Pop Culture

The Driven Mr Beresford

The Canberra Times 6 November 1999

"Ideas are what our films lack. Highly superficial, they are vulgar in their sentiment, embarrassing in their heroics, badly constructed, with unreal, often theatrical, dialogue. Compared with many films made in foreign countries, films containing social comment, films reflecting and interpreting the life around them, Australian efforts are immature, quite removed from, and with no feeling for, our way of life."

Relax. That is not a recent comment, but part of an article published in the now-defunct journal Nation (and duly reprinted in the British magazine The Observer) back in 1960, written by an opinionated 19-year-old named Bruce Beresford. As you would guess, the article was not exactly patriotic, but Beresford would later prove that he was not simply a knocker. Rather than just complain about Australia's film scene, he would do something about it, becoming one of our most successful writer-directors.

One thing is still the same: he is still willing to give his opinion on anything, particularly if it is cinematic. Looking back on the article, he admits that it was "rather arrogant" to denounce the history of Australian film, and puts in a good word for both silent film director Raymond Longford (The Sentimental Bloke) and epic director Charles Chauvel (Jedda). However, he considers Ken G. Hall, our most commercially successful film-maker of the 1930s, as "probably the worst film director in history" - a view that would offend many local film buffs.

Whatever the case, he maintains that the article was written with good reason. "Among the film community here, such as it was, I felt that there was a great feeling of complacency. They made the Commonwealth Film Unit films, and everyone felt that everything was coasting along very well, but in fact the films were desperately unexciting."

Things have changed, of course, thanks partly to a group of exciting young film-makers who would surface a decade later, not least Beresford himself. Nowadays he is a strong supporter of Australia's film scene. Indeed, when I spoke to him, he was in town to launch the fast-growing Canberra International Film Festival. However, after so much time away from home, he had not seen a new Australia release for over a year.

Of course, he shares that situation with so many of our film-makers - something he finds encouraging. Once an Australian director makes a promising debut feature, chances are that the overseas offers will soon follow. "That's because of the awareness being created of Australian films. Now [overseas producers] will say, 'Oh, it's a new Australian film. We'd better have a look at it.'

"They give them bigger budgets and more access to markets, which is a big incentive. If you make a bad American film, it will be marketed all over the world. Make a bad Australian one, it will never get shown outside Sydney. Even if you make a GOOD Australian one, it's still hard to get it played."

Perhaps so, but isn't it a shame that so many Australian directors go overseas after just one film? We were happy for Baz Luhrmann, Jocelyn Moorhouse and P.J. Hogan, but wasn't it our loss that they went straight to Hollywood? If that was happening in the seventies, Beresford might have left our shores after The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. Don's Party, The Getting of Wisdom and 'Breaker' Morant might never have been made.

OK, he admits that the current situation has it's drawbacks. "Of course, nobody in Hollywood is forcing them. They can always come back here and work. They're not exiled permanently. There's nothing to prevent them coming back. Some of them do, don't they?"

Like himself. "In my own case, not every film that I ever want to make is set in Australia. I did 11 features in Australia before I left - and then I came back and did The Fringe Dwellers, and Paradise Road, and I'm doing another one next year. So it's not as if I'd gone away never to return."

Beresford's latest Hollywood film, Double Jeopardy, will premiere in Australia on 4 November. When released in the U.S. in September, it became the top box-office film for three weeks, even relegating Random Hearts, Harrison Ford's latest vehicle, to second place. The story is about a woman (Ashley Judd) who is wrongly imprisoned for killing her husband. In prison, she discovers that he is still alive, two-timing her with another woman. Upon her release, knowing that she can't be tried twice for the same crime, she decides to kill him anyway. Tommy Lee Jones plays her parole officer, trying desperately to prevent her from carrying out this plan.

This action thriller (described by one U.S. magazine as "The Fugitive and Louise") marks a change of pace for Beresford, who was previously best-known in Hollywood for the mild-mannered Driving Miss Daisy.

