RAY ARGYLL



You worked as a cinematographer. Was this where you began in the film industry?

It probably started with making my own films, on Super 8 and then eventually on 16mm, so I really did everything. That was back in the days of the Experimental Film Fund. It was very easy to do it then - well, I shouldn't say 'easy' - it wasn't very fashionable, film, and it was a very different sort of business than it is now and you needed to be very resourceful. I learned by just doing it and experience.

Then you made some films with Ian Pringle?

Yes. I'd made a few 16mm films and then went off to film school and during that time I shot the first film for Ian - and it just happened that I was doing camerawork. I'd always enjoyed it, I always really liked camerawork. I then went on and edited a couple of his films too, as I did with Brian Mc Kenzie, so I sort of split time between cinematography and editing.

Ian Pringle's films were features and Brian Mc Kenzie's a mixture of both documentary and features?

I've done a lot of work with Brian. Ian is very much into features and drama and very atmospheric pieces, which is really challenging because often it's not stuff I'd necessarily do myself, but it's wonderful to work with. Ian and I, when we found our way of working together, it was that we really trusted each other and that worked well.

With Brian, it took a long time too. I think it does take a long time when you're working with people. I probably found the same as a director and producer. You take a while to find people, to find out how to work best, but when you do and you trust one another, it will be the way you get the best out of a situation. Brian has been great over the years because he's forced - perhaps I shouldn't say 'forced' - the films he's made, particularly the documentaries and they have been very challenging. You've been thrown in there with a whole range of people and you've had to cope; and you're working with real people, particularly with his style of documentary. They dictate what happens in a feature or a drama.

I think I've just about worked on all of them, every documentary that Brian has done. He does them over a long period of time - years. I'll Be Home for Christmas was probably the first one I worked on. Homeless men - it's gruelling in some ways, but I think it's terrific. The film gets done eventually, and I say eventually because I know Brian, 6 or 8 months into the project, will often be despairing that he hasn't actually found the essence of what he's trying to do. But he does, it's there. It sometimes just takes a lot of time. With that film I did a bit of filming, I did a bit of sound work, I think I helped in the editing room. With the other documentaries I did some cinematography, some editing but not so much sound.

How did you make the transition from editing and cinematography to directing? What was the genesis of Return Home?

I had the script for seven years or so and worked on it. I always seem to take a long time. I've always kept doing my own work, mixing it up with doing various other things for Ian and Brian and Mary Callahan and all those people. I guess the story was just based on some people I knew.

What drew you to writing, since you were so hands-on with the other aspects of film-making?

It all begins with doing your own stuff. When I was a teenager, I'd always written, not very well. I'd always been writing and making my own films, a few on the Experimental Film and TV Fund. I sort of worked as a freelance while doing my own stuff on grants. But that was in the old days where people just put it together whichever way they could. You learnt on the job. There were things I'd written and I'd always got together with actors. In the early days they were just friends and we'd work the scripts out together. So in terms of writing and directing, I've always been fairly collaborative. I guess I never felt my writing was so good that it didn't need some sort of collaboration. And actors are the best people to work with. I've found that in just about everything I've done.

With Return Home, would you have been writing with actors in mind, say, Frankie J. Holden and Ben Mendelsohn?

No, because I took seven years or so from when I started writing. At the Berlin Festival I remember saying Ben was probably in nappies when I wrote it. He wasn't, obviously! But no, find I don't write with actors in mind. I guess some people do. You might have someone in mind, but it always changes. And an actor will always make the character into something anyway. You welcome that contribution to develop it a little bit further. Often you choose an actor who's going to do something really interesting with the part and develop it rather than just read it exactly as it's written.

The writing in Return Home and Eight Ball is naturalistic. It sounds authentic and Australian. That's a gift and your actors have the capacity to speak it and dramatise it well.

