The director of `Romper Stomper’ is expecting some flak over his new film. But he knows how to deal with it. Larry Schwartz reports.
GEOFFREY WRIGHT hopes he has not come across as a “petty, vindictive creep”. Said in jest, there is nevertheless an abrasiveness about the controversial director who has stirred up both acrimony and applause in recent years.
His last film, `Romper Stomper’, generated as much controversy as any in the history of Australian film. Unfazed, he seems blessed with single-minded confidence in his vision.
But that’s not all that carried him all the way from dreary factory work to international success.
“I do admit that part of my motivation is baser stuff like revenge,” he says. “It’s base. But envy is the beginning of a lot of good things. You can’t achieve anything that does see the realisation of your dreams without a little bit of envy. So I recommend envy. I do.”
He snarls at sons of lawyers and doctors who saw a career in film because it was “a cool, hip thing to do: they had their own kind of Ivy League circle,” he sneers.
Looking down from a hotel window on a city fast greying with rainclouds, he can make light of claims about the likely harm his latest film, `Metal Skin’, may wreak.
“Well let’s see what could happen. After the film comes out, a lot of people will shoot their fathers. A lot of churches will be desecrated. There will be illegal drag racing in the suburbs, and Satan will walk the Earth.”
All this, he says, provided `Metal Skin’ runs true to form. `Romper Stomper’, released in 1992, won three AFI awards, strong international interest and a generous helping of fear and loathing.
It was not just the brutish depiction of skinheads in Melbourne’s western suburbs that led film-maker Paul Cox to interrupt a Berlin premiere. Not just David Stratton’s refusal to review it on an SBS movie show. Not just critics’ claims that it “unwittingly . . . seems to celebrate violence” or was “mainly an excuse for loads of rude words, bashings . . .”
It didn’t end there. The 35-year-old director recounts some ugly incidents for which the film was held responsible. “R-o-m-per St-o-m- per,” yelled a fat girl with bad teeth, bashing an Asian girl at Flinders Street Station. “Gook, gook,” bayed the hoons at the cricket, echoing abuse in the movie. “Hando,” they also shouted, naming the gang leader played by Russell Crowe.
Wright insists that citing `Romper Stomper’ has been a useful ploy for defence counsel. Yet racial abuse was rife at the MCG years before his movie. Sure people may recognise an anger they share with characters in the movie but, he says, “no film ever made someone do something that they didn’t want to do”.
Starring Aden Young, Tara Morice, Nadine Garner and Ben Mendelsohn, `Metal’ is a disquieting look at a bleak world of limited employment opportunity and parental ineptitude, where one of the few forms of release is in illegal drag-car racing.
Wright’s gift is to make art of the ugly. “I will lay claim to the fact that I can take this action and this conflict and turn it inside out and make it a piece of drama on a film and say these are the kind of pressures that force a person to kill a
member of their family.”
He attributes the fascination with cars to a crash during preproduction for his first film, `Loverboy’ (1988). He had been driving his gold-flecked-green 1976-model Toyota along Burke Road, Camberwell, about 2 am when another car barrelled through a red light.
He found himself trapped in the wreck, wondering if the fumes from a ruptured gas tank meant he was soon to die in a blaze. Broken-limbed, he was prised loose by the fire brigade.
It took a while to regain enough confidence to get behind the wheel again. To help, he bought a bulky 1974 HJ Holden, an “Australian muscle car”, as he puts it, and began research on souped-up engines and legal and illegal racing.
This, he insists, led to insights not just into cars but into a sense of “cultural desolation that their (the racers’) passions were required to keep at bay”. `Metal’, he recently noted, “ultimately has little to do with cars and a lot to do with a handful on the psychological and geographical fringes of our sprawling cities.”
His father was a Board of Works meter reader. The would-be film- maker spent much of his childhood in Pascoe Vale and attended Strathmore High. Though it is in the city’s west that his imaginative world is firmly set, home for several years has been Camberwell, the heart of the east.
“The fact of the matter is that my flat is fantastic and I couldn’t find (one) like it on the other side of town. But if it’s any consolation to anyone if anyone cares I think I’m about to lead the life of a Gypsy anyway. So my address is going to become tragically transient, I suppose.”
Success has come fairly recently and he can empathise with the frustrations of the likes of his central characters. “I think the ’80s were an enormously destructive period in terms of unemployment, and there are people, including me, who haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be chucked out of the system and to be told you’re redundant.
You’re out there in the wilderness for a long time and you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Though he has studied at Swinburne film school and worked as a reviewer, it is not long since he earned his living by delivering ball-bearings or working as a cleaner at factories and, at one stage, a Camberwell girls’ school.
ALL this is a world away from the plight of feted, if controversial, film director. “Last year, I visited Universal, the old MGM lot, which is Sony, Fox, Paramount. I’m wandering around talking to all these big shots and, after the meeting, walking around the sets where they shot this or that.
“And I think, `Gee, you know, the old daydreams in Laverton and Pascoe Vale did really take me a long way. It’s interesting that passion can do that. And commitment’.”
He has lank blond-hair and sports a windcheater, jeans and sneakers.
The word “Speed” on the T-shirt is a reminder of an initial title for his film. He prefers the new title chosen after the success of the US film `Speed’, starring Keanu Reeves.
Success or no, Wright himself does not come across as a happy chap.
He sees a world plagued by lack of love in which relationships are unlikely to endure. “Most relationships fail; some of them fail catastrophically. I’ve certainly failed in them; most of my friends have failed in them . . .”
For all the camaraderie of events such as Anzac Day, the grand final or Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, his world is one in which there is little sense of community and people turn in on themselves, nurturing petty, personal values. No right or wrong, just competing moralities.
He sees this in Joe (played by Aden Young), who places all hope on an invention he believes may make him a million dollars; Dazey (Ben Mendelsohn) dreaming of a career as a professional racing driver; and Savina (Tara Morice), a lovestruck witch, practising Satanic ritual.
“They are a law unto themselves. They are a church of one in terms of Savina, a race of one in terms of Dazey. . . .and a research-and- development bureau of one in terms of Aden’s character.
“. . .We are all like this group of one. We pursue the concerns of No. 1 and, when we come out of our caves and our covens and our racetracks and we bump into each other, all hell breaks loose. And I’m saying this in a kind of operatic way.”
He is wary of critics who have taken him to task for not issuing a clear condemnation in `Romper’ of the neo-Nazi skinheads. “They say it’s your moral stance or the fact that the film’s going to cause trouble. But I can’t ever escape this sneaky feeling that they’re just upset because I didn’t give them an easier film that somehow is like a dry martini . . .”
One of the first movies he saw was David Lean’s `Lawrence of Arabia’. It comes as a surprise to hear that it is this saga against which he measures films and invariably finds them lacking. As an eight year-old, he went to see a film on rocket ships and was intrigued to see Stanley Kubrick’s `2001: A Space Odyssey.’ When he saw it again, at 14, he realised films did not have to be escapist.
“I lived for a number of years in some pretty boring places. And you’d go out to the movies and you’d watch the heroes of the day perform great stunts and succeed. Then you’d go back to the suburbs and your life would go on.
“Well, I’m basically saying I’m putting a halt to that. If I was a kid today I wouldn’t be interested in seeing Jean-Claude van Damme doing a couple of flying roundhouse kicks and fight himself out of Doctor Doom’s Temple or something.
“I want a statement. I want to come across as someone making a statement that my lot is like a labyrinth of the Minotaur, the Greek myth. That there is no way out. The only way out is transcending the transcendental solution that my characters grope for but don’t ever obtain.”
Unlike his characters, he appears to have found his way out of the labyrinth. Wright has been considering offers from Hollywood and been over there four times in the past six months. “The dogs are barking,” he says.
Tempted by big budgets, he fears an inevitable loss of control and wonders whether successful directors such as Peter Weir and Fred Schepisi have not been compromised by overseas success. The next film may well be an American-Australian co-venture, he says. He wants US backing to work in Melbourne, conveniently out of Hollywood’s reach.
“What I’m trying to do . . is to land a big fish and bring it back here.”
He has achieved a financial security that has enabled him to resist inappropriate projects. “For quite a long time all I’ve done is read scripts and I’m happy to continue that . . . It’s great to be able to not have to do things. I want to do things for the right reasons.”
The Wright reasons, that is.
THE SUNDAY AGE, 07-May-1995
Larry Schwartz Writer 