GEOFFREY WRIGHT



After Lover Boy, Romper Stomper and Metal Skin, you seem to have a particular niche in Australian cinema. What do you see as your contribution?

I think that what I have contributed - if I have contributed anything - is this: a look at the fringe of our cities. That is in terms of content. This has been coupled rather intimately with the stylistic thing about my films. I don't separate this from the content. The style is a kind of `operatic high relief'. It is a melodramatic, highly manipulated, but not necessarily manipulative (in the conventional sense), approach to my work. It probably draws just as much inspiration from MTV as it has from people like Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese - people who have maintained authorship of their work and control of their work. I still have an enormous respect for and am in awe of them, especially Kubrick.

Is it correct to see A Clockwork Orange in some of the sequences of Romper Stomper - in the subway or in the robbery at the wealthy man's house?

In as much as I thought that practically everyone had seen A Clockwork Orange and that I couldn't move in on that genre without referring to it, I didn't think that there would be any harm in referring to it. If we're trying to be honest about those characters, we could say that they would have seen the film too. So there was a certain irony in putting them in situations which the film had depicted. And, of course, we do hear the odd story in this country about those kinds of crimes. There are more of them in America.

The strange thing about A Clockwork Orange is that advocates of censorship are gleeful over the fact that Kubrick won't let it be released on video in England, but what they don't realise is that Kubrick and his family received death threats, `If you allow the film to be released, we're going to bomb your house'. So Kubrick is acting on a fear of terrorism rather than a belief in the causal relationship between his film and crime in the community. I find that quite ironic.

There was quite an amount of criticism of Romper Stomper. In retrospect how do you see the criticism and your reaction?

I find - and I thought this might happen - that the dust has settled a bit. I find that people still talk about it at dinner parties and get into rows about it. But I also find that there are more people now that are prepared to give the film the benefit of the doubt and to listen. This didn't happen when the film first came out. It had its supporters and it had its very vocal opposition. And a lot of people said, `I don't want to know about this. I don't know what the opposition is saying, but I certainly think that this film looks horrible'. Now I find that there are a lot of people catching up with the film on video, people who were perhaps too embarrassed to go to the cinema. I think that there's a reappraisal of the film amongst those sections of the public that weren't our target audience to begin with, and I think that reappraisal will go on.

I think that it's a film which is going to be a recognisable point in the history of Australian films, much more so than some other films that were released at the same time that were much vaunted and applauded. While people will think about the money, the incredible amount of money that certain films grossed, rather than what was in those films, I think people will still be talking about the content of Romper Stomper ten years from now.

The response to Metal Skin? Less dramatic?

Yes, thankfully. But, I mean, I wasn't setting out to make another film as controversial as Romper Stomper. I don't know that that would be possible and I would be a fool even to attempt it. That's not my job. I'm not out there to raise hell for its own sake. I'm not interested in that. Unfortunately, what I am interested in occasionally provokes strong responses anyway, so I suppose I'm never going to make a film which people will walk out of saying, `Oh, yeah, well, that was quite nice'.

Metal Skin, even though it's obviously less controversial, still leaves people with the same kind of hung, drawn and quartered feeling, psychologically, as Romper Stomper did. And if you look at the faces of people coming out of Metal Skin, they're very similar to the looks on faces of people when they came out of Romper Stomper. There are a lot of white faces, a lot of ashen faces and people have said to me, `Don't ask me what I think of that. I have to process it. I have to think about it', because it is a very dense film. It stands up well to a second viewing or even a third.

A lot of people say that they like it better the second time. I hope I'm not sounding like I'm blowing my own trumpet here, but it's actually a very dense film. There's a lot loaded in there, and if you care to work your way through the hieroglyphics, there is a lot going on.

I wanted to show the characters' psyches from the inside out. If they `see red' then the audience can see red in the images. Some of the experience is psychotic so it is shown in a way that communicates this.

Why the western suburbs of Melbourne? Because they are familiar or a special symbolic place?

