PHILIPPE MORA: The Hollywood Interview

"Stand and deliver, sir!" Dennis Hopper in Philippe Mora's Mad Dog Morgan.


PHILIPPE MORA: BALLAD OF A MAD DOG
By
Alex Simon

Born in Paris in 1949, Philippe Mora is a member of one of Australia’s best known artistic families. His parents, Georges Mora and Mirka Mora, migrated to Australia from France in 1951 and settled in Melbourne, where they quickly became key figures on the Melbourne cultural scene. Georges, a wartime resistance fighter, became an influential art dealer, and in 1967 he founded one of the first commercial art galleries in Melbourne, Tolarno Galleries. The Mora family home and restaurants were focal points of Melbourne's bohemian subculture. As a result of this, Philippe and his brothers had what he has described as a "culturally privileged childhood."




Philippe moved to London in late 1967 to pursue painting and filmmaking. He was one of many important Australian artists, writers and others who moved to the UK in this period. He had met Sydney artist Martin Sharp in Melbourne and when he arrived in London, Sharp (who had travelled there in late 1966) invited him to move into The Pheasantry, the renowned artists’ colony in Kings Road, Chelsea. His room mates included a struggling musician named Eric Clapton, among other soon-to-be notables.

Mora gradually began to make a name for himself in London. He gained support from established figures such as Eduardo Paolozzi and the critic R.C. Kennedy, who championed him in Art International and included his work in a show called "Narrative Painting in Britain in the Twentieth Century" at the Camden Arts Centre in 1970. Artist Alan Aldridge also invited Philippe to contribute to his now-famous book "The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics", for which Philippe illustrated "I Am The Walrus" and "Good Morning, Good Morning".

In 1973, Mora began an association with producer David Puttnam and Sandy Lieberson which resulted in two award-winning films, both of which featured innