JAMES RICKETSON



Blackfellas has been referred to as the Australian Once Were Warriors. Is this a helpful description?

Strangely enough, I gave a videotape to the woman who wrote the screenplay for Once Were Warriors. She sent a note back to say she liked the film very much. She said, `It's very Once Were Warriorish'. I think she might even think that I made the film after Once Were Warriors but, of course, it was made quite a while before it.

I suppose it's similar in some respects, insofar as it's a hard and uncompromising look at its characters and their situation. But in this case it's made by a white man, rather than by an Aborigine. In the case of Once Were Warriors, the director is himself Maori. Not that that necessarily means anything in dramatic terms. A Maori can make a bad film about Maoris and an Aborigine can make a bad film about Aborigines. So to my way of thinking, it doesn't matter a huge amount in terms of the dramatic product.

The Australian Catholic Film Office gave Blackfellas its 1994 prize for the film that best dramatised human values. Once Were Warriors won the Ecumenical Prize at the Montreal Film Festival, 1994. What is your response to the churches' reacting to both films, especially yours, so positively.

I hadn't really thought of it in any great detail, but I imagine the response has probably been the result of people recognising that Blackfellas is an uncompromising look at the reality of the lives of these characters. This reality has connections back into the real world. I suppose we're all so used to being confronted - up until very recently anyway - by images of Aborigines which were either dishonest or misleading. We've moved into another phase where, because of the whole political correctness brouhaha, it would be quite difficult if someone was to try and make Blackfellas now. You would probably find a whole lot of people saying, `But hang on a second. You're simply depicting Aborigines as a bunch of drunks and car thieves'. So I imagine that the award is a recognition of the fact that it's an honest film. The Aboriginal community that the film came out of were delighted with it when I showed it to them. They thought it was wonderful, honest and true to their lives as they understood their lives to be.

What attracted you to the project in the first place?

I had made a film, the first of the series Women of the Sun, back in 1982, called Into the Flame, which was set in the 1820s. It was a first contact story of Victoria. I went to Arnhem Land to get a cast of tribal people, to bring them down to Victoria to act. That was my first contact with our indigenous people. I was 30 something at the time and I thought how odd it was that I have lived all my life in this country and had no idea about the lives of these people. Of course, that made me curious and interested. I got on well with the people I worked with, so when someone suggested to me that I read a book called `Day of the Dog' by Archie Weller. I thought, `Okay, I'll read it', so I did and I fell in love with it immediately.

It took a couple of years, for complicated reasons, to actually get the rights for the book. And then I set about making the film. Back in 1983 or thereabouts, I was doing a film for Film Australia which was eventually a feature-length film about an alcoholic rehabilitation centre for Aborigines out of Kempsey. In doing the research for that film, I went all over Australia and I wound up talking to a lot of Aborigines. I went to a few rehab clinics and spoke to Aborigines about the problems of alcohol abuse. That was at a time when, by and large, the media were not prepared to really talk completely openly about alcohol abuse in the Aboriginal community. This is a roundabout way of answering the question. But I found that when I was speaking with Aborigines, that they had no problems at all talking about the huge problem they had with alcohol. When I talked to white people, they were sort of embarrassed that a white person should be asking these questions.

So the Aborigines were saying to me that they would welcome a film that had a good, honest look at the problem of alcohol in their communities. In the process of doing the research, I stumbled upon the Nungarr community, which is the community out of which Archie Weller's book is written and out of which the film comes. I found myself one night in a hall with about 300 Nungarrs, probably one of three non-Aboriginal people there, and I was struck by the energy and the liveliness and the music. I thought, `This doesn't even feel like Australia to me. I've never been a part of Australia that's anything like this'.

I also thought, `if I don't know about this part of Australia, even though I've had more contact with Aborigines than probably 95 per cent of the rest of the population, then it means that the rest of Australians don't know about these people either'. So when I read the book, I was already primed, if you like, looking for a story that came out of that kind of community. And there it was.

What was the name of the film about Kempsey?

It was called The Haven.

It's not very well known.

You can actually get a copy from Film Australia. It's a feature-length documentary. It was made at a very strange period of Film Australia's history, when there was a changeover from one guard to another, and for some reason, when the film was completed, it was neglected. And then, by the time anyone got around to thinking, `What are we going to do with the film?', its time had passed. I still think it's a good little film. It's all about why and how it's difficult for Aborigines to get off the grog. It's also about success stories, about people who have actually managed to succeed or are in the process of succeeding. I think the film is quite relevant today, but it hasn't been pushed at all.

