ROWAN WOOD



The Boys was invited into competition at the Berlin Film Festival.

It was marvellous and overwhelming at the same time because I'd been to various world festivals with short films before, but I'd never been to a big festival where I was in the eye of the storm, so to speak. A wonderful learning curve, but overwhelming at the same time. We had huge crowds. There was a lot of heat on the film mainly because all the big Hollywood films had already been and gone. They'd been well and truly discovered and had just had all the publicity in the Golden Globes: Good Will Hunting, The Big Lebowski, Great Expectations, Jackie Brown. They were really there just for their European launch. But journalists and press at world festivals like to discover films. I think that would explain the enormous attention we got.

The press screening alone, before our big opening screening, was in an 800-seater - there were about 900 world press there, sitting in the aisles.

Your short film, Tran the Man, screened at the Melbourne Film Festival.

Tran the Man was the film that I made when I was coming out of film school. I did the one-year writing course at film school. I was a little bit unusual for a film graduate because I'd already had about ten years of short film-making experience. But Tran the Man was the film that I desperately wanted to make. At that stage I wasn't sure whether I was going to get funding, so I was a little cynical in the way that I approached film school. I thought this was probably the only way to get this film made.

It's a story about two brothers who are in a state of conflict over the selling of the family home in Cabramatta, which is a new Vietnamese suburb. Twenty years ago it was actually Gough Whitlam's party platform and now they call it Little Saigon. I've had a long connection with Cabramatta because both my parents are teachers and my mother taught Vietnamese out at the hostel. And I have a long association with the Asian community, a lot of family friends, Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians come from that area, so I wanted to tell this story.

A lot of people would call it a new gangster story, but I saw it as a really interesting story about two brothers who were in a state of conflict: one who embraced his Vietnamese community and the other who was a total gangster; in fact, the only thing he embraced in that Vietnamese community was the drug culture. All he was interested in, in terms of his own suburb, was how much money he could make off the streets. The other brother didn't want to have anything to do with that; he just wanted to sell the family home - the mother had died - and say goodbye.

It's probably more topical now than it was when you made it.

I guess it was on the cusp of being topical back then. It's the same as in Melbourne - I think Footscray is probably the equivalent suburb to Cabramatta.

Springvale.

Springvale, yes, and there's a suburb in Brisbane that I visited when I was directing some TV up there that's very similar as well. Yes, it's very topical in Sydney.

Tran the Man and The Boys share violent suburban themes.

The other notable film I made a couple of years before Tran was a film called Kenny's Love. It went to the Melbourne and Sydney Film Festivals long before I got into film school. It was actually the year after I was rejected by Swinburne at the tender age of 24. I went out and made this 16mm film off my own bat. Again it's a very specific Sydney film about an intellectually handicapped man who has just left home and sells hot dogs at the football. That was very specific to where this character, Kenny, lived in Sydney, a very particular suburb of Sydney. So all my films have a very particular cultural basis. Always, as a matter of course, I arbitrarily set my worlds not just in a suburb, but in a street. So all the homework that we do, the designers do and the actors do and I do, is all based on that starting point that I designate before anyone makes any creative poetic decisions. I don't want them to be making those decisions from a cultural void, so I insist on all sorts of homework, field trips. In the case of actors, there is much discussion and talk with people who are living in that suburb who may be the real-life equivalents in similar circumstances.

I've gone from comedy to gentle romance to much harder stories. People call Tran the Man a dark story. I don't necessarily see it that way. But I've traversed all different sorts of tonal areas with film and I think the one thing that is common to all of them is that sense of place, and that probably comes from the way I work.

That was certainly very strong in The Boys with the house and the street, a strongly localised atmosphere of the place and the people from this place. Did this come from the original play or did you work with Stephen Sewell on this for the screenplay?

No, the play is completely separate. The play happened in 1991. Robert Connolly, fresh out of the University of New South Wales and the theatre arts course there, produced the play. It was first a play that was read at the playwrights' conference. Robert picked it up from there as a young student, developed it with a writer and a director and produced it. It was enormously successful. It was in a small theatre called the Griffin; it broke box-office records there and people were queuing down the street. That all happened well before I knew Robert or David Wenham.

Several years later, when I met Robert at film school and began working with him on other projects, I discovered that he was the guy responsible for this amazing play. I hadn't even seen it, but I'd heard all about it from my actor friends who said it was the best thing and that David was extraordinary, a real landmark performance. And on the back of all that good word from that play, I actually courted David and he was in Tran the Man. So I got together with Robert and David. After film school, Robert moved straightaway into Arena Film, was offered partnership in the company on the back of having associate-produced John Maynard's film, All Men Are Liars, in his third year at film school.

