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.

"Although it is just an ugly piece of metal, it is in solid silver," Turner quipped in an interview with Australian Art Collector on his rooftop terrace in central Rome. "They even bottle a special wine for the event." The award is named for its patron, Achille Bonito Oliva, director of the 1993 Venice Biennale and best known for single-handedly promoting the influential Italian contemporary movements, Ipermanierismo (Hypermannerism) and transavanguardia, (Trans-avantgarde). Turner first worked with Oliva in Venice in '93 when Turner was on the selection committee of Aperto, the section at Venice dedicated to emerging international talent which that year featured a young Sydney artist, Hany Armanious. Turner considers Oliva "one of the most brilliant, fascinating, charming, and also irritating men you are likely to meet. He was extremely important figure in Italian and European contemporary art in the 1960s and 1970s and invented, the Italian version of neo-expressionism. He identified it, he put it together, and basically proposed a completely different view of what Italian art was considered at the time, which was the arte povera, championed by Germano Celant."

Turner triangulates his time between Rome, Sydney and Amsterdam: "I've put on Italian and Australian shows in Holland as well as Dutch shows in Italy and so on." The author of scores of artists' monographs, he writes widely on European contemporary art for titles like ART + Auction and Flash Art, and has been the Rome correspondent for US magazine Artnews for more than 20 years. In Rome he has been a driving force behind the annual contemporary art fair RIPA and has had a long relationship with Il Ponte Contemporanea, Rome's leading contemporary commercial gallery, where in 2005 Turner curated and an all-Australian group show that featured Tracey Moffatt, Maree Azzopardi, Paul Ferman and others. Turner has also curated shows in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, mainly the Nederlands, for Australians Patricia Piccinini, John McRae, William Yang. In Australia he is probably best known for bringing a touring exhibition of iconic French art photographers Pierre et Gilles to Sydney and Melbourne in 1995. "I work a lot with Roslyn Oxley, Martin Browne and Robin Gibson in Sydney and with Tolarno in Melbourne and Libby Edwards." In the summer of 2007 Turner returned to Australia to curate solo shows for Azzopardi and Ferman.

However it's his internationalist approach that earned him the ABO. "I only work with artists whose work I appreciate. There are a lot artists, both Australian and otherwise, who I've been working with for more than 20 years … I'm not Italian, but I also don't view myself or my work as being a national representative of anything. And again, even though I've lived in Rome for more than twenty years now, I've returned every year to Australia to work - and I feel 'at home' wherever I am."

In this era of the touring blockbuster, Turner believes the independent contemporary art scene has adjusted well by "moving beyond elitism and is thriving. I'm seeing more private philanthropists than I did before, and more collectors and patrons are taking up the role of developing artists that business used to occupy more. I used to work a lot more with business, I'm not now. The corporations that are breaking up collections that they have spent years putting together are very ill-advised."

Turner's criteria for working with collectors: "Anyone with passion is perfect. A good collector tends to have such a strong vision of what they want and like that it's a pleasure to work with them. A collector is never wrong, just like an artist is never wrong." His approach to curating revolves around the demands of the space: "I only organize shows when I know exactly where it is going to be seen. I don't attempt to helicopter a show in, and say here it is, fit it in however you can. Each show must be tailored to the space it will be shown in. You don't try to pander to a particular taste and neither would you pretend that you're so fabulous that people must accept it from on high."

Turner eschews any adoption of a general philosophy of curating: "It can be ad-hoc. Artists tend to need help. And if I think they have talent and I like their work, then if I can help them I do. I'm a bit like a one-man Ministry of Culture." Meanwhile, the art life beckons and our interview ends: "I have to rush, I am going at midday to see two newly restored paintings by Caravaggio, which will be nice for the soul, since both are owned privately, and neither I have seen before."

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First published in
Australian Art Collector
No.40, April 2007

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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. "There's an estrangement or alienation ... A lot of works refer to everyday objects which in being transformed become unusable or threatening. There's an undercurrent of some kind of malevolent force." For instance Incommunicado (1993) presents a cot as designed by sadists, made from cold steel with a base of razor-wire where the mattress should be. Malevolent indeed, but in terms of pure design, it is cold, seductive and beautifully executed.

More recent work such as Homebound (2000) "deals with the home and can be seen in terms of women and domestic entrapment, domestic violence". An array of objects - tables, chairs, cups, lampshades, beds - are wired for electricity and alternately glow and buzz. Surrounding the exhibit is a wire fence that has the spectator wondering if it too is electrified. Hatoum says "it's really just to make people question their environment". One much-visited theme refers to architecture as "a kind of institutional violence - as structures that imprison, constrict or regiment the body in some way." In Light Sentence (1992), a "swinging lightbulb casts moving shadows against the wire-mesh [cage] and the whole effect is kind of woozy, like the ground is shifting under your feet." And let's not forget surveillance. InHatoum's celebrated Corps Etranger (Foreign Body), a microscopic camera makes a strangely compelling journey. "The film is shot inside my body using endoscopy," she explains. "It's very seductive but also disgusting. People want to follow it and see where it's going ... it has this double edge to it. It's like invading the boundaries of the body and taking surveillance to an extreme."

Hatoum is also keen to set the record straight on the media’s tendency to distort and “sex up” her biography as some sort of “exotic other”.

“It is a problem,” she laments. “Some people always think that I’m speaking as someone who grew up in Lebanon or from the experience of an exile. It does sometimes enter into the work because I have been displaced, because I’ve had to deal with very different environments, leaving my culture and entering another culture, nothing is secure or stable or understandable, but it doesn’t mean that everything I do is framed by my biography. The geographic part is not what makes the work.

“People often call me a refugee, but please do not describe me as a refugee,” she continues. “It’s an insult to refugees to call me one and I don’t want people to think I’m trying to get any mileage that way. I mean I’m exiled from Lebanon, my parents were exiled from Palestine, but they were never actually refugees.” Hatoum cites a recent monograph that said her my mother (who died three years ago) was living in Sabra and Sha-tila camp, “which is simply not true.”

“I don’t where people get these bizarre facts from. One writer said Light Sentence was about the architecture of the Palestinian camps – I mean how did they come up with that? They obviously have never been to a Palestinian camp, these places grow up very organically, there’s nothing programmatic or regimented about them.”

Hatoum’s is the exemplary post-Cold War contemporary art resume: a graduate of London’s esteemed Slade School of Art, represented in serious public collections from MoMA to the Tate, she had her first solo show at the Pompidou in 1994; was short listed for the Turner Prize in 1995 (and was favoured to win but was pipped by the Shark-embalming controversialist, Damien Hirst); joined Jay Jopling’s white hot stable at White Cube gallery in London the same year; was included in the Charles Saatchi’s landmark landmark 1997 show, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection; and since the early nineties has been traveling the globe, mounting shows of destabilising wit in public galleries, museums and art fairs, all to a chorus of gut-wrenching, teeth grinding approbation.

Not that it’s gone to her head. She denounces any association with the YBA’s and renounces the patronage of Saatchi: “I’m ten years older than all these guys. The only reason I was in Sensation is that Saatchi got his hands on one of my works. In fact at my first show at White Cube (in 1995) he wanted to buy everything and I said no, I didn’t want to be part of that. He managed to get hold of a couple of works and that was why I was in Sensation but now he’s since sold them all.” (Coincidentally, Deep Throat (1996), the work that appeared in Sensation, still stands as Hatoum’s auction saleroom record, selling for £60,950 at Christie’s London in 2002, against an estimate of £25,000-£30,000.) In an age when artists rush to play self-promoting entreprenuer, constructing celebrity to seduce collectors and seeking publicity to attract commissions, Hatoum’s unguarded commitment to art before the art system is refreshing, and undoubtedly (and ironically) one key to her success.

Hatoum was visiting London in 1975 with her parents when the unholy hell of civil war broke out in Lebanon. She would remain in London pursuing a career as an artist. Now it’s collectors and curators who pursue Hatoum and the curators are winning. “I prefer to have my work bought by museums - I’ve only ever done one private commission,” she admits. “I’m always being asked to do private commissions but I don’t really like that very much… I want the work to exist in the public domain and be visible to as many people as possible.”

Firmly in mid-career, approaching two decades at the peak of her profession, can there still be much to wring one’s hands about in this life? You bet. “If one feels alienated or whatever, the fact that one becomes successful, has a bit more money in the bank or becomes recognized as an artist won’t necessarily change that,” she replies. With lesser lights you might doubt their sincerity, but Matoum displays such a healthy indifference to flattery and critical distance from success that it’s obvious she remains steadfastly uncomfortable about the state of world and burns with a need to say so – no matter how wacky, obscure or difficult the saying might be. And hey, it’s contemporary art and she can get away with it.

“Recently I was asked recently why I wanted to be an artist and I replied probably because artists are permitted to break rules. I always felt I was in a very restricted society growing up in Lebanon and felt that art was one way out of that, a licence to go crazy and do whatever I want.”

