Unconditional Love

by Jocelyn Moorhouse

  The angry lecturer didn’t notice my panic attack. Paul had saved me. Nothing like being swept off your feet in a TV control room. But I was very loyal to John and buried that first spark of romantic feelings towards Paul. We remained best friends and got on with making our films.

  I spent my twenty-first birthday in an abattoir in Homebush. I was working on a third-year director’s film that was set on a killing floor. I was a first-year, vegetarian camera assistant. In the area where we were filming, bodies of cows, cut in half and hoisted on vicious hooks, would travel past and above us in an endless parade of fresh death. Part of my job was wiping the drips of blood off the camera equipment. It was disgusting. The smell of blood and cow death stayed in my clothes for days. Watching cows being disembowelled on a conveyor line was not how I had imagined spending my twenty-first birthday, but it was a film set, and I was intensely aware that my dreams were coming true. That night I went to an Indian restaurant with my fellow students (including Paul) and we celebrated my birthday. I had found my tribe.

  Paul’s first short film was called Getting Wet. He showed me his various drafts as he was writing the script. I was harsh in my criticisms but, fortunately, he completely ignored me. The screenplay was very funny: a nerdy, awkward teenage boy is forced to go on a beach holiday with his family. He falls in love with the girl who comes to clean the holiday house, and has his heart broken when she falls for his hunky older brother. In a fit of jealous rage, he beats up his brother and destroys the holiday for everyone. Then he happens to meet a sweet girl who suggests they ‘put on each other’s clothes’, and he realises that maybe the beach holiday hasn’t been a complete disaster.

  We all headed down to Kiama, on the south coast of New South Wales, to shoot the film, which took place, for the most part, in a delightful, weatherworn beach cottage. The crew, including Paul, stayed in the cottage. Paul decided that I would be housed separately, in a nearby caravan park, sharing a van with two other students. He thought he was doing me a favour, but I felt rejected and left out. Why didn’t he want me to stay in the holiday house with him and the crew? This was the first of many misunderstandings that led to the realisation that we were in love—just like in a romantic comedy!

  So I began the shoot already cross with him. He couldn’t have cared less. He was directing his first film and all he could think about was making it as brilliant as possible. He didn’t even notice my bad mood. He was just glad I was there to talk to and argue with. He gave me the job of continuity, a role that requires meticulous attention to detail, copious note-taking, the precise use of a camera to document scenes, and a stopwatch to time them.

  Continuity is a hard job, and I was terrible at it. I would get so interested in the actors that I would forget to time scenes. I would forget to notice which hands they used to pick things up, whether they turned left or right, all of the things I was supposed to be noting down. Paul would get furious with me. Then I would get furious with him for being rude. Jane Campion, who was the first assistant director on the shoot, took us both aside one day and reprimanded us for having shouting matches on the set. She told us we were acting like children and that our behaviour would harm the film and our friendship. We agreed to behave with more respect towards each other.

  I was still smarting from being left out of the sleeping arrangements at the beach house. But I held in my resentment. One night we were watching the previous day’s footage on a wonky screen set up in the beach house living room. I was sitting next to Paul on the couch. He was distraught about something that had not gone well; he groaned in despair and laid his head on my shoulder.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ I said, trying to ignore the jolt of electricity that went through me as I felt his hair against my cheek. I could smell his shampoo. I found an excuse to move away, because I was confused about my emotions. Truth had revealed itself to me and I was startled. What the hell? Was I was falling in love with my best friend? This was insanity.

  I became even angrier, trying to repress my feelings. I was engaged to John. He was the one I loved. Paul was annoying, rude and arrogant. I was not attracted to him. No way. The shoot moved back to Sydney, where Paul decided to take over our share house and shoot some of the scenes in our lounge room. It was a crumbling art-deco mansion in a leafy northern suburb. The floorboards were a shiny dark brown. Paul wanted to do a lot of shots of a little boy lying on the boards, looking at his mum’s legs as she walked back and forth. It was going to take all day. The crew were traipsing in and out of everyone’s rooms, including mine, to plug in power cords or dump equipment. I was furious, because I had told Paul that I would only allow him to film in our share house on the condition that no one went into my room. I didn’t want people looking through my stuff. But now my room was filled with equipment boxes, coils of cords and crew members. I was incensed.

  I stormed up to Paul while he was rehearsing with the little boy, and told him he had behaved disrespectfully in allowing the crew into my room and I would never forgive him. Yes, I may have gone slightly over the top. Jane dragged me away and told me that I was behaving in a ridiculous and unprofessional manner, and that I had to stop shouting at Paul, who needed to concentrate on directing his film. I said I would stop if he apologised. Later that night, when the crew had finally left, I heard a knock on my bedroom door.

  It was Paul, looking exhausted and bewildered. ‘I don’t know what I did to make you so angry, but I am truly sorry for whatever it was,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ I snapped, ‘because I am seriously considering moving out of this house if you don’t change your ways.’

  Now he looked worried. ‘Don’t do that. Surely this won’t end our friendship.’