On day one out of film school, he presented John with his first project. John looked at it, read it and boggled, and, further to that, Robert said, 'I want Rowan to direct it and, when Rowan comes on board, such-and-such comes on board and such-and-such'. All of these people were first-time feature makers. So, to John's credit, he is one of the few producers in the country who has actually embraced this sort of thing. He did Sweetie with Jane Campion with all her friends who were all first-timers.

Thus began the long process of developing it with a different writer from the play, Stephen Sewell.

Had he written for the screen before?

Yes, he had written one thing that had got to the screen, Isabelle Eberhardt, which was a strange esoteric piece. And he had written a lot of screenplays that haven't been made. I think he had been burnt a lot by the film world. He's a very uncompromising playwright who wanted to cross over but would always come a cropper with producers.

Our first brief for Stephen was to leave the play behind but hopefully glean from the play the sensibility and what was good and powerful about the play, the sorts of questions it throws up to the audience. My only one proviso was that the flash-forwards that weren't really in the play in that form would be changed to that jigsaw puzzle effect you get in the final film. In the play you have 20 minutes of pre-crime, 20 minutes of post-crime, 20-minutes of pre-crime, whereas in the film it's the day and night before the crime with fleeting, mysterious visions of the future. So that was one of my briefs. My other brief in relation to the play was: please take the women out of the house because, in the play, the women all remained in the house after the boys had left that night and committed the crime. They soliloquised at length about why the men did what they did. To my mind that was an interesting thing to do on stage. You could get away with it. But logic and common sense tell me that the women would make a stand in whatever way they could to survive, apart from anything else. I was also incredibly nervous about it being both illogical and demeaning because they wouldn't be allowed to make the decisions that they would make in real life.

Obviously, the mother character can't leave. That's one of the reasons I wanted to take the flash-forwards in the direction we did because, aside from the jigsaw puzzle effect on the audience, a very important reason why the flash-forwards are there is that they provide a resolution for the mother character. They lead to a final point of resolution. If you had ended the story when the boys left the house, the mother would be left standing.

People talk about this as being a dark film, but I thought that in a way it's a very positive film, especially for the women characters, particularly the mother. After going through a lot of denial when her son has been in jail, she gets the chance to come out of that state of denial and say, 'Well, if you want to continue to arrogantly deny,' as most of these perpetrators do when they sit in jail, 'then I'm walking away, because it's breaking me up'.

Someone remarked that he was surprised that all the women actually did leave. He thought that they had been in some ways battered into submission and that they might not have had the psychological and moral strength to leave. On the other hand, this seems to be a statement that women are finding ways to survive.

They are. In the process of developing the film we obviously cover every single possibility for women. You explore them for what they're worth, and you discover whether they're logical in relation to the world we know. And it was just logical that all those women, given their circumstances, would actually leave. There was no PC baggage about it. I'm only interested in what is logical and makes sense. Any politically correct angle on it is out of my realm and there was no option for those women that made any more sense than this. Nola probably hung around too long because she's a bit dopey and was caught in unusual circumstances where she didn't have a family to go to (which is obviously strategically set up to justify the fact). Jackie gets out as soon as she can, but comes back because there is still the hope that Glen will come back to her.

Of the three brothers Glenn seemed to the one with some spark of decency. The other two seemed to have no spark.

Absolutely. He is the one who has the clear choice and he's vacillating between Brent and Jackie. And also between genuine feelings of family loyalty and camaraderie and love in the family - because, let's not forget, we're not painting a picture of pure evil - and, on the other side, Jackie.

Michelle is a complex character.

Michelle is different again. Michelle is, I think, an incredibly interesting heroic character. She's obviously had a psychological battering possibly because she has been part of that relationship with Brent. She's at a point now where she's as psychologically manipulating as Brent is, but tough. She has had a hard background and can stand up to Brent, which is very important because, if everyone just falls over and folds with Brent, there is no struggle.

Before The Boys there were Black Rock and Idiot Box here and Nil By Mouth from Britain portraying men and women in the suburbs.

They're very different films, though, if you think about it. People tend to just take the darkness, for want of a better word, and group them. But, Idiot Box is a very fanciful film compared with mine. I mean it, not in a derogatory way, but it's as different from The Boys as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is different from The Boys. It starts with the premise that these boys are so poor, they just look at the idiot box, and they're so bored that they have to go out and rob a bank. Then follows this incredible crazy comedy, really, comedy of errors. It's as fanciful as Priscilla.