They are symbolic because, for me, they have a certain atmophere. Basically the western suburbs remind me of what Melbourne used to be as the manufacturing centre of Australia. It's that no more. Consequently there's a lot of empty buildings. Things are on the upturn now, getting better and those buildings are being filled up with all sorts of things. But you must realise that these films were all conceived and written in a three to four-year period. They all happened in quick succession on paper. Metal Skin was written before Romper Stomper was shot. It was written while I was waiting for the money to come through for Romper Stomper. I was living in Laverton at the time. I spent five years in Laverton. It's just off the Geelong Highway and it wins Tidy Town awards. But while I was there, it was a place for that cliche, quiet desperation. Nothing rang truer than that.

I remember riding on a bicycle at night through the place and I used to imagine that those petro-chemical plants, which have never ceased operating, were actually spewing out more toxic fumes during the night than they were during the day. I thought that, maybe, they can get away with it more during the night. I realised that in Laverton we were a long way away from any kind of organised entertainment, or anything really. If you wanted entertainment, if you wanted to go to the movies, you had to get into a car and get on the highway and drive, perhaps, to Werribee, which has its own problems, or into Footscray. But whatever you do, you have to have a car.

I also remember one night travelling on the Altona line to get to Laverton and I thought, `I don't want to catch the train'. It was late at night. I didn't have my car, so I got the train . Sure enough there were some pretty shifty, dodgy-looking characters on the train. Then all of a sudden the lights went out. The train went faster and faster and faster, and lo and behold, we passed through a station - I forget which one it was, one of the stations in Altona - so help me God, it was on fire. The station was on fire. So the train driver had taken it upon himself, rather than to slow down and go into the flames, to decide to accelerate through. So never let anyone tell you that the western suburbs are dull. The lights were out. We were sitting there in the darkness. He was accelerating, and we barrelled through a station which was on fire, with towering columns of flame. Finally we got to the end of the line. It was like something out of Indiana Jones.

The locations of your films are not only the fringe, but the edge. These young people are living on the edge.

Well, what do you do when you live on the edge? We underestimate boredom in our society. We think boredom is a petty emotion. It's not. It's a form of anger. When you're bored, you don't know you're alive, so you turn to things which make you feel you're alive. This is very much what Romper Stomper was about, and Lover Boy and, of course, Metal Skin. I'm singing the same song, I really am - different choruses.

Boredom, then rage, then anger and the vicious outbursts.

Yes, and misunderstanding and confusion and introversion. You meet these kids who move in on their own worlds, whether they're tribal as in Romper Stomper or totally personal as in Joe's Metal Skin world, with his ambitious million-dollar invention.

Young people who are being forced to make choices from a position of weakness rather than strength usually make the wrong choices. There are so many choices but no rock-solid social certainties. There is no one thing to believe in especially in the social dislocation resulting from eighteen years of recession.

The other thing the film is about is the responsibility of young men. A lot of young men came up to me at previews and say, `we really got into Romper Stomper. I'm not sure about this one'. And I've said, `Listen, buddy, that's because this film is about the lack of responsibility of your group, of you guys, of you too, and how you treat girls and your parents and yourselves and your mates'. It's about young male irresponsibility, and Dazey is the penultimate irresponsible male.

Joe says Dazey didn't deserve to be loved.

He didn't deserve to be loved. Unfortunately, it's an unjust world and love is not necessarily given to the worthy. It's often given for reasons which people can't control. That's the shame of it. But we have to learn to live with it. We can't say that the guilty will be punished by an act of God. Justice often takes a long time.

The migrant experience is central and crucial to your films. You have the migrant trauma of the Asian people in Romper Stomper and the reaction of the mainly Anglo-Celtic? people who are neo-Nazis. Then in Metal Skin there are the eastern and southern European migrants who contrast with characters like Roslyn Harrison and Robert Day. They survive, but the migrants don't. The most pessimistic aspect of Metal Skin is that Savina and Joe die.

