Mum was very tired, and very worried about Dad. He was not only forgetting things, but was having delusions that he was a general in World War Two, responsible for hundreds of soldiers’ lives. He would charge out into the night in his pyjamas. One night he headed out in a storm. Mum couldn’t find him and called the police. He was found in his underwear, unconscious, by the side of the road. When the doctors checked his pacemaker, they saw that his heart had stopped and the pacemaker had sent an electrical charge to start it up again. Dad swore he had been shot. It probably felt like that.
Even though Mum was exhausted, she was excited when I told her Sue Maslin and Rosalie Ham were coming to visit me while I was in Warragul. Mum made a lovely lunch for our meeting. She sat with Sue and Rosalie and me while we talked about The Dressmaker, and I showed them all my look-book of photographic images for the movie. It was a wonderful afternoon. After Sue and Rosalie left, Mum told me how proud she was of me, and how happy she was that I was finally going to make a movie again. She knew how much a part of me filmmaking was.
I tried to talk Mum into considering a nursing home for Dad. How long could she keep looking after him by herself? We did some tours of local nursing homes, but they were not what we wanted for Dad.
Mum cried. ‘I made a promise to this man nearly sixty years ago: for better and for worse. I’ll keep looking after him until the day he forgets who I am. Only if that day comes will I let him go to a nursing home.’
‘Of course, Mum,’ I said. I wished I could be more of a help to her. I wished I lived in the same town.
In mid-October 2011, PJ was in Melbourne, cutting Mental with the editor Jill Bilcock. I was in Sydney, shopping for Halloween decorations, when I got a call from Sandy Graham, my father’s respite carer. Alarm bells. Why is Sandy calling me? Something’s wrong. Which parent?
‘Jocelyn…your mum is in the hospital.’ Sandy was crying. ‘She had a stroke.’
‘Oh God. How bad?’ I asked.
‘Bad. You should come right away.’
‘I’ll catch the next plane.’ I dropped the bag of cobwebs in my hand and started walking out of the shop.
Sandy was still crying. ‘I can’t get hold of Kathy or Greg,’ she said.
‘I’ll find them,’ I told her. I hung up and dialled Kathy. She didn’t pick up, so I had to leave a terrible message on her answering machine, asking if she could drive to the hospital. When I called Greg, I got his voicemail too.
I called PJ in his Melbourne editing room. ‘Mum’s had a stroke. It’s bad.’
‘Oh, darling. I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Can you drive down there now? I can’t get hold of Kathy or Greg and I’m scared she’ll die before I can get there.’ I was sobbing like a child now, because saying the word ‘die’ out loud made it real.
‘Of course,’ said PJ. He got in his car immediately.
When I landed in Melbourne, I called him. He was already with Mum.
‘It’s bad,’ he said. Greg was there too, and the doctors were giving Mum a CT scan.
I sped down the freeway in a rental car, pulled into the parking lot and raced through the hospital doors. Mum was in critical care on the third floor. The elevators opened and I charged into the last room on the right, a two-bed room. Yellow curtains billowed. I glanced at the woman in the first bed and saw that it wasn’t Mum. In the next bed, there was a woman I didn’t recognise. Confused, I walked out. But something made me stop and turn around. It was her, just swollen and strange-looking. I walked back to the bed. Mum’s eyes were squeezed shut, as if the light in the room was hurting her. She was hot, sweating.
‘Mum, it’s Joss. I’m here.’
Mum didn’t respond. I walked out of the room again, feeling useless and scared. PJ and Greg were walking down the corridor towards me. They had just seen Mum’s scans: there was an enormous bleed in her brain; she could die at any moment. If she survived, she would be profoundly disabled.
‘What about that medicine they can give stroke victims that can reverse the damage?’ I asked, trying to remember something I had read in a magazine about a drug that dissolved blood clots if given early enough.
