympics? Watching Jimmy and the interviews? His decision to get Steve to impersonate one of the athletes?

7.Steve, his reaction to Gary’s suggestion? His reluctance? His athletics background? Pretending to have learning difficulties? Gary being sure that Steve would win? However – the bet that Jimmy would not win? The presentation of the loan sharks, the betting moguls?

8.Steve and his becoming Jeffie? His meeting the fellow athletes, sharing the room with Bill? His consistency in manner, the mannerisms of the learning-impaired? His meeting with Lyn, attracted towards her, his going to lunch with her? The discovery of her boyfriend?

9.The athletics, the training, the athletes being better than Steve? His having to train? His interactions with Bill in the room, Bill and his smart lines? Steve as an impostor, the confrontation? His confession?

10.Jimmy, arrogant, sure that he would win, his successive victories? His lording it over the others? The group determined to beat Jimmy?

11.Bill and his character, Glenn? The range of the team? Their various disabilities? Their helping Steve with the training, the hard regime? Bonded with the group – sharing with them? The food, the jokes?

12.Steve taking the group to the movies, seeing Lyn’s boyfriend, the other woman? The confrontation? Letting Lyn know the truth? Her reaction?

13.The Special Olympics, Gary’s hopes? Steve and the confrontation with Jimmy, Jimmy and his success? The hurdles, Jimmy falling, Steve helping him? Gary’s desperation? The irony that one of the impaired-learning athletes wins? The happy ending – Gary and Steve winning the money because Jimmy did not win? Steve and his confession to Lyn – and the public confession for all to hear? Lyn’s reaction?

14.Steve, his working in the play, the group, Shakespeare? Their bringing Lyn to the rehearsal, her seeing what Steve had done? The reconciliation?

15.A sympathetic presentation of learning-impaired men? The role of the Special Olympics and the achievement? Steve and his bridging both worlds? Lyn and her care for those in need? Her boyfriend and the callous attitudes? Gary and his sailing through life successfully?

HOSTEL

US, 2005, 93 minutes, Colour.
Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Ethor Gudjonsson, Jan Vlasak.
Directed by Eli Roth.

Hostel arrives with severe condemnations as being one of the ugliest, sadistic horror films of recent years. It has also been attacked by the government of Slovakia, where it is set, as giving an awful impression of that country and its people. They are not wrong about that.

But, those of us who see most of the horror films have seen much worse. Rob Zombie’s House of a Thousand Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects were far more explicit and brutal. At least this one has something of a plausible underlying explanation of the horror – the writer-director asserts that he came across a Thai website inviting people to pay money to go and experience killing victims provided by a criminal gang.

More of a difficulty with films like Hostel (and comedies like Eurotrip which it resembles in the first part) is what religious commentators used to refer to as ‘a low moral tone’. This is not the violence and horror. This is rather the presumption that life is meant to be hedonistically self-indulgent, no matter what. The three central characters here are college students and a lecherous type from Iceland descending on Amsterdam, backpacking for ‘a good time’. Within the first twenty minutes, they are seriously stoned, have been desperate to visit a brothel, caused a loud mouthed American brawl and listened to advice about a hostel with girls readily available in Slovakia. These men act like leering adolescents, as if this was how life is to be lived. As heroes of the film, they elicit no empathy. We feel that maybe they should be sliced up sooner rather than later. It is depressing that so many film-makers assume that this is what their audience is like and that this is what they want.

In that context, the torture scenes and the killing are ugly but not as lingered upon as in many others. The violent revenge at the end makes some immediate desperate emotional sense, but…

1.The reputation of the film? Sadistic? Excessive? Horror genre? Backing by Quentin Tarantino? Box office success?

2.The appeal of this kind of film? To horror film buffs? Why? The genre, conventions? The use of conventions? Extremes?

3.The Dutch and Slovak settings? The clubs, hotels, bed and breakfast? The old Slovak town? The warehouse and the dungeons? Musical score?

4.The title, backpackers from the United States, hostels in Europe, bed and breakfast? Their sinister hostel?

5.The picture of Americans backpacking, young, sex obsessed, drinking? An impression of Americans abroad? Josh and Paxton? In Amsterdam, looking for girls? With their friend from Iceland, Oli? Life in Amsterdam? Drugs, women? The promise of the hostel in Slovakia?

6.The train journey, the sinister man on the train, Dutch background, the advance towards Josh? Their moving away – later encountering him, in the dungeons, his participation in the rituals? Paxton seeing him on the train on the return – and the violent revenge?

7.Slovakia, the Slovak government objecting to the portrait of the country? The old town and a historic setting? The hostel? Meeting the women, the easy dates? The disappearance of Oli? His being drugged, taken away, tortured and killed?

8.Life in Slovakia, the hedonism of the Americans? Josh, the girls, his being taken, tortured and killed?

9.Paxton, the same experience? His waking up? His discovering the warehouse with the audience? The tortured men? The sadism and brutality? The different rooms? The threats to himself? The discovery of the company, Elite Hunting? The girls in their employment? Seduction and drugging of foreigners? The homicidal fantasies of the men? Paxton, his reaction, using his wits, violence, his discovering the truth, his escape?

10.On the train, the escape, the Dutchman – and his killing him?

11.Critics criticising the film as wallowing in sadism? The reality of this kind of club – human beings and the sadism and thrill of killing others? Audience response to this kind of story?

C.R.A.Z.Y.

Canada, 2005, 127 minutes, Colour.
Michelle Cote, Marc- Andre Grondin, Danielle Proulx.
Directed by Jean- Marc Vallee.

Very popular in French Canada, this film has mixed appeal for other audiences. While most of it is presented as realistic comedy drama, there are touches of ‘magic realism’ about it.

It begins in 1960, Christmas Day, and the birth of our hero, Zac, whose eccentric story we follow. He is a ‘different’ child - a faith healer confirms that he has powers of healing (with relatives continually ringing during family meals to ask for his help). His mother is devoted to him. His father wants a tough macho son, more like his older brothers – one of whom is a lout and will grow up with drug problems and violence towards his wife, the other is a non-descript footballer. A younger brother is eventually born who distinguishes himself by being fat. This is something of a crazy family.

It emerges that Zac has some sexual problems which in the 1960s and 1970s were not talked about. This causes some anguish especially as he is expected to have a girlfriend, and one of his neighbours is willing and she tries. However, it eventually emerges that Zac is homosexual but it takes a long time for him and his family to come to terms with it.

Zac is immersed in the pop culture and styles of his time which alienates him from his father (whose main delight is a record of Patsy Cline singing Crazy).

The best aspects of the film are those which show the details of oddball family life, the brothers and their ups and downs (especially the older brother with drug problems, gaol sentences, money borrowing). Allowing for the heightened mood and the touch of caricature of family, church, school, the film reminds audiences of what attitudes were like back then, why they changed and how they changed.

1.The impact of the film? A crazy family? Patsy Cline singing ‘Crazy’? The awards?

2.The Montreal setting, the city, suburban homes, schools? Ordinary situations? Made somewhat extraordinary? The authentic feel – despite the parody and spoof? The musical score, the songs, especially Patsy Cline and the father’s love for the record? Its being used as a symbol of the relationship between father and son?

3.The title, the family itself, Zac, the way that he was perceived by his family, the way he perceived himself? Crazy within a crazy family?

4.The opening, the story of Zac? His mother’s pregnancy, going into hospital, giving birth, Christmas? The link between his birthday and the birthday of Jesus? Celebrations? Gifts? The scenes showing these birthdays over the years?

5.Zac’s parents, his mother, her love for her children? Her tolerance? Her not understanding her son, but being supportive of him? Their hopes? Her tolerance for her husband, their love, clashes? Discussions about sexuality? Their concern about Zac as he was growing up? His mother more open-minded? His father, sports, wanting his son to succeed, his disparaging remarks about sissies, about homosexuals? His refusal to face the reality about his son? The clashes? The build-up to the dinners, the fights, Zac and his alienation from his father? The eventual reconciliation? How well delineated the characters of mother and father, how credible?

6.The four boys, their growing up together, games together? Raymond and his being pushy, his growing up, taking drugs, dependent? Violent? The clashes with Zac, seeing Zac as a favourite? His girlfriend, his going to jail, his violence? Coming out of jail, sex encounters, being clean and dry, falling back? His wanting money from the family? Zac giving him money? His wanting to pay it back? His making a mess of his life? Antoine, sporty, breaking wind – a stereotype? The youngest brother, his being fat, his dependence on Zac, the younger generation as different from the older? The portrait of the four boys and their growing up?

7.The passing of time, the Midnight Masses, Zac and his imagination, being bored? The reaction of the priest? Glaring, sympathy? The children’s choir and performing Sympathy for the Devil? The religious background? The surface Catholicism? The role of the church, church practices, prayer? Zac and his rebellion?

8.Zac and his growing up from fifteen to twenty-one? Rebellion? His clothes? The lightning flash on his face? His relationship with his girlfriend, the encounters, his reluctance, trying to prove himself? Her liking him – but eventually being disillusioned? His best friend, his best friend being gay, the episode in the car, his father’s reaction? Zac and his denial? His trying to prove himself? The passing of the years, an acknowledgment? His final decision to travel, his going to Israel, the encounter with the young man? It merely being suggested – and the film being visually and verbally reticent about the theme? The importance of the trip to Jerusalem, postcard to his mother? Israel as a kind of quest?

9.The sporting characters, the extended family, the visits, the celebrations, the parties? Joy, tensions? The passing of the years?

10.The importance of the passing of the years, the period between 1960 and 1980, costumes, décor, the suggestion of the times?

11.Zac and his qualities, his possibilities of healing, his mother taking all the phone calls, promoting his skills? People depending on him, asking him for healing? His own attitude, reluctance?

12.The portrait of a young boy, in Montreal, the religious changes in Montreal, more permissive society? The changes in family bonds? Zac and his immersion in the culture, his favourite records, the posters in his room, a person of his time and culture?

A COCK AND BULL STORY

UK, 2005, 95 minutes, Colour.
Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Dylan Moran, Keely Hawes, Gillian Anderson, Naomie Harris, Kelly Macdonald, Jeremy Northam, James Fleet, Ian Hart, Shirley Henderson, Benedict Wong, Mark Williams, Kieran O’ Brien, Roger Allen, Ronni Ancona, Stephen Fry, Greg Wise.
Directed by Michael Winterbottom.

It sounds like a foolhardy venture to attempt to film Laurence Sterne’s 1760 inventive, picaresque novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq. Not only does the plotline ramble, Tristram himself, the narrator, is not born for most of the time. In pre-post-modern style, the narrative is stream of consciousness with the author playing on all kinds of literary forms, word-play, social satire and philosophising about human nature.

But prolific British director, Michael Winterbottom (who successfully filmed Thomas Hardy with 1996’s Jude) and his frequent writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce – writing together under the name Martin Hardy – have pulled it off. Their basic premises was not to transfer the novel as such to the screen (a fatal approach that has damaged many a screen adaptation of literature) but to find the cinematic equivalents of what Sterne was doing. This means that it is a film about how you might make a film of Tristram Shandy as well as a film about the making of a film of Tristram Shandy. The makers have made it contemporary – which means that in ten years time they could make another go of it with a different cast and different frames of reference and humour.

This time the stars are Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden. Coogan made his name on British television with his Alan Partridge persona (and there is a lot of joking reference to this which will be lost on those not in the know). Bryden is part of the very successful satiric show, Little Britain. There is a lot of humour about star temperament and rivalry, billing and enlarging roles and pressures on wardrobe and make-up to satisfy these unreasonable whims.

Coogan thus plays a fictional version of himself (including Kelly Macdonald as his partner with their baby on set), something of his actual self. He plays Tristram as well as his father, Walter. This means that there is a lot of humour and subtext about identity (as when Tony Wilson (whom Coogan portrayed in Winterbottom’s Twenty Four Hour Party People) interviews, as himself, Coogan, as himself and as the fictional Coogan, for an extra on the DVD edition of the film! Rob Bryden is Uncle Toby in the scenes from the book. Various British actors appear as director (Jeremy Northam), writer (Ian Hart), producer (James Fleet) and commentator (Stephen Fry) who part way through the film explains Sterne’s method for those who do not know Sterne.

When Widow Watman’s part is written out, the producers decide to ring Gillian Anderson in LA to ask her to do the role, with a five-split-screen to show all the people amicably involved in the conference link-up. Gillian Anderson does do the role but it takes place in one of Coogan’s nightmares in a special effects womb before he is born as Tristram.

And so it goes. Audiences need to be mentally alert to stay with the various time levels the film is working in, to appreciate the reflective side of the dialogue, to pick up all the jokey references, especially to movies (like a dismissal of the battle scenes in Cold Mountain). Sometimes there is laugh out loud comedy, especially a scene where Tristram has a hot chestnut down his trousers and Coogan can’t act it to make it funny. Bryden then puts a chestnut down Coogan’s trousers and Coogan is wonderfully funny at acting out what it might be like.

A Cock and Bull story is very much that, but an experiment in literary film-making that is a dare that comes off.

1.The title: as explained, visualised? A story of imagination and invention?

2.The literary status of Tristram Shandy? Laurence Sterne as an author? 18th century literature? Tristram Shandy and its experimental style? What it did as literature and variations on literary form, so this film as a cinematic version of what the novel was trying to achieve? In addition, the story of making the film?

3.The re-creation of the 18th century as well as the early 21st century? Moving in and out of each world? The different styles? The literary allusions? Language and the changes in language and vocabulary? Images of the 21st century for 18th century language? Universal humour? Philosophy, issues – and earthiness?

4.The films of Michael Winterbottom, eclectic, British, social concern? The writing of Frank Cottrell Boyce? The quality of invention?

5.The strong British cast: Steve Coogan, as himself, as Tristram Shandy, as his father? Steve Coogan’s television image, film image, personality? The real Steve Coogan versus the image? Rob Brydon and his television career? The playing on this for different perspectives on character? The allusion to real-life events – but fictionalised, especially Coogan’s marriage and relationships?

6.The rivalry between Coogan and Brydon? The opening, the makeup, the discussion about teeth? The rivalry about shoes and height? Their scenes together? Discussing who was the main star and who was the support? Show business jokes?

7.Tristram Shandy and his autobiography, the voice-over, the narration starting before his birth, the birth, the chapters, the literary forms and styles? The variety?

8.The 18th century and Tristram Shandy talking to the reader? 21st century talking to camera? Uncle Toby, the mother and father? Susanna? The midwife, the staff? The pregnant mother? Tristram Shandy at the window? The joke about the circumcision? The wound – the test and the nightmare? Uncle Toby and the European battle? His infatuation for the Widow Wadman? Dinner with the pastor? The creation of the 18th century style and the visual references?

9.The range of literary references, cinema references, to films and actors, to Hollywood? The British film industry – and so many of the cast and crew? Reviews, media, magazines and gossip? Admiration for Al Pacino?

10.The travel to Hollywood, the agent, Gillian Anderson and the invitation for her to be in the film? The split-screen technique? The east with which Gillian Anderson said yes? Her arrival, the scene? The party, the rushes, her comments? The allusions to The X-Files?

11.Steve Coogan in himself, Alan Partridge as his TV image and people assuming they were one and the same? Vanity? Sex and the columnist? The discussions about shoes, his demands, the staff having to find him better shoes? His relationship with Jenny? Jenny and the baby, care, talking to Rob Brydon? Tony Wilson? Interviewing him – and the jokes about Winterbottom’s twenty-four hour party people and Coogan portraying Wilson? The nightmares?

12.Rob Brydon and TV, the talk, rivalry, jokes and impersonations? His acting the role of Uncle Toby, the wound? The vast model of the battle and his explanations, the site of his accident – and the innuendo with Widow Wadman?

13.The crew, the director, the cast, the battle sequences, the producers and the argument about money, ringing Hollywood, the makeup artists and their talk, criticisms of the cast, costumes? Jenny and the discussions about Fassbinder? The army? The writer and the pressure on him to change? Stephen Fry brought in as an expert to explain the nature of 18th century literature and Laurence Sterne?

14.On location, style, pressures?

15.The humour, verbal and visual, farce, irony? The importance of the hot chestnut joke – as impersonated, as shown as spontaneous by Coogan? The quality of visual humour?

16.The achievement, the final meal, the discussion, Stephen Fry appearing again? An inventive experiment for relating literature and cinema?

ALIEN AUTOPSY

UK, 2006, 95 minutes, Colour.
Ant Mc Partlin, Declan Donnelly, Bill Pullman, Goetz Otto, Morwenna Banks, Omid Djalili, Harry Dean Stanton, John Shrapnel, Jimmy Carr, David Threlfall, Shane Rimmer.
Directed by Johnny Campbell.

If you are besotted by UFOs, Aliens and believe firmly in Roswell, don’t see this film – unless you are eager to bypass the evidence and construct a conspiracy theory about what the American government did and didn’t do there and what they want and don’t want us to know.

