Bruce Beresford on Film: Interviews, Chronicles, Statements

By R.J. Cardullo

This is the first book to fully document Bruce Beresford's directing career—through interviews, a filmography, a bibliography, movie images, a contextualizing introduction, and a comprehensive index. Up to now, Beresford's career in Australia and America has largely been ignored, despite the fact that he has been working for five decades, directed two Academy-Award-winning films (Driving Miss Daisy and Tender Mercies), and collaborated with such stars as Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Sharon Stone, Jane Fonda, Glenn Close, Albert Finney, Pierce Brosnan, and Diane Keaton. In Bruce Beresford on Film: Interviews, Chronicles, Statements, Beresford's directing career finally gets paid the attention it deserves.

Bruce Beresford on Film: Interviews, Chronicles, Statements is aimed at cinephiles or film buffs, scholar-teachers, and students with an interest in world cinema (Hollywood included), in general, and Australian cinema in particular. The book is aimed, as well, at those educated readers with an interest in the practice of both film directing and arts journalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BearManor Media
• Release date: Oct 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215578124

Book preview

Bruce

Beresford

on Film:

Interviews,

Chronicles,

Statements

Edited by

R. J. Cardullo

Bruce Beresford on Film: Interviews, Chronicles, Statements

Edited by R. J. Cardullo

Copyright © 2022 R. J. Cardullo

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying, or recording, except for inclusion of a review, without permission in writing from the publisher or Author.

No copyright is claimed for the photos within this book. They are used for the purposes of publicity only.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

INTERVIEWS, CHRONOLOGIES, STATEMENTS

Stone, Judy. Bruce Beresford. 1982.

Crowdus, Gary. An Aussie in Hollywood. 1983.

Van Gelder, Lawrence. From the Boer War, Bruce Beresford Turns to Texas Life. 1983.

Borsten, Joan, & Roderick Mann. "King David and Its Modern Goliaths." 1984.

Williamson, Kristin. From Flop to the Fringe of Success. 1986.

Rochlin, Margy. Tender Crimes. 1987.

Fischer, Paul. Bruce Beresford: Interview. 1991.

Mitchell, Sean. Storyteller to the World. 1991.

Katz, Susan Bullington. A Conversation with Bruce Beresford. 1997.

Beresford, Bruce. How I Failed to Make a Green-Lit Movie. 1999.

Lynch, Stephen. Double Threat. 1999.

Malone, Peter. Bruce Beresford in Interview. 2001.

Darmody, Sarah. Bruce Beresford. 2002.

McLeod, Penny. Bruce Beresford as Himself. 2004.

Boland, Michaela, & Michael Bodey. Bruce Beresford. 2004.

Galvin, Peter. ‘Is There Really an Australian Film Industry?’ 2004.

Byrne, Jennifer. Bruce Beresford: Interview. 2004.

Thompson, Peter. Interview with Bruce Beresford. 2007.

McFarlane, Brian. From Ockers to Oscars. 2007.

Hedley, Andrew. "The Mao’s Last Dancer Interview." 2010.

Di Rosso, Jason. Directing Eminence. 2011.

Dillard, Clayton. "Bruce Beresford on Breaker Morant and Mister Johnson." 2015.

Ebiri, Bilge. Aussie Cinema, Powerless Characters, and the Worst Film Experience. 2015.

Bodey, Michael. ‘It’s Not Like a Real Job.’ 2016.

Horner, Ian. Some Film Stars Don’t Live in the Real World. 2016.

Crouch, Monica. "Ladies in Black and Directing Movies." 2018.

Galloway, Stephen. "Getting Ladies in Black Off the Ground." 2019.

Beresford, Trilby. When My Dad Won Best Picture. 2020.

Beresford, Bruce. Planning a Film by Zoom. 2020-2021.

Beresford, Bruce. Henry Handel Richardson and Me. 2021.

Peirce, Andrew F. Bruce Beresford Investigates. 2021.

FILMOGRAPHY & CREDITS

ADDITIONAL PRODUCTION CREDITS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE EDITOR

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My deep thanks to Bruce Beresford for his cooperation in this undertaking and permission to reprint his interviews, chronicles, and statements.

