Unconditional Love

by Jocelyn Moorhouse

  ‘Why?’ I asked, perplexed.

  ‘Because I don’t look like a stegosaurus! I feel like one, and I know I am one, but when I look in the mirror, I’M NOT A DINOSAUR!’

  He was inconsolable. I put my arms around my sobbing stegosaurus and tried to explain to him that he was born human, but that he could always pretend he was a dinosaur. It didn’t matter what he looked like in the mirror, what mattered was how he felt inside. Somehow that cheered him up.

  He and I would imagine dinosaurs hiding in people’s gardens on our walks to the local shops. He had dinosaurs living in his cupboard too. He had a plastic yellow stegosaurus called Steg that slept on his pillow every night.

  Meanwhile, my American agents, Bobbi and Beth, were organising special screenings of Proof in Los Angeles for studios and producers. The first producers to show real interest in me were Bill Horberg and Lindsay Doran, who worked for the director Sydney Pollack and had a script by Tom Stoppard based on Poodle Springs, the novel Raymond Chandler was writing when he died. I read the script and loved it. Pollack’s production company, Mirage, flew me to Los Angeles to meet with Stoppard. They put me up at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. The whole experience seemed quite surreal.

  On the first morning, I found myself in a taxi, talking to a security guard at the Universal Studios entrance. He circled a building on a map that he handed to the driver. I had never been on a studio lot before. The place was enormous, with bungalows and office buildings dotted around numbered sound stages as huge as aircraft hangars. The taxi driver had no idea how to find the office and dumped me in the middle of the sound stages. I checked my watch. I was already ten minutes late. Overdressed, wearing painful, ridiculous shoes and sweating in the Californian heat, I clomped around on my stupid high heels for a long time, completely lost.

  A young man in an electric golf cart drove up to me. ‘Do you need assistance, ma’am?’ he asked in a friendly Californian voice.

  ‘I’m looking for Mirage,’ I said, rattled. I was nowhere near Mirage. He invited me onto his golf cart and dropped me at the right office, exactly twenty minutes late. I stumbled in, full of apologies, but Sydney Pollack and his producers William and Lindsay were totally charming. We talked about the project, and possible revisions for the script, which mostly aligned with my thoughts. They told me I would be meeting with Tom Stoppard at the Four Seasons Hotel that afternoon.

  Tom asked me what notes I had on his script.

  ‘What if,’ I suggested, ‘Philip Marlowe, who is now getting on in years, has a heart condition and keeps having to take pills? What if, on top of the murder mystery he is investigating, he is also dealing with his own mortality?’ I made some other suggestions too.

  Tom smiled, nodded and listened respectfully while we drank copious amounts of tea in his hotel suite. He argued his points carefully and occasionally convinced me I was wrong. But I persisted with a few ideas. At the end of the meeting, he told me politely that he did not like my ideas, and that he was happy to withdraw from the project if I would prefer to write it myself.

  I was stunned. ‘No, Tom, I don’t want you to withdraw,’ I said. ‘That’s the last thing I want.’

  What a disaster: the producers had flown me around the world and, in the space of a few hours, I had driven the great Tom Stoppard off the project!

  ‘Tom, we don’t have to do any of my ideas. I’m totally happy to stick with the script the way you have written it,’ I blurted out in a panic.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, unruffled. ‘You don’t want to do that. Just do it your own way. Write your own draft and I will back off.’

  ‘No, don’t back off!’ I pleaded.

  ‘Really, Jocelyn, I think this is best.’

  ‘But…we have a meeting with the producers in the morning,’ I said, feeling nauseous. ‘What will we tell them?’

  ‘The truth.’ He was not at all upset. Being a proper English gentleman, he walked me all the way to the lift. The doors opened and I stepped inside. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said.

  I waited for the doors to close again.

  Then Tom started to say something else. ‘Oh, by the way, Jocelyn...’ But the doors were closing. I put my hand out to stop them, but they kept closing. I pulled my fingers to safety milliseconds before they would have been crushed, and let out an involuntary squeak of alarm. As I was letting myself into my room, I heard my phone ringing.

  It was Tom. ‘Are you all right, Jocelyn?’ He sounded worried.

