RICHARD FLANAGAN


You wrote The Sound of One Hand Clapping, novel and screenplay at the same time. What was that process like?

It's very difficult to explain to people that it's neither a film of the book nor a book of the film, because they arose together more or less simultaneously. I did start writing the screenplay first but, as I wrote it, I used to write it up as prose notes and translating it back into a screenplay, because I understood prose; I didn't really understand screenplays. So, when I finished the screenplay, I had a basis for a novel but not a very good basis, because I came to realise when the screenplay was finished, there was no actual interest in its being made into a film.

People really liked it but they thought it was too difficult a project, would cost too much money. When I finished it, it was that period when Australia was enjoying great success with all those quirky comedies, Strictly Ballroom, Muriel's Wedding, Priscilla, so it wasn't a project that found favour with financiers. Also, nobody could say what it was like. It wasn't like any film that had been done in Australia. It wasn't really European. Investors like being able to say it's a cross between Priscilla and The Terminator! Nobody could precis it in those terms. I wasn't too fussed because I'd learnt to write a script, which is a different form of the craft of writing, so that had interested me.

Then I thought, well, I like the story and I want to take it further, so I'll write it as a novel. I spent about the next two and a half years of my life writing it as a novel. And what I thought would be relatively simple, seeing I had all the characters and plotting worked out, was actually more difficult than writing a novel anew because a film, at the end of the day, is simply a short story. I think that, structurally, a film is a cross between a short story and a poem, whereas a novel is an entire cosmology which you must invent. It's difficult to turn a short story into a novel; you have to turn the thing upside down and start again. So I finished the novel about two days before the film news. I literally sent off the novel to my agent on a Wednesday and on the Friday they rang me and said they had actually got the money for the movie. We were helter-skelter into making the movie. Then, in the editing of the movie, I rewrote the entire novel.

Although they informed each other somewhat, I came to realise they were entirely different forms and must be respected as such. You must try and understand what it is that works and doesn't work in each. Each has its own possibilities and its own limitations. The novel in some ways was liberating for me, because I never felt a need, it never worried me, chopping things out, and I never felt a great fidelity to the script. What I felt a need to do was to try and make the strongest and best film I could, which I may have failed at doing, but that was the ambition.

It was good because I never attempted to turn the film into a novel. Perhaps if I had just written the script and not the novel, I would have had novelistic aspirations which, I think, destroy a lot of films. Films are a very taut form of storytelling and if you introduce too many characters, if you try to introduce too many themes, they're unsteady and frail edifices and they're easily broken.

You then wrote for television?

After I did the script, I was asked to do a treatment for a TV drama series, which I did, and I really disliked doing it because it's very directive. You get told, 'We want this and this because German television are buying that at the moment and we want this element and that'. But again I don't think it ever does to be snobbish and you are always learning something - but I would never go back into TV. As Kieszlowski said, there is nothing wrong with television as a medium. I really dislike people who think that it's an inferior medium to cinema, because it isn't. It's just that the way it's run is even worse than the way film is run because, essentially, every creative decision is made by executives.

Your book about John Friedrich - an interesting project?

Yes, it was a terrific project. A friend of mine was working as Friedrich's bodyguard. It's a long story, it's a great story but, in essence, they had to get the book written because he was about to go off to jail for a very long time and he wouldn't work with other people. They told him to get someone and he got me because he didn't know any writers and his bodyguard did. I had to write it very quickly. I had about six weeks with him in this executive's office at what was then Heinemann Australia. For no reason I can ever think of, it was a huge secret and no-one was to know except the managing director and the publisher and one editor. To everyone else, myself and this strange little man who used to wear a baseball cap and sunglasses because he was obsessed with secrecy, we were editing an anthology of medieval folk verse. That's what everyone else was told. Why on earth it was a secret, I don't know.

It did a number of very good things for me as a writer because I had to write a book in the first person about someone I disliked profoundly and who had such a profoundly different view of life. He actually believed life was evil.

He was very influenced by Nietsche - what I think was a misreading of Nietsche. He would quote Nietsche and we would argue about that. His belief was hard to argue against. One could merely take a position for or against it, really. I had a position against it, but his was possibly more coherent philosophically than my position: that the evidence is that the world is evil and that, therefore, you can either seek to ally yourself with that evil - he put this to me as baldly as I am to you - you can seek to ally yourself with that evil and take what advantages accrue along the way and what pleasures can be had from it, knowing it will destroy you, or you can pretend, as he would put to me, 'Pretend like you that there's no evil and you will be destroyed without even getting the few small pleasures and benefits that you could accrue by being honest.' So his argument with me was that I was simply dishonest in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, and that's difficult to argue against.

