Twelve months earlier I had headed to East Timor to meet and attempt to convince Nobel Laureate and President José Ramos-Horta that making the film in his country, in the places where the tragic events in the film had actually happened, was worth supporting.
This trip and meeting were made more complex because the screenplay depicted Ramos-Horta as the much younger man he was in 1975, an infamous Che Guevara–like revolutionary, consummate womanizer and formidable diplomat.
Refusing to live in a more formal presidential palace, Ramos-Horta’s home is a far more humble traditional structure, just east of the heart of the nation’s capital, Dili, and a five-minute walk to the beach. Six months later, a failed attack would see him take three bullets in the gut in the very home we arrived at to argue our case.
I had sent the screenplay ahead, uncensored (despite my better judgment that softening the edges might have made our task easier), together with a DVD starring the actor we proposed to play his younger self.
‘This actor,’ he began immediately after we arrived, ‘I have shown his film to some close friends, women. “Is he good looking enough to play me?” I asked them. “No”, they all agreed. “Certainly not.” George Clooney I was thinking would be better, what do you think?’ A cheeky, playful twinkle in his eye betrayed his mischief.
He was curious about our first impressions of East Timor. The impact of Indonesia’s savage withdrawal in 1999 was everywhere: sprawling displaced-persons’ camps surrounded the airport, United Nations and Australian troops patrolled the streets, almost the entire infrastructure remained damaged in some way. At the airport in Darwin that very day, we told him, the Australian government had raised the security advice for travel to East Timor to only one step beneath post-invasion Baghdad.
The travel warnings clearly frustrated him; they discouraged tourism and investment. The US warnings were the same, he said. East Timor was, as we found while filming, as safe as Ramos-Horta had promised us that night over dinner. In one minor public joke to make a point he had posted an official warning to East Timorese travelling to New York: ‘Please be advised that if you are dark of skin, using the subway in certain parts of New York is unsafe.’
The shoot would require permission to film in the remote town of Balibo, where five young journalists had been murdered by invading Indonesian troops to conceal the truth of a covert military incursion. Ramos-Horta had been in Balibo in 1975 with the journalists and had warned them of the dangers before heading back to Dili to await the full-scale Indonesian invasion that would happen by sea and air only a few months later. The world would turn a blind eye.
Ironically, in the heart of Balibo, a statue looks down on the town square where the journalists were killed. A relic from the Indonesian occupation, it depicts a man breaking chains, the shackles of colonial occupation. After 400 years of Portuguese rule, the Timorese enjoyed only nine days of independence before Indonesia claimed this small nation as its own. Ramos-Horta offered that night to tear it down if it would make filming easier, and gave us the permission we needed to move ahead.
Four hours’ drive from Dili, Balibo sits on a strategically high vantage point looking down towards the Ombai Strait and the border with Indonesian West Timor. A 400-year-old fort built by the Portuguese continues to take military advantage of this extraordinary location, with Australian troops stationed there in 1999.
On the evening before we recreated the Indonesian invasion of Balibo and murder of the journalists, Lieutenant Colonel Sabika turned up with Ramos-Horta’s blessing, together with over a hundred of his troops. Not only would they help depict the invasion by playing the invading soldiers, Sabika himself would be our guide. As a young commander in the East Timor army in 1975, he had defended Balibo on the morning of the invasion. His troops camped the night in the fort.
Looking down towards the sea at dusk, Sabika showed us where the boats had been positioned, where the troops had landed and the direction they had attacked from. It was humbling to stand there with a man who thirty-five years before had attempted to defend this town.
We slept that night next to a small church beneath the fort; the five actors chose to stay in the house the journalists had slept in the night before they died. On the wall at the front of that building, recovered beneath layers of paint, a picture of the Australian flag has been framed. The journalists had hoped it would afford them some protection.
Together, before morning, we all headed up to the fort to prepare to film.