Yes, often the best stuff comes from rehearsals and workshops because people are relaxed. They haven't got the pressure of the film crew there. I can do a certain amount. I'm happy doing a certain amount of the work, but I can't take it much further beyond that because you're limited by your own life experience. I've met a lot of people and done a lot of things, but when people bring their own elements to it, that's what you pick up on and say, 'That's good,' and I put it straight in the script. If you're doing research, if someone coins a phrase a particular way, it can just capture something that you're after. I guess these are the sorts of things you want. A lot of the really nice moments in Return Home and Eight Ball are like that. I wouldn't say they're accidents. We've put the time into rehearsals and come up with this material. The same with earlier scripts where I'd been workshopping ideas.

I remember us talking about the pressures of a bigger budget and more money and so forth and how that was a restriction in some ways and something you had to learn to cope with. You had to learn to cope with those problems.

You mentioned the importance of landscapes and your feel for the countryside, even a preference for the countryside to the cities.

Yes. It's funny, I don't think of working in the backyard or something as a bit harder. I've always enjoyed working in South Australia. It's got a lot of elements that I find I feel very comfortable with. Likewise some of the country areas. Tasmania I think is another place; maybe Western Australia, although I've never worked there. It's away from Melbourne or Sydney. I know there are areas of Melbourne and Sydney that are really interesting. It's just that you've got to get in there but sometimes it's easier to transport yourself to another place. Maybe it's easier to be objective or maybe it's easier to observe things when you come fresh to a place. I certainly found that with South Australia. It does have a unique landscape. There are differences between suburban Adelaide and suburban Brisbane or Melbourne or Sydney, but I guess basically there are similar themes running through all those areas.

Another element is the quality of ordinary relationships in the family and the home and relationships between the generations. In Return Home you capture a lot of the Australian values of the home and the family, in a family of battlers.

Yes, the family theme. Sometimes you can look at your early work and you realise that you're repeating yourself in some ways. But, really, you can dig into any family and find the most fascinating stuff. It's funny, one uses the term 'ordinary', but in fact there's no such thing. When you scratch around, there's all sorts of interesting conflicts and seeing how conflicts are resolved, how people work through those day-to-day difficulties and what values people have in the end. I guess that's what's always interested me. Obviously this is where I live and work and the particular values within an Australian family situation is what interests me and what I try and bring out.

I think it was basically that in Return Home they were very decent people that you could like and respect. The other interesting thing you said the other day was about the younger generation. We were talking about Frankie J. Holden and his influence on the Ben character and you were talking about whether the younger generation really is lost or not.

I seem to have noticed recently that people are very happy to talk about how they would fix the world, how they would fix things for the young people and all the problems the young people have. They say the reason they have the problems is because of a loss of this and a loss of that. I think there's a lot of truth in those things, but when you actually get down and spend time with young people - not that I have recently because my kids are very young, but I've got nephew and niece-in-laws that I spend quite a bit of time with - it just seems that they do have a fairly mature perspective on what's happening. They're actually coping with the incredible pace of change in the world better than some of the older generation. I mean, in some ways they're not coping. But it seems easy from the outside to look at what the problems are and have solutions; I think a lot of the time people are suggesting solutions that are right for their generation or their social arena, whereas for young people, I guess they've got to discover it for themselves. I reckon a lot of them are doing pretty well. They're actually coping well and coming up with interesting ways of resolving those issues.

You have said that they aren't as articulate as they might be. It isn't that they are lost, that they are just inarticulate.

Yes. I'm struggling with getting articulate about things now, and I'm 40. A lot of the kids I've worked with over the 15, 20 years I've been doing films have got really good values, they really are quite focused. They just lack sometimes the verbal skills to articulate and express themselves very clearly. Some of them can, but I guess it just comes with maturity. You can't replace wisdom with anything; it comes with years. You can see it there, it will develop. It's great watching them grow up - most of the time.

With Eight Ball the production money was more readily available than it was for the previous film, but that that had its repercussions on how Eight Ball turned out.