Thanks also to the following publishers, journals, organizations, and individuals for permission to reprint: the estate of Judy Stone; Cineaste; New York Times; Los Angeles Times; Kristin Williamson; American Film Institute; Paul Fischer; Writers’ Guild of America West; Allen & Unwin; MovieMaker Magazine; Peter Malone; New Holland Publishers; Limelight; Inside Film; Jennifer Byrne; Australian Broadcasting Corporation; HarperCollins; Metro Magazine; Andrew Hedley; Jason Di Rosso; Australian Film, Television, and Radio School; Slant Magazine; Bilge Ebiri; The Australian; Ian Horner; University of Sydney; Hollywood Reporter; The Spectator; and Andrew F. Peirce.

CHRONOLOGY

Events

Born on August 16, 1940, in Paddington, an inner-city area of Sydney, Australia, the son of Lona (née Warr) and Leslie Beresford.

Grew up in the then outer-western suburb of Toongabbie.

Early education at the King’s School, Parramatta.

Graduated from high school, 1956.

Film trainee, ABC-TV (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 1957-58.

Directed first short film, The Hunter, 1959.

Higher education: Sydney University, 1959-62; B.A., 1962.

Advertising-agency work, 1960.

Moved to London, 1962, and taught at a girls’ school in Willesden.

Film editor, East Nigerian Film Unit, Enugu: 1964–66.

1965: Married Rhoisin Patricia Harrison and had three children; later divorced.

Head of British Film Institute Production Board, 1966–70: produced eighty-six films, notably short documentaries; helped to launch the careers of Mike Leigh, Ridley Scott, Stephen Frears, and Nick Broomfield.

Film advisor, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1966-70.

Directed first documentary, Lichtenstein in London, 1968.

Moved back to Australia, 1971, but maintained a London residence.

Directed first feature film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, 1972.

Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, 1974 feature.

Side by Side, 1975 feature.

Don’s Party, 1976 feature.

The Getting of Wisdom, 1977 feature.

Money Movers, 1978 feature.

Breaker Morant, 1980 feature.

The Club, 1980 feature.

Puberty Blues, 1981 feature.

Moved to Los Angeles, 1981.

Tender Mercies, 1983 feature.

King David, 1985 feature.

1985: Married Virginia Patricia Mary Duigan; one child.

The Fringe Dwellers, 1986 feature.

Crimes of the Heart, 1986 feature.

Her Alibi, 1989 feature.

Driving Miss Daisy, 1989 feature.

Mister Johnson, 1990 feature.

Black Robe, 1991 feature.

Rich in Love, 1992 feature.

A Good Man in Africa, 1994 feature.

Silent Fall, 1994 feature.

Last Dance, 1996 feature.

Paradise Road, 1997 feature.

Double Jeopardy, 1999 feature.

Moved back to Australia, 1999.

Bride of the Wind, 2001 feature.

Evelyn, 2002 feature.

The Contract, 2006 feature.

Mao’s Last Dancer, 2009 feature.

Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, 2011 feature.

Mr. Church, 2016 feature.

Ladies in Black, 2018 feature.

Awards

Best Director, Australian Film Awards, for Don’s Party and Breaker Morant.

Best Screenplay, Australian Film Awards, for Breaker Morant.

Best Adapted Screenplay, Australian Film Awards, for The Fringe Dwellers.

Best Picture, Academy Award, for Driving Miss Daisy.

Best Director, Canadian Film Awards, for Black Robe.

INTRODUCTION

Prior to the late 1970s, Australia was something of a cinematic backwater. Occasionally, Hollywood and British production companies would turn up to use the country as a backdrop for films that ranged from the classic (On the Beach [1959]) to the egregious (Ned Kelly [1970], starring Mick Jagger). But the local movie scene, for the most part, was sleepy and unimaginative and very few Australian films traveled abroad. Then, without warning, Australia suddenly experienced an efflorescence of imaginative filmmaking, as movies such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Getting of Wisdom (1977), My Brilliant Career (1979), and Breaker Morant (1980) began to be shown all over the world. Hitherto unknown talents from behind the camera (including Bruce Beresford. Peter Weir, Phillip Noyce, Tim Burstall, Gillian Armstrong, and George Miller) and before it (most notably Mel Gibson and Judy Davis) became overnight sensations and were snatched up by Hollywood.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) was the first Australian film to be featured in official competition at the Cannes Festival. Jimmie Blacksmith opened in the United States to critical acclaim in the fall of 1980, after which Fred Schepisi, its director, was invited to Cannes in a continuation of that Festival’s love affair with New Australian Cinema—an affair that had been initiated by Ken Hannam’s archetypal Sunday Too Far Away (1975). Hannam’s picture was selected for screening at the Directors’ Fortnight in 1975, as was Schepisi’s The Devil’s Playground in 1976. By 1978 there were twenty Australian films at Cannes, including Jimmie Blacksmith. Following this accomplishment, several new Australian films were significant hits at the Cannes Festival, and later in the United States, in the next two years, including Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career in 1979 and Beresford’s Breaker Morant in 1980.

