Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  The male lead in Flirting was played by Noah Taylor, who had originated the character in The Year My Voice Broke. The British-born actor went on to appear in nearly two dozen films, including Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Vanilla Sky (2001).

  Flirting begins at the boys’ school with a number of boys, including Danny, reporting to the headmaster’s office for a sound whipping. After the canning, Danny lies in bed and mulls over the complexities and absurdities of life, finally turning his thoughts to the girls’ school located across the lake. To Danny, with his suppressed sexuality, the two schools stare at each other across the water like “brooding volcanoes.”

  When the scene switches to the girls’ school, Thandiwe, who is the only black student in the school, feigns sleep as a group of white girls gather around her and wonder aloud if the black girl with an African past would be interested in a banana.

  Danny, an awkward boy who sometimes stutters, is attracted to Thandiwe, who is the more aggressive of the two. As if to prove that, she breaks away from a dance to sneak into his dormitory. They sit on his bed to talk for a while, then she excuses herself to go to the bathroom. While she is gone, the other boys return from the dance, leaving Thandiwe trapped in the bathroom. Danny goes in to rescue her, but they both get trapped in a stall when several boys enter the room to shower.

  Danny and Thandiwe soon become pen pals. When one of the other boys steals one of her letters and reads it to everyone, she is mortified. She blames Danny. When they put on a coed play, she chooses Nicola’s suitor as her partner. Nicola ends up with Danny, a development that does not please her.

  One of the movie’s best scenes occurs when Nicola and Thandiwe come together as dance partners. As the dance teacher yells out instructions for the girls to look “sultry” and “smolder,” the two girls spar with eye contact. Nicole is magnificent with her body language and facial interactions. Finally, after peppering her foe with haughty body language, she gets to the point. “I think we should swap partners in the musical,” explains Nicola, who goes on to explain that Danny did not read the letter aloud—it was taken from him. Later that evening, Nicola catches Danny and Thandiwe kissing.

  One night Danny and Thandiwe have a sexual encounter in which she relieves his tensions with her hand. When she returns to the dormitory, Nicole asks her if anything happened. Thandiwe, overcome with guilt, coughs and says, “I beg your pardon.”

  “No, it’s all right you don’t have to tell me. I think if I liked some boy enough, I’d want to.”

  “Have you ever?”

  “Of course, not.”

  “Almost?”

  “Well . . . do you remember the young guy who was fixing the bell tower? I used to take him a cup of tea each morning before assembly. I rather liked him, although he never said anything much. I used to . . . close my eyes and sit on a chair and let him touch me all over as long as he promised not to take anything off. I thought it was so exquisitely daring I’d almost faint. I’d have to sit down because I’d be trembling so much my legs would have given away. Afterward, I’d be reading a lesson convinced all the teachers must know because I was so shivery delicious all over.”

  “I’m amazed,” says Thandiwe.

  “So am I when I think of it, which is most of the time, especially at mass.”

  Nicole offers up a toast. “Here’s to risks,” she says, bravely.

  Nicole’s eyes danced the entire time she told the story about the boy in the bell tower. Her concept of on-screen sexuality had changed over the past couple of years; for the first time we are given a glimpse of a more mature actress, one who understands the nature of the connection between her brain and her vagina. If the truth is told, no one talks about sex better than Nicole Kidman; utilizing those skills, she would make an amazing dominatrix at a dead poets’ society.

  The movie ends predictably enough, but not before Thandiwe is seen topless in bed with Danny, a surprise since the actress was only fifteen at the time.

  Flirting was not released in the United States until 1991. For the most part, reviewers were enthusiastic about the film. Wrote Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun Times: “So often we settle for noise and movement from the movie screen, for stupid people indulging unworthy fantasies. Only rare movies like Flirting remind us that the movies are capable of providing us with the touch of other lives, that when all the conditions are right we can grow a little and learn a little, just like the people on the screen. This movie is joyous, wise and life-affirming, and certainly one of the year’s best films.”

