Past Programs
Actor - 2008
The Week in Film
02/10/2008
Appropos Paul Newman, who died this week aged 83
I once heard it said that it was easier for the beautiful to be good than for the rest of us. The logic being that the beautiful receive more attention and affection than the rest of us, and so, bathed in emotional sunshine, can spread warmth and cheer.
Now it ain't necessarily so on my observation, but the remarkable thing about Paul Newman is that he was, for one so physically favoured, never a narcissist onscreen. The extent of his goodness we only truly discover on his death.
The actor with the chiselled jaw, the crinkly grin and those arresting blue eyes was a huge part of the cinema of my teens. Indeed I think I spent my first date, aged fifteen, in the Woy Woy picture theatre distractedly watching Newman, the outsider, the drifter with the shady past, juggle amour with both Joanne Woodward and Lee Remick. This was in the Long Hot Summer, and it was an awkward occasion. I was wearing a condom on my thumb in the mistaken belief that it was something else. But that's another story. Someone enlightened me, at interval.
The fifties though were like that at the movies. Sex meant small southern towns and repressed sons and daughters chafing under the tyranny of big daddies, played by Burl Ives or Orson Welles, and scripts based on stories by William Faulkner or Eugene O'Neill. Perhaps it was all a metaphor for the kind of oedipal explosion post war America was cooking up: within half a decade the sons and daughters were repudiating all the big daddies, bigtime.
Meanwhile there was Paul Newman, always the dangerous outsider, even when, as in Hud, he was the son of the ranch. He was beyond sexy. He had that dangerous air of independence, standing a little back and to one side, sizing up the scene and making up his own mind. It was blindingly attractive.
Of today's stars, only Daniel Craig possesses the same blend of willpower and sexiness amplified by intelligence.
Face it, George and Brad are too easy going. Along with Matt Damon, they do good philanthropic things, and they stand up for their beliefs as Newman and Joanne Woodward did for theirs. But they are, all three, nice guys.
Paul Newman wasn't nice. He was good, which is a far harder, rarer thing to be. He was good onscreen, where he didn't demand scripts which made him a celluloid hero. He was willing to play scramblers, and losers -- look at him with Joanne Woodward in Mister and Mrs Bridge, or his last role, in The Road to Perdition. He never displayed the narcissism of his screen partner, the Sundance Kid, in his choice of roles, and he aged far better.
He was good off screen: a good husband and father, according to his kids, and a philanthropist. Just how good he was, how many sick children and small community organisations benefited, we are only now discovering.
And the man could cook! What more could any thinking woman want?
Black Balloon nominations
And in other film news this week, first time director Elissa Down is leading the field as the Australian film awards season gets under way.
Her fellow directors awarded her best director for the feature film The Black Balloon last weekend at the Australian Directors Guild awards. The Black Balloon then received ten nominations for the If awards, including another for Melissa as director. And now it's also been nominated as best feature film for children in the prestigious Asia Pacific Screen Awards.
Scott Hicks; Tony Ayres
In Adelaide Scott Hicks has begun shooting on his first Australian film since Shine a dozen years ago. Called The Boys Are Back in Town, it stars Clive Owen as a sportswriter who has to learn to be a father to two sons.
And Tony Ayres is slated to direct a film based on the James Bulger murder case, one of a dozen looking for investors at the upcoming Screen Producers Conference of Australia.
Interview with Alan Ball, director, Towelhead
02/10/2008
Alan Ball walked off with an Oscar for his screenplay for American Beauty. That was back in 2000 and he followed this by creating the gloriously wacky and insightful TV series Six Feet Under.
Now with credits like these, Alan Ball could call his own shots. And what he chose to do was to adapt a daring novel by Alicia Erian told by a thirteen-year-old girl, Jasira, who has to deal with her own blossoming sexuality in the kind of red-neck Texan town where people fly flags on their front lawn.
It's the time of the first Gulf war, and Jasira's mother is worried because her live-in boyfriend is developing eyes for her daughter. So she ships her off to her self-absorbed, Lebanese-American father, who is equally ill equipped to parent a teenage girl. Only the next door neighbour, a hyper-patriotic army reservist, seems to actually like Jasira...and maybe in the wrong way.
Because of the Gulf war, around that time anyone from the Middle East copped epitaphs like 'Sand Monkey', and 'Towelhead'. Yet when the film was released in America, the distributors got cold feet. They called it Nothing is Private.
