DAVID CAESAR

David Caesar is a Sydney-based director who made a number of acclaimed documentaries, Bodywork, and then moved into feature films with Greenkeeping(1992). Caesar has also directed television, including telefeatures in the Hallifax, pf series. His second feature film was The Idiot Box (1997). His most recent film was Mullet, released in Australia in mid-2001.


You made a transition from documentaries to feature films. Is this something permanent or will you move between the two?

It's actually become easier for me to make feature films than it is to make documentaries. Because I had such a distinctive style in my documentaries - they all had a particular look - I have been associated with that style and, at the moment, there is a very different sort of documentary movement in Australia. It uses a sort of home video technology and lots of, not necessarily filmic techniques, but recording a lot of material and community-based work and so on. I think these things go in stages and the sort of work I do is currently out of favour with the documentary community. That's just a stylistic thing. In the early 90s everyone was making films in that style. I mean, it wasn't just influenced by my work. When I started making documentaries in the late 80s, there were a number of people doing similar things to what I do.

How would you characterise your documentary style?

Very contrived, probably; very cinematic and very controlled. It's not just recording what happens. It's essentially interview-based, created and lit, often with tracking shots and so on in between the interviews. That isn't traditional documentary. The idea is a sort of `fly on the wall' tradition. It was very strange, because a number of films all came out at once, so I assume that a lot of people around the world were thinking about these things - The Thin Blue Line came out about the same time that Body Work did, Cane Toads was around that time, and there were some other films from Europe that Peter Greenaway did, documentaries that he made in the mid-'80s.

So I guess a lot of people were thinking the same. For whatever reasons, whether they were reacting, whether I was reacting - to some extent I was reacting against the notion of truth in the other films, because I'd been involved in making some of them, I found that they weren't very truthful at all. The fact that you're there is artificial. So I was reacting against what I thought was a bit of the fakery, the pretence that it's truthful. So my attitude was that I wanted to make sure the audience was 100 per cent clear that the whole thing was artifice.

So, for me, to make the transition from documentary to fiction wasn't that difficult, because a lot of what I did was using fictional film techniques. It happened very suddenly. I hadn't really done much fiction - I'd done a few little films, 10 minute long films - and then all of a sudden I did a feature, which wasn't really what I wanted to do. I didn't really want to make a feature. I wanted to make a 50 minute film. But, as most people will tell you in a common-sense way, you can't actually do anything with a 50-minute film. There's no market for it. You can't get it on in the cinema. You can't sell it to television. You can't put it on video. No-one's interested. I can understand that but, by the same token, as a film-maker I believe in the process of development on the craft level. I tried out more and more things with my documentaries as I went on, and the same thing's happening with my drama.

But the problem is that when you make a feature the knives come out. Which is fair enough, because they're not cheap things to make. Greenkeeping was relatively cheap. But relatively cheap is $800,000, and people could argue that that $800,000 could have been better spent on Aboriginal health care and, at the end of the day, that is a valid argument.
I don't accept the argument of the difference between private and public money. Money's money and whether someone's wasting money that comes from Rupert Murdoch or money that comes directly from taxpayers, I think waste is waste. It is the same thing, whether it's private or public money. So when you do spend a lot of money like that, I think your responsibility is to do the best job you can. That craft thing was a real problem because there's always the push on to find the next hot young thing in a country like Australia. So the push on is to make a feature.

Your choices of subject for the documentaries and your attitudes towards truth and fiction: they seem to be essays. Would that be a useful analogy?

I guess so. I wouldn't say they're essays in the sense of a commentary. What I was trying to do, in a sense, was capture something, capture some ideas that weren't necessarily my ideas. Even though I manipulated the people and got them to say things again and again in slightly different ways, at the end of the day all the stories in all the documentaries I've done have been the stories of the people who were in the film. It's been their stories. It hasn't been my stories. Often I have very clear things I want to say, but I feel uncomfortable about just getting out there and putting wall-to-wall voice over and saying, `David Caesar thinks this about car culture,' or, `David Caesar thinks this about personal space,' or, `David Caesar thinks this about the funeral industry.' I feel much more confident in having people tell their stories.

