Turner Prized

Michael Hutak profiles Australian critic and curator Jonathan Turner.

While the international success of Australian artists has become commonplace, it's much rarer to encounter a writer/curator making their mark in the rarefied circles of the international contemporary art scene. Which is what makes Sydney-born's Jonathan Turner Continental presence so noteworthy. Turner, working out of Rome and Amsterdam, has since the early 1980s curated more than 100 solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the U.S., Thailand, Macau, Australia, New Zealand. He recently won the prestigious Premio A.B.O., awarded annually to the most influential critic/curator in Italian contemporary art and beyond. Previous recipients have included Rome's current Mayor Walter Veltroni, artists Joseph Kosuth and Enzo Cucchi, English collector Alex Sainsbury, and Danilo Eccher, director of Rome's Museum of Contemporary Art.

Mona Hatoum: Exile from main street

Endoscopy, electricity and estrangement drive the thought-provoking art of Mona Hatoum.

"I don't know where this is going," interjects Mona Hatoum during an exclusive interview with The Bulletin last month. "Is this about me or is it about the work?" Well, when you're one of the most lionised figures in contemporary art, about to mount your first Australian show, and it's called Over My Dead Body, then it's got to be about both.

A survey of Hatoum's sculpture, performance and installation since 1992, the show was nabbed for Sydney by Museum of Contemporary Art director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, when she saw it at Berlin's prestigious Hamburger Kunsthalle lastyear. Hatoum will be in Sydney to oversee the show's installation and participate in public Q&A sessions.

"Much of my work gives a sense of uneasiness with the world," says the Beirut-born Palestinian, who has lived in Britain since 1975 when civil war broke out in Lebanon.

Deal Me In: Stuart Purves

Australian Art Collector caught up with Australian Galleries' Stuart Purves in Rome, where the dealer was passing through en route to Tuscany where he planned to take possession of the latest raft of works from his octogenarian stable star, Jeffrey Smart.

STUART PURVES: I’ve come to Italy to honour Jeffrey [Smart], who’s in his early eighties now, and why not, we’ve been dealing with eachother for over a quarter of a century. I am a second generation dealer and I had two parents [Anne and Tam Purves] who were full-time art dealers. Believe it or not I’m the oldest continuing art dealer in the business. I can’t believe it coz I’m still young and that shows you how young the art world is in this country. But what it all comes down to that it is art before money. It really isn’t a business, instead you’re more like a leaf floating down the river, steering a course. There’s no real competition in the art world because everybody is in a sense heading in the same direction - to find that kernel of proper and inspiring art. There’s too much chasing of the money in it today. The money’s there, it’s always been there for good things–

History Never Repeats: ADS Donaldson

Australian Art Collector, Issue 24, Autumn 2003

Kelly's first stand

Heard the one about the expat Kiwi running a British film company using American money to make a film about an Irish revolutionary in Australia? Michael Hutak plunges into Kelly country. 

"Are you gonna whack Heath on the cover?" asks Tim Bevan, founder of Working Title Films and arguably the world's most successful independent movie producer. On the line from his London office, there is much more than just his new flick, Ned Kelly, to promote today.

But let's start with the movie. Starring Heath Ledger as the defiant one, Geoffrey Rush as his Victorian police nemesis and Naomi Watts as his lady love, Ned Kelly reunites the producer-director team of Tim White and Gregor Jordan that crafted Ledger's 1999 breakthrough hit, Two Hands.

Global warning

An eminent American academic came to Sydney last week to alert us to an ongoing war, one in which nothing less than our entire way of life is at stake, writes Michael Hutak.

Dr Stephen Schneider - adviser to every US president from Nixon to Clinton - arrived to spread the news not about global terror, but global warming.
With the issue of climate change hotting up, concerned citizens collected at the University of NSW in Sydney last Thursday to hear the accomplished "greenhouse guru" spell out the planetary consequences of the industrialised world's love affair with coal-fired production.
However, as one of the lead authors of the documents that formed the scientific basis for the Kyoto Protocol, Schneider is the first to admit that predictions of what will happen are not cut and dried.
"There's no statistical way to figure out what 2100 will look like," he told the audience. "The weather is a chaotic, dynamic system that cannot be predicted beyond two weeks. Instead what we have is climate models, which are inherently uncertain.
"Add to this the uncertainty of human behavioural activity and global warming by the year 2100 will range from anywhere from 1(degrees) or so to up to 6(degrees) -- from the relatively mild to the catastrophic."

Matthew Collings: Strictly modern

Intriguing connections surround the recent Australian visit of British art critic and author Matthew Collings, best known here for his British Academy Award-winning television series, This is Modern Art.

Collings, who has charted the rise of the so-called Young British Artists movement of the mid-1990s, wound up a sell-out speaking tour last week with a talk at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, where his subject was "The Solemn and the Trivial versus the Serious and the Playful". Collings' witty, plain-speaking accounts of the works of YBA stars such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst have done much to demystify art for the general public.

But now he believes that, while the popularity of modern art is on the rise (in Britain, at least), artists should have no obligation to be popular. Indeed, art is "neither democratic nor a form of entertainment but is a specialised endeavour for those willing to make the serious effort to engage with it".