At least, in Australia it will open under its original title.
The Week in Film
25/09/2008
Spielberg's Dreamworks divorced from Paramount
After a lot of bitter wrangling, Stacey Snider, Spielberg and David Geffen are free to go it alone, with huge backing from the Indian studio Reliance to the tune of about 500 million US dollars.
The deal was announced back in May at the Cannes Film Festival, but the divorce has been ugly. Paramount didn't want custody of any of the executives but got very tough about assets, hanging on to just about all Dreamworks' development slate, except projects going to cost a big lot of money. Among these, according to Variety's Anne Thompson, is Tintin, the film Spielberg is planning with Peter Jackson about the Belgian comic strip adventurer who looks like Kevin Rudd.
Spielberg had approached Universal studios to finance it, but the price was too steep. Now Paramount has counter-offered to fully finance the film -- another in 3D -- and Spielberg and Jackson are considering the offer.
Now Dreamworks has to find another big studio-type distributor. We do live in interesting times.
Screen Australia
Staunchly ignoring all this manoeuvring, as hedge funds flee the film business, Screen Australia goes in search of a mandate. Australian screen directors meet for their annual conference this weekend, to talk about collaboration. Editors, sound designers, composers, cinematographers and other specialists will take the podium with directors to tell tales of collaborations that work, and maybe some that don't.
The Guild will announce its annual awards for best director in a variety of categories, and animator Bruce Petty will receive a career achievement award. Rowan Woods, the Australian director who made The Boys, and Little Fish, will be there with his first American feature film to show his colleagues. Winged Creatures, it's called, it has among others Forest Whitaker, Kate Beckinsale, and Dakota Fanning -- and I hear it looks pretty good.
Interview with Eric Guirado, The Grocer's Son
25/09/2008
Time to take a quiet trip in the French countryside, I think. We're trundling around the South of France on the back rounds, going from hamlet to tiny hamlet in one of those big, white anonymous-looking vans one sees everywhere in the European countryside. When it stops, the side lifts up and lo -- it's a grocer's shop, stuffed with delicacies and dangling hardware for the old folks who wait for it most days.
The Grocer's Son is a gentle, calmly reflective story about a sullen, thirtysomething young man called Antoine, summoned back from Paris to help his mother when his father is hospitalised with a heart attack. He's back in the family home and business he fled ten years before.
He takes on the van, but doesn't understand how to deal with the customers. It takes a friend from Paris, the charming, much more lighthearted Claire, to show him what the customers want. And they are pretty feisty customers. Their knees may be gone but boy, do they have attitude!
The Grocer's Son is by Eric Guirado, and it's a world away from the trendy nostalgia of city folk for country ways which has figured in recent French comedies.
The Week in Film
18/09/2008
Disgrace triumphs in Toronto
Disgrace, the Australian film based on JM Coetzee's bleak South African novel, has won a special award from international film critics at the Toronto Film festival. It stars John Malcovich, was adapted from the Coetzee novel by Anna Maria Monticelli, and directed by Steve Jacobs. It won one of two FIPRESCI awards from a jury headed by eminent American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. ICON film will release Disgrace in the New Year.
Screen Australia mission statement
Screen Australia has released a statement of intent in response to a request from Arts and Environment minister Peter Garrett. A kind of mission statement, if you like, a set of principles to be fleshed out by a more comprehensive review towards the end of the year.
Among the principles, now being discussed in a lightning round of industry consultation, are a commitment to Australian films developing distribution and marketing strategies early in the production process; a proposal to encourage successful filmmakers behind small or medium films with bonuses; and an emphasis on developing sustainable film production businesses rather than supporting one-off film projects.
This last is not exactly new. It's been the aim of most Australian film support packages since the Gonski review a dozen years ago. The idea of bonuses is new, though, but details have yet to emerge.
Matt Damon Haiti appeal
And finally, Matt Damon went to hurricane-ravaged Haiti last week with Haitian born singer Wyclef Jean, to hand out food relief and encourage people to donate to the United Nations relief appeal. More than 800,000 people have been left homeless on the impoverished island after it was hit by four hurricanes in a month. The UN needs to raise a hundred million dollars. We'll put the link on our website.
Interview with Bruce Beresford
18/09/2008
Bruce Beresford's memoir Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants To Do This: True Stories From A Life In The Screen Trade was published last year. It had some very funny stories but what impressed me reading it recently was the man's tenacity in the face of all these projects which haven't happened.
