JOHN HEWITT


Your first film had a graphically direct title, Bloodlust.

It's a purpose-made, market-driven, crass, exploitation film. It isn't particularly good but, for me, it was really my film school. It's where I taught myself how to make a feature film and made a lot of mistakes on it - but I tried to learn from them. It was a film made in the context of not really being able to get any support for anything I was trying to do, then just going out and making something that I thought would have a back-end market, would be a safe bet, a sort of straight-to-video schlock film.

And in fact that ended up being a correct evaluation. It was called Bloodlust. It's a delirious horror vampire film and it's gone on to become a bit of a cult movie. It was very profitable as a commercial undertaking for the investors but, as a calling card, which I also hoped it would be, it was a big mistake because in Australia it closed doors for me. When people watched it, they thought I was a complete nut-case for making such a horrible, crass film. They couldn't see beyond that surface idiocy and actually see, 'well, of course it's like that, but actually - he can make a movie'. So that was a misjudgment that I made.

You co-directed it?

Yes, it was really a two-person job. Richard Wolstonecroft and myself are good friends and we basically did everything on that film: from the catering and acting (in about ten different roles each when people didn't turn up) to directing, writing and producing. It was a living nightmare making that film. It was an intense six-week shoot and we just sort of threw ourselves off a cliff. Somehow it ended up getting finished - God know's how. There's some real legends behind it - one of the stars was actually put in prison on drug charges for three weeks in the middle of the shoot. It was a miracle it ever got made.

It's a leap from Bloodlust to Redball.

After finishing Blood Lust in 1991 and then writing numerous substantial high-quality (I thought) scripts but still not being able to get them made, I wrote Redball to be shot as a very, very light-budget, do-it-yourself feature film. I wrote it for plainclothes police officers in Melbourne so, basically, I knew I could get actors to come in their street clothes, that whole aesthetic. And I wrote it in very focused little scenes that I knew I could shoot in a few hours each - and we could do it over weekends. The script actually did end up going through a funding process but eventually fell on its arse. It couldn't get funding, for obvious reasons. It was always a fairly contentious and controversial script.

What was the contribution of Film Victoria?

Film Victoria ended up giving Redball $100,000 from their low-budget feature film fund. But that was after the film was cut - finished all bar the sound mix - with international and domestic distribution and fairly substantial advances secured. So Film Vic gave me the $100,000 they had to give me. If they didn't give me that money, that whole low-budget accord would have been seen as ludicrous, because Redball is the ultimate low-budget Melbourne film. So they gave me the money they had to give me, but they wouldn't give me any more. I mean, I'm very grateful for what they gave me but, ultimately, the budget of Redball has 17.37% investment from a government agency. The rest has come from the private sector. So I still had to go out and make it in the private sector. It was a bloody struggle. I had a fine cut of this film in July 97. I delivered the film at the beginning of August 98, so it took me a year to take it from fine cut to get the money together to transfer it to 35mm.

It's not a fairytale film like Love and Other Catastrophes. They shot that and the AFC gave them $600,000 to do everything they had to do with it. Hopefully I'm not bitter about it, but I always found it absolutely extraordinary that the AFC would not give Redball any money at all. I went back to them three or four times and each time they knocked me back. I can only assume they did it because it was just inherently controversial. Even with domestic and international distribution attached, they wouldn't even give me ten dollars, let alone ten thousand. But anyhow I got it finished, so that's okay.

It has a very distinctive visual style.

We shot it on mini-DV, which is a domestic video format. Digital video is a very new technology. Three years ago it was science-fiction and now you can go to Brash's and buy one for a grand. It's incredible. I've shot on all video formats and it's just extraordinary the difference between digital and analogue, and it's extraordinarily inexpensive. So basically we shot Redball on a $2000 camera on tapes that cost $45 for 90 minutes.

We shot it on weekends over a period of six weeks, but we shot it in ten days. It was a ten-day shoot spread across about six weeks and we shot it very quickly and painlessly. It was a remarkable experience for me, because my first film was a living nightmare and this one was just a terrific experience, mainly because I had great actors and a supportive crew - actors who could just turn it on when you said "action" and all you have to do is capture them in the frame and they do the rest. That was the big lesson I learned on my first film, and it was a big revelation, a discovery for me. The thing I loved about the whole process was the actors turning the script into something. I thought I loved art direction and composition and special effects. That's what I thought I loved about the cinema. But I actually discovered I loved the raw performance, just the actor and the lens.

The opening with Belinda Mc Clory is very striking, the interrogation and the power of her presence, the close-up of her face and the way she spoke.

