The Getting of Wisdom

The getting film of wisdom Bruce Beresford has learned to accept that lights and camera don’t always mean action, writes Sandra Hall s a Sydney University want to lie and say it’s a masterpiece. student, film director “It might be okay. You just sort of Bruce Beresford (BA’64) hope. You can’t tell, you know.” A had thick, curly dark hair He will allow that it’s a great story. and an intense look that could well What struck him, he says, is the have scored him an audition to play determination shown by Li Cunxin, Byron or Heathcliff. These days, the who realised early on at the Beijing hair has thinned and the intensity Dance Academy that he wasn’t has been moderated by a mingling as naturally gifted as some fellow of self-deprecation, frank practicality students. Yet he worked so hard that and wry amusement at the wonders of he became one of the best. the industry in which he’s worked for A similar tenacity has marked almost 50 years. Beresford’s long career. He’s We meet at a coffee shop in the weathered tough times. Even better, Queen Victoria Building concourse. he’s written about many of them in He hasn’t eaten this morning and one of the frankest and funniest film having already discovered that the memoirs to be published in recent breakfasts here are good value; he years. Josh Hartnett Really Wants To Do orders a hearty bacon and eggs. This recounts his experiences during Newgate Prison on trial for her life. He’s taking time off from editing a peripatetic 18 months from October Starring Leo McKern as Boswell, his new film, Mao’s Last Dancer, 2003 to July 2005 when nothing went the play was a hit in the West End an adaptation of the best-selling right. As he flew between the US, but the hard heads that prevail in biography of Li Cunxin, the Chinese Australia and various parts of Europe commercial movie making were ballet dancer who defected to the and the UK in search of that elusive harder to win over. After signing on US, danced with some of the world’s commodity, the done deal, projects to direct against the judgment of his great companies and married an kept crashing around him. Promises Hollywood agent, Beresford decided Australian ballerina before retiring evaporated, money dried up, yet he he wanted Richard Dreyfuss to play from dance and finding a new career persevered, sustained, it seems, only Boswell. When his backers vetoed as a stockbroker in Melbourne. by his sense of humour. that, Michael Caine was cast instead, As to how the film is going, To his chagrin, the book didn’t sell along with Samantha Morton as Mary Beresford (whose credits include The well – possibly because few readers Bryant and Michael Gambon as the Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Don’s over the age of 20 have heard of the Lord Chancellor. Party, The Getting of Wisdom, Breaker young American star, Josh Hartnett, All up, Beresford spent 14 months Morant, Puberty Blues, Tender Mercies, but it did generate some very positive on pre-production. The Australian the Club, Crimes of the Heart, Driving responses from his peers, several cinematographer Peter James, a Miss Daisy and Black Robe) says he of whom registered a sharp shock frequent collaborator, went to London hopes it will be all right. His tone of recognition. “So many directors and the designers began building a set doesn’t exactly invoke confidence contacted me,” he says, “to say, ‘I for the prison at Shepperton Studios. but there’s nothing new about that. I thought it just happened to me’.” They also got as far as making 40 once heard him introduce a screening Of all the projects that got away, sedan chairs. Then a little more than a of Paradise Road – his gripping one that he particularly mourns is week before shooting was due to start, film about a group of women held an adaptation of the play Boswell Beresford got a call from the film’s in a Japanese POW camp during For The Defence by Melbourne writer English producer. World War II – with a speech that so Patrick Edgeworth. The story He tells the story with his now thoroughly undersold the picture you centres on the latter years of Samuel standard air of bemused resignation: could have excused the audience for Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, “I was in the car when Nik Powell, rising en masse and racing for the exit. struggling to maintain his law practice cheerful as ever, rang me and said, When I mention this, he’s mildly in London, when he’s engaged to ‘the film’s off’. I couldn’t get back to surprised that he could have done defend Mary Bryant, the convict him. The phone had been cut off and Bruce Beresford at home in Sydney. such a thing then returns to Mao, woman whose remarkable escape when I got back to London, the office Photo by Ted Sealey cheerfully adding that he wouldn’t from the Sydney colony landed her in had gone.” 18 SAM Autumn 09 Beresford has That night, they had a morose wrap pursuing the next one, Beresford is eventually scored a late-night slot on party for what Beresford has since directing opera. He fell in love with television. There was, too, It Droppeth pursued a dubbed The Best Film I Never Made. music as a small boy listening to ABC As The Gentle Rain, a dramatisation career of such Another ambition, which he’s been radio at home in the western Sydney of a piece by the surrealist poet and pursuing for years, is to film Women In suburb of Toongabbie. He was not screenwriter, Jacques Prevert. Made diversity it’s Black, a beguiling novel by Madeleine much older when he bought his first with fellow director Alby Thoms, hard to pin St John, a contemporary of Beresford’s movie camera. Ever resourceful, he this five-minute offering managed to him down at the University. Set in Sydney in made tasselled holders for golf tees, offend NSW’s censorship laws with a the 1950s, it’s about Lesley, a girl who peddling them on golf courses and scene that has God signalling the end gets a holiday job in a department putting the proceeds towards an of the world by defecating on a room store modelled on David Jones. 8-millimetre camera. “In those days,” full of partying socialites. There she makes friends with Magda, he says, “I was interested in making Since then, Beresford has pursued an older, sophisticated saleswoman. films for the sake of making films. I a career of such diversity that it’s Mixing with Magda’s émigré friends, later got interested in having things to hard to pin him down. As his book Lesley receives a rapid education in make films about.” demonstrates, luck and expediency fashion, food and European culture. He was a teenage film buff, have had such large roles to play Beresford has been working on the travelling all over Sydney to hunt that it’s difficult to see where their project with producer Sue Milliken down art house classics – which influences end and his own style and he thought they had a chance throws us into a mutual bout of and tastes kick in. I suggest that he’s of making it happen after Isabella nostalgia as we reminisce about naturally attracted to stories about Rossellini said she’d be interested in long-gone Sydney cinemas. He social interplay and he agrees. the role of Magda. Potential backers, fondly recalls the mid-city Savoy, Then there’s his tenacity. He’s however, thought otherwise. Not which served coffee in the foyer and still sad that he didn’t succeed in box-office was their verdict. And their featured curtains decorated with getting Women In Black onto the picks? The much younger Monica an Eiffel Tower motif. But it was at screen while close friend Madeleine Bellucci or Salma Hayek. Sydney University that his early film St John was alive. (She died in London of emphysema three years As things now stand, his next career began to flourish. His was the ago.) Beresford is her literary executor film looks like being an adaptation era that produced Clive James, Robert and somehow, sometime, I think of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman Of No Hughes, Germaine Greer, Mungo he’ll definitely get this one up and Importance starring Annette Bening McCallum and John Bell. It was Bell running. SAM and Sean Bean. This one, too, has who starred in Beresford’s first real been in the works for a while. fiction film, a 36-minute melodrama Sandra Hall is a biographer, novelist and When he’s not making films or called The Devil To Pay, which film critic for the Sydney Morning Herald SAM Autumn 09 19.

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