It's funny, isn't it - if you look at docors and lawyers in our society, there still mainly Anglo-Celtic? groups. The migrant groups tend to go to other professions and jobs - there's a lot of real estate agents and people like that - but in the corridors of power it's still an Anglo-Celtic? game. The same with politics, with the odd exception, your Al Grassbys and people like that. But, they're visible because they are out of the ordinary. By and large, considering the proportion of the population which they make up, migrants are still under-represented in the professional classes; and I don't know why. Doctors and lawyers, politicians and money-movers, people who know how to move wealth in our community (which is fundamentally a capitalist one), people who understand how wealth is generated and moved and acquired, are to this day by and large Anglo-Celtic?.

Further, they are educated in the private school system and they have children who are let in on their secrets. And on and on it goes. I'm not a Left-winger, really, about anything - except education. I'm infuriated by the discrepancy in the quality of education that people receive in our community and I don't understand why we tolerate it. I find it awful.

The other aspect of the migrant experience is that Savina's mother is mad, obsessive with her continual brushing.

Yes, obsessive-compulsive.

... and Joe's father is quite mad. What has driven them mad? What do you think has driven them mad in Australia?

I think that people like that are subject to the same sort of pressures that a lot of Anglo-Celtic? people are subject to; but whatever else happens, there's always one more straw that may break the camel's back, and that is the fact that you're among migrants and a minority. And the bottom line is our multiculturalism. We think of ourselves as a multicultural society, and in terms of recreation we are. But in terms of how the country is run and the organisation and the channeling of wealth and power, we are monocultural. And that is the dominant Anglo-Celtic? culture. If you want to learn how to move money, you have to understand how the Anglo- Celts work. I hope that doesn't sound like some kind of mad racist statement, but what I'm saying is that that network, the professional network, has nothing to do with a Greek influence or a Rumanian influence or an Italian influence. Capitalism is an Anglo invention, a western European thing.

On a certain level there's something for Anglo- Celts to take pride in, in the fact that they gave birth to the parliamentary system, but along with that there was capitalism that always worked in tandem; and, unless you play their game and are part of their network and understand how they think, you aren't going to get to the bottom of how our society works.

The background and treatment of religion are of particular interest in Metal Skin. You have the Rumanian Orthodox tradition: Joe has the icon of the Madonna next to his broken mirror; his father, who fled the communists in the early 50s also has his icons. Why choose the Orthodox Christian tradition, images and its music? What was the specific religious focus?

I think that people are desperate for a transcendent or transcending spiritual grasp of the world, and we often resort to institutionalised religions for that. It is the logical thing to do. That is an example of people clinging to something that they feel may empower them. Even in the backblocks of Altona, next to the petro-chemical plant, there is God. And that's what they think. So they need to be reminded of it. That's why we have religious icons, to be reminded, and to focus our meditative attentions on religious images like that.

As regards the Rumanian background, in the back of my mind was the thought that I wanted something Gothic (with echoes of the Dracula myths).

Were the icons there simply as background? Did they have some influence on Joe or his father?

I see Joe basically (I think he sees himself) as a kind of age-of-reason-type figure, a Newtonian figure, who may be putting religion on the back burner and is more concerned with Newtonian physics and the new mechanical inventions. Joe sees the answer to his problems in a kind of revolutionary idea, as he describes it, in `separating the oxygen from the hydrogen'. He's going to be a scientist. He thinks he can transcend his problems with a scientific breakthrough. So, for him, the religious iconography that we see in the house and beside his mirror is basically the past and a reminder of the limitations of the past: the fact that God may be present but my immediate surroundings are still materially depressed, I can't tolerate this any more, and I'm alone; I'm going to get in touch with the bigger community by this scientific breakthrough because I can't do it with the Orthodox religion; so I'm going to do it scientifically because that is the common language, the lingua franca, of the modern world, science. So that's his answer.

Savina's answer is through an old, old nature-based kind of religion which began as pagan, and which was painted, I suppose, by the early Christians as being anti-Christian or an Antichrist thing. And that is the memory, the piece of history, the notion that she has adopted, that is genuinely anti-Christian. Her religion is a religion with one member - Savina. So she's going to empower her life through her religion. She's the minister and she's the member and she's the congregation. She's all these things in one. So she's going to plant this seed in the bigger seed of the established church. But, of course, things go wrong for her too.

