Tinkering

by John Clarke

  Day 9

  Trouble at mill. We’re filming above the roof of Murray’s house when the remote focus breaks down. This slows us and will require a rescheduling of the shots we’ve lost. We can’t really afford this and must make time by shooting other scenes faster. Inside the house, there are about four thousand of us in three rooms. This is actor Darren Casey’s first day. He has one scene. He is quite worried. He arrives, gets it right first time and leaves.

  Over lunch there is a meeting about getting the roof to come off Murray’s house in post-production by shooting the preceding scene in a particular way and then taking the shots into a computer environment and using animatronics. I nod a fair bit and maintain eye contact with Laszlo and Chris. They seem happy so I relax and have a cup of tea with the gaffer, Darryl, who has subjected his best boy, the noble Anthony, to continuous low-level flak over the performance of the All Blacks in the World Cup. The Wallabies/All Blacks semifinal is on this weekend. Ant and I look forward to it. Bring it on. Let Darryl’s humiliation begin.

  Day 12

  The result of the rugby is not important. It is a childish game which has never really interested me. More pressingly, as we are getting the shot of the house that is required in order to do the computer whizzbangery with the roof, an enormous storm hits and we rethink the afternoon so we can use the rain. It’s always messy to change the schedule on the run and I’m sure there are problems but no one complains and what we get is very good indeed, with David inventing his dialogue as he goes. We may discover something David can’t do but it hasn’t looked like happening yet.

  Day 15

  On Day 15 we shoot Darren’s first scenes in the office. He has five of them. He is quite worried. He arrives, gets them all right first time and leaves. Deborah and David agree to shoot three scenes in one great sweeping progress featuring three separate arguments and using the full length of the office. They eat it alive and it is not until the following day we learn there is a hair in the gate. This means a strand of hair has been caught in the camera as we were filming. The footage is unusable and we must reshoot it.

  In the afternoon we’re in a hotel in Clifton Hill shooting a Labor Party branch meeting, a Beckett scene, rich in boredom. Chris has hung a large yellow tarp up behind the stage with ‘True Believers Karaoke Night’ on it in red, David sits on the stage and Laszlo has put the camera down low to David’s right, looking up. It’s a beautiful shot and I wander over from the split and tell Laszlo it looks great. ‘When I was a young cameraman in Budapest,’ he tells me, ‘that is how you had to shoot the Russian leaders. It makes them look big, strong, important.’ I compliment David on his playing of the scene and his eyes soften: ‘My father was a friend of Fred Daly,’ he says. ‘I grew up licking envelopes in Fred Daly’s electoral office. I’ve been to meetings like this since I was a kid.’

  We finish early today so David can go the AFI Awards where he is the red-hot favourite to be named best actor for his remarkable performance in Getting Square. Like many of us in the industry, David is concerned about the likely effects of the amusingly named ‘Free Trade Agreement’. I flick the tellie on when I get home and see him mention this in a gracious acceptance speech.

  The following morning we reshoot the ‘hair in the gate’ shot. One of the actors asks if he can have his photo taken with David. ‘I’m sorry to have to do this to you David,’ he says as they pose. ‘But I work in the building industry and nobody believes I’m doing a film with David Wenham. I got time off to do this scene the other day. But when I said I had to come back and do it again because there was a hair in the gate, no one knew what I was talking about. So this will prove I’m actually doing a film.’ After shooting the studio parts of the roof scenes at Murray’s house, we go outside and shoot Angelo Agnelli taking a call from Murray in the company of a young bit part actor called Steve Bracks who moonlights as the Victorian State Premier.

  Day 19

  On Day 19 we shoot the enormous accident sequence. We start at dusk. We have agreed to get certain parts of the job done by certain times, so as not to inconvenience nearby horse stables, residents and local businesses, so the logistics are somewhat character-building. We have tall water towers and tankers for simulating the rain, we have two yellow Renaults, both expendable, a massive crane to drop one of them into the water, a team of police divers to go down and reattach the car so it can be pulled back out again; we have two cameras, lights on both sides of the river, we have the art department dressing ramps and bits of ground and cars. And we have Chris’s dog Ethel who will feature as the stray dog who sticks with Murray through the rest of the film.

  We drop the car in the water. Great. Move on. Our guide is still the drawing Chris did in the office. Laszlo works out how best to shoot these sequences and all night we shoot the various parts of the accident. It is nearly dawn and Chris is walking Ethel toward the car as David tiptoes along in clothes dripping from the river. Ethel walks gently and cautiously, listening to Chris but completely in sympathy with Murray as if taking her cue from David. When they get to the car and the sense of danger has lifted, Ethel jumps in and sits in the offside driver’s seat. The car drives off. Perfect. The big impossible night-shoot is all done and we’ve got several extra shots which weren’t in the schedule. This is a remarkable outfit.

