|
GRAEME
ISAAC INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION: J:
When did you first become interested in making films? G:
Well, Wrong Side of the
Road was the first film that I produced, or was involved in the
production of. My
background prior to that had been more in theatre and in music.
I’d worked with the Australian Performing Group in Melbourne in
the early 70s, and I was involved with Circus Oz in its early years.
And I used to play in various bands around Melbourne, including
Matchbox, Captain Matchbox. I had done a little bit of work… acted in a rather hammy
fashion in a couple of films, and done a little bit of soundtrack music,
but no sort of mainstream involvement.
And then I’d been teaching for a year in Adelaide at an
Aboriginal music school, where the bands that were in WSOTR
formed. I started to become
frustrated with the difficulties raising money for recording.
At that time the Aboriginal arts board was still under white
control, and really the main focus of the arts board was in
merchandising Aboriginal artists to a white audience.
All traditional artists -they didn’t see much scope for
supporting the contemporary Aboriginal arts. The various record
companies that we went to put up a little bit of money for demo
recording, but basically were balking at the idea of putting any major
money into a project where they had to merchandise a black band to a
white audience in Australia. And
they were quite open about the fact that that was their nervousness.
So it was out of frustration from that that the idea for the film
sort of grew, and I had known Ned Lander, the director and co-producer,
some years before in Melbourne. We’d worked together on a couple of things.
He was just out of film school and working on a documentary –
an Aboriginal documentary up north to do with uranium mining. J:
Okay, that would have been Dirt
Cheap? G:
That was Dirt Cheap,
that’s right. So I rang
him and played him some of the music over the phone, and said, look this
is all pretty exciting, you’d better come down.
And it was exciting, because while there had been plenty of
Aboriginal country bands and so forth, these bands that were forming at
this music center in Adelaide were - to my knowledge anyway - the first
Aboriginal bands that were writing in a contemporary style, and writing
original songs about their own lives and their own experiences.
I was helping them to organise these tours that were going up the
west coast towards Western Australia, up to Ceduna on the edge of the
desert country, and also up along the Murray.
It was really exciting to be a part of that because you just felt
that you were a part of something that was really new and exciting and
uplifting for all the people who were involved.
And also because there was this incredible connection between the
music, the bands, and their audiences – you know, it all mattered
somehow or another. It felt
engaging and involving, and you felt like the music mattered.
So Ned came over to Adelaide, and he became totally excited about
it as I was, and so we just went from there.
The project started on a much smaller scale originally as a short
film on 16mm, which we struggled to finance.
J:
Where did the funding for that come from? G:
About half of it came from the Australian Film Commission, and the other
half of it we were able to raise from private sources. The Film Commission had been a little bit nervous about it in
the beginning, because it was a style of film that had not really been
made in Australia before, and hasn’t been made much since, although
it’s quite common overseas – where there is some sort of
intersection between documentary and drama, where you have people who
are actually acting, but they’re playing out their own experiences,
experiences from their own lives, or the lives of their family and
friends. There were very
few professional actors – a couple of the white roles - but apart from
that, certainly all of the Aboriginal people in the film – it was the
first film with a principally Aboriginal cast, and they were not
experienced actors. The
funding body sort of looked at it, and said “well it all looks very
interesting, but who’s going to play the part of the people in the
film?”. We said they’re
going to play themselves, and there was a bit of concern.
But anyway, we managed to get it going, but then during the
production, the course of the production, we managed to convince our
supporters to let us shoot the budget out and go to feature length.
And eventually we were able to blow up to 35mm.
So the project sort of grew during the process.
There was a little bit more elbow room in those days.
The industry has become a lot more regulated, professionalised
and everything now. That’s
been to its advantage in certain aspects, but it’s also been a
disadvantage in others. It’s
[now] very hard to break through in that sort of way, in the way that we
were able to then. You
know, to do something that was very new, and very different.