  Flirting is a film to “make you believe in love again,” wrote Michael Morrison for the Edinburgh University Film Society. “It’s all been done before,” he wrote. “But this film is refreshingly original. Flirting is intelligent, witty, tender and beautifully understated.”

  Hal Hinson, writing for the Washington Post, called the film “brilliant.” He praised one “touch and kiss” scene and wrote, “Every event has that urgent desperation of adolescent hyperbole when every sensation is a new one, and so the whole movie has this drunk-dizzy, head-over-heals quality.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Australian filmmaker Phillip Noyce began making short films and documentaries as a teenager, but he was twenty-six before he made his first feature, Backroads (1977). He followed that up the following year with Newsfront, a film about the movie newsreel industry; that effort won him Australian awards for Best Film, Director, and Screenplay. For the next decade, he did a couple of feature films, but for the most part, he worked in television, most successfully on “The Hitchhiker.”

  When he was chosen to be the director for Dead Clam, a thriller based on Charles Williams’s novel, he knew he had his hands on something special. Technically, it would be a challenge to film, he knew that, but that was the least of his problems. Since it was basically a three-person story—two men and a woman—everything would ride on casting. A mistake there would nullify even the best camera work and direction.

  For the female lead, the role of Rae Ingram, Noyce and the producers considered a number of “name” actresses such as Debra Winger and Sigourney Weaver, but the more they discussed it among themselves, the more Nicole Kidman’s name came up. Her performance in “Vietnam” had affected Noyce greatly.

  After watching the emotional radio scene in which Nicole carries six minutes of the action simply by virtue of her facial expressions, he was so moved by her performance that he wept. She had never attempted a role as complicated and as psychological demanding as the one required in Dead Calm, but he had no doubts about her ability to handle it, despite her youthful age.

  Veteran actor Sam Neill, then forty years of age, was chosen to play opposite Nicole as Rae Ingram’s husband John Ingram. The Irish-born actor had made nearly twenty feature films, including Omen III: The Final Conflict and The Good Wife—and appeared in about as many television series—so he was considered a safe choice.

  When it came to the second male lead, the villainous role of Hughie Warriner, the Dead Calm brain trust decided to go with Billy Zane, another newcomer. The American-born Zane had appeared in only two feature films, Critters (1986) and Back to the Future (1985), but he had done several television shows, “The Case of the Hillside Stranglers” and “Police Story: Monster Manor,” that had demonstrated a propensity for creating offbeat characters. At twenty-one, dark and emotionally unpredictable, he would be an effective counter-point foil for Nicole.

  As Dead Calm begins, Nicole’s character, Rae Ingram, is in an automobile accident that kills her young child. Disconsolate over the loss, she and her husband, John, take a long cruise so that they can be alone with each other. Three weeks at sea, they spot their first ship. Dead in the water, it appears to be deserted. As they stare at the schooner, they spot a man in a dingy rowing toward their ship. When he comes aboard, he tells them that his name is Hughie Warriner. There was a disaster aboard the schooner, he explains, and all five crew members died of food poisoning. To make matters worse, he insists that the
schooner is sinking. All he wants is to get as far away as possible.

  When Hughie goes to sleep, John rows over to check out the ship. What he discovers alarms him and he heads back to his ship, but before he can reach it Hughie knocks Rae unconscious and takes over the ship. John makes a desperate move to get aboard and, to his horror, he fails. As the ship sails away with Rae unconscious and Hughie at the wheel, John returns to the schooner and tries to get the ship operational again.

  Rae is horrified when she awakens and sees that the schooner is no longer in sight. “Would you just tell me one thing?” she asks. “I just need to know if that boat is sinking.”

  “No,” Hughie answers, looking at his watch. “Past tense would do, but, yeah, it is. Why don’t you believe me?”

  “Yeah, I believe you. ‘Course I do. That’s why we’ve got to go back. To get John.”

  “There’s no going back.”