‘They found her too late. She’d been lying in the garden for a couple of hours,’ said Greg. As it turned out, Mum’s was a haemorrhagic stroke, so the drug would not have helped in her case.
When Mum woke up, she could only speak with great difficulty. She was paralysed down her right side. Her voice was raspy.
‘Mum, I’m so sorry you were lying there on the ground for so long,’ I said sadly.
‘It was all right,’ she replied haltingly. ‘I was in my garden and it was a nice day. I knew someone would find me eventually.’
As the months went by, Mum continued to deteriorate. She desperately wanted to walk again. As her speech grew less articulate, she wrote notes with her left hand. It still hurts to see the scribbly writing: I want to walk. Help me to walk. She became very depressed. We found a good nursing home in Drouin, where Mum and Dad could be together in a room for a married couple. It still felt like a betrayal, and we all felt wretched about it.
Dad’s dementia was getting worse. Before the house was sold, Kathy thought it might be a good idea to take him for a brief visit home, to see if he wanted any of his furniture for their room in the nursing home. I flew down from Sydney to help, and brought Jack with me. Dad was now in a wheelchair. As soon as we wheeled him into the house, he thought he was coming home to stay. Meanwhile, Jackie started throwing his zebra toy over the back of the couch where Dad was sitting.
‘What the hell is the matter with that child?’ Dad shouted. ‘Why is he here? In my house. Did I invite him here?’
‘Dad. That’s Jack,’ said Kathy.
‘No, I am Jack!’ said Dad. ‘That child is a nuisance. There’s something wrong with him! Is he mentally incompetent?’
‘Yes!’ I snapped. ‘And he is your grandson! I named him after you.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Dad.
Kathy stared at me. ‘Jossy, go and give Jack a bath.’
‘I don’t want a fucking bath!’ said Dad.
I scooped Jackie up and took him to the bathroom. I locked the door and started running the water. I was shaking now. It was all so sad and horrible. Dad’s anger and confusion were a normal part of his dementia, but that did not make it easier. Little Jackie took off his clothes and happily got in the bath. After a few minutes, Kathy knocked on the door. When I opened it, she hugged me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This was a bad idea, wasn’t it?’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘None of this is easy.’
With heavy hearts, we took Dad back to the nursing home, along with a few pictures and ornaments to make the room seem more homely. Before Mum’s stroke, she had made lots of photo books for Dad, reminding him of things in his life. We took those books with us too. They were similar to the books I made for Lily and Jack.
I have a beautiful photograph of my mum during this time: she is trying to smile at me, but only half her smile is working. Her brown eyes are warm and loving. She has a flower behind one ear, which I tucked there right before I took the photo. The light is perfect. Her face looks resigned. She was so brave.
25
A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts—for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.
ANDREI TARKOVSKY
‘Make cloud go away.’ Lily stands at the edge of the verandah, glaring resentfully at the sky. She’s tall for sixteen, with shiny dark hair and porcelain skin. I’m sweeping the dirty wooden planks of the wide verandah. Through the green fringe of jacaranda leaves, I see a cloud has drifted across the late-morning sun. Now she says it with more urgency: ‘Want Mummy to make cloud go away.’
‘Mummy can’t do that, bubba.’
‘Feel angry.’
‘I know. Bad cloud.’ I pretend to be angry at the sky. ‘Ba
d cloud!’ I shout. ‘Go away, bad cloud!’
The cloud goes away. Great. Now Lily will ask me to do this every time.
She wanders inside the house, humming a melody I don’t recognise. She giggles, her deep hazel eyes twinkling. She starts to raid the fridge. I forgot to lock it. I race past her in time to salvage four of the six mini tubs of yoghurt she has grabbed with lightning speed. Still laughing, she runs off into the family room.
