Immersing the Audience

Robert Connolly is the writer and director of the feature films The Bank (2001), Three Dollars (2005) and, most recently the film that is the subject of this conversation, the extraordinary Balibo (2009). He is the producer, together with his business partner John Maynard, of The Boys (1998) and Romulus My Father (2007) (which won four AFI Awards including Best Film). Robert received a Centenary Medal for services to the Australian Film Industry in 2001 and was recently appointed to the new board of Screen Australia. We met to discuss the writing and making of Balibo just a few days after Connolly returned from East Timor and the film’s first public screening in that country—and the day after I’d attended an early screening. The film had a profound effect on me.

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: The Boys was loosely based on a real story but it was much more fictionalised, wasn’t it?

Robert: It was.

Sophie: This was the first time you’ve worked so directly with a historical event.

Robert: Absolutely, yes. We used to talk about Peter Shaffer’s play Equus where he’d read in the paper ‘A young boy gouged the eyes out of eight horses’, that’s all he read, and he went away and thought: my God, why would a boy do that? and wrote a play about it, but never researched the specifics of that. The Boys was the writer responding to the Anita Cobby murder—‘How is it that three brothers could do a crime together?’—but not researching the Cobby murder. Balibo is a piece of history, though it falls into the camp of speculating about what may have happened between characters and people.

Sophie: Was it hard to keep on top of the creative process when you felt so much responsibility?

Robert: Yes. I met all of the families, those of the Balibo Five and Roger, and I met a whole range of Timorese activists and historians, I also met the President of East Timor—who is a character in the film. I was up there, and I think I mentioned in my speech at the screening, I was in Dili screening it for Jose Ramos Horta, I was sick in the stomach …

Sophie: How did they respond?

Robert: They loved it. For example, in the massacre that we depict on the wharf, there’s a woman who hands a child over in it. It’s just a little moment. She was based on the wife of Nicolau Lobato, the president of East Timor at the time. For Australians it’s just a moment in the scene, but for Timorese it’s an iconic moment in their history. They killed Isabel Lobato. She handed over her child who is now in his forties and in the Timorese Government.

It was incredible to be in the cinema with them because it’s their story. It was one of the great experiences in my life, actually.

Sophie: Have the families seen it?

Robert: All the families have seen it.

Sophie: I don’t know how they sat through the murder scene.

Robert: Shirley Shackleton got up after it and went into the bathroom, she said she threw up, and then she came back and watched it again.

Each family watched the film separately at their own screening, and they were all quite incredible experiences to be part of. In casting those actors, I wanted to find actors who took on that responsibility too. They almost felt like they had to get permission to play those men.

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.

Sophie: I had wondered if there would be DNA evidence left, even today?

Robert: I know that there’s a big issue about the remains. There’s a box of bones that was buried in Jakarta. It’s an amazing bit of history. On 16 October the Balibo Five get killed, 7 December is the invasion, which Australia clearly knows is about to happen, so in the interim period a rushed funeral is held in Jakarta for a box of bones, which is the Balibo Five.

Sophie: And the Australian Government said they were killed in the crossfire?

Robert: They said that a bomb had blown up the house or something and there was talk of crossfire. But why at that point in history the Australian Government didn’t take a deep breath and say ‘We need to scrutinise this, five Australian based men have been killed’ … The Australian Government just accepted Indonesia’s official line, and so quickly buried the bodies, which was all part of laying the clear foundation for this invasion that was about to happen that Australia had signed off on, as had America …

Sophie: Is the Australian Government nervous about this film?

Robert: I think on a practical level the Australian Government is deliberating about whether to honour the findings of the coroner of eighteen months ago, which were that two Indonesians who are significant figures in the Indonesian Government should be charged with murdering the Balibo Five. The coroner’s findings went to the attorney-general, who then gave it to the federal police. They have torespond in some way at some point. This film will, on a very practical level, bring to public awareness this story in a way that will put pressure on the Australian Government to come to a decision about what it’s going to do. I know that’s the families’ hope. There’s part of me that can’t quite believe that we’re still so afraid of events of thirty years ago. If you think about the Vietnam War and how cinema has scrutinised that war … it started only a few years after the war with films like The Deer Hunter.

Sophie: The Australian Government doesn’t know how to deal with the Indonesian Government, I suspect …

Robert: That’s right, yes. And that anxiety is ill-founded because as we know history reveals all truths anyway. We know that the history of this time, whether it happens now or it happens in another ten years, will be explored.