Black Rock is very different in the sense that it seeks to explain the unexplainable, at its own risk, I reckon. Nil By Mouth is a film that is being compared to this film overseas, so I assume that it's closer to The Boys in terms of staying away from big explanations simply because it doesn't feel, like The Boys, that it has got any answers. That would be folly. That that would insult the audience, given that it's got this real brief, this non-fanciful brief.

The Boys is so stylised, with the flash-forwards. You show the consequences of what was happening, and leave it for us.

At its heart The Boys is about what leads up to the moment of violence and it's uncompromisingly about this and the consequences, so for that very reason the crime in the play and the crime in the film is obviously not there on the screen, because it's not about that. If it was about the crime itself, then that would be on screen. But with this story the crime would consume it and change it into something that it's not. And, aside from any other concerns that I have that violence has become almost meaningless on the screen these days, it's not about that anyway.

The film was certainly about power. His mother said that he looked down at everybody from a great height. The final sequence with them looking at the victim is very strong.
It's an extraordinary ending that Sewell has come up with. It is about power. Obviously, it's about a lot of the issues that reside with the main character, Brett, this incredibly contradictory character who feels the need to control. He's got a few tiny screws loose. He reminds me a lot of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. He has a very strong sense of honour and loyalty in family, more so than anyone else in that family. Like the moments with Nola, which are incredibly scary moments but, in fact, they are, at that point in time, genuine moments from Brett in terms of comforting Nola. But the flipside of that is that he's machiavellian in some respects. He can easily be labelled as evil because he's the one who's capable of the most horrible violence. He led the boys into that situation. He's a very complicated, dangerous chap, Brett.

The effect on Australian audiences?

Well, it's doing what I imagined it would. There was enormous controversy around the play, but part of that controversy was positive: the questions that were raised about the relationship between men and women, about where things broke down, about what goes wrong in situations like this. It's not a simple picture. It's a very complicated, messy picture. But all these questions about male-female relationships were thrown up in the aftermath of the play - lots of letters to the playwright, to the producer, lots of discussions. The same sort of thing is happening in relation to the film. The audience tends to have this incredible emotional journey. You always get that pin-drop reaction at the end and a certain shock afterwards. But in the days after the film they actually are forced into thinking about not just the world and the visceral aspects of what they've experienced, but the questions. Which is what was incredibly powerful about the play and what we always wanted from the film.

And a challenge to Australian men?

Absolutely. It's a portrait of one tiny subsection of Australian manhood and it should be put into question. They're not depicted in charismatic fashion by any means. They go down for what they do, as is the case in the real world if you perpetrate such a horrible crime and you're caught. I don't think it's a depiction of evil, either. When we were developing this, we quickly discovered that we were somewhere in the middle of the spectrum in relation to opinions about such perpetrators. Just a little bit of research confirmed and reconfirmed where we were. We weren't at the end the spectrum that said that people who do these things are pure evil and they need to be put away forever or strung up. We weren't at the other extreme either. We didn't feel the need to produce a sympathetic portrait by any means. We were just somewhere in the middle, realised it was a very complicated, difficult situation to put up on the screen and we had to produce a real and truthful portrait of this family in crisis.

The structural concerns of the piece are interesting for me because what they do, in true Hitchcockian fashion, is create the sense of incredible tension, almost like an old-fashioned suspense or horror film, and to me that was entirely appropriate because it reflected upon those real, tangible qualities of fear that surround violence that is about to happen - domestic violence. Anyone who's had a personal connection with a nasty crime in the making, or the aftermath of a nasty crime, will tell you it's like a horror movie. It's like living in a real-life horror movie, and I wasn't going to shy away from that.

We made a lot of strategic structural decisions - not showing this, keeping this amount of information away from the audience, depicting the house as it is, the various points of view of the women in the house. It's all about reflecting upon what one feels in that fearful situation. It's real horror.

Ending with that sense of anticipation of horror?

That amazing ending which, in the very first draft I was blown away by - surprised that he came up with it - it's almost like Apocalypse Now. After all that happens during the day that we've been witness to, you have three guys and they are out of it. All the avenues for rage are closed to them and they're just in this netherworld. Brett, in that very out of it state, reveals categorically for the first time in the film that he has a few tiny screws loose, that he has a mixed-up fear not just of religion, but of science-fiction in relation to religion and his whole nonsense world. Nevertheless he puts his case forward, all big stuff, science-fiction, that he spews forth. It reveals that he's got a few screws loose at the same time as it all having a sort of metaphorical significance.

Interview: 12th May 1998