It’s 2012. Mental has come and gone at the cinemas. It was loved by many, particularly people with experience of mental health issues, but it did not do well enough to make PJ and me any money. Having sunk both our salaries into the movie’s budget, we were now broke, and worried about the future. On the verge of declaring bankruptcy, we decided it was time to sell our house. With PJ’s help, I was trying to finish writing the screenplay for The Dressmaker, but I had been feeling unwell for weeks.
My chronic chest infection developed into pneumonia. I was bedridden. A nurse came around twice a day for the first week to administer IV antibiotics. I was too weak to walk without assistance. It was hard for PJ to take on all the housework and childcare in addition to his writing. From my bed I could hear shouting matches downstairs. Maddy came up to visit me, and to tell on Daddy for yelling at Spike. I told her to tell Daddy that if things didn’t calm down soon, I was going to come downstairs. After Maddy had delivered her message, PJ ran upstairs, ordering me not to leave the bed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, flustered. ‘I was bringing in the groceries and told Spike to watch Lily, but he got distracted. When I came back into the kitchen, Lily had opened a box of ice creams and taken a bite out of each one. She’d also opened a tub of yoghurt and poured it on the floor.’
Somehow we got through my pneumonia. Not long after, as I was herding the kids through our front gate after school, I heard my name being called. It was Cate Blanchett, walking past with her kids. She and her husband, Andrew Upton, who ran the Sydney Theatre Company, were neighbours. Our children went to the same school down the end of our road. ‘Joss!’ she called out. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you…’
I opened the front door and the kids ran inside. I turned back to Cate.
‘What would you think about doing a play? Have you ever worked in theatre?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Not since I was at teachers’ college.’
‘Do you think you might be interested in directing a play for the STC?’
I thought about it for less than two seconds. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d love to.’
‘Good. I’ll pop the script over in a couple of hours. Take a look. Jacqui McKenzie has already agreed to be the lead actress. Do you like Jacqui?’
‘She’s brilliant.’
‘Good. Bye for now.’
I walked into the kitchen, where PJ was making tea. ‘I just got offered a play,’ I said.
‘In the street?’
‘Yes, actually.’
Sex with Strangers, by Laura Eason, an American playwright, is a very funny two-hander about two writers who accidentally book the same remote cottage to work on their projects. Neither wants to give up the cottage, so they end up sharing it. They couldn’t be more different. The woman, in her late thirties, is trying to finish her second novel. The brash, twenty-something man’s claim to fame is that he once had a blog called sex with strangers, where he documented sleeping with as many women as he could in a year. She thinks he is disgusting, and far from being a real writer. He thinks she is pretentious, but sexy. Of course, they end up sleeping together. It’s a lot of fun, but also manages to say some important things about gender politics and literature.
I cast Ryan Corr as the young man, and the STC decided to give me an assistant director. I completely forgot that I had agreed to meet one of the candidates at home. When an eager young Dominic Mercer turned up for his interview, the house was a mess and Lily was home with tonsillitis. I warned him that my disabled daughter might come into the room and act a little weird. ‘No problem,’ Dom said politely. He was in the middle of telling me about his time overseas after graduating from NIDA when he paled and looked at the floor. I turned, and there was Lily in the doorway, stark naked, nonchalantly eating a slab of chocolate cake. I leaped off the couch and dragged my icing-smeared Venus off to find her bathrobe. Needless to say, Dom got the job for remaining unflustered. Oh, Lily.
The cast and stage crew of Sex with Strangers had a glorious time rehearsing. I was thrilled with the long rehearsal period—in theatre, of course, every line, every move, every lighting cue and wardrobe change has to run like clockwork. Doing that play was one of the greatest joys of my working life. It helped me regain confidence in myself as a director, and I will always be grateful to Cate and Andrew for getting me back into the director’s chair.
I also learned so much from working with Jacqui and Ryan. You can’t do a close-up in theatre, so you have to use a different visual language. What the theatre audience sees is what we film people would refer to as a wide shot. But that allows them to see how the actors convey emotion with their whole body. The theatre experience changed the way I approached film direction. I realised that I should not be afraid to use more wide shots, in which the actors can change the energy of the shot by changing the ways in which their bodies move.