Ken Burns: oxymoronic hybrid

Dubbed the world's most influential documentary film-maker, Ken Burns has made his name and fortune bringing the past to life. "I've become so influential," Burns told The Bulletin, "that one of our most respected historians said recently that more Americans get their history from me than from anywhere else, to paraphrase the [American] ABC news slogan."
Burns delivered the keynote address at the 2002 NSW Premier's History Awards last Friday. Premier Bob Carr had been trying to get Burns to Australia since he instituted the awards in 1997. He was booked to come last year but September 11 intervened. Yet the director of the most watched documentary in television history, the epic nine-part The Civil War, admits he is "completely untrained in American history".

Gillian Armstrong: Shades of Gray

Gillian Armstong hopes by the time you read this, there will be no need to introduce CHARLOTTE GRAY, the acclaimed Australian director’s latest film and her first in four years. If life has followed the script, word of mouth (not to mention a healthy dose of good ol’ fashioned movie marketing) following the Christmas US release of the $US25 million World War II drama should have thrust Armstrong‘s film into Acadamy Awards contention, and her star Cate Blanchette into the running for another Best Actress nomination.

"I'd be hopeful for Cate,” the 51 year old director of 14 feature films told Australian Style in December last year. Our audience with Armstrong takes place at a Bondi hotel, a week after locking off the final print and two days before flying out to LA to begin the US publicity tour, a task the director faced alone, with Blanchette due to give birth to her first baby.

"The poster has just gone up on every bus stop in LA,” said Armstrong. “We open in America on December 28 in a select group of cinemas and then we go wide in January, which means we become eligible for the Oscars. That's why we've been working day and night to finish the film, but we literally only finished the mix three weeks ago. I mean, we had to screen a workprint with a ‘temp’ mix for all the long-lead magazines in America, and we’ve only locked off the final print ourselves a week ago.”

Easel Angles: Julian Schnabel on Before Night Falls

Julian Schnabel knows a lot about the collision of art and personality. He tells Michael Hutak why he put down his brushes to make a movie of a doomed Cuban writer. 

"I don't think this film will ever be gone from me," says Julian Schnabel, artist, film-maker and renaissance man, of his latest epic motion picture, Before Night Falls.

Splitting his time these days between his huge New York City loft/studio and the ritzy Spanish seaside resort of San Sebastian, Schnabel spoke to The Bulletin from his summer retreat in Montauk, Long Island. Premiered at last year's Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize, Before Night Falls won praise at the recent Sydney Film Festival and is due for Australian release. Schnabel financed, co-wrote, produced, cast, directed, edited and is now promoting this film himself.

"It was like a year ago," he says, "we were at Venice and while I can't believe I've been talking about the film for that long, it will never leave me, it was such a magical experience to be able to give this guy a voice."

Interview: Ben Mendelsohn

For a professional actor on a mid-career surge, Ben Mendelsohn is uncharacteristically modest... “I’ve been doing this (acting) since pretty much the beginning of my teenage years, and I’ve been financially independent since I was fifteen but it’s not really a career, is it? It’s a series of jobs, is what it is! I mean, you will never get to be ‘Head of South East Asian acting’. You might have a great life but it’s not a career.”

It’s mid-morning and we’re talking in a café overlooking Bondi Beach. “Bondi’s got a bit hectic – I’m shifting basically. I remember seeing this great TV special when I was 12, it was about Penthouse Pets and one of ‘em lived in Bondi – and I remember all these shots on the beach and I thought what a promised land – Bondi! I love living here but it’s getting very hectic.”

Cunnamulla: Australia all over?

[Feature interview, The Bulletin, 16/01/2001]

Documentary filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke's talks about his controversial new film.

"CUNNAMULLA - it's a c**t of a place!" scream the provocative street posters for Dennis O'Rourke's new film. And on the basis of his intimate portraits of several inhabitants of that remote outback Queensland town, it's hard to argue with him. In O'Rourke's Cunnamulla, social and cultural disintegration spans the racial divide, cut through poverty, brutality, incarceration and ignorance.

"Grog, drugs, fighting, lookin' for women, breakin' n'enterin' - that's about all y'can do in Cunnamulla," says Paul, a young Aborigine facing 6 months jail on assault charges.

"There's no work," says Herb, the local scrap metal dealer. "We're all livin' on the blackfellas money on pension day." Then there's 13 year old Cara and 15 year old Kellie-Anne, who tell in uncomfortable detail of their promiscuous lives: "The boys here don't like usin' protection but I tell 'em any boy that makes me pregnant, I'll dump the kid on 'em." Neredah, the local taxi driver's wife, advocates public floggings as a deterrent for teenage pregnancy, or any other misdemeanor, for that matter. "And if they do it again flog 'em harder!"  And you can't tell her husband, Arthur, "that they're not in-breeding in a town like this."

O'Rourke clearly courts controversy, and with Cunnamulla, you know he's going to get it. "We all have a dark side," he tells the Bulletin on the eve of the film's Sydney release. "I actively look for it, I want to go there, to reveal all those contradictions and hidden paradoxes which are all the things that make for great stories."

Contradictions like Jack: an Aborigine who openly refers to "those black c**ts", a pensioner who relies on sickness benefits yet denounces government for doling out handouts to those who "won't work". The very epitome of One Nation, Jack reckons "those c**ts John Howard and Peter Beattie should both be put up against a wall and shot." Ruminating on such matters, sitting topless in his kitchen in front of the electric fan, Jack cuts a compelling figure, warts and all.

It's unsettling, and that's just how O'Rourke wants it. "I think this film is really deeply disturbing to us and it says something about us in total," he says. "I'm looking for real people, that's where I'm trying to go. For everything you want to say you don't have to go looking for the big glossy subject. You can find life and truth and revelation and ultimately make political statements in the most unprepossessing or banal situations.

"If this film resonates then it's because you say 'yes, that's it!' that's life, it's the struggle, it's the tragedy of it all."

None of these "characters", as O'Rourke calls them, are easily pigeonholed. That's because, working completely alone, O'Rourke spent the better part of a year living with them, befriending them, winning their trust in order to capture the complexity of their lives on film. "Not only did I get to know them very well, they got to know me very well."

By becoming so involved with his subjects O'Rourke hopes to break down the so-called "critical distance" between the observer and the observed. He wants to debunk the conventional notion of the documentary filmmaker as the dispassionate, impartial observer of an uncomplicated reality.

"I get involved and place myself in relationship to my subject, and the audience has to see it through me. And by making myself vulnerable, or even deficient, or even of questionable character, I place the audience there as well."

It's a strategy that doesn't always work, like the last time he made himself "vulnerable", in his 1991 film The Good Woman Of Bangkok, in which he "cast" himself as a sex tourist who falls in love with a Bangkok prostitute after purchasing her services in order to make the film we see about her life. In fact he worked for three months with local NGOs to find the right subject for the "lead role". So while the details were almost fictional - he did "fall in love" with the good woman - the portrait of Bangkok's pernicious sex trade and its effect on the sex workers was not. But in blurring the line between documentary and fiction O'Rourke ran headlong into a torrent of moral outrage, as the normally righteously open-minded audience of Sydney Film Festival doubted and openly denounced his motives.

Ten years on, what he doesn't want with Cunnamulla is "what happened with The Good Woman, and that is to be hijacked by people who are in a terrible rush to avoid confronting a much more messier truth and reality than they want to know about."

But O'Rourke himself avoids some realities in favour of others. Cunnamulla's local Aboriginal activists are cut from the film simply because their "level of performance wasn't good enough… I started to film them but we're doing cinema here and it just didn't work."

He takes up the point, stridently: "There's several other films in there including the one that many people said I should have made which shows the so-called 'other' side of Cunnamulla. Well, what you see here is MY vision of the world, and it's not a simple one. It's my job to reveal the truth as I see it. No matter how uncomfortable. To those who say, 'oh, you shouldn't do that' - they're the frightened ones. They don't want to know.

"That's the responsibility of the artist  - to say things that may be troubling. I'm not in the public relations game."

What does he say to critics like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz on the SBS Movie Show, who dismiss the film as nothing but a freak show? "I'd say to them 'get f**ked!' - David and his bloody pontificating! I love Godard's quote about critics: 'They are like soldiers that fire on their own men'. I love that."

Yet he does want the film "to resonate, provoke, and disturb - if it doesn't I'll feel I haven't done my job. We who are not making fiction films have an obligation not to pander, not to preach to the converted, not to just give the simplistic messages that people want.

"I can't put my finger on it, but I know this film speaks deeply about what it means to be Australian at the end of the twentieth century."

He's right: you can't put your finger on it. In Cunnamulla, the ultimate message – whether complex or simple - remains unclear. Whether you're a rampaging redneck, bleeding heart liberal, or PC social engineer, Cunnamulla will both confirm and deny in the same instant every prejudice or stereotype you might hold about Australia's Deep North and the plight of outback Aboriginal people. Certainly the viewer IS free draw her own conclusions but by closing credits we can conclude little more than that Cunnamulla is indeed a c**t of a place.

At the end of the film O'Rourke allows Herb, the scrap metal dealer, to poke fun at the filmmaker's own ultimate distance from his subjects: "You've got a soft bloody life - standing there with a half smirk on your face. Free hotels, free travel, flash bloody machinery. So what's next?"

O'Rourke pauses and replies "I might just settle down in Cunnamulla." But Herb, O'Rourke himself and the audience all know he's just been passing through.

CUNNAMULLA opens nationally in January.

- MICHAEL HUTAK

Interview: Ken Done

Soon to open an exhibition in a upmarket shop, artist Ken Done remains an enigma, writes Michael Hutak.

THIS month one of Australia's best-known artists will open an exhibition of his work and launch a book to celebrate 20 years at the easel.
Perhaps unusually, it will not take place in some trendy gallery or cloistered museum.
It will be held on September 22 at the Elizabeth Street store of David Jones. Impresario Ric Birch will be master of ceremonies.
But then, the subject of this gathering is no ordinary artist. It is Ken Done . . . and already the art world is sharpening its knives.
Loved by the masses and loathed by elites, Done is the riddle of Australian art. In the 80s they said he'd never make it. And as far as they are concerned, although just about every Japanese visitor goes home with a piece of his work, he is still an outsider.
He is represented by no commercial gallery, doesn't figure in any major Australian corporate collections, has no works in any major state or national gallery and is virtually absent from fine art auctions.
His relentlessly sunny, day-glo approach to art has seen him almost universally dismissed as merely decorative and profoundly lightweight.
Every article about Done's art is duty bound to recycle the late Brett Whiteley's ultimate put-down: "I'd rather have methadone than Ken Done." It is his crown of thorns and crystalises how Done's work is held by the art establishment.

"I am the least commercial artist in Australia," Done lamented from Perth, on his way to Paris, where he will unveil a seven-metre square artwork that will hang outside the Australian Embassy until the end of the Olympics next year.
"I spend no time courting or trying to influence people in the art world, no matter if it's Sherman Galleries or Billy Bloggs. I just like to make pictures, I like being a painter. I'm 59 now and I've been painting pretty much solidly for 50 years and I only feel like I'm just getting started."
Certainly the most commercially and internationally successful designer this country has produced, when it comes to his art Done is the vanishing point where art meets commerce.
The more the world perceives him as successful, the less currency his "serious" art has in the established art world.
But it's precisely this recognition that money can't buy that Done clearly craves.
"Everybody wants people to understand what they do.
"If you're an Australian painter, it's only natural that you should desire that you're work is good enough to be hung in the National Gallery of Australia. It's what I am striving for and I don't shun that sort of recognition at all."
But what he has shunned is the traditional stepladder to acceptance in the art world. His profile has been due to self-promotion. Since his first public exhibition in 1980, Done has applied a business strategy of "vertically integrated marketing" to promote his artwork - he is the creator, producer, distributor and retailer of his own art. Since that first exhibition, he has run a gallery which sells only his work.
"I've never had a government grant and I've never wanted to be part of somebody else's stable," he said. "Opening my own gallery is no different from a chef opening up a restaurant. What I am doing is managing an artist-run gallery."
To art world outsiders - ie, the public - ignorant of this strategy, it might appear that Done already has all the success and acceptance he might desire. For instance, next week his long-time friend Ric Birch will launch a book, Ken Done, Sydney, celebrating 20 years of Done's visual love letters to the harbour he adores. The book will coincide with a major retrospective of his paintings.

SERIOUS art investors look upon a retrospective as a signal to start buying.
Done's retrospective is different. It's being held at David Jones's Elizabeth Street store and has been mounted by Done in conjunction with the retailer and greeting card company The Ink Group, which has published the book, again in conjunction with Done.
His daughter, Camilla, designed the book.
A David Jones representative told The Sun-Herald: "Exhibitions like this are only mounted when they are product related."
Thus a plethora of Done Design products will be on sale. But this strategy is nothing new for Done.
"I'm not going to die to prove the point, but the Art Gallery of NSW is quite happy to put Matisse and Picasso on T-shirts and coffee cups and then point to how it's helped their bottom line on the balance sheet," said Done "I'm just trying to do the same thing while I'm alive."
Done has at least one champion in the form of Powerhouse Museum director Terence Measham. Measham has written extensively on Done and in 1995 mounted the only significant exhibition of Done's design work in Australia.
"I feel very strongly that he should be included in State collections," said Measham. "I can't understand why you wouldn't want to. The onus should be on these directors to say why they don't collect him. Certainly there are many artists in State collections who are no better than him."
The only works by Done in the National Gallery of Australia are some textile designs done for Sheridan, which the manchester manufacturer donated.
In the National Gallery of Victoria it's the same story.
"We have no works by Ken Done," said contemporary art curator Jason Smith. "Nor are they a priority for the collection."
Art Gallery of NSW contemporary art curator Victoria Lynne concedes that Done "is a significant and very successful Australian designer with a very popular aesthetic.
"But I wouldn't say he has made a significant contribution to contemporary Australian art practice. His work is too much on the decorative side to be included in our contemporary collection."
In the early 60s Done went to Japan for the first time and has been returning since. It is in Japan that his art is most seriously regarded. His works sell for up to $50,000.
In 1965 he went to Mexico and New York before settling in London, where he would spend the next five years as creative director of advertising agency J Walter Thompson.

RETURNING to Sydney in 1970, he continued in advertising, but "somewhere around my mid-30s I realised there was no short cut to painting.
"So I gave up advertising totally and had my first show in June 1980 and I've been painting three to five days a week ever since."
While Done has devoted himself to coming up with the designs and images, it his wife, Judy, and two adult children - Camilla, 28, and Oscar, 23 - who run the Done merchandising and marketing empire with an estimated annual worldwide turnover of $50 million.
"Me?" he asks. "Ninety per cent of what I do today is simply studio-based painting."
In another context, Done would be happy to sing the praises of his business. Today, when we're talking about Ken Done, the artist, not Ken Done the brand, he plays it down.
"It's just a tiny Australian business is all. We have 10 shops across Australia and our gallery in the Rocks, and we distribute our merchandise throughout the world."
It's hard to feel sorry for Ken Done.
The only Australian artist to make the BRW rich list, Done lives in an idyllic beach house on millionaires' row overlooking Chinaman's Beach in Mosman, where he paints to his heart's content.
But still the weight of the world seems buried just below the surface of his positive spin-doctoring. The issue of his artistic credibility clearly dogs him as he lets out a heavy sigh.
"I've never tried to to be confrontational. Whatever it is I'm doing, my aim is always to make it as good as it can possibly be. All I can say is I'm trying my best."

T-shirts turn off auction houses
AT the Ken Done gallery in The Rocks, large canvases are on sale for up to $17,000. Yet since 1989 just four of Done's paintings have been offered at public auction.
Three were passed in and the other, a gouache and oil painting on paper titled Mosman Festival (1990), sold for a meagre $742 at Lawsons auction house in Sydney in September 1997.
Georgina Pemberton, paintings expert at Lawsons, is blunt: "I usually discourage people from bringing his works in because there simply isn't a market for them.
"The auction market is for serious, established artists."
"It's a question of should I buy one of his paintings or one of his T-shirts?"
Annette Larkin, Australian paintings expert at Christies' auction house, says Done has been "a fantastic entrepreneur and ambassador for Australia, but as far as being a serious artist is concerned, I'm sure he has his collectors, but you rarely see his work coming through the sale room."
The Sun-Herald asked Done why any serious collector with an eye on investment should buy his works?
"Because they love them! My works don't appear at auction because my buyers don't sell them, they keep them."

