CHRISTINA ANDREEF


You have something of a multinational background but, originally, you are from New Zealand?

Yes, I'm born and bred in New Zealand.

And studied journalism?

I studied journalism first, when I was 18, then travelled the world for many years as a backpacker. I ended up at university in Northern Ireland, wanting to further my journalism skills. But part of the degree course that I was doing included a media degree with film studies, film theory. We had wonderful teachers and I got completely hooked on film and shelved the journalism. This was the late 70s, early 80s. Since then I've been completely impassioned about film.

So, what brought you to Australia?

I came to Australia after finishing my honours degree in Ireland hoping to go to the Film and Television School. I applied in the early 80s, with my first-class honours degree, to get into the School but, unfortunately, I was not successful. That was a big shock because there had never been anything in my life that I really wanted so much. But I then got a Commonwealth Scholarship and ended up at Macquarie University, doing postgraduate film theory. I continued for another four years at university, studying film theory, before I met Jane Campion. I think I met her when I was writing my thesis.

What was the topic of the thesis?

Australian women film-makers and their films. Truthfully, I was never an academic and I was there at university only because I didn't get into film school. I was craving to actually be on-set and I used to work for nothing whenever I could on people's 16mm short films. I was a runner, an AD and all the different jobs I did to create my own film school. And then, of course, I had a fantastic break, meeting Jane. We became friends and I worked as her assistant on Sweetie. That was the beginning.

And An Angel at My Table and The Piano?

Yes. So I had my film school. Actually, I had a much, much more valuable film school than I would have got at the AFTRS.

Your short film, Excursion to the Bridge of Friendship, raises the issue of your Bulgarian background. Your ancestry, then? From Bulgaria to New Zealand?

Yes. My father is Bulgarian and emigrated to New Zealand in the mid-'50s when a lot of eastern European and Mediterranean men, particularly, were migrating all over the world, away from the poverty and, in Dad's case, away from Communism. He washed up in New Zealand and married my mum, who is Anglo-Irish?, and had us kids. There were six of us, all born in New Zealand. But we have a Slav-Celtic? heritage.

What about religion? Was he Orthodox?

Dad's mum, my grandmother, was Greek Orthodox. Dad's not terribly religious. Mum's Catholic.

Quite a combination. And yourself? Did you have a Catholic education?

Yes, I did. I went to St Joseph's Primary School in a small town called Whakatane. The Catholic primary school in those days took you right through Intermediate to High School. I actually had an incredible education with the nuns in the small town. By the time we got to High School, all of us Catholic schoolkids were streets ahead in maths and languages.
A lot of Catholic kids in our town went off to Catholic boarding schools in bigger cities but our family couldn't afford that, so we went to the local state high school, which I'm also very glad about because my town in New Zealand is very much a Maori town and we became steeped in Maori culture and music. That was a really rich part of my upbringing.

The main thing I remember from Excursion to The Bridge of Friendship is the music. It was very striking. The black and white photography and music. What led you to write the film? Going back into your family heritage?

It was actually a crazy thing. I had been working as Jane Campion's assistant for several years by that time and, while I was working for her, I started writing my own short scripts. She was a great mentor and very generous overseer of my work. I'd written a lengthy short film that never got financed and I found that quite hard.

When I was growing up, my father and mother were always receiving letters from strangers in Bulgaria who wanted help to come to the west. Those were still the Cold War days before the Berlin Wall came. They wanted to come to the west or they needed medical help - you know, all sorts of things.

I remember the months and years of effort that my father and my mother put into negotiating with authorities, both medical and political, to help various people come to New Zealand, or for sending boxes of drugs, sending food. My grandmother was still living there. We looked after her from afar. So it was quite a part of our family's culture to receive these letters from strangers wanting quite big things and sometimes quite outlandish things, like very expensive angora twinsets! They'd write and ask for specific things, often things that my mother could not afford for herself, in fact, ever. They didn't really know what they were asking for. So, I used to feel that they were quite demanding.

Then when I became an adult, I started getting these requests myself. Strangers would write to you and often you'd write back. But I was a young woman on the dole, trying to establish a writing career and a film career. I could barely support myself. Out of the blue in the mail one day came a cassette tape from a fairly famous Bulgarian folk-singer who was an archivist of Bulgarian folk-music. She would travel the country collecting half-forgotten lyrics and she would recompose the songs and record them. She lived in Germany and her name was Evanka Ivanova - and she wanted to come to Australia and get gigs!

At the time, I was part of this very inner-city Sydney coffee bar culture where I'd hang out all day with friends and try and write - and basically scratch the rent together. So the thought was terrifying that this woman, who was not related to me at all (and I don't know where she got my name and address from) was going to come to Australia and land on my couch and be there, trying to become rich and famous.

