NED LANDER INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION:
DIRECTOR OF WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD  

SEPTEMBER 2000

JESSE:  Ned, I’d just like to start by asking a few questions about your background as a film maker.  When did you first realize you wanted to make films?

 NED:  Very young.  <laughs>  I’ve been involved since I was a teenager. 

 J:  Right, and you went to the Australian Film and Television School?

 N:  Yes, in 1975. 

 J:  How did that shape your direction?

 N:  Well, it was a very interesting time in Sydney, there was quite a bit of political film making happening; documentary film making.  I’d actually fallen in love with “the movies” as opposed to documentary film making, or political documentary film making, but I guess at that point in time there was a lot of activity and I got involved in issues like the uranium issue… Timor was an issue… and I sort of found myself heading into documentary film making for a while. 

 J:  So is that why you decided to make Dirt Cheap?

 N:  Yeah, yeah.  As I say, the two big issues in 1975 were the opening of Arnhemland for uranium mining, and the pushing through of the Ranger uranium mining agreement… and Timor.  They were the two things at the top of the agenda.  Of course the sacking of the Whitlam government was in there as well!  <laughs>

 J:  Did the making of Dirt Cheap provide a helpful background for the making of Wrong Side of the Road? 

 N:  Uhh, yeah.  I mean, the making of Dirt Cheap was my first intense involvement in connection to an Aboriginal community, and it was because of having made that that people down in South Australia who were involved with the Center for Aboriginal Studies in Music contacted me and said “do you want to come and have a look at what’s happening here and think about possibly doing a film together”. 

 J:  Right.  I understand that Graeme Isaac provided some of the thrust of focusing on the bands?

 N:  Yes, Graeme was a teacher at CASM, as it was called - the Center for Aboriginal Studies in Music. He was involved in film, and he had gone there to teach music, and he had gotten involved with the newly forming Aboriginal bands there – No Fixed Address and Coloured Stone, and Us Mob, and a couple of other bands. 

 J:  When the film was described in many different ways – a road movie, a protest film, a political film, a rock film, etc.  How would you describe the film? 

 N:  Well it’s all those things, and it’s very much a personal story as well - a number of personal stories.  The thread that runs through the film is the story played by Les Graham in the film, of a boy looking for his mother.  We constructed the script out of life stories that we recorded from members of the bands, and people around the bands and at the Center.  They weren’t necessarily playing themselves – Les was in fact playing someone else’s story in the film.  But if you look today - here in 2000 twenty years later - at the significance of the stolen generation and the way that that has become part of the whole public debate – it wasn’t in those days, but that’s what that story was about.  It was about a kid who had been taken away from his family, and in fact right through the seventies that was still happening.  There was many ways that those sort of situations came about, obviously there were instances of kids being forcibly removed from parents, and also instances of kids being removed for a whole range of other reasons.  But always with the same consequence, which was the fragmentation of family, and the dislocation of family, and of kids trying to reconnect with both their blood family and their broader community. 

 J:  I understand that none of the Aboriginal actors in the film actually had any acting experience.

 N:  Uh, no.  Well, yes and no.  They didn’t have film acting experience, but they were certainly performers, and they were used to performing in public.  And they were very quick to get involved and engaged in the process. 

 J:  Well, I think the acting is actually very good.  It’s got a very realistic feel for me.  How much did you actually direct them, and how much did you let them do what they wanted to do? 

N:  We did quite a lot of work-shopping before the film - although we weren’t very sophisticated about, or certainly I wasn’t at the time.  I guess we were sort of taking a Mike Leigh approach.  In fact, the person that I sort of was looking at at the time was Ken Loach, who sort of predates Mike Leigh.  It was that approach where you know the general area, you’ve defined the area that the film is going to deal with, the broad strokes of story and so on; and you’re developing character, and you’re looking at the relationship of story to character, and the whole process is one of work-shopping.  We shared a physical space where we were living, writing, working, rehearsing, and in fact shooting and editing.  So it was a very engaged process.  It was pretty exciting.

 J:  How did you feel as a white filmmaker, making a film about the black experience like this?

 N:  I felt very engaged, very involved.  It was a very robust dialogue going on between us, and I felt very much invited into that situation.  I guess most of the questioning of that relationship at that time came from non-Aboriginal people.  Most of it came from non-Aboriginal people who had in fact done very little to in any way engage themselves either with the issues, or with the process of trying to create the circumstances for Aboriginal people to tell their own stories or make films.  Which is I guess something that has been the sort of political agenda since that time, with support through the funding commission, the ABC, and various other groups.  The training and funding of Aboriginal film makers.  That’s what’s happening now days, with Ivan Sen, Rachel Perkins, Erika Glynn and Warrick Thornton, and a whole range of Aboriginal film makers who are making films and telling their own stories.  But that’s been a 20 year process of development, and it needed funding.  I suppose things like the Sand to Celluloid, series where money was set aside to fund an indigenous short drama series, and the Indigenous Documentary Fund and so on, have had a big role in that process.  And it’s certainly something that people like Graeme Isaac and myself and others, have been involved in supporting, and in the process stepping back from the film making role, and watching Aboriginal people take that role.  But at that point in time that hadn’t occurred.  And so the engagement that we did have was terrific, but it was not one of having been able to turn around and say, okay, we’ll have an Aboriginal director, we’ll have an Aboriginal cinematographer, or the sorts of things have occurred since. 

 J:  When the film came out there was a bit of backlash from people that felt that the film was biased, or exaggerated the harsh treatment the Aboriginals received.  What did you think about that sort of criticism at the time?

