JOHN HILCOAT



You have spent a lot of your career in making video clips. How did you become involved in the world of movie-making?

That came first, actually, in that I went to Swinburne, the film school in Melbourne, always with the idea of getting involved in feature drama. It was hard to survive there. There were very limited resources, so you really had to learn the hard way. I did specialise, through Swinburne, in editing. My first editing job was Nick the Stripper for the Birthday Party, which was Nick Cave's second band. That was just a way of making a bread and butter living as well working in film, and I developed scripts as I moved into music videos.

What was the impact of Papua-New? Guinea on you and its influence on your making To Have and To Hold.

I travelled there with my sister about ten years ago. It was an incredible experience, sailing along the Sepik River and coming into the villages. There is an atmosphere in Papua New Guinea and the climate..., the heat and the landscape. It's very, very rich, a naturally rich, diverse country and a wide diversity among the people. To work there, it's very difficult, especially because of the climate. It affects everyone in some way. Everything is heightened. Each area conjures up various images of its own. It's stunningly beautiful. But it can be extremely ugly.

We did a lot of preparation for the film but the setting came first and then the story out of that. It was initially based on meeting expatriates in these situations and it grew from there.

To Have and to Hold is reminiscent of the stories of Somerset Maugham with their stories of expatriates and their experiences - and of going troppo.

Yes. There are parallels and some of the cast and crew did read some of his stories. But we wanted to portray that sort of thing in a contemporary setting. The expatriates are living a different way of life because, fundamentally, they are living a radical contradiction. This drives them to drink because it is such a different climate and culture. But they have set themselves up in a rigid kind of way while they are surrounded by a different culture that causes great friction and heightens and exaggerates everything.

And Jack brings in videos and video technology.

Yes, that is one of the difficulties, people bringing in their own culture and setting up dynamics that contradict the Papua New Guinea culture - and then they start handing out tee-shirts... It's a last frontier. Papua New Guinea has not had such a long exposure to outside influences but now there is a rapid infiltration.

Is Papua New Guinea presented in the film as seen through the eyes of your central character?

That's true to a degree but we also tried to get a bit of distance. We deliberately had the character of Luther seem dangerous but then change. He was seen through Jack's preconceptions. These are also the audience preconceptions which have come through the media and television. And that accentuates Luther and his role in the village. He is like many young males today, caught between two cultures and rejected by both. He is also the scapegoat. They're bombarded with western influences and wealth and the things that everyone tries to get, that play on our fantasies: we would like that car, or whatever... And the young men come to the big towns and, naturally, they can't get any of these things, because it's all riddled with corruption - and unemployment. And it's the expatriates that are driving those cars, so they get caught up into other means of getting what they want.

The expatriates live in this kind of compound fantasy world, surrounded by a very different world. And it is this very strange setting that triggered off the idea of romantic obsession as well. Because what Jack does to Kate is very similar to what the First World does to the Third World. This is what people do. They act out fantasies of power and control and impose them. It is projecting their own ideals on to a culture that is radically different and dominating it.

Why was the original title `The Small Man'?

That was really a cultural thing that did not come out in the finished film. There's a term up there about `big men'. These are the villagers who achieve great deeds. Jack wants to be a big man but emotionally he's a small man.

You refer to the film as a `romance noir'.

It is a romance - but there is a darkness in the destruction that occurs. It delves into the darker side of romantic love and the myths about it. Some people in love are attracted to the darker qualities in the other, on a subconscious level. This becomes part of their obsessive relationship.

You refer to `mythic qualities' of romantic love.

Yes. Romantic love can be romantic obsession, one projecting their own fantasy on to the other and the other projecting their fantasy back. Fantasy then rules reality. In this way, love is blind, idealising the illusion. In that sense it becomes a distortion because it believes that it can be perfect. Romance, in many cultures, is a form of insanity, even a sacred form of insanity. Jack's is a journey into madness.

Jack has his wife Rose's red dress and makes Kate wear it. With his French background, the red dress is a classic symbol of his idealising his wife. But because Jack is French, he seems the handsome foreigner or the equivalent of a brooding Heathcliff figure. Jack is a classic mythic Heathcliff character. His passion is genuine but he is doomed to repeat the pattern with each woman he meets.

Kate writes romantic fiction and she moves easily from the real world into the fictional romantic world. But she pays a tragic price for it.

Critics have noted the Hitchcock reference, especially Rebecca and Vertigo. Others mention the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, florid melodramas.

The basic plot comes from Rebecca and Vertigo. But I have always loved the melodramas of the 40s and 50s with their raw power, the films of Douglas Sirk and the films of Michael Powell like Gone to Earth. I have drawn on this cinematic language, the movement, colours and emotion which embody the inner struggles of the characters. We can see their world as they perceive it.

What impact would this kind of story and film treatment have on an audience of the 90s?

I hope that it brings up those issues of feelings and love and obsession. I hope that they see those issues in a contemporary setting. I think it's one of those stories of desire and fantasy which are still very much a part of the cinema, but I think it's good to express these stories in heightened, expressionistic ways.

Going back to Ghosts of the Civil Dead: what were the origins of the film? what decided you to make it at that particular stage of your career?

It came, really, from a book that I read, In the Belly of the Beast. It was basically dealing with characters who were non-innocent - in the sense that they were at the end of the line, in a very extreme situation and where they had crossed over from what is deemed as correct behaviour in society. They had been singled out and raised in a different world, the world of the criminal. I found that intriguing because I thought there were a lot of parallels, in heightened, exaggerated ways, to our own world: the way that fear and social institutions impact upon us. All these take quite a major role in our thinking and our behaviour without our really questioning or thinking about them.

So, it was looking at a group of people who were at the end of the line and seeing how society deals with them. I felt that most prison films that I'd seen usually had `the innocent prisoner who was framed' type of thing. This is a kind of safety valve, to say: well, really, he's not bad and he hasn't done anything bad. The film was a kind of playing with those sorts of notions, of the way a criminal class is actually created.

I actually wrote a letter to a prisoner wanting to obtain the rights to the book. That didn't work out, so then it went into further research and just talking. I came across an inmate who had recently got out, and it kept growing. The research just grew and grew, and after three and a half years of full-time exploration of prisons, out came Ghosts of the Civil Dead.

You also visualised the technology of the prisons of the future.

Yes. That was another major part of the film, the way the technology is affecting us.

In fact, that continues through To Have And To Hold and to the role the media has over us and the alienating effects of media and technology. Then the extremes that we go to with technology, how we use it and how it can then turn our minds. Those are both extreme examples.