* Michael Hutak is editor of Australian Art Collector Magazine.

KEN DONE AT AUCTION SINCE 89

* Oil Paintings

Total offered: 4

Number sold: 1

Mosman Festival (1990), gouache and oil crayon on paper, initialled lower right, 62 x 45 cm. Lawsons Sydney 16/09/97, lot 124. Estimate: $400-$600 - sold for $742. Mosman Festival (1990), 8-18 March, gouache and oil crayon on paper, initialled lower right, 62 x 45 cm. Lawsons Sydney 10/12/96, lot 263. Estimate: $1,400-$1,600 - Not Sold. From The Studio Window (1991), oil on canvas, 75 x 102 cm. Lawsons Sydney. 20/09/94, lot 326. Estimate: $3,000-$5,000 - Not Sold. Morning Glory And Nasturtiums (1979), oil crayon, 42 x 43 cm. Lawsons Sydney 12/09/89, lot 137. Estimate: $4,000-$5,000 - Not Sold.

* Watercolours

Total offered: 4

Number sold: 2

Average price: $600

* Other media and drawings

Total offered: 2

Number sold: 2

Average price: $375

* Prints and graphics

Total offered: 13

Number sold: 12

Average price: $251

Source: Australia Art Sales Digest

----

Date: 12/09/1999
Words: 1326
Publication: Sun Herald
Section: News
Page: 58

Interview: Kidman on Kubrick and 'Eyes Wide Shut'

So just who was Stanley Kubrick and why should you care? What’s so special about this filmmaker that he commanded such awe and respect in the movie business and could indulge his cinematic vision like no other director before or since? Nicole Kidman spoke exclusively to Juice a week before the Australian premiere of her latest, and by far most eagerly anticipated movie, the late Mr Kubrick's sexual sayonara to the cinema, EYES WIDE SHUT.

We began by asking why do Kidman and husband Tom Cruise, two of the most sought after stars in Hollywood, give over 3 years at the height of their careers to participate in what is, despite the somewhat deceivingly raunchy marketing, an intellectual art film in the European mould?

"People have said 'How could you do this?'" says Kidman. "My answer, of course, was why not? I would have been mad to turn it down. There are very few times as an actor when you think I will be forever proud of this work - that it is timeless work - just in terms of the director. I can never be objective about my work. But I am so honoured to have been a part of Stanley's body of work. Full stop."

Based on "Traumnovelle", an obsure 1926 novel by an obcure Viennese novelist Arthur Schnitzler, the film stars Kidman and Cruise as two psychiatrists whose marriage is cast adrift when they embark on a series of torrid sexual adventures and experiments. Kubrick had held the rights to the novel for over two decades. In development for four years and produced under typically paranoid secrecy, it took 15 months to shoot in, according to Kubrick's biographer, "the longest continuous shoot in motion picture history."

From the opening scene of a naked Kidman, EYES WIDE SHUT is "truly the riskiest film of Kubrick's career", according to respected critic Janet Maslin, of the New York Times. "The man who could create a whole new universe with each undertaking chose the bedroom as the last frontier."

Less charitable commentators have dubbed the film "Eyes Glaze Over". The film relies heavily on the believe-ability of Kidman and Cruise's on-screen relationship, and Hollywood's hottest couple have a lot of credibility riding on the film's success. Past efforts don't augur well. The cars were more riveting than the acting in DAYS OF THUNDER while the most memorable thing about FAR & AWAY was watching the stellar pair struggle with working class Irish accents.
But the buzz is that it's Oscar time for Kidman at least. That she broke her schedule to talk to Juice testifies more to the weight of responsibility she feels to Kubrick and the film, than her own image. When the enigmatic auteur died just after completing the film, the burden of explaining to the public the master's intentions in the complex and dark project fell entirely to its stars. With an evangelistic zeal, she appears to be reveling in the task.

"Kubrick, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini - they were the great masters of the cinema - and anyone who is interested in films thatchallenge the way they think should see this film. You know Scorsese, (Sidney) Pollack and Gus Van Sant all saw the film thesame night and each of them came up after and hugged us. Scorsese said 'Can I hug you nowbecause you worked with the master and you have made one of the great films' -and coming from Martin Scorsese - also one of the great film makers of ourcentury - I thought 'Wow!'"

---

Stanley Kubrick was born into a on July 26, 1928, in the Bronx. A brilliant but bored underachiever at school, Kubrick got his first break at 17, scoring a job as a still photographer for Look magazine. But the cinema was always where he was headed and between 1951 and 1953 he set about producing, directing, writing, shooting and editing three short documentaries. A brilliant chess player, he financed the films by hustling on the streets of New York, plus a relentless pursuit of the funds of friends and family. He would later say that making a movie is like chess: "It is a series of steps that you take one at a time, and it's balancing resources against the problem, which in chess is time and in movies is time and money."

One-time beatnik, jazz drummer, and self-appointed expert on every subject from flying to poker to making hamburgers, it was Kubrick's know-all personality that set him on the road to filmmaking. "I didn't know anything about making films, but I knew I couldn't make them any worse than the majority of films I was seeing," quotes John Baxter in his excellent Stanley Kubrick: A Biography.

His uncompromising one-man-band approach would only realise 13 feature-length films over the next 40 years, but, apart from SPARTACUS (1960) where he was brought in to take over directing after shooting began by executive producer and star Kirk Douglas, each film has the irrefutable mark of its director. Film is a collaborative medium but with a Stanley Kubrick film, it is the director who is always the real star. But while his films - to date - have won 8 Oscars, none were for Best Director.