So I had to try to write a book trying to take in this madness. Here was a person who would talk - whether through simple bravado or not, I still don't quite know - but he would talk about how he was going to get someone blown away, as he put it, and get a contract out on them. A lot of that was bluster, but I think he was sufficiently cowardly that this had a sort of appeal, to actually use the cash nexus to kill people. He was an awful, sad, tortured soul and he shot himself in the middle of it, at which point I had to finish writing the book. And then big headlines - Friedrich has left manuscript of life, tell-all manuscript with publishers, publishers refuse to divulge any details. As well they wouldn't, because I was making them up here in Hobart. So that was a potboiler, but it was actually - as Gabriel Marquez said when he took to writing soap operas after he won the Nobel Prize, 'The medium is an invitation'. All different forms are an invitation that we must explore, I suppose.

That potboiler, I got $10,000 for writing it. Which allowed me to write full-time for a year. That's when I started writing Death of a River God, which was my first novel. It changed how I wrote and how I thought about writing. As a work, it's a potboiler.

But you still enjoy your writing?

I do like writing. The thing about writing is that all I've got to do is try and make it the best possible work that I can. I don't have to, each day, make ten phone calls just to keep the last sentence I wrote. I don't have someone standing over me quoting Pam Ayres and asking me to write the next chapter in her style. With film you have an industry that wants to produce product, as they so ingloriously call it, in the manner that Walkmans and McDonalds' hamburgers are made. It frustrates them enormously that you can't make things that might mean something to other people in that way. It's infinitely mysterious and difficult. You simply have to trust the people who are doing it to do it. That gives you your best chance and, even then, it will probably be a failure, but you must allow them to take that risk.

Film people have a very odd attitude. They have an idea of art that if you can work out what all the weaknesses are and eliminate them - that's the whole idea of test screenings - if we can just eliminate all the weaknesses, then we have something good. But I have an opposite idea which is that somewhere between your ambition and your failure is your achievement and, somehow, in what is weak in what you do and what is flawed lies the kernel of what actually moves people and might mean something to them. You can carefully fillet every weakness out of something, then what are you left with? But unfortunately that's the mentality that's brought to bear.

Your decision to direct The Sound of One Hand Clapping, directing your first film?

I asked Rolf de Heer if he would direct it - I didn't know him - and he read the script and very generously said that he felt he couldn't direct it, that there was a very singular voice in the script and that the only person who could direct it was me and that, if I would direct it, he would produce it. I've got no background in film-making whatsoever; my wife takes the family snaps. I don't even do that. But as Carlos Fuentes once wrote, 'you cannot act without the horizon of failure constantly in view' so, in spite of my terror, I was interested. It was too interesting a thing to turn down and I've always liked doing different things. I've worked with architects in the past, designing things. I always like experimenting with different forms, so I agreed but was very frightened about it.

What I loved about film was the process of film-making. It's a great joy and when you do have those great collaborations with people, with my composer and people like Kerry Fox and John Scott, to me that's joyous because my work is largely solitary as a writer. The bad side of film-making, the extraordinarily ugly side, is the politics and the extent to which a director must be party to that because, in the end, you must fight every day simply to be allowed to keep on making the film. I think that's profoundly wrong because it doesn't allow the best work. More than half your energy each day goes into fighting for the right to continue to make the film. That's utterly destructive and stupid. The problem with film is that at the end of the day it's a totalitarian society in which the tyrant is money and it leads to a lot of people, who in other situations are good and decent people, behaving quite badly. I very much admire people who make good films in spite of it and now I understand why most films are so compromised.

The other thing is that to concentrate on individuals is to miss why people do what they do. It is an industry which, because of the sums of money involved, morally compromises a lot of people very easily - they start off decent, but without being aware of it, they've sold their soul for a mess of pottage. You can't get it back, and I think it's immensely sad.

What about the location work, finding the locations, the logistics of getting everthing and everyone there?

I loved all that. It's like the circus coming to town and you're allowed to play with it. It's a lot of fun. Making a film is odd because you summon this cyclone into existence and then you exist in the eye of the cyclone. It has these great creative powers and also these great destructive powers and you just hope you're not dashed to pieces with it. The process of shooting - it's like that description of war that gets quoted: it's long moments of boredom interspersed with the occasional moment of terror and exhilaration. I can see why people are seduced by that, why they spend years and years for that short time on the set.

Your Tasmanian experience and your Tasmanian perspective? It's very strong in your early writing and your interest in the wilderness and the Greens. Did I hear trees being chopped down during the final credits of the film?