J:
Talking about the actors, and the way that you had
non-professionals playing most of those roles… how do you think the
way the script was written helped those roles?
G:
Well… firstly, the story was based on reality.
There were two bands, and in fact there were more than two bands
from this music center that were going out and doing these tours.
And so the film is basically based on what was happening at the
time, with the two bands on the road.
All of the other threads in the story, for instance the thread of
Les the guitarist of No Fixed Address looking for his Aboriginal family,
the guy who had been fostered out, trying to track down his Aboriginal
ancestry – that wasn’t Les’ story, that wasn’t Les’ situation
at all - but the guy who was the roadie for the band at the time was
going through exactly that same thing.
That was a common story for them, and it’s become a higher
profile issue now with all of the stolen generation stuff.
But you know, it was all still happening then of course.
And so even though it wasn’t Les’s story, we decided that the
guy who was going through this couldn’t really do it on screen, and so
Les would do it. So firstly
the script was based on the reality of the lives of those who played in
the film. And secondly,
whilst we had a script that was largely scene-by-scene scripted - fully
scripted with dialogue - there were very few scenes where people
actually learnt lines and said the same thing in each take.
Basically, we took the action of the scene, and would play the
action of the scene, and they brought their own dialogue to it.
So if you like, there was a level of improvisation, but
improvisation within a framework, and a basis of reality.
And that’s why the film, scene for scene, has got a sort of
documentary feeling to it, it feels like it’s really happening.
It’s because of that. Although
in fact, the coverage was drama style coverage, even though a certain
amount of the material was hand-held.
We would stop the scene, we’d stop the shot, or we’d move the
camera, and we’d play the same scene again, or we’d play a portion
again. So if you like, it used a combination of documentary and
dramatic techniques in order to achieve its end.
J:
When I spoke to Ned, he mentioned that that was partly because of
a credibility issue. He
said that there were credibility problems with the story, and obviously
there was some backlash to the film, from people that though that it
exaggerated… G:
…It would have to be defensible.
At the time, a number of the things the film was asserting were
very controversial. I mean,
it was not controversial for anyone in the Aboriginal community or
anyone who has hung around with Aboriginal people, but in terms of the
mainstream media, many of the assertions of the film were going to be
seen as controversial. So
we felt the film had to be defensible.
J:
What did you think about the backlash that the film got when it
was released? G:
Well, I don’t know that there was that big a backlash.
There was certainly a lot of critical commentary, there was a lot
written about the film, an enormous amount.
Mostly it was very supportive.
The Police Association in South Australia weren’t very happy
with the film. We managed to get their cooperation to shoot, but they
weren’t too happy afterwards, and several of the guys in the bands got
roughed up. One got
his arm broken. But in terms of the mainstream media response, the
response to the film was pretty positive.
Within the film world, certainly the response to the film was
very warm - it was a total surprise, it was a style of project that had
come from nowhere, and it dealt with a subject that no one had really
stopped to think about much. It
came from sort of nowhere, and was nominated as Best Film in the AFI
awards that year, and it was sort of the “little Aussie battler”
film up against Gallipoli –
in fact it was made probably on the catering budget of Gallipoli.
So it was very warmly received within the film world. J:
And of course it won the 1981 Jury Prize. G:
Yeah. J:
How did it feel getting that sort of recognition? G:
Oh, well it was fantastic. But
I think that in reality it was a recognition of the courage of the cast,
of the people involved, and it was a feeling of sort of empathy that
engendered the recognition. Oh
well, I suppose it was partly that and partly to do with the film
itself. It’s hard to
know. There’s a sort of a
looseness to the film, in terms of it’s narrative structure, and the
fact that it has so many characters in there, so many main characters,
was always going to make it a difficult film in terms of it how
effectively it could work as entertainment in conventional terms. It
would have been so much simpler to make a road movie with one band. You
could have got really involved in the characters and so forth, but the
thing is that we felt there was two bands happening in this situation,
and there had to be two bands in the film, because the whole basis, the
whole credibility of the film rested in the feeling of veracity and
being real. We had to go
for that, and we had to represent that, particularly because it was the
first film with an all black cast, the first film like this being made
in Australia. Therefore
there was a lot of pressure on it to carry certain sorts of political
messages and to refer to a wide range of issues that were facing the
black community. In a sense
you could say that that may have to some degree compromised the dramatic
effectiveness of the film, but on the other hand it sort of provided the
film with a lot of its strength and integrity.