“For me, the impetus behind making works that show the world as an alien, foreign or maybe hostile place is in some way to articulate the experience of people who are culturally displaced, exiled, or feeling like a foreigner wherever (they) go – I mean that’s not a feeling one can ever change or that ever changes.”

The entire world will remain a foreign land for Mona Hatoum until she departs it. Luckily for posterity and the world’s patrimony, her artworks will remain to prod, provoke and stimulate us into considering what it means to belong to a society, a culture, a people - but also what it means to not belong, to be lonely in the crowd.

Over My Dead Body is at the MCA, Sydney, March 23-May 29
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First published in The Bulletin, Volume 123; Number 12

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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–

MICHAEL HUTAK: -but as a dealer your responsibility is two-fold - one to your collectors and one to your artists–

SP: -and one to myself! I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I’ll wring as much out of it as I can. But what you have to ensure first is that you’re putting good work forward, and then make a powerful shot at the money. Not the other way round.

MH: - there’s no mint to be made out of mediocre art.

SP: You can for a while, but then it goes back to that adage that eventually you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

MH: What effect has the rise of the auction scene in Australia had on your business?

SP: Absolutely fantastic. If you took the auction scene out of the galleries now, the prices would go back to about a quarter of what they are now. They’ve popularised it and they’ve proved it. The thing is they have also destroyed some artists as well, but they are quite forgiving in that they don’t talk about that much, whereas they sure as hell make a big fuss about the things that go up. It’s a bit like an undercurrent, it’s inclined to drag everything along – rubbish, weeds, sand, shells, crabs the whole lot - and I think that’s the effect it has had on the entire art world.

I remember one day, I was at Euen Heng’s place, we’d been dealing with him for quite some time and he’d never been offered at auction and I was looking at the work as we were about to have an exhibition. So I was looking and thinking, this work was just fantastic and I thought what can I do here, and I turned to Euen and said ‘We’re going to double the prices’. They were $9000, they would now be $18,000. Well, he went pale, I got in the car with a dry throat thinking 'what have I done?', but I might tell you they sold better at $18,000 than they had at $9000. His previous clients who’d bought three or four were thrilled because the works they’d bought had immediately doubled in value and it was simply a case of saying, well if we don’t respect this artist’s work how can we expect anyone else to?

But the whole thing was also timing. I didn’t do it when it wasn’t ready. I didn’t do it until the day I looked at these paintings and thought, shit, this guy is a real artist and we had better respect that. It’s not as flippant as that either. We changed our attitude on framing, we produced a proper catalogue, we backed it up, we played the right music for it and it’s worked out very, very well.

MH: And that’s now Heng’s new base level.

SP: Absolutely, and I think we’ll be doing it again, because he really deserves to be up there and one of the ways you can call that attention is to raise the prices. I mean you can show and show and show, but sometimes you have to make the leap of faith and back your artist’s talent.

MH: What happens when say an artist like Jeffrey Smart has a breakthrough sale at auction that is streets ahead of his current gallery price? How do you cope with that?

SP: It’s pretty easy. You just add a zero to everything you’ve got in the stockroom. (laughs) But, what it means is this: it’s time. It’s as simple as that - the market has told you. Because for every sale like that there’s an underbidder. Jeffrey is a perfect example, he’s been a perfect gentleman in every sense of the word, and his paintings have honoured him in the same way.

Like I said we’ve been representing Jeffrey for over 25 years and the first painting we sold of his was a thing called The Dome. It’s quite famous now, and we sold that for $6000, good money in those days but now we sell similar works for $250,000 maybe $300,000. I think it gets back to the fact that Jeffrey’s senior, and the art world is interested much more in itself than it once was and therefore it is looking back to its senior artists, and they are few in number on the ground. It has to go that way. He’s also had recent retrospectives, [Art Gallery of New South Wales’ director] Edmund Capon is a fan and that doesn’t go astray.

I’m now becoming more interested in the contemporary area. When my parents ran the gallery, you have to think I grew up with Sydney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Fred Williams, John Olsen and Brett Whiteley, and then I’ve done my own reshaping and I’ve made the gallery quite big – I mean it’s now four galleries in two cities, a production department, it employs 14 people, it needs ten thousand fresh dollars of profit every day to stay in business, we have a publishing program. But the other thing is I feel as though I've got to keep growing with it so an artist can grow through the gallery, doesn’t have to leave and go somewhere else.

