DAVID PARKER



You were a photographer before being a writer and director?

Yes, I was a stills photographer working in theatre, opera and ballet and in television, and then in film. I would manage with the magazines I was working for. And I'd go on set and just cover that particular day or days for that particular magazine. I really started developing a love for the process of film-making and that grew to a point where I was employed as a still photographer on movies. I consciously went after that style of work. And I guess I worked in a lot of movies in the '70s and into the '80s, The Man From Snowy River and Mad Max, Burke and Wills, a lot of those quite big movies with quite long shoots. So I was really very much a part of the process, although as a stills photographer, you never are part of the process.

Just observing it?

Yes. But what was interesting about it was that my job was to record the process as well as shoot for posters and publicity. What was actually happening was I was getting one of the best apprenticeships you could ever have as a film-maker. It was on The Coolangatta Gold, the film that Edgleys were doing in Queensland, that I started talking to Colin Friels about it. By that stage I really thought that I had more to offer than just being a stills photographer on films, that I had some stories that I wanted to tell. My dilemma was who to get to write them, because I felt my stories were unique and I had a unique way that I wanted to tell them. It was he who suggested to me I should write them myself.

I thought that was fairly audacious because I had an immense respect for the craft, skills, creativity of scriptwriting but, having said that, I launched into writing what was to become Malcolm.

You landed on your feet instantly?

Yes.

In those unique stories, there's a lot of emotion but there's also a lot of very strong ironic humour which somehow or other taps into to a lot of that ordinariness that Australians have. showing the funny side of it without being patronising.

Yes, I think so. Only, I suppose, that term, ordinariness, is generally regarded as a negative term, but to me it's not. Most of it's going about life, working away and trying to make our lives as good as we possibly can - and I think that applies to everyone. So I love commenting on, I suppose, the non-celebrities in our lives, the people who are the workers and the people associated with the workers. I find it such a colourful part of our culture and that's why I like drawing on it.

All those features are in Malcolm. Whose dreamed up the mechanical side of things - the cars, the cameras? Did they come from you?

Yes, it did. I've always had quite a bent towards things mechanical. I actually started doing mechanical engineering - I feel it's the only thing I have in common with David Williamson, that both of us did engineering. He got a bit further with it than I did and, certainly, as a writer he got a little further than me as well. I went into engineering because I was always building gadgets and things as a kid. I remember designing self-opening doors on my mother's garage, which all came to grief when the doors slammed shut on her car rather than doing what they were supposed to do. I took the motor off the motor mower and put it on a 60s bike, things like that. I was always up to mechanically-oriented things.

So I was quite interested in weaving that side of me into the character of Malcolm, because it was an area I knew really well and I think that in your first script it's pretty important to draw on things that you know well because there's a great degree of honesty.

And you wrote Rikki and Pete and The Big Steal?

Yes, I did.

And again that quirkiness that commentators refer to these days...?

For me it's normal. When I think about what I write, I obviously choose a very small part of any particular community and make the story out of that, something that comes out of my imagination or has been triggered by some thought. The story itself might be unique, but the pallette that I use is not. It's life.

It's the inner city Melbourne streets and the ironic and offbeat facets of human nature stand out in both those films. What attracted you to Hercules?

Well, I'd seen Double Take always been very amused and in awe of what they did. I think Des Mangan is a very clever fellow just to come up with the concept. I know it's been done in different forms in different parts of the world, but I don't think anyone did what Des did, which was basically take over a theatre and use the concept of revoicing a film live, which is what they did. So I got involved in this idea of doing a film based on that concept. Des came up with the idea of having a guy who was unhappy with his lot, working for a big distribution company so he takes over his own theatre. On opening night he finds his film's in Italian and not in English. So then you can swing into the idea that he has to rework it on the run.

For me, the difficulty with that film was that there was something very tactile, I suppose, about a live performance, and that's not what you have with the film. So we had to ascertain how much of the success of Double Take was to to do with the tactility of the live performance, or could that idea be transferred into film. We believed it could be.

It was your chance also for some live-action direction.

It was. I think my respect for Nadia went up about 2000 per cent. You know it's tough. You're there, you see a scene, it's not the way you imagined it. And the skill is being able to communicate to the actors how to fix it within their terms, and their terms differ. If you've got three people standing there, you have to speak to the three of them in a different manner because they may use different approaches to their parts. So it was quite an awakening for me.

Hercules was screened at the Venice film festival. Do the Italians enjoy that kind of send-up of their films?

They do, actually. I think given that the Hercules movies from that era - and the original Hercules we worked on - were a bit of a spoof anyway, I don't think there was any problem with it. There was nothing sacrilegious, that's for sure, in we were doing film from the Italian point of view. The original director actually contacted me and wished me luck. He hadn't seen it but he thought it was a wonderful thing to have happened to his movie. Which was a relief - I'm glad he wasn't attached to the Mafia or anything or had a different reaction.

Diana and Me has had a strange history because history intervened.

I remember saying to Nadia at the time I must have had a very pleasant previous life for things like this to happen. I was very happy with the film we made. I thought that, even though it was probably a more standard type of formula, it was a really interesting idea and I felt that we had to shoot it pretty darn well.

You touched into the whole excitement of magazine competitions, royalty, Australians, abroad and British photographers.

Yes, the British papparazzi. I mean, having been part of that scene for a while, very much on the edge of it - but I was in there. I had done royal tours. I had staked out Charles and Diana in Alice Springs, so I knew what I was talking about. But here we were doing paparazzi on motorbikes, joyfully chasing George Michael who'd had a car accident.

There was nowhere to go with that film. We did shoot a new little top and tail for it primarily to place the movie within the past so that it would at least work chronologically. But it appeared it wasn't enough. We either came out too early with it or such was the response to Princess Diana in life and death that we were completely on the wrong page, a film that could be released only after her death.

I think that a very clever marketer in the United States could do very well with this film, because it holds Diana up in such a good light, and I think there is a fear that that won't be the case and people don't want to be exposed to that.

Did it get a release in England?

No. I think we're disadvantaged in that area, in that territory because there are two members of the Village Roadshow board who are in the House of Lordsn or are heading for it. There's no way that they're going to do anything to rile royalty at this point.

You mentioned your admiration for Nadia. It's been a very fruitful collaboration over these years.

It has been great, yes. And it will continue to be. My partner and I, we're pretty much ensconced in Melbourne, we'll always be back there.



Interview: 10th September 1998