Well, all those one-takers! All I had to do was just hit "on" and let her do the rest. The script was structured - I call it a scattergun narrative. There's all these seemingly self-contained scenes, self-contained in their own right, nice little nuggets of drama, but they do actually knit together to tell a sort of broad story. A female Homicide D from Melbourne is going through some sort of breakdown to do with an ongoing case that they can't solve. It tells the sort of stories that I always wanted to tell and heard from friends of mine who were police officers.

A variation on Homicide?

A little bit. I wrote the script from a position of real love for the cops and real sympathy for the sort of lives they have. Unfortunately a lot of people see Redball as this scathing indictment of the most appalling police corruption - which it sort of is - but I would hope that the film actually has a lot of sympathy for the characters because I really do see police as people who are right in the middle of it - it's the thin blue line. I mean, my sympathies are with the cops, not the other elements.

You show the pressure on the police. But you also set up an ethical framework right at the beginning, with Jane's comments on good and evil, right and wrong,especially when she was young. You've led the audience into this ethical perspective from the very beginning of the film.

Yes. I'm obsessed with the grand old themes like loyalty, good and evil, what is the truth and what is fiction. They're the sort of things, like obscure literary references, make films really interesting for me.

And in-jokes about films?

In-jokes about films. The video store scene comes from a friend of mine who's very powerful in the video industry. He told me, "If you ever make another movie, you've got to have a scene in a video store in it, because the shops will love it." From going to lots of festivals and watching movies where there are film references, I know it always goes down a treat with film-lovers, so I thought I've got to get a film reference in there as well, plus some contentious speculating on the video culture and what damage that sort of stuff might do, without actually finding any answers. But at least I said it.

And you picked on Brian de Palma and Body Double?

Body Double is one of my top ten favourite films. It all seemed to fall together as I wrote it. I love Brian de Palma. Film-makers that I really love and who perhaps influence me are those delirious film-makers where people often have dual feelings about them, like Oliver Stone and Abel Ferrara and Lars Von Trier. Sometimes people see their films as having a confused morality. I like films or words that absolutely challenge the way I think the world should be. For me, say, a great critique of Nazism or a great examination of Nazism would be a work that had an interior logic that was a critique, but also had the excitement of that ideology in there as well. I love the razor edge of ideology where it doesn't just stand there and shake its finger at what it wants to criticise, it actually shows the excitement of it all. and that's what I want. When I was shooting those scenes where the cops abuse their power and get those beautiful young girls to do all sorts of things, I wanted there to be a grain of, "Wouldn't it be great." It was important for that to be there.

You got it there in that episode. The young girl was particularly good.

Yes, Sharon Stewart. She was absolutely terrific. She looked so pure then, at the end, she looked so damaged. It's frightening. That phenomenon, from my experience with the police, is one of the major perks of the job as far as cops are concerned, that ability to just casually use their power to coerce lots of things, but sexual favours is very high up on the list.

The theme of coercion and power within the force was also strong when the officers told the junior police not to bother with the floating corpse: power, the older and the younger, rank and the chain of command.

I wanted all the constables to be really as young as they could be along with these world-weary older police. But I also wanted it to be a twentysomething movie, all the police are in their twenties or thirties. A lot of things like Blue Murder and Phoenix, which were very influential on Redball had a downside in that they were all set in the past and all the cops were just too old, all in their late forties and fifties. And, certainly in Phoenix, everybody was squeaky-clean whereas in Blue Murder, well, that's what it used to be like back in the '70s and '80s. I think the cops are more corrupt now than they've ever been, and it doesn't matter what you do, it will always be part of the system. My quote is, "The system isn't corrupt, corruption is the system. That's what keeps it all going." So I've got that ambivalence there. It was important for me to have that.

You mentioned references to favourite directors. Visually, Redball is in the vein of Lars Von Trier.

Absolutely. I showed the cast and crew Breaking the Waves. We went to a special preview about four days before we started shooting and I said, "Listen, here's a guy with a big budget at his disposal, but what he's said is, 'I've made all those perfect movies like The Element of Crime and Zentropa. Now I'm going to make a real grungy film,'" and he shot it hand-held concentrating on performance. And those scenes where it was completely out of focus, he kept them because the performance was there. That gave me the guts to think that's what I'm going to do. I shot the film completely hand-held - except for those monologues. We didn't use the sticks at all in the film. It was all hand-held, just like that. So Lars Von Trier definitely.

Thematically, of the directors you listed, it's probably Abel Ferrara that struck as the most apt comparison.

Yes, Abel Ferrara and Lars Von Trier are the two big influences on this film. I always say this whenever I can - for me, Andre Tarkovsky is the great artist of cinema. He's like the Bach or the Mozart or the Leonardo da Vinci of the cinema. But I couldn't say that his films influence me as a film-maker, because that's the Holy Grail - I mean, you don't go there. That's his realm. I'm just squirreling away here.



Interview: 27th August 1998