Think of Brian Johnson, Violet Guila, William Mora, Rudy Komon – the common factor with all those dealers is that their galleries died with them and I don’t want that to happen to our gallery. It’s a long term family business, it will be 50 years old on June 13th of 2006, we’re going to do a big production book for that. We’ve got a record of every exhibition we’ve ever had going back to 1956, the date and what pictures were in it. We’re scrapbook people. (I might tell you our house burnt down in 1970 and we lost an enormous amount of records, two Boyd Bride paintings – the impact killed my father, he died at 59 years old.) But we’ve got 25 volumes of newspaper clippings, the State Library has a program where they keep our correspondence. I’m interested in shoring up what my parents started, I’m interested in my own success with this group people that I represent now, and I’m interested in starting two contemporary galleries, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne, so that the whole thing continues to roll on.

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Abridged version published in Australian Art Collector

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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".
"I'm an amateur historian, a popular historian at best, but I have a huge, huge following in the States. We estimate that over 75 million Americans have seen The Civil War, 50 million saw Baseball and more than 35 million watched Jazz, and that's an amazing testament to the power of television." Burns puts his success down to an ability "to touch the popular nerve" and to produce films that "rather than express an already arrived-at end, are rather about me sharing with the audience a process of discovery".
But it also takes a magician's skill: "I mean I've got these dead, morbid still photographs, these first-person quotes lying dusty in an archive; I've got the commentary of scholars who over the course of a two-hour interview might be as dry as toast; I've got some narration and I'm trying to make a historical event come alive. It's what I do to those materials that hopefully makes you feel for a moment what it was like to be there." Burns recently redigitised every photograph in The Civil War, and added new voice¬overs and remastered the sound for the series' DVD release. The revised program has just been rebroadcast in the US, again with record ratings.
Carr hosted a dinner for Burns last week which included self-confessed US history "tragics", former federal opposition leader Kim Beazley and former Wran government minister Rodney Cavalier. Burns was apparently impressed with his host's depth of knowledge of American history. "I don't come to Australia with any expectations, but I'm thrilled to be here because a politician in your country not only has a love of history, which is rare, but of American history, which is even rarer. My films have actually done extraordinarily well here; The Civil War had higher ratings here [for SBS] than in the US – and it remains the highest-rating program ever aired on PBS [the US Public Broadcasting Service]."
Burns originally wanted to be a Hollywood director but discovered non-fiction in college. He moved 25 years ago to rural New Hampshire where "I could live for nothing and have the luxury of being unconcerned with the marketplace". But working in the public sector is no impediment to wealth in the land of the profit motive. "I've actually made a huge amount of money and I've paid back all my grants. I'm a unique oxymoronic hybrid – a documentary film-maker who is actually known and has made money."
He spent Friday with Carr in Port Macquarie for the announcement of the awards, where Nadia Wheatley won the $15,000 Premier's History Prize for her 2001 biography of post-war author and columnist Charmian Clift.
Of slight build but determined disposition, Burns has the tenacity to see his multi-hour epics to completion not over months but years. "You never know it's going to be 19 hours long going in. Jazz took 6½ years to finish, to the day." His schedule is all booked up for the next 10 years, with a major series on Martin Luther King in development and another on World War II slated to air in 2009 or 2010. "I have a lot on my plate." Meanwhile, Burns' 2001 four-hour biography of Mark Twain airs next year on ABC-TV.
And the next target for NSW's impresario premier, who previously brought Gore Vidal to Sydney for the 1998 Sydney Writers' Festival, is historian and former JFK speech-writer Arthur Schlesinger jnr.
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First published in The Bulletin

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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.”

Mendelsohn is dressed smart casual, freshly shaved, hair combed and still wet from his morning shower. His world weary delivery, punctuated by a steady succession of ‘Styvo Reds’, are at odds with his image, which is reminiscent of a naughty boy wagging Sunday school. How refreshing, we comment, to find an actor not obsessed with his public image; a thespian, no less, unencumbered by “vaulting ambition”. Oops, spoke too soon…

“Oh, I have very unhealthy ambitions,” he protests, “but I don’t see the point in advertising ‘em, y’know? I don’t see the point in sitting down and telling you (slipping into mock American accent) what I’m gonna do next. Coz if I do it I’ll do it and we’ll know about it then.

"I can just see that quote coming up – ‘I have a lot of unhealthy ambitions’.”

If there’s blood coursing in his veins he should. On the back of good notices for his supporting role in the Hollywood blockbuster VERTICAL LIMIT, Mendelsohn is on a roll, with last year’s SAMPLE PEOPLE garnering him favourable press and anticipation high for his new release, a comedy drama called MULLET, which reunites the actor with David Caesar, his director in the 1995 hit, IDIOT BOX. And with CHILD STAR, his third film with director Nadia Tass, set for release in a couple of months, now is a good a time as any for ambition.