Not being a UFO addict, I missed the alien autopsy film of 1995, purporting to be the lost film of an autopsy of one of the Roswell aliens. Apparently it was shown to mass audiences all around the world. Now the true (“true”) story is revealed. A local London barrow conman who specialised in pirated tapes and his friend who worked as an accountant in a biscuit factory, sought out memorabilia of celebrities life Elvis, bought them and re-sold them. When they get their hands on the Roswell footage, they find it is corroded and faded. What else can they do but stage their own amateur moviemaking with family, friends and neighbours and pass it off as the real thing. A huge hit. Now they tell their story.

“They” are Ant and Dec, popular entertainers on British television, two interchangeable 30-somethings (well, one is tall and the other isn’t) who have a mass UK following. Whether they have a career in movies is an open question.

It is all lightly amusing, although Bill Pullman and Harry Dean Stanton look as if they are taking the project far more seriously than the locals.

1.The popularity on British television of Ant and Dec? Their TV persona? Inseparable? Cheerful? Their transition to feature films? Successful?

2.The very British setting: the present, the offices and film studios? 1995, lifestyle, London markets, video piracy? The transition to the United States, Ohio? The south? The re-creation of Alien Autopsy? The extract from the original film of 1995? Musical score?

3.The characters of Gary and Ray, their friendship, Gary and his bravado, the market, the videos? The contrast with Ray, the biscuit factory, his expecting advancement, his being consulted, about others being advanced? His clash with the boss, leaving? Gary selling his car? The arguments, the decision to go to America? Gary and his living with his grandmother, dependent on her? The contrast with Ray’s apartment? The travel to America?

4.The seeking out of Elvis memorabilia, the meeting with Harvey, buying the film? Harvey, his explanation about Roswell, taking them home, showing them the film? Harvey and his drinking, his story about Roswell, the CIA giving up jurisdiction, his having the film? The sale? The return to England?

5.The contact with Laszlo Voros? His style, the gangster, henchmen? Sexual orientation? Vanity? Lending the money? His watching the film, wanting to own it, arranging for the screening? The surprise of so many people turning up?

6.Gary and Ray, their worries, their sending the film to the laboratory? Their friend Geoffrey? The news that nothing was visible? The decision – the grandmother, the cameraman, the friends from the local kebab shop? The working on the film, re-creation – and the amusement of amateur photography, special effects, wanting to make it authentically 1947? The success? The fans all turning up, their being satisfied that everything was true?

7.Voros, the money, the standover tactics – and his being murdered? By the Americans?

8.The characters of Grandma, her boyfriend, the kebab shop owners, the camera? Ordinary citizens? Their success?

9.The deals, the auctioning of the film to the television stations, interest around the world, interviews, bidding? Gary and Ray becoming celebrities? On television, being asked awkward questions? Their manner of getting out of the deal?
10.
11.Harvey, watching the TV programs, wanting to get in touch? The news that there was some footage on the film? Their being sick of all the celebrity? Their having the money? Their deciding to bury the film?

12.Morgan Banner, the opening and closing of the film, his coming to Michael Kuhn at his office, the discussions with Gary and Ray, their telling their story? The impact on Banner – and his wanting to find the film?

13.Alien Autopsy in 1995? The claims? The history of Roswell? Aliens and UFOs? The credibility and credulity? The reality of the film or not? The American government – and using the fake film as a smokescreen for the reality? The film showing how such footage could be made – and possibility of all kinds of fakes and conspiracies?

ROGER SCHOLES





You have made both feature films and documentaries. Have you a preference between the two?

Storytelling is really my longing and interest, the influence of storytelling on our lives, on how we live and how we see the world. That's really why I make films. And documentaries - there are stories that are better told in that way and this little story, The Coolbooroo Club is one of those, because it comes from a history of a community, a real story, a true story of events that fiction, the best of fiction, is also about. It's about people in adversity digging deep within themselves and the meaning of their community in order to find the empowerment to go on and deal with things and find their way through this miasma that's been set for them.

So mythically I see it more spiritually or mythically because there's a good conversation to be had between those two

Feature films are really what I want to do, but it took me a long time to get The Tale of Ruby Rose up. I think it was because the way that the story was structured wasn't really legal tender at the time. It was written in 1983. People saw value in its regional history and sociology, but they didn't see value in its connections to the self and the self's spiritual journey because notions of spirituality in the early 80s were still considered to be vague. They were dismissed. Attitudes were quite dismissive. It was a fairly dry, rationalist-based period of time. We're still in it but, fortunately, there are little chinks. People are beginning to see the need to make connections between experience that is not understood or resolved within rational terms.

So Ruby Rose took a long time to get up - and was canned by the people who bought it. They bought it in order to get hold of The Lighthorsemen, but then put it on a shelf. It was a disaster for me because it meant that I had no work. The problem with making films is you have got to play the game - and the game is that your first film has got to give you a bit of a shunt on. If you don't get that, you're the mercy of styles and trend. Within the bureaucratic institutions, it's just like a sea, it can go one way or the other. So it's taken me ten years, basically, to get to the point where the next feature film I'm doing can be made.

I had done a lot of story-writing at that time, but all of the stories have really been about the same thing: how do we connect with the world or with the cosmos and what is the human longing which people refer to in different ways for resolution and hope and where does that hope lie? That's really the focus that I have. It's always in anything I'm interested in doing.

Ruby Rose is set in the 30s and in Tasmania.

It came from oral histories. The original idea came from a clinical history and an oral history. The clinical history was a phobic experience. It's interesting that most phobics, people from all walks of life, if they go through a deep experience, end up invigoring forces or personifying forces in their lives. A highly rational person can, in spite of their rationale, recognise numinous forces at work in their life within the phobia. This is a clinical history.

Then, in the regional histories of Tasmania, in the highlands, there are many stories about people who, in isolation, begin to see beyond traditional perspectives of religion that they have been given.

So in the case of Ruby, that story came from a couple of old histories where people, one woman in particular who spent a lot of time in isolation and she really dispensed with the normal parameters of life. Her search was a spiritual journey. But she wasn't a mystic. Religion was just a dry and arid form for most of these people where, if they were in town, they might go to a service in a church, but that was as close they came to any kind of institutionalised discussion about soul or self, spiritual self. Whereas real spiritual digging was going on in people's lives. There was no dialogue that could be had on any official social basis to inform it. Religion was just a very personal thing. It comes out when you listen to these people.

So those are the two things that interested me: isolation and what isolation does to us. If you're stripped of all of these socialising forces, where do you end up? Most people end up with some sort of inanimate god, a personification of the forces that impact them, in other words, a spiritualising. They lose the Enlightenment picture and they go back to a pre Enlightenment picture of cosmology. That's what interested me.

And you used dream, the Tasmanian Devil and the darkness to explore this?

Yes. It's the same now. That's still my interest.

This has its effect on relationships between men and women and their not being able to be articulate or help one another in their journey?

Yes. These people are captive inside the pictures of self that they were given by their parents and their society. Men were never allowed or meant to have so-called female longings or notions. At least anything like what Ruby was expressing would be considered loopy and, certainly, feminine and, therefore, not part of the male world. Therefore, there's no possibility for them, as husband and wife, to share their problems and their journey.

She wanted to do something for the boy so that none of this would happen to him?

Absolutely. Good on her.

The grandmother and her helping Ruby in the search?

That's right, Grandma. I think that when I wrote the story - probably my attitudes have changed since then - I saw her as someone who clearly had a Christian faith. That was the tradition she was brought up in. But she saw it in what I see to be a cosmological frame. By that I mean she wasn't contained by some kind of Christian fundamentalism. Her experience of the world had taught her that the soul path was the primary religious journey that a person needs to go on. Dogma can, in fact, obliterate that path at times. It can certainly obfuscate it for people.

There was a lot of dialogue in the film that the Americans cut out, dialogue between the two of them which had to do with interpretations - where Ruby was interacting with Grandma about the pictures that she had and how they were connected one to another. In a sense it was more of an explanatory conversation. You know, quite often when film-makers do these directors' cuts, they're not necessarily as good as the film that the producers gave us. I've seen quite a few directors' cuts and sometimes they don't actually work better. They're better off without those parts left to the imagination.

I'm not sure with Ruby Rose. There are some hops or skips in the structure of the story at the points where the Americans cut out sections. They cut out about four major sections in the film, some 15 to 18 minutes. You have to make a leap at those points.

Was that the version we saw?

Yes. We didn't have enough money to do two versions.

A review of Ruby Rose said that the bath sequence was a spiritual rebirth symbol. Are you happy with that kind of symbolism?