In 1954 Kubrick teamed up with producer James B Harris and moved to LA where the pair would make the three films which would establish Kubrick's reputation as one of Hollywood's brightest and most daring talents: the noir racetrack heist, THE KILLING (1956), the moving anti-war drama PATHS OF GLORY (1957) and the controversial LOLITA (1961), Nabakov's dry tale of illicit sexual obsession. LOLITA begins Kubrick's most successful quartet of films. The black comedy, DR STANGELOVE OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), released in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination, is the ultimate expression of Cold War nihilism in the form of high farce. It ends with images of the atom bomb accompanied by Vera Lynn's wartime standard, "We'll Meet Again." The film was branded by the New York Times critic of the day as "beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across". With Peter Sellars in three roles, it was a huge hit.

In 1968 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was also panned by the critics on release as just a ponderous light-show with a few futuristic riddles thrown in for diversion. It too went on to box office glory, lauded in the age of psychedelia as the ultimate trip movie, a hyper-philosophical mind fuck.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) opens with a youthful Malcolm McDowell kicking a drunken tramp to death while giving a caustic rendition of "Singing In The Rain". Orange is arguably the most subversive youth culture movie yet made, and certainly a most prophetic vision of aliented urban youth which predicted the punk revolution by at least 5 years. David Bowie said that with Ziggy Stardust he "wanted to 'deviolence' the look of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE." Meanwhile The Times was holding Kubrick personally responsible for the unravelling of Britain's social fabric: "The cases of rape, murder and beatings attributed to the film's influence are too numerous to be dismissed as tabloid hyperbole. Tramps were killed, girls were assaulted and beatings were dished out as Kubrick's symphony of violence rang in then head of the perpetrators."

Kubrick was always mistrustful of Hollywood and had settled permanently in England in 1974. But he wasn't doing the Welles thing; he wasn't banished or in some self-imposed exile. He just liked England better. But after the violent reaction to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, he became so reclusive for a period that an Englishman impersonated him for several months before being discovered.

In another recent biography, Vincent LoBrutto pins down all the essential elements of the Kubrick myth: "a cool, misanthropic cinematic genius who obsesses over every detail, lives a hermetic existence, doesn't travel and is consumed with phobic neuroses."

As is usual with myths, Kubrick the man was something quite different. "People always think he was this idiotic dictator," said Christiane Kubrick, his third and last wife of 40 years, after his death. "But he was always asking everyone's opinion on most things. What do you think of this? What do you think of that? Do you think I should have done this different?"

It's true he demanded take after take from actors, sometimes running to over a hundred takes. The reason? Because actors didn't know their lines. "If people don't do their homework, the only thing I can do is spend time doing multiple takes while they learn what their job is supposed to be." Aperfectionist to the last, but as Kirk Douglas would say to him after SPARTACUS: "That doesn't make you perfect!"

---

To cinephiles Kubrick is the director's director, certainly one of the key artists of the cinema's second 50 years. Ever since the furore that greeted the release of Lolita, every new Kubrick film has been greeted as a landmark cultural event. But while he made seven features in his first decade, he took over 30 to make the final six. Many reading this may not have seen any of his films.

icole Kidman is right to think Marty Scorcese makes a fine contemporary referee, but Hollywood hugging aside itÕs been twelve years since Kubrick's last film, the searing Vietnam War drama, FULL METAL JACKET (1987), briefly burnt up the screen then was pretty much forgotten.

You have to go back another seven to find THE SHINING, Kubrick's chilling adaptation of a Stephen King horror story and his most openly commercial film, but then clearly the work of a director treading water. Go back five years more and you hit BARRY LYNDON, a beautiful but boring 18th century period drama which picked up four Oscars (for music, cinematography, art direction, costume design) but recouped only $9.5 million of its $30 million production cost.
So it's still not surprising that Variety tagged EYES WIDE SHUT as having "questionable appeal for under-25s". It will "captivate older audiences more than it will mainstream Tom Cruise die-hards", said the movie industry bible. Bums on seats at EYES WIDE SHUT have more cellulite per square centimetre than those that sat through, for instance, AMERICAN PIE, the latest hit teen sex comedy which EYES WIDE SHUT ironically displaced from No.1 when it opened in July with a first weekend box office of over US$21million, a record for any Kubrick film.

Both films were rated 'R' in the US, for "strong sexual content, nudity, language and some drug-related material", but while American Pie is a funny but forgettable farce about "losin' it", EYES WIDE SHUT is an art film in the European mould which Variety called "a deeply inquisitive consideration of the extent of trust and mutual knowledge possible between a man and a woman."

Thus for Juice, Kidman is keen to dispel the vibe that this is 'adult fare' that's not really gonna be 'dope with the kids'.

"To underestimate the intelligence of a younger audience is patronising," counters Kidman. "I know when I was 16, l8 and l9 I remember seeing DR. STRANGELOVE, then LOLITA and then 2001. Then, when I was twenty-one, I saw A Clockwork ORANGE and it really shocked me and awed me - you know? All of Kubrick's films have that ability to shake the groundwork that you have, to shake it up and challenge you philosophically and I think young people today desperately want to see that - it's just they aren't given it that often.

"Kubrick was oneof the masters and this is his last film and I think young people are interested. Anyone who is interested in sex, jealousy andobsession will relate to this film, so of course it is a film for youngeraudiences as well as older audiences."