 N:  It spoke about the depths of both ignorance and hostility… racism… that was in the community.  We actually toned the film down in many instances from the stories that had been recounted to us, because we knew there was going to be a credibility issue.  So the film was already toned down before it went out, and people still had problems accepting that it was in any way representative of reality.  At that point in time, a very large part of the Australian population, non-Aboriginal population, had little contact with Aboriginal people, and had absorbed a bunch of nonsense from their education.  Y’know, that Aborigines were a “proud and noble people that lived a long time ago”, at best.  At worst, there was just straight out hostility and racism, and fear and ignorance.  Not to say it doesn’t exist today, but I guess the level of debate has shifted. 

 J:  I understand that many in the police force in particular also had a problem with the portrayal of cops in the film.  What happened there?

 N:  Well, I think we’re still in the situation where we’ve still got mandatory sentencing in the Northern Territory; we’ve still got all sorts of outrageous expressions of racism.  On the other hand there are shifts within the community to people trying to educate themselves about the history, and become aware of the background of circumstances, and so on.  But there’s still a long way to go. 

 J:   When I was researching the film I found an article that mentioned that the NSW Education Department was looking to screen the film in high schools, but the NSW Police Department objected.  What was the outcome of that – was the film ever shown in schools?  

N:  The film’s been widely shown in schools.  I couldn’t tell you the outcome of that particular conflict, and I don’t know if it was officially shown through the education system, but I know that many, many high schools have ended up with VHS copies of the film.  Certainly many TAFES and Universities and so on.  It’s a film that, today, is still being widely shown. 

 J:  The film was critically well received as well, and it won the 1981 AFI Jury prize.  How did you feel about that? 

 N:  We felt incredibly excited that something that had started as small as it did, with our complete lack of experience at the time, with just an incredible amount of energy and passion to tell our stories, had broken through and got some sort of public exposure.  We were very excited by that.  I think everyone was, the bands, and the older people that had supported them in the Aboriginal community.  We felt vindicated by that. 

 J:  The film seems very much like a documentary in places, why did you choose to make it like that? 

 N:  Well, I guess it’s exactly that issue that you were raising earlier about credibility, and about wondering or challenging whether or not these sorts of things actually happen in Australia.  I think by giving it that grittiness, and that verite feel, it really challenged those points of views.  Y’know, does this happen, or doesn’t it happen?  And people were dealing with not just “does this happen in real life?”, but people were dealing with “is this real? Is what I’m looking at real?”.  In fact, of course it’s constructed – in a sense documentary is constructed too, what you choose to put in and what you choose to leave out creates meaning at every turn, whether it’s drama or documentary footage.  There was a great deal of documentary footage in the sense that we were reporting a point of view.  If we sat down and filmed talking heads, much of the content of the film would be in the story, told by those talking heads.  We chose to dramatise it, and we chose to use a hand-held camera, and to give it a documentary feel, but it is constructed drama, drawn from documentary evidence. 

 J:  I find the pace of the film quite natural as well, and at times it feels we’re drifting around the same as the protagonists are sort of drifting around.  Can you tell us a little about the pace and the way that it was edited? 

 N: Yeah, it was edited by John Scott, who is a fantastic film editor.  I guess he looked very much to give it pace and intensity in certain scenes, and in certain parts with the music and the action and so on, and at other times give it space and time and allow it to slow down.  You certainly get shifts like that, even from the urban to the rural country areas.  You get shifts through different peoples’ stories.  I suppose we were looking to create those rhythms where it was quite intense at times, and slowed right down at other times. 

 J:  The soundtrack is obviously crucial to the film, but the film is obviously a lot more than a showcase for the band’s talents.  How did you decide how much to concentrate on the music, and how much on the experiences and everything surrounding the music?

 N:  Well, the music was absolutely critical to it, because it was around the music.  The music was the point of energy around which the guys were focused.  The members of the bands were passionate about their music, and they wanted to record it, and the film provided a financial and organizational structure through which they could record their songs, and that was some of the first recording. Coloured Stone was doing some recording, there were other people recording around, but it was very much through this energy coming out of the making and recording of the music that the film grew.  So it was totally natural that that would be at the heart of it, and that we would do a soundtrack album, and all those things.

 J:  Did the bands perform songs of their choice, or did you listen to their material and select some songs ahead of time?

 N:  Well, the music was recorded ahead of time in the studio, in the way you do with the movies.  But I guess there was a bit of both.  Graeme in particular was sort of doing his criticism and evaluation, and giving critical feedback to the bands, and they had strong feelings about things they wanted in there as well.  So it was just a dynamic situation. 

 J:  Do you have any thoughts on the way that reggae music in particular was used in the film? 

 N:  Yeah, it’s an interesting one.  I mean, people sort of would talk about the fact that there was a reggae influence in their music.  You would occasionally hear white people saying “oh isn’t it a shame they aren’t playing their own music, they’re playing music from another country”.  And you’d sort of think, “how could people say these things, how can a white fella stand there, when rock’n’roll and every sort of major music that the non-aboriginal community engages in, has probably got a non-white origin.  An African-American origin, or indigenous origin of some form or another.  But somehow they don’t realize that white fellas playing rock music is an appropriation.  Whether you call it an appropriation, or whether you can it influence, it happens in all directions, all the time.  It’s just that people somehow have this notion that Aboriginal, or indigenous music, should be static in time. 

 J:  Do you think about the film differently now, 20 years down the track?

 I still like the film.  I guess as a filmmaker you’re always criticizing your own work, and you’re always going “oh god, why did we do that”, or “what a mess that is”, or “I love that bit, that reminds me of such and such”.  But no, it’s one of those films that you feel… I guess there was a validity in what happened at the time - there was a validity in the energy, and the coming together of white fellas and black fellas to make something meaningful, and that value is enduring.