I wouldn't mind making some very clear essay films that were very much my point of view. But, at the end of the day, I don't know how many people would be interested in seeing them because I think what I have to say in that way is probably not as interesting to a large group of people as what I have to say in other ways, in more interpretive ways, about other people's lives and other people's work. I think my life and my opinions are just not as interesting as those of someone who comes from the western suburbs or from a particular industry, just because by the very nature of what I do.

I don't actually have real life experiences any more. The very nature of what I do means that I live in a very limited area. I mean, I could talk with great experience about the film-making process, about what that involves on a human level; I could talk about going to film festivals and I can talk about negotiating profit-sharing relationships and stuff but, I don't think they're particularly common human experiences. I think it's more important to talk about larger things than that. There are film-makers who make films about film-making and I think, well, who cares?

Greenkeeping - where did the story come from?

For better or worse, all the scripts I've written - and I don't even know why this is - are all about being a man and what that actually means. With Greenkeeping, I had previously written a script called Prime Mover about a truck driver in the outback. It's a very male, macho sort of script. It's about a guy trying to find his way in that world and not doing very well at all. I still hope I'll make Prime Mover. With Greenkeeping, I tried to do something about a character who was trying to go for a far less masculine lifestyle, a character who was literally doing the best he could within a domestic world; about trying to make his relationship, a very difficult relationship, with his wife work; about trying to do a job that he wasn't very good at as best he could; about trying to deal with problems like that. I think it's important to tell more stories like that. So it's about a guy who's doing the best he can. And I'm interested in telling stories like that, but on different levels.

I think that Idiot Box is about two young men who are doing the best they can with the resources available to them. Now, the fact that the resource available, as far as they're concerned, is robbing a bank doesn't change the fact that it's still about them trying, basically not giving up. I'm surprised that people haven't come down on me for saying, `Oh, this is going to promote people robbing banks.' The issue with the film, from my point of view, is that it was about people who hadn't given in to their circumstances.

The suburban settings are very important?

Well, it's a funny thing, the suburbia thing. With all my stuff like Prime Mover... I grew up in the country and what I was writing was set in the country, and all the ideas I had for documentaries were in the country. But the reality was that, when I was at film school, the things I started making were set in the city. And the people I related to most on a social level were people from the western suburbs. They had similar value systems, similar sorts of childhood, similar relationships with sport.

So all the stuff I was doing was about the country, but the most direct relationship I could find to that was the suburban thing. At home, we lived in a fibro house on a large block of land in the country. That was the sort of lifestyle I led. It wasn't in a terrace house and it wasn't in a block of flats. A lot of the culture I grew up with was about cars, and getting to and from places, and it was about drinking, it was about Rugby League, all those sorts of things. The more I made out in the suburbs, the more I got the sense of that actually being a more important thing to talk about, purely on the demographic level. That's where most people live and, for better or worse, the suburban experience is that of the vast majority of Australians. It's very important that, as a culture, we actually record the experiences of ordinary people, make films about people who basically keep things going. If all the lawyers and politicians and judges and bankers and academics and economists all died tomorrow, I don't think it would make a great deal of difference to the vast majority of people's experiences.

My father literally worked in the sewerage industry - he worked on the council and they run the sewerage industry in the country. If he stopped doing what he did, people would die. It wasn't a glamorous job; it wasn't a particularly nice job, even. But he didn't have a problem with it. He thought it was an important job and he took it very seriously. So I think it's important that those people are actually talked about. And I also think that the real cultures of any society are the cultures of the ordinary people. Middle class Australian culture in Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane and Perth and wherever is probably 95 per cent the same as this culture in America and Europe and, probably now, Japan. They have the same value systems, the same associations to education and money.

So, at the end of the day, if I see myself as an Australian film-maker, I have to make films about ordinary people, because I think that's the only place where Australian culture exists.

Your characters? You seem to like them in Greenkeeping and in Idiot Box as well.

