Scott Hicks: The Hollywood Interview

SCOTT HICKS: ONE OF THE BOYS
By
Alex Simon
Scott Hicks made his bones as a filmmaker the old-fashioned way, paying his dues as a crew member during the Australian film industry’s birth in the 1970s. Born in Uganda March 4, 1953, and raised in Kenya, England and finally Australia, Hicks worked his way up to assistant director for soon-to-be big names such as Peter Weir and Bruce Beresford before moving into directing industrial films and documentaries for television. Hicks didn’t direct his first feature, Freedom, until 1982, and had to wait for his second, in 1996, to put him on the A-list. Shine was the true story of Australian piano prodigy David Helfgott, and his battle with mental illness. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won a Best Actor statuette for Geoffrey Rush, who played Helfgott as an adult.

Hicks has been choosy since then, going back and forth between features (Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), Hearts In Atlantis (2001), No Reservations (2007)) and documentaries (Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (2007)), but always putting quality before quantity. Scott Hicks’ latest film, The Boys Are Back, is based on Simon Carr’s memoir of the same name and stars Clive Owen as British journalist Joe Warr, a fiercely driven sports writer who now lives Down Under (Australia, for those not in the know), and finds his life turned upside down upon the sudden death of his wife, leaving Joe to care for their young son (newcomer Nicholas McAnulty). To complicate matters, Joe’s estranged teenage son (George MacKay) from his first marriage arrives from the UK to comfort his bereaved father. Hicks avoids the sentimental pitfalls that could have put this fine drama in movie-of-the-week territory, and delivers a quiet, powerful human drama that is also full of honest humor and terrific performances. The Miramax release opens in U.S. theaters September 25.

Scott Hicks sat down during a recent visit in Los Angeles to discuss The Boys Are Back and his nearly-forty year career in film.

What attracted you to this story, initially?
Scott Hicks: Well, I was sent a script, and the scripts come in, and there are just very few that move you quite so profoundly, and this was one of those. It was full of situations I felt I’d never seen. We’ve all seen films about fatherhood and bringing up children, but this was something new. It felt very real to me, and of course it was: it was based on a memoir that I was unfamiliar with at the time. I re-read it, and it moved me again, and I guess it wouldn’t let go after that. I said ‘I really want to do this.’ Then we went to Clive in fairly short order after that, and he fell for it, as well. And I thought, ‘Great, we’re off!’ That was 2004. Welcome to independent filmmaking. (laughs)

Clive Owen (left) and Scott Hicks (right) on the set of The Boys Are Back.

How was working with Clive Owen, both as an actor and a collaborator?
What was very pleasing, I think to both of us, we found the other agreed with one fundamental principle: we had to avoid at all costs allowing the film to cave into something sentimental, and avoiding some of the easy solutions. That required an actor that had the resolve to do things that are not always likable. And Clive’s not afraid to do that. He does things in the film that makes people wince, but it was essential that we didn’t soften off those edges, and we discussed at length about where to target those harsher moments, for instance when little Artie says to him, “Can I live at Laura’s?” And he says to her “You want to live with her? Right, pack your bag, and get out.” That’s not the way to talk to a six year-old who’s grieving for his mother. So it was in those critical moments that we had this mutual understanding that, if it hadn’t been there, would have led to some very uncomfortable moments on the set. A lot of actors would have protested, saying “I don’t want to do that. That’s really unlikable.” Not Clive. He had a bigger picture of how it should be.

Did you worry about finding the right kid to play little Artie?

Oh God, yes. I mean, you read the script, and it’s so great, but then the realization hits you: how are we going to find a child to do all these intense emotional things? It was a huge search, hundreds and hundreds of boys were screened all around Australia. I was seeing the pick of the crop and it got to the point where I was lying awake at night, wondering if it was ever going to happen. Then one day, I saw Nicholas and he really stood out. He wasn’t just cute and appealing with all that lovely innocence children that age have. He had attitude. There was a defiance about him that I really liked. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew it was what we needed. With George, who plays Harry, it was a different thing. He’s a proper actor who’s done a lot of work before. He’s very focused and intensely interested in the craft of acting, and is very well-equipped. In a funny way though, what Nick was doing was the benchmark, because it was real, and that’s what I needed the other actors doing.

Geoffrey Rush's Oscar-winning role in Hicks' breakout film, Shine.

Like Shine, in the wrong hands this could have been a movie-of-the-week. You mentioned earlier that you avoided clichés and sentimentality in the story. Is that the key difference between a thoughtful study of human emotions and a one-off movie-of-the-week?