The focus here, of course, is on Bruce Beresford (born 1940), who is a sort of hero to me. He has been struggling for fifty years: first, to have a directing career at all, which is par for the course; second, to make films that are well out of the ordinary, which is not. As a result, Beresford’s career has been described as both interesting and uneven. It discloses the struggle of a gifted man to make a serious career in a field that always says yes to seriousness and then tries to tame it. Even Beresford’s lapses show a real reach for the unusual. One can wish, furthermore, that some of his scripts were more worthy of his mastery; but one can assume that, in the brawl of a directing life, he chose the best he could get at the moment.

Since his debut as a maker of feature films in 1972 with the broad comedy The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), Beresford has made a wide variety of movies, as he is one of the rare directors who keep developing, growing, and diversifying. But there is unity in this variety. If his Australian films, such as The Getting of Wisdom and Breaker Morant, seem more hard-edged and political than Tender Mercies (1983), Crimes of the Heart (1986), or Driving Miss Daisy (1989), his later American films nevertheless carry a social comment, if conveyed ever so quietly. In any case, Beresford has proved himself conclusively not just an Australian director who can speak to the world, but a world director able to direct anywhere (an almost unique achievement) and speaking to everyone, Australians naturally included. Occasionally obliged to make a predominantly commercial movie (like Her Alibi [1989], which, despite moments of charm, was a too-light light comedy starring Tom Selleck), he acquits himself honorably. But Beresford is incomparable when he gets hold of a story that gets hold of him, and he works, as an artist should, primarily to please himself.

He showed an interest in making films from an early age but moved to England when he saw little chance of being able to direct in Australia. After holding a number of jobs abroad, including a stint working for the British Film Institute, Beresford returned home when government subsidies offered the possibility for an expanded local production schedule. His first film, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, was deliberately commercial and pitched at a popular level since he felt that Australian films needed to prove their marketability at that time. The success of this satirical, often ribald film and his next ocker epic, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (1974), gave him the leverage within the industry to be able to explore a different, more serious kind of work. (Beresford’s subsequent collaboration with Barry Humphries, Side by Side [1975], was less successful.)

The social comment of Don’s Party (1976), for example—a film set against the failure of the Labor Party in the national elections of 1969—offered a clear-eyed look at Australian society of the 1960s and pursued in a determined way the contradictions in the Australian character. While the film deals with an environment that is essentially political, its concerns are sociological as well as sexual. Don’s Party is a small movie based on David Williamson’s 1971 play, and it was filmed largely within the confines of a suburban house. Its intense probing of character and the film’s at times claustrophobic atmosphere surfaced again in the director’s later, better known films.

Beresford next turned to a project he had wanted to do for some time, The Getting of Wisdom, based on the 1910 autobiographical novel by Henry Handel (a.k.a. Ethel) Richardson. The story traces the adventures of a young woman who arrives from the outback to receive a proper education at a city girl’s school. The film is a period piece but provides a devastating look at the overly genteel pretensions of class-bound, nineteenth-century Australian society; The Getting of Wisdom noted that the society, not yet secure in its own identity, still copied the Victorian social arrangements of the motherland. A stunningly beautiful work, it established Beresford as a maker of serious and thoughtful films in the European art film tradition.

After shooting a forgettable caper film, The Money Movers (1978, based on the 1972 novel by Devon Minchin), Beresford made Breaker Morant (inspired by Kenneth G. Ross’s 1978 play of the same name), which returned to Australia’s past and explored the country’s colonial relationship with Great Britain against the background of the Boer War. Breaker Morant contains a savage look at British attitudes towards its former colony and examines the exploitation and condescension such imperial attitudes produce. The film explores one of Australia’s military scandals, the trial and execution of two Australian officers during the Boer War. Beresford is not afraid to argue that the entire process was one long miscarriage of justice, a poor concession to Australia’s partners in the war, and a weak peace offering to the Boers themselves.

