Talk Talk Talk May 2005

Features
TALK TALK TALK
Bruce Beresford, Australian film director

May 2005

Vivid: I pulled out your biography, and some interviews you have done.

Bruce Beresford: Oh did you? Off the Internet? I’ve never seen them, give us a look. Where do they get these from, ‘Film Freak Central’? What a horrible photo! That must have been some time ago.

So what good films have you seen recently?

Well, to be really esoteric, I saw a wonderful Korean film in Sydney called Musa. It was just billed as a Korean epic, and I thought, “Uh, I’ve never seen a Korean epic.” And I watched it and was completely staggered. I was so stunned. I thought, “Am I going completely crazy, or is this the best adventure film I’ve ever seen?” You know, just an adventure film, something like Ivanhoe. It was set in the 14th century, about some Korean envoys who are sent to outer Mongolia, then they have to fight their way back to Korea across these deserts, and there are baddies, and tribesmen, and they rescue a princess. I’d never seen action scenes staged so well – never. And there was none of that silly running up walls – you know when they run up walls and across treetops. They minute they do that I’m gone, I’m out of there. Like in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I thought, “The moment someone runs across a lake, I’m leaving.” And it happened almost straight away, so I left. But in this one, the fights were so bitingly real. I looked up on the television guide and noticed that it was on the next day, so I taped it and have watched it twice since then. It was just fantastic, but no one has ever heard of it, so I’ve been thinking, “Am I the only person who thinks this is a masterpiece?” And it had a huge budget, a massive budget.

The fight scenes were realistic, then?

The fight scenes have to be seen to be believed. You can see the actors really struggling. The choreography made the battle scenes seem so realistic, you just end up thinking that they must have killed half the cast. They had these huge swords, and gunpowder that they packed these explosives into primitive shells and threw at each other. The characterisations were fantastic too. Whenever the Koreans got into a dangerous situation I found that my heart was pounding. It’s a much better film than anything going around, much better than Hero, much better than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Gladiator was probably one of the best epic adventure films made in recent years.

This is a better film than Gladiator. Gladiator was brilliantly directed, but this film has a much better script. And it has very good dialogue too – even in the subtitles, I thought the dialogue was marvellous. Another film I liked recently was Downfall, about Hitler’s last days. I’ve already seen it twice. It’s brilliantly directed with the most meticulous eye to recreating the period, and superbly cast, right down to the smallest role.

What about some of the films that featured in this year’s Academy Awards?

I think I saw all of those. I saw Million Dollar Baby, and thought it was quite good. I think Eastwood’s films films have got better. Some of his earlier films were so sloppy, they ought to have been shot again. He seems to be more careful now, and this is better. And he’s using a better cameraman. Million Dollar Baby is beautifully shot, and conjures up that rather seedy world of the boxing ring very well. But I thought that about two thirds of the way through, after the girl has the accident, it became rather sentimental and implausible, and I kind of lost interest after that. But I thought the boxing scenes were well done, and Eastwood’s own performance was absolutely stunning.

He did a great job of directing it, too.

You know, when you’ve got to direct actors, you’re always terribly aware of what it is they are giving and what they’re exposing. When I did Crimes of the Heart I was so aware that Sissy Spacek really laid it on the line. The emotions were just bare, emotionally naked, she held nothing back. She got an Academy Award nomination for that. And you compare that with Jessica Lange’s performance in the same film … well, she was just performing. I mean she is wonderful, and it’ll come across well, but …

She was acting.

She was acting, yes. And Diane Keaton is very talented, but such a peculiar sort of person, that the reality she reveals is not so everyday. She’s a very nice woman though - extremely charming, completely unaffected.

You are right in that scene, aren’t you? Do you think of yourself as a Hollywood director?

No, not really. I’ve never lived there. With a lot of these actors, you work with them and it’s like a shipboard romance. You become friends and stay in touch with some of them, but no more so than anyone else in other aspects of your life. You know, I find that with almost all the films I’ve done, I often become great friends with the writers, because I’ve got a lot more in common with them. The writers are almost always very interesting people with an interesting take on the world. I’d say on about half the films I’ve done I’m in constant touch with the writers.

And you’ve done a lot of writing yourself.

I’ve done quite a bit. I’ve written two new films. Most recently, I wrote an adaptation of The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney – you know, the great 1,000-page Australian epic novel, by Henry Handel Richardson.
I adapted it for TV, over four one-hour segments – I don’t know if they’re going to do it or not. And then I did an adaptation of the David Malouf novel, The Conversations at Curlow Creek, for an American producer. I was at home in Sydney for about a year doing those two, which I liked a lot. So that was quite fun.

Is David Malouf living in Australia now?