I still couldn’t really tell you to what degree the response to
the film was a response to the issues that the film raised as opposed to
the artistic or creative elements involved in the film itself.
J:
Talking about the amount of characters in the film, I find the
pace very natural, there’s one period in the film in particular, in
the middle, where it feels like we’re sort of drifting around,
following the various characters who are also drifting.
Can you tell us a little about the pace, and I guess the way the
film was edited to get that feel as well? G:
I think it’s one of those things that… it’s not that we
sort of deliberately set out to do that. I think that what we decided was that the most important
thing we wanted to do with the film was to have the audience feel that
they were with those characters, and they were sharing their lives and
their journey. The fact
that their journey is a discursive one, that they stop here and there
and wander round, that was to do with their lives, so the audience got
to share that. So the pace
of the editing and so forth was partly sort of a function of that.
I think you’re referring to a scene around the middle of the
film where there’s a party? J:
And also the scenes on the land, and the flashbacks and so on. G:
Yeah, that’s around the same sort of area I think.
There’s one band that end up at that party, and then there’s
another carload of people that are on a beach somewhere. J:
That’s right. When the film came out, it was described in many different
ways. How would you
describe the film? G:
I’m not quite sure how to put a label on it.
Do you mean… J:
…I mean… I know it was described as a road movie, a rock
film, a revolutionary film… it had so many different characteristics
ascribed to it. I’m just
thinking how would you describe the film yourself?
G:
Well, the byline to the title was “48 hours on our side of
town”, and I suppose that was really what we wanted to do with the
film, we wanted to take an audience, principally a white audience, onto
the other side of the road for a while.
And just to have them share in the day-to-day experiences of a
group of young black Australians. And
I think the film was able to do that.
And of course for black Australians, I think the film was sort of
treated as an affirmation. It
didn’t tell them anything new, but it was an affirmation for them, it
was saying I guess, well this is true, we do have these experiences, and
this is what it’s like for us. And we have fun as well as having these problems and
difficulties we have to overcome. The
other fantastic experience with the film that I had was having the
opportunity to see it in the bush, and also hear about other screenings
in remote areas - where Aboriginal people still living closer to a
tribal style of life with their cultural traditions intact, watched the
film as a sort of story about their families in the city.
So I suppose for them the film did carry something new in a sense
that it brought immediacy to that experience they knew about only
anecdotally because it wasn’t theirs.
J:
Well how did you feel as a white man making a film about the
black experience like this? G:
Well I don’t know that I stopped to think about it too much.
Prior to going to Adelaide and starting work at this Aboriginal
music school, I’d had very little contact with Aboriginal people, as
you do if you’re brought up in Melbourne as I was, or in Sydney, or
anywhere else – that’s part of the difficulty, it’s that thing of
ignorance, that most white Australians have very little to do with
Aboriginal people, so they don’t have that personal contact.
But I didn’t feel a barrier or a problem.
I suppose the one thing that I was aware of was - the difference
in my situation was that I had chosen to step into that world and become
part of it, but I would always have the option to step out.
So even though I was very close to the guys in those bands, and
we played together and toured together and did all sorts of things
together, I always knew that I was able to step out of that world if I
chose to. So there was
always that difference. But
I think… my experience with them, and my subsequent experience with
Aboriginal people in other situations, has made me feel that you’re
accepted as a white person for who you are inside yourself, and for what
you do. So I didn’t really have a difficulty in that sense.
