SAMANTHA LANG
You did some film study in Prague?
There's a film school there and I was fortunate enough to go just as the government was being overthrown and Vaclev Havel was coming to power. I was hanging around with the film students. It seemed to me at that time that the arts community in Prague had been very politically active and crucial in helping the change of government come about. It was quite a life-changing experience really because a lot of the young people I met had been refused entry into university because of their parents' political leanings; and we don't have those sorts of problems here - or perhaps they're more covert.
Is it appropriate, therefore, to say that The Well is a European-looking and European-sounding film?
Yes, I am happy to say that. But I don't think it came purely from the Prague experience. I grew up watching European films from a very early age, then I had a fantastic French teacher who showed me French cinema and I watched a film called Hiroshima Mon Amour, which was instrumental for me, a kind of turning point. Then I went to university in France - I started to do a degree there and continued this obsession with cinema, but felt that before I could even try to make a film, I needed life experience and I should go and learn other things. So it's been a long, gradual process. Now I watch lots of American films, but it really wasn't until I went to the film school that that kind of cinema was opened up to me. Up until then it had been very dominated by watching European movies. So I think that, somehow, even without my consciously aiming for a European look, that maybe it's part of my make-up.
And the photography?
Yes. The landscape was very important for me as the visual metaphor for Hester's inner world, so very much a reflection of what was going on for her psychologically and emotionally. I've tried to make the landscape mirror what was going on with her.
Your short films?
I think they have screened at the St Kilda Festival. They're very different from The Well. The Well is quite a huge departure.
They're fiction, the short films? And the film that won the award at the Sydney Film Festival?
Yes. Audacious was my graduate film, which got me a lot of recognition. It's a story about a woman who's bored with her sex life with her husband. She works in a computer company and, through the Internet, she finds a husband and wife team who invite people to write their fantasies down and they will re-enact them on video. They start doing this as a means to work out what's going on sexually between her and her husband. Then, watching them gives her the confidence to try things out on her husband. At first he is reluctant to engage in these activities and then eventually yields - at which point he discovers all the tapes and feels deeply humiliated. So there's a kind of showdown. But all the way through the film he has been obsessed with his video camera and, at the end of the film, when she tries to make amends, she records a message on the video camera, rewinds it and finds that he's been a voyeur into her life. her showering, her putting on her stockings... I was interested to see how technology affected us and whether it actually improved relations between people, helped intimacy or prevented it.
And you wrote the screenplay?
Yes, I did.
You also directed a story in the Twisted Tales series?
Rachel Ward was in it and it was about a video-dating thing, with Marshal Napier.
A bit in the vein of Audacious.
Well, yes. They gave me the script and I thought, I'm being typecast here. But I think that what Bryan Brown did with Twisted Sales was a wonderful thing and ground-breaking for Australian television.
Is that your only television work?
Yes, it is. It's very hard to break into Australian television as a director. What he was doing was giving new directors a chance.
The process from novel to film for The Well?
The rights for the book were acquired by Sandra Levy who commissioned Laura Jones to write the screenplay. That carried on for about six years. In mid-1996, I was asked to read the screenplay, which I did, and I came back with other ideas.
Since Laura Jones was the screenplay writer, she's largely responsible for the translation from the novel to screen. It's true that in the book there is more plot and that we don't have as much time to include everything. Some of the back stories aren't there. One of the difficulties in adapting The Well is that there's a lot of interior monologue and you have to find a way of presenting that on the screen, so if it's not explained in dialogue, then we understand it from the actor. But the thing that we concentrated on was being true to the spirit of the novel rather than its form, because sometimes, I think, you can become restricted by your reverence for what is in the novel and, therefore, you restrict the potential of the film. So we had to throw the book away and say okay, we've got to make this into a film and it has to stand alone as a film.
But interestingly, at the end Elizabeth Jolley saw the film and thought that it was true to what she had written.
We had two weeks' rehearsal, going through the script, talking through the scenes, especially those that seemed more complex. There was an exercise that Pamela actually suggested and that was that on the final day of rehearsal we went through the whole script and I would call out what the scene was about and Pamela and Miranda would try and find a key image for it in terms of physically expressing it. So we did the whole film but for each scene we tried to find a key gesture or a key movement.