Yeah, he lives quite near me, in a little terrace house in Redfern. He must be about 70 now, but he’s one of those trim kind of guys who will just go on forever.

Wasn’t he at one stage one of those Australian artists living in an enclave in Tuscany?

He was, along with Jeffrey Smart and a lot of those people …

And Germaine Greer.

And Germaine Greer. I was at university with Germaine. What a ratbag she was. Yeah, David Malouf was one of those artists who lived in Tuscany, but I think he just got sick of all the travel. He now has a place up on the Gold Coast. He writes up there. Have you been there? It’s ghastly. I asked him why he has a place up there, and he said, “No one I know would ever go there, so I can work completely undisturbed. No one I know will drop in.”

You had early success directing the film of another Henry Handel Richardson novel, The Getting of Wisdom, which was a great film.

Yes, that was a good film. Anyway I did that script for an American producer, and I got an email from him yesterday saying he now thinks he’s got it financed. I’d love to do it. It’s set in Australia in 1826 in the convict era, about an Irishman who is in the British army, who is sent out over the mountains to Curlow Creek where he has to hang a bushranger that they’ve caught. And they want to hang him because if they bring him to Sydney and try him, they might have another rebellion on their hands from all the Irish prisoners, because they had already had one back in 1812. They didn’t want to have to explain to King George that Australia had become an Irish republic, and not a British colony. So he goes out there, and because they’re both Irishmen, he gets to know him quite well. Then the question becomes, Is he going to hang him in the morning? And there are three others there, who watch over the two of them with increasing suspicion. Right until the end you don’t know what will happen.

How important is it to be remembered as having made a difference in filmmaking, as having made a statement, as opposed to making a great yarn, like The Matrix?

I have no objection to straight adventure films, as long as they are well done. The problem is that most of them are so tawdry and repetitive and cliché-ridden. That’s why I liked Musa so much – because it’s fresh.

You’ve made some films that have stood up for the underdog, and been anti-system. Breaker Morant, for example.

Well, yes. But nobody ever saw that film. It doesn’t help my career, making films like that. Well, I suppose it did, because it got good reviews. It had no audience.

But it was early in your career, and you’ve got to go through that. You can’t just click your fingers and become a world famous film director.

No. I suppose actually it did help me, because it was at Cannes. And then I got all these American producers saying, “We want you to come and do a film for us, Bruce, we saw Breaker Morant.” And when I asked where they saw it – because it had hardly been screened anywhere outside Australia – they said they had seen it on the plane between LA and New York. And they all watched it as an in-flight movie. Then I started getting all these scripts sent over. And yet Breaker Morant never made a cracker, anywhere. Even in Australia, it flopped. But it was somehow very prestigious, and I still get people ringing me up and offering work on the strength of Breaker Morant – a film that has had a worldwide gross of less than $1 million in 25 years (laughs).

And then there was The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

Well that was a popular success in Australia. Actually that was a mistake to have made it, because it got such a critical blasting in Australia that I was out of work for quite some time (laughs).

But there weren’t many films being made in Australia at that time.

Well they were just getting going then.

Did Barry Humphries write that?

We wrote it together.

So both you and Barry Humphries can be credited for inventing spewing onto a canvas as an art form, right?

(Laughs) I adapted it from his comic strip in Private Eye. He gave me the strips, and I did the original adaptation, and we changed it around a bit, then he gave me other material from a Barry McKenzie musical, which he’d started to write and abandoned.

You look back on things that you’ve done with no budget and with just the resources that were there at the time and you cringe, but surely most filmmakers have to go through that.

Well, none of those films had any budget. I mean, Breaker Morant was only $600,000 which, even at the time, was very small.

And you did Don’s Party, and The Club. And then you did Puberty Blues, which was the last Australian film you made before going to America.

Well I’d been sent a pile of scripts from Hollywood, all on the strength of Breaker Morant, but they were all fairly conventional. The only one that was any good was Tender Mercies, which was actually a great script. The writer, Horton Foote, had seen Breaker Morant. The producers all said No, no, we can’t have an Australian make a film set in Texas, but evidently he insisted. So I ended up directing it, and it won three Academy Awards.

And after that it was basically either Australian or American financed films …

Well I’d have made more films in Australia if I’d been able to get them off the ground, but its not that easy.

… except for one, in Nigeria.

Mr Johnson? Well that was American financed, but low budget. The only feature film that’s ever been made in Nigeria, and probably the only one that ever will be. That is not a country you want to go to.

I did live there for a while, when I was a kid, in the 1960s.

Did you? I was there too then. Where were you?

In Lagos.