Yes, but in the end it's a problem that you have to take responsibility for yourself. I have to say I spent too much time and put too much energy into making everybody else happy and doing the right thing by everybody else instead of doing the right thing by myself. There's a point where you need to actually focus on what is there. There were many elements of the storytelling that I could have focused on and developed, rather than just dropping and replacing them with something new, and it may have helped. The romance between the main character and his girlfriend - there was a great desire on the part of quite a few of the people who were financing it, to develop this and to make it a strong element. It's not a real strength of mine, and I did all that, but at the expense of other elements that were probably more in tune with the story that I originally had in mind. I developed those things but in the editing room we probably cut it down to what it was in the original script.

You sounded as if you were very interested in the ex-prisoner's story and his relationships?

Yes, I was. I liked the whole thing with the big fish and the character of Charlie developing it all. But I guess that how I got those two stories to work together was a big call and it was hard when the balance fell out, trying to chase through that romance bit, and it took quite a while before the story of the other character picked up. Here was a guy who had just got out of prison and was trying to resolve things with his son and stepsister, a very interesting family relationship. I felt in many ways that this part was quite successful.

Perhaps your ambition with Eight Ball was a bit like the architect with the fish; that everybody else thought the fish should have been different and more colourful or whatever.

That's true. But that's mainly in hindsight. You can always say there are similarities between the characters and the stories you're telling and your own experiences. But there was a certain amount of frustration and a certain amount of inevitability about trying to create something that was commercially appealing in one person's mind where in fact it might not have had the integrity.

You did some television work, episodes of Sea Change?

I haven't been working much in the last six years or so. I've got young kids, so I haven't been taking on many jobs. I've had plenty of scripts, and occasionally scripts come through but they're entirely different to the sort of thing I would normally do. It surprises me when people send them. But I suppose that's good; they think that you might be able to do it. I often think it's just a matter of finance, people trying to finance a project and just trying to get a group of good names that fit together nicely on a bit of paper so that it helps the financing, but you're going to have to put a lot of your life into it.

Until this recent job, I haven't actually felt much attraction to television. There are a few things I would like to have done that just didn't happen, a couple of shows that would have been great, but I didn't get opportunities to work on them. I did one episose of Raw FM and that was the first TV drama I'd done. It was very interesting. It was a great cast and it was probably the first time I'd felt attracted to something.

I had a lot of trouble because I was a co-writer on that. I had a lot of trouble working out what was right for me and what was right for the TV show, because you're talking about a whole series. It's a very good discipline to learn and to apply yourself and be true to what you wanted to do and the characters you wanted to create and also true to what the broader picture is.

When Sea Change came along, it was a co-production with Artist Services and I'd liked their work before. The scripts were just terrific. It really was something. I've loved Ballykissangel and Northern Exposure and that sort of show. There haven't been many of them and there certainly haven't been many in Australia. This was right down that alley, so you could say it was timing and I justg sort of fell into it. They also gave me the opportunity to be involved in the setting up of the series, the casting and all of the rehearsals which, of course, is the main thing I'm interested in. It's the process of developing something and working with actors away from the set, developing character and so forth. So it was just terrific. It was very hard work. You have to deliver a lot of drama in a very short amount of time, screen time per day. It was hard going first, because you had to get it all up and running, but I really enjoyed the process.

You directed episodes 3 and 4 first to help get the cast into it so that when the first two episodes were filmed they would be used to their roles.

Yes. Originally they were going to do 1 and 2 first and I was very happy to do that because those scripts were good. All the scripts I've read have been terrific and I think the quality of the show is very good. But apparently in the past they've done this, where the first episodes they actually shoot are not the first ones that will be seen. They can get the cast warmed up so they're a little bit more relaxed and comfortable with their characters by the time they get to episodes 1 and 2. Particularly on episode 1. A lot will always rest on that episode. If the actors are really punching the stuff out, then it helps get an audience. I don't know if it works or not. I like to think that episode 3 and 4 are dramatically as good, as rewarding for an audience as any of them will be. You will find that the styles differ from time to time, but I think the cast were so in love with their characters that that is what will come through. I felt my job was to try and help all of that come together in whatever way I could.

Interview: 13th March 1998