Originally published in Scoop Magazine

The early films of director Phillip Noyce, such as ‘Newsfront’ and ‘Heatwave’, have left an indelible mark on Australia’s cultural landscape. After the success of 1989 thriller ‘Dead Calm’ propelled him into the Hollywood stratosphere, the past decade has seen him remodelled as an established blockbuster man with such behemoths as ‘Patriot Games’ and ‘The Bone Collector’ to his name.

A decade is a long time away from home in the belly of the machine, however. 2002 sees Noyce return to his homeland to tell a story of the stolen generation and, in the sweeping outback brushstrokes of ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, create what may just be one of the most important Australian films in decades.

“I was contracted to make a $220 million adaptation of Tom Clancy’s ‘The Sum of All Fears’, which was to star Harrison Ford,” recalls an exhausted Noyce, putting the finishing touches to the film just a week before its first screening. “It was to be the third in the series of Clancy novels, and Harrison was having doubts about doing another one. I was holed up in a New York hotel working with a writer and trying to convince Harrison to commit.

“The ridiculousness of the situation finally got to meoI woke up one morning and thought I’m in the wrong country, I’m in the wrong city, I should go back to Australia and make ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’. The daunting nature of the blockbuster, where in many ways you are directing traffic as much as directing, just got me downothis film was an antidote to the Hollywood machine.”

‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ tells the true story of Molly Craig (Everlyn Sampi), a young Aboriginal girl stolen from her family in Jigalong, Western Australia, in 1931. Sent to the Moore River settlement by the white authorities, “for their own good”, the girls were early victims of a government policy which the nation still struggles to come to terms with to this day. Along with her younger sister and cousin (Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan), she escapes the settlement and sets off on a 1500-mile journey, pursued by the authorities, knowing little except that if they follow the rabbit-proof fence, which separates the East of Australia from the West, they will find their way home again.

After dragging renowned Australian cinematographer and ex-Merchant Mariner Christopher Doyle from “under a barstool”, the greatest challenge Noyce would face in the production of the film was finding and preparing three young Aboriginal girls to carry the film, and to draw natural emotions from their performances.

“Pretty early on in the casting process, we realised that we were going to need to look in the hinterlands for kids that were more in contact with traditional lifestyle,” he recalls. “They were cast because they were natural performers, but I could never hope for them to absorb all of the technical needs of film acting in just two weeks of preparation and seven weeks of shooting. Each of them was typecast according to their natural similarities to the characters that they were playing.

“Everlyn Sampi, who plays Molly, the eldest and the leader of the group, is herself very proud and singular minded and she is a determined young woman who doesn’t like being told what to do. She brings all of those characteristics to her portrayal of Molly without even being told what to do.”

“Everlyn was a bit of a bitch here and there,” laughs actress Ningali Lawford, her on-screen mother, “but she was fantastic. Everlyn is in the middle, between a teenager and a little girl, so there’s all that stuff she has to go through, it’s a nasty age.”

Sampi is the spiritual and emotional centre of the film, a radiant screen presence seemingly nonplussed by the gravity of starring alongside such screen legends as David Gulpilil (eWalkabout’, ‘Crocodile Dundee’) and Kenneth Branagh. Off-screen, however, it was a different story.

“She left the set many times,” Noyce admits, “but that was okay because she was playing the part of a kid who didn’t want to be locked up and told what to do. The more that she related to me as a de facto A.O. Neville [the infamous chief eprotector’ of Aborigines] the better. I was the authority figure in her life who was telling her that she had to do things because they were for her own good, and sometimes she was willing to believe me and often not. That was fine, because she used that to fuel her performance.”

The most confronting scene in ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ is the harrowing abduction of the children from the Jigalong settlement, which was, for Noyce, an outpouring of rage, fear and shock that strikes at the very core of our nation’s history.

“Two of the children and all of the indigenous adult performers had family members who had been taken,” he says. “They have grown up with these stories in their memories and it was almost like all the pain of 200-plus years of contact and confrontation between two very different cultures came out in the re-enactment of that scene. It was like it was all vomited up.”

Lawford, perhaps best known to Western Australians as the face of the Water Corporation and for her work with the Yirra Yaakin theatre company, confronted deeply personal emotions as she found her character fighting with the authorities, searching for some comprehension of an incomprehensible action.

“My father was taken away, along with his brothers, and I was just putting myself in my grandmother’s position,” she recalls. “I was there, it didn’t become a set for me, it became reality. My mum was there as welloit was really sad for her. We all cried, everybody on set cried.”

Despite the inherently Australian nature of ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, and its great significance as a long-overdue look at a dark chapter of Australian history, Noyce believes it has a reach far beyond our shores.

“The story has a special significance to Australians,” he says, “but the storyOeis a universal one, and I’m sure the film will play on an emotional level everywhere that it is shown. All of the political issues are embodied in what is a very, very simple, emotion-driven storyothree girls get taken from their families and incarcerated, they escape, and they struggle to get home.”