Never before had the idea of sunrise held such significance on set. A coronial inquest had explored the reasons the journalists had remained after Sabika and his men had retreated on that fateful day. The journalists’ 16-millimeter cameras required enough light to get a reasonable exposure to capture the footage of the invasion. They had perhaps stayed until the sun had only just broken the horizon in order to film – but by then it was too late, and they were murdered shortly after.
Cameras ready, we too waited for that moment, a soft light only just revealing the landscape. Amongst the many moments in filmmaking that are repetitive and dull, the more sublime moments, rare as they are, can be extraordinary. That morning remains the most moving of my career.
Standing by on that hill with the Australian and Timorese cast and crew poised to film, Sabika’s troops waiting down below to recreate the attack, the anticipation was overwhelming.
The sun broke the horizon, and we began to film.
The Broome Circuit
AARON PEDERSEN
Aaron Pedersen is an Arrernte/Arabana man from Alice Springs. Whilst growing up, Aaron believed many images of Indigenous Australians on television were negatively stereotypical. After initially training as a journalist at the Australian Broadcasting Commission in Melbourne, Aaron transitioned into acting. Through his work on Wildside, Water Rats, MDA, Territorians, Grass Roots, Queen of Hearts, BlackJack and The Secret Life of Us, Aaron has been able to champion the changing representation of Indigenous people in Australia. In 2007, he won a Deadly Award for Male Actor of the Year. Most recently, Aaron was the co-lead in the Seven Network police drama, City Homicide, and was the lead in series one and two of the SBS miniseries, The Circuit, set in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
It was late 2008 and we were nearing the end of a long and arduous three-month shoot in the Western Australian Kimberleys. We had been filming the second series of The Circuit in and around a very hot and humid Broome. From the very first ‘turn over’ the shoot felt heavier and somewhat harder.
During the shoot Broome slowly became blanketed by humidity. The buildup was so intense at times it was like working in a sauna. The weight just fell off cast and crew. Some dropped fifteen to twenty kilos. There was very little relief.
The buildup was a bonus in some way because it added extra weight to the minefield of emotionally charged moments that were woven into the stories. It brought rawness to the characters’ journeys and life to the world of The Circuit. Its very presence became a character in the show. Every day it was there.
It was the second-to-last day and it was sweltering. We were located about fifty kilometers out of Broome filming amongst the stillness of an isolated roadhouse. It was unbearably hot especially under the lights. Some days it felt like I was being baked. This was definitely one of those days.
It was late in the afternoon and most of the cast and crew from the main unit had wrapped. For them the tireless journey was finally over. Like a shot they were back in Broome, hungering to get back to the cool ocean breeze that was to bring them relief. No doubt they were happy that their day was done. I reckoned they were down the beach soaking their sweat-drenched souls in the soothing salt water. I would have been. The crew set the bar very high. In my eyes they were best on ground.
The sun hadn’t quite set on this story for me and several of the others just yet. We had one more call sheet to complete. Some might say that we were the unlucky ones, that we drew the short straw. I didn’t think so. I was there
at the beginning and I was keen to be there at the end. I had a good feeling about the last day’s shoot.
The small convoy of cast and crew hit the road and headed further away from the luxurious coastline of Broome. We were heading to a community that was inland some three hours. Some might say that the community was in the middle of nowhere. But it wasn’t, it was where it should be.
Along the way we knocked off some driving scenes for my character, Drew Ellis. There were several important moments we still had to get in the can. Some were lighthearted but the rest were soul-searching. As I was actor and director, the last day was going to be the hardest shoot day of all.
One in particular was a pickup scene for the first episode about deaths in custody. The character of Clarrie (LeRoy Parsons) was found hanging in his prison cell. Drew had lost a good mate. How was he to deal with it? There were tears. This was to set the scene for what was to come.
It was our final night together and we were camping out. Cast and crew were spending the night sleeping under the stars. We all bedded down for the night, some wrapped in their swags, some in the dirt, and some on makeshift beds on top of the four-wheel drives. It was the right way to say goodbye to the country and each other. It was good for the soul.
The last day arrived and the early morning sun was already making a statement. You could feel the temperature building up. The air was hotter out here. It made breathing hard work. Little were we to know that it was going to be the hottest and most punishing day of all, reaching a staggering sixty-seven degrees Celsius in the sun.