  Rae locates the schooner on the radar screen, but the radio contact with John is only one way (he can hear her, but she can’t hear him). He uses clicks to talk to her. One of the auditory delights of the movie occurs when she talks to him on the radio, her whispers of “Are you there?” cutting straight to the bone.

  In an attempt to get control of the situation, Rae allows Hughie to make love to her. Whether the sex is a seduction on her part or a form of rape is left up to the viewer to determine. Nicole is nude during this scene, her by-then famous posterior exposed for maximum benefit.

  Once Hughie lets down his guard, Rae drugs him and then tries to load a shotgun, only they end up fighting over it. He tries to choke her, but passes out from the drugs. While he is unconscious, Rae ties him up and nails down the hatch to the cabin. She tries to start the engine, but it won’t start. She hoists the sails and turns the boat around. There is more drama as Hughie gets free and goes after her once again. She wounds him with a spear gun and sets him adrift in a rubber raft. Of course, this being a thriller, there is more action to come.

  Nicole’s physical acting in this movie is superb. It was really the first time she had been asked to display anger, panic, and resolve with her body—and she rose to the task, even in those scenes, so uncharacteristic of Nicole, in which she had to go toe-to-toe with Hughie in physical combat.

  “She was absolutely focused on that picture, which is remarkable for a twenty-year-old,” says assistant director Stuart Freeman. “She handled everything like a trooper [and] under pretty hard conditions. I did a picture with Vanessa Redgraves in Alaska many years ago and Nicole reminds me so much of Vanessa in the tenacity to get the performance. She’s so focused on getting a performance that she is unaware of being cold or being roughed up because she is so focused on the performance. That was in 1987—now the world knows how focused she is.”

  That is high praise coming from an assistant director as experienced as Freeman. Born in Great Britain, where he began his film career, he moved to Australia in 1981; by 2002 he had worked on over sixty feature films in twenty-nine countries and had completed more than two hundred hours of television.

  Although Freeman had lived in Australia six years before production began on Dead Calm—and he was familiar with Nicole’s work—he had never met her. That occurred in the producer’s office in Sydney while they were in pre-production. They did not meet again until everyone arrived on location in Queensland, a resort area in northeastern Australia just inside the Great Barrier Reef.

  The actors and film crew stayed on Hamilton Island for the duration of the twelve-week shoot, living in chalets and block apartments usually rented to tourists. The island is one of the most popular in the area and features a high-rise hotel and a jet airstrip with direct access to Australia’s major cities.

  They knew from the start that it would be a difficult shoot—most of the action takes place aboard a schooner and working with boats is sometimes as worrisome as working with animals—but there was no way during pre-production for them to prepare for their worst enemy, bad weather.

  “We shot it when the trade winds were full on,” says Freeman. “When we did the storm sequence, we actually sidled out and caught the edge of a storm, which was happening daily. That was the remarkable thing about it—the storm sequences were virtually for real.”

  Working at sea is one of the hardest things to do on film, he explains. “It doesn’t matter what happens; if you miss the mark, you can’t just put the brakes on—you have to turn around 360 degrees to come back again and you are subject to the wind, the waves, the elements. The most difficult thing [for the actors] was being able to concentrate on the performance when everything else was against them, the way the weather was treating us.”

  When the weather was bad, they simply filmed on a set they built on the island. They constructed it from scratch around a seventy-by-forty-foot tank that was filled with water. Buoyed by empty oil drums, the sets floated on the water, thus providing a sense of realism. When the actors walked, the make-believe boat rocked and rolled, generating a realistic movement comparable to what they would have experienced aboard the ship.

  The first acting challenge Nicole faced was as a car accident victim. Lying in the emergency room of a hospital, tubes connected to her body and her face battered and bruised, she convincingly portrayed a mother who had just lost her only child.

