Phillip Noyce sails from dead calm to the centre of a political storm
By James Mottram
3 November 2002 - When Phillip Noyce received a phone call from screenwriter Christine Olsen at 3am one July morning in 1999, announcing she had the perfect script for him, it was the start of a journey that would force him to face up to the decisions he had made for the sake of his film career.
It would lead to Noyce shooting his first feature film on home turf for 13 years and one far removed from the type of film that made his name. Best known for his boat-set thriller Dead Calm - which launched the career of Nicole Kidman - Noyce has earned a reputation for delivering slick mainstream entertainment such as Sliver and two of the four Jack Ryan films, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.
The script Olsen was offering was for Rabbit-Proof Fence, the true story of three Aboriginal girls’ remarkable journey home across 2,000 kilometres of dangerous outback in 1931.
"I think Paramount were surprised when I walked away," says Noyce. "But I had looked in the mirror and saw that I was nearly white-haired, and thought, ‘I came here to Hollywood and I was a young man, and 12 years later, I’m an old man! What did I lose my youth on? All these throwaway movies.’ I wanted to make a difference."
Based on the book Follow The Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington - the daughter of Molly Craig, eldest of the three girls who made the trip along the fence used to protect Western Australia from the plague of imported European rabbits, the film revolves around the ‘stolen generations’ - thousands of part-Aboriginal children who were forcibly separated from their families and assimilated into white society up until 1970.
The story of the three girls’ escape from their new white masters after being brutally wrenched from the arms of their parents, has already been attacked by Australian politicians for "playing fast and hard with the truth".
Noyce refutes these claims, saying part of the problem is "that people can’t accept that genocide could have been committed by people who were dedicated to doing the right thing".
Indeed, the over-zealous ‘protector of the Aborigines’, AO Neville (Kenneth Branagh) emerges from the film as a misguided, almost sympathetic, character - rather than a cruel sadist. "The intentions and the results are poles apart. In this case, the preoccupation was with children of mixed marriages. The feeling was that they had to be saved from their black side."
Despite the evident power of the piece, he is not sure that Rabbit-Proof Fence will be enough to provoke a formal apology to the Aborigines from the Australian government.
"The current prime minister [John Howard] is a man of miniscule intellect and compassion," he says. Later this month, Noyce’s second new film will be released - an eloquent adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American. It stars Michael Caine as foreign correspondent Thomas Fowler, who becomes embroiled with the eponymous American - Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) - while stationed in Vietnam in 1952.
A love triangle set against the backdrop of political upheaval and corruption, it is a forceful, beguiling effort that sheds all of the flag-waving patriotism seen in Noyce’s Jack Ryan films.
"The movie is not really anti-American but it invites self-reflection," says Noyce. "I think Americans are not inclined to go in that direction at the moment. People are very sensitive. You can’t underestimate the sense of violation Americans felt after 9/11. I have been told by some of the publicists associated with the movie that I’m a little impertinent to be leading any chorus in that direction."
If anything, Noyce’s return to a more personal, polemical brand of film-making is a pleasing sight to those who believe the Hollywood machine simply sucks out your soul once you have entered it.
Rabbit-Proof Fence opens on Friday. The Quiet American on November 29
Source: The Scotsman
Noyce work
Stephen Applebaum
7 November 2002 - After 13 years of making slick, expensive, often empty movies in Hollywood, Australian director Phillip Noyce has returned to the politically inflected film-making of his early career - and walked straight into controversy. With Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American, he asks audiences at home and in the United States, respectively, to confront uncomfortable truths about their countries’ recent pasts. In Australia, in particular, the reaction has sometimes been hostile, as people have tried to defend the indefensible.
It is quite a change for Noyce, who since uprooting to Hollywood on the back of his international hit Dead Calm has filled up his CV with films such as Patriot Games, Sliver, The Saint and The Bone Collector. That it came about, he says, was the result of planning and coincidence. He had wanted to do The Quiet American since rediscovering Graham Greene’s book on a visit to Vietnam in 1995, but had found it impossible to find actors and money. Meanwhile, he was looking for a project that would take him back to Australia, as he was feeling increasingly disconnected from his homeland.
"In Hollywood you hang out in an expatriates’ bubble, surrounded by Germans, South Americans, a few Brits and Australians," he says. "I felt very much in between cultures. In that sense, you’re a perfect footsoldier for Hollywood, because you’re unencumbered by any cultural loyalties. You’re an international man. I had become alienated from my own culture."
Noyce was preparing to direct another multi-million dollar "behemoth", The Sum of All Fears, when fate intervened in the form of an unwanted 3am phone call. It was Australian documentary-maker Christine Olsen. She had written a script and was convinced only he could direct it. Noyce was unimpressed, both by the time and Olsen.
