‘How about we start shooting?’ Phil asked me.
‘You mean do the first shot now?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’ He grinned. ‘Get one done, so we have a bit more time tomorrow.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
They got out the camera slate and wrote Slate 1, Take 1 on it. They turned on the camera. It hardly made a sound, not like the old 35mm cameras I used on my earlier films.
‘Rolling,’ said Phil. The clapper loader held the slate up in front of the camera.
‘Set,’ said the camera operator.
Phil leaned closer to me. ‘Do you want to call action, or do you want me to?’ Sometimes, depending on what the director wants, the first assistant director calls actions.
‘I’m too nervous,’ I whispered back. ‘You call it.’
‘Action,’ said Phil.
I watched the grips slide the camera forward on the shiny tracks. The Dressmaker, my new movie, had begun. I’ll never forget that moment.
My crew knew what I had gone through, and were happy to see me back behind the camera. I couldn’t stop smiling. When I called, ‘Cut,’ everybody cheered, and my heart swelled. I was directing again. It felt like coming home. Because it was. I had come home to me.
We shot for the first few weeks in the sound stage at Docklands to give our carpenters as much time as possible to finish building our town of Dungatar. On the weekends, my assistant drove me out to the construction site and helped me plan shots for future sequences. It was so peaceful standing on that hill in Little River, watching as the set I had imagined came to life.
The Dressmaker had a large supporting cast, handpicked by me. I wanted to make sure each character made a strong impression. I hate it when the actors in movies seem almost interchangeable, and the audience gets mixed up about who is who. I wanted every character to have a distinctive look, voice and presence. Caroline Goodall, Kerry Fox and Rebecca Gibney, who had all worked with us on Mental, played important roles, as did Shane Jacobson and Geneviève Lemon. Alison Whyte was extraordinary as the fragile and slightly deranged Marigold. Shane Bourne and Sacha Horler were both simultaneously hilarious and scary. Gyton Grantley was superb playing Teddy’s disabled brother. I kept telling him he reminded me of Jack, but grown up. I desperately wanted Geneviève Picot to join us and had to talk her into playing Mrs Tobin (named after my maternal grandma) from Winyerp. She was mortified when I told her she would be singing and dancing a song from The Mikado! But she did it as a favour and was brilliant.
I got permission to take Maddy out of school during the shoot, on condition she kept a journal of her time on the film. She spent most of her days on set, watching me work and making friends with the actors and the crew. She got to be in the film, too, as a flower girl at Gertrude’s wedding. Marion Boyce made her a beautiful dress. She also played one of Teddy McSwiney’s many sisters, dressed in a bedraggled pinafore. She loved playing with the pig and dogs in the McSwiney scenes, and gave Sarah Snook a smiley face sticker right before we shot her wedding scene. Sarah stuck the sticker to the inside of her hem, for luck.
On the last day of the shoot, we were filming, perhaps fittingly, Molly’s funeral. Hugo joked that I should have asked Judy to hide in the coffin and pop out, to scare Kate. I told him I didn’t think Judy would take method acting that far. It felt odd filming a fake funeral only a year after Mum’s actual funeral. And then the shoot was finished. A week later, I was editing the film in Melbourne with Jill Bilcock. I flew back to Sydney on the weekends, where PJ and Spike were holding the fort. I Skyped with the kids every night, but I still missed them terribly.
We did a test screening of The Dressmaker. I was so terrified, I was shaking. Sue Maslin, Jill Bilcock and Mike Baard from Universal were there, along with executives from Screen Australia. And, of course, members of the general public who didn’t know anything about the film they were going to watch. I had to walk past the punters, pretending I was not the terrified director. All these people had the fate of my film, and my career, in their hands. After the movie, each audience member would be given a card to fill out, with boxes to tick or cross. The most important question was: ‘Would you recommend this to your friends?’ Word of mouth sells tickets.