Breaker Morant is often compared to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), and the comparison is more than apt. Beresford’s film is much less polemical than Kubrick’s, however, and possibly more convincing—as a condemnation of war itself. Although Breaker’s leading character was played by an Englishman (Edward Woodward), the movie was also a showcase for Australian acting talent. It confirmed Beresford’s international reputation and opened the way for him to make films outside the rather limited resources of the Australian cinema.

With The Club (1980) and Puberty Blues (1981, from the 1979 novel by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey), Beresford returned to contemporary Australia. The Club, adapted from another of David Williamson’s plays (from 1977), is a satire on the inner workings of an Australian football club, including its financial woes, moral tensions, and labor disputes. Puberty Blues deals with a pair of would-be surfer girls growing up along the beachside suburbs of Sydney. The film deftly explores the macho world of Australian surfers while offering up an unflattering picture of how young women in this world are exploited and abused.

In part because of his growing international reputation, Beresford moved to the United States to direct his next film, Tender Mercies, from a Horton Foote script about a down-and-out country singer who finds love and solace with a small-town Texan widow and her son. At first glance the story seems an unusual subject for Beresford to film, but Tender Mercies contains much of the same humanist (if not social) commentary and visual beauty of his earlier films. The acting is notable, as is the evocation of the rural locale, which is not unlike the arid spaces of the Australian outback. This is a quiet, small, poetic, even anti-pastoral film, the kind of movie Beresford was used to making, and it set the pattern for the other successful American films that followed. Only when he ventured into the Biblical mega-epic with King David (1985) did the Beresford touch falter. (King David did indeed miss the mark, but it required more artistic daring than many other directors have.)

Returning to Australia, Beresford made The Fringe Dwellers (1986, from the 1961 novel by Nene Gare), a movie about a family of Aborigines and their attempts to integrate themselves into white Australian society. Their failure to do so causes a split between the generations and a dissolution of the family itself. Beresford handled the integration issue—long a touchy subject in Australia—with sensitivity, tracing the sad divisions between the races. King David came next. Although fraught with high expectations (and starring Richard Gere), the film was a critical and box-office disaster.

Beresford recouped whatever damage the fiasco might have done to his career by turning to Crimes of the Heart, an adaptation of Beth Henley’s 1979 play about three eccentric sisters who have come together as a result of a family crisis. Once again, the director captured the ambience of small-town Southern society with gentleness and affection. The three sisters, all played by major Hollywood stars (Jessica Lange, Diane Keaton, and Sissy Spacek) who worked remarkably well together under Beresford’s direction, come off as a loving but eccentric by-product of regional gentility and repression. Underlying the film, moreover, is a steady and unblinking look at the place of women in this traditional society.

It is noteworthy that Beresford’s next film rated a large spread in the financial section of the New York Times. Driving Miss Daisy (adapted from Alfred Uhry’s 1987 play) cleaned up at the box-office as well as at the Oscars, and made Beresford’s name a known quantity among general film audiences around the world. A quiet picture about the relationship between a black man and his elderly Jewish female employer in the South, this work features tour de force acting performances from both of the principal stars, Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy. For the most part the movie does not deal with racial or social problems, but prejudice hovers around the edges of the world of the film and subtly affects its tone. It is another of Beresford’s small or chamber films, a work of intense concentration that focuses on a microcosm of the modern world and which, in its unfolding, explores broad human as well as social issues.

Beresford’s films of the 1990s have met with mixed critical and financial success. Mister Johnson (1990), based on a 1939 novel by Joyce Cary, follows the adventures of an English engineer (Pierce Brosnan) in West Africa during the 1920s. The engineer, who has been hired to build a road through the native bush, is accompanied by Mister Johnson, his wily local assistant who is mission-school educated and thinks of himself as English. Like many of Beresford’s other films, this is a tragic (and sometimes comic) story about the clash between societies in a colonial setting.

Black Robe (1991), adapted from the 1985 novel by Brian Moore, is a larger-scale historical film set in the Canadian wilderness. In 1734 a French Jesuit priest is accompanied by a tribe of Algonquins on his mission to convert the Hurons. The priest’s spirituality is challenged by the hardships he faces not only in the wilderness, but also among the North American Indians. As one might suspect, Black Robe is a grim film (perhaps too grim for movie audiences)—one whose bleak, scenic locations create a stark and almost thoughtful background for its drama of cultural friction.