What was interesting about the centre was that it was run by an Aboriginal woman called Val. Val herself is an alcoholic, although she hadn't had a drink for 18 years. She believed that what was really important for Aboriginal alcoholics was to remove them from the community in which their mates were. If they were around their mates, of course the mates were all drinking. You can't just remove an individual Aborigine from the community; you have to take the whole family. You know what the consequences are if you just take one person away. They get homesick.

Val was focusing her work on Mt Isa, bringing all the people from Mt Isa to Kempsey in a bus. She'd bring an entire family. For the children of the family there would be mum, dad, maybe even an uncle and aunt there as well; it would be the first time they had ever seen their parents in a sober environment. She believed this was a much more successful way of dealing with Aboriginal alcoholics than the way in which white people often deal with the problem.

You wrote the screenplay for Blackfellas?

What happened was - it had a curious history - that Archie and I wrote the first draft of it together. The first draft is actually very, very different from the finished film. What I discovered was that Archie's strengths lay in his understanding of the community and in his original story. My strengths lay in my experience as a scriptwriter and in my capacity to give it a structure. Interestingly, someone asked me recently to talk about the film and adapting the novel. So I went and read the book - I hadn't read it in seven years or so - and I was amazed to find how little relationship there is, in fact, between the story of the film and the story of the book. I can see clearly in my own mind - it went through about twenty drafts - how it changed from draft to draft to draft. It's actually very different now from the original book. So, yes, Archie was involved in the first draft of the screenplay. Thereafter I sort of took over and just kept on changing it and changing it until I wound up with the film you've got now.

The title change from Day of the Dog to Blackfellas?

The title change happened after the film was completed. While we were having some test screenings in Fremantle, people were saying to us things like, `Day of the Dog? Where's the dog? I didn't see a dog...', all that kind of stuff. Then there was one guy - I was editing at the ABC in Perth and we used to go next door to get sandwiches at a sandwich shop, and after we had been going there for a couple of weeks, he said, `What are you guys doing?'. I said, `I'm editing a film at the ABC'. He said, `Oh, really? What sort of film?' I said, `It's a film about Aborigines called Day of the Dog. He said, `Oh, yeah, I've seen that'. I said, `No, you haven't seen it. I haven't even finished it'. He said, `I have seen that film. It was on telly'. I said, `No, you haven't'. He was thinking of My Life as a Dog, Dog Day Afternoon - he wasn't sure. But he felt that he had seen the film. There had been a lot of films with titles like it.

When we got to thinking about a poster for the film - and I wanted the film to be seen by a more general audience - we asked, `How do you actually sell a film called Day of the Dog which bears no relationship whatsoever to the story; there's no reference in the film to the concept of `every dog has its day', which is where the expression comes from. I started casting around for different ideas and eventually hit upon the idea of Blackfellas. I thought it's slightly provocative; there will be a few people who will think, `Hang on a second, you can't use that word', but knowing full well that within the Aboriginal community they refer to themselves as blackfellas and us as whitefellas and that's not a problem.

If you've been up in the Northern Territory - it depends on your tone of voice, of course - but you wouldn't have any problem at all calling people blackfellas. It's funny, as is often the case in these situations, it's white people with the very best of intentions who have never met an Aborigine in their lives who take exception to these names.

Your collaboration with the cast, John Moore and David Milpijarra?

There was no real collaboration with them. I had a finished script. The only things that really happened, I suppose, were to be quite honest, probably the result of just working through a few of the scenes. There's probably a little bit more swearing in the film now than there was when I finished the script but, again, that's true to the way these people talk all the time. But that's about the only change that happened as a result of the collaboration.

There were other little things that happened in the community beforehand. For instance, one concerned the scene were Polly and Doug find themselves in the bedroom alone, the scene were Polly tries to seduce Doug. In the original screenplay, it said, `Polly strips down to her bra and knickers'. Three girls came in to audition for the film. I was talking to them about it and they said, `There's no way we can do this scene'. I said, `Well, you know, I'm not asking you to be naked or anything like that. It's just like going down to the beach and stripping down to a bikini'. They all giggled and laughed and said, `There's no way we would do that'. I said, `you wouldn't even expose your bodies on the beach in that way?'. They said, `No, we always wear T-shirts', and indeed they do. I said, `Well, what about with your boyfriends?' We got very personal then and they said that, even with their boyfriends, even with the boyfriends that they're sleeping with, they're still reluctant to take their clothes off. I was struck by that and fished around for a reason. I thought that maybe there was a sort of a missionary aspect to it that went back a few generations. I could never figure out where it came from, but it certainly made me change the script because I realised that it was culturally inappropriate: that Aboriginal girls simply do not strip down to their bra and knickers in the way that a white girl might.

The response to Blackfellas from the Australian public? It did not receive wide distribution.