For a start, I think being an independent film gives you more leeway in terms of being able to keep those rough edges in there. Whereas if you working with a bigger committee that was testing material or trying to second-guess what the audience were trying to hear, you end up sort of blandifying, and that’s where you fall into the trap of sentiment. For example, in this story, when the father says to the little boy, “Mummy’s going to die,” I’ve never seen a film where the child responds “Is she going to die by dinnertime.” Now, in the American TV-movie context, the automatic response is “What an unsympathetic child! He should burst into tears!” Then we’ll all feel sorry for him, then dad will burst into tears, then we cue the music and we fade to black and we’ll all feel sorry for them. The whole point of this was the reality of the child who just doesn’t understand.

But in the independent world, you never run into filmmaking by committee?

Not as much, although we did have one person suggest that we get a female writer to come in to do a polish on the script so we could have a “woman’s perspective.” And I was like ‘What’s the point of that? It’s from a man’s perspective! It’s about three guys!’ (laughs) You have to resist in those situations because it can run off the rails so easily.

L to R: Scott Hicks, Clive Owen and Nicholas McAnulty on the set of The Boys Are Back.

You mentioned that this film has been in the works since 2004. What took so long to get it off the ground?

In addition to getting the money together it mostly became about synching Clive’s and my schedules. He’d be off doing something, then I’d get offered a job. And that went on for a few years, until finally everything just fell into place. It’s funny, because if we’d done this in 2004, the boy who plays Artie would have barely been born. I like to think we were growing our own during the waiting period. (laughs)

The film must have resonated with you very personally, because you have two boys, right?
I do, yeah. They’re 16 years apart in age, and both grown up now, but since fathering has been such a big part of my life, since I was 18, there was a very big appeal for me. But the take-away is the idea that family is where the love is. It’s definitely not DNA, and it’s definitely not nuclear anymore. But it’s about the fact that this guy pieces together a shattered family, and that’s powerful to me.

L to R: George MacKay, Nicholas McAnulty and Clive Owen in The Boys Are Back.

Let’s talk about your background. You were born in Uganda and raised in Kenya. How did your family wind up in Africa?
My father graduated as an engineer during the Depression in London, and there were no jobs. He saw an advertisement for young engineers to come to East Africa, and off he went. He was a mountaineer, so he looked at a map and saw these wonderful mountains, which attracted him to go. That was in the ‘30s and all my family was born there. I’m the youngest of four. There were there for 30 years or more, my parents. It wasn’t until the year when Kenya was given independence in 1963—my parents had lived through the Mau-Mau emergency and weren’t sure what would happen after independence—that my parents moved to England. England by then was such unfamiliar territory that they looked for an alternative and settled on a life in Adelaide, when I was 14.

What was Kenya like growing up?
Well, wildlife was in profusion back then, and sadly has been somewhat decimated now. I think back on it and it sounds quite romantic, and it was, but it was the only world I knew. You’d go on a drive, and you’d see these fabulous herds of animals. We’d call it “going on safari.” We stayed in these wonderful national parks, in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. As a child I remember walking up to the 12,000 foot mark of Mount Kenya, after which is a serious climb. In fact, my dad was the first person to climb the north face of Mount Kenya, which was considered unscalable. It was a 5,000 foot sheer granite rock face, which he studied for years, then he and a colleague came up with a plan of attack and did it.

He must’ve been quite a guy, your dad.

He was. He wouldn’t think himself that, because he was this very self-effacing, retiring person. I asked him why he took up mountaineering, and he said it was to overcome his fear. He was very frightened of heights as a little boy. I think he had it tough. He was sent away to boarding school at the age of 3, then at 7, he was sent to England for school and didn’t see them for seven years. It’s a definite cultural…thing in the UK that I’ll never quite understand.

All you have to do is see Lindsay Anderson’s If…to want to keep your kids out of those awful boarding schools.
It’s funny you should mention that movie. You know who I met last night? Malcolm McDowell. He came to our screening last night, he’s a friend of Clive’s, and we went out and had some drinks afterwards. And I said to him ‘You know, you are partly to blame for my induction into cinema because I was 15 when I saw If…and it was transformational.’

Did you ever see Richard E. Grant’s film, Wah-Wah, about growing up in Africa during the '60s and early '70s? The two of you would be contemporaries, I’m guessing.