Yes, absolutely. It was, in a way, a baptism into a new communion in the sense that Ruby had recognised that she was not alone in the universe, that Grandma was her soul partner. This experience gave her renewed vigour to go back and deal with life. Now, she brought her own baggage to this, the idea of bringing all the stuff of Grandma's back to the mountain. But people do. Life's not a clear path. But, yes, this was clearly a ritual moment for them. Like The Piano, when it came out in 1993, people had already started thinking again about the notion of ritual. But in 1985 or 1986, when we shot Ruby Rose, people didn't really understand this at an ordinary level. I wish in some ways that the film had been made now because so much of the material which is in it would have been better understood by the community.

Do you like that link with The Piano, its setting and themes?

Yes, absolutely.

For most Australians, Tasmania is somewhat remote and the mountains even more so. Could this story have been set anywhere else or is
it particularly Tasmanian?

It's particularly Tasmanian because every regional history is particular. So the Nunga story, from Western Australia, in The Coolbooroo Club could never have happened in Sydney or Melbourne. But, for me, regional history becomes universal myth, the universal story, and the more regional you are, the more universal it's going to become, because the intimacies of a community are the closer experience of spirituality, a mirror of the broader pictures of spirituality.

It's the same for story, like the universal story which variousus contemporary psychologists would talk about. This is the story, there's one monomythic story and we all fit into it. There's a certain amount of truth that I see in that, too. The closer you get to people intimately connected to a community in that story, the more likely you are to find those universal truths. Having said that, I'm sure that you could find a story of isolation which created for a person an inner world which was at odds with the rational pictures that they were given in downtown Fitzroy. But that kind of isolation is absolutely unique.

You don't have those mountain structures anywhere else in Australia, cool temperate highland. In the Australian Alps you've got Kosciusko, but you don't have ups and downs and hidden valleys whereas Tasmania is full of them. And in that time there were still people trying to tame it. This is still the dream that Henry had which he brought from Europe with its history of husbandry to this wilderness. It's the same as in the history of North America. You have conflict or conquest over and against indigenous being. The pictures of indigenousness in Ruby Rose are the land. There are no people left up there to tell that part of the story. Ruby, in a sense is picking up those song lines from the land. She represents an indigenous aspect of the conflict.

The Coolbaroo Club. Where did you first come in contact with the story?

Well, Steve Kinnane is the co-writer and co-producer. He's a Nunga in the community in Western Australia and his family was intimately connected with this story, this history. His mother was Mum Smith. She was one of the main community personalities. She was one of the rocks, one of the anchors. It's not the right metaphor but she was a very strong person and had a very deep connection with belonging and identity. The card games she ran were one way that she could help people stay together. So it was a very personal history for him. He'd spent three years developing an idea that could have become a book but became a film. He was collecting oral histories from many of the people who appear in the film and shaping it into a first draft. It was offered to me as a director as a commission by Penny Robbins, the producer of the film.

From there on, Steve and I sat down and rewrote the script. My interest was seeing this film not as history but as story. And again, what is the meaning of this story for these people and how can we begin to get some idea of how this community operates, lives and exists outside of the `normal issues', `current affairs-driven' picture of Aboriginality that we've got. As a community it really is pretty much disconnected from indigenous history and meaning. So, it's just a little picture of a small group of people and how they live, as if they were one of us, because that's the way they tell the story about themselves.

Steve was very keen on this. He had a more rational base because he's searching for a more objective view of his community's history and I suppose I was coming from a slightly different position where I felt that the more intimate and the more subjective the story, the better.

Did he want to tell the story for his own people or for the broad Australian audience?

It had to be for both and, very importantly, as a Nunga, he knew that it had to be told in a way that made sense for the community, but he also knew that it was quite different from the way we tell stories. We don't have a patriarchal community and an eldership base in our community, partly because of our cynicisms and partly because the Enlightenment has moved towards our notion of democracy. So, there are big differences in the way you tell a story. But it would have to be for both and he really wanted the story to be celebrated within their own community. He wanted the young kids to see something in their forebears' experience that made sense to them - and that's a big problem at present in the Nunga community. There's more and more alienation from the older community, disconnection and loss of meaning. The same kinds of harassment are at work now. Steve thought that this is a story that needs to be out there and abroad in the Nunga community, but also in the Australian community.

Who chose the archival material?

It was created on need. One of the things that I felt very strongly was that, originally, his idea had no real context because, to him, it had already been told: stolen children, settlement life, servants to the whites, all of that was the background to the story; he just wanted to tell the life of the community in the midst of this harassment and what they did. And I completely agreed with him but I said, `Look, you've got to remind people of how they got here', because the importance of the Coolbaroo Club rests in the story behind the story. Otherwise it's just a little old dance club like anybody else's. The meaning of the club rests in what was going on that brought these people together, how they got there and then what they did.

A lot of the contextual material came in that restructuring. We looked all over the place but Steve had a pretty fair idea of what was available. He knew, for instance, that there wasn't one skerrick of footage of Nungas in Perth in existence, because essentially the white press were banned by the government from covering Aboriginal affairs - not in law, but implicitly.

You included race advertisements from the past with what now seem extraordinarily prejudiced and condescending lines, for instance,
about aborigines reading English `and not just the funnies, Jacky...'

`And not just the Sunday funnies, Jacky.' That came from A.W. Morse in a speech at the time.

That was certainly one of the most telling moments in the film. The other aspect is that, while it is a documentary, the sequences re creating the
past gave you the opportunity to do drama. That was an effective way of storytelling, that the audience thought it was looking at documentary
but it was actually looking at drama.

Yes. But, to me there's little distinction. Of course there are distinctions and you have to be guided by the storyteller. And essentially the cosmology and the ethics of the storyteller determine how you make the links between those elements. But this notion that there is objective truth and subjective truth doesn't actually fulfil what we experience. There are connections between story and real life that we have lost that many other cultures don't have a problem with because they blend the two. So too in the Aboriginal community. The way the people tell these stories to themselves was mirrored, or we hoped it would be mirrored, by the way we crafted the film, and the blending of all these elements was one of those things. So, to redress the archival footage, to support one of the points in the story and then go on is exactly what would happen. For instance, `Look at this photo. Here's old Billy. Remember when he was doing such and such'. That's just the way it would be told. So what was your question?

The dramatic sequences...

Well, it wasn't going to work without them, because there's essentially a black hole surrounding footage of the Nunga community. It wasn't going to work as a film unless these elements were enlivened by a story and being able to see characters interacting. Now, on a documentary budget it's very hard and most re-enactment is a sort of stylised two dimensional business which it's hard to get beyond because you haven't got the money to dimensionalise the material you're working with. But we found a really great bunch of people to work with.

The singer was very good.

She's fantastic. She has got a beautiful voice and Lucky Ocean's compositions are fantastic. It was all done in two weeks. Just extraordinary.

Her singing and the dancing enhanced the whole atmosphere. Will the film reach a wide audience and change attitudes?

I think people will find it perplexing in a sense but, hopefully, challenging as well as enjoyable. A lot of European Australians, well-meaning, well-intentioned, may think, `Hang on, why are these people doing white dance stuff? Why are they having to borrow our culture? Why didn't they have the freedom to continue to have their own culture?' But they've missed the point. I felt that when I went in. I thought, `What's going on here?' It took me a while to realise you're just laying another trip on these people. They are evolving as a people and they absorb, like any group of people would, the surrounding social conventions and express themselves socially through those conventions. Full stop.

But we think, `Well, it's not right. There's some further colonialism going on there'. But that's another film, another story, the half-caste notion of aboriginality which offered a sense of place for a lot of people at the time. They'd been dragged from their community experience into servant life, a kind of paltry version of white culture. They weren't allowed to go back to the traditional culture, by law. They weren't allowed to really enter the white community. They had to find a place of their own. But they did.

Some of the older ladies had Catholic religious pictures on their walls.

Quite a lot of the women are Catholic because there were quite a few Catholic missions in Port Hedland, New Norcia and many of them continue to have a Catholic faith. As far as orthodoxy is concerned, I'm not sure. Many Nunga and Koori people blend their Catholic experience with some other more traditional notions of spirituality. For instance, Helena is Catholic but she keeps it separate from the story-telling tradition. It's as if privately she would be making connections between the meaning of her Catholic faith with what I would consider to be the spiritual story in this film, but publicly she wouldn't say it. In a sense what she's giving us is what she's got to give us. There's no point in regressing to a more public proposition of faith. Whereas, when other people speak, they might refer to some more public position, politically or religiously. None of them did, even though they knew that in what they were saying there were connections between the community and the spiritual self.

You also made a documentary about Africa?

Yes, The Valley.

That's the kind of film you've been making since Ruby Rose?

