Interview with John Maynard
“I made inquiries about the rights the following day,” he says. “It appealed to me on a gut level”. Yet the journey from book to film took more than eight years, much of it dealing with the hesitancy of the author, Raimond Gaita, and the thorny problem of representing the truth on screen. After all, Gaita is a Professor of Moral Philosophy, one of the major concerns of which is responsibility for truthfulness. To make matters more complex, the truth at stake in both the book and the film is Gaita’s own childhood, marked with the tragedy of a mother’s death and a father’s madness. It was hardly surprising that Gaita’s agent told Roxburgh to forget the whole idea.
Gaita had been approached by many filmmakers before Roxburgh, but had always been reluctant to give the film rights away because he saw the book as something other than literature. “I wanted to bear witness to, rather than merely record, or even celebrate, the values that defined my father’s moral identity,” writes Gaita in his preface to the published screenplay. “The integrity of witness seldom, if ever, survives invention, however honourable the motive for it might be.” For Gaita, the idea of ‘bearing witness’ meant that the book’s primary purpose was to confirm, through his own eyes, the essential nature of his father’s character. He could not see how this could be translated onto the screen.
Roxburgh worked slowly and carefully, building a team of people who would understand Gaita’s concerns and put his fears at rest with a highly empathetic treatment of this story of father and son. The first step was securing a writer to develop the screenplay. Roxburgh, together with producers Rob Connelly and John Maynard, believed that an understanding of the European origins of Raimond and his parents was critical. Romulus Gaita was Yugoslavian, and his wife Christine - Raimond’s mother - was German. They came to Australia in the 1950’s with four-year-old Raimond. “We had an exhaustive hunt for the right person to adapt the story, and finally settled on an English poet of Czech parentage,” says Roxburgh. The writer was London-based Nick Drake, who spent more than a year working in consultation with Raimond Gaita to produce a dialogue sparse and profoundly touching account of the young Raimond Gaita’s ‘bearing witness’ of his father’s compassionate fatalism.
Through the process of making the film, Gaita realised that the screen could never really replace the truth. “From the start, Nick and Richard warned me, gently, that the film would involve many departures from the book, that things would have to be invented.” Slowly Gaita came to trust the filmmaking team, and most importantly Kodi Smit-McPhee, the young actor who would be playing the part of Raimond. “His performance is one to marvel at,” says Gaita. “He is a miracle.” Director Roxburgh was also amazed at Smit-McPhee, who is only nine years old and in his debut feature. “He’s got phenomenal focus and empathy. He understood that Rai Gaita, the person he was playing, actually went through this stuff, and he could feel what that must have felt like.”
Roxburgh also sent the script to Eric Bana, in the hope that he’d play the part of Romulus. He had an immediate response and it seemed like perfect casting. “Not only did he love the script and the book, but Eric is the son of a Croatian immigrant and a German mother, a motorcycle enthusiast and a very devoted father,” says Roxburgh. Other leading cast members have similar backgrounds: Rai’s mother is played by German actress Franka Potente, best known for her mesmerising role in Run, Lola Run. Australian Russell Dykstra, who comes from Dutch parentage, plays Mitru, a close friend of Romulus and Christine. Dykstra talked about the pressure of being truthful to his deeply complex character. “It really hit me when I visited the graveyard where Mitru was buried, and I saw his gravestone,” said Dykstra. “You suddenly realise that you have a huge responsibility to the real person.”
Roxburgh and the team had another responsibility that to deal with: keeping the focus of the film on the themes of moral integrity that lay within the narrative. Producer John Maynard says that vision was always clear: “It’s not a migrant story. We stayed clear from that, as it certainly wasn’t what Raimond was writing about.” Roxburgh agrees that the focus was elsewhere: “The singular thing about this story, given its tragic dimension, its almost biblical reach, is how strangely uplifting it is. Somehow through the pain, there is not only a sense of possibility, but of promise, held in the relationship of that father and son.”
When Gaita finally saw the finished film in Melbourne recently, he described it as a harrowing experience. Yet he has nothing but praise for the team of people who brought his very personal prize-winning book to life on the screen. He acknowledges that there are scenes and details that never existed in real life, that there are important moments that had to be cut. But he also makes it clear that the film is true to the spirit of the book and to the special view of humanity that was somehow passed from father to son. “I find it hard to imagine it being other than it is”, he says. “That, I suppose, is the highest praise I can give it.”
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