"She sounded very weird," recalls the congenial 52-year-old. "She sounded like someone that wanted to get something on you and then use it against you. I think it was just nerves. But within that system and within that town, everyone’s got a script. And if you let them into your lives too much, people take advantage. One develops an antenna for weirdoes and the bell was ringing!’ "
When he was finally persuaded to read Olsen’s screenplay, two months later, it was a revelation. Based on Doris Pilkinton Garimara’s bestseller, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, it told the true story of three Aboriginal sisters removed from their mother by the authorities as part of a programme to assimilate half-caste and quadroon Aborigines into white society, in the 1930s. The girls escaped and, following the eponymous structure, walked 1,500 miles home. The script had a similar effect on Noyce to The Quiet American.
"Just like Greene’s book, it was asking questions that I had in the back of my mind and answering them, too. Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back forever changed, so there were a lot of questions. Well, same thing with our relationship with Australia’s indigenous population. I was reading the script and suddenly it was pressing buttons. Buttons that you, along with the rest of the country, have not wanted pressed."
He was moved to think about the 500 Aborigines that lived on a reserve near his childhood home in Griffith, New South Wales. "Australia’s called ‘the lucky country’ because there’s so much to go around. Well, if that’s the case, why were these people locked up behind this fence? It seemed normal at the time but later you’d think, ‘This normality is not normal. There’s something up.’ "
Despite this segregation, Noyce says he knew nothing about the shameful policy of removal, which continued into the 1970s, because no-one had ever spoken about it. His eyes wide open, making Rabbit-Proof Fence became a personal mission. Production went ahead unopposed, thanks to a more enlightened appreciation of Aboriginal culture that had developed in Australia during the 1990s. Cathy Freeman’s success on the athletics track, suggests Noyce, helped change the mood of the nation.
Nevertheless, when the film was released right-wing commentators emerged from the woodwork to pick holes in it and accuse the director of fabrication. Some denied that the scheme to "breed out" blacks ever existed, while others said Noyce’s depiction of AO Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, who ordered the girls’ removal, was too harsh. If anything, Noyce lets Neville (played by Kenneth Branagh) off the hook, slightly, portraying him as misguided rather than someone who, according to many historians, was knowingly prosecuting a policy of genocide.
"I was very conscious of the need to allow the white Australian audience to understand how this could have happened," says Noyce. "And all the documentation did not point to a man that had an evil bone in his body. He may have killed with kindness, but he really thought he was doing the right thing. The context has to be appreciated. This was a time when, on the frontiers, there were still mass killings. So in that context, providing life, he was a bit of a saviour."
While Noyce was making Rabbit-Proof Fence, funding came through for The Quiet American, saving him from having to return to direct Sum of All Fears. Finally, he got to make his labour of love. The film was test screened on 10 September, 2001 and, according to Noyce, the response was good. The next day the Twin Towers were attacked and the world in which he had made the film was suddenly, irreversibly, changed. Who, in America, would now want to see a film in which an American CIA agent facilitates terrorism in Vietnam on his country’s behalf?
The story goes that the film sat on the shelf for a year because Miramax were afraid that releasing it would appear unpatriotic. Finally, in the absence of a release date, star Michael Caine harangued the company’s boss, Harvey Weinstein, threatening never to work for him again if the film did not appear soon. As a result, Weinstein let the film be screened at September’s Toronto Film Festival as a litmus test. The response from the media was positive and the film will now be released in the States this month.
While it is true that Caine intervened, Noyce insists the film was not gathering dust for a year. He says Weinstein continued to test screen the movie in New York after 11 September. As you would expect, the results were pretty dire.
"People thought we were being smart alecks," says Noyce. "They could see whoever made the film was English-speaking and they didn’t appreciate it. But we were being slightly masochistic by continually screening it in New Jersey and New York. We were previewing it amongst families who were not pleased to see maimed bomb victims, let alone the inference that there may have been terrorism in the past sponsored by America."
Noyce says the versions shown were rough cuts and he did not deliver his final edit to Miramax until May. He believes that Weinstein’s decision not to release the film was based on economics rather than politics. As we move further away from 9/11, Americans will likely become increasingly receptive to the questions that the film (and left-wing intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky) is asking. "In the long term," says Noyce, "why they’re trying to kill us is the key question. Not ‘let’s get them’. That just means they’ll come back for more."
Still, some involved with the project remain nervous about the film. Executive producer Sydney Pollack is nervous, says Noyce, because he does not think Pyle, the duplicitous CIA man played by Brendan Fraser, is innocent, as he is in the novel. "But I keep telling him I don’t think he ever was innocent. The training of a CIA agent in the 1950s involved reading a very famous book about con men. So, whatever Graham Greene might have thought, maybe he was being conned as well."
Michael Caine is tipped for an Oscar nomination for his performance as Thomas Fowler, a cynical reporter in The Quiet American, and Rabbit-Proof Fence has been nominated Best Picture at the Australian Film Institute awards. Noyce now hopes to make a sequel to Rabbit-Proof Fence based on Pilkinton Garimara’s follow-up novel, Under the Windarmarra Tree. Hollywood might have bought his time, but it clearly hasn’t bought his soul.
Rabbit Proof Fence is released tomorrow. The Quiet American follows on 29 November.
Source: The Scotsman
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