Yes. But I've been trying to make features for ten years and it's been a long, long road. I've written about five or six scripts, two for British producers and they just got lost; one that got sold from under me and has been done by other people; two that are on the shelf at home. My wife, Catherine, is a writer and we have often worked together. We've made about six documentaries together. All of my documentaries are mainly to do with environment/ecology/spirituality/psychology, I suppose. Both of us are very interested in the convergence of each of these disciplines in the modern era and the need for those disciplines to talk to one another, which is not new, but I think it's very important for us to do that.

Catherine has her own work. We're both storytellers. We both work essentially as script editors on each other's projects. She has done four books in that time, so I have been working with her on those. We did a book together called We the Earth, which was published in 1995 and in the United States in 1996. We're planning a documentary based on that book.


Interview: 19th August 1996

RACHEL PERKINS






Radiance was your first feature film. What was your background in film-making before you came to Radiance?

I was living in Canberra and thought I would go to Alice Springs where the rest of my family, that I hadn't really met before, lived. I wanted to meet them. A job came up at CAAMA, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association, so I went for the job, initially as a television presenter. I thought,'it's just an air fare to Alice Springs'. I actually didn't get that job but I got another in the television production department, so I started as a trainee there. That's where it all began, really.

And you did some documentary film-making?

Yes, my production before Radiance, all of it was documentary and television. I had never really done any drama previously.

Did you find that the documentary training and background stood you in good stead, or was Radiance a completely new venture?

No. It was great because I had a good idea of storytelling and the production process as well as working with crews. It was the working with actors that was the unknown thing. But I was lucky to have such good actors that allowed me to find my footing and explore with the whole cast, so that was terrific.

Louis Nowra's play - did he approach you or did you approach him?

Actually, Trisha Morton Thomas, who plays May, the bitter and twisted sister in the film, she's actually my relation and I went to see her do her entry performance. She did the monologue from the film that she does on the mudflat. It's one of the high points of the film. She stood up and did that piece, just on her own, to the audience. I was devastated by the piece and so moved by her performance and the writing that I rang Louis the next day and asked him if I could adapt it as a half-hour drama, because we were talking about doing half-hours at that stage. But he said, "No, look, I think you should do it as a feature." I said, "Fine". So Andrew Myer the producer and I, we got started. It was terrific.

And both you and Louis Nowra collaborated on the screenplay?

Yes. He wrote the screenplay and I worked with him on it.

Was it difficult to make the transition from stageplay to film?

I think everyone's their own judge of that. We wanted to keep its essence, that it was very much a drama between these three people and to keep it claustrophobic, keep it in the house, rather than try and broaden it out too much in the adaption. I think we tried to keep a balance and give it enough narrative push to make it interesting. It was a balance between the two.

It worked that way. It's a very powerful story of women. Was that part of your aim, to bring the insights and feelings of those three women to the screen?

I think so. Obviously being an Aboriginal woman, these characters are close to me and my experience, so it was a story that was close to me, a story that I relate to - not that it's necessarily my experience or the characters like mine, but it was a known area to me. I think that was the more appealing thing about it, rather than working from a feminist point of view. It was just that it was a close story to me. But it was also the writing that really attracted me to the piece. I had never seen women portrayed as characters in such an interesting, fully-dimensional, fully-developed way before.

Where did Louis Nowra got such empathy from?

I know this sounds like a cliche, but a lot of his friends are Aboriginal women and he actually wrote it for the Aboriginal people in the play, Lydia Miller, Rhoda Roberts and Kylie Belling. He wrote it for them and they were involved in a lot of the workshopping of the script so, by the time I got it from being a play, it was quite a developed piece that rang true, because they had spent a lot of time working on the material.

So it's an authentic voice of Aboriginal women?

I think so, yes.

Rachel Maza's character is very successful with a singing career and in opera. You used the operatic overtones to take the audience beyond
the particular world of the Aboriginal women.

Yes. Initially when we were drafting it, people were urging us to give her a different career. They said, "Make her a blues singer, maker her a jazz singer. An opera singer is too unlikely in someone like her." That's a racist premise in itself, for a start. But then we also thought, well, one of the leading opera singers in the world is Kiri te Kanawa, and she's Maori, so that was great.

Deborah Mailman gives a vital performance as well, and Trisha Morton Thomas embodies the disappointment and bitterness. It's a powerful combination. The character of the mother is rather mysterious. What are your perceptions of the dead mother and the effect she had on those three women? The mother belonged to a very different generation of Aboriginal women.

I think both the elder daughters didn't really understand her, as is often the case of daughters and their mothers - it comes later in life that you understand your parents and their social position. I often think children blame their parents for a lot of things, but without understanding the context. It's often the case: children judge their parents without knowing the situation of their parents or understanding their position. I think both the older daughters blamed their mother for not having a good, proper household to grow up in, blamed her for their being taken away to convents when actually she had very little control over that. So they were, with reason, unsympathetic to her.

I suppose I was interested in exploring that and, particularly, those aspects of the stolen generation. A lot of children have felt, "Why did my parents give me up? Why did my mother give me up?" There are often two sides to the stolen generation story, and we wanted to explore that. We didn't really want to make the mother present. We thought of having flashbacks, but felt that the imagined is often more evocative than actually seeing things, so we kept her unidentified, apart from the photo. But, to me, she was a woman who was struggling with being a young, independent, beautiful Aboriginal woman who was growing up in very difficult times. In her situation, she was often betrayed by the men who she thought loved her. And she was used by them, which was just part of being an Aboriginal woman in those times. She tried to have a good life, tried to be in love and live a full life.

A comment about the priest who presided at the funeral and was distracted looking at the daughter?

Yes, that was probably very offensive.

A touch farcical?

Very much, and the actor actually played it all up.

There were very few people at the funeral.

A lot of people asked why there wasn't anyone there. In an Aboriginal community there are always people there. We were making a statement there that does not have much basis in reality, but we were trying to show how extremely isolated they were. There was the question of Catholics cremating people and all sorts of religious inconsistencies there.

Ultimately the ashes in the Radiance container were the source of pathos and black irony.

Yes.

Radiance was very popular at film festivals right round the world.

A couple of critics have said that it only appealed because it was a black film and that the audience was very keen to see it. But I dont think that was valid. There have been two other Aboriginal films and they were both commercial disasters. People found it a moving film, because its heart was there and it really treated people like people. That's what they liked about it.

And for the Australian public?

Look, I think absolutely that there's a resistance to Aboriginal films and Aboriginal people. It's a very strong part of our cultural make-up. But Radiance did quite well, actually, about half a million dollars, which is more than most of the Australian films of 1998 got in box office. So it's done quite well considering the low budget. It's done better than any other Aboriginal film ever before.


Interview: 18th December 1998

SIMON WINCER






Have you a favourite amongst all your films?

It's always a very difficult question because it's a bit like asking a parent which is the favourite child - and I suppose that's a fairly standard answer. Phar Lap is very dear to me because it's a wonderful story and Phar Lap represented so much of Australia to so many people. I was also a great admirer of Tommy Woodcock. He was such a wonderfully genuine human being who was, I think, an old-fashioned Australian hero who had wonderful old-fashioned values. That's very dear to me. But I suppose every film is like giving birth. You live with them for so long - each one takes at least a year of your life - that it's hard to say which is the favourite. I suppose Phar Lap might be slightly more favoured. It was also the film that got me recognised internationally and set me on the path to a much wider career with a lot more options.

You made Quigley with an American in Australia and Lightning Jack with an Australian in America. Quigley was originally written as a western?

It was, and it was actually written a long time ago. Quigley was written originally and developed for Steve McQueen's company but it floundered when he passed away. Then, I think, Clint Eastwood's company, Malpaso, picked it up and kept it for quite a while. The first I heard of it was when Kirk Douglas thrust it at me when he was out here doing The Man from Snowy River and said, `What do you think of this?' It was a pretty average sort of script, very American.

When MGM was reformed under the direction of Alan Ladd Jnr, he sent it to me (it was just after I had made Lonesome Dove) and said, `Look, we know the script needs a lot of work but Tom Selleck's attached to it and we think he would be terrific for this character'. I was very anxious to do something in Australia and I liked its potential, so Ian Jones, the Australian writer, and I reworked the script to fit it into an Australian historical context.

I also think it presented an important side of Australia. But I know the film was absolutely damned in Australia (which I was very upset about), probably more than any film I have ever been involved with. I was more upset that it was totally dismissed in Australia because I thought it had something very important to say about the treatment of aborigines and genocide because there was nothing in the film that did not actually happen, although the story itself was fictitious. All the aboriginal people involved in the film were really great fans of it because it showed a side of history that so many Australians just aren't aware of. My children learn history from Australian history books now, but when I grew up, I learnt Australian history from a British history book. The bias was totally different and we didn't hear about these events.