When I was growing up, as well, my father was very strong-minded about his culture and very determined that we'd grow up little Bulgarians. He played this music and I used to hate it. I love it now. I think it's astonishing, so open-throated. It's extraordinary. There was something about the music that my father played that was even rawer than what we hear now. The studio produces more refined versions of that music now, but as a child I found it intolerable. Probably the way children find good wines intolerable and yoghurt and things like that. Then you grow up!

Well, I used to hate that music as a child and here it was in my letterbox. I was laughing about it with friends when one particular friend said, 'That would make a good short film'. So we made a film about it. I contacted the woman, but she never came to Australia. She did sell us her music and we used it in the film. Then it came to the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, invited for the Un Certain Regard section.

Your next short film was The Gap?

Since I've made the feature film, Soft Fruit, there have been requests for screenings of the three short films in retrospectives, which has been very nice. And I've seen The Gap again recently, not having seen it for years. It's a strange film and I don't know what it came out of. After Excursion to the Bridge of Friendship, which was so much part of my personal life and my family biography, I wanted to test my skills with a subject-matter that was not biographical, to see how I would be as a director.

It was based on a story that I read in the newspaper about a man who had sat on the edge of The Gap at Watson's Bay, trying to throw himself off, 24 hours of preparation, really, for this event. Two plainclothes police, a female and a male, tactical response police, came to try and talk him down. I read this little story and I read how they talked him down. So I went and interviewed the two police at length about everything that happened in that 24 hours on the edge of the cliff.

I found it really heart-wrenching. They quoted to me the actual things that they had said to the man and the things that had happened, his fear and how he wet himself. It was so visceral and corporeal and banal, too. So the film is that story. Filmicly, with short films you really want to go to places that feature films can't easily go to. There's a compulsion and desire to experiment and to use the medium in a more adventurous way.

I devised this idea of breaking from the straight narrative, each of the characters turn at a certain point and sing to the camera. They sing their secret soul. The man who's jumping is gay and he's married and has children but he's completely closeted in his relationship. This is all simply hinted at in the film. You don't really get to know him specifically. But he sings. He intimates all this in his song to the camera.

The policewoman, the longer she stays up on the cliff, gets that feeling that we all do sometimes, of wanting to jump. She becomes more and more attracted to the edge and the camera follows her to the edge as she gets more and more mesmerised. The man who wants to jump starts taunting her as if she's going to jump. So she sings about this desire to jump out into the wild blue yonder at The Gap.

The other character, the policeman, is quite hard-bitten. He's learnt through his training that you must never sacrifice yourself. The policewoman would. She'd go down with this man in her attempt to save him. The policeman would not. He goes so far as constantly lathering himself with sunblock because he's not going to get burnt for this guy. In New South Wales the police are not allowed to grab, touch the person who's jumping because deaths do happen that way. Cops do get dragged down. But this one is hard-bitten. He's not going to be psychologically or physically injured by any of this. It's just a day in the life of his job. So the focus of The Gap is that they sing their secret fears and desires to the camera.

You then moved on to relationships and intimacy?

Yes, and to violence. By that point I was thinking that my ouvre was going to be musical violence. Shooting the Breeze is about living in the heart of King's Cross, which we do, and the dilemma of how much you have to be involved with your neighbours. It's that modern syndrome in inner-city culture of minding your own business and not interfering. People do live in such close proximity to each other. I'm sure it's similar in the more open suburbs as well.

But this is very intense dramatically because it's set in an apartment building. A young couple come home. They hear the neighbouring couple fighting through the wall. We never get to see the fighting couple, but we hear them, and the soundscape grows. You can hear slaps, you can hear kicking, you can hear furniture being shoved around. And the woman in our story becomes more and more upset because she had promised her boyfriend that the next time this happened, she was going to call the cops. He doesn't want to call the cops, he doesn't want to interfere. So it's this dilemma of becoming involved or not.

The boyfriend starts taunting her. Her name is Greta. He doesn't want to phone the police, he wants to mind his own business. Then they start fighting, the pair of them. There's a mosquito that you see that travels between the two apartments, the two fighting couples. It's as if it's bringing the contagion of violence on the wind to them. You get the close-ups of the mosquito, increasingly closer, biting the neck of the woman and she breaks out in violence. Violence has bred violence and this couple end up in their own violent altercation.

All of that is a powerful preparation for Soft Fruit. How successful was the film in its Australian release?

It ran for 14 weeks in Australia, which we were thrilled about, because I'm sure we thought it would be taken off at Christmas for the big American holiday releases, but it stayed on. We got really great reviews, so we were very happy.

So what was the appeal? What did you touch in the Australian psyche?

I think people responded to the whole package. I think people were always interested in the short films. I was looking forward - it's a bit of an upstart thing to say, isn't it! - to the feature that I would make.

I certainly was.

Yes, people do. They get to know the family of film-makers in their community and they're interested in what your first feature is going to be.

In the film, we cast four big women in the roles. It's not unheard of but Sydney women who were larger than a size 10 or a size 12 got to come and audition and strut their stuff. Really, there's amazing talent in Sydney in the acting sorority of women who are not your conventional screen actors. The energy around the casting was fantastic, and we got a great cast.

