Unconditional Love

by Jocelyn Moorhouse

  A Thousand Acres was not due to start its pre-production for a month or two. Anthony would take Spike out during the day and I would stay in the apartment with five-month-old Lily. I used to call her my panda girl because her hair was so black and her skin so pale. When I took her for walks in the stroller, strangers would stop to comment on how cute she was. She always ignored their attempts to make her smile.

  One day in the apartment, I was rolling around with her on the floor when I heard a bang on the window. A man with a rope tied around him was hanging onto the window with suction pads. He was washing our windows. He smiled at Lily and me through the glass. It was such an odd encounter, I ended up writing it into a scene a couple of years later for the movie Unconditional Love.

  Like so many mothers of new babies, I spent hours up at night with Lily. I would sit in a rocking chair by the window, soothing her back to sleep, gazing out at all the other tall buildings that surrounded ours. We were living in a forest of glass. I watched people going about their lives, framed by their windows, as if I was the James Stewart character in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, watching his neighbours. I didn’t witness a murder, thank heavens, but I could see the man who was always exercising, or the little boy who got up early and leaned against his bedroom window, staring out, sometimes showing his dinosaurs the sunrise. Directly opposite our living room, a dignified old man ate a late dinner at his table at the same time every night. He kept the lights down low in his apartment. I wondered if he was lonely.

  It was a strange, rarified life. The only exciting thing that happened were the fireworks every Friday night. Around 9 p.m., we heard the bangs and rumbles and would run to our windows to watch the fluorescent explosions reflected in the windows of the neighbouring buildings. I used this image in the script for Unconditional Love too.

  PJ decided to hire Patty Witcher, my wonderful line producer on Quilt, to work with him on My Best Friend’s Wedding. He also hired the legendary Dick Sylbert as production designer. Dick’s credits included Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown. Tall and stringy, he dressed in a safari suit and walked with the swagger of a man with a million spellbinding stories to tell. He loved PJ and the feeling was mutual.

  I helped PJ as much as I could during his pre-production, but it was time to start focusing on my own movie. I found a lovely Irish nanny, Mary, to help me look after Lily. Lily loved Mary. I was insanely jealous and wrote to Kathy:

  I just cannot work it out, this working mother thing. Lately, I have been lying awake at night, imagining giving up work all together and just being a mum full-time. I only get these urges in the middle of the night though. In the morning I get excited about my work, and it’s back to business. I don’t understand these mood swings. I must be like Dr Jeckyl and Mister Hyde. Except my monster is melancholy, not violent.

  Kathy had not yet met Lily. It was hard to be apart, to miss seeing each other’s kids grow up. PJ and I had never expected to stay in the USA this long, and hoped to return to Australia in June 1997, when both movies were over.

  Laura Jones, the screenwriter, flew to Chicago to do some tweaks on the next draft. I really liked the screenplay, and Laura was great to work with. It was also nice to hear another Australian accent! I was due to start filming in Iowa on 15 August, when Lily would be ten months old. Spike would be home-schooled for the duration. PJ was due to start filming his movie on 10 September in Chicago, so our shoots would overlap by three or four weeks. After I finished shooting A Thousand Acres, the children and I would move back to the apartment in Chicago for the final weeks of PJ’s shoot. I poured out my fears into my diary: ‘Is this possible? Where will the kids be? Chicago with PJ or Iowa with me? With me, of course, but Iowa is nothing but corn and soybeans for hundreds of miles. What will they do out there?’

  Location-scouting in Iowa was tricky. My crew and I drove around for days, following highways and back roads, searching for the perfect farmhouse. None of the locations had any sense of drama or offered the kind of foreboding I was looking for.

  We flew back to Illinois and began scouting the corn-belt farmland there. We found ourselves in a town called DeKalb, where the fields are dead flat and the colour during the corn and soybean growing season is green and gold. A farmhouse in the middle of two hundred acres of cornfields looked exactly how I imagined the Cook farmhouse should. If we could get permission to build a fake farmhouse right across the road (Rose Cook’s house), it would be the perfect location. The farmer agreed and we were all excited by the filmic possibilities. DeKalb was only a two-hour drive from Chicago, so PJ and I could catch up on the weekends. In theory, anyway.

  When I returned to the apartment, I learned that there had been an emergency while I was gone: Mary had overdosed on a party drug and been rushed to hospital unconscious. Anthony had held the fort and watched both Spike and Lily. I was horrified. I felt sorry for Mary, but I had to fire her. I was terrified to let Lily out of my sight. I called Mum and Dad and begged them to let PJ and me fly them to Chicago to help with the kids. They were delighted.

  I flew back to Los Angeles for casting, along with Anthony, Spike and Lily. Mum and Dad arrived the next day. We interviewed a number of nannies. The last one was a young woman from Colorado named Rhonda Dodds. Rhonda was tall with a warm smile and a great sense of humour.

  ‘She’s the one!’ my parents declared. They were right. Hiring Rhonda was one of the best decisions I ever made. She remained Lily’s nanny for seven years and became a very close, lifelong friend.

  With Rhonda looking after Lily, I could concentrate on casting the movie. I wanted Jason Robards to play Larry Cook, the patriarch in A Thousand Acres. I had watched a lot of his movies and loved his performance as Howard Hughes in Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard. I also thought he was brilliant in Julia, where he played Dashiell Hammett. No one else I tested had the regal quality I needed for Larry Cook. And I needed someone who was on an equal footing with Jessica and Michelle—who could be convincingly intimidating as the father of these two powerhouse actresses.

  I cast one of my favourite actresses, Jennifer Jason Leigh, as the youngest sister, the Cordelia figure. I loved her intensity and intelligence. Coincidently, Jennifer was a family friend of Jason’s: early in her career she had added his name to hers as a tribute to him. It was easy for them both to slip into a father-daughter relationship. I also cast Keith Carradine and Colin Firth, as well as Elisabeth Moss and Michelle Williams, both teenagers.

  I tried very hard to convince the producers to let me hire Martin McGrath as my director of photography. They overruled me, however, and insisted on US-based Tak Fujimoto, who had worked on Melvin and Howard, Silence of the Lambs and Terrence Malick’s masterpiece, Badlands. Tak is an artist of the cinema and it was a delight to work with him.

  The shoot was hard for me. PJ was on his own set in downtown Chicago. I was used to having him around to consult with. It was lonely without him. Rhonda, my parents and the kids kept my spirits up. Lily was so much fun. She loved to press her face up against mine and stare into my eyes. On the set, she would watch Jessica Lange having her make-up done. She loved Jessica’s dog, Jake, and sometimes took naps on his belly. Every lunchtime Rhonda brought Lily to the catering tent so she could eat with me and the cast and crew. She would sit on my knee and I would sing songs to her. But she was beginning to have sleeping problems, waking up screaming. Rhonda would rock her back to sleep, because I had to get up before dawn every morning.

  On the days when I had to shoot in the pigpens, I came home with stinking boots. Mum grabbed them before I got inside. She washed them and sterilised them for the next morning. We were staying in a comfortable house with lots of bedrooms, a basement (in case of tornadoes!) and a carpeted attic that had been set up as a kids’ play area. In the evening, we would sit on the verandah and wait for the fireflies to sparkle in the undergrowth. Spike and I pretended they were fairies.

  One weekend Spike was playing in the at
tic playroom with a friend. He came down to me in the kitchen, his eyes full of fear. ‘I found a gun,’ he said in a horrified whisper.

  He led me up to a corner of the attic. A rifle was leaning against the wall, a box of bullets beside it. I was terrified. I sent Spike and his friend downstairs while I figured out what to do. Images of my kids playing with the gun flashed through my mind. I picked up the rifle and the bullets and brought them downstairs to my bedroom, where I hid them in the top of the wardrobe. I called the man we were renting from and asked him to come and pick up the rifle.

  He laughed and said it wasn’t going to hurt anyone. ‘It’s not loaded.’

  ‘I just don’t want it in the house,’ I said. ‘You said the kids could play in the attic, but you didn’t warn me there was a gun in there!’

  Eventually he picked up the gun, bemused by my fear.