There are some striking sequences in Quigley, scenes of aboriginal massacres. They are difficult to sit through, but all Australian audiences need to face them. One of the massacres was of shooters firing on the aborigines (but perhaps we are somewhat used to this from American westerns). The other was of the aborigines being herded to the top of a cliff and being pushed over.

It's very powerful and quite confronting. Probably why it was dismissed here was because people didn't want to see an American come to Australia, be the hero, and solve all our problems. But on the other hand, Australia in that era was not really so much `Australian' as it was a British colony and populated by a melting pot of races from all over the world. First-generation Australians were probably not involved in anything like this because they were growing up in the major centres. But the outback was still populated by all sorts of ruthless people, very much rulers of their own little kingdoms.

There is another brief but telling sequence where Tom Selleck meets Alan Rickman, the landowner. At the table it emerges that Rickman wants Selleck to hunt aborigines rather than dingo; the elderly aborigine who's serving at the table stands silently listening to the racist statement that the American Indians have no word for `wheel'. Later there is vindication with a vengeance with the death of Rickman and the aborigine walking silently from the homestead. This had a great deal to say to a wide audience.

Yes, and, in fact, the film was well reviewed in America, particularly in the trade magazines, because they thought it was a frontier classic. It did pretty well theatrically and in America it has done very well in video release. So I was really disappointed in the way it was just dismissed in Australia.

The contrast, then, is the Australian in the United States. How do you see Lightning Jack within those western conventions?

I was not really involved in the genesis of Lightning Jack. Paul Hogan never saw it as a fish-out-of-water story in terms of comparing it to Quigley. Crocodile Dundee was, of course, a-fish-out-of water story but I think Lightning Jack is simply a Western. It doesn't depend on Paul being Australian or anything like that. He is Australian. You can't get away from that. In fact, when he wrote it, he was thinking of just being an American cowboy, but I think it was Greg Coote of Roadshow who said to him, `Paul, don't be silly, you've got too big a persona, you can't suddenly be doing accents and stuff', and he was absolutely right.

But the genesis of Lightning Jack was, in Paul's thinking, bank robberies. We always see a bank robbery in a western with the guys either riding off or getting shot, or, maybe, the third cowboy from the left gets away. Who is this character? What does he do? What is he like and what happens to him after this? So that's really how Lighning Jack came about, the sort of mystery guy who's an underling in a bank hold-up - and he happens to get away. These characters, like anybody else, have flaws, have egos and so forth. That was where Paul really took it from. He wanted to poke gentle fun at the western genre.

He also wanted to make a more traditional, old-fashioned sort of classic western that was not revisionist like, for example, Unforgiven or Lonesome Dove. It wasn't too dusty or too sweaty or too bloody or anything like that. There was more of the feeling that John Wayne could ride over the hill at any moment or canter down the street. So we actually went to all those older classic western locations. I think you can see that, visually, there's a great deal of familiarity with the more traditional westerns and with slightly larger than life baddies and heroes, virtually no blood, and a more up-market saloon than the reality of those days.

So that was the approach. In fact, Paul really wanted to get right away from the fish-out-of-water thing because he felt he had already covered it. And in the 1880s there was not a huge difference between what was happening in America and what was happening with Australia. They were both in the hangover period of goldrushes and land-grabbing.

Reviewers commented on racial themes and the character, Ben, played by Cuba Gooding Jnr. They thought the portrayal and the mannerisms
were racist and a retrograde step. In radio interviews Cuba Gooding denied this. Paul Hogan has said that this was not the intention and that,
in fact, he hadn't thought of it at all.

We were floored by some people's comments - probably more so in Australia than in the United States - about the sort of `Steppin Fetchitt approach' criticism. First of all, the part of Ben was written not for a black actor, nor for a white. We just happened to cast Cuba because we felt he was best for the role. In fact, I think the first actors we were considered were Christian Slater or Johnny Depp, actors like that. They weren't available.

There was not a line of dialogue or piece of business changed for Cuba. But it all takes on a totally different meaning, of course, when suddenly there's a black actor and everyone is so politically sensitive. It had never even occurred to us and I think we were all a bit hurt by some of the comments. For example, criticism was made when Cuba shoots himself in the foot and rolled his eyes - if you shoot yourself in the foot, I defy anyone not to put on some weird expression. Of course, on a black face the eyes look that much wider and that much whiter. While we were all a bit hurt, we have to live with that sort of criticism because certainly nothing was intended by us. At some of the preview screenings, we questioned black members of the audience and they didn't seem to have any problems with the film at all.

Was it successful in Australia?

It has done well in Australia, yes, very well. It's interesting because it took off with a big bang and it was, I think, the twelfth biggest opening of all time in Australia and did very solidly over the Easter period and then gradually, as all films do, started to fall away, then levelled off. Later, older people were still going as well as people who take four or five weeks to make up their mind to go to the movies. I think it grossed eight or nine million dollars in Australia, which is pretty solid, and the film, will, I think, break even throughout the world. I think America was a bit disappointing because again it opened really strongly but the distribution company, Savoy Pictures, didn't have the muscle nor the financial resources to really support it.

The earlier films, Snapshot and Harlequin, were local thrillers. In Harlequin, Robert Powell portrayed a character who was based on Rasputin,
a diabolical figure, a Devil-figure.

In the earlier days of the Australian film industry, I had been working at Crawford Productions with the writer, Everett De Roche. We were toying with some ideas for movies and he often said he was fascinated by the Rasputin legend; that it would be good to do a story on it. I said that it would be nearly impossible to do something Russian and in period. He said, `Well, why don't we do an updated version of the story?'. That's more or less how it came about. We were very lucky to get Robert Powell because he had gained a huge following, particularly in Catholic countries, through his portrayal of Jesus in Jesus of Nazareth.

Robert, I think, is an extraordinary actor because he has a great stillness which is almost frightening. He can simply twitch the corner of the lip or move an eye. I think a lot of the strength of that character in Harlequin is so effective because of the way it's played by Robert - terrifying and yet fascinating. In a way, it's a little like Ralph Fiennes' character in Schindler's List. Amon Goeth is an appalling character but you can't help being drawn in by him because he's just so awesome. Interestingly, Harlequin was most successful in, of all markets, South America - again because of the popularity of Robert Powell.

It's a long time ago, and if I were to remake that film, I think it would be pretty different now - simply because of growing up and experiencing a lot more of life. In those days production was really hurried - I think that film was made in five and a half weeks, or something like that.

The particular angle, the diabolical figure, as part of our Australian screen fiction is an interesting highlight.

It is, yes. Everett really has to take the credit for that rather than me. I was the one who put it on film but it's his creation. I suppose I steered Robert in the direction we thought it should go, but I can't claim credit for having created the character. But it is interesting to create characters like that - there was something about him that women found very attractive too.

In talking about values and devilish characters, are you interested in any explicitly religious themes? Do you have some religious background?

Not really. To give you my background: I'm sort of middle-class Church of England, went to a private school in Sydney and was pretty happy - a very similar background to Peter Weir's. I grew up in Rose Bay and he grew up in Watsons Bay and he went to Scots College, which is up the hill from Cranbrook, where I went to school. My only dealings with Catholicism in those days was football, when we played CBC Waverley or Joeys (St Joseph's, Hunters Hill) or some school like that. They were always tough and they always seemed to have hairy legs.

I was, of course, confirmed and Liz and I still occasionally go to church - at Easter time. And, quite often, in Los Angeles on a Sunday morning we'll get up and go to Church - she's a Presbyterian and we just go because we enjoy the experience. I regard myself as a Christian - not what you'd call deeply Christian - and I've tried to instil those values in my children, who have all been brought up Catholics because their mother was Catholic.

As regards religious themes, Operation Dumbo Drop, a job for Disney, delves very slightly. It's about a rag-tag group of soldiers that have to escort an elephant across Vietnam - a true story and wonderful story - and they suddenly realise the religious significance of this elephant to the group of people they're trying to take it to. There's a very powerful scene where the young boy who's attached to the elephant as a mahout walks into a temple in the middle of the night. It's somewhat overgrown by the jungle. It's an elephant temple. I've been into some of these temples and they're extraordinary. The group realise the significance of this being, an eye-opening experience for them.

You made The Girl who Spelt Freedom, another Disney feature?

That's right. George and Prissy Thrash were Baptists from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Through the church they both felt they had a calling and took on the care of a Cambodian family, all of whom I've met - a most lovely group of people. I'm sure Lin Yan would be capable of running America one day, she is so bright, so articulate.

