How did you get from mainstream Hollywood to doing political films like Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American?
There were political films during the Hollywood years as well. Clear and Present Danger was dealing with some of the same themes as Graham Greene's novel. I just woke up one morning and decided that I'd had enough of working in Hollywood. I was enjoying myself, I mean, it was just like a kid in a candy store. But it was too much of a good thing. In this case, it was too much of the star system, too much of the Hollywood machine, the politics that go with that, too much of the pre-masticated stories, in particular, those that come from making bestsellers into movies, the predictability that comes with dealing with those big budgets where it doesn't really matter whether the movie is good or bad, they'll sell it to everybody and the audience will come - all of that made it seem that moviemaking had become part of a factory. A process, a conveyor belt.
Then, going back to Australia and working on Rabbit-Proof Fence seemed to be the antidote to all of that. But, more particularly, it was the story itself, Rabbit-Proof Fence. This is the kind of story a Hollywood writer could have been paid a million dollars to get wrong. You've got these three little children, seemingly powerless, completely irresistable as characters, faced with this seemingly impossible task. I mean, they might as well have been transported to Mars, they're so far away from home. You think they've got no chance and then they follow the umbilical cord of this mythical fence that brought their fathers, and if they find it, they get home. And ultimately, it ends with this bittersweet triumph that's very affirming. You know, it's the kind of stuff that, if you can invent it, you're doing very well. But it was real, so the story was really irresistable. It was the power of that story that got me to escape from Hollywood.
And you got the story when you were still there?
Yes, I was still there. I was working on The Sum of All Fears. I was going to make another $100 million movie. And the phone rang in the middle of the night and it was this strange woman. She said, "We have the perfect film and you're the perfect director to make this into a movie."
And this was Christine Olsen, the documentary filmmaker. She'd never written a script before, but she'd bought the rights to this story. And she'd written her first screenplay and now she was calling from Australia - she got the time difference wrong. It was two, three o'clock in the morning. And I thought, I've got to get rid of her quickly - but efficiently, because if I offended her, she would probably keep ringing me and ringing me, and so, I told her to ring my office the next day.
So I got rid of her and left a message at the office telling them that there's this crazy woman, she's got some story about stolen generations and everything, so try and just gently... get her out of our lives. But somebody didn't get the message, and so, when she rang the next day, they made friends. Christine sent the script, the assistant read it and then passed it onto someone else who passed it onto someone else... and they all started coming to me and saying, "You must read this story!" I said, "What story?" They said, "The story by that woman." I said, "No! Forget that story! We're doing this big movie. Don't waste my time."
Eventually, I read the story, and I thought, Oh, my God, what was I thinking? This is an incredible story. And there I was sitting on The Sum of All Fears. We'd paid a screenwriter something like a million and a half dollars to adapt this story and it still wasn't working. It was all bullshit and make-believe, you know. The Russians were... I don't know, I forget myself. But you know, it was supposedly based on reality, but the story wasn't working. And here's this simple, little, tiny movie. It didn't need millions of dollars. It didn't need stars. Seemed like the perfect antidote to everything that the Hollywood experience had become, despite all the fun I was having.
Did you have problems raising the money to make The Quiet American?
We did have problems, but then, there was so much money in the Neuer Markt, here [in Germany], that some of it had to go to a good cause. And that's where we found the money.
Sounds likely.
Yeah. No, we couldn't finance it in America. It was developed for a while at Paramount by Sydney Pollack and I who had deals there. I was making Clear and Present Danger and he was doing the John Grisham, the first one, The Firm. So we were making big movies for big studios and we said we wanted to buy this book. And they said ok, just to keep us happy. And we gave them the script and they read it and they said, "Oh, no, we can never make this. It's not commercial." We couldn't find the money, but eventually, we found it here.
Seems a shame that it only got one nomination for an Academy Award, Michael Caine's.
Well, in order to get nominated, you have to be seen. The movie was shown for two weeks in November and then it was not screened again until after the voting took place, the nominations, and to make up for that, usually you send out tapes or DVDs. But in this case, the tapes were sent out after the voting. [laughs] So it was impossible, absolutely impossible for it to even get nominated. It was a miracle that Michael Caine got nominated. Nobody who voted could see the movie! [laughs]
Could it be that the Americans don't want to see such movies, where the Americans aren't the heroes?
No, I don't think that's true. I think that when the final figures come in, the box office in America and in the rest of the world will be roughly the same. Which is usual for any movie. Nowadays, it's fifty-fifty, America and the rest of the world. So I don't think that the audiences in Australia, France and so on combined are going to be any bigger than the American audience.
The Americans have embraced it. If you look at the IMDb - that subject interests me also; what's the American reaction? - look at the American voters and the non-American voters. The Americans actually rate it higher. So that's not necessarily true. America is a nation that celebrates diversity and controversy.
There was a time after 9/11 when the film was in rough cut, not finished, and we were screening it in the New Jersey area, often to people who'd been involved in the attack on the World Trade Center. There, the response was very negative in those months after 9/11. Then, yes. People felt violated. They felt that the film was an aggressive act. But I think that period has passed.
How do you think the film resonates now?
I think it's amazing that Graham Greene was such a genius, or rather, that his observation was so acute, writing this novel with this character, Alden Pyle, the quiet American, this do-gooder, this evangelist who wanted to save the world, or the Vietnamese people. And that that portrait may be more true today than it may have been when he wrote it. That's remarkable. It is amazing that the story is even more topical now than it was fifty years ago when it was written.
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