Backstage backstabbing
Jim Schembri
The Age
It's one of those delicious ironies of modern movie-making
that a film as brimming with life-affirming themes of love, selflessness,
devotion and forgiveness as
And director Paul Cox wants to talk about it. Boy, does he
want to talk about it. From his native
Although often portrayed as something of a grump, Cox is in
high spirits, due, no doubt, to the fact
Written by John Briley (an Oscar
winner for writing Gandhi), the film recounts the moving story of Father Damien
(David Wenham), a Belgian priest who, in the
mid-1800s, devoted himself to the lepers isolated in the
It's a simple, stirring tale of faith, defiance, love and
sacrifice. Beautifully filmed on location at the existing leper colony and
featuring a very un-Cox-like cast of big-name stars - including Peter O'Toole,
Sir Derek Jacobi, Sam Neill and Kris Kristofferson -
the film also boasts an exceptional performance by David Wenham, who made the
film just as his fame as SeaChange's Diver Dan was
taking hold. It's easily the best work Wenham has done to date.
"It was all based on trust and friendship,"
recalls Cox as he sips on a fresh coffee. "I don't think you can worm a
performance out of an actor, they just have to trust you. That's how I always
do it. David was also very keen to do something like this. He's a marvellous character actor the way he wormed his way into
the character of Damien, which is much closer to my heritage than his."
Although the tale is little-known here, the legend of Father
Damien was drilled into Cox as a youth.
"I knew about the man when I was little, in a fairly
strict, madly Catholic background where you're riddled with such guilt that you
can't even look at yourself in the mirror. Damien was part of that whole thing;
he was a Roman Catholic hero."
And an inspiration. Damien defied
instructions not to touch lepers, even though doing so meant contracting
leprosy himself.
"I spent a lot of time in Kalaupapa
with the so-called lepers and I really started to understand why Damien didn't
mind catching their disease and being one of them," says Cox. "I've
never really found such kindness, such warmth, such human dignity and such
immense beauty. In the poor, dwindling flesh of these people there is such
force and power."
The experience also offered a contrast to Cox's rather dour
view of the world.
"I can honestly tell you that the world is such a f---ing mess, it's so stupid,
and here are these people that actually have nothing and suffer so badly and
have such dreadful lives, yet they give you so much. There's such love and
warmth. I wouldn't have minded contracting leprosy and staying there. It was
actually a wonderful time in that respect, with the people. I still write to
lots of them every month."
It's typical of Paul Cox to speak eloquently and sensitively
about human emotions one moment, then say something blunt and coarse the next.
He is, by nature, a man with a double edge to his view of people, and he openly
acknowledges this.
"Whenever I go away I always say that I don't want more
than three people around me, because, basically, we behave like a pack of rats.
We're shockers! But individually people are very beautiful, and when you give
them a bit of time they become marvellous."
It's as though his cynicism about people is in perpetual
struggle with his optimism. "As Anne Frank said at the end of her diary, 'We must keep believing that people are basically good,
otherwise I'll cease to exist.' Everybody has this beauty within them. Almost everyone."
For a film maker who specialises
in making profitable low-budget films - "Actually, if you do proper
research, I'm probably the most commercial film maker in the country", Cox
quips with quiet pride -
"The large scale of it frightened me at the
beginning," he recalls, "but it's basically the same story as most of
my films. I always make films about love and the lack of it."
But while there was lots of love in the story, there wasn't
too much love lost between Cox and his producers.
"There's one great line," he recalls with a laugh.
"I was told by them that there are too many lepers in the film! Now, as
you may have noticed, this is a film about leprosy ..." Cox breaks off for
another chuckle. "That's what basically set all the trouble off."
There was lots of other trouble as well. Cox insisted that a
horse wrangler who'd been sacked be reinstated, as he'd never had anyone sacked
from one of his films. The American crew sided with Cox against the producers,
one of whom, Cox says, was chased off the island. There was also an incident
where Cox had to hide footage from the producers in a policeman's back yard.
In a nutshell, the producers felt the film wasn't going to
be commercial enough and Cox was fired during production. Pressure from the crew,
however, saw him reinstated.
After Cox cut his version of the film, the producers
radically recut it "behind my back" and
released it in
After the success of Cox's multi-award-winning Innocence,
the investors of
With the film finally being released in
"I'm especially pleased for David's sake, but it left a
big scar on me. I will never, ever trust any producer around me on that level
again. I will never, ever make a film where I don't have final cut. F--- the lot of them. This is the big, dreadful shame of modern
film-making."
The story of the making of
Still, he looks forward to it eventually seeing the light of
day. "You would not believe it," he says with a chuckle. "It
reads like a thriller."