Well I was in Enugu, working for the government film unit, between 1964 and 1966. It was chaos then, and it’s worse now. When we went back there to do Mr Johnson in 1990, we found no post, and no phones. And although there are police in the towns, they don’t seem to do anything. There are no traffic police. And when there’s a car accident, which happens all the time, the bodies just seem to stay by the side of the road. There are no ambulances and no hospitals. All the basic services that the British left in place – the railways, for instance, they don’t work any more. You can’t send anything, such as bank transfers, because they’ll be stolen too. When I was there I wanted to contact someone in a town about 200 miles away. What you have to do is get a man, and a car, and pay him to drive there. And wait. The country’s just completely broken down.

And the film that you’re making in Bulgaria. How do you feel about that?

Well, it’s a thriller, I mean it’s, you know ...

Do you like making thrillers?

If the script is OK.

Is that the first thing you look at – the script – to help you decide to do a film or not?

Usually yes, but I think I took it because I’d been trying to set up so many films that hadn’t come off.

Would you never sign on for a film with a bad script?

I guess I wouldn’t accept a film with a script that I didn’t think I could make work.

Like for example, Double Jeopardy. You didn’t like the script for that, did you?

Well, it was very hard to make that believable. I think I did a good job directing that, because audiences swallowed it. And it just doesn’t make any sense at all (laughs).

I thought that was quite an achievement, because I still keep meeting people who tell me how much they liked it. “What a good story,” they say, and the story was ludicrous. But it was done in a way that as you watched it, you bought it.

I bought it ...

You see!

… until I read a couple of interviews in which you really canned it.

It’s OK, it was quite fun to do. It’s a kind of genre thriller, and they can be good. I’d been watching quite a few, and the best one I’ve seen in the last few years is The Bourne Identity. A very well directed film and a very good script, which moved well.

So the script is all important.

The script is so crucial. Ever since I started working in films I’ve noticed that the greatest area of dispute you have with people has to do with the script. And the number of people who can actually recognise a good script when they read one is effectively zilch. It always amazes me that when you get a script there will be writing all over it saying this is a masterpiece, and then you meet these people and you realise that their idea of a masterpiece is a book like The Da Vinci Code (laughs).

Isn’t that funny? What they’re probably thinking is that this script will probably work at the box office.

Well, it’s a struggle. When we were doing Driving Miss Daisy, which is certainly one of the finest scripts I’ve ever had, the screenplay was marvellous, and I thought it would be so easy to set up because it was such a fine piece of writing, you can’t go wrong. Well, boy, was I wrong. The script assessors all hated the script. It took us three years to get the money to make it. I remember sitting down with Richard Zanuck and saying, “Could we be wrong?” Everyone else that we had given the script to thought it was absolutely hopeless. And he said, “We’re not wrong. We have to keep going.”

That film did a lot for black-white relations, didn’t it?

A lot of black people in America didn’t like it, because the black man was the chauffer to the white girl. But it was a period film, and black men can work as chauffers in period films. Morgan Freeman, who played the chauffer, thought the criticism was absolute rubbish, completely absurd. The two become best friends in the film, which shows how genuine understanding between two people bridges everything. They were crazy objections. It cost almost nothing to make - $7 million – and certainly made a lot of money. But I was lucky in a way because it was financed by a Canadian guy called Jake Eberts, which meant that I didn’t have the studio breathing down my neck all the time.

Obviously you can muck up a film as a director but the less interference you have the better the film is likely to turn out.

The best films that I’ve made without exception were the ones where I wasn’t told to change everything. And the worst ones were the ones where they came in and said Oh we don’t like this and we don’t like that, and you change it all and you think, “Well, it’s completely shithouse now (laughs).”

So can you work with the big studios?

Yes you can, because you often find people at the big studios who don’t alter everything. That was the case with Double Jeopardy. There were some people who came in and watched the test screenings and fiddled a few things around, but generally speaking, I wasn’t monstered. They didn’t come in and make radical changes that were going to undermine it. I mean, I know an Australian who went to America to make three features, and when I saw him he said he wouldn’t even know he directed them, so different did they turn out.

I guess that can happen quite easily.

Well, whenever there’s a lot of money involved people can get frantic, and I guess they’re just trying to protect their interests. More often than not I think it’s counterproductive. The thing that proves it really is seeing the director’s cut of a film. Find one director’s cut that is not superior to the original film. I bet you can’t. They’re always better, always.

How difficult is getting an idea for a film off the ground?

It’s tough. It’s relatively easy with genre movies but much harder to get something really interesting financed. That’s why I think some of the very best films that are made are low budget independent films. The studio films with tend to be fairly conventional and predictable. I know from flying around a lot that when you get on a plane and you look at the list of movies they’re playing and even though on planes you’re really bored, you’re not that bored that you want to watch this kind of rubbish (laughs).

Bruce Beresford was Head of International Jury at last month’s B-Est International
Film Festival.