  Monday

  I go into the editing room where I sit with Wayne Hyett, who has been joining the footage up day by day as we’ve been shooting and already has an assembly which currently runs 103 minutes. We’ll need to take about ten minutes out of it and we have a couple of problems but they’re addressable. When Murray swims to shore and scrambles up the bank to safety after his car accident, for example, we need to shorten the sequence slightly and this is hard to do because there’s nothing else we can cut to. We can’t cut from David coming up in the middle of the water to David reaching the shore. We can’t cut from David getting out of the water to David at the top of the bank. We need a couple of extra shots of Ethel to give ourselves something to alter the pace with, and we’re still waiting on the computer miracle whereby the roof comes off the house. The shots we need after shooting officially finishes are called ‘pickups’. These are scheduled and shot. Ethel looks great in the new shots and we can redesign that section of the film.

  We meet with the post-production sound team and with Jeremy Smith, who will write the score. Jeremy was previously a Hunter and Collector and has already begun beavering away at Murray music in the basement of his house in Fitzroy.

  Wayne and I begin to whittle. The odd scene disappears altogether. Sometimes we don’t need the beginning of a scene. Sometimes we can get out a bit earlier at the end. We try some things, find they don’t work and have to put humpty dumpty together again. We get the duration down to about ninety-four minutes and we show it to a few people and listen carefully to what they say. We also show it to the investors, to Channel 7 and Southern Star, to the Film Finance Corporation and to Film Victoria. Wayne starts taking out the temporary music he has been using as a guide, and putting Jeremy’s music in. The post-production schedule is being run by Colleen Milling, who should be running Telstra. The service is excellent, the technical backup is immediate and the customer is always right. The computerised removal of Murray’s roof works brilliantly, Jeremy gets his final music cues done and suddenly we’re in a sound suite mixing the final picture.

  Sunday 18 April

  We have hired one of the cinemas in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Federation Square and have invited the cast and crew to a screening. The screening turns into a very satisfactory afternoon in fine company.

  Sunday 30 June

  Stiff goes to air and wins the ratings.

  The Howard Apology

  Delivered by John Howard on 3 July 2000 on The Games

  Good evening. My name is John Howard and I’m speaking to you from Sydney, Australia, host city of the year 2000 Olympic Games.

  At this important time, and in an atmosphere
of international goodwill and national pride, we here in Australia—all of us—would like to make a statement before all nations.

  Australia, like many countries in the new world, is intensely proud of what it has achieved in the past 200 years. We are a vibrant and resourceful people. We share a freedom born in the abundance of nature, the richness of the earth, the bounty of the sea. We are the world’s biggest island. We have the world’s longest coastline. We have more animal species than any other country. Two-thirds of the world’s birds are native to Australia. We are one of the few countries on earth with our own sky. We are a fabric woven of many colours and it is this that gives us our strength.

  However, these achievements have come at great cost. We have been here for 200 years but before that, there was a people living here. For 40,000 years they lived in a perfect balance with the land. There were many Aboriginal nations, just as there were many Indian nations in North America and across Canada, as there were many Maori tribes in New Zealand and Incan and Mayan peoples in South America. These indigenous Australians lived in areas as different from one another as Scotland is from Ethiopia. They lived in an area the size of Western Europe. They did not even have a common language. Yet they had their own laws, their own beliefs, their own ways of understanding.

  We destroyed this world. We often did not mean to do it. Our forebears, fighting to establish themselves in what they saw as a harsh environment, were creating a national economy. But the Aboriginal world was decimated. A pattern of disease and dispossession was established. Alcohol was introduced. Social and racial differences were allowed to become fault lines. Aboriginal families were broken up. Sadly, Aboriginal health and education are responsibilities we have still yet to address successfully.

  I speak for all Australians in expressing a profound sorrow to the Aboriginal people. I am sorry. We are sorry. Let the world know and understand, that it is with this sorrow, that we as a nation will grow and seek a better, a fairer and a wiser future. Thank you.

  Doorstop Poems

  A series of poems made from verbatim transcripts of interviews given by the nation’s leaders. These are best read between the lines.

  John Howard

  The Tao of Howard

  Look, I have said all

  I am going to say

  About that.

  Don’t ask

  The same question

  Fifteen different ways.

  18 September 1997

  Alexander Downer

  My Greatest Hero

  I don’t know.

  Isn’t that

  An incredibly difficult

  Question?

  It would have to be,

  You’d have to ask

  Yourself the

  Question:

  Who is the person

  Who’s had the most positive

  Influence on the whole of the

  Millennium?

  And,

  You know,

  It is tempting to say

  Don Bradman

  But I think the honest

  Truth has to be somebody like

  Caxton

  Who developed the printing press because without

  Printing

  Then the whole of civilisation would have turned out to be

  Completely

  Different.

  30 December 1998

  Philip Ruddock

  A Plea for Understanding

  If desperation

  Is born out of a desire

  To achieve a migration outcome that you’re not entitled to,

  We’re dealing with

  Desperate people.

  Let’s understand

  What we’re dealing with

  Here. We have a group of people who go out there

  To release people who are lawfully detained,

  To breach our laws,

  They take children with them and

  They hold themselves out to be fulfilling some

  Public duty,

  Under the name of ‘There are no borders’

  Or like euphemisms.