Once the screening began, I relaxed. The audience were laughing in all the right spots. Then they were crying when I wanted them to cry. I started to think the film was working. But I have sat in previews before, like the one for Unconditional Love, where the audience seemed to be enjoying the movie, but then killed it in the cards. We had to wait twenty minutes while the scores were collated by the market research people. Finally, a woman came in, saw me and handed me the score. Normally it’s given to the producer or the investors. I stared at the numbers, bewildered. I had no idea how to interpret them. I looked around, on the verge of panic, and caught Mike Baard’s eye. He walked straight over to me.
‘What does this mean, Mike?’ I asked him.
Once Mike had the scores in his hand, everyone gathered around us. He looked at me and grinned. ‘These are very, very good, Joss. Very good indeed.’ He gave me a hug. ‘These numbers mean that The Dressmaker is going to be a huge hit.’
After the edit was ‘locked off’, I had a couple of weeks off before the mix was due to begin. In that time the sound editors were getting all the various tracks ready, and David Hirschfelder, the amazing composer on the film, was finishing his music cues. I headed back to Sydney to spend time with the family.
One sunny afternoon, my babysitter called to say she was running late picking up Maddy from an after-school playdate, so could I collect Lily from her daycare program.
Lily was twenty now. Having finished a special-needs version of high school, she was now attending an excellent adult program, still run by Giant Steps. Lily could continue to learn social and self-help skills, but also go on fun excursions. I parked my car and walked towards the door, where Lily was being led outside by one of the teachers. As soon as she saw me, she started screaming that she wanted to go home. I reassured her that home was exactly where we were going.
As soon as I sat in the driver’s seat, reminding Lily to buckle her seatbelt, she began to swipe at me with her sharp nails. She apologised, then did it again. I got her to swallow her tiny orange pill, her afternoon dose of Risperdal, then offered her a banana I had brought with me. She threw the banana into the back seat and grabbed my arm with both hands, squeezing hard and digging in her nails, breaking the skin. I tried to ignore it, remembering my training in extincting a negative behaviour.
Once she had stopped, I began driving. As soon as we hit the highway, Lily started digging her nails into me again. After five minutes, I was bleeding, covered in small wounds. She kept grabbing my arm off the steering wheel, scraping my skin and shrieking. She wasn’t using words, just guttural sounds. Things were getting dangerous.
I pulled down a side street, parked and shut off the engine. I got out of the car and walked around to Lily’s side, where I calmly told her, ‘Lily, you’ll have to sit in the back seat unless you stop hitting me.’
Lily got out of the front seat. As I opened the back door for her, she began pounding me on the arm, roaring and howling. Finally, she sat down in the back seat. I turned on the ignition and started to cry as we drove down the hill, while Lily kicked the back of my seat, trying to reach my head with her foot. When I attempted to stop the car again, I realised the brakes were no longer working. Approaching a T-intersection, praying we’d avoid a collision, I remembered to put the car into park and use the handbrake.
As I rolled safely around the corner at the bottom of the hill, my mobile phone rang. I had forgotten a scheduled call with the music supervisor on The Dressmaker, who was with David Hirschfelder and a group of musicians and singers in a studio in Melbourne. I was supposed to listen via Skype to what they had recorded. I told him I couldn’t speak right now. Hoping I would make it home soon, I asked them to call me back in fifteen minutes.
‘Okay, Lily, we’re g
oing to walk,’ I said.
Lily did not like that idea. As soon as she got out of the back seat she went for me. She was really hitting me now, with both fists. People on the other side of the road were staring, not sure what to do. I had my phone in my hand. I considered calling the police, or an ambulance, but knew Lily would find the experience too traumatic. Just then my babysitter drove by with the other children. She saw us and stopped. When Lily saw the babysitter, she stopped hitting me. She smiled and got quietly into the car. I got in too, bleary with tears and bleeding from the many deep scratches on my arm.
Maddy stared at me. ‘Are you okay, Mummy?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, trying to sound relaxed. ‘Lily got a bit upset, but she’s okay now, and so am I.’
Actually, I was very shaken. Lily had not been this upset and violent in years.