Beyond the performances of its actors, and the power of its story, perhaps the greatest thing to take from ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, as Lawford testifies, is simply that the time has come when its story can be told.

“I’m lucky that it’s not a policy now in my time, with my children,” she says.

“It is a story, and a warning, but it is real. It will put light into that part of our dark history.”

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Originally published in Hype Magazine

Low, a band for whom the word ‘slowcore’ had to be invented, sound like nothing else you’ve ever heard. The lingering tempo and mournful lyrics of husband and wife duo Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker paint a sweeping emotional canvas where the real heartbreak is found in the moments between notes, where the empty spaces swallow you whole. After a week of missed calls to their hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, Hype tracked down Sparhawk in Melbourne via the mobile phone of their ex-Perth labelmates Sodastream, and asked him where Low’s unique sound originated.

“We were fairly young when we started the band, and there were certain influences that we were pulling from, but it became evident right away that this was a new thing that not a lot of people had done before,” he explains. “There were some elements going on that hadn’t been explored very much — mostly it was the spiritual, transcendent thing that can happen when you explore minimalism and repetition, quietness or subtleness.

“A slow pace rips a song open and opens it up to a bit more, I don’t want to say drama, but it seems like a lot of we do is stripping things down to a very simple language in the hope that in doing so, whatever you’re trying to say will be a little bit more powerful.

“At the same time, you’re taking a risky road in that most people in passing are just going to hear something quiet and think that there’s nothing going on here, I’m not going to listen and invest my mind. But we try to make something there for people who do listen.”

Low’s last two albums, ‘Secret Name’ and ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’, have been produced by the legendary Steve Albini, a man known more for his mastery of fuzz than for Low’s brand of sparse minimalism.

“Steve seems to work at the same pace and ethic as we do, which is usually pretty fast,” explains Sparhawk. “The Auteurs record he did was very lush. He is just really good at capturing sound, that’s why a lot of those harder records have such an edge. If that amp is screaming, he’s going to pick that sound up and get it on tape. There’s an art to that.”

Their last long-player opens with Sparhawk and Parker in duet, crying “when they found your body, giant X’s on your eyes”, and from there delves into a sombre, dark lyrical world perfectly in tune with the sprawl of the music. Sparhawk claims that the band’s reputation for serious, dark songwriting stems from a desire for honesty.

“It’s kind of a personal thing and I’m pretty picky about what I’ll let myself say. We’ve always felt that whatever is said is going to have to be something you really mean, because you are going to have to get up in front of people and say it. I don’t think our lyrics are terribly negative, but they are serious.”

On Low’s first visit to Australia, Sparhawk admits to being tentative about the size of their audiences on the other side of the world.

“We get correspondence once in a while, but it is always hard to tell until you come and do a show and people show up,” he says. “We always expect twenty people to show up, so it’s nice when everything goes well. Once in a while, maybe thirty people will come.”

Their gig at the Watershed on February 14 gives Low an opportunity to play in a small-scale music festival, but Sparhawk is openly relieved that they aren’t faced with a mega-festival situation.

“If we’re thrown on the bill of a huge music festival, we don’t go so well,” he laughs. “It’s Huey Lewis and the News, and now here’s Low! Well that was fun, bring on the Red Hot Chilli Peppers!”

As serious and slow as their reputation claims them to be, Low have, of late, begun to rock out a little more. On their wonderful ‘Christmas’ EP, one could have almost accused them of being, well, jaunty.

“The Christmas EP has some shiny moments,” Sparhawk concedes. “The more we do this, the more we are open to letting go and thinking that if a song happens to be somewhat positive, let’s let that be, let’s not stifle that, obviously that’s something we’re feeling.

“There’s some rock business going on the last album. We’ve got a couple of new songs that may be construed as a little more rock, but it’s just something we step into a little bit once in a while, to mixed success as far as our own feelings about it, but it depends on the night. Sometimes playing the loud songs feels a little wrong.”

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Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Harold Becker
Starring: John Travolta, Vince Vaughn, Matt O’Leary, Teri Polo, Steve Buscemi

Have you ever seen a major Hollywood star defy gravity? Look out the window—there’s John Travolta falling from the stars, and he’s falling faster than anybody thought possible. Once upon a time, after one failed career, Quentin Tarantino gave the disco-king a chance at a second life in ‘Pulp Fiction’ and Travolta blew Hollywood away. After following up over the next few years with further memorable roles in films such as ‘Get Shorty’, ‘Face/Off’ and ‘Primary Colours’, something strange has happened recently. With his scientology creeping in at the edges in the worst film that nobody has ever seen, ‘Battlefield Earth’, and the worst haircut of 2001 in the inexcusable ‘Swordfish’, Vinnie Barbarino seems to have lost his legendary charisma. ‘Domestic Disturbance’ signals another low for a rapidly fading star — he is outshone by the wooden stylings of Vince Vaughn, Hollywood’s most uninspiring leading man (editor’s note, five years on: Vince found his feet in the frat pack, and now I love him muchly).