Well, I was disappointed at what happened in Sydney. I could see it coming. The whole thing was financed largely with government money and, to be quite honest, the distribution of the film as far as I was concerned was a mess, a disaster. It wasn't handled well. It was almost as if the distributors were slightly embarrassed. The people who put the money up for the film, their attitude was, `Look, it's a good little film, but really and truly no-one is going to want to see it'. So in Sydney it only ran for seven weeks.

The exception to that was in Melbourne where the exhibitor who saw the film and liked it was a film buff, and he runs a little cinema, the Lumiere. It ran there for 18 weeks. That was because it was properly handled. I went down to Melbourne and appeared on TV, radio interviews, and they did a story about me in the press. It was handled properly, so it ran for a reasonable length of time. I think that the marketing budget for the film was something like $25,000. Now, the other Australian film that was out at the time was The Heartbreak Kid. They spent a million dollars and the film did very well at the box office, or at least appeared to do very well. But that's because they spent a million dollars on prints and advertising. Now, I understand that they didn't make any money at the end: they spent a million dollars and probably got a million dollars back. But the fact of the matter is that they actually got behind it and basically said to the general public, `This is a film you should see'.

My argument, when the film was finished, to all the relevant parties was, `now we've got a film we want people to come and see'. Mabo had just hit the presses. It was front-page news at least once a week during that whole period. I said, `Look, Mabo is all about Aboriginal relationship with the land. This film is all about a central character who's obsessed with his relationship with the land. Why not publicise the film as one that every Australian who wants to understand the Aboriginal relationship with the land should see'. Now, it's slightly misleading, but only in the way that all advertising for movies is slightly misleading. But they didn't pick up on that. In fact, the distributor for overseas markets said to me on the phone - and I couldn't believe it - `Oh, James, when we promote it for overseas, we're not going to use the word `Aboriginal' at all. We're not going to mention the fact that it's about Aborigines, because it will be a turn-off to the audience'. So I think it was a mess, the way it was dealt with.

Is it a hopeful film or does it dramatise hopelessness without much hope?

Well, I think it's a film full of hope, myself. I know a lot of people have seen it and said, `Oh, God, it's depressing'. I don't see it that way at all. I think it's hard and gritty and doesn't pull any punches, but at the end of the film you've got Pretty Boy Floyd, who finally commits an unselfish act to save his best friend, and you've got Doug, having extricated himself pretty much from the life of petty crime and drinking, and you've got Polly and Doug preparing, at least tentatively, to make a go of it out in the country. To me, it's a very positive although tragic ending. But then a lot of people don't see it that way.

What about the John Hargreaves character? How real? and how much caricature?

Some people think John's a bit over the top. But from what I saw in Perth and from the stories that I heard from members of the cast, of things that had happened to them, in terms of his character and what he does and the way he behaves, there's no way he's a caricature. He might be a bit over the top in terms of his performance, but I think that's okay. Some of the stories that I heard... Jaylene, who played Polly in the film, because she had in fact been a street kid at one point, told me stories of just walking down the street, being picked up by the cops and being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, driven 15 miles out of town without any money and dumped at the side of road - just like a joke, to antagonise the kids.

At one time when that happened to her, they threw her out. I can't remember whether they broke her arm or sprained her wrist, something like that. She went to see the Aboriginal medical service the following day, and they recommended to her that she should lay charges against the police. She said, `What's the point? If I lay charges against them, they'll just victimise me'. I heard variations on that story over and over again.

There was another story where one of the members of the cast, who played only a small role, was in a play with a woman at around about the time we were rehearsing for the film. The woman was married to an Aboriginal man who was a policeman, and she had his car; they were driving back from the theatre. The police had got a report of some car being stolen, saw an Aboriginal man and woman driving a fairly flash-looking car - in other words, not a rustbucket - pulled them over to the side of the road, got them out at gunpoint, had them lying on the asphalt in the middle of the road with a pump-action rifles at their head, simply because they were black. Of course it turned out that this was her husband's car and her husband was a policeman, and they were both on their way back from the theatre. Now, that kind of thing goes on all the time. So, I hate to say it, but I don't think that the John Hargreaves character is a caricature.

It isn't that all police that are like that; it's only a particular kind of policeman but, unfortunately, the police force does attract some of these people. I have had a good deal to do with the police myself for one reason or another, and I've found just as many really decent blokes in the police force but it is a job that attracts some people who have less than honourable intentions.

Your Women of the Sun episode was set in the 1820s.

That was a story that had been written by two people, Sonia Borg and Hyllus Maris, an Aboriginal writer and a white writer. It was about first contact, about a man who was a convict and who was swept ashore - he was a castaway, or he jumped overboard, it was never quite clear what had happened - but he was adopted by a group of aboriginal people and became their friend. When white settlers arrived in the area some years later, he assisted them unwittingly in taking the land away from the Aborigines. Of course, there were the usual reprisals, one act of violence leading to another which eventually leads to the people being massacred. It was also a simple little story about a friendship between a white man and an Aboriginal girl which goes terribly wrong, a simple story, really, about dispossession.