I write essentially from character and then try and build a plot around the characters. It's a terrible thing the way the industry is set up, people desperately wanting plot-based material. Essentially the American film industry is plot-based. It's something that you can describe in one line. That's what everyone wants. I'm more interested in character-based material. That makes it harder to make films. I make characters who are amalgamations of people I've known in the past, parts of my personality.

Your past is important for you?

Yes. You can't grow up somewhere and grow up with people and not remember them. I don't know if `strong' is the right word, but the relationships with people I had in my teenage years have been much stronger, or I remember them more vividly, than the ones I had in my twenties. I don't know why that is, I don't know whether it's because they're your formative years, establishing who you are as a human being.

Anyway, it's a funny thing, but I do like my characters and, when I'm writing them, I often actually have conversations in my head between the characters. I often have them outside my head, too, and I think some people sometimes see me talking away to myself. Because I hear them, they become real to me, hearing their voices.

Idiot Box's Mick and his poems?

I'm a great believer in the idea of poetry, not necessarily in a more formalised sense, but in the music of language, the poetry of language. I find that really exciting. I'm a great believer in the poetry of language per se. I try to write the dialogue in general in a poetic way, using a lot of repetition and alliteration. I like the sounds of the words. I like the sound of slang. It was always a big deal to me, the poetry of language, and I just decided that I'd take that one step further and actually have a character saying that he was a poet. I wanted to make it clear in the audience's mind what the relationship to the language in the film was.

The macho theme that you spoke of before - how did you dramatise it in Kevin and Mick?

Well, I have this belief that the domestic world is essentially a feminine one. The things that make it work are conflict resolution and all the sorts of things that I think women are pretty good at, for whatever reasons, whether it's stereotypes or cultural loading or whatever, I don't know. Most things that men have been good at or did were active, they do things.

One of the things I wanted to have in the film, part of the central core of the film, was about how the character of Mick is torn between the completely male, masculine, active character of Kev, who doesn't do anything that is feminine in the sense of being compliant or being understanding, being sympathetic to other people's needs or wants. Everything was about what he wants and how he's going to get it. Mick's attracted to that, but he's also attracted to Lani, the female character. She is actually much more in control of her life. There's a whole subtext in the film that's not on the screen. She has a job, for starters, but what she's actually doing at her job is that she's studying. She's doing a tech course during the day. She's actively controlling her life in that way. It's possible for Mick to go that way as well. He is in a position, throughout the film, of making choices, choosing between the two.

Part of the subtext of the film as well is the idea that Kev, in a tribal sense, is worried about losing Mick, who was a member of his tribe, to the woman. Part of the reason why he pushes things forward throughout the film is that by action, he keeps Mick in the tribe, the male tribe. For me, the core of the film is the moment at the end where Kev's standing outside the door of the bank and the girl's on the other side of the road and Mick's in the middle, choosing whether he goes back or not. In a sense you do a futile - what I call a Celtic - gesture. Lani is on the other side of the road. Mick, essentially leaving Kev behind, goes to her, probably to having some sort of domestic relationship.

Previously, on the freeway bridge, Mick and Lani looked at the cars and speculated on where they were going.

Yes. I see a lot of those masculine images in Australian culture as essentially Celtic - Celtic in the sense of Culloden, of futile heroic gestures. There's dozens of them. The main moments that define Australian character in history have all been futile heroic gestures, Gallipoli or Ned Kelly or Bon Scott in rock music - any number of things, but the heroic futile gestures. The Eureka Stockade. They're all heroic and they're pointless and they're unwinnable situations, but they're the things that define our self-image. I wanted Kev to be part of that. There's all this talk about Ned Kelly. He wears Bon Scott shirts. And his relationship to the world is aggressively active in a negative way in that sort of environment. There's no real place for him. There'd be a place for him running over the top of the trenches in the Somme or in Gallipoli or on the Kokoda Trail - he'd be a hero - but there isn't really a place for him in the world that exists today.

Did you actually have him crucified on the footpath at the end?