How could you keep going as a filmmaker, just keep hanging in there with so many projects which haven't happened?
Bruce Beresford is now happily finishing post production on Mao's Last Dancer, his first Australian film since Paradise Road, ten years ago.
But he's gone into print again this weekend with a short essay on the Australian film industry which takes issue with some received wisdom, particularly about the early days of Australian cinema. It's one of a series of anniversary essays in The Australian's weekend magazine. I had a sneak preview, and I talked to him at the post production house where he's editing.
Interview with Kumar Shahani
11/09/2008
Now it's time to meet one of the intellectuals -- and great storytellers -- of Indian cinema: Kumar Shahani. I'm not talking Bollywood here but what's called in India 'Parallel Cinema'.
Shahani's l972 film Maya Darpan, also known as Mirror of Illusion, is credited as the first Indian 'formalist' film. His work belongs firmly in the avant-garde, and is informed by studies across cultures and art forms.
Kumar Shahani was born in Pakistan, and settled in India after Partition. He had polio as a boy, and time at home to read, study and dream. After university in India, he went to Paris and assisted Robert Bresson on Une femme deuce. He also participated in the May 1968 events, and was influenced by the debates on cinema at that time.
Kumar Shahani was a visiting artist at the Asia Pacific Triennale in Brisbane in 2006, which is where I met him. The cinematheque there has since acquired his 2000 film The Bamboo Flute, a fascinating work which uses images to mirror and stand for the rhythms, and the breath, of one of the oldest elements in Indian civilisation.
The Week in Film
11/09/2008
Aranofsky, Rourke woo Venice
The big surprise this last week was the winning film at the Venice Film Festival; Darren Aranofsky, who hit a wall when he took that ponderous CGI clunker The Fountain to Venice two years ago, went back for more this year with a very different film called The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke, a man who's been in more clunkers than most.
And hey, they won the Golden Lion. Talk about comebacks. Critics are raving. Variety's Tod McCarthy, for example, called Rourke's ageing wrestler 'one of the great, iconic screen performances'.
It must have been a godsend for the Venice jury. Critics this year have been united. It was one of the most dismal festivals in a decade. 'Godawful' The Guardian called it. So bad were so many movies there was a major desertion -- even empty hotel rooms in the Lido's Hotel des Bains.
Icon sold
Meanwhile, another Australian distributor of indie films has gone west...been sold that is.
Mel Gibson and Bruce Davey's Icon, which bought Dendy Films as well as its cinemas last year, has sold its distribution arm to UK's Stewart Till, former CEO of United International Pictures, and currently chair of the UK Screen Council.
Till is building a global sales and distribution company under the banner 'Stadium'.
Icon will remain a production company, and will also keep the Dendy cinemas. But it does mean the field of little Aussie battlers distributing indie and small films has shrunk again. Or maybe reshaped itself.
The Australian arm of Icon has a number of films still on its slate to release, with diminishing expertise.
Mind you, it's been a rough time for distributors of independent films. There's been a huge glut, largely because of a surge of hedge funds with cash swashing into the business a few years back. Five or six years ago there were four hundred plus independent films released in America. This year, there were six hundred.
Now the hedge fund billions have disappeared, the industry is changing fast I think, and Davey saw the writing on the wall.
Vale Michael Pate
04/09/2008
Michael Pate was a writer, director, producer and, of course, actor, whose career in show business spanned seventy years.
It took him to Hollywood, where the boy from Drummoyne in Sydney was in hot demand as an Indian who could ride, shoot, project, and usually die convincingly in westerns. Pate reckoned he had died in sixteen of them, by the late fifties.
He was the Apache Chief in Hondo, he wrote the original screenplay for Escape from Fort Bravo and he also played in The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, in Julius Caesar, and in The Desert Rats.
In Hollywood, Pate was able to earn a comfortable living as a consummately professional support actor, without ever cracking stardom. And when television began thriving he worked regularly on the westerns The Rifleman, Rawhide and Wagon Train.
But he returned regularly to Australia, where he contributed much. He was associate producer of The Age of Consent, the delightful film in which Helen Mirren frolicked naked for the first time on screen. He worked for Channel Seven, including such stand-bys as Matlock Police.