Yes, absolutely, and I loved that film. There were many resonances for me, although he grew up in Swaziland, which was a bit different in nature than Kenya, but there were enough similarities that I really enjoyed his book and the film. He captured that era beautifully.

What was the epiphany you had as a kid that made you fall in love with film?

I wasn’t a kid. I was a teenager. I had really had very little exposure to cinema as a child, and no television. Basically, I started at Flinders University, which is in Adelaide, and wanted to study English and history. They had these interesting rules which were that you couldn’t study majors from two different disciplines, in my case social sciences and humanities. I wasn’t going to give up English, so I looked around for a suitable companion to English. I settled on drama, and then in drama, there was a little topic I stumbled into called filmmaking. There was a little bit of equipment, friends who were enthusiastic and would go out and shoot stuff. Suddenly this was the most fun thing you could imagine and it just took over my university life, and it became about filmmaking and seeing films. My family were completely mystified: “But you saw a film last week. Why do you need to see another this week?” (laughs) I was making up for lost time, I think. But I never imagined that you could make a living out of it.

Hicks and Max Von Sydow on the set of Snow Falling on Cedars.

What other films captured your imagination, in addition to If…?

Oh, a lot of the European filmmakers: Bergman, all the great Italian filmmakers, the sort of East Coast American filmmakers like Orson Welles, Scorsese…they were my sort of education, in a way. I remember vividly watching Max Von Sydow in Bergman’s films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and to be able to work with him in Snow Falling on Cedars was like coming full circle. It was almost an indescribable feeling. He’s the most charming man. In that film, he’s defending this Japanese-American man who’s unjustly accused of murder. The young man I cast had never acted before, and was struggling, to be honest, and I was quite concerned. And I just watched Max sit with him for a month in that courtroom, and it was like a master class for this young man. Max was so kind to him, so encouraging, when he could have been quite disdainful, and been like “It’s all about me,” but he was the antithesis of that. People would come in just to work for a day or two, some really fine actors, to appear in the witness box, and I remember one of them just fell apart when confronted by Max, being cross-examined by him. Max was so generous and helpful to me, and the actor, in keeping his performance together. Not all actors are that generous. The best ones are, because they know that any scene is only good as the worst actor in it, so it’s useless trying to steal it. Well, when working on other people’s films, I’ve seen some very selfish actors who demand attention and ruin a film

They’re usually flashes in the pan, though.

Yeah, or on the downhill slope in their careers. Clive is actually very generous, too. In doing this film, he had to accommodate, particularly when working with a six year-old, he’s so meticulous, prepared and organized, he knows his stuff. So he’s like that, and then you have this little spitball kid, who’s completely unpredictable, and Clive completely engaged him. When Clive comes to the set, he’s very loose and loves to laugh, but the minute you say ‘Action,’ he has this laser-like focus. Clive’s spirit was infectious, really.

Hicks and Catherine Zeta-Jones on the set of No Reservations.

You cut your teeth doing industrial films and documentaries. Was that a good training ground?
Yeah, I really learned on the job, because I had no real formal training at university. I had access to equipment, ideas and other people, but no real training, as such. I chose projects that interested me. They were little industrial documentaries and government department films, but some needed actors and I always tried to cast good actors, even if they had to come from another city, so I could figure out how to direct these people.

And this was the ideal time to being doing that, during the 1970s and the birth of the Aussie New Wave.

That’s right, and I got to work as a crew member on some of those big productions, when they’d come to town. I would be a third assistant, or work in the art department, but I just loved watching these guys work.

Hicks with Anthony Hopkins on the set of Hearts in Atlantis.

Who were some of those guys?
Peter Weir was probably the biggest name. I worked in the art department of The Last Wave and worked as the night watchmen at night, and slept on the set. I also worked on a little film of his called The Plumber, which was a telly movie. I’m actually in it. I walk out of an elevator at one point, since we didn’t have any extras, Peter cast me at the last minute. It’s a gem of a film, shot in three weeks on nothing, about $300,000. Anyway, Peter wanted to do some rehearsals with the key cast in the board room of the film corporation. He said “I need somebody to videotape these rehearsals. Are you interested?” And in those days, video cameras were the size of a suitcase, but I said ‘Of course!’ So I got to spend three days in this room with Peter and his key cast as he rehearsed them. At one point he looked back at my framing and said “You’re really getting into this, aren’t you?” (laughs) What a master class, you know? Then I worked on other films, by guys like Bruce Beresford, and other big names of the day. It was great.