Sophie: Was it a decision not to mention specific Australian politicians? There was no mention of the specifics of the Australian Government’s machinations. Was that because it was hard to do that in a naturalistic way?

Robert: There are two moments in the film where Whitlam is referred to. What I decided was, do I overtly make this like a documentary analysis of what was happening or do I use little moments and hope that they reverberate through the film? It’s such a fine line because in feature films you need to allow the characters to not become a mouthpiece for the filmmaker’s political views, but by the same token I knew the film would lack courage if it didn’t refer to Whitlam and Suharto and the time. So it was a fine balance during the process of editing the film how much or how little to have of that.

Sophie: Can you tell me when you made decisions to fictionalise and when you made a decision to stick with the ‘facts’—and how that process worked?

Robert: I think we approached it with a very strong view that the murder of the Balibo Five and the murder of Roger East and the massacre on the pier were two significant moments in East Timor’s history and in our own history. And that as they were being contested and as over so many years they’d been concealed, we didn’t want to further complicate people’s view of what the truth of those events was.

Sophie: It took so long to uncover the truth, to then add or change details would be problematic?

Robert: Yes. So the coroner’s findings were very helpful in that regard. There are hypotheses about where the men were standing. We know that Brian Peters went outside. It’s assumed that Tony Stewart was killed out the back …

Sophie: The detail about the asthma attack, how did that …?

Robert: That came from a great interview with Shirley [Shackleton’s wife] where she talked about Greg’s asthma and about how scared he was about having an asthma attack up there. So that was part of a hypothesis about how the individuals were responding to the situation. But the essential thing is these men declared they were journalists and they were murdered because they were journalists, and they were murdered in cold blood. It was easier to depict the murder of Roger East, because the Indonesians killed him in broad daylight. I’ve always asked the question, if the Australian Government had shown more spine and stood up to the Indonesians about the murder of the Balibo Five, would Roger East have been executed so blatantly in public seven weeks later?

Sophie: Why is his story less known?

Robert: I think when you’re adapting any piece of history you begin with what you know from the public sphere, but when you dig deeper there are things that surprise you. For me, I approached the story about the Balibo Five, and then you discover the story of Roger East, and Roger East being a journalist in his early fifties. He’s less glamorous, he was highly paid and working in PR, but he’d done various things. There was some evidence that he was on the passport blacklist that Wilfred Burchett was on. I think he had an anti-authoritarian bent, and his politics were complex. He wasn’t a member of the Communist Party but he had an affinity with the left. Incredibly, he’d run an English-language newspaper under Franco, he’d covered the civil rights movement in South America, he’d worked in South Africa and covered apartheid. I found Roger East’s story a fascinating juxtaposition with the story of the Balibo Five because the Balibo Five were all in their twenties …

In terms of finding the inherent truth in a work of fiction, Jane [Norris, casting agent] and I made a decision to cast men that age because I thought that cinema has an ability to conceal the truth in subtle ways.

Sophie: That worked. There was a vulnerability to them because they were young. It also made you forgive their naivety. I’m thinking of that extraordinary scene where the Fretilin say, ‘Hey, do you want to come on duty with us?’ and they’re half-pissed and staggering around in the bush in their shorts.

Robert: That’s right, and it speaks of that time. I wanted to speak of their youth and to also look at the idea of the responsibility journalists were given at that point in history. It’s interesting, you talk to Tony Maniaty, he goes there as a 26-year-old, he pulls himself out. There’s no satellite phones to talk … there’s no Fox News telling them what to do. Once they’re there, they have complete editorial control. So the expectation is that these journalists get the story, film it, record it.

I think one thing we learned is they were very good journalists. You look at the material they did get out: they did scrutinise what was happening and get to the crux of things. But set against that Roger East, who’s fifty-two. That scene where he’s looking at the photos is there because I wanted to create the idea that he saw in them himself as a much younger man and he knew the predicament they were in because he’d been there himself.

Sophie: Wiser but also more cynical?

Robert: That’s right, and I hope that the Horta character stirred something in him and pulled him out of that.

Sophie: Age is important in the film, isn’t it?

Robert: That’s right. East Timor is a young country. Jose Ramos Horta was twenty-six. And Anthony was really interested in that and how men respond to men. Horta seduces East, basically. In those early scenes he’s seducing this older man. He’s cast his spell and Anthony was very interested in that, not in terms of dealing with any issues of sexuality but … that meeting really happened. Horta had been in Canberra trying to meet Whitlam. Whitlam refused to meet him and he was coming back through Darwin. As we know now, ASIO was spying on him.