  I have a lot of great memories of working with the cast and crew of A Thousand Acres, but I discovered, too late, that there was not enough time or budget to shoot the film I had planned. So many of the ideas we had talked about in pre-production fell by the wayside in the brutal reality of getting the job done within the constraints of an unrealistic schedule. It was one of the most disappointing experiences of my career.

  And there was not enough time to get it right in the cutting room either. After the first Audience Test Preview, the studio brought in an additional editor to take away control of the cut from me. This happens in Hollywood. A lot. The new editor was a film industry veteran named Donn Cambern. I discovered later that he had worked on a couple of my favourite movies, Easy Rider and The Last Picture Show.

  If I had known his credits back in 1996, would I have been able to befriend him, talk to him about what I liked in his work, and find some common ground? Could we have found a way of keeping some of my favourite scenes? Who knows. At the time, he seemed like a stranger who had come to kidnap my movie. The producers gave him total authority over me. He was very friendly, and told me I was welcome to stay and watch as he and the producers recut the film. I tried this, but after a week or so of watching my scenes being undone, recut and reshaped, I realised I had no role on the film anymore. The hardest thing was seeing Jason Robard’s performance being picked apart. They were searching for takes where he smiled more. The audience-testing had listed his character—the perpetrator of incest and child abuse—as the most hated in the movie. The producers were trying to make Larry Cook more likeable. It was insane. It hurt. Badly.

  In spite of everything, I am proud of A Thousand Acres. I put all my energy into trying to make an honest and powerful film. It is flawed, I know, and not as good as the novel it was based on. I also know that critics tore the film apart. But Jessica Lange was nominated for a Golden Globe for her powerful performance as Ginny Cook. I have received touching letters from people, some of whom had suffered childhood abuse, who were moved by the film, and told me it helped them feel less alone in their pain. This is reason enough to make me happy I directed the movie.

  15

  Why should I cry for not being an apple, when I was born an orange, I’d be crying for an illusion, I may as well cry for not being a horse.

  DONNA WILLIAMS

  After the ten months I spent working on A Thousand Acres, I now wanted to do two things. First: concentrate on my darling kids. Second: write something funny, uplifting and anarchic. Being thrown off the film in post-production had been a major blow to my self-confidence. The dark demons of my self-doubting childhood had come back to dance on my head. A sense of failure and inadequacy. It was as if making A Thousand Acres had sent my emotions back to high school, when I was getting bullied by the cool kids.

  I was in the mood to write something crazy. I wanted to find a part of myself that had got a bit lost. As a teenager, I was a big fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and later I adored the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian. Of the comedians who worked on those movies, Graham Chapman was my absolute favourite. It was only after he died from cancer in 1989 that I learned he was openly gay and loved his life partner. They were pre-internet days, so it wasn’t easy to find out information about celebrities back then. The man was gorgeous and hilarious, and now he was gone. I had a strong urge to fly to the UK and crash his funeral. Fortunately, I couldn’t afford to do such a crazy thing.

  The memory of that weird impulse stayed in my mind, and now, almost a decade later, I decided to write a film script about a famous gay man. I realised I would have to add some conflict to the story. What if, like Liberace, he was hiding the truth from his fans? What if, I wondered, my main character had a secret boyfriend? The sudden death of Princess Diana in August 1997, and the outpouring of grief that followed, made me even more fascinated by the idea of fans adoring someone they don’t really know.

  I titled my script Unconditional Love. The main character was not the gay man, but a Chicago housewife, Grace Beasley. Grace is stuck in a loveless marriage, living with her husband on the fortieth floor of an apartment building overlooking Lake Michigan. Her son and daughter rarely visit her, and her husband wants a divorce. The one thing Grace knows she is good at is being a mother and a homemaker, but no one in her family appreciates her. She has become invisible.

  The only joy in her life is listening to her favourite crooner, a Welshman named Victor Fox (think Tom Jones or Perry Como). Grace dreams that, one day, Victor Fox might meet her and fall in love with her. He will rescue her from her depressing life. Then she hears on the news that he has been brutally murdered, shot through the heart with an arrow from a crossbow. Grace decides she must go to Wales and crash his funeral. She shocks her family by making the pilgrimage to the Welsh town where Victor grew up, where she places flowers out the front of his boyhood home.