He produced The Mango Tree with his son Christopher, and later adapted, directed and produced Tim, from the Colleen McCullough novel, starring the young Mel Gibson.
Michael Pate actually began his show business life in the ABC, in the late thirties, as a writer and interviewer. The sort of stuff we do here. But he soon drifted into little theatre, with people such as Doris Fitton.
His first film job was in l940 on Charles Chauvel's Forty Thousand Light Horsemen.
Michael Pate. An unmistakeable presence in Australian cultural life. He stayed engaged till the end. A consummate professional... and a good bloke.
The Week in Film
04/09/2008
Vale Don LaFontaine
In a world where many people talk in deep gravelly voices, few have had the impact of Don LaFontaine. The man who voiced more than 5,000 movie trailers died this week, aged 68, of complications from what was described as 'an ongoing lung related illness'. Hmm...
He was a former editor and sound mixer. Then one day, he voiced a part of a trailer. Then more. Soon film trailers and commercials became his life.
His death leaves the American studios, already coping with a movie shortage as a result of this year's writers' strike, with an additional problem. How will they market the films they have this season? And for the election spin-doctors, who will voice the key political advertisements in the presidential campaign?
Two Los Angeles casting agencies have begun searching for men with extremely deep, gravelly voices and a belief that the end of the world is nigh. Or at least, nigh-ish.
Venice latest
From Venice, where the 65th Film Festival is now winding up on the Lido, the news is not so good. There's been a wave of moaning and grumbling from critics and film journalists at this year's festival about the standard of the films -- particularly those in competition. Director Marco Mueller, who won praise for upping the standard during his first four years, has conceded that a number of films he had hoped to screen were not finished because of the writers strike.
But few competing films seem to have found favour with the media. One exception is the Hayao Miyazaki animation Ponyo On the Cliff by the Sea. Another is Birdwatchers, a film about the decimation of Guarani-Kaowa people in the Amazonian rainforest. But there have been few standout films, and new films from directors Barbet Schroeder and Ferzan Ozpetek have not found favour. We'll see.
Correction
I have to thank all those listeners who phoned and emailed last week to point out that I committed a further howler about Alexander the Great, while attempting to apologise for my original mistake.
So...not only did he not build Persepolis, he also died in 323 BC not 300 AD!
Interview with Gal Zaid, writer-actor, 'Foul Gesture'
28/08/2008
In the last few years we've begun to see some very interesting Israeli films here, films in a range of styles and genres, often embodying a critique of prevailing government policies.
Any of you will have seen the delightful comedy of a few months ago The Band's Visit. Coming up is a very powerful film from Ari Folman, an animated documentary called Waltzing With Bashir.
In fact there has been a blossoming of Israeli cinema, and there are some strong offerings screening in the 2008 Israeli Film Festival, sponsored by an organisation called Australian Israel Cultural Exchange.
Here for the festival is Gal Zaid, a very well known actor turned screenwriter and director. He's co-written and stars in one of the films in the festival, called Foul Gesture -- which I think is a rather too polite title...
Interview with Jasmine Yuen Carrucan and Bryan Brown, 'Cactus'
01/05/2008
Written and directed by Jasmin Yuen-Carrucan, with cinematography by her partner Florian Emmerich, Cactus is essentially a two handed road movie.
Bryan Brown has a well drawn cameo role in the film, and he also produced it.
Interview with Casey Affleck, actor, 'Gone Baby Gone'
17/04/2008
Casey Affleck, younger brother of Ben, made an early appearance in Gus Van Sant's film To Die For. He also co-wrote and starred in the experimental film Gerry with Matt Damon, another Boston boy.
He appeared in some low profile art house films and a couple of undistinguished potboilers, then his career took off when Andrew Dominik cast him as Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
It was a stupendous performance of a young man determined to make his way, and make his mark in the world, as we see him going from adoration of James the outlaw hero to rejection, humiliation, failure and determination to find another way. Affleck indeed outshone Brad Pitt as James, and was simply unforgettable. And it's clear he regards this as the role of his life so far.
Interview with Nicole Kidman, actor, 'Margot At The Wedding'
21/02/2008
One of the most interesting phenomena of recent Hollywood has been the blossoming of Nicole Kidman's career since she and Tom Cruise separated. She was the one who persuaded him to work with Stanley Kubrick, and in the past decade she's made a series of small but fascinating films working with directors she admires: Alejandro Amenabar, for example. Jonathan Glazer for Birth, Lars Von Trier for Dogville. And now, Noah Baumbach.