  ‘Oh yes, I got my hand out in the nick of time. What were you about to say?’

  ‘I’m having dinner with Fred Schepisi tonight. Would you like to come?’

  We had a great dinner at Fred and Mary Schepisi’s place. Fred is a generous, warm-hearted man and he thought it was very funny that Tom and I were not going to work together after all, but were still chummy with each other.

  At the next morning’s meeting with Lindsay Doran and Bill Horberg, Tom announced he was not going to continue with the project, and then said he had to go to another meeting. After Tom left, Lindsay and Bill turned to me. ‘Would you like to take over the script?’ they asked.

  I was terrified at the prospect of revising a Tom Stoppard script without the participation of Tom Stoppard, but I said yes. I did have his blessing, after all. Kind of.

  I didn’t know much about the history of Los Angeles, so research took up a lot of my time. I bought maps of the city, read everything I could by and about Raymond Chandler and watched the classic movie The Big Sleep over and over. I worked on Poodle Springs for a long time. I was still working on the screenplay when Muriel’s Wedding began pre-production in the spring of 1993.

  We auditioned a lot of young women for the role of Muriel. PJ was working with the terrific casting director, Alison Barrett. Lynda and I were too busy in pre-production to attend the auditions, so PJ brought the tapes home and did not tell us who his favourites were. Lynda and I would sit down every evening and watch the auditions. Toni Collette tested on the first day. I felt that familiar little chord going off in my heart. ‘You know it’s her,’ I said to PJ.

  He looked nervous. ‘It can’t be that easy,’ he said. ‘She’s the first one who read for Muriel. She’s brilliant, but it can’t be her.’

  PJ auditioned actresses for another three months, but finally announced that Toni was his perfect Muriel. The character of Rhonda was harder to cast. We tested a lot of vivacious, fabulous girls. We had imagined Rhonda as chubby, like Muriel. Rachel Griffiths came in, skinny and sinewy, like a greyhound. She was full of energy and sexuality, but with an eccentric, wild edge. She changed our minds about the character.

  Toni and Rachel were gorgeous together. Watching the two of them, you could really believe they were friends. That was crucial, because their friendship was the emotional anchor of the movie. It had to feel true.

  One morning, in the middle of shooting Muriel’s Wedding up on the Gold Coast, I woke to find Dowie crying. He had strange spots all over his body, so I took him to see a doctor. Sadly, I had chosen the angriest doctor on the Gold Coast, who examined Dowie and told him to stop crying.

  ‘He is in pain,’ I said. ‘He can’t help crying.’

  The doctor turned to me, his eyes wild. ‘I will tell you what is wrong with your son,’ he said, pointing a finger at me. ‘You!’

  I was astounded. How had I caused the spots?

  ‘You!’ continued the strange doctor. ‘You have kept him as a baby who cries. It is your fault he is not growing up!’

  ‘He’s three years old,’ I said. ‘I came here for your help, not your judgement!’ I took Dowie by the hand and began to lead him out of the doctor’s office.

  ‘He has school sores. Impetigo. Nothing you can do. It will pass!’ he muttered.

  On my way out I told the receptionist that the doctor she worked for was appalling.

  She shrugged. ‘I know.’

  I bought a bath treatment at the chemist, and Manda, our nanny d
uring the shoot, ran a bath for Dowie while I got ready to head out to the set. PJ and the cast and crew were in the main street of Coolangatta, filming the scene where Muriel and Rhonda are leaving Porpoise Spit in the taxi, shouting, ‘Goodbye, Porpoise Spit!’

  The motel phone rang. ‘There is a call from America for you. Will you take it?’ said the girl at reception.

  It was Beth and Bobbi, who told me excitedly not to go anywhere, because Steven Spielberg was about to call.

  ‘What? Why?’ I stuttered, my mind turning to mush.

  ‘He’s going to offer you a film.’

  ‘Yes! I’ll do it!’ I shouted.

  ‘Don’t say that to him,’ said Bobbi. ‘Say you will read the script first, otherwise you’ll sound ridiculous.’

  ‘Try to sound calm when he calls,’ Beth added.

