SOPHIA TURKEWICZ



Your background is Polish?

I was not born in Poland. In fact I was born in Africa. I came to Australia as a child with my mother, and grew up in Adelaide.

What drew you into film-making?

I was actually a teacher before I became a film-maker. I was teaching at Loreto in Adelaide for a few years - I was a very bad teacher because I was interested in learning myself rather than giving at that stage. I was studying part-time at Adelaide University, completing a BA and I discovered that I could count a film unit from Flinders University towards my Adelaide BA degree. So I started the film course there and that set me off in that direction towards film.

I was basically hooked from that point on. I then continued teaching but was trying to get into something more interesting. I realised that teaching was not the way I wanted to go, and I was very lucky with timing, being around at the right time when things were happening. While I was teaching, I started doing various school broadcasts for radio and, then, in the early '70s the South Australian Film Corporation was just starting up and they were looking for local writers to train and, because I had done some of these school broadcasts - while it was radio, not film or television, at least it was a little bit of drama - they advertised and I got into a course, a two-week course where they trained locals.

The people who were running the course happened to be Penny Chapman and Joan Long. There were about 13 or 14 people and the idea was to develop a story concept and, if any of them were interesting, they were going to be produced. I was one of the lucky two people who ended up getting our story ideas actually made. They were little training films that the SAFC were doing. So that was one turning point and that was in 1974. And again, timing just was perfect for me because in 1974 the Film School was advertising for their first full-time course students for 1975 and, because I had done this workshop with the SAFC, I could submit that to the Film School, and I got in.

So I was at the right place at the right time, basically, and got into the Film School - at that time as a writer. I did the three-year course, left the family in Adelaide, came to live in Sydney and in the course of that three years I discovered directing as well, discovered that that's what I wanted to do, combine writing and directing. That's what I graduated from the Film School as, a director, but I still saw myself very much as a writer-director. And again luck - I can't believe what incredible luck I've had - one of the assessors for our final year student films happened to be Joan Long, quite coincidentally, I had nothing to do with this. I walked in and there she was. I don't know whether you've seen my graduation film, Letters from Poland, but it started to explore the theme that I later developed more fully in Silver City, it was a starting point.

Way back at the course in Adelaide, I had talked about this idea to Joan, just as an idea because my family had come to Australia as immigrants. They had gone through the migrant hostels.

Your father was Polish?

No - well, my real father is actually Italian. My mother is Polish. My mother ended up coming to Australia as a single mother from Africa and then married my stepfather, who's Polish, and that's where the name Turkewicz came from.

So I had talked to Joan about this idea that I had, this film I wanted to make back there in 1974, and there we were graduating then in 1978 and she was there assessing Letters from Poland. And I said, "I haven't forgotten that idea. This is just a little starting point and I want to, when I graduate, go out there and develop it," and she got very interested and involved. And again I was one of the most incredibly lucky students graduating, to actually have a producer interested in one of my films once I was out in the big wide world.

I remember Professor Terpewicz. saying, when we were graduating, that it would take something like five years before we made any sort of a mark, made our first movie, and I remember thinking it's not going to take me that long. But sure enough, that's how long it took to actually develop the idea, get the money and finally we went into production in 1983.

You collaborated in the writing with Frank Moorehouse. Is that right?

No, not for that. Thomas Kennealy came in and got involved in draft 5, because at that stage we had just were hitting obstacles with funding. It was a hard project to get funding for. There was a lot of interest but we were having problems, and Joan's idea was to break this obstacle we just needed to get another name writer involved to open doors, and indeed it did, so Thomas Kennealy came on board at draft 5. He had just come back from Poland, researching Schindler's List, so he had a whole lot of things in his head to do with the Polish mentality. He had three weeks between jobs. He came in and did a sort of quick draft and then I took over, and that was enough to kick it into the next level of funding. I think I went on to do about another four drafts or whatever and finally it got up.

It's interesting, the Polish mentality is an interesting thing to explore, but also you have dramatised there very interesting aspects of the Australian so-called mentality as well. It's an interesting reflection, I suppose, from the '80s back those twenty or thirty years of the experience of the migrants. Where did you draw your understanding of the Polish mentality?

Very much from my family. That's what I was drawing on for the social and historical context of my story. I had been imbued with that, just growing up in my Polish family. My mother came out, her first job was in various Catholic convents as a domestic in Western Australia in little country towns called Three Springs and Donga - you probably haven't even heard of them - and she was very isolated at the time, but then she met Polish people and eventually moved to Adelaide and married my father, and from just growing up with her friends and the family, those early days I remember as a kid, the Polish community was still very much a cohesive community.

I can remember the social events like parties and lots of vodka and lots of singing. It was just a really happy time. Well, it wasn't all happy, not in the wider context, but certainly within the community there was just a lot of community feeling that gradually, very sadly, dissipated. All that group has just become more and more isolated as they've become integrated into the wider Australian community and it's all just vanished now. But certainly that period of my growing up, my sort of childhood up to about the age of 15, 16, was very much imbued with that Polish community mentality. That's what I lived and breathed.

