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John Duigan
Of the 1970s and 1980s Australian New Wave filmmakers, no one comes as close to transcending the boundaries of that auspicious moniker, "Australian," as writer-director John Duigan. He is the one filmmaker who opted to stay home at the time and make movies in Australia while Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi and even Gillian Armstrong defected to the lure of the Hollywood golden dream. Duigan consistently stood his ground and viewed life through his unique perspective. Outside of Romero, which was shot in Mexico and Wide Sargasso Sea in Jamaica, Duigan prevailed at presenting the stranger in a strange land even on his own turf. Born in England and raised as an Air Force brat in Malaysia, Duigan settled in Melbourne where he became involved with the LaMaMa theatre troupe and began to make films. After a move to Sydney, which was instrumental in his creative growth, he moved back to England.On this early, rainy Seattle morning, one gets the sense that Duigan would rather be sleeping than talking. But his is a remarkably articulate and thoughtful interview, able to effortlessly put into decisive terms his thoughts and ideas.
He is here to discuss his first American venture, The Journey of August King, which stars Jason Patric and Duigan discovery Thandie Newton. They play two damaged souls who meet in the Carolinas when a slave (Newton) runs away from her sadistic master, seeking refuge -- and freedom -- with a guilt-bearing frontiersman (Patric) who cannot overcome the pain of his wife's death. With a resume that is overwhelming in its ability to define and create home wherever he might happen to be, Duigan can boast about such personal-vision films as Winter Of Our Dreams, which featured a then relatively unknown Judy Davis, as well as Far East, The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting, Sirens and Wide Sargasso Sea.
Duigan's most distinctive trademark is his ability to create a natural extension of the geography. His characters have a fragile place in the landscape; they seem to be passing briefly through enroute to a new plateau of self-enlightenment. Duigan told me that, "hopefully the films taken together articulate some kind of philosophical position on a range of areas, particularly ethical and moral. Certainly the identification to the land is very important to me. When they'd come around with the census in Australia and say name your religion, I'd say pantheism. But it's something that stems back to when I was young and I would be wandering around the countryside. I would feel certain things I never heard people talk about or describe. Later on in life, coming across some of the views by aboriginal or other indigenous people, that sense of wonder and of a tangible interaction with the brute reality of the land became a common human experience. It's just that our layers of civilization tend to divide us from it. I try in my films to evoke this, sometimes explicitly, sometimes organically within the piece. That certainly was an element of The Journey Of August King. Jason Patric's character actually talks of the mountains being alive; you cut them and blood flows out of them. That was part of its appeal as a project, although it's a substantially more internal journey of two vary damaged characters going through an evolution of trust. They will probably only understand it retrospectively."
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| Thandie Newton, Kym Wilson and Naomi Watts in Flirting. |
Duigan has been instrumental in his discovery of new faces -- Noah Taylor in The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting; Nicole Kidman in Flirting; Thandie Newton in Flirting and The Journey Of August King. I ask him what spark he sees in the casting process when he comes across an unknown talent. After pondering a moment he notes "it isn't something I analyze. I take the time to work with them and then they'll spring off the screen for me. You just know within yourself that these people have some element of life in them. Occasionally I come across people in life who I think would be fantastic as actors."
As for crew, Duigan likes to use the same one he used before, if possible. It ties into his eternal search for extended family and familiarity. He "took five or six key people over to Mexico for Romero and to Jamaica for Wide Sargasso Sea. On The Journey Of August King that wasn't feasible. They were completely new so it was slightly daunting not having anybody I'd worked with before. Apart from Thandie, actually. That was nice to have her there. It was a very hard shoot and we only had 40 days. It was a very complicated film, particularly from the location point of view. We had to use all our ingenuity to do it in seven weeks, particularly because it rained for 35 of the 40 days. But the crew had worked on independent films of all sorts, so their expectations were similar and it sort of gelled together very well."
Light, too, maintains a standing as a character in a Duigan movie. I tell him he seems to have a painter's temperament and sensibility. He laughs, noting he loves painting but is totally incompetent at it. "But I love going to galleries like the Tate in London. I evolve a look with the cinematographer from the start. We work together with the production designer and pick very specific key colors for each film. The production designer will make sure the costumes and sets stay in that key. I leave the lighting to the cinematographer and I only raise something if it seems we won't achieve a particular look in the scene. I can then concentrate on working with the actors on the actual shoot. The decisions made beforehand will enable them to prepare for each scene well in advance." I ask if he opts for a certain reference point in his films. Sirens, I mention, feels influ-enced by the Pre-Raphaelites. Duigan concedes that "he keeps a notebook for each film and puts notes or photographs or postcards into it. In Sirens, as it was about a painter, I took one or two compositions from his work and some compositions from the Pre-Raphaelites, you're quite right. Ophelia was one we deliberately were evoking, when she lies back and there are flowers in the water around her. It's my favorite scene."
When it's nearly time to end the discussion, I ask how autobiographical he wrote the character of Danny in The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting. He smiles and concludes enigmatically, "To some extent. I used that character to describe my evolving sensibilities on various things, but i'ts not strictly speaking autobiographical, except in the most rudimentary way. His background is completely different from mine. The boarding school experience is very similar. I tend to give the characters certain experiences I had but I give them a lot I didn't and a lot I would have liked to have had."
He laughs, noting, "Like meeting Thandie Newton
at the sister school. It's a liberating form of oblique autobiography
because you can do anything." MM
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by judy on 11/12/07 at 5:36 pm
Is John Duigan still living in London?
- Comment by DaTa LiFe AnImE on 5/01/11 at 12:44 am
thank you a lots
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