That was a very interesting experience. When I cast Mary Kay Place and Wayne Rogers and all the kids, we were filming one night at Vancouver Airport, which is where we made the movie because there is a large Cambodian population there, and the real Thrash family came up with Lin Yan's family from Chattanooga. They all met each other that night and it was fascinating because they all turned out to like each other and be so like each other. The only difference was that George Thrash is actually quite small and Wayne Rogers is very tall, but Mary Kay Place and Prissy Thrash are almost identical and they just hit it off at once.

These are more serious-minded Disney films.

That's interesting because, when Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg took over Disney in late 1984, they decided to get back into this sort of movie for the Disney Sunday night movie and this was the first of them. I thought it was such a good one because it was really the story of children of the killing fields, a true story about a little girl who had never been in a classroom in her life, got to America and became the shining star in the spelling bee and got to meet the president. I think it was a wonderful heartwarming story.

Values, legends, myths seem to appeal to you. What is your approach to myths in doing The Young Indiana Jones films? And you have
explored, especially in Phar Lap and The Lighthorsemen, the Australian ethos and myths.

Yes, and it was the same for my involvement with The Man from Snowy River. I suppose we all like to dream about being the best or creating the best. I remember at school wanting to be the best at football, the one that people looked up to. I've always looked up to people so, I suppose, legends and heroics go back to that sort of thing. But I am fascinated by this. I guess, I don't quite know why. It's always easier for the critic to look in and say, `Well, this is probably why', than for me to be analytical about it. I've always liked the classic story and the mythic proportions. I've had a few conversations with George Lucas about this, an extraordinary person that I really enjoyed working with.

I bought him a beautiful bronze lighthorseman as a 50th birthday gift, because I did an episode in Turkey about the Australian Lighthorse, a sort of remake of The Lighthorseman. It's from a different perspective, where young Indy's in Beersheba as a spy, trying to save the city from being blown up as the Australian horsemen come in. Cameron Daddo played the leading Australian character, delightfully too.

So you have made The Lighthorsemen twice?

Revisited it, yes. What happened, in fact, was that George Lucas actually bought the film from RKO in America so he could use footage from it. So we've intercut footage from the original into the new. It was very interesting because we had Turkish horsemen playing the lighthorsemen. It's fascinating to see them dressed up as Australian, the men that were firing the guns at them out of the trenches. Anything heroic gets the old heart beating - and that's a heroic story, 800 men who galloped across a three-mile open plain into Turkish cannons machine guns and entrenched Germans. They didn't question what they were doing but did it because they were told to. To me these are wonderful values that seem to be fast disappearing from this sad world we live in.

You invested Phar Lap with something of that same kind of drive for success. Tommy Woodcock had it.

Phar Lap was an icon to the Australian public especially during the Depression. There was something about that horse - he came from the wrong side of the tracks, he was half owned and trained by a battler, he wasn't part of the Establishment; he was a working-class horse, if you like, and he became an icon because people knew they could go to the course and put a bob on Phar Lap and they would get their money back. I think that has very deep roots in the `them and us' thing which has always been big in Australia. I suppose that goes back to the convict days because not only was Phar Lap trained by a battler and half owned by a battler, but the other half-owner was Jewish and American to boot, so that was really shoving it up the Establishment and the squattocracy.

Do you think that the editing of Phar Lap for the American audiences altered its dramatic impact?

We talked about this a great deal. Everyone in Australia knows the horse died and we wanted to deal with that and get it out of the way and end the film on the note of his greatest triumph rather than his death. I preferred the film the Australian way but obviously in America it's not a well-known legend. It took the film a while to get going over there. But, again, if I remade the film now, it would be interesting to see the approach we would take. We just learned so much over the years. David Williamson and I talked for ages about it, and with John Sexton for ages. That's the approach we decided to take because we knew that otherwise the audience would be sitting there waiting for the final death scene. I said we wanted people to leave the cinema up rather than down.
I would love to work again with David Williamson. I'm a great admirer of his but nothing has presented.

Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man?

After doing so many period films, it was nice to do something that's very contemporary. I do like doing action films, films with a lot of action, and so I guess that's the reason I did it. Probably the script could've been a lot better. But it's interesting that when was shown on Australian television, a lot of people who didn't see it in the theatre here - it did okay but not great - particularly of my son's vintage, came up and said, `I really enjoyed that film'. I had just got back from the US opening of Lightning Jack, and was quite surprised that all sorts of people came up and said how much they enjoyed it.

Finally, Free Willy?

Again it's them and us, it's the good triumphing over evil. What appealed to me about it (and all my films apart from, say, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man), is that they're all pretty much family-based films. They have very broad appeal. I like every kind of film as part of an audience but also as a film-maker. Because you have to live with something for so long, I'd rather live with something that I personally enjoy. I love ending films on a note of triumph. If all my films have a common thread, it's that they have a very strong emotional thread, all of them.

You received unanimous favourable reviews for Free Willy.

Yes, pretty much everywhere. When I read that script, I knew if we could deliver that moment of the whale jumping over the wall we had a movie. It's a very strong story, the little boy, the parallel stories: what appealed to me about the film was the theme of family, the boy who has no family, trying to come to terms with foster parents and new family and the whale that has been plucked away from his family, the two of them being drawn together and having a similar background and, somehow, forming this unusual friendship. It really appealed to me a lot.


Interview: 8th May 1995

PHILLIP NOYCE


Clear and Present Danger is a Tom Clancy action thriller but it seems to be an ethical film or a film that takes ethical stances?

Yes, it has a very strong moral line. It's really about the rule of the law - one of the basic assumptions of the film is that human beings are imperfect and, as a result, we need protection from ourselves. That's why we codify human behaviour by erecting laws, by having moral codes that we are expected to follow. This is a film essentially about what happens when we don't follow those laws.

That's what America was doing in the '80s?

It's what the whole world has been doing. It's about the chaos that results when we ignore the laws or the moral code.

This is a film for the new political era. In the post-Cold war world, the influence of the American president has become even greater as the United States is increasingly called upon to act as a police force to the world. This is a film that asks when it is appropriate for such a powerful nation to act and how should it act. Jack Ryan has to decide whether he keeps quiet and not injure the presidency, the institution he has served for so many years or does he do something that will endanger his own career and reputation and endanger the presidency and plunge the whole country into turmoil akin to Watergate or the Iran Contra affair.

Staying with ethical issues, what do you think Backroads contributed to an Australian understanding of aboriginal issues?

I don't think it contributed a whole lot to understanding. I think it probably contributed much more to aboriginal self-awareness because, as insignificant as this might seem, it was the first film which gave them a hero or an anti-hero. And the film has been very popular - even now, 20 years later, it's still screened and shown all around Australia to aboriginal groups.

I'm not sure that it had a great effect on the rest of Australia because essentially it was preaching to the semi-converted. I don't know whether it made them any more aware.

You're pleased with it in retrospect?

I think so. I mean it was principally an artistic exercise, and part of that notion turned it into a political tract. The idea was to construct a B-movie, a road movie, and then, by inviting Gary Foley - who was a known activist and spokesperson for the then strong black movement in Australia, an emerging black movement - by inviting him to be the star, I knew that there would be a political confrontation in the making of the film and that this would appear on the screen. But that was an artistic decision and, as it turned out, the film then evolved into a political statement.

So I'm pleased with it in retrospect in as much as we achieved that confrontation. We captured it on screen so the film was a weird combination of this escapist B-movie and political tract, and somehow they sat together in the one strange document.

There are more explicitly religious themes in Newsfront. In looking at, say, the presentation of the Catholic Church in films, Newsfront offers
some significant perspectives: Angela Punch McGregor's staunch character, especially, her leaving her husband and, against the laws
of the Church, actually re-marrying and giving the Church away. There were also church sequences associated with the anti-Communist
referendum of 1951. What was your perspective on things Catholic as you dramatised them in Newsfront?

You must remember that this is not exclusively my perspective because Bob Ellis was the writer of the original piece - I adapted the screenplay but he was the original screenplay writer - so he's principally the author in that respect or it's a shared authorship in film terms, because I was then interpreting his writing and, in a sense, adapting and reinterpreting it by the characterisations and so on.

I think that Australia and the Australian character has been formed through the confrontation between Irish Catholicism and Anglicanism and, of course, these are, at least in part, seemingly irreconcilable philosophies. In my interpretation, the one philosophy, the Irish Catholic philosophy born out of the combination of the Irish experience and Catholic doctrine, is that you should not expect to inherit the earth while you're on the earth but you will later, whereas English and Scottish Protestantism says you will inherit it now and you should do everything you can to get it because it's yours. So take it and don't worry about later. We'll worry about that when we get there.

This is a film, in part, about the confrontation of those two sets of values. But it's also very much a film about Australian Catholicism, the good and the bad aspects of Australian Catholicism - the repressive aspects and the enlightening aspects. But, as we know, and as in America, the Catholic Church was also seemingly split into two extremes: one the extreme Right, the other the extreme Left. And it has always harboured these seemingly irreconcilable philosophies.

Angela Punch Mc Gregor's character, in moving from her staunch stances to her abandonment of Catholicism, seems to represent what was
actually happening with Catholics during the 50s and 60s?

Yes, the film principally describes change, and Australia has changed enormously since the Second World War. The seeds of those changes are to be found in that first decade after the war.

In Heatwave we again find ethical issues. You have used the word `confrontation' several times. Heatwave seems to be an ethical-confrontational film.

Yes. Heatwave was the story of a working-class Protestant boy who made good. I don't know whether audiences realised that, but we had always assumed that he was a working-class Protestant and that Judy Davis's character was a middle-class Catholic girl. She, in the Catholic saintly tradition, had adopted a social cause - had set herself up as the spokesperson and protector of the working class. He, as a working-class boy, of course, was now forced to confront the moral implications of his own success and how that affected other people.

In a way, the religious and ethnic backgrounds of the two characters were just a continuation of the conflicts that we had seen in Newsfront, but Australia had by this stage moved from a principally working-class and upper-class society to a principally middle-class society.

That's captured in the atmosphere of inner Sydney, its buildings and the regulations of law and government.

Obviously it's a film which deals with ethics and morals and responsibilities and just like Clear and Present Danger, the issue of right and wrong. But it seems as though so much Australian history - and I'm talking about that conflict between Irish Catholicism and English Anglicanism - was captured in those conflicts over land development. By that time, of course, it had been embraced by groups who had come to Australia after World War Two. The English seemed to have joined with any nouveau riche who presented themselves, whether they were Czechoslovakian or Hungarian or whatever.

The most interesting thing about Australia is Irish Catholicism - I mean, it's the basis of the country.
Interestingly enough, I think that it is the basis of the value system and has had much more effect - or at least it has produced the unique Australian character - much more than the English, in my opinion, simply because of its strength.

Through personalities and the public moral stances?

A great deal of that has to do with transportation, as Robert Hughes points out, as much as it does immigration. This is because of the number of radicals, whether they were political or religious or social, who were transported from the British Isles between 1788 and 1850. As Hughes points out, every single radical movement in the British Isles sent a representative to Australia.

You moved into Asia with Shadows of the Peacock (Echoes of Paradise).

Echoes of Paradise was a very different film from the one we intended to shoot, because the film was meant to be set in Bali and, at the last minute, due to an inflammatory anti-Suharto family article in the Sydney Morning Herald, all permission was withdrawn and we ended up shooting a bastardised version of the film in Thailand which we probably would have been better off not to have shot.

It might have been much more political?

Yes, the original story was very different. It was really about the Balinese character's alienation and his coming to terms with it, coming to terms with a western influence and his traditional obligations, trying to work it all out. Wendy Hughes' character went through a very similar journey in the original story. It's just that the setting and the Balinese character were very different once we moved to Thailand.

Twice in Clear and Present Danger there were references to East Timor - briefly in a news bulletin on the radio and in a remark made to the
American President by one of his advisers.

You did hear it? Actually it's not the radio, it's the TV earlier on - in fact, it prophesies a revolution. It's a little low, unfortunately. I mixed it too low, but in it the Fretilin have taken over the radio station in Dili.

It was a bit low but then the President's or his adviser says that the situation is calm.

I put it in for the Indonesians. It's symbolic really. I thought, `We'll put it in and we'll see if they pick it up. If they don't, well, that's one over them because they'll have this film out there throughout the country, a hundred prints all around Indonesia and a lot of people will hear it, will wonder about it and they will start some discussion. If they ban the film, then it will be really interesting, because they'll ban it on such a flimsy pretext. This itself will cause some discussion. Otherwise they'll have this sixth column element running around all the villages of Indonesia.

But I should have mixed the TV comments - it was a delicate thing - where the Fretilin have taken over the radio station, just a little louder. I was afraid that if I made it too loud, the authorities would hear it and they would definitely cut it out. But I now realise that it's just a little low.
It's in there for the Indonesians. It's aimed squarely at a building in Djakarta called the Department of Information, which is full of funny little men who do nothing else but listen to radio shows, television shows, read newspapers and things like this, so that they can ban whatever is considered anti-Indonesian. It's a whole building of Orwellian characters.

And your move to Hollywood?

I grew up watching and delighting in Hollywood movies. Hollywood is the Mecca for directors and I'm happy to work there while I can. I am interested in the content of a film rather than its pictorial possibilities. But I am also an outsider and can bring a `South Pacific cynicism' to a film and that is a virtue. With Clear and Present Danger, there is an opening close up on the American flag. I can force the audience to look at the kitsch and reflect on it. It is a portrait of American life slightly different from one made by an American, an involuntary filter placed over events. Czech Milos Forman's view of American life is different - and the U.S. liked it. Paul Verhoeven, with Basic Instinct, brought a combination of repression and indulgence that is Dutch. With the Jack Ryan stories, I have a combination of escapism and reality (though some believe one cancels out the other) and audiences can be entertained and enlightened simultaneously, escapism and political relevance all rolled into one. That's the best combination.

As a director?

There are ten or fifteen superstars in the United States on whom Hollywood depends. But there are three to four hundred directors waiting for a phone call from the superstar!

The director is a ringmaster in a circus. A good circus is no good without a good ringmaster. All those good acts can fail - a big pause and someone needs to bring on the clowns, and when the clowns aren't funny, you need a drum roll. The tightrope walker beings. And you need another drum roll.

But directors are also like vampires sucking the life-blood ideas out of everyone around them - and then calling them their own. A director needs to have a soft front, a strong back and allow everyone to speak up.


Interview: 8th September 1994

NEVER DIE ALONE

US, 2004, 88 minutes, Colour.
DMX, Michael Ealy, David Arquette, Clifton Powell, Drew Sidora, Antwon Tanner, Robbie Robinson.
Directed by Ernest R. Dickerson.

Never Die Alone is a very grim drama. It is a portrait of a petty criminal, a drug thief in New York City. It is also about turf wars amongst the gangs in American cities. It serves as a portrait as well as a warning.

The film was directed by Ernest R. Dickerson, a cinematographer who moved to directing in the 1990s, making a number of similar films as well as working in television. He gives his film a dark tone with his cinematographer’s eye.

The star of the film is DMX, well-known rapper, who appeared in a number of films, especially Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 the Grave with Jet Li. David Arquette stars as a novelist who saves the main character from an attack and takes him to hospital, being rewarded with his money and jewels as well as a box of cassette tapes which are an audio diary of the criminal career of the character who is called King David.

The film is violent, tight, rough. It is an interesting example of the black urban genre.

1.The audience for this film? African Americans? White Americans? The impact in the United States? Its relevance worldwide?

2.The tough gangster world, the world of journalists? Street violence, drugs? Betrayal? Money, power? Death?

3.Ernest Dickerson as a cinematographer, his camera style? The use of high definition? Editing and pace, action sequences? Immersing the audiences in the action and the violence?

4.The musical score, the black music? DMX, the rap music?

5.The structure of the film: the audience seeing the dead man in his coffin, the voice-over? Audience approach to his way of life? In view of his death? The death images?

6.A deeper understanding of King David, the cassettes? His reputation? As a person, his personal style, violent and monstrous? The confrontation with the gangsters? His paying back his debts? His being targeted? The violent attack, his being wounded, it leading to his death? His relationship with women, sexuality, the girlfriend, their interactions? Drugs and his making women dependent on cocaine and then heroin? Mike and his partner, meeting him in the street, angers, his death? The audiotapes? Paul, taking him to the hospital, his being given the rings, the jewels and the tapes?

7.Mike and his friend, their world, the sister? Moon as the leader, his orders? Their attitudes towards King David, violence? His being stabbed, the sister shot? The repercussions? Mike’s friend and his type?

8.Moon, the gangster, his henchmen? His loans, wanting the money back, a loan shark? The exercise of power? His orders? Deaths?

9.The women, the girlfriend, the prostitutes, the sister? Their place in this society? Victims?

10.Paul, in the bar, his work, the drink, his seeing the situation, helping King David, taking him to the hospital, his fears? The orderly, the rings? Paying the expenses?

11.His listening to the tapes, his wanting to be a writer, the discussions with the editor? The investigation of King David’s career?

12.The effect on Paul? The effect on the audience? The initial sympathy when he lay dead, his views on reincarnation, redemption and atonement? Looking back over his life – possibilities of redemption, or not?