Just thinking about the Polish mentality - so people are coming after the war, so it's a refugee kind of mentality, is it, or just a migrant one or both?

Probably both, because all of that group, like my family and their immediate circle, have been through the war, the dislocation of the war. My mother's story is absolutely incredible. She ended up being caught up as a prisoner in Siberia, aged 16. Both her parents had died and she was orphaned by the age of five, then the war broke out. She came from a tiny little village just on the border of Russia and Poland at the time, and as soon as the war broke out, she and a lot of civilians were just taken off to Siberia to work, basically, in the gulags, and that's where she spent the war years until eventually the release of civilians was negotiated and she ended up in various refugee camps in what was then Persia, like Tashkant and Esfahan, and gradually - like in what were British army camps that had been converted into refugee camps - and then eventually, as they overflowed and people got moved, she ended up in Africa in a camp there in Lusaka in what was then Northern Rhodesia and met my Italian father, who was a prisoner of war from Libya. An incredible story.

Her closest friends had also been through that experience in Siberia, where the husband of one of her close friends died of starvation and she came out with two little kids. They're the people that I grew up with. So it was probably very much that war experience, that refugee experience, was probably just as - probably more vivid than the national sort of Polish cultural stuff.

You made scenes of the religious dimension - I notice the dominating Polish clergy - which I, of course, found very interesting. How much was yours or was that a Kennealy kind of thing as well, or not?

I think I brought that in, because I grew up as a Catholic - my family were very Catholic. I'm not any more and my brothers aren't, I'm sure, either, but my mother is still deeply Catholic. She prays every day and night for me still and it's very much part of her. I can't remember, actually, the development through the script, what - I think that might have been me. I think it probably was, the confessional scene.

And the severity of the priest visiting the house. It's almost a dominating or humiliating kind of authoritarianism that I remember from it.

Yes. I have to admit I think it was me.

Which of course some people would say some of the clergy still are, but anyway, we won't say that.

I think, in terms of characterisation, one of my criticisms now of the film would be - like it was a first film, it was an immature film - it's a very different film from the film I would make now, for instance, and I think that especially with some of the minor characters I did fall back on stereotypes. I did with the priest, probably, and certainly with the Australians.

The couple next door? No, they were nice.

But even the Roy Jenkins character with the big ears who she tries to get involved with her - I think I would do it differently now. I would try and make the characters much more three-dimensional. I think I achieved that with the Polish characters, the main characters, but with the minor characters, I didn't know then, I wasn't experienced enough as a writer to understand that to make them more interesting and human they had to have more light and shade and three dimensions, basically.

In defence of it a bit, in a way you were showing the Australian mentality and culture through the eyes of the migrants, which could have been to that extent caricature.

Yes, but I could have done both. I could have still seen it from the perspective of the immigrants, but I also could have given the Australians more depth and complexity and less stereotype.

I wonder what the people like your mother, when she arrived - I wonder what she was hoping for and what Australia could provide and whether it did in those days?

I think it certainly did for her. The other option would have been to go back to Poland. She was orphaned, her part of Poland didn't exist any more. If she had gone back there, I think her life would have been a lesser life. With my stepfather - I think he paid a price. My mother had never been to school, she's totally illiterate, she had never been inside a classroom, so if she had gone back, I think she would have only had the possibility of menial work anyway, which is what happened here in Australia, but at least there were opportunities that opened through hard work that I don't think she would have - my feeling is that she made the right choice in coming to Australia.

But with my stepfather, who is a much more educated person - he was actually studying to be a teacher and had been to university - had not finished his studies when the war broke out - he became a prisoner of war in Germany, and all his family ended up going back to Poland, apart from him. He was actually terrified of going back to Poland. In the refugee camps in Germany, there were refugee officials going round saying, "With the Iron Curtain you can't go back to Poland; you're not even allowed to speak Polish in Poland any more." He started writing to his own family in Poland in Russian because he believed he was not allowed to write letters in his own language. So he was too frightened to go back to Poland and ended up coming to Australia and ended up working as a labourer at General Motors Holdens for his entire life. When I think about his life, I think it was diminished by coming here. He would have gone back, been with his family, probably got himself educated - finished his education - and become a nice middle-class, or equivalent of, guy in Poland.

It's quite a background, isn't it, to those characters in the film, and also I presume from when you mentioned the letters there in Russian, that what you did in Letters from Poland - was that part of the theme there, since I haven't seen it, but I just thought I must ask you.

Letters from Poland was a story about a man who a Polish woman is waiting for to come to Australia to join her, who's the father of her child, who never arrives. That's very much autobiographical, with my Italian father, so yes, that's slightly different.

The other side of it, of course, which again was interesting for the film, is the Australians like the neighbours, but I suppose how unprepared they were for the groups coming in after the war. And the second question is how were they changed by such groups like your family?

The Australians, you mean?

Yes. I don't think, with all that kind of language of New Australians from those days - - -

Yes, I think Australians had absolutely no concept of what that group of refugees had experienced. I think they do now, a lot of them, in retrospect, understand, but at the time how could they? There wasn't the exposure. All they were seeing were people coming off the boats. They had no idea what they had actually been through. I can't really generalise, and my family mostly had good experiences with the Australians - my mother got work and my father working at Holdens tended to work with just other immigrants there. That was his world, they were the labourers who were working there, so he didn't have as much contact with Australians.