The same creative team that filmed Driving Miss Daisy (in addition to Beresford, producer Richard Zanuck and screenwriter Alfred Uhry) reunited to film Josephine Humphreys’ 1987 novel about a Southern family whose conventional lives are disrupted when the mother unexpectedly, and without explanation, leaves her husband and children (only to live secretly nearby). Rich in Love (1992) deals with the various members of the family but focuses on the coming of age of the youngest daughter, who has taken over the mother’s duties. Both the acting and the screen adaptation were critically praised, though the picture did not do well at the box office.

In A Good Man in Africa (1994, from the 1981 novel by William Boyd), featuring Sean Connery, Beresford returned to Africa, where the locals and the British were still at odds. The film was rather badly reviewed and—possibly because of political correctness—several critics found the portrayal of the Africans in the film stereotypical and dated. (Still, A Good Man in Africa is a good film that, tonally speaking, goes slightly bad in the end; how much better than today’s customary trajectory from bad to worse!) Silent Fall (1994), for its part, is a suspense film about a psychiatrist (Richard Dreyfuss) who solves a double murder witnessed by the victims’ nine-year-old son. It was released right on the heels of A Good Man in Africa and might have helped to save Beresford’s reputation at the time, but this movie was so infrequently and negatively reviewed that it only multiplied his troubles.

Unfortunately, Beresford’s next film didn’t help matters much. Last Dance (1996) was—no surprise—superbly made, but it had the bad luck of bad timing: it came along just after a big hit on a similar subject, Dead Man Walking (1995) with Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon. Paradise Road (1997) itself tells the story of a group of English, American, Dutch, and Australian women who are imprisoned by the Japanese in Sumatra during World War II, but the film did not do well, commercially or critically—perhaps because, oddly enough, it had more stories to tell than one film could accommodate. Double Jeopardy (1999), a crime thriller and slick piece of entertainment featuring Tommy Lee Jones and Ashley Judd, did do well—at least financially—but did nothing to enhance Beresford’s artistic reputation.

Nor did Beresford’s first film of the twenty-first century, Bride of the Wind (2001), which recounted Alma Schindler’s marriage to Gustav Mahler and her extra-marital romantic liaisons; his second, Evelyn (2002), a maudlin Irish drama starring Pierce Brosnan, loosely based on the true story of Desmond Doyle and his 1955 fight in the Irish courts to be reunited with his children from a broken marriage; or his third, The Contract (2006), a lame action picture featuring Morgan Freeman as a professional assassin and John Cusack as his pursuer. All three of these twenty-first-century ventures failed to return their financial investments.

Mao’s Last Dancer (2009)—a biopic about Li Cunxin, the Chinese ballet dancer who defected while on a student visa in Houston in 1981—at least made money despite its excessive sentimentality and sometimes leaden pacing. Despite their own mawkishness and tedium, the same cannot be said for either Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding (2011), a dramedy starring Jane Fonda and set in Woodstock, New York, forty years after the famous rock festival there; or Mr. Church (2016), the story of a unique friendship that develops between a little white girl and her family’s talented black cook (played by Eddie Murphy).

Based on the 1993 novel The Women in Black, by Madeleine St. John, Beresford’s latest film, Ladies in Black (2018), is a period drama about the influence of Eastern European refugees on Australian society, via the story of a group of women working in a Sydney department store in the late 1950s. Ladies in Black may mistakenly be seen as lightweight or slight, but it isn’t. It brims with subtext and nuance on the subjects of immigration, integration, and female empowerment, and, at the same time, the film succeeds in being a thoroughly enjoyable (if not hugely profitable) entertainment.

After two of his subsequent projects—biopics, respectively, about the World War I Jewish general John Monash of Australia and the mid-1950s American singer-songwriter Buddy Holly—fell through, Beresford began work on Nearer the Gods, an adaptation of playwright David Williamson’s 2018 witty comedy about the seventeenth-century English scientist and mathematician Isaac Newton. As of this writing, the director is still seeking financing …

In conclusion it may be said that, although in many ways Bruce Beresford has become a Hollywood director, one who likes large budgets and the options that such budgets afford, his films remain really quite consistent. Preferring ensemble acting to star vehicles, smaller films to epics (even though Breaker Morant was favorably compared to a David Lean extravaganza by the critics, the film is still basically an intimate courtroom drama), and always infusing his films with an insistent social critique, especially on the question of racism, Beresford has (to reiterate) fashioned a remarkably consistent career for all of its seeming diversity. He continues to be noted for his artistic range—comedy, tragedy, epic, thriller, even opera; his geographic span (Australia, China, the American South, ancient Israel, Africa, Canada, Austria, and Ireland); his work with actors (among them Albert Finney, Sharon Stone, Glenn Close, and Robert Duvall); his skill in adapting novels and plays to the screen; his sensitivity in his films to women’s issues; and, perhaps above all, for his tackling of such delicate subjects as race, class, and colonialism.