Sophie: Did Oscar Isaac spend time with the real Jose Ramos Horta?

Robert: Yes, met up with him in Dili. They got on very well. Horta said, ‘Well, I guess as George Clooney wasn’t available, you’ll do.’ But they liked each other a lot. I needed to find an actor who you could believe would one day lead this country to freedom and win the Nobel Prize, so you’ve got find an actor of such strong intellect and a little bit of mischief, as Horta had.

Sophie: The fight scene by the pool between East and Horta is terrific. Was it a construction?

Robert: Horta said something interesting about that when he read the script, he said it didn’t happen as it did in the script but it could have. Camus once said a similar thing about works of fiction based on fact, this idea that often the question is not whether something happened as it did but whether it could have. I don’t make documentaries but I think that works of fiction can consider history in a way that is liberated from the nuts and bolts and is able to really get into the heart of the human experience.

Sophie: Is it to do with the word ‘immersion’, which you have used?

Robert: Yes, I think with fiction you are trying to take the audience into that point in history and allow them to journey through it.

Sophie: You very deliberately avoid the notion of the hero. Roger East is, at moments, slightly pathetic. I was really struck by the lack of vanity in LaPaglia’s performance. The only thing I was unconvinced by was that his shirts seemed to be better ironed than the other characters’.

Robert: We thought about that detail! Roger East was in the navy. He was in Singapore Harbour as a 19-year-old when it was invaded by the Japanese. He saw great tragedy, he saw boats being destroyed. We got out his military records and saw he was discharged for a psychotic disorder. We discovered that meant he had post-traumatic stress syndrome, something now we’re compassionate about. Anthony was very interested in the idea that there lay in him a fear of his own inability to cope. But on a practical level—there’s a scene where he’s got everything ordered to pack to go. He tried to keep principles he learned in the military. You fold your shirt. I thought the costuming in the film was just great.

Sophie: The shorts!

Robert: That Shackleton did those famous pieces to camera in footy shorts that look like undies now!

Sophie: Was the murder scene very difficult for the actors, was it difficult for you?

Robert: I did the film in chronological order, so I shot their murders as the actors’ last scene. When they got on a plane, arrived in Dili, I got them in costume and shot within twenty minutes the scenes of the actual journalists arriving in Dili, so that I could get a sense of …

Sophie: … that freshness and that sense of amazement?

Robert: That’s right. So I cast actors the same age, I took them there, I took them on the journey and I took them to the point where their character was killed. They fell in love with these men they played.

Sophie: You could see that.

Robert: Damon Gameau had Greg Shackleton’s real diaries of his trip, so we were in these places and he’s reading about thirty, forty years before. It was very moving for them. And Damon after the scene where he was garrotted he had a quiet moment. I went over to him and then I left him there because he was weeping. He’d been to Balibo, he’d stood where Greg Shackleton had stood to film the footage that he was murdered for.

Sophie: I was very struck by the performance of Mark Winter who played Tony Stewart. He was a very still character—a more spiritual figure. In the final scene he’s sitting there thinking, well, this is it, what do I do now? Do I make it happen quicker or do I just sit here and wait? That’s a very beautiful piece of acting.

Robert: Yes, he had a photo on the wall when we were filming that of Tony’s real mum and his brothers and sisters, so he was really trying to …

Sophie: Speak to them.

Robert: That’s right. How do you contemplate those final moments? His death was the loneliest death, the last. The fact that he stands up and opens the door and goes out to his death knowing that it’s impossible to avoid.

Sophie: And the performance of the East Timorese actors is wonderful too. Particularly Anamaria Barreto as Juliana.

Robert: Yes, she lives in Darwin. Her grandfather was in the resistance with Xanana.

Sophie: Is Juliana an actual character or a construction?

Robert: She’s based on a whole heap of the CAVR interviews, one in particular with a woman in her forties who described being nine and witnessing the invasion and the parachutes coming down. I’m so indebted to the CAVR, the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation who did the 8000 interviews, but also Jill Jolliffe’s Living Memory Project, who have interviewed all these women who were tortured under Indonesian rule. These interviews are profoundly upsetting. The film didn’t originally have the bookends of the Juliana story, that came quite late.

Sophie: I thought she was important because she connects the story of the Balibo Five more broadly to the East Timorese.