I don't believe in the supernatural myself and I don't see any cause or effect in her rituals. But she believes that there is. The train of events turns out, but not through black magic. But, of course, there are elements and forces and we are not aware of their influence.

After all her rituals, the parodies of traditional religion and the iconography in the church and in her room and home, especially those associated with her mother, she hides from the priest on the roof of the church - he seems to be sympathetic...

Yes, he's not a hostile figure.

... but she could not literally hold on to the church any more.

Yes, she's a fallen angel. I don't know, there may be something in the story of Satan for her. But it is like the Miltonian Satan rather than the New Testament Satan, Satan as Milton understood him. Maybe that's what happening, a sin of pride and the fall. When you think about what happens to her, it's a melodramatic, nightmarish surreal experience. I find the whole sequence very old-fashioned in a way because Savina defiles the church and she's swiftly punished. Basically, she's punished in the same way that Richard III is punished. She takes on too much. You find that the natural order of the world has to take up arms against such a bold vaunting interloper - as it does, whether you're Idi Amin or Adolf Hitler or Savina.

What about Joe's nightmare with Savina's mother hammering the nails into Joe?

What I'm saying there, in a basic kind of symbolism, is that Joe is being split. There's something penetrating his head. He doesn't understand it. He sees himself being martyred. That visitation of Savina in the nightmare is not supernatural. That was always intended to be a psychological experience, the result of the drugs and the alcohol. It's a kind of irony that, although she's dead, she continues to influence the living. Our memories of the dead influence us. The dead, if we remember them, are never really dead. My father is dead, but I don't think of him as dead because I can still hear him say things in my head. I can still hear him giving me advice.The electrical patterns in my mind make up the memory of him. It's odd. The memory is an extension of him now.

That notion is actually explored in the last chapter of `Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', where Persik is remembering his dead son who was killed on the streets of San Francisco, after attending a religious meeting - he was murdered - and he says, `In a way my son lives inside me, because of my memories. He has left me something'. I think that's the notion here, only it's a very negative thing. It's Savina's frustration and her bitterness and her kind of melodramatic, bold, sweeping decisive action is being passed on to him.

Joe kills his father. That sort of thing happens - we read about it in the newspapers all the time - that kind of domestic tragedy. This time it is caused by a gang of kids, and he takes it out on Dazey. When the father dies, he says `Dazey, Dazey'. I think he also says, `Where are you?' or something like that. It's a kind of love-hate relationship. He really loves Dazey. And if he can't have him, he's going to kill him. Joe is an idealist. Idealism is doing what he thinks is right. But terrible things are done in the name of idealism.

That reminds me of the Queen Street massacre killer. He was after one person in particular. He killed all those other people. The person that he was after hid behind a bench and survived. All those other people died and he died too, but the one he was after survived. Jim Schembri said to me, `I don't understand why Joe is after Dazey if the people that trashed his house and attacked his father were the other gang'. I said to Jim, `Well, to begin with, worse than that is the fact that Savina is dead. He's coming to terms with it; and he knows that Dazey is behind all that', (plus the fact he's in love with Dazey). He hates Dazey and he's in love with him. People who wipe out their family love their kids when they put the bullet in their kids' heads. They love them, but they want to control their lives, they want to possess their lives.

And the complexity of his attraction to Ros, his relationship with her and his seeing Dazey betray her?

Yes. That's one thing about the film I'm very proud of, that it is, I think, appropriately complex.

Lover Boy in relation to the explorations of the later two films?

I think that Lover Boy probably contains my most reasonable characters and the ones that people can most easily relate to. I don't give them that kind of outlet in the other two films. Lover Boy, although it's equally pessimistic, is probably a bit more lyrical and the characters are more, shall I say user-friendly or less intimidating, less aggressive, less operatic? But certainly the progression is clear - I have noticed the films are becoming steadily more abstract. Lover Boy is quite linear. Romper Stomper is somewhat strident and shrill. Metal Skin is like fractured glass. It goes in four ways with the four characters. It's a much more challenging film.