Everybody knew that, as an actor, I was going to take my character Drew to some emotional places that day. Drew was heading back to his homeland with the old people. Leading the way would be the man who had found him, Jack Stallion (Phillip Green), followed by his uncle Lionel (Jimmy Edgar) and his father’s youngest brother, Mick (Tony Briggs). He was going to walk on his country for the first time with the men in his family. What was this going to do to him?
The one thing that I didn’t get to do during the course of the shoot was a ‘location recce.’ I hadn’t seen ‘the homelands.’ I was flying blind, just like Drew. We were both going to see it for the first time. Maybe that was a good thing. I wasn’t sure what we were in for. Anything could happen.
It was a different part of the Kimberley. The land’s character changed dramatically. This country was proud and silent. There were no pristine beaches out here, nothing close to it. The landscape felt very familiar to me, strong mountainous red cliffs like the kind that I had grown up with in Alice Springs. The only difference was the hundreds of majestic boab trees. They stood tall like guardians on the land. Maybe they were there guarding us. Guarding me.
We reached a small waterhole hidden amongst the cliffs. It was to be the place where Drew would find himself. What was this going to look like? What were we going to see? Nobody knew. Not even me.
My last piece of direction before the scene started was to ask old Jack Stallion to call to country. I needed to hear from the elders. This was to be my trigger. The scene was in motion. The land filled with silent pride. There was no stopping it now.
It all went quiet. Old Jack Stallion called once. ‘Coooeee!!!!’ His ancient voiced echoed off the jagged cliffs and pierced all who were present. It got me right inside me. I could feel my own heart beat. I could hear myself breathing. It was like I was outside myself. It was happening. Drew was connecting with his homeland.
The old man followed up again with four or five more sharp calls. Each time it was louder. ‘Cooeeee!!!!’ Shivers snaked up my spine. I literally felt the country rise up from inside me, something broke. Uncontrollably I started to shake and cry. I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling it. The crew were feeling it too. We were all connecting with something, somewhere. The old men watched on. They’d been waiting for this moment. The country had found Drew.
India: A Family Portrait
STEPHANIE MARCH
Stephanie March is an actress, activist and dedicated traveler. She is best known for her role as Assistant Deputy Attorney Alexandra Cabot on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Other television appearances include Grey’s Anatomy and 30 Rock. She has also appeared in the films The Treatment, Mr & Mrs Smith, The Invention of Lying and Head of State, as well as several Broadway and off-Broadway productions. She is a contributing editor of Fathom at www.fathomaway.com, and a graduate of Northwestern University. Stephanie resides in New York City – when she is not plotting her next getaway.
Three years ago I went on a family vacation. Three fun-loving, cocktail-slugging blondes from Texas indulging in a girls’ trip – my mother, sister Charlotte and me. We wanted to shop, have tea, take in a show and make fun of other relatives. We decided to do this in India.
Group travel evolves into the same basic hierarchy no matter the participants or the destination. One of the players is always In Charge. This person chooses the destination and accommodations and maps a basic itinerary of each day’s events. The second person is First Mate. This person brings along guidebooks and sunscreen, suggests interesting dinners or sightseeing adventures, and is helpful to In Charge in realizing her perfect vision of the trip. First Mate’s secret powers lie in her ability to shape the trip to her liking without ever engaging in direct confrontation with In Charge. Grumbler is the individual who complains in a passive-aggressive fashion throughout the trip without ever actually making an effort to improve things. Grumbler wants vegetarian options. Grumbler is hot/knew we should have turned left/makes a big deal about brushing her teeth with bottled water. This dynamic has even greater meaning when the travelers in question are intimately related and have thirty years of familial power structure embedded in their DNA. Taking a family trip is sort of like this: imagine you are asked to sew a quilt for a king-sized bed. Now imagine the quilt has to be made completely of Saran Wrap. Good luck.
