CHRIS KENNEDY



We are doing this interview in your dental surgery. I's still difficult for you to work full-time in the film industry?

It's difficult for almost everybody to work full-time in the film industry. There are very few practitioners in Australia who don't have something else to their bow - very few producers that don't work out of a back room of their house or are desperate, working from job to job. Most actors have to work at taxi-driving or something like that. For some reason, people think that being a dentist is extraordinary. I don't know why.

It's certainly a necessary service.

That's right, someone has got to do it.

But what drew you to film-making?

I started writing in England when I was working as a dentist there. The work was very tough. I would drive for hours to work in the morning, drive through the snow and ice, and see a patient every ten minutes and then come home late at night and find I was virtually shaking by the time there. And I thought that, essentially, there must be more to life than this. I found the job a little bit repetitive and soul-destroying. At school my best subjects had been English and Economics -dentistry I still enjoy - but I felt I needed a little bit of something else, so I started writing. I just told the boss I was going to take a couple of days off a week to write. He thought I had gone mad.

Then, when I came back to Australia, the Film and Television School was just getting into full gear and the 10BA legislation was funding films that I didn't know a great deal about. So I went to the Film and Television School. I set up a practice in Drummoyne and had another branch practice in Dulwich Hill. It was reasonably quiet at the time, only just starting the places, so I took the opportunity of going to the Film and Television School where I did some writing courses. You had to be accepted on the strength of the bits of work that you had done in the past, so I did that. I found it quite inspirational because I was amongst like-minded people. But I suddenly found that they can't really teach you a lot about writing; they can inspire you to go on and keep your nose to the grindstone.

I wrote a couple of scripts. I wrote a script that actually won an Annual Writers' Guild Award in the early 80s for the best unproduced script of the year. I was flush with thoughts that my media career was on the way. But I found that wasn't the case at all. The rights to the film were picked up by various small production companies who in turn paid me a small amount of money before going broke. In the end I found it just impossible to make a movie.

In that time I had also done short directing and producing courses at the Film and Television School and then went on to do a directing course in Paddington, a part-time theatrical thing which I wrote and directed for. Then, in the end, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The Western Australian Production Company was the final one to pick up the rights to this film that I had written and they rang me up one day and said, "Well, we think we've cracked it, we've made the big-time. We have just got into bed with a fellow called Laurie Connell and I think this film is finally going to get made." And, of course, the film went the way of Laurie Connell.

In the end I just went to the bank. I had an Irish friend who considered himself a bit of a film producer and I considered myself a film writer and director and producer, so I went to the bank and talked them into giving us the money to make Glass, on the understanding that we would be able to recoup the money. It was a bit of a naive prospect, but I sort of talked the bank into it. They didn't know any better and I didn't know any better. So we went ahead and made the film.

Essentially Glass was made with a view to selling it effectively. It was made to be something that you could turn the sound off in Iceland and still get a pretty good idea of what's going on. Apart from other things, apart from being a terrific learning curve for me, it was really making movies on the job without ever having made a movie. No-one at the top end of the cast or crew had ever made a feature film before, and I was the blind leading the blind. But in the end it was quite a presentable little movie. Channel 9 bought it and Foxtel bought it and it sold to an unbelievable number of countries, so it served its purpose in a way. It was a calling card, to some degree, that I could go with and a film that had done reasonably well in recouping a good deal of its budget. It was a very small budget but people within the industry were quite impressed because very few Australian films make any money. Virtually none. Even the big blockbusters have awful difficulty getting the money back.

It was screened on Channel 9.

I have a bit of difficulty watching it myself. It's a bit like eating your own cooking, to some degree, although the two films I made after that I quite enjoy, if I ever get the opportunity of watching a bit of them. Glass was a bit of a raw and amateurish effort, but there are bits and pieces of it I quite like.

This Won't Hurt a Bit is worth seeing again.

Yes, it's a film that I like. I mean, it was close to my heart and I still find it very amusing - some of the performances and my understanding of dentistry. And certainly dentists like it. They take it and show it at the New South Wales Dental Conference. It's on video, but it's not everywhere - small releases. The big chains don't buy many Australian films. It was a good opportunity for a lot of actors, too.

HG before he was HG?