Those stories of Women of the Sun contributed a great deal to changing perceptions in the Australian audience of the early '80s.

I think so. Interestingly enough, I remember a friend of mine when he first saw the film said it was the first time that he had ever seen Aborigines looking sexy on film. What he meant by that was that he actually thought, `These are attractive people'. One of the things I've discovered in the many different projects that I've done - when I've been talking to people who haven't had much contact with Aboriginal people - is that, even if they don't think that they're racist, deep down they have the idea that Aboriginal people are ugly. So it was quite a shock to them to find attractive Aborigines in Women of the Sun. And, again, when I was doing Blackfellas, I quite consciously thought I would like to have in the lead roles quite attractive Aborigines. As it turned out, they were also the best actors available - I was very lucky in that respect - because I didn't want an audience to be able to bring all of their normal prejudices. I wanted to get beyond and behind some of the audience's natural preconceptions and prejudices.

I hope that at some point in the not too distant future someone could actually tell a similar story and have, perhaps, overweight and unattractive Aborigines, but I think at this particular time it's probably fairly important to recognise the nature of the prejudices and try and work against them.

Your other films, Third Person Plural and Candy Regentag?

With Third Person Plural, which was made for $35,000, an extremely small amount of money to make a feature film on, back in 1978 or 79, it was just an experiment, really. I just wanted to see whether it would be possible to make a film on that small budget, shoot the whole thing with a hand-held camera, integrate improvised dialogue with scripted dialogue, work with a small core of actors on a character-based piece, which is what I did, and then to approach the editing of the film in an innovative way.

Now, I happen not to like the film myself. Having done the film - it was fun to do it - I decided that I didn't like it, and it certainly wasn't the direction that I wanted to go in. But as it turns out, there weren't many films of that kind that were made back then. Interestingly, since then there has been many a film that has been shot with a hand-held camera and that has employed some of the low-budget techniques that we employed there.

In the case of Candy Regentag, it was a screenplay that was given to me. I was asked if I'd like to direct it. The money was there, $750,000. I liked the story. It was a story about a difficult kind of love between a man and a woman that happens to take place in the context of a brothel. But the same relationship could easily have taken place elsewhere. The man is incapable of making any kind of emotional commitment to the woman. The film was not hugely successful and I suppose I don't really think about it very much now. It's probably not a great film, but it's all right.

On video it is called, Kiss the Night, and has a rather lurid jacket.

Well, they tried to sell the film. The film is not softcore porn, and yet they tried to sell it with that cover - the whole marketing of the film was as if it was a softcore porn movie. I went to a couple of afternoon screenings when it was showing at the Academy Twin and there were, literally, men with raincoats. People had obviously come along for the wrong reasons to see the film. The film wasn't marketed well. But then, quite honestly, I don't think it deserved huge success but it would have been nice for it to have been marketed a bit better.

Further projects?

I'm working on one now which is called Angel of Death. It about the rehabilitation of a woman criminal called Julie Wright. And I've just finished a treatment for another thing called And Nothing But the Truth, which is a thriller based on the idea of a current affairs host who has been kidnapped and held for ransom; the ransom is not a money ransom, but a demand that certain stories that have been put to air, be put to air again but told in a truthful fashion; the demand is made by someone who believes they have been maligned, defamed by this particular current affairs program. It's a thriller. Then another one I'm trying to set in the 1840s is a western, about a Scottish family and an Aboriginal family who occupy the same tract of land for a period of time and then find that the combination of drought and overgrazing make it impossible for them to work there any longer. So I'm hard at work on a lot of different things.

How do you see yourself in the overall picture of Australian cinema, your particular style and contribution?

I'm probably the last person you should ask that question of. It's probably easier for other people to say that. Clearly I haven't gone to Hollywood and achieved success. Who knows, in a year's time I might have made a film that is a huge success and suddenly agents and others will be calling from Hollywood saying, `Mr Ricketson, we want you to come and do a film'.

On the other hand, it's a very up and down kind of business, and I think you would find even if you look at someone like Gill Armstrong - Gill's an old friend of mine - she went through a few years of things not working out quite right for her, and films that she did do in Hollywood that didn't work out well. Then she would bounce back with something else. It's such a fickle industry. You know, I might never ever get to make another feature film, or my next feature film might be a huge hit and I'll suddenly be a hot director. Who knows? That's the way the business is. Anyway, one thing's for sure. You have to take a long-term view of it and not get too caught up in either your immediate successes or your immediate apparent failures.



Interview: 22nd May 1995