I wanted to have a sort of spiritual dimension to it. It ended up with him being crucified. But the idea of his arms up was, for him, his spiritual Epiphany (or whatever it is) through action. When they set off the car alarms, steal the car and it's spinning around, his ecstasy is like reaching up to the heavens. That's what I was trying to do with that scene. But there was also the reference to that photo, that famous photo from the Spanish Civil War of the person being shot. I wasn't trying to do a crucifixion image. It's almost like a surrender, if you know what I mean, a surrender, giving up life.

When I saw those images at the end, he's lying on the ground with the arms outstretched, but it's upside down as well, I thought: I hope people don't read too much into that, because I was concerned that people might misconstrue that as being a Christ image and I didn't want him to be a martyr in that sense, because I don't think that what he did is good. I don't think he was really heroic in a good way, in a positive way. I think he was heroic in a pointless way.

You gave Kev some telling lines, for instance about his being angry and Mick saying that he ought to get a hobby and he replies that being angry is his hobby, a revelation of the macho attitudes and the frustration of the suburbs. Is it accurate to call Idiot Box a `moral fable'?


No. I believe it is a moral fable. In a sort of an Old Testament sense, though. It's very much cause and result. You do something good and something good happens to you. You do something bad and something bad happens to you. It's very Old Testament in that way - and I was very conscious of that when I was writing it. A lot of people have compared the film to those of directors like Quentin Tarantino. I have a big problem with his work because I think it's essentially amoral. I think the film-maker should say, `I think this is right,' or, `I think this is wrong,' and I think he doesn't do that. A romp is fine. I think cartoon film-making is fine. But at the end of the day they're should be a moral code in what you do, because film is the most powerful medium in the world.

I would stand by the morality behind what Idiot Box says. If you do something bad, something bad will happen to you. I mean that in the larger social sense of the film as well, that the reason these guys are so angry and destructive on a social level is because of how society has treated them. I don't mean the bleeding heart notion of giving them more money. It's much more and on a larger level, the fact that there isn't a conscious understanding of masculine energy, except in a negative way. That is a real social problem. Until we start to acknowledge the fact that young men have a lot of energy, whether it's sexual or hormonal or whatever, that if it isn't channelled into something positive, like sport or a job that involves a lot of physical labour. But if it isn't channelled, it often has to come out. Whether it's in small countries falling apart or riots at soccer games, we see that happen, because the energy isn't channelled. And I see that as part of the larger morality of the film.

But yes, I'm a great believer in a film actually having morality. I believe it's the responsibility of the film-maker, especially when you're having characters doing things that are anti-social. It's a problem if there isn't a morality that says if you do this, something will happen to you, or if you do that, your relationships with people will not be as good, or if you do this within a relationship with a person that you're intimate with, then it will fall apart too, and it won't be as good as it potentially could be. So I believe in the morality within a film. It's essentially simplistic, most of the morality, it's quite black and white.

I'm not afraid to have Kev doing sexist or saying racist things because in reality those characters would. To homogenise them and make them cute, fluffy working-class guys out in the suburbs who, if someone gave them a chance, they'd be all right. That's not the reality. A lot of the worst things about them are ingrained because of the social conditioning. I wanted them to be sympathetic to an audience and I wanted people to understand why they were the way they were, but I didn't want to hide the more negative parts. The humour is a big part of their character, the way the characters rib each other, make fun of each other and make fun of other people all the time is very much part of that sort of culture. Obviously it's heightened. Obviously the action is slightly bigger, the jokes slightly cruder, the ribbing slightly more exaggerated, but it all comes from the reality of that world.

The reason for Idiot Box as your title and the highlighting of the role of the TV and TV violence contributing to the macho ethos?

Yes, basically. I'm not essentially a Luddite. I don't actually have a problem with television per se. I watched the series on SBS about the history of the American west. That is what television can do if it's used properly and creatively. And as an entertainment tool, it can be fantastic. I mean, the same way that a bit of paper is just a bit of paper and it might have an important piece of medical information or it might have child pornography on it - it's still exactly the same technology. And I don't believe in censorship per se. I don't believe in technology as evil. I think that television is just a machine and it has no morality at all. I think the problem is the amount of money that people can make by just producing crap - and if that's all you offer, that's what people are going to watch. It's as simple as that. I mean, their attitude is, `Why would we make something that's better? Why would we bother? It will cost us more money, so we don't make as much money.' I think that's a real problem.