No, HG was already HG. HG was probably the least experienced of the cast in the film, actually. People like Jackie McKenzie?, she was a terrific little actress even at that stage, and Gordon Chater and Colleen Clifford and Alwyn Kurtz, people like that had all had long histories in the Australian film industry. HG really had never played a role in a movie before.

With his kind of deadpan delivery he was going to be seen as people's caricature of a dentist.-

It was funny in a way. Most people went along expecting to see HG ranting and raving, which he didn't - which was a little counterproductive. Casting him in that role, which is almost a non-existent personality - he was to be a mysterious so that everyone reacted around him but no-one really knew who he was or what his motives were - meant that everyone was expecting any minute that HG was going to stand on a soapbox and say his piece. That's a bit problematical, but I think it's still funny. People who had never seen HG before thought he was great.

A non-character?

Yes, he was almost the non-character. People like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz, for example, although they both liked the film, Margaret thought it was great but David was whingeing about the fact that the love relationship was virtually non-existent and the character was virtually non-existent - which was really the idea of it! People get locked into an idea and try to massage a movie into what they think it should be.

You drew on your experience in England as background?

Well, I would be bashful to say it's autobiographical, but I did draw on my English experience, sure. And there have been all sorts of colourful characters that have been through the English dental scene, some of the most colourful I have known. There was a fellow in England called Hugh Hourigan who went on the run from Interpol in much the same way that HG did in the film. They all came through his front door and he went out the back door and they only caught him years later. He left everything, left his fleet of cars, his big house and his wife and family, and everything and he disappeared. They eventually grabbed him in South Africa. I think he went into one of the Homelands to play a game of golf. They were waiting for him, and they brought him back. It was on the front page of the newspapers - George, they called him - they brought George back to try him in the Old Bailey. There were various other people like that in the '50s and the '60s, in the early days of the National Health, an awful lot of funny people over there!

Glass is a thriller and This Won't Hurt a Bit is comedy and Doing Time for Patsy Cline has something of both.

It has a bit of both, yes. I have trouble drifting away from comedy entirely. I've had some ideas for deep and dark psychological dramas and that type of thing, but I think I'd probably do better to leave someone else to do that because whatever I start out with, it starts to wander back towards something that I find amusing. I think Glass was intended to some degree to be slightly tongue-in-cheek too. It was a little bit silly; it wasn't intended to be taken absolutely seriously.

Patsy Cline is a different sort of a movie in that you're expecting a little bit more of the audience. I had two streams of the story, intended not to be immediately obvious what they were, and intended to resonate off one another to some degree, so that if at the end of the movie you had done your sums right, you were repaid by understanding what had happened. It's a dangerous thing in that distributors and exhibitors don't really like it. If you're Pasolini or somebody it's all right, but they want a movie to be pretty obvious.

Where did the Nashville Dream come from? Is it something you were interested in yourself or did it become a symbol for that kind of hopeful young man?

It's a little bit symbolic of everyone's dreams. You have your ideas in your own life. You pick up people from your own life and put them into your dreams: you know someone who does you down in real life and you'll get back at him in your dreams, or vice versa; the unattainable love in real life will be someone who's not so unattainable in your dreams. So it was a way of putting those two things together. The interesting thing about it was that a lot of the critics, particularly in Australia, didn't twig to it or put all sorts of strange interpretations on it.

David Stratton said how he found it difficult to interpret whether it was real or whether it was a dream.

He came out and admitted to me later that he just didn't get it. A lot of people didn't get it. People like Bob Ellis couldn't get it. There's a few funny things I've said about Bob Ellis. I don't know whether it's got something to do with country music, which they consider to be lowbrow, something that doesn't deserve thought and they don't switch into that mode. Bob Ellis is the sort of person who will sit down and discuss Fellini's 8 1/2 till the cows come home, but you pose a simple conundrum like that and it just went straight over his head. I think it's got a lot to do with the music. A lot of the subtext of the movie was to some degree carried in the music and the lyrics. You have to lock into that in order to understand what was happening in the story. So, if you didn't like the music and put it to one side, the whole thing would be a long haul and you wouldn't bother to sit down and try to work it out.