I don't know what that is. Now you've got me worried.

I thought, 'He's done this deliberately,' the sound of the wilderness being destroyed, and a touch of message.

Oh, God. I like the idea. I wish I'd had it. No, there's not meant to be any message. It's the sound designer, Jim Currie. It's a very unusual sound design. Specifically, we did lots of wild recordings up in the mountains and that's one of them which we felt worked at the end. And it could be anything. We used all sorts of odd sounds. We used sounds of little rapids in creeks and things like that instead of more conventional sound effects. It was all recorded on radio mikes to give it a much more intense feel and then it was all mixed. I wanted to mix it in a very spare way and constantly drop out any extraneous sounds because the convention is you put atmospheric tracks all the way through and locate people's movement with sound, through music. Whereas, here, the music was meant to be one of the fundamental characters in the movie. Cezary Skubiszewski, the composer, was brought in months before we started pre-production. I worked with him a lot then and his music influenced how I was shooting and vice versa. I'd be altering things from the demos he was producing.

The style of the film is very 'European' and reminiscent of The Tale of Ruby Rose, with its rugged wintry mountain locations and isolation. But the accent of many of the characters - Julie Forsyth's neighbour and family sequences - had such an Australian accent and tone (and Vegemite) that it was a strong combination of what the migrants to Tasmania experienced: the European background, the new place, a homely Vegemite kind of culture and accent.

I'm glad you liked that because, for me, there was a short moment in my childhood when I realised there was this meeting of Old Europe and Old Australia and both worlds had a certain grace and both worlds no longer exist. There was something about them that I have a great affection for and both of them met strangely. The point about Tasmania - I obviously have deep feelings about the place, but in essence I grew up in a world that I knew to be profoundly different and I think Tasmania is a different country and I think Australia is composed of a number of different countries. And this is no argument for secession, it's not a political argument! I think it's just an acknowledgment of a cultural fact. I mean, blackfellas don't have a problem knowing that to grow up in the Kimberley is a different experience from growing up in south-west Tasmania. I grew up in this world and I have always found it quite magical.

I suppose I came out of an Australian Irish Catholic peasantry, really, all convict people who kept on marrying each other. They had a very rich oral culture. But then, as I got a bit older, I realised that we were despised and that we were seen to be less and if you wanted to write or paint or do any of those things, then you were expected to leave. Our experience was forever the most marginal and we were the most marginal of people. I don't think Tasmanian experience is better than growing up in Sunshine or Bankstown or wherever. I just don't think it's less, that's all. What attracted me in writing was that I realised the history of great writing is the history of people of regional culture - that is, of Joyce writing about Dublin in Trieste, of Marquez writing about little towns on the coast of Colombia and Mexico City, of Flaubert writing about Madame Bovary in Normandy. And the films I've liked have always done that sort of thing, too.

So I suppose I both wanted to honour that world and also, as Faulkner, who I love, once wrote, when he was asked why he wrote only about Mississippi, 'Well, I have all these books I want to write and I have only one lifetime to write them, and I don't have another lifetime to know another country.' No less and no more here than anywhere else, I understand this place a little. I don't understand anywhere else at all, so this is the field I suppose I'm condemned to plough - but it's not a bad field.

You've brought post-war migrants with their world into this Tasmanian world that your family had lived in such a long time. A commentator referred to the migration issues and the theme of dislocation in the context hydro work there in the '50s.

At the end of my first novel, Death of a River God, you realise everybody's related to one another. That's the point, everybody's related. I always feel that there is an intense connection with people and I always hate politics or art that tries, like European culture for all its great brilliance, posits a position of utter despair, which is that we are alone. I don't believe that, that we are alone in life and at death. It recurs again and again in their books and their films. But my experience and the fundamental feeling I have is that we are inescapably connected to each other and to the earth, and that's our answer to European culture; that is the answer to Australian experience, and that's what I've wanted to represent most fundamentally in my work.

So the experience of migrants coming here was, to me, not much different. It's the same experience my own people would have had. My great grandfather lived through the famine and came out here as a convict. His experience must have been the same.

With Sonia's father and the mother, especially at the beginning of the film which I did not appreciate until later, knowing what actually happened - and then it was more devastating - you show the dislocation. You wanted us to know what Maria had experienced. But she came to Tasmania and died alone. And the father, unless Sonia had come back to him, may well have died alone after living so many decades here. I wondered what this says about that post-war generation coming to Tasmania and seeming unable to be part of it.