In the US, the film was heading for a dreaded NC17 rating which translates roughly into Box-office poison. In order to secure a R rating Kubrick agreed to alter 65 seconds of the orgy scene which is the centre piece of the film by adding digitally created figures to obscure the 'action'. Kubrick wasn't averse to such compromises, having gone through similar negotiations with censors on both Lolita and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Still The Los Angeles Times put to Tom Cruise that if Kubrick was such an uncompromising filmmaker, why didn't he have the courage to say with Eyes Wide Shut: "this film is unsuitable for a 15-year-old kid".

"Stanley knew he had to deliver an R-rated film," Cruise replied. "And he didn't think it hurt the integrity of the film. If I was 15, I'd like to have the opportunity to see the movie, even if I didn't comprehend everything.

"I don't think it's offensive to see people having sex, but that's just me."

The final irony is that although the uncensored version is screening in Australia, an R rating here means only 18 year olds and up can view the film without risk of prosecution.

---

"I am in a world of shit," declares Private Joker (Matthew Modine) in the final moments of Stanley Kubrick's second-last film, the 1987 war drama FULL METAL JACKET. "But I am still alive. And I am not afraid."
Sadly, Kubrick ain't alive anymore. But when you look back at his canon of thirteen dazzling, incredibly diverse features, you find he wasn't afraid to depict thirteen worlds that are indeed full of shit. Lightning rods of the popular cinema they may be, but they span four million years of dubious progress of the human race.
It's not easy to be light and breezy about Kubrick. Variously regarded as a pefectionist, myogynist, nihilist, anarchist, genius and visionary, Kubrick isn't about providing easily consumed entertainment, despite the fact that his films are immensely entertaining. Instead he is about spectacle, seduction, voyeurism, horror, atrocity, indifference, hypocrisy, madness, obsession, lust, suspense, anxiety, emotion, and ideas. No easy answers in that list, only uneasy questions.
His films are populated with common criminals, sexual deviants, juvenile psychopaths, insane purveyors of mass destruction, even computers that kill. The Shining, about "an ordinary guy who just wants to murder his family" according to Jack Nicholson, is typical Kubrick fare. Not a frame out of place, not a plot-point astray, not a moment of suspense or horror wasted, not a punter in the house that isn't scared witless. Nicholson himself couldn't wait to get off the film: "Glad to be off that one," he said at the time. "That was rough duty."
Not merely powerful stories brilliantly told, Kubrick's films created new benchmarks in their use of advances in filmmaking technology. In production design and art direction, 2001 on the big screen today feels more like a documentary from the future than science fiction. Many interior scenes in Barry Lyndon, his picaresque tale set in Georgian England, are lit with candlelight.
More than a director or technician, Kubrick was the complete filmmaker who took meticulous control of every stage of production from script through to marketing. "I know how to do virtually every job on a movie," he said in an interview in 70s. "I can light, I can record sound, I know where mikes go. I don't know how to act. But I'll tell you this, we will get the best shot."
One of the few American directors who had the prestige to make big-budget movies while working outside the Hollywood mainstream Kubrick was "the one person in the film industry who knew how the industry worked in every country in the world, remembers one Warner Brothers executive. "He knew all of the dubbing people, the dubbing directors, the actors, he had relationships with foreign directors who would supervise his work because he couldn't be there to supervise himself. We had to go around to every cinema to make sure the projection lights were right, the sound was correct, the ratios were right, the screens were clean."
Warners have released nine of his features on home video to coincide with the local release of Eyes Wide Shut. All his major films are in the collection except for A Clockwork Orange, which the director decreed be exhibited in theatres only.
As we write Clockwork Orange was playing in its 234th consecutive week of late night weekend screenings at Village's cineplex on Sydney's George Street movie strip.
"About 18 months ago we had to replace the print," says George Livery, general manager of Village Cinemas. "So we had to apply to Stanley to get hold of a new print, and he gratefully signed off on a new one. Of course also he had to approve of us showing the film in the first place.
"We get a lot film students at the screenings. ItÕs been running so long I canÕt remember why we decided to bring it back in the first place, although itÕs been in repertory really ever since its original release."

---

It's understandable that EYES WIDE SHUT has been hailed - like John Huston's THE DEAD - to be Kubrick's 'last will and testament', the crowning acheivment of an extraordinary career. But the one thing the cinema's most famous control freak couldn't schedule was the timing of his own exit and he never intended Eyes Wide Shut to be a swan-song. That honour was to go to AI (artificial intelligence), based on a Brian Aldiss short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long". Wanting to top 2001, which he believed was his most complete film, Kubrick spent seven years this decade developing AI. Throughout the early 90s he wrote several drafts with Aldiss and made exhaustive use of George LucasÕs peak special effects house Industrial Light & Magic but with Kubrick calling on ILMÕs resources to conduct more and more obscure and intricate experiments, Lucas eventually called a halt to work on the project, telling Kubrick they were too busy working on another film called JURASSIC PARK.
Warner Bros had originally agreed to give Kubrick carte blanche on AI on condition that he first produce 'a quickie'.
Four years later that quickie - EYES WIDE SHUT - was in the can. Four days later, Kubrick died in his sleep in his English home.
But its clear that Kubrick has bought himself life after death - his films will remain to speak for him literally till doomsday. They will be there to remind us that movies can be more than just money making exercises in niche marketing, demographics, and manufactured entertainment.
Of course, with the exception for BARRY LYNDON, his films DID make money, which means he could keep making them. Kubrick proved that you can have it all - creative, critical and commercial success. His films have cost millions, made millions, and been watched by millions. But as he told his accountant after closing a lucrative deal with a major studio to make a picture: "You know, I'm glad they don't know I would do this thing for nothing if I had to."
Says Kidman: "He had a great belief in the cinema as an art form - so when you work with somebody like that, you say: 'I am willing totake the journey with you. I am privileged and honoured to take the journey with you.'"