  So reasonable, and so adorable. I found myself melting again. Yes, he was clearly having an effect on me. I slammed the door. Dammit, I was falling for him.

  I had to confess my feelings and find out how he felt about me. One night, a week later, I asked Paul to help me lug the garbage bins out to the kerb. I knew this might be my only chance to talk to him privately. In a share house there is always someone else hanging around. He agreed to help and I found myself alone with him, standing over the smelly garbage bins.

  ‘Paul,’ I said, ‘if I told you something about myself that might truly disgust you, do you think you could still be my friend?’

  I’ll never forget the look on his face. What was I about to tell him? Why did I choose those particular words to begin a confession of love? Sometimes, when I try to say something important, the most ludicrous utterance comes out of my mouth.

  Paul looked at me with an earnest expression, bless him, and said, ‘Of course I will still be your friend.’

  Wow. He didn’t know what I was going to tell him. It could have been anything. But should I tell him I was in love with him? That he was the love of my life and I wanted to stay with him and never be apart from him? Should I say I wanted to marry him and have his children?

  No. I decided to act cool and pretend to be someone I wasn’t. ‘I want to have sex with you,’ I said. ‘How do you feel about that?’

  Poor guy. He looked like a deer in the headlights. Did he sweep me into his arms and kiss me passionately? No. He looked really shocked. ‘Can I think about it?’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, my heart sinking. ‘So that doesn’t disgust you?’

  ‘No.’

  We went back inside. I went into my room and he went into his. I wanted to scream into my pillow with embarrassment, but he would have heard, along with everyone else in the house… It was a long night. When I got up the next morning, Paul had already left for film school. I took myself off to school and was typing in one of the writers’ rooms, working on a strange script about a girl who grows out of an orange seed. I could barely concentrate, and then he appeared in the doorway.

  He walked in and closed the door behind him. He looked nervous. ‘If you meant what you said last night,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m all yours.’

  I h
ad to tell John. When I said I had fallen in love with someone else, he said, ‘It’s Paul, isn’t it?’ He must have known before I did.

  I never wanted to break John’s heart. We had been each other’s first love. We had been so important to each other for six years, a long time. We started to grow apart when I was accepted into film school. And when John got accepted into the Victorian College of the Arts to study music, I knew he wasn’t going to give up that opportunity to move closer to me. Even though we got engaged, I don’t think either of us really believed we were going to get married. We tried our best to make a long-distance relationship work, but our dreams ended up taking us in different directions.

  The other film students were shocked when Paul and I became a couple. ‘I thought you hated each other,’ many of them said. Jane called me into her editing room and told me that I shouldn’t expect my relationship with Paul to survive, but that I should have some fun while it lasted. She was worried that I had broken off my engagement to John in a moment of weakness. But she was happy for me too, and mildly amused, considering all the arguments she had been forced to referee. Paul later confessed to me that, on the night I propositioned him over the garbage bins, he thought I just wanted a one-night stand, a last fling before I got married to John. That’s why he had been so worried: he didn’t want to be a one-night stand. Little did he know that I was secretly plotting to take over his entire life.

  9

  We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone—because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

  MAYA ANGELOU

  The day before Paul and I graduated from the AFTRS in February 1984, I fell off the kerb at our local shops. I couldn’t walk without severe pain, so after Paul had carried me to a taxi rank about a kilometre away, we drove to a medical centre, where a doctor strapped my ankle. The next day I hobbled up on crutches to collect my Diploma of Arts, Film and Television (D.A.F.T.).

  During my three years at film school, I had made two short films and a video production called The Moat, a dystopian drama about a circus at the end of the world. I researched real circus people, who lent me a trapeze. Kathy made a fantastic clown suit for one of the characters using flags from different countries. But The Moat was a disappointment. When I showed it to my assessors, one of them said, ‘Perhaps the writer was better than the director.’ Since I was both, I worried that I was going to fail. Suddenly I was crying. I cry way too easily, and often, but this was a hard moment for me. The assessor was right. I made a lot of mistakes at film school, experienced quite a few failures and learned a great deal.

  In his final year, Paul changed his name to P.J. Hogan. Everyone understood why. For me, it took some getting used to, and sometimes I still call him Paul. During his film school years, PJ made one TV production (brilliant) and one film (ridiculously good). Everything he directed was impressive.

  After graduation, I got a job at the newly created Channel 7 Drama Unit, in the western Sydney suburb of Rydalmere. I caught a bus and train there every day. My boss was a delightful Welshman, Howard Griffiths, who had written episodes for some of the TV crime shows I used to watch as a child with Grandma Wood. They were currently producing a new TV series called Rafferty’s Rules. Sometimes I was asked to assess a script. But most days I would wash dishes, take lunch orders, walk up to the sandwich shop on Victoria Road and bring the lunches back. I rarely received any thanks. Howard always treated me courteously and kindly, but some of the men who worked in the office were rude and boorish.