  30 March 2002

  Simon Crean

  If…

  Well, they

  Shouldn’t be there,

  That’s the starting point.

  And if

  Labor was in office, they Wouldn’t be there.

  This war is wrong, and we Shouldn’t be part of it.

  And if

  I was Prime Minister today, I would bring them home.

  But

  The reality is,

  The reality is

  I’m not the Prime Minister…

  27 February 2002

  John Howard

  The Explosion of the Water Tank

  Another lady

  Who I embraced

  Said—

  We’ve lost our house but

  We’re all safe

  And sound and we can rebuild it,

  We’re all safe.

  A man,

  A veteran

  Of World War II

  Showed me his charred

  Medals and we

  Sort of

  Resolved to make certain that he got some new ones

  And he got them replaced. There were many stories

  That are so touching.

  And freakish stories

  Of one house under an ember

  Attack

  And somehow

  Or other

  It led to an explosion of the

  Water tank,

  Which put

  The fire

  Out.

  19 January 2003

  Quiz Answers

  January 2010

  We had an excellent response to last month’s quiz and we congratulate everyone who entered. The winner was Robin Vale of Robinvale. For the record, the correct answers were:

  1. Climate Change. (We’d also accept Global Warming, John Howard, Eleven Years, Nothing.)

  2. Punt Road. With a huge international effort and determination on all sides, there is some prospect of a solution in the Middle East.

  3. ‘To be or not to be’ (Shakespeare), ‘I have a dream’ (Martin Luther King), ‘This was their finest hour’ (Churchill), ‘The budget’s buggered’ (Wayne Swan).

  4. Stage three and a half water restrictions. Peter Pan and the unicorn are imaginary figures for children.

  5. Brendan Nelson. He was CEO until Malcolm Turnbull made a successful cash offer for the party in late 2008.

  6. Kevin Rudd. More work is required on the voice, the rhythm and the content but otherwise the Obama impression is coming along nicely.

  7. There were two deliberate mistakes in the announcement: ‘Bailout’ and ‘Property Developers’.

  8. False. There were only seven wonders of the ancient world and Rex Hunt was not one of them.

  9. False. It is not an inventory of Scottish vegetation. He played The Joker in Batman.

  10. False. It is not because he can’t get another job. It is due to a selfless obsession with representing the good folk of Higgins.

  11. False. George W. Bush had no second language. His first language will be known when the CIA files are opened.

  12. False. Hussein is the name of the Jordanian royal family. Usain Bolt is a rapid pedestrian.

  13. True. When Jelena Dokic appeared at the 2002 Australian Open she was booed. When she appeared at the 2009 Australian Open she was photographed wearing a flag and her opponent was booed. The media were present on both occasions.

  14. False. Melbourne’s Public Transport system is not a raffle. A raffle doesn’t get cancelled twice a week, catch fire, bend, buckle, break, melt, or require a billion dollars’ worth of infrastructure.

  15. True. Work stopped on the desalination plant in winter because the site was underwater. (This only happens every year.)

  16. False. John Brumby is not an acknowledged international expert on water management.

  17. Ron Walker. The Grand Prix. $4
5 million a year.

  18. Andrew Symonds. All the others are boofheads.

  19. No it does not sell toilets. A convenience store is so called because its prices are sufficiently high to make it convenient for the owners.

  20. The Liberal Party. The Brady Bunch fell apart when the ratings dropped.

  21. The Howard Years. Paradise Lost is a poem by John Milton.

  22. Peter Garrett. Everything Midas touched turned to gold.

  23. Philip Ruddock. The others are all garden ornaments.

  24. Kevin Andrews. Dr Haneef will see you now.

  25. Jeff Kennett. Ivan the Terrible was called Ivan.

  26. Tony Abbott. The Victoria Cross is a bravery award.

  27. George Pell. The others are Darth Vader and Anna Wintour.

  28. Farnsie, Barnsie, Warnie, Tubby, Boonie, Buddy, Gillie and Punter. Ian Frazer is an immunologist, best known for his work on the development of a cervical cancer vaccine.

  29. False. There is an economy. It comes down the chimney once a year if you believe really hard. Perhaps if all the children join hands.

  30. Correct. Hedge funds are monies collected in order to facilitate the purchase of herbaceous borders.

  November 2010

  We had a fantastic response to our last quiz and we thank everyone who entered. The winner was Violet Town, of Violet Town. For the record, the answers were as follows:

  1. True. Penny Wong agrees with the ALP’s policy position against Penny Wongs.

  2. True. John Howard was surprised that the African and Asian countries didn’t want him as Vice President of the International Cricket Council.

  3. False. The ABC is a non-commercial network. The man who is still in awe of the sea, the conductor of coloured bubbles and the woman who pretends to be a novelist are not commercials. A commercial has a purpose.

  4. False. It is not The Dill Solution. It is called The Dili Solution. It is essentially the Pacific Solution but with auto focus, image stabilisation and a better zoom.