Its success (it has earned $90 million so far), has been a pleasant surprise - to Beresford and everyone else. "I never had any anticipation. You just can't tell." He reflects on how unpredictable the business can be, remembering Paradise Road (1997), a film very close to his heart. It had well-received previews and a fine ensemble cast, including Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Wendy Hughes and a promising young actor named Cate Blanchett. But it flopped. "Absolutely nobody went to it, anywhere in the world. I felt very disappointed."

It was not the best of times for him. After Paradise Road (and an unfortunate Hollywood project, which was never completed), he spent two years trying raise interest in Our Country's Good, an Australian film about the First Fleet. Again, it was all in vain.

"My agent called me and said, 'Give up on that Australian film. You'll never get it off the ground. I'm going to send you a script for a thriller.'

"I read it and thought it was good... but it's not the kind of film I thought they would have offered to me. I went back, met the studio and said, 'Well I'm an odd choice, but if you want me to do it, then I will.'" Of course, Double Jeopardy is not his first radical change of style. Unlike another outstanding figure of our film "renaissance", Peter Weir (whose melodic, ambient direction is apparent in each of his films), Beresford is a chameleon, modifying his style to suit the story. In 1980, he was still best-known as the director of such "ocker" comedies as Don's Party and the Barry McKenzie films. Then he made the powerful courtroom drama 'Breaker' Morant, which scooped the pool at the AFI Awards and even won an award at Cannes (for Jack Thompson's strong performance - another surprise).

Not surprisingly, the film is now considered a landmark in our cinema history. Whenever a poll or a critic attempts to name Australia's greatest films, it usually vies for first place with Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock. But like Citizen Kane, the usual American winner, its prestige was not matched by its box office performance. Beresford recalls that it didn't even last a weekend in London's West End, despite being opened by Prince Charles.

For Beresford, however, 'Breaker' Morant was all good news. Within three years he had his first Oscar nomination as a director (the script for 'Breaker', co-written by Beresford, had also been nominated), for his first Hollywood film, Tender Mercies, best remembered for Robert Duvall's Oscar-winning performance as a alcoholic country-western singer making a comeback.

Beresford has never been nominated since, not even for Driving Miss Daisy, which won the 1990 Best Picture award nonetheless. For now at least, Beresford is in a small but distinguished group of film-makers (including Alfred Hitchcock, Edmund Goulding and William Dieterle) who directed Best Pictures, but never won Oscars for themselves. At the time, Australian film buffs were outraged, cynically suggesting that "the film obviously directed itself".

The man himself does not share their concern, noting what many people tend to forget: a movie is a team effort, not just a directors' medium. "I was a bit surprised, but I certainly wasn't angry. I guess they thought that the film was easy to direct."

Nonetheless, the Driving Miss Daisy case was unusual. "It took about three years to get the money for that film. Everybody said, when they read the script, that no one could direct it entertainingly enough to sustain an audience's attention for 100 minutes... There's just an old man and an old lady, chatting in the kitchen.

"So when the film then won Best Picture, it was odd not to get a directing award, in view of the fact that I'd been told repeatedly that the film was director-proof, that it couldn't be directed."

As a seasoned Hollywood director, he knows what a crazy place it is. "They let the actors make all the choices, which is one of the reasons that so many terrible films are made. They're the films the actors choose to do."

He is often surprised when Australian films aren't more successful, giving the "tremendous" Angel Baby as a case in point. When we spoke, he had not seen an Australian film since The Boys. "It was better than Ken Hall could have done," he laughs. "I liked it, but I can see why it would be a very hard film to sell."

At the age of 59 (and looking some years younger), Beresford is not about to retire. In fact, as Double Jeopardy demonstrates, he is still willing to experiment. He recently directed (with ????) the IMAX film Sydney: Story of a City, which is now playing at the popular Darling Harbour super-screen. It has already sold to Singapore, Tokyo and New York.

He has several other movie projects in the pipeline - both local and overseas - and will be directing two operas in his spare time. (He is a long-time opera buff.) One of the movie projects was "hovering for about six years. The producers were never able to get funding. About three weeks ago, somebody suddenly read the script and said, 'This is great. I'll do it.' They put up the money, just like that. That's what happens, you know? It just takes one person."

He still hopes that will happen to some of his own projects. Perhaps the First Fleet will be filmed after all...