  “When a good actor focuses, they become that character,” observes Freeman. “Nicole mentally put herself into that position. Obviously, Phil Noyce would have set the scene, the tempo, but it doesn’t matter what the director does because in the long run it has to be the ability of the actor to pull it off. It comes down to ability. She showed that amazing ability at such a tender age. In terms of the style of acting in such an oppressive, if you like, psychological aspect of the movie, it was astounding that she had the ability. I’ve often wondered if she knew she had the ability.”

  Another tough scene to make realistic was the sex scene between Nicole and Zane, which was filmed on a set designed to look like the interior of the ship. Nicole’s character initiated the seduction, perhaps with the intention of making him trust her, but shortly after it began (she removed her shirt and he ripped away her shorts), she left him to go up on deck, only to return to complete the act. The scene was tough on Nicole, not because of the nudity—she had appeared nude in movies before—but because of the emotions involved, the fact that she would be having sex with a man she despised.

  “All the crew that had to be there were there,” says Freeman. “Everyone respected [her feelings] and that was another thing that she handled superbly. Those that have to be there to do their job, do their job, and part of her job was to do that scene. So it was a matter of doing it and doing it professionally. Again, for her tender years, she was so mature.”

  Although Nicole was somewhat shy in her personal relations with the other actors and crew, when it came to the work product, she was surprisingly assertive. “I remember there were many times when there were discussions about a particular scene that she and Phil would have a very, very deep and meaningful conversation while we were doing lighting or getting the positions right,” says Freeman. “Sometimes they would go off and just discuss the performance.”

  The subject matter of the film was not the only difficult consideration. Simply dealing with the sea and its many moods was time consuming. Typically, the crew and actors put in fifteen-hour days. Already located a good twenty miles from the mainland, they had to travel an hour by boat from Hamilton Island to reach the lea of another island, where most of the filming took place.

  “We had a boat for makeup, support boats, divers, people in the water, camera boats—and our catering was brought out by boat,” says Freeman. “We had a massive boat for our base and we had other boats to take us out—it was absolutely colossal.”

  On weekends, everyone let down their hair and partied on Hamilton Island. No one ever thought about leaving the island to go to the mainland. “There were fun times, singing and partying, but nothing extraordinary,” recal
ls Freeman. The only person who did not seem to relax was Nicole’s co-star Billy Zane. “He was very intense in those days,” says Freeman. “The part he was playing, he put his heart and soul into it, and it was hard for him to get out of it.”

  Nicole had a different take on Zane’s apparent isolation. “Phil Noyce manipulated us in certain ways, so that Sam [Neill] and I got on very, very well, and Billy, well, we didn’t get on,” she told Rolling Stone. "But Billy and I were playing characters that were in conflict constantly. And I think there was an unspoken agreement between us that we weren’t going to get on. I don’t think you can be buddy-buddy with someone you’re meant to be struggling with, and feeling so much animosity towards.”

  To keep in character, Nicole made it a point to be in bed by 10 p.m. each night. For Zane, who remained in character twenty-four hours a day, Nicole’s standoffishness was a challenge and he constantly exhorted Nicole to come out and play past her bedtime. It annoyed her because, as she later admitted, she secretly wanted to be the wild one.

  Freeman’s strongest memories about the film revolve around Nicole’s relationship with his daughters—Rachel and Joanna, who were four and five years of age at the time of filming. He recalls that Nicole would complete terrifying scenes in which she was fighting for her life, then she would sit down to watch the dailies and invite Rachel and Joanna to sit on her lap. It was an amazing sight to Freeman, who was not used to seeing actresses change emotional gears so quickly. It touched him to see his daughters cling to her and have their affections reciprocated.

  “I have nothing but respect for that girl,” says Freeman. “She’s a very favorite lady of mine because of the things she had to do [in the film] and the conditions she had to do them in. When we saw the dailies and she sat the girls on her knees, you wouldn’t know that she’d been putting on that ordeal the way she was smiling and playing with my girls. She’s an amazing woman . . . Nicole Kidman is one of my happiest memories. I have nothing but respect for her.”