In Metal Skin, you've used such a variety of styles, even within minutes: stridence, with jangling noise, screams, music and then silences. It moves into the imagination and into reality both past and present. And there is the circular structure of the film.

Well, with the new physics, they say that our idea of time as being linear results from the way our brains process the experience of time. If you think about time, what is time? It's movement. It's movement separating itself from other movement. So what do we think of time? Time is a very weird thing, and the way we think about time is a convenience born of the way our brains process information. I think that the past is the past: a past of ten days ago is no different from the past of ten seconds ago. It's all the past, and if you want to mix up these different pasts - which we do in our memories, and emotionally, - that's quite justified. So I do like to challenge our ideas about a linear kind of progression of time because most of what we regard as common sense is a convenience.

The US visceral approach to film-making is more authentic and compelling. It is images that make impact.

There were some changes after the festival screening in Venice?

Yes, probably half a dozen changes. On the soundtrack, special visual effects (we swapped a few shots around), a few reaction shots and things like that, half a dozen things which I thought made it a few degrees better. It's amazing. I always thought that there was a problem with the rhythm at a certain point in the film, but after we made those half a dozen changes, I was satisfied with the rhythm. I feel that the pace is quite good, considering the fact that we're telling the stories of four people - a very difficult thing to do.

Your using Shakespeare and operatic references?

Yes, I love Shakespeare with a passion, a great passion.

They're both pessimistic and tragic. Which word would you prefer?

Tragic. Tragic stories are the ones we're telling. What are they saying? I think Orson Welles said the great stories of the West are `Paradise Lost' with a death in it! getting booted out of the garden and confronting death. Our society has a great fear of death. And our society has a great resentment of youth as well, because youth have what we will never have again. But I think what I'm trying to say with all three films is that youth has its own horrors and its own difficulties. Don't envy youth. It's rough. Don't envy it. Youth have to get on and make the best of what is to come, because youth is a very difficult time. I think the only thing they've got going for them is skin cells that rejuvenate quicker than ours - but that's about it. Everybody's adolescence and early 20s are difficult times, and some of them are fatal.

How many male friends do I have that are now dead through drugs or hard living or who just they felt that they didn't want to go on any more. I've lost too many. So if people say to me, `Geoff, you're making another pessimistic film', I think `well, there are plenty of people out there making films that are going to make audiences feel good after a hard day's work, plenty. There must be space under the sun for me and what I want to do. I'm sorry but why are all these people dying? I just think that we should be less afraid to face death and be less resentful and less condemnatory'.

There was a Pearl Jam concert at the gardens near the Myer Music Bowl. I think a wire fence fell down and a lot of people surged in and didn't pay. The next thing you hear on the media, `we've got to stop this sort of thing; one of these kids could have been killed', - and this, that and the other. But they're kids. They want to have experiences. They want to have a good time. They need experience. How are they going to become adults unless they have experiences? You've got to let them do their thing, and if a bloody wire fence comes down from time to time, that's too bad. And if some of them get hurt - I know that we worry about them and we don't want any of them to get hurt, and I've just been saying about how too many of them die - but you can't put them in cotton wool. You've just got to make sure that they know that they're loved and everything will come out right after that. If they don't know that they're loved, they'll spend years looking for it in the wrong places or finding something else to replace it.

I don't see anything wrong with pessimism in the context of film. Life goes on, but film is not life. Tragedy shows the way things go wrong. If you can conduct your life better than that, well and good. A two hour film can't offer a `way out' but it can cast light on relationships and problems.

So you're a hopeful director, really, although you're involved in the tragic?

Look, why else would you do tragedy unless you think that someone is going to listen to you - but, don't do as my characters do. That's what I'm saying.



Interview: April 27th 1995, incorporating material from Press Conference at Venice Film Festival, 1994.