Maybe she has a better feeling for drama than for comedy. Bewitched, and The Stepford Wives were not exactly high points.
But this is a smart woman, who can do the blockbusters (her Mrs Coulter in The Golden Compass was alluringly ruthless) while seeking out the smaller and riskier films.
But why, exactly, Margot at the Wedding?
Margot At The Wedding
21/02/2008
Somewhere inside the lanky Australian actress with the porcelain doll features is a familiarity with discontent. I say this because I am more and more convinced that Nicole Kidman's best work is unfailingly in those roles in which she is neurotic -- or flaky, driven, or downright unhappy. Think To Die For. Think Dogville, The Hours, Birth, The Others. It's these characters we remember, rather than her romantic roles.
Margot At The Wedding is another lacerating family drama from Noah Baumbach, who wrote that extremely perceptive film The Squid and the Whale, almost a diary of the disintegration of a family as two teenage sons watch their parents divorce.
Now here's a second in Baumbach's Ibsenesque saga of disintegrating families and unhappy women. It's about a sibling rivalry so intense it's as though two sisters, in adult life, can only recognise themselves if one is annoying the other.
Kidman's Margot is a New York writer of short stories whom we meet on a train, with her young teenage son Claude. They are on their way to her sister Pauline's wedding.
'I thought you and Pauline weren't speaking,' asks Claude. 'No.' Margot snaps. 'I wasn't speaking to her. But I am now.'
This is a woman used to having the upper hand. We are forewarned when Margot looks at her son and sighs one of those discontented sighs. 'You used to be so much more graceful when you were younger,' she says.
On arrival, her younger sister Pauline rushes from the house then stops, mid-lawn, bracing herself. How will this reunion go?
It is clear the sisters are very attached. They have a shared past, they're in the family home together, and only they know the territory. And yet, almost from the arrival, Margot begins to undermine those around her. Particularly Pauline, whom she thinks is wasting herself in this marriage. She's met Pauline's fiance, Malcolm, a musician -- or is he a writer -- who has yet to establish himself. He's played, quite straight, by Jack Black, and he has Margot's number. But he's not the type to exert himself. For now, he stands back while the sisters wrestle.
Pauline oscillates between an eager belief that she and her successful big sister can really be friends and outraged backlash. For years, it seems, she's protected herself against Margot's interfering by doing the opposite of whatever her sister suggests. Margot has other agendas.
Recently separated from her husband Jim (John Tutorro), she doesn't want him at the wedding. But she does want to go to a local book signing, and catch up with a fellow writer with whom she has had a fling. Neither of the men in her life exactly oblige her wishes.
Add to the mix a trio of teenagers in the house, and it's set for explosion. The dialogues are lacerating and funny at first, but the mood darkens as old wounds surface. The ending is tragedy on the brink of farce. Or perhaps the other way around.
This is an original, and not always comfortable film. Noah Baumbach and his editor navigate the family conflicts by cutting briskly from drama to drama, sometimes almost in mid sentence. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black are in top form, and the teenagers behave like real, disconcerted teenagers.
These days American independent cinema serves a constant diet of small films which are homilies on so-called dysfunctional families. This is a term derived from an outmoded social theory called functionalism constructed by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, which argued that we all occupied roles and statuses in society. It's not much of a theory because it couldn't account for group or social change. Indeed, It's always reminded me of a demented housewife tidying up, chanting 'A place for everything and everything in its place.' But the annoying term has been taken over by popular culture, and by too many screenwriters, and become a kind of smothering blanket for every kind of unhappiness.
Baumbach cuts much deeper, and much more precisely. We know these people. Maybe we recognise parts of ourselves. And Kidman is superb. You can add Margot to her gallery of memorably discontented divas. Afterwards, I ached for her.
Interview with Mathieu Amalric, actor, 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'
14/02/2008
You may well recognise Mathieu Amalric when you see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Well known to French film goers, Amalric played the son of the terrorist godfather figure in Munich. In life, as on screen, he exudes great energy. Which is maybe why he is now playing the main villain opposite Daniel Craig in the next Bond movie.
But this man, with more than 60 acting roles to his credit, insists he's only an accidental actor. He set out to be a film maker, and has written and directed four films. The fifth, as we'll hear, is ready to go. I met him last October in Paris.