- MICHAEL HUTAK

First published in Juice magazine

Interview: Liam Neeson is Michael Collins

Picture this: four movie writers sitting round a five star hotel boardroom wondering if the Great Man would even appear.

Liam Neeson’s schedule on this hit and run promo tour is so tight there isn’t time to grant our respective publications a one-on-one interview. Now we have been told that that even our allotted thirty minutes with the star of writer/director Neil Jordan’s new film, Michael Collins, was in jeopardy.

The marketing flacks tell us we have to be satisfied with either a fifteen minute audience or none at all. We figure that at fifteen minutes there’s not much chance of even pretending to bond with Neeson, given we will have just under four minutes each to penetrate the movie icon’s psyche.

But such is life in a media ghetto. While we wait we chat about the film. Collins was an Irish freedom fighter in the 1920’s, the man credited with inventing modern guerilla warfare, and who brought the Brits to their knees in the war for Irish independence that followed the First World War. Collins would finally shift from his “talent for mayhem” to become peacemaker, negotiating the treaty which saw Ireland split into the Catholic free South and the British Protestant North.

Collins’s role in the treaty, according to Jordan’s version of events, led to his own assassination by the IRA for “selling out the North”.

We agree it’s starting to look hopeless when the former amateur boxer finally saunters in.

Interview: Alex de la Inglesia

Alex de la Inglesia interviewed by Michael Hutak, September 1995

---

If nothing else, Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Inglesia is in your face.

“I hate the real violence but I love the violence in the cinema. Violence is necessary in all artistic creation. Violence is part of humanity. Shakespeare works with the same idea. There is no drama without violence. My mum is violent, my dad is violent - the best thing to do is laugh.”

Emerging from the patronage of countryman Pedro Almodovar, Inglesia is on the phone promoting his latest film, Day of the Beast, an occult/sci-fi/splatter black comedy, which won six Spanish Academy Awards and has just opened locally. It tells the unlikely tale of a middle aged Madrid priest who discovers the antichrist is about to be born. He enlists the services of a tabloid TV host and a death metal freak in a desperate and hilarious attempt to stave off Satan and save the world. In the best Spanish traditions of the theatre of cruelty, gory, grizzly, and garish are words that spring to mind. And funny. Very funny.

“Day of the Beast is a local story - a story about the chaos that exists today in Spain. I set myself a hard task - to make an action film with an old man as the star. It is black humour - oil and water. The old man discovers a big secret, that the world is going to end, and this is too big a task for him.”

Portrayed as a decaying, morally bankrupt sespit, Madrid comes off very poorly in Inglesia’s vision, but “it’s not just a critique of cities, the problem is the people. When you put so many people together.

“The worst people are the normal people - who watch TV and go to the supermarket. I prefer people who say ‘I am not normal’. I’m afraid of the people who are satisfied.” When I ask if these people aren’t precisely his audience he lets out a strangely evil laugh, like I’ve caught him out. “I don’t think of my audience. I think of me. I try to explain the story, that’s all - like Hitchcock, the best director in the world,” he says, before adding cheerfully, “People enjoy it when you insult them. Ha, ha.”

While he may have disdain for the common man, his two features to date have been box office hits with the great unwashed in his native country. Day of the Beast, which cost just $US2 million, was the most successful local film in Spain last season. His first film, Militant Action, produced by Almodovar, was also a hit. “It was about handicapped terrorists who attack normal people. It’s a black comedy.”

Inglesia describes himself as a country boy who went to Madrid to draw comic books. He then started working in film, first as a set designer, then as an art director, before he got his big break when Spanish film’s most famous bad boy Almodovar read his script for Militant Action and offered to produce. “This is the best thing about Almodovar,” says Inglesia without missing a beat, “We have nothing in common at all. He loves Douglas Sirk. He is homosexual. Almodovar is not a person who likes followers.”

Talking from Mexico on the set of his latest film, Inglesia’s enthusiasm for his chosen craft pummels infectiously down the phoneline, his pidgen English struggling to match the obvious speed with which the ideas are coursing maniacly through his head.

“I have one or two proposals in Hollywood. Little movies I can make in Spain. I can do anything I want in Spain. I have no limits.” Coincidental to Australia, Spain swung to the right in elections earlier this year after 13 years of socialist government. “It was a very open country,” he laments, “in the last 20 years it was a cultural paradise, now it’s like the finish - the party’s over.

“That’s why I’m working in Mexico. In my next movie all the people are talking about God. It’s so funny. It’s a road movie with an android sex slave and a nymphomaniac girl of 12 years. But we needed more money - the budget is $US6 million which is very expensive for Spain so we are making it in America. Ciby2000 has the rights.”

“If I work in Hollywood I want a big budget. The most thing I love is sci-fi movies. But I want to do something not commercial - very violent, very sexy. Sci fi now is pathetic. When you have $US50 million budgets you have to make a family movie. This is not me.

“I work fast, I’m afraid to respect things. It is dangerous. I don't believe in talent, I only believe in work. I am only learning now - I have only made two movies. Movies aren’t mystical, they are work. I think if you make 80 movies, then you are a good director. The most important thing is work.”

MICHAEL HUTAK

---

First published in Beat magazine