  One day I noticed that one of my male colleagues had put up a whole lot of posters of naked women in his office. As all our offices had glass walls, the pictures could be seen by everyone. I complained to Howard that I found the posters offensive, but he said that, as the pictures were in the man’s office, he couldn’t ask him to take them down. I asked the man to remove the posters. He laughed, then refused. The next day there were two more naked girls on the wall. I decided to take matters into my own hands. While he was at a long lunch one day, I cut out paper clothes for the naked girls and stuck them on top of the pictures. The next day the posters had been taken down, but I got angry glares from a lot of the men.

  After a couple of months, Howard asked me if I would like to go on a research trip. He wanted to create a new drama series set in the outback. His idea was to send PJ and me out to a small town to create character portraits of people we found. He pulled out a map of New South Wales and told me to look for the tiniest dot. I found a remote place called Wanaaring, about a hundred and fifty kilometres west of Bourke, out in the dry western part of the state. I kept my finger on it and showed Howard.

  ‘You’re going there,’ he said.

  PJ and I headed off to the outback, accompanied by another writer, Phillip Ryall. It was an amazing, eye-opening adventure. The three of us were not at all suited to the outback. Veggies were barely considered food in the outback, so it was especially tricky for me. After a three-hour drive from Bourke along a red-dust road, we arrived at the sun-bleached Wanaaring pub to check in. Our host was nowhere to be found, but a dead cow was hanging from a hook in the courtyard. A regular patron was paying his account in fresh meat, cutting up the carcass on the spot.

  We spent two weeks in Wanaaring, and returned to Channel 7 with hundreds of photographs and volumes of notes. Howard commissioned me to write a pilot episode and ‘series bible’ for a new series called Kelly’s Crossing. Then they gave me the go-ahead for twelve more scripts for the first season. It was an extraordinary career break for me.

  Howard was a great mentor. He hired an experienced writer and story-editor, Barbara Bishop, to work with me. She became a good friend and another mentor. Together we created the storylines with a group of veteran writers, including Howard. The pilot was directed by Leigh Spence, who cast a former rock star, Frankie J. Holden, as an outback entertainer on the show.

  I was allowed to attend rehearsals, but on the first day I discovered Leigh had rewritten some of the dialogue. I was outraged and ran upstairs to my office, photocopied the original scenes and brought them back to the rehearsal room. I handed them out to the actors, much to Leigh’s displeasure. I was immediately banned from rehearsals. Howard told me that my conduct was highly unprofessional. I apologised to Leigh, and was allowed back into rehearsals.

  I got to know the actors, who began asking me about their characters. I enthusiastically shared my thoughts with them, including my sadness that their dialogue had been changed. I was banned from rehearsals again, this time permanently.

  Meanwhile, PJ’s film, Getting Wet, won Best Short Film at the Australian Film Institute awards. It was so exciting to see him on stage, picking up his award. As he returned to his seat, a man tapped him on the shoulder. It was Tim White, a producer. He and his producing partner at the time, Miranda Bain, were planning a low-budget thriller. They wanted to know if PJ was interested. He said yes, but weeks passed and they didn’t call.

  In 1985, I received a grant from the Australian Film Commission to make a short comedy I had written over one weekend. In The Siege of the Bartons’ Bathroom, about a suburban family, the little girl Elly was intensely attached to a tree in her backyard. It was the only tree for miles around. Her next-door neighbour wanted the tree removed, because the leaves messed up his lawn. Elly’s father agreed to cut down the tree, but she staged a protest by locking herself in the family bathroom (and only toilet in the house). She refused to come out unless her Dad promised to spare the tree. She ended up winning and the tree survived.

  I cast the actor Max Phipps as the villainous neighbour, and Frankie J. Holden as Elly’s dad. I found a delightful girl, Rebekah Elmaloglou, to play Elly. Howard gave me six months’ leave without pay to make the film. I ran out of money, so it remained unmixed while I went back to work. By now, Howard had resigned, replaced by a man who took an instant dislike to me. I was soon fired.

  M
y Kelly’s Crossing series never got produced. I did see the pilot, which turned out nicely, I thought. When the credits began to roll, I looked for my name. It wasn’t there. I thought a mistake had been made, but then I saw it. Instead of being up front with the other creatives, the producers had put my credit at the end, just after Catering. It was a kind of ‘Fuck You’ message for me. I received it loud and clear.

  Now I was in need of job. Barbara Bishop put in a good word for me at Crawford Productions. ‘If you don’t mind moving to Melbourne,’ she said over the phone, ‘the job is yours.’

  The day I got the job, I found out some bad news. John McAll’s sister Pip had been diagnosed with liver cancer. Pip and Greg had split up four years earlier, but had remained good friends.

  PJ and I had a car by now, a second-hand Saab. We packed everything we owned into the back of the car and set off down the Hume Highway. I still didn’t drive, so my role was to keep PJ entertained. An ardent fan of The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, he owned the various collections of her reviews, which I read aloud to him all the way to Melbourne.

  I went to see Pip in hospital the day after we arrived. She looked so small and vulnerable, sitting on her bed in her nightie, surrounded by flowers and cards, sunshine bathing her in a golden light.