With Matt Day's character, you had the nice, naive Australian from the land, good-natured. That's the Candide kind of experience, I suppose. And he meets up with Richard Roxburgh and experiences all the adventures but finishes up in prison and where is his dream? Interesting symbols of Australian young men in the '90s.

Yes, they were supposed to be mirror images of each other. Boyd was intended to be the sort of person who could have been anything, who had the talent and the ability but didn't have the raw guts and determination or the perseverance to weather it out. He was jumping from relationship to relationship. He'd jump from every easy opportunity to the next to make money, whereas poor old Ralph didn't have the talent, didn't have the same sort of golden-haired good looks or the talent that Boyd had, but he had all the guts and determination in the world. They were in there to teach each other something about loyalty. Boyd was there to teach Ralph that you can only follow your dream so far and make him understand or come to realise that certain other things are as important, if not more important, in life. And Ralph was there to teach Boyd at least some glimmer of loyalty and respect for other people.

And Patsy?

She was to float between them, really. She was to be available to both. Helen Garner, for example, wrote a scathing critique of the film, obviously from a political perspective. Clearly, she doesn't think that we should make movies where women are compliant in that way, or dominated by men in that way. I've never spoken to her about it, but I was startled to read her review. She said Patsy should have stayed well away from it all and waited until a decent male came along. So it's interesting when you're in a position like this and you feel that 99.9 percent of comment is positive, but occasionally you will find someone who just thinks it's a load of old cobblers.

Patsy had a certain independence. She was dependent on Boyd, but she had her own dreams. And with the illness, she seemed to make her own decisions.

Well, she did but in the end, of course, Boyd's personality overwhelmed her and she was going along with him. But, to be honest, I didn't even give any thought to the political correctness. I just based it on characters that you dream up or people that you know.

Actually, I based that pretty much on the relationship of a couple that I know and who have long since split up. She was in and out of psychiatric institutions, and this particular fellow has only just got out of jail himself. But despite that, the scrapes he's got himself into, he's a very, very charismatic character. If you came up to him and said, "I've just run out of money; can you help me," he would give you all his money and then he would turn around and say, "Hang on, I've got no money. I'm going to have to go and get some money," and he might not find the best way of getting it. So it was that contradictory element in the character that I was looking for with Boyd and I think Richard played it so well that he managed in the end to make you sympathise with him despite how terrible he really was.

With Ralph's parents, the prisoners in the jail and the police, you created quite an entertaining gallery of Australian offbeat characters.

Yes, it worked out very well. You go into a movie in the hope that you will do that. You do what you can to cast it in a way that will provide this, but I was delighted in the end with what we came up with, for instance, the policeman coming in with his little photo album of his wedding (and Tom Long did that very, very well. In the script development stages people say that this type of relationship is totally unbelievable and there's no way this can ever work on screen. It's interesting and amusing to look back and say, "Well, for me anyway, it works really well and I'm delighted with the way it works." And the father was such an archetypical sort of farmer, hanging in there till the son gets back, and the poor mother...

You had very entertainingly nice larrikin aspects of the Australian character, even the odd group of prisoners and the way they interacted with Ralph.

The characters in the cell next door, I think were terrific. I remember little Kiri Paramor, the young little fellow in the cell next door. I saw him first in Flirting, the kid with the braces on his teeth and he really stole the show.

I remember when we were working on it, almost shooting and he was umming and ahing about this character and the business of the picture of Marilyn Monroe - he would pull it out and say, "This is my girlfriend, she's American, but a great woman." I remember him coming to me and asking, "Do I really believe this?" And I said, "Yes, you believe it." And he said, "The minute I knew I believed it, it was easy for me. The minute I knew that I wasn't kidding, I believed it," little things like that, and they fitted so well. Lawrence Coy, with the big tattoos on his arm and the cigarette and Tony Barry too, of course. He's a terrific actor. It was only a tiny role for him, but I think he got a great kick out of it - he had to have his head shaved off and swastikas tatooed on the side of his head!

Anything in process?

I've just written another script. It's probably something I shouldn't talk about too much, but it's called Made in Australia. It's a sports-related story, once again a comedy drama - you'll laugh and you'll cry, I hope. It's to the point of doing something about it. I've got a studio sweating on making it but, of course, all the guns are fired elsewhere, not by me, unfortunately!


Interview: 12th November 1998