But my mother ended up getting domestic work in the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where she was involved with food for nurses and there was the interaction between Australians and Europeans. She had mostly positive experiences - I've never heard her actually say anyone was racist towards her, I've never heard any stories like that.

Have you seen The Sound of One Hand Clapping?

Yes.

That's interesting - it's just a bit later, but set in a different part of Europe, but very depressing.

It was. I'm not sure I enjoyed that film. I didn't think it quite came off.

It's just such a grim picture. I was just thinking of the two - your mother compared with the mother killing herself. I mean, she had had the terrible experience back in Yugoslavia and then the decline of the father, although he was isolated. So those stories I think are still worth telling. They need to be. I had better ask you about Times Raging, which I did see on television when it was made. That was the collaboration with Frank Moorehouse. It was one of his stories?

Yes, that was with Frank Moorehouse. Funnily enough, I had the two projects in development, Silver City and Times Raging, with Joan, and the idea was in fact to make Times Raging before Silver City, just because it was such a huge leap.

As I said, Joan and I had Times Raging in development at the same time as Silver City because I was supposed to have made that as my first movie after graduation, because it was a huge leap between making a student film to making Silver City. But as it turned out, Silver City got funding before Times Raging, so we ended up having to put Times Raging aside. Then finally when Silver City was completed - I actually can't remember why Joan didn't follow up on Times Raging, I can't remember the circumstances, but I think we tried but it was just too difficult getting the funding and eventually it never happened.

But a friend of mine, Michael Carson was then a producer at the ABC and was looking for telemovies to put on as a series. So rather than make it as a feature film, I decided to go ahead and develop as one of these telemovies. So that's how that happened.

The themes and relationships that you were exploring there - would you like to comment on that? It's a while since I've seen it.

It's a while since I've seen it, too. I can barely remember it. I liked that movie, it was a lot of fun to make. The theme of it was a woman in her thirties with biological time running out, wanting to have a kid and being involved with a guy who was psychologically incapable of having a kid, who basically was a kid himself. He couldn't be a father because he was a kid himself. That was just one of the themes that interested me at the time, I guess, because I suppose I was working through those sorts of things. Everything I write isn't directly autobiographical, but it draws on whatever I'm going through at any particular stage of my life, I guess.

I hesitate to ask you then about the other telemovie you made after that. Hasn't that got suicide in it?

Is this I've Come About the Suicide? Yes, you mentioned that on the phone. That was silly, basically. It was a telemovie that I made for the money. It was one of those dreadful 10BA shonky money type of movies where most of the money went God knows where rather than into the movies. But working freelance, I was broke at the time and just had to take the work. And I can remember looking at it and thinking, "Oh, my God, have I come to this?"

Who wrote it?

I can't remember - it was a playwright. It had been a play that he had put on, that had then been converted as a telemovie. He was very inexperienced. He didn't know how to actually structure and shape a film story, and I didn't have the time to work on it to reshape it. I was brought in as a director, I wasn't involved in it as a writer at all. I had a couple of meetings with the writer. So all I could do was try and salvage it and shape it as much as I could in the rehearsal period, which was about a week. And what I did was get some really good actors like Goscia(?) and Barry Otto and Ralph Cotterell and said, "Look, this is a heap of rubbish, guys, but we'll see what we can do." And we just tried to improve it and find some sort of story structure to it in the course of this week's rehearsal, and that was the best we could come up with, I'm afraid.

It's interesting to hear people reflecting now on some of those 10BA films.

So when I say everything I do is autobiographical, it's only specifically the movies that I write myself. Were there any more after Times Raging that you wanted to ask me about? Because after that I tried to get other projects up of my own, and couldn't, went broke and basically had to redirect my career into television just for income. And that's where I've been for the last eight or nine years - and having a really good time and a good income, I must say, and working in a lot of children's drama.

I was noticing that. I bought a book the other day by Tom O'Regan, 1956-93, and I was thumbing through that to find out what people were doing, and I noticed you had been doing some television work and children's films, so you've been enjoying that.

Yes. I've got a ten-year-old child, so over the last decade or so I've had a natural interest in kids' drama because of my son growing up, I guess. And that's where I've done a lot of my work. But after coming back from New Zealand, I've started to think I would just like to get back into film, so just this year I've been trying to reorient myself back into film and I'm just working on a script - in fact I'm just putting the finishing touches to the second draft at the moment and I'm about to send it out to producers and start that whole game again - lottery, and who knows what's going to happen. But I'm pulled back now towards film.

Just one last thing then about Gosia Dobrowolska, because she was very, very striking when I first saw the film, and there's all the stories about how she didn't have the English, but she certainly did very well and has never stopped working, really, has she?

Yes, she has been working - I'm thrilled to bits that she's got this job in Poland because I think she has been limited by her accent in the sort of roles that have been offered in Australia


Interview: 19th November 1998