The whole debate about public versus private, say, ABC and SBS and commercial networks, that's never part of the argument. People seem to be afraid of things like the public good or larger social and moral issues. People seem to think that if you say something like that their being prescriptive for society. If you don't have some form of talking about those ideas, then you end up in a moral vacuum socially. And that's part of what Idiot Box is about, in that these guys would never watch ABC or SBS. If you watch Mc Gyver and - I forget all the other bad actiony shows they have on television - all within a moral vacuum where violence resolves all problems.... In the world they live in, there aren't tangible real male figures, there aren't fathers, they don't have people they can look up to at work because they don't have jobs, so all their male role models, even if they're aware that that's where they're getting their information from, comes from characters on television.

The film had big sound. We tried to get all the layers of the information overlay the characters get: the television soundtrack and radios going, talkback radio and the music, rock and roll and game shows, old TV shows and old movies, the layer upon layer of information, just to get the sense of overlaid information that's quite useless to them.

Television could be an incredibly positive force in society. But people are afraid to look at those issues. Often when they talk about morality, they talk about it in the sense of Little House on the Prairie, which is pointless. It has no relationship to our world. There isn't much of a sense, often, in those films about real moral issues. The moral issues they raise and resolve or don't resolve - they're usually resolved, I think - are small fry. Very few people want to tackle the real issues.

A few films get made and they slip through the net but no-one ever sees them. A film I saw that I found incredibly moving, was The Saint of Fort Washington. If only more people could make films like that - well, if only people saw more films like that. I'm not really sure what it says on a moral level, but I think Breaking the Waves is an incredible film. I don't really know what it's saying morally, but I think it's important that films actually take moral stands. I think that it's far better for someone to have a moral stand, even if it's a moral stand that's based on racism and sexism as long as people have a morality they believe in that they're putting forward. I think there's a real emptiness to most popular culture that says morality is like a commodity that's traded for whatever and as long as you've got a nice smile and as long as you do this and that, you can exploit people. You can do anything as long as you do it in a nice way.

Idiot Box, Black Rock and The Castle were the first Australian films to receive release in 1997 and all had suburban settings, all with a moral viewpoint.

I hope it's not just a feature of 1997. I hope it's a feature of Australian film-making, that we do go forward and do make films that actually talk about moral issues, because - I don't want to sound like Fred Nile or Call to Austrlian - but I do think that morality should be discussed. There isn't one morality that's right, but I think that the power of film is incredibly important.

Do you think your Kevs and Micks actually went to see Idiot Box? And if they did, what impact did it have on them?

I don't think they did.

On video?

I think they will see it on video. I think they'll go to the video shop and someone will tell them, `Oh, yeah, that's all right, that one.'

We filmed at a house out in the western suburbs - Kev's house, I think it was. There was a bunch of guys living there, three of them living in this house. We got them to come in and look at the film when it was finished. They weren't really keen to. But afterwards they said, `Oh, no, it was really good. I thought it would be like an Australian movie.' And I thought, it's like an Australian movie? I see. `No, it was good. It had action in it and stuff.' I don't know how you get around the idea of what an Australian movie is. I don't know if it's possible, because I think the vast majority of films we will continue to make will be essentially art house films. Maybe that's all you can do in a culture like Australia's where you're up against Jerry Maguire and The Long Kiss Goodnight and all those sorts of films, where you're up against a massive level of free publicity just because of star power that you can't compete with. So I don't know. I don't know if it's a lost cause, but I certainly don't have any answers. I thought Idiot Box would work with that audience. I just don't think they went to see it in the first place.

But they might appreciate it when they look at it on video.

I hope so. Fingers crossed.

Interview: 4th April 1997