It always struck me as extraordinary that you would meet people in a place like this, which is so often dismissed as the end of the world, who had lives that were so often dismissed as utterly ordinary and insignificant, yet impressed upon their souls were the great epic movements of our age: the experience of Fascism, Bolshevism, total war, the loss of languages, countries, homes, families, and they'd ended up living - they might be living across the road from you. And it still goes on.

I was living just a few streets away a couple of years ago and a Vietnamese family moved in. They had little children who were about four or five years old. The father said, 'G'day, mate,' and they started telling me about being on the boat and the people who'd got washed off and were never seen again. The things they'd seen! And that's Australia. This seemed to me to be almost unbearable that people live with such horror and try to find meaning in their life. What I wanted it to be about in the end was the redemptive power of love. This is very unfashionable because the idea of love itself is profoundly unfashionable and the idea that love can redeem people is seen as both naive and ridiculous.

Not hard-hitting enough?

Yes. I get annoyed because I think too much art these days deals in the shadows of existence, sex and violence. There's very much a place for that, but to me there are only three great stories: birth, love and death. They are the only real stories that have ever mattered and people are terrified of them. It's because they're so hard to actually deal with in a way that isn't either pathetic or comic. I knew when I made the film - and I've got no idea whether the film's good or bad - I knew the risk that it would run was that it would be melodramatic or even comic. It's very difficult material, I suppose.

You've made it moving, birth, love and death. What you've actually given us is death, then love and birth.

That's right, it does end with the birth.

You've given us new life, Sonia deciding whether she wanted to abort the baby or not and the way her decision was made, the support that she got and, then, the her father's ability to come alive after so many decades of going slowly to his death. The redemptive power of love did give life. The same with your producer, Rolf de Heer. Critics said that the end of Bad Boy Bubby was just too nice.

... when he's got the sprinkler out in the garden, yes.

In real life, nobody wants to have gloom and doom. They actually do want to have the sprinkler out.

It's very odd when you think about it. Everyone used to despise the Hollywood happy ending because it became such a cliche that was untrue; but we have the Hollywood unhappy ending now, which is an equal cliche. I would hope that the film finishes on a tentative note. There is, for people who have known only despair and anguish, simply hope. It's an ambiguous hope, but there's hope. That's as much as you can ask for in life, I think, and it's a very powerful and good thing.

When I was writing the script, I was influenced by what was going on in Bosnia and the rape of women there. It interested me how rape has been too often interpreted in the narrow sense - a very modern Western idea - simply being a crime against the individual woman, and it most definitely is that. But it was also understood and used there in its military capacity as a crime against a community. By destroying that person's worth in the community, you also destroy the family and the community.

One of the things that interested me about the whole rise of violence in films was how, as Clint Eastwood said most memorably, 'Violence has consequences, but films don't deal with them'. And that's true. The central act of violence in the movie is the rape of the mother, which you don't see at all. The whole film was about the consequences of an act that would have taken two or three minutes, and how that shoots like a bullet through a wound through generations of people. It is about how difficult it is, but how it was also possible to overcome a great act of evil intent.

And the abuse of Sonia as a child when she went to stay with the Picotti family?

There was a lot of debate at the scripting stage because people said she should be abused. But the thing is she won't let it happen. You must never forget that people have an agency. Again a lot of modern drama and fiction is about people as victims. But people can be placed in positions of great powerlessness, even children, instead of power. That's not to deny a lot of people in those situations have no choice, but it seemed important to me that at that moment when Picotti tries to touch her up, she actually asserts herself and gets away. It seemed to me that all of us must remember, no matter how powerless we feel, that we have a dignity that can manifest itself as a power if we have courage.

Sonia also acted when she finally left her father and his brutality. And she decided to come back. So she took initiatives, even if they were a long time apart and she felt tentative about them.

Yes, I'm glad if you thought that. I worried some people might find her too passive, but for me her decisions are the most momentous and the most difficult to arrive at.

Kerry Fox looks at times as if she's passive. She has a kind of quiet presence. Then, after a while, you realise that she's working on every issue.

Quite steely, yes. It was a really difficult role for Kerry because the film's not dialogue-driven at all. She knew it was difficult because I could tell her what it was about, but it was something that had to be communicated by nuance and gesture and look. There's nothing much else and that's hugely demanding upon an actor.

The rest of the cast was very strong, especially Evelyn Krape.