We reconnoitered with an overnight stutter step in Delhi (Charlotte had been in India for three weeks on her own). We took twelve hours to wash the hair, down a few gin and tonics (our preferred antimalarial), and repack the bags for our journey to Udaipur the next morning. Upon arrival at the jazzy, Western airport hotel, I discovered that my beloved film camera had died a mysterious death. No new battery, no new film, no tender wiping of gears and lenses could bring it back to life. Refusing to resign it to the ignoble grave of the hotel’s garbage can, I toted it through the rest of the trip wrapped in my nightgown. And I commandeered my mother’s camera, using the unassailable logic that I took much better pictures than she did (years of Christmas cards bore me out on this). Then I got busy documenting the hell out of our Indian adventure. At that moment I was In Charge. I knew exactly how to conduct this portion of the trip. I was in the arts, for heaven’s sake. My whole livelihood was picture and story. I knew what I was doing – so just take your smiley, out-of-focus, stupid shot of the bougainvillea and Charlotte and me and step aside, all right?
In Udaipur I forced us into all manner of Jewel in the Crown–inspired tableaux. Mom and Char with a distant palace and dusky sunset behind them. Mom and Char on a cheery, leaky boat puttering out to a hotel smack in the middle of a lake. Mom and Char gazing behind marble purdah screens carved like lace. Mom insisted on taking the camera for a shot of Charlotte and me on camels and I immediately groaned about how badly she was going to frame the shot. The minute I got down (way down – God, they are tall) I scanned through her shots. I was right. They were evidence without being story and I was annoyed at her inability to capture the moment. I rolled my eyes and wordlessly showed the shots to Charlotte, who agreed with equal annoyance about how average our mother’s pictures were. We were hostages no longer to her timetable, her mandatory afternoon nap, and her insistence that liver and onions were a perfectly good dinner. No sir. We were In Charge and First Mate. Hop on board or be left behind.
We carried on in this bratty fashion for the rest of the trip. We were unstoppable. Surging through me was the absolute need to assert
myself. My psyche was trapped in 1989 and every instinct was one eye-rolling, smart-alecky, defiant, pathetic declaration, ‘You are not the boss of me.’ Charlotte and I were right, just right about all of it. Which way the cab should turn, what time the museum closes, whether or not dhal is always green lentils, and the fact that the tourist with the funny accent was South African, not British for chrissake.
It wasn’t all bad. Not at all. In fact, it was magnificent. India is remarkable, even on a bad day, and there was plenty to keep us lively. In Udaipur we visited the City Palace and were squired about by Ashook, the subcontinent’s most charming guide. Ashook never met a carved niche or painted miniature that did not elicit a delighted chirp. He breathlessly extolled the virtues of every portraiture artist since the days of the Mughals (about 75,000, by my count). We lunched under banyan trees and ate our weight in paratha. We shared suppressed giggles every time someone mentioned the movie Octopussy – filmed at our hotel and handily the most popular local fact. Honestly, you could spend a week in Udaipur and not hear a word about Kipling. Try to go ten minutes without having a copy of Octopussy forced into your hand and it’s another matter entirely. One night we finally succumbed and piled into Mom’s room with a bottle of Scotch and the DVD. It was like getting a good kiss from someone you don’t like – impossible to ignore and leaving a weird queasiness.
In Kerala, I corralled the girls into smiley scenes on the slim wooden boat that silently bore us through tiger-eyed backwaters. The man steering the boat was the color of coal and had hands like rocks. We discovered cardamom coffee at our hotel (a treat I continue in New York City) and drank coconut water at every breakfast. Across the hotel there was a cheerily lit, thatched-roof theater housing a Kathakali dance company and several touring musicians. We attended performances and marveled, along with a dozen feral cats running across the rafters, at the heart-stopping talents of both. I will never forget the dancer who moved forty-seven different muscles in his face, one at a time, to the beat of a drum. I captured all of it with an energy boarding on mania using my mom’s digital camera. Having been liberated from the tyranny of film rationing, I began to construct a monster masterpiece of our Perfectly Documented Trip.
Lights, Camera...Travel! Page 16