  So I waited. Manda got Dowie out of the bath and I applied ointment to all the horrible blisters on his legs. She put on a dinosaur video—The Land Before Time (a Spielberg production, of course). I waited some more. Finally the phone rang. It was the girl at reception again, this time sounding amused: ‘There’s an American man on the phone—he says he is Steven Spielberg.’ Clearly she thought this was a joke.

  ‘Yes, yes. Put him through,’ I said. I could hear her guffawing as she connected us.

  ‘Hello, Jocelyn?’ came an unmistakable drawl. His accent made my name sound like Jarsalen.

  ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I am actually talking to you,’ I gushed like an idiot. Then I remembered Bobbi’s and Beth’s words of advice. ‘I’m sorry,’ I added, ‘I will try to calm down.’

  PJ is always reminding me that I have foot-in-mouth disease. I do. I have said the wrong thing so many times in my life. Luckily Steven Spielberg is a very nice guy and he laughed.

  ‘I have a script I want to send you,’ he continued. ‘It’s being produced by two great women, Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, and we would all like you to direct it.’

  I breathed slowly. ‘I would love to read the script,’ I said, trying to give the impression I got sent amazing offers all the time. He told me it was based on a novel, How to Make an American Quilt, by Whitney Otto. The adaptation was by Jane Anderson and it was about love and marriage, from the perspective of a group of older women in a small-town quilting bee. They were trying to give advice to a young woman named Finn, who had recently received a marriage proposal. The script flashed back in time to show the women’s own love stories. It sounded intriguing; I told Steven I was interested.

  When I headed out to the Muriel’s Wedding set an hour later, the crew teased me about being late to work. (I was supposed to be stopping pedestrians from walking in front of the camera that day—not exactly a glamorous job.) When I told them I’d had a call from Steven Spielberg, no one believed me.

  Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury had produced, among other movies, Desperately Seeking Susan and The Band Played On. When the script of How to Make an American Quilt finally arrived in my letterbox, I read it immediately. I loved the characters of the older women, as well as the love stories. I knew nothing about quilts, but I would soon become an expert.

  After the shoot for Muriel’s Wedding was finished, we all moved back to Melbourne, where PJ began editing the movie with Jill Bilcock. I put Poodle Springs to one side and dived into working on the script for How to Make an American Quilt. I read the novel twice, making notes. Amblin, Spielberg’s production company, flew Jane Anderson to Melbourne to work with me on the next draft of the script. After two intense weeks, Jane returned to Los Angeles to complete the second draft.

  Both Poodle Springs and How to Make an American Quilt were Universal projects. Early in 1994, the studio decided to fly me out to Los Angeles again. They wanted me to choose which film I was going to direct. I was very lucky. Both were extraordinary projects and the two production companies, Amblin and Mirage, were run by good people. It was a difficult choice. I went into Amblin to meet everyone involved in Quilt. Steven had just won an Academy Award for Schindler’s List and I was completely dazzled by him, So I chose Quilt. Winona Ryder had expressed interest in the movie and Amblin flew me to Vancouver, where she was shooting Little Women with my role model, Gillian Armstrong. I think everyone was counting on me falling under Winona’s spell, which I did.

  I met Winona in the lobby of her hotel. I expected she might be a bratty star, but she was a polite twenty-two-year-old with loads of charm. We had a chat over a cup of tea and I marvelled at her sweet personality, her luminous skin and her direct, even humble, nature. I wasn’t immediately sure if she was perfect for the role of Finn, the young anthropology student who is afraid of getting married, but she was a serious contender. I flew back to Los Angeles the same day, and on my return found that Universal had decided to greenlight the movie. It was all real now. Midge and Sarah asked me how soon I could move to Los Angeles. They wanted me to start pre-production in June, only a couple of months away.

  A month later we got the news that Muriel’s Wedding had been invited to the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. PJ and I couldn’t believe our luck. Both of our first features had been given the honour of premiering at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs. It felt as miraculous as lightning striking twice. When Steven heard that I was headed for France, he asked me to stop in Paris to meet Gwyneth Paltrow, his twenty-two-year-old god-daughter. He thought she might be perfect for the role of Finn.