And the other thing was, that the whole basis of Wrong Side of
the Road was that it was about these two bands, it was providing a
platform for their music, and for them.
So, whilst Ned and I were sort of building this platform, and
constructing a vehicle for them, it was theirs in the sense that it was
their songs, their expressions, their statements, rather than ours.
So I didn’t feel that I was in the situation of speaking for
them, which I of course couldn’t, rather that Ned and I were helping
to create an opportunity for them to speak out more loudly to a broader
public. J:
Well how much of a role did you play in regards to the way that
the bands music was used in the film?
I mean, I guess you sort of discovered the bands in that sense… G:
I didn’t discover them, they sort of formed or came to this
music… there was this
music center in Adelaide, and it was affiliated with Adelaide
University, it was a little building with salt-damp on the edge of the
University, and at the time that I came there it was basically being
used by the University as a fishbowl for their musicology students.
There were Pitjanjajara tribal elders who used to come down from
Indulkana south of Alice Springs, men and women who would teach their
traditional singing, traditional music.
Not their serious songs, which are only for initiated people - so
I suppose what they were doing was teaching nursery rhymes.
Nevertheless they were teaching the urban Aboriginal students
this material, and white ethno-musicology students from the University
would come and sit in on these sessions.
That was the principle interest of the University in the
organization at that time, in the music school, which was called CASM
– Center for Aboriginal Studies in Music.
The university wasn’t really interested in it as an ongoing
educational musical institution for the Aboriginal community in
Adelaide, and its resources were very scant.
But there was a guy named Leigh Hobber who taught there in the
year prior to me, and he’d been able to get the beginnings of some
electric instruments in there, a drum kit, and an amplifier.
When I came I was able to help build on that, and one band
formed, which was No Fixed Address.
And as soon as they went out and started playing publicly, at the
Aboriginal football club dance, or at various social events within the
black community in Adelaide, as soon as they started to perform
publicly, there were all these young guys (mainly, there were some girls
as well) knocking on the door of this place saying they wanted to come
and study there and enroll as students.
Even though the facilities were very poor and there weren’t a
lot of incentives, it was an opportunity to get access to equipment, and
to be able to play. And the
guys from Us Mob all arrived as a result of that, and Us Mob was then
formed during the course of that year.
And Coloured Stone was as well, and interestingly enough,
they’re the band out of the three of them, that are still on the road.
They’ve played solidly for 20 years.
Although at the time we made the film things were a bit shakey
within the band, and they weren’t fully able to function.
But the situation for them was, as young musicians, it was hard
for them to get a hold of gear, they couldn’t get hire/purchase
amplifiers or guitars easily because they were Aboriginal, it was hard
to find somewhere to practice where they wouldn’t be hassled.
So that’s why they came along.
When they started to play there were three bands playing, and the
music started to be recorded and circulate, and really it was a major
part of that rebirth or birth of contemporary black music in the
country. There had been
other black bands playing around the place, but mostly they were playing
covers or playing country and western.
I don’t know of any full-bore black rock’n’roll bands that
had been writing their own stuff about their own lives; that had been
playing anywhere else. One
of the most popular songs was “We Have Survived’, the No Fixed
Address song, which became a key song to the film, and in fact that
became sort of the slogan of the land rights movement – certainly in
the eighties. That whole
sort of notion of survival against all odds.
So, really a lot came out of it.
J:
Yeah, well that’s actually how I got interested in the film,
I’m actually a reggae fan; so I’ve sort of have to ask this question
– do you have any thoughts on the way reggae music is used in the
film? G:
How do you mean the way that it’s used? J:
I guess the fact that it is reggae that they’re playing at
times. Us Mob not so much,
more No Fixed Address… G:
It’s just that that was the music that those guys were drawn
to. The most dynamic person
in the band was the drummer Bart Willoughby, and he had a natural feel
for reggae. They were
pretty young, those guys, when they started to play. They were 15 or 16.