Have you seen the new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, about the so-called “Ozploitation” movies of the ‘70s?
No, but I’m dying to see that! It was such a rarified time. I had no idea that as I was coming out of university, making films for a living was actually possible. But it was so wide-open back then, which isn’t to say that breaking in wasn’t problematic, but if you were creative you could get your foot in the door.

A lot of the guys in the documentary said that that’s what made it so easy: there were very few rules in place at that time, so you could really just take your crew out and shoot.

Yeah, there was very little unionization and delineation, so we really made it up as we went along. I remember vividly one night on The Last Wave, the scene was about this hail storm hitting a house, because these strange weather patterns are happening. In those days, the special effects were just physical, so you literally had the entire crew, the entire back office, the publicist, the caterer, and we were all chucking ice at this house. (laughs) It was crazy, but in its own way, a wonderful collective energy. So that was my film school, really, was working on other people’s films. Then there’s a certain defining point where you are either going to be a career assistant director, where I made good money, but it wasn’t apart to directing. I always “wanted to do what that guy did.” (laughs) Of course I realize now that there was nothing else I could have done. Choice wasn’t an issue. Do you remember the film Breaker Morant?

Of course.

Do you remember the actor who played the youngest solider of the trio of accused men, Lewis Fitz-gerald?

Yeah, he was the kid of the group who was spared in the end.

Exactly. He plays the newspaper editor in The Boys Are Back.

No way! I never would have recognized him.

Well, it was a long time ago. But he’s actually a director now. He directs television.

Great film.

Oh God, yes. That last scene, again speaking to the restraint we’ve been talking about, as Bryan Brown and Edward Woodward are walking across the field, away from the camera, towards the chairs that they’re to be shot in, and one reaches out his hand, and they just hold hands, and it’s just such a touching, profoundly moving image. No dialogue at all.

Scott Hicks, lining up a shot.

Except for Edward Woodward’s wonderful final line: “Shoot straight, you bastards!”
Yeah. Brilliant.

Two of my favorite actors in that film: Woodward and Jack Thompson.

Edward Woodward…(laughs) Noel Coward said “The man’s name sounds like a fart in a bath: Edward Woodward.” (laughs)

Did you ever see an old series Woodward did on the BBC called “Callan” about a working class spy/assassin.

Oh yeah! That was great! Really dark…

Yeah, dark and unrelenting, like John Le Carre, but even darker. I always wondered if Woodward’s show from the ‘80s, "The Equalizer," was supposed to be Callan in retirement.

Yeah, that would make sense, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, we digress. Let’s talk about documentaries. You’re one of the few filmmakers who still goes between docs and features. The only other I can think of who does that is Werner Herzog.
Yeah, and Scorsese does the odd doc as does Michael Apted. Coming out of this sort of sponsored documentary background, when the ‘80s arrived and I stumbled on the story that became Shine, I was hired to do these big budget documentaries for the then-emerging Discovery Channel. I did a big documentary on the Chinese army that I won a Peabody Award for, so they asked me to do a series on submarines, and I won an Emmy, and all the while I’m writing Shine, I’m working on Shine, I’m trying to get Shine to happen, and I’m thinking to myself that this is all trying to tell me something. You’re doing well at documentaries, why don’t you just stick with that. It was like I’d been given a chance to really be good at something. So why do you keep going on and on about this other story—all said in an interior monologue. (laughs) I read as much non-fiction as I do fiction, and I guess it influences the films that I make, since Shine, like The Boys Are Back, was based on truth.

Hicks (center) interviewing a subject for Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. Philip Glass is seated at right.

Your most recent doc is the film about composer Philip Glass.

Yeah, it’s out on DVD now and the DVD is really good. There’s a second DVD in the set which are my full interviews with Philip and then 45 minutes of performance. The film worked out really well and got short-listed by the Academy, and made it down to the last 15 nominations. He’s one of the most remarkable men alive, and so accessible when you’re lucky enough to be in his company. He’s completely unlike what you’d probably imagine, which is austere, intellectual, dry. He’s funny, sociable, a gossip, likes to cook for his friends. He has two kids under age 5, and he’s 70. He loves riding the roller coaster at Coney Island, just a fantastic, all-around man. But the defining moment of the film, which I won’t give away, comes early, and you see that his life isn’t all beer and Skittles. You see that in The Boys Are Back, too: the more technologically advanced we get, the more things like family get squeezed out into a tiny box. If there are prevailing themes in what I’m interested in, it would be those, I guess.