I worked with Alison Barrett and Nicki Barrett, the casting directors. We spent many months in a heartfelt way, finding people. You know how you see films about families where they don't really feel like families? They have a couple of stars thrown together and they're meant to be sisters and it just doesn't work. This family had to feel like a real family and be profoundly related. We were looking for a certain gene pool that could have eastern European and Celtic roots - big, blowsy, oestregen-laden girls - and we found them. It was just fantastic. I think the cast are a big reason for the success of the film.

And the family theme?

Of course, that's universal. Personally, I love to see films about families where some of them are...

Warts and all?

Absolutely, warts and all, and not being afraid to go into the ugly obsessions in families in order to expose the beauty, to expose the bonds that you can't actually bear to be severed. As you grow older, it's so difficult to stay in relationship with your brothers and sisters and your parents. When you get into your thirties and forties, paths are dividing. That's not the case in countries like Spain. They remain very attached to their families. We don't so much.

So Soft Fruit is about that family struggle. You think you don't care when you have a fight and fall out. Then you realise that you're suffering profoundly because you're on the outer. It's about that struggle to get back on the inner, on the inside.

I took a Lithuanian woman and a French woman to see Soft Fruit and they identified with the family themes. But they were overwhelmed by the scene where the father took off his clothes for his son.

Really? For me, it is the emotional pinnacle of the film. The sisters bustle about and get into all sorts of strife and woes. But the real pain of the film is the relationship between the father and the son. That is their moment when they do something simple and human. They simply recognise each other for a moment. And it's only a moment. The window goes up, they see each other and then it goes down again.

The father apologised and the son didn't.

Do you think he apologised?

Well, taking off his clothes to be with his son...

Was somehow equalising. It's very primal. It's a quite instinctive thing.

The theme of death and Jeannie Drynan's ability to communicate the experience of dying to us was very powerful.

I was very concerned that the subject-matter could be sentimental. I myself am not that kind of person. When you're making your first film, you don't know what the tools are to avoid sentimentality. You just have to trust yourself, and that's very hard to do and you're full of self-doubt a lot of the time. But Jeannie, Patsy, the character in the film, has her faith. She is religious. Again it's not overstated in the film, but she's Catholic and she's always been Catholic in that old-fashioned way where she's almost embracing death. And her daughters get really angry in different ways. They want her to fight it, they want her to heal herself through natural therapies, they want her to be an obedient sick woman in bed. She is actually walking towards death. She knows it's coming and she's not afraid of it. Well, of course, everybody is sometimes afraid of it.

The 'buried alive' theme.

Yes, that's where it comes out.

You had her standing under the trees at the house and she said, "It would be terrible to buried alive." I thought that that was where she had been, buried alive in the house all those years.

That's exactly right. I think that's where her fear of death comes out in this kind of strange displacement, an irrational fear of being buried alive.

But also the glamour of Jackie Onassis.

And her own death with her loving family around her. Patsy's very keen on the parallels between her modest working-class life and Jackie Kennedy's palatial Catholicism.

A moment on the Catholicism theme, the sequence where Patsy and her daughter were cleaning the church and then they hid in the car from Sister.

Yes, Sister Stanislaus.

Are those little details from your childhood?

Yes, they are. I mean, I was a vestal virgin and I used to clean the church with my mother and my sisters. That was a big part of my growing up, polishing the brass and arranging the flowers. And the nuns - as I say, from age 5 to 13 I was under the spell of the nuns. I wanted to be a nun, of course, as all good Catholic girls do. They were strong women, and they were snooty about housewives, even back then. They were independent women who were quite sniffy if all you wanted to be was a housewife. This was in the '60s in New Zealand.

More than a touch feminist.

Yes, I know.

The details at the funeral, the singing of 'Hail, Queen of Heaven', seemed just right. It was moving to see Beau weeping, that you had the man actually dissolve and his soft side at last come out during the funeral.

We were blown away by his performance. I wrote that in the script, that he would be kind of snotty and snivelling, not snivelling, but just kind of... And he just did it. I had no idea that he'd be able. I had thought, well, let's see what he does here without putting any pressure on. Then he wanted to do retakes. He was amazing.

I know that 'Hail, Queen of Heaven' is the wrong song for a funeral, but it's such a hymn from my childhood. It felt right at the time, because Patsy had chosen it. It was her choice. The hymn doesn't have to be what it should be. It's just what she would have chosen.

Finally, how confident are you about the Australian film industry - and your place in it?

I'm not so confident about our industry. It's fragile and increasingly overwhelmed by American culture. That's my feeling. I feel confident of my place in it. I feel like I've done my apprenticeship, I really do. I'm excited to be going on, to make more films. And I'm very keen to make them in the Australian and New Zealand vernacular. I want to work in that world.


Interview: May 2000