It took us many months to discover the cause. Her violence towards me escalated. After trying different dosages of medications, then emergency doses of Valium, then different medications all together, Lily’s rage attacks continued to get worse. We hired a behavioural specialist to advise us. He observed her and asked us to fill out detailed charts of when and where Lily’s behaviour grew aggressive and violent. ‘Behaviour is communication,’ he told me, especially in people whose words cannot express everything they want to communicate.
In the end, it was Lily’s carers, Rob and Ysobel, as they filled out the charts, who deduced what was happening with her. They came to me one day and said they thought Lily’s desperate rages might have something to do with the amount of time she was spending cooped up with a lot of noisy fellow students in Lily’s day program’s minibus. Nearly all of her aggression occurred during, before or after being in the day-program bus. We decided to withdraw Lily from her day program and create an individualised home program instead. No more noisy bus trips.
Over the next few months, Lily gradually calmed down and the aggressive episodes grew less and less frequent. Now they have ceased completely. Lily has her own home program, where a carer will teach her chores to do around the house or take her on outings. She is happy again. She no longer needs emergency Valium. She can even travel in our minivan again with her siblings, and no one gets scratched. Behaviour is communication.
In the meantime, we finished The Dressmaker, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015. We got to walk the red carpet. The first official audience was a crowd of nearly two thousand people. When it opened in Australia, The Dressmaker ran for three months and made over $20 million at the box office. It won a lot of awards, and was sold all over the world. I will always be grateful to Sue Maslin for never taking no for an answer. And to PJ for helping my dream come true.
I was still grieving for Mum when I directed The Dressmaker. Perhaps my feelings seeped into the scenes between Tilly and Molly. Audiences embraced the look of the film, and the beautiful costumes, and its tale of revenge, but I think what really moved them was the mother–daughter love story. That was certainly the core of the story for me.
28
If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story—his real, inmost story?’—for each of us is a biography, a story.
OLIVER SACKS
In May 2016, Kathy called to tell me that Dad had been unexpectedly diagnosed with bowel cancer. We all gathered at the hospital while the surgeon explained to Dad that he had two options. If he did nothing, the tumour causing his bowel obstruction would kill him in a couple of days. Or, at the age of ninety-one, he could have surgery to remove the tumour. Dad chose option two.
‘Do you understand what I am talking about, Mr Moorhouse?’ said the doctor.
We weren’t sure if Dad understood, but he nodded, and said, ‘We are talking about me facing my mortality.’
Wow. What an answer. Sometimes Dad would get so confused, but in this moment he was as sharp as a tack.
Dad was operated on for six hours. While sitting with him afterwards in the ICU, I wrote in my diary:
In the bed is a man whose ninety-one-year-old body is struggling to stay alive. Every now and then his eyelids flutter and I glimpse those grey-blue eyes I have known all my life. He used to have thick, shiny, black hair and thick, black eyebrows. He looked a lot like Gregory Peck. Which is lucky, because my young mother had a crush on Gregory Peck—hence my brother’s name. Now Dad only has about three snow-white hairs remaining on his shiny pink dome.
When I was fourteen, big hunks of his hair went white overnight, leaving his head stripy like a zebra. He had just lost his mother, a complicated woman. Immediately after her funeral, Dad crashed his car into a tree. The police tested him for alcohol, and took his licence away. At fifty-three, the regional manager of a number of ANZ banks across Melbourne, he now had zebra hair, had to catch a train to work and was racked with depression. I remember seeing Mum painting his hair black in the bathroom. He was so embarrassed, I was ordered loudly out of the room.
Over a couple of months, all his hair fell out. They called it telogen effluvium, a stress-induced type of alopecia. Dad changed into a silent father who sat in the lounge room, staring into space, absent-mindedly touching the lumps on his head where windscreen glass was still embedded. We didn’t know what to say to him. I was a bit frightened of him. Mum would beg me to go and sit with him, which I did. Every so often he would ask me to sit on his lap, or sit next to him, and he would pat my hair. He loved his daughters’ hair. We had the LP soundtrack to Mary Poppins, and Dad would listen to one side over and over. The song that Mr Banks sang, about time slipping through your fingers like sand, would bring tears to his eyes.