And they weren’t all steeped in reggae, but Bart really liked
it, and he was the one who was doing most of the early writing – well
there was Bart and there was Ricky Harrison.
And one of Ricky’s first songs was a reggae song… but others
weren’t. Bart’s songs
were all sort of in a reggae style, and the audience responded to it,
and they recognized it as something different, and somehow or other the
sound that popped out when they played reggae was different.
It was fresh, and it was new, and it wasn’t different out of
artifice or because they decided to make it different, but because they
couldn’t help but do it their way, and that made it different, because
of their youth and so on. Bart’s
flair as a drummer – he’s very gifted and he always had played
almost as his own percussionist as well - if you listen to especially
those early recordings, it’s like a drummer and percussionist playing
together – and if you put that together with the simplicity of the
bassline (the bass player was very young, he was only 15 at the time,
and really had just taken the bass up) – I don’t know they just sort
of fell into this groove, and people responded to it, and recognized it
as something fresh and new. They
got a lot of interest in Adelaide from local radio stations, and started
building up a white following as well as a black following in Adelaide.
And it just sort of grew that way.
There were two bands in the film – one was a reggae band, and
one was this heavy rock band. So
the music in the film is a combination of both.
I was going to say fusion, but it’s not fused together.
You follow the two bands on the road, and depending on who
you’re with, you get one sort of music or the other.
J:
Yeah, I guess the members are mixed up to a degree, but the music
is still quite separate. G:
Yeah. J:
How do you think about the film now, 20 years down the track?
Do you regard it any differently, or think about it any
differently? G:
No, not really. For me it was sort of an intense and very exciting period of
my life, and I get a good feeling when I think about the film, and it
brings those memories back to me. I’m
sort of gratified by the fact that the film still seems to hold together
as a film that works; it hasn’t been dimmed by the passage of time,
and I think that’s because it feels real.
I think it’s because of the qualities that it had at the time,
that attracted it a lot of attention – that it felt like it was coming
from a real time and place and telling you something about these
people’s lives and sort of bringing you into it.
So I think the film was effective that way, and it’s still
there, and it seems that the issues of the film are as alive and
relevant as ever. J:
I guess they are just as relevant today – have you ever thought
about giving the film a proper re-release for modern audiences? G:
Well, if there was a distributor who was prepared to take it up
and put some money into it and do that, that would be great.
It has been screened a lot on television; the ABC have licensed
it a number of times, two or maybe even three; it’s been screened on
Channel 7 certain states; I think it may have been screened by SBS as
well. It ran again as a
special on the ABC a couple of months ago, and in fact it’s going to
run again in maybe six months time.
The Australian Film Commision is putting together a package of
films that they were involved in that they regard as historic films, and
that’s going to be one of them. So
the film is still alive, it still goes out to an audience, and it still
screens regularly out in the bush or in Aboriginal communities.
It’s actually had a very long and active festival life as well.
It’s probably been, in terms of Australian films going to
international festivals, one of the most traveled Australian films now
overseas in terms of its festival exposure. And it still goes out now and again to different festivals
overseas. So that’s sort
of gratifying, to feel that the film is still alive like that after 20
years, because of course most films aren’t.
The one thing that I do feel sad about sometimes is that so many
of the people in the film are dead and passed on.
A number of the younger people; people in the bands.
That’s sort of a reflection of some of the issues that the film
raises itself. Sometimes
Ned and I have thought about whether to do a documentary, or whether to
do something in relation to looking back at the film, or what’s
happened to all the people that were in it.
I’m saddened by the reality of that, and neither of us really
know how to deal with it, and whenever we speak to – I know I have
this experience, and I’m sure Ned has – if we speak for instance to
Auntie Vonnie, one of the elder Aboriginal women in the film, or
sometimes to one or two of the other guys, that’s often something
that’s mentioned. |