ScreenWize

It seems highly appropriate that Australian film director Geoffrey Wright is seated in the middle of a bright red sofa. Let’s face it, he likes blood. In Wright’s first feature film Romper Stomper, Russell Crowe spills plenty of it before losing his own. At the end of Cherry Falls, Wright’s last film, a waterfall turns symbolically red with the blood of the town’s many victims. It may come as no surprise then, to find that Wright has just completed a film version of Shakespeare’s blood-fest Macbeth, which is set in the Melbourne crime world. But for Wright, the flowing of blood is not just a gratuitous screen moment. It is the inevitable consequence of putting the kind of characters that he is drawn to, in the kind of situations he finds most intriguing.

Those characters - whether a Melbourne skinhead resisting cultural change, a disturbed serial killer seeking revenge, or the Thane of Cawdor securing his foreseen ambition – are “highly motivated” as Wright puts it. He smiles fondly as he speaks, his eyes giving away a remembrance of the visual power of these three men in full flight. “I like characters who approach life like a head-on collision.”

Wright grew up in Melbourne’s lower middle class city suburbs, and as a teenager was aware of both the aggression and the beauty of the place. Not sharing the town’s passion for sport, Wright found himself “a slight outsider who starts to live in his own head, who starts telling stories about the place.” He moves forward to the edge of his seat and continues his recollection with urgency. Melbourne is the city that has been the backdrop for all his Australian films. “It’s a river town, and very flat. When I was a teenager I used to explore it with a camera and was amazed by the angles in the Victorian architecture and the streets. It often seemed deserted and eerie. I remember a lot of boredom, a lot of aggression and this perverse visual interest.” He explains that it was this combination of stagnant aggression and strange urban imagery that prompted a creative response. “For visual story-telling, Melbourne was fantastic. It demanded a reaction.”

After three years at Swinburne’s Film & Television School, Wright’s first reaction was a short feature called Lover Boy, starring a young Noah Taylor. Wright’s reoccurring narrative interests and film style are already strongly evident in this early work. The story is one of angry young men, love, cars, but above all else, sex and death, and why one might urge on the other. Primary colours find their way into the frame: yellow bins, blue walls, red shirts. And all this in a cleverly isolated space that might be Melbourne, but which is actually Wright’s “slightly outsider” world where colour and action makes things happen and causes blood to flow – in this case, that of Noah Taylor’s young lover boy.

Then it was on to Romper Stomper, a film that pushed both Wright, and his leading man Russell Crowe, into the international spotlight. It’s both a violent and strangely tender film, focusing on a love triangle in a Melbourne skinhead gang. The skinheads, led by Crowe’s menacing fascist Hando, are unable to just sit and watch as Vietnamese migrants move into their small ugly patch of the city. They are, as you would expect from a script by Wright, highly motivated. They act. And with an irrational intensity that fractures not just skulls and homes, but the vague ideals around which the gang itself is bound. Wright steers his camera documentary style at the narrative explosion that results, following the remains of the gang as they self-destruct. At the end of the film there is only the love triangle left. They have driven a stolen yellow car to a deserted beach, where the last madness is played out, where the last of the blood to be let will dribble out, red on the yellow sand, and from there be washed into the blue sea. It’s very Geoffrey Wright.

Back on the red sofa we are talking about films of the sixties and seventies, the ones we grew up on, and getting nostalgic about the old days when endings were ambiguous and producers could afford more than one star. Wright admits he always loved films as a child. “Especially the intense and highly visual movies, which had contradictions. I didn’t like simple films, but ones where people paid a price for things.”

Wright nearly paid a price himself. Shortly after the success of Romper Stomper, he had a head-on collision of his own in the middle of a busy Melbourne intersection. Pinned inside his car with the stench of petrol all around him, he waited to be cut out by emergency crews and taken to hospital, reflecting on death. “It’s just there, around the corner”, he says, but you cant help but feel that this accident didn’t dent his ambition and energy, that it was taken in stride and put to good use.

It certainly got him thinking about cars more closely, and his second feature Metal Skin focused on the speed at which isolated people burn up when forced from their emotional hideouts. The film wasn’t well received in Australia, perhaps because of its complex and often esoteric narrative, complete with black magic, madness and paranoia to complement the love, blood, sex and death. Yet Wright’s work directing the technically difficult car chase scenes in the film brought him to the attention of Hollywood. He was tapped on the shoulder by Warner Brothers, and decided to go for a “trip.”

Five years later Wright returned. Although he only directed one film in that time – and not one he would have made by choice – he is highly pragmatic about the experience. “You can learn a lot from the Americans. They have a great professionalism and confidence. The experience was great and it was horrible.” Wright initially worked in project development, helping to select and write new film ideas, pushing them to greenlight status. He was three days away from the commencement of shooting a science fiction film called Supernova as director, when he fell out with the President of the studio and was sacked. There’s no trace of bitterness as he tells the story. It’s life, you keep moving. You keep motivated.

Shortly after this, another film company approached him to direct a teen-horror flick. Wright’s first instinct was to turn it down. “They told me they didn’t want it too dark, and I said to them ‘Me. Geoffrey Wright. And you don’t want it dark!’ In the end, they talked me into it, and I did it for the experience.” Despite the horror-lite category of Cherry Falls, and the fact that it isn’t Wright’s script, you can see still his hand in the film. The primary colours are still there, creeping into frame. The cars are there, now small spaces for lovers to be murdered in. And of course there is the sex and the death. And the blood.

Which brings us finally to Macbeth. Wright says there were two compelling reasons to make a film version of this Shakespearean tragedy in Melbourne. “On a personal emotional level, I have this fascination with characters that persist with their struggle after it is obvious that they are doomed” says Wright, thinking of Macbeth, whose ambition overtakes first his ability and then his sanity. “There’s something totally absorbing about the poetry of the gesture, about a person who’s being driven on only by the sheer force of their personality.”

The second reason for Wright’s interest in Macbeth perhaps says something about his own personality: “It’s the last thing you would expect an Australian filmmaker to do, and I wanted to do it because of that sheer oddness, to get me away from the naturalism of my other work, to stretch some new muscles.”

Wright has cast Sam Worthington in the role of Macbeth, a young Australian actor in much the same stage of his career as Russell Crowe was in Romper Stomper. Wright thinks that Worthington has a very different style of talent, but one that has the potential to go as far. “He has a quiet, moody screen presence. I see him as the outlaw who wont say much and then who will burst with explosive action.” When Wright and Worthington discussed the character of Macbeth – now reborn as a contemporary Melbourne gangster - they watched Roman Polanski’s famous film version of the play, and Jon Finch’s interpretation of the man who will be King. “Sam wanted to play it very differently. He wanted him to be angry – very angry, and so that’s how we did it.” Wright likes his actors to interpret the characters their way, and was very happy with the result. “Macbeth is a difficult character because he has to change from a hen-pecked husband to a tyrant. He has to develop a sense of confidence that enables him to go so far with the killing.”

The choice of gangsters as a context for the film was an obvious one for Wright, the well publicised gangland killings of recent years a reflection of Shakespeare’s theme. “It’s about what happens when you take on too much death, what happens to your soul. The Melbourne gangsters were caught up in a machinery that they couldn’t stop, that was clearly out of control. The result was thirty-four unsolved murders.”

So it seems as if once again Wright has made a film about Melbourne, and angry young men, and sex (the three witches are now young seductresses) and death. “These two are the big issues “ he explains, “and they like the camera very much”. The colours of the film are much richer though, the primaries merging to make a more complex palette. Well, except for red. There’s plenty of that still there in Wright’s Macbeth. It comes with the blood. It comes with the director.

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon