From Hollywood to jigalong

Nobody could really have expected Phillip Noyce – the Aussie emigré and director of such slick Hollywood thrillers as Patriot Games and The Bone Collector – to come up with one of the year’s most controversial films, but he’s only gone and done two of them. When we meet on his recent visit to Dublin, even he admits to being somewhat surprised.

“It’s strange alright, but I went to Hollywood because I’d been making films for 12 years, and because in Australia you had to go through the bureaucracy of government funding, it had taken me over a decade to get three films made. So I liked that Hollywood was a meritocracy, but after ten years of making movies there, I may not have been a frustrated filmmaker anymore, but I realised that I was only telling other people’s stories so Rabbit Proof Fence allowed me to go and explore Australia again.”

The director’s cinematic homecoming has prompted much reaction down under and while Rabbit Proof Fence has won many admirers, Noyce has also found himself shepherded into every screening in his native country while promoting the film.

In fact, he has come under heavy fire from those who maintain that the film, which deals with the government policy of removing half-caste children from their Aboriginal families, erroneously portrays Australia as racist. Unquestionably though, this practice (which continued into the 1970s) could hardly have been depicted in a positive light yet Noyce has become a popular hate figure among those affiliated with the Pauline Hanson, right-wing end of the Antipodean political spectrum. Still, the director doesn’t seem to mind their criticisms too much.

“It’s great,” he maintains. “I was really disappointed when the film came out first and we didn’t seem to have attracted that group of naysayers because I thought we could rely on them to whip up a bit of controversy to help the film. In no time though, they were all out with big articles, and big headlines and outrageous attacks – ‘Shame on you Phillip Noyce’ – the works. And we just demanded equal space and we got pages in newspapers through the debate that came about. In Tasmania, one politician used government funds to print leaflets that advised his constituents not to see the film. We thought this is fantastic! Free publicity!

When Miramax brought out the poster for the film, which read: ‘What would you do if the government kidnapped your child? It used to happen every week in Australia’ – we did, I must admit, send a copy to a few choice individuals. Sure enough, there’s one of them denouncing the film in parliament the following week. Great.”

However, the forthcoming storm surrounding the release of Noyce’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American promises to eclipse the furore over Rabbit by a considerable margin. This well-crafted and rather fine film provides a timely reminder of the devastating consequences caused by American interference in Vietnam during the 1950s. Unfortunately, Miramax (the company that produced the film) balked at the finished product, and were it not for the movie’s star Michael Caine threatening to refuse to do publicity chores for his next film (another Miramax production) The Actors, then The Quiet American might never have seen the light of day.

Caine’s attitude was understandable: the film sees the most compelling turn of his career as a world-weary foreign correspondent with old-fashioned, colonial libertine propensities. He finds an unlikely adversary in Brendan Fraser, playing a seemingly well-intentioned yet chilling American visitor to Vietnam. The two men then play out the passing of the colonial era and the dawning of the new imperial age, both in political and personal spheres, as they compete over Vietnamese beauty Phuong. Thankfully, this particular Caine mutiny has succeeded against the odds, as Noyce explained.

“We previewed the film in its first cut on September 10th, 2001 so talk about bad timing. We continued to preview the film while we put the final touches to it, and in New York response went from good to bad to worse to horrendous. The mood just totally changed. People felt violated and emotional. Looking back, screening in New York was a bit masochistic, especially for The Quiet American which contains images of a bomb aftermath. We are now getting a limited release before the Oscars and we’ll see what happens but I’m not sure where we’d be without Michael (Caine)’s intervention.”

These may be politically sensitive times, but Noyce is rightly and thoroughly unrepentant about the film’s depiction of the Brendan Frasier character in more sinister terms than the 1958 Joseph Mankiewicz version of The Quiet American.

“The Mankiewicz version just isn’t a version. I mean the only reason to make the film is for the portrait of the American, and what his actions mean to the wider world. In the 1958 version, everything gets blamed on the Communists. That’s not the book. People have gotten upset, including Sydney Pollock, who produced the film. They’ve pointed out that the American in the book is just naive, but I never read it that way, and when I did research that idea didn’t hold up. One of the CIA manuals from the early ‘60s was called The Big Con – it is basically a crooked and criminal version of How To Win Friends And Influence People. So is it the truth that a CIA operative in Vietnam would have been innocent, or would he have been pretending to be? I wanted to convey a bit of both.”