Robert: There are a lot of people who say, ‘Yeah, yeah, five men died, but what about the 200,000 Timorese who died?’ The Timorese don’t feel that because they feel that the Balibo Five dying kept the story alive in the Australian psyche and that helped them to become independent. They talk about the Balibo Five as their own, it’s part of their national story. You talk to Paul Stewart [Tony Stewart’s brother], he says when he goes there, Timorese come up to him and say, ‘We’re so sorry for the loss of your brother in ’75.’ And he says, ‘How many family did you lose?’ The answer is often ten or twelve, and yet they still have this compassion. But it was a challenge for us. I hate this Hollywood genre of white men saving the Third World.

Sophie: A certain cluelessness comes through … Tony Maniaty talks about that in Shooting Balibo: that he wouldn’t want to advocate that young journalists be so inspired by the Balibo Five’s story that they fling themselves into these situations.

Robert: What I hope is that the film puts their journey in the context of the greater tragedy of this nation … but that ultimately the film speaks of this country’s ability to demand that its story be told.

Sophie: It was such a small country.

Robert: In 1975, 600,000 people lived there and 183,000 died as a result of the conflict. An hour from Darwin. As a percentage the death toll is up there with the Holocaust. Thirty years on, 50 per cent of the population are under eighteen. The average number of children per woman is 7.2. They’re trying to rebuild their population.

Sophie: Xanana Gusmão is trouble at the moment.

Robert: Yes, I read that. I think it’s the fledgling stages in a new nation. It wasn’t helped by Indonesia destroying 90 per cent of the buildings when they left in 1999. Indonesia made sure that it would be generations before East Timor could get up off its knees. They wanted it to fail.

Sophie: I can only assume that the film shoot was much less controlled than other shoots you’ve done. There’s no way you could have controlled exactly how scenes played out, given that you had so many non-actors, that you’re in a very particular place …

Robert: Yes, Timorese army playing the soldiers.

Sophie: Was that stressful or did you just become Zen?

Robert: Yes, I did try and get in a Zen-like state which was a challenge for me as the way I works is usually very analytical and structured. In a film like The Bank my work is very precise in terms of the shots and storytelling and tracking and so forth. But with Balibo I knew I couldn’t do that.

Sophie: It’s all a bit more method-like, isn’t it?

Robert: I gave lots of thought about this in advance of making the film. I had this approach with the cinematographer which is that I would set up the drama and we would explore it with the camera—I had two cameras—not construct it. There were lots of times when I’d call ‘action’ and I had no idea what was going to happen. I’d have five actors filming, I’d have 100 soldiers running up here, in a remote part of East Timor with a crew of ten, and I’d literally have the two cameras and call ‘action’ and it would be, like, okay …

Sophie: I found that really effective—that sense of chaos as soldiers are running up the hill and the journalists start to run away. I liked the fact it’s not a finely tuned battle scene.

Robert: Great. And with the pool fight you talked about earlier I didn’t have stunt guys …

Sophie: That was almost amusing, you could just see them like two school boys, they were pathetic.

Robert: That’s what happens when people fight, that’s right. I just stood back with the cameras and the actors decided that if they didn’t get to a point where they were that angry with each other they wouldn’t fight. So I let them go and they got really mean towards each other, and then Anthony went and threw Oscar in the water and then he jumped in after him and he put him under the water, then put him under the water again. I’m watching it and we’re just filming it, and I’m thinking, did he let him get a breath?

It was hard but I knew that I needed to approach it in that way in order to pull it off, and I just didn’t have the resources to make a conventional, huge piece of cinema. We’re used to Hollywood making things dynamic for a visceral effect. I think maybe audiences are so used to such structured storytelling in film now that it’s become predictable. I tried to avoid that. Take the scene in which the five are killed—there’s no music over that scene, there’s no slow-mo, there’s no tracking shots, it happens in real time. It’s brutal.

Sophie: How many drafts and how many years did it take to write the screenplay?

Robert: About five years. There was all the early phase with David Williamson, then I came in for the later phase.

If you think that the characters in the film go on a journey from caring about themselves or, in Roger East’s case, caring about the Balibo Five, to ultimately caring about this nation—that’s what I’ve tried to plot. So with Greg Shackleton in his famous piece to camera, you see that he actually cares about East Timor. He might have issues of ambition and ego but in that moment you know the country has cast its spell, and the same for Anthony LaPaglia, for Roger East. When he says ‘I’m staying’, he knows what’s happened to the Balibo Five, he’s staying for this country. And the Balibo Five’s families talk about the same thing, they all say that the tragic loss of their father, their son, their husband transformed into a passionate concern for the plight of this nation. I think the screenplay parallels that. It was all about the Balibo Five early on but the writing was profoundly affected by my journeys to East Timor. The screenplay shifted from being about the Balibo Five to being about East Timor.