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Immersing the Audience: Sophie Cunningham talks to Robert Connolly

November 05

Robert Connolly is the writer and director of the feature films The Bank (2001), Three Dollars (2005) and, most recently, the extraordinary Balibo (2009), which has been nominated for 14 AFI awards. In the September edition of Meanjin, editor Sophie Cunningham spoke Connolly just after he returned from the film’s first public screening in East Timor. A brief extract of that conversation is below, you can read the full interview on our editions page.



Sophie Cuningham: Balibo is the most explicitly political of all your films, isn’t it?

Robert Connolly: Yes, it’s a piece of history, it needs to be looked at with great rigour, and it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. Think of the 1980s, of John Pilger’s documentary of Gareth Evans and the foreign minister for Indonesia in the Lear jet flying over the East Timor oil and gas fields drinking French champagne and signing the deal to share it and celebrating sharing it when we know below a third of population was dying and a massive famine was happening on our doorstep. I think there’s every reason for that shame to be part of our own national story.

Sophie: There’s something about the seventies re-creation footage of the Balibo Five … I had a very emotional response to the film partly because of remembering news footage shot in the way you shot those scenes.

Robert: With cinema, it’s a case of how do you take the viewer into that state? How do you create a sense of immersing the audience in something? As a director you’ve got someone sitting in a dark room for 100 minutes, captured. They can’t get out—or they don’t try to generally! How do you create an emotional space that they inhabit for that time rather than necessarily just a narrative …

Sophie: So in what conscious ways did you do that?

Robert: For the Balibo Five sequences you just mentioned we used the old lenses from the seventies, the Angenieux lenses. We did do some colour grading in post-production with this amazing colour grader, a South African guy, Brett Manson (he graded a South African film called Tsotsi, did you ever see that?). So he’s incredible and he had a great eye for the colour. But because we shot on these beautiful Angenieux lenses … there’s so much you can do digitally now but I think imperceptibly those lenses really helped us.

Sophie: Is it a blue light?

Robert: The colour palette is different and they’re a little bit softer.

Sophie: And you used those for the scenes of the five but not of Roger East.

Robert: The other stuff was really sharp: modern lenses to get more of a typical political thriller look.

Sophie: It’s such a complex story. How do we even know what happened to the Balibo Five? Because Roger East died, did the circumstances under which the Balibo Five were murdered have to be re-created?

Robert: East got some of the story out there. Horta did find three witnesses for him in real life, and those witnesses were the basis on which East got out the gist of what happened—that they were killed and that they had been murdered. Then there is Jill Jolliffe’s book [Cover-Up: The Inside Story of the Balibo Five] and her re-creations and witnesses.

I think the scrutiny that’s been applied more recently though, the rigour with which the coroner, Dorelle Pinch, considered the events—she brought out lots of Timorese witnesses—has finally given us a definitive version of what happened. I’d been working on the script for five years so obviously it had been developed a lot before the coroner’s findings, which were released in December 2007. That created a challenge.


 

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