Dad was a proud man. He stood with a straight back and a steely glare. When he got angry he would roar like a lion and swear like a trooper. When we were kids, he terrified us with that roar and his curses. We knew he loved us, but we never wanted to make him angry. A lot of our childhood was spent tiptoeing around him. I just don’t think he knew what to do with us when we were small and annoying. We kids were always squabbling, and we never kept our bedrooms neat. This really made Dad cross. ‘Pigs!’ he would roar at us. ‘I have slovenly pigs for daughters!’ Mum would take us aside after his rants and say, ‘You know he loves you more than anything in the world. He feels terrible after he yells at you. He hates himself for it.’ Poor Dad. I think he was depressed for a long time. Sadly, you can’t easily explain depression, grief or an existential crisis to children.
Dad and I sat in silence a lot. He taught me about silence, how it’s okay to sit with your loved one and not have to say anything. When I was attending Rusden State College, he would pick me up on his way home from his office in Moorabbin. I would wait in the dark, in the bus stop on Blackburn Road, watching all the headlights. Finally, a set of headlights would pull over, and there would be Dad in his Holden Statesman. I’d get in the front passenger seat and the radio would already be set to the ABC for the news, then the classical music. He would ask me if my day had been okay, and I would say yes. Then we wouldn’t speak for the forty-minute drive home, just listening to classical music. Sometimes I felt awkward and would try to think of things to say, but usually we just sat in silence together.
After two days in the ICU, Dad surprised everyone. The nurses tried sitting him up in a chair. He was eating small amounts of jelly. But then, sadly, he developed a terminal infection in his wound and had to be moved to a palliative care hospice.
Kathy, Greg and I took turns staying by his side. He was given a syringe driver of morphine. We watched his face become more sunken. He got very hot so we washed his hands, feet and face with cool cloths. We cleaned out his mouth with damp swabs dipped in soothing flavours. We played him his favourite classical music, and Kathy read aloud from Mum’s unpublished novel about our time in PNG. Sometimes I played soothing nature sounds on the iPad: waterfalls, forest sounds, bellbirds. He had spent so much time in the bush, so I hoped he found the sounds calming. I tried to keep touching him, patting him. I thought about how comfor
ting a baby finds touch. Odd how my mothering skills clicked into gear at the death of my parents. Is death a kind of birth in reverse? It felt that way.
On the day Dad died, his favourite carer, Sandy, was visiting. A young boy, a volunteer who ran trivia games at Dad’s nursing home also decided to visit that day. He had come all the way from Warragul to the city to see Dad. Still in his school uniform, he walked into the room holding a cheery ‘Get Well’ card. I knew Dad only had hours, maybe minutes to live, but I didn’t want to send this sweet kid away. He looked at Dad, then frowned.
‘I was looking for Jack Moorhouse,’ he said.
‘This is Jack,’ I said. ‘He’s lost a lot of weight.’
‘Oh…’ He smiled. ‘Actually, I always call him Mr Google because he has the most amazing memory for trivia.’
There was an awkward silence. ‘I think you might want to say goodbye to Jack,’ I said.
The boy looked flustered. ‘Oh, bye then,’ he said, and turned to go.
‘No, I didn’t mean you have to leave. Sorry. I mean he’s very sick. I think he’s on his way out.’
The boy looked stricken. He went quiet, and put his card on the tray table. I looked at Dad, lying there so pale and still, his breathing very slow. I told Sandy I missed seeing Dad’s blue eyes. On cue, Dad opened his eyes wide and stared at the ceiling.
‘Look,’ said Sandy, ‘he’s opening his eyes for you.’ But we both knew this probably meant something else. Sandy nudged me. ‘I think this is it.’ I moved closer to Dad and held his hand. He started gasping for breath. I leaned in close and whispered, ‘Go to Denice—she’s waiting for you. Denice is waiting for you, Dad.’
Unconditional Love Page 24