Yes, Evelyn and Kerry together were just magic. She was here for a week, and each night at rushes everyone's going, 'My God'. The Australian film industry, it's so conventional in a lot of its choices and in its casting. It just casts the same people again and again. Evelyn is somebody who is an extraordinary actor and she's been overlooked because she was seen to be a comedian. Kristof Kaczmarek came from Poland and is a terrific actor. Melita Jurisic had a very difficult role because she doesn't do anything much except break down and walk out. Yet she had to give those few short moments such weight. Most of the time she was acting to either me or to little taped crosses on the camera because little Arabella, the three-year-old Sonia, we'd just put her on for her singles and then whip off because she was a three-year-old

Religious themes? You gave Sonia's father strong dialogue about God and belief in God. Sonia reacted to that in a puzzled kind of way wanting her First Communion dress and the Rosary. Then the strictness of the women, that old-style Catholicism.

There were a number of influences there. I don't carry a great candle for organised religion, but I do believe that what afflicts us at the moment is a profound spiritual crisis. As we've become ever more materially prosperous, there is an equivalent spiritual yearning that is not answered. I think a lot of our art, unfortunately, is also frightened of addressing spiritual issues. It's difficult country to traverse, but we must set out through it.

The women - that actually comes much more from my own experience because I grew up in that. Parts of my family were that very old-style church, just like that, sitting around doing the decades of the Rosary, and it made no sense to me. So I grew up in an ultra-orthodox church and I also grew up in a very heterodox church, which was much more the religion of my mother and father, which would have had them burnt at the stake some centuries back. It is much more a religion about love and openness and that I admire greatly.

Boyan makes a point with the woman about the SS. There have always been two types of European migrants to Australia: those who are fiercely of the faith, be it Catholic or orthodox or whatever, and those who are fiercely anti-clerical, which of course is the other great peasant tradition of belief since the 18th century in Europe. And the church's record in the occupied countries was very bad, particularly in Slovenia where, as he said, the church was an active party to the rounding up of people who worked with the partisans.

But I think you have to clear some of that away and then address things more fundamentally and say, well, that's the nonsense and clutter that can accrue, but that's not what genuine spiritual belief is about.

I'm that most hopeless of fallen Catholics, the Catholic agnostic. Irredeemably Catholic. You can't grow up in the world I grew up in and lose it. I always disagree with people who say, 'I'm no longer Catholic,' because culturally you are, forever. I'm always interested in reading secular Islamic writers because it's more profoundly Islamic than the work of fundamentalist Islamic writers. Somehow, by getting rid of the clutter, they see how much it has actually shaped them. And they have time-honoured ways of trying to understand the human condition. These things are difficult and mysterious, aren't they? I don't like making any claims for anything I do and, most particularly, I get very frightened of making claims about spiritual intent, because I think you can look very foolish.

The title itself, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, where did it came from? What were you highlighting? Or were you leaving it for us to ponder on?

It's very funny. At a certain point it had to have a title, and I'd come across that phrase when I was at Oxford, in an essay about the history of the influence of early feminism on the British co-operative movement. Nothing else of that essay remains in my mind except this phrase, and I thought it seemed right. There are always things that are enigmatic and art, in essence, is always a journey into things you don't really fully comprehend. And I never worry. It's when I do comprehend them I think that it's becoming too obvious. So it had to have a title and it seemed right. So that was it. Then, when the book came out, we did this huge tour around the country promoting it. Everyone would always ask me this question, which is quite legitimate. But then they would normally say, 'For me it means...' and they would offer this very clever sort of interpretation of the novel in terms of the title, to which I can only agree. But I liked it myself - and there have been a lot better reasons propounded for why it is a good title - but I liked it simply because I think there is a lie that has taken almost universal hold within the mentality of our age, that salvation lies within us individually, that if there is any hope for us, that it lies within us individually, and this takes all forms of madness from step-aerobics to self-help books to the liver-cleansing diet to psychiatry to - you know. But the idea is that somehow we are all afflicted with a certain anguish and we think that somehow we can answer it ourselves. But I think if there is any answer, any meaning, it lies with other people. It doesn't lie with us. We don't exist as individuals, we exist socially. The way modern capitalism is, it encourages us only to be individuals. It is no wonder that the spiritual reflex of that has been to search for this individual salvation. But it's a lie. The truth is that it's very difficult to try and find what meaning there is in other people, because other people, like us, are flawed and difficult... it's our family, it's our friends and they have as many faults as we do. But that's where it exists for me, the film, the book - and they were both purposefully constructed with that idea in mind, that you have two people whose lives are actually deaths until the point at which they both recognise that, without each other, they are the sound of one hand clapping. So that, for me, was why it worked. But there were many and much more eloquent interpretations.


Interview: 3rd February 1998