  This time we took Dowie to Cannes with us, and he took Steg. In a back street, we found a tailor who had a tiny sports jacket Dowie could wear to the screening of Muriel’s Wedding. PJ was certain the event would be a disaster. He had heard about Cannes audiences booing a movie if they didn’t like it. He was certain Muriel would suffer that fate.

  Before the public screening, there was a press screening. Lynda and I decided to sneak in to gauge the reaction of the critics. We crept in a few minutes after the film had started, steeling ourselves for the worst, but were surprised and relieved to hear laughter. The laughter kept building. At the end, there was massive applause and cheering. From the press! Lynda and I rushed back to the hotel to tell PJ. Sick with nerves, he thought we were lying to protect him from the truth.

  That night, the reaction at the public screening was ecstatic. At the end of the film, PJ and Toni Collette went up on stage to a standing ovation. It was a marvellous moment. Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths became overnight stars. Harvey Weinstein invited Lynda, PJ and me to a party on a luxury yacht. He wanted to persuade us to let Miramax distribute the film in North America. Harvey was big and brash, talking a mile a minute. Lynda stood her ground until we had a deal that would protect the film from being recut (that was always a fear with Miramax), and managed to get Harvey to double his offer. I was very impressed with her business savvy.

  In Paris, on the way home, PJ and I went to the Louvre and stood in front of the ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, the enormous painting by Théodore Géricault. I was transfixed: it depicts survivors of a shipwreck, clinging to a sinking raft as they glimpse a rescue vessel. The figures are larger than life and the colour and lighting are full of high drama and emotion. PJ and I discussed how, before cinema was invented, paintings like this came close to creating a powerful ‘big screen’ experience.

  While PJ and Manda took Dowie to the Eiffel Tower, I set off for my appointment with Gwyneth Paltrow. I was curious about her, after seeing her in a disturbing film called Flesh and Bone. She was only starting out in her career, but she had already made quite an impression. We met in a café full of Parisians and their dogs, including Gwyneth’s giant black labrador. No one blinked an eye when the dog sat up in a chair next to Gwyneth. He was adorable, though, and not much of a distraction. Until he got an erection. Gwyneth and I kept chatting over our café au laits, but I couldn’t help seeing the large pink thing resting on the table right next to her coffee cup. I tried not to stare.

  Gwyneth was charming and beautiful. It was impossible not to compare her with Winona. They were the same a
ge, and completely different. I realised Gwyneth had a certainty about her, whereas Winona had a complicated, slightly nervous quality that might make her a better choice for Finn.

  Dowie, Manda and I flew from Melbourne to Los Angeles in June 1994 to begin pre-production on Quilt. PJ would follow a few weeks later: he was researching a script about nuns and had just found a convent where they were willing to help him. As soon as we arrived at our hotel in Santa Monica, I took Dowie for a walk down Third Street Promenade. We were amazed to find a whole row of fountains, all in the shape of dinosaurs. ‘I love America,’ announced Dowie. It became a daily ritual to visit the dinosaur fountains. One morning, as we were gazing at the water shooting out of a stegosaurus’s mouth, a homeless man walked up to us.

  ‘He’s a cute little boy,’ said the man. His face was dirty and his long hair was tangled. His speech was slurred, but he was friendly.

  Dowie began to tell him where the sculptor had made a mistake by forgetting to put spikes on the dinosaur’s tail. The homeless guy laughed and started throwing Dowie up in the air. Dowie thought it was funny, but I was getting nervous. I said we needed to go, but that it had been nice talking to him. I pulled out a five-dollar note. ‘Can I give you this?’ I asked.

  He got angry. ‘Why did you have to go and do that? Fuck that,’ he said, and walked away, offended.

  Dowie asked me why I had made his new friend angry.

  The casting period on How to Make an American Quilt was glorious. I auditioned the younger actors, Samantha Mathis and Claire Danes, but you do not audition movie legends. You meet with them and chat over coffee or lunch. In that case, you are the one being auditioned by them. Making that movie, I got to work with movie legends Jean Simmons, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn and, amazingly, Maya Angelou. She had an air of royalty about her. When she walked onto the set for the first time, everyone gathered in a circle to greet her. It felt like she was blessing us all. Her assistant told us to call her Dr Angelou, but after the first day she grinned at me and said, ‘Oh, stop that, will you? Just call me Maya.’