Sex with Strangers reminded me that working with actors is always a vigorous process, requiring a lot of energy, quick thinking and creativity on the part of the director. It’s very exciting working with actors who all work in different ways, but sometimes it can be tricky. Every actor has a different process. Some are quite inward-looking and like to create their performances without much input from the director. Others might want a lot of direction.
Sometimes actors lose their confidence. Your job as a director is to help them regain their confidence and belief. This has happened on every movie I have done. Usually it is because something has gone wrong, and my job is to figure out where the misstep occurred. Every actor I have worked with will remember me saying at some point, ‘Wait a minute, I just have to rewind the scene in my head to work out what has happened.’ I often equate it to being a conductor working on a piece of music with a group of musicians, all playing different instruments. If the horns don’t come in when they are supposed to, the music won’t have the same effect.
I realised that directing was still in my blood. I loved working. I needed to work. I needed to reclaim this important part of my life, the part of me that had nothing to do with autism or motherhood. I needed to acknowledge the creative artist in me. The me I used to be. Could I find her again?
26
Between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And—I would argue as well—all love.
DONNA TARTT
PJ and I finished the final draft of The Dressmaker in 2012 and Sue Maslin loved it. So did Screen Australia, and Mike Baard at Universal Pictures Australia. The next step was to send the script to an actress whose name would help us raise the rest of the financing.
One of the names on my list was Kate Winslet, whose work I had loved since I saw her stunning performance, at the tender age of seventeen, in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. We sent her the screenplay and waited. On 29 January 2013, she wrote back to say she loved the script, adored the character of Tilly, and wanted to do the movie. It was probably the most exciting email I have ever received.
I flew to London and took a train out to the town where Kate was living. We met for tea in a little café. I wanted to look into her eyes and hear her say she was really going to do this movie with me. She said absolutely, yes, she was going to do the movie.
Waiting on the freezing country railway station for the train back, I called Sue Maslin in Melbourne. ‘She’s really, really doing it!’ I shouted down the phone.
When I got back to Australia, I called Mum. The nurse put the phone to Mum’s ear. I told her that Kate had said yes.
‘I’m so happy for you, darling,’ said Mum slowly, in her raspy voice. ‘Kate is gorgeous.’
All our investors were thrilled. We got the green light and things were about to swing into action, when I got another email. Kate was pregnant. She hoped Sue and I would put off the film for a year, but understood if we needed to find another actress. I told Sue I couldn’t bear to cast anyone else, and Sue agreed. It meant another year of barely any income, but Kate was worth the wait.
On my next visit to visit Mum and Dad, I noticed Mum was sinking even further into depression. Lately, Dad had been forgetting who she was. One day she said to me in her croaky voice, ‘I don’t think your dad loves me the way he used to.’ She was looking at him as he chatted with a nurse.
‘Mum, Dad loves you,’ I said, patting her good arm.
‘Not the same,’ she said sadly.
In mid 2013, we learned that Mum’s kidneys were failing. She had also been having small strokes in recent months, as well as seizures. Greg, Kathy and I felt like frightened children. The thought of losing this amazing woman, the glue of our family, was unthinkable.
On 25 September, she was getting close to the end. Greg and Kathy and I took turns sitting by her bed. Dad knew what was happening. He held Mum’s hand and looked at me. ‘I’m starting to think about my end now,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ I said. ‘When that time comes, we’ll all be here for you too.’
‘Thank you,’ said Dad, in his formal, bank-manager way. It was heartbreaking.
I found a cottage to rent in the nearby town of Neerim South. Greg came to stay with me. There was a small herd of caramel-coloured, big-horned highland cows in a nearby paddock. They stared at me every time I opened the cottage door.
On 3 October, I wrote in my diary:
Unconditional Love Page 22