This is the first book to fully document Beresford’s directing career—through interviews, chronicles, and statements; through a filmography, a bibliography, images, and this introduction. Up to now, Beresford’s career in Australia and America has largely been ignored, despite the fact that he has been working for five decades; directed two Academy-Award-winning films, Driving Miss Daisy and Tender Mercies; and created at least three masterpieces: Tender Mercies again, Breaker Morant, and Mister Johnson (with honorable mentions going to Don’s Party, The Fringe Dwellers, and Black Robe). The result is that, by and large, his directorial skills are still unappreciated. Take one index: there have been books about Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, and the like, as well as a spate of books about Quentin Tarantino (who deserves by now to be forgotten). Yet there has been only one less-than-satisfactory, nearly unknown volume about Beresford, published by Peter Coleman in 1992. Perhaps this is because Beresford’s style is not to declare a style, but rather to serve his films.

In Bruce Beresford on Film: Interviews, Chronicles, Statements, the man’s career finally gets paid the attention it deserves. This volume is aimed at cinephiles or film buffs, scholar-teachers, and students with an interest in world cinema in general (including Hollywood) and Australian cinema in particular. But, just as important, the book is also aimed at those educated readers with an interest in the practice of both film directing and arts journalism. The interviews, chronicles, and statements contained herein have not been edited from the form of their initial publication (except for the correction of factual or grammatical errors). Consequently, the reader will sometimes encounter repetition of both questions and answers. In the editor’s belief, however, noticing the same questions’ being asked and the consistency (or inconsistency) of the responses, in their unexpurgated form, will prove of value to readers. More or less like Beresford’s movie career itself.

Stone, Judy. Bruce Beresford (Sept. 19, 1982). Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers. Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1997. 15-18.

When a British critic caustically likened Breaker Morant to an old-fashioned Stanley Kramer movie, director Bruce Beresford did not break out in hives. I thought, actually, he was not entirely wrong, Beresford said when he was in San Francisco for the delayed opening of his 1976 film Don’s Party.

He had a similar hang-loose attitude about everything: the difficult distribution prospects for his just-completed, first American picture, Tender Mercies; the probability that Paramount Pictures will give him a go-ahead on a projected seventeen-million-dollar King David; as well as the censorship he had faced on his last Australian film, Puberty Blues. That kind of disarming ease under pressure is not a notable characteristic of most directors.

The Australian director blithely recounted the story of British criticism of Breaker Morant. With a Puck-ish grin and a broad Down-Under accent, the tall, boyish Beresford confessed that Breaker Morant got terrible reviews in England and was a box-office disaster there. He looked as casual as he sounded, wearing jeans, a battered leather jacket, a blue-and-white shirt, and a distinctive brass Australian belt buckle with an embossed kangaroo design. American critics have raved about Beresford’s tale of two Australians executed by the British during the Boer War, and it was, he said, a modest art-house success in the United States.

"I don’t think the British critics objected to my point of view, because Peter Weir’s Gallipoli [1981] had a point of view that was even stronger. It got good reviews and was successful commercially, Beresford said. The comparison to Stanley Kramer (once accused of making sermons in stone) was probably because Kramer is prone to overstatement, which is by and large what critics accused Breaker Morant of. I don’t mean that my film is no good, but I think if you have to pick a fault in it, that’s probably what’s wrong. I don’t like Kramer’s films. I think he’s a terrible director, but if I had to do Breaker again, I’d probably make the same kind of film. I can’t turn around and produce films like Fassbinder’s. I’ll always be directing narrative movies and I guess they’ll have touches of Stanley Kramer about them."