“Since the whole Vertical Limit thing my face has been back in the newspapers, and I’ve had a few more scripts come my way. I mean I’ve been in this business so long that I’m not expecting that much. It’s about working, y’know? About getting a bit of money in the bank, enough to not have to work for a while. I mean I don’t give a fuck – y’know? I don’t give a fuck.

“I hang out with a couple of actors but most of my time isn’t spent with other actors. My private life is not in the business. I’m not a big networker and luckily I’m not in a position where I need to do that and I’m glad about that. You’d go fucking mad – all you talk about is how much you’re working or how much you’re not working – I think about that stuff enough, I don’t need to pump it up any more.”

Having spent half his young life in the limelight, he’s more than accustomed to the drill. A new film, a round of publicity, same old questions: “It’s all bullshit, mate,” he intimates in reassuringly hushed tones.

Mendelsohn has been in the public’s consciousness since he was 15 and the HENDERSON KIDS was a hit on our TV screens. And it’s been more than 14 years since his remarkable film debut in the director John Duigan’s groundbreaking THE YEAR MY VOICE BROKE, a film that also launched the career of his contemporary, Noah Taylor.

He remembers the film fondly. “It was slated as a telemovie, in amongst a bunch of films that Kennedy Miller were doing for TEN. They loved it so much in the first weeks that decided to go ahead and make it into a feature. I had no idea it was going to be so big.

“Duigan was fuckin’ great! He’s like a horse whisperer. He’s got the abilty to point you in a direction and just let you go. They’re the ones I like to work with, and look at the performances he got out of us – they’re pretty fucken on the money!”

Mendelsohn won the first of his AFI Awards for the role, and a string of distinguished performances ensued in some of the local industry’s best films of the late 1980’s and 1990s - THE BIG STEAL, SPOTSWOOD, MAP OF THE HUMAN HEART, SIRENS, METAL SKIN (attracting his second AFI Award), COSI, and IDIOT BOX. He’s an actor that relies on his natural gift and sheer charisma. You can drop all that method "bullshit"!

“One of the misconceptions about performance is the idea that you can get it perfect, that the more you wring your hands about it the better it’s gonna be – that’s bullshit. If a director or another actor asks me what my motivation is, well, I tell ‘em it’s got nothing to do with them.

“I wanted to be a spy when I was a kid,” he says straight-faced, which somehow figures perfectly. “I left school at 15, and I haven’t ever formally studied acting. I mean talking about acting is a bit like fucking for chastity, y’know?” He checks for a second, and is obviously keen to impress that he’s still very serious about his work: “That doesn’t mean I don’t do whatever I need to do to get the performance up there, I just think there’s a certain cult that focuses more on the preparation than on the actual result whereas I think here’s a lot to be said for just jumping in and doing it. I do like to think I’m getting better at it, but I don’t know that! I’m very critical of my own work and I see the bits that don’t work before the bits that do.”

Mendelsohn’s aim is to be ‘in the moment’ when the camera is rolling, a characteristic self-evident in his easygoing performance in MULLET, a modest but moving comedy drama set in a small south coast fishing village. Headlining a bevy of accomplished Australian actors like Susie Porter, Andrew S Gilbert and Steve L Marquand, Mendelsohn carries the film with an easy Aussie charm. He plays the lead role of a bloke in his late twenties who returns home from the Big Smoke. When Mullet upped and left after three years earlier he didn’t tell a soul, and so his friends, family and ex-girlfriend don’t exactly accept him back into the fold with open arms.

“Mullet’s a guy whose taken a turn in life and he can’t go forward without taking a counter turn… and so he has to go back home and try and reconcile what it is he’s trying to leave behind. Which is place, where he comes from, the situation with his family.”

Mendelsohn himself comes from Melbourne, but he’s been “living in Sydney close on ten years. I lived back in Melbourne in 96/97 for a year or so… I still see myself as an expatriate Melbournite more than a Sydney boy."

And after the exposure afforded by VERTICAL LIMIT, what about the ‘States? “Yeah, what about the ‘States? I dunno, I guess I’ll go over and have a look. I was there recently very briefly, saw a couple a people. I’ve got an agent there but I don’t talk to her. I got an agent in Britain too, but I don’t talk to her either.

“I’m Australian based until I’m not. More or less.”

One thing’s for sure, when he does do it, we’ll be the first to know.

MICHAEL HUTAK
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First published in Australian Style

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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!'"

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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!"

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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.

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"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."

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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

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Interview: Alex de la Inglesia

Alex de la Inglesia interviewed by Michael Hutak, September 1995

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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

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First published in Beat magazine

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