  There she meets a tall, handsome man named Dirk. He is in a terrible state, drunk, bitter, in mourning. The townspeople refer to him as Victor Fox’s valet, but in truth he is his secret lover. I wrote the part of Dirk for Rupert Everett, whom I got to know while he was working with PJ on My Best Friend’s Wedding. It is the only time I have ever written a part with a particular actor in mind.

  When Grace discovers the truth about Victor and Dirk, she is shocked. Dirk expects her to flee in despair. Instead, she identifies with Dirk as the unappreciated spouse of a selfish man. She decides to give him a mother’s love. Of course, this is the last thing Dirk wants. He tries to make her leave. She refuses to go. Madness ensues.

  I wrote whatever insane ideas came into my head. It was my therapy! I decided I wanted Barry Manilow and Julie Andrews to appear in the film. Why not? I wrote in a lot of songs, not knowing if we would get the rights to any of them. It was fun and I had no idea if it would ever get financed. I also wanted to pay tribute to Chicago. I loved the lake, the museums, the weather and the underground road system—I set a lot of Unconditional Love in Chicago’s creepy subterranean world. It felt appropriate, like something out of a Greek myth.

  Now that PJ had finished post-production on My Best Friend’s Wedding, we decided to go back to Australia for a while. I wanted the children to spend time with their grandparents and cousins. PJ and I were excited to catch up with family and friends and introduce many of them to Lily for the first time.

  PJ had another reason for wanting to leave Los Angeles. My Best Friend’s Wedding was about to be released and he was convinced it was going to be a box-office disaster. He was afraid he would never work again. I knew it was going to be a hit. It was brilliant. Very funny and sweet and romantic. But PJ didn’t believe me. We rented a house in Melbourne for three months and decided that if My Best Friend’s Wedding was a disaster, we would stay in Australia and make Australian films.

  Lily, now thirteen months old, charmed everyone back home with her glossy black hair, big hazel eyes and cheeky grin. While I was writing Unconditional Love, I would sit her on her play-mat next to my desk. She would be immersed in her blocks, or ball, and not want any attention from me for very long periods. It started
to disturb me a little. But was it really abnormal? I told myself that Lily was simply a pensive girl, her own quiet self. I used to call her my zen baby, because she was so different from five-year-old Spike. At thirteen months old, he had demanded attention all the time. Lily seemed perfect to me, but there was something different about her.

  16

  Empathy comes from being empathised with.

  STANLEY GREENSPAN

  An uneasiness about Lily was forming in my gut. I shoved it down, way down, and told myself I was looking for things to be worried about. But disturbing things kept happening. Three weeks after arriving in Melbourne in June 1997, Lily and I contracted a killer flu. We were bedridden, practically unconscious, with blinding headaches and fever for a couple of weeks. Years later, I wondered if this virus had played a part in what was to come.

  After we recovered, we flew north to visit the Hogan family in Coolangatta. Spike was desperate to visit Dreamworld on the Gold Coast. While we were waiting to go on a ride, Lily let go of my hand and took off through the crowd. I ran after her, calling her name a few times, but she didn’t look back. I caught up with her and took her hand, but she let go and again hurried ahead of me. I decided to walk behind her, to see if she stopped to wait for me. For a full five minutes, she didn’t stop or even look around for me. Finally, I couldn’t stand it. I stopped her, picked her up and held her close, before walking back, troubled, to where PJ and Spike were waiting for their ride.

  It was September when we returned to the USA, and Lily was nearly two years old. We had broken the trip in Hawaii, and the flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles left late at night. After a day in the sun, Lily was angry when we took her back to the airport. She was tired and confused. She started to scream—and the screaming continued for two hours. The only thing that calmed her was if I cuddled her and kept walking. If I stopped or tried to sit down, she would start her ear-splitting screaming again. So I kept walking. Rhonda and PJ offered to share the carrying and walking, but Lily only wanted me. Me walking.