Actually, there’s not a touch of Stanley Kramer in Beresford’s caustic comedy Don’s Party, which won the 1977 Australian Film Awards’ Best Director prize for its version of David Williamson’s hit 1971 play. The film satirically contrasts the pretensions of the men at an election-night party with the way their wives, and others, see them. It only recently got an American distributor after the success of Beresford’s The Getting of Wisdom and Breaker Morant. "What I liked about Don’s Party was its very accurate observation of Australian life. It is very, very accurate. I knew I could do it easily because it was part of my own background. I’ve been to parties like that all my life. I knew exactly how the people behaved, and I was really grateful that such a good script was offered to me. Williamson put in dramatic form what everyone knew to be true about Australian life: the way the men treated the women, the amount of boozing that went on. A true artist brings a realization of the obvious. You can walk through something every day of your life and not notice it. Then someone will come along and crystallize it in dramatic form, and there it is for all to see."

Don’s Party was most difficult to make because it all takes place in one room. "I had to direct it in such a way that people in the audience weren’t falling asleep, looking at the same visual patterns again and again. It had to be filmed in a prosaic little suburban home. Don McAlpine—who’s shot many of my films—didn’t mind because he knew it was worth it in terms of the realism that could be achieved. The ceilings were only eight-feet high and they came into the shot, and it gave you the feeling of being inside the house. It was difficult for McAlpine because he didn’t have anywhere to hide the lights, and we had lots of elaborate panning and tracking shots. If you’re going to film a play and it has only one setting, Don’s Party is the best because there are eleven people and a lot going on."

When Beresford made Puberty Blues, a novel by a sixteen-year-old girl about surfing, sex, and drugs, he liked it for the same reasons he had liked Don’s Party. It chronicled a way of life that everyone knew was there but no one had done anything about. The beaches run all along the coast and the boys are out surfing every day. The girls stay on the beach and hand towels to the boys like slaves. The surfers are like medieval lords. The girl who wrote the book told about her efforts to get into the gang, her disillusionment, and her exit from it.

Before Beresford started shooting Puberty Blues, he ran into trouble from a new censor, a woman. She objected to the film’s even being made. "The book came right out and said all those kids were having sex at the age of twelve, and were smoking pot and getting into heavy drugs by the time they were fourteen or fifteen. If you didn’t think this was the case you were kidding yourself. But she didn’t want to know about it. She’s the only public figure who’s a noted conservative. She banned the Brazilian film Pixote [1981], for example, because she thought it was salacious and degrading. I think the film is marvelous. I wrote a letter to the newspaper saying that it was a completely moral movie, but it wasn’t printed."

As a result of the censor’s objections, Beresford had to play down the heavy drugs in Puberty Blues. He thinks the film "should have been harder hitting, not as hard as Pixote, but not as soft as I made it. They said if I didn’t agree, I’d have to abandon the film." His own children, ages eleven, thirteen, and sixteen, did not influence his decision to make Puberty Blues. I visited schools and found that, as frightening as the book is, it’s understated. The censor said drugs were overstressed in the book, but the censor’s quite wrong.

"The film was more popular than Breaker Morant and a big success with younger people, Beresford continued. They were very proud of seeing their own generation on screen. They’re not worried about the sex or drugs. I don’t know if I am or not. It’s a bit hard for me to understand their boredom, because I was never bored. They’re sitting on wonderful beaches, surrounded by beautiful mountains, and they can’t think of anything to do.

When Beresford was twelve he had already begun making movies in the countryside outside Sydney. He started with 8mm film, and the first one he turned out was a drama of impenetrable obscurity called Time of Crisis. His father, a salesman, and his mother didn’t approve of his hobby. My mother was annoyed because my stuff used to mess up the house. I was always turning rooms into nightclubs, and people were there putting on makeup. My parents thought it was a terrible waste of time and money.

In 1962, after getting his university degree in philosophy, Beresford went to England because there was no film industry in Australia and little locally made television. He spent two years as film editor of a non-existent production unit in Nigeria and was head of production for the British Film Institute for five years. When he returned to Australia, his ribald The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, which poked fun at the British, was the first Australian film to become a big box-office success.

Critics dealt with it and its successor [Barry McKenzie Holds His Own] harshly, but Don’s Party boosted his reputation and The Getting of Wisdom, about adolescent girls in a boarding school, confirmed the fact that he was becoming one of Australia’s most creative and versatile directors. When a projected Australian film fell through, he took up an offer from EMI [Electric and Musical Industries] to direct Tender Mercies. The people I dealt with in Hollywood were a lot easier than the Australians. They were very informed about movies and very enthusiastic.

The Hollywood types could also afford larger budgets than the Australians.