Laura and I collaborated on the final draft of the screenplay and the shooting script. During the shoot she was there for collaboration. Then, once I'd done part of the film, we talked about it. She's quite a generous person in the sense that she always said to me, `This is your film. You have to make it the way that you want it to be. If there's anything here that you don't agree with, it has to go', so I had the good fortune of having her support and her collaboration when I felt I needed it.
The character of Hester: what was driving her - with her father, with Harry and, then, with Katherine.
There's always a difference when you're actually making something and then when you stand back and watch what you have made. You see it much more analytically. When you're filming, it's often much more instinctive. Certainly I see the film as a sort of `states of mind' film, an exploration into the female psyche. As far as Hester is concerned, I think she is a woman who has basically lived an emotionally repressed life, bereft of any kind of warmth or physical contact and hasn't grown up. I think that when Katherine comes into her life, what happens is that Hester's emotional life starts.
She begins as very stilted and then, literally, lets her hair down and begins to `break out'.
Yes, and I guess that what is poignant about it is that Katherine evokes all these feelings in her but she hasn't learned how to articulate them. So you have their relationship shifting from a kind of employer-employee, mother-daughter, two-schoolgirls-going-through-adolescence-living-out-their-fantasies relationship. And then there is an underbelly of physical stirrings because Katherine is also discovering the potency of her sexuality and her sensuality. She can play around with it and Hester is enamoured with that kind of freedom, that physical freedom, but is scared of it at the same time. So for me, the well, as well as its narrative function, becomes a metaphor for feminine or female sexuality. Hester is scared by the danger of what sexuality will do. Katherine wants to bring the body up out of the well - it's the object of desire so she wants it up there, whereas Hester is feeling, `Go down, go down'.
She threw the man down the well.
Yes, and then she seals it because it's too potent, it's too scary and if she allows it to come up, it means their relationship is going to have to change, whatever way that may be.
How calculating is Katherine or is she just floating through life? Then what of her fantasy of the man down the well claaing to her and, finally, her stealing the money?
I'm happy for people to put whatever interpretation they choose onto the film. My own feeling is that Katherine is deeply traumatised by the accident; that when the accident occurs, it gives Hester the upper hand in that she, by throwing the man down the well, apparently saves Katherine and takes control. It's the control that Katherine is losing. Katherine's only defence is to use the power of her imagination to invent the man and make him alive. Then he is a weapon against Hester and a way of combating the tight hold that Hester has assumed over her. So I believe that Katherine believes in the man. For me, the money is - dare I say it - inconsequential in that what's most important is that Katherine chooses to leave at the end.
She left earlier but came back and now she can finally leave.
Yes.
Genevieve Lemon's character seemed to be an ordinary woman, wife and mother, but also a Mother Earth symbol contrasting with these two strange, mutually possessive women.
Yes, she's Mother Earth.
The men in the film were largely peripheral.
Yes, peripheral, but also, if you think about the intruder, the man down the well as being male, he is also central. I find it interesting about the story that they are peripheral in that you're in the inner world of the woman, but they are also central to that inner world. Even though it is not articulated, is the male presence.
Have Australian reviewers audiences responded well to these themes of the female psyche and sexuality - especially the male reviewers?
To my surprise and great joy, they've responded extremely well, which says more about them than it does about me. I've been really overwhelmed at just how well people have talked about the film and responded to it. What was interesting is that when The Well was in Cannes at the Festival, there was a great contrast between southern European men who said the film was not about anything, and southern European women who said, `Oh, you've explored taboos about female sexuality', and feted me as this pioneer talking about female sexuality. The men said no, it's not about anything. It is good to come back to Australia and have it reviewed by men and women and for them both to see it as interesting, at least. I think says a lot about our society.
Are you satisfied with The Well?
Film-making process is a process. You have an idea of what you're going to do in terms of the film. Then through each stage that idea evolves. So once it starts with the screenplay and you have an idea during production and then during shooting, you are rewriting the film. It never stops, right up until you're finishing the sound, what sounds to add, also...
Really you battle against time to do the best you can for a film and finish it to make it as good as it can possibly be, but eventually, because of time and money, you have to stop.
In a way it's dangerous to think about changes do doing things better because when you're making a film, you're doing the best you can, given the circumstances that you're surrounded by. So I content myself with, well, I did the best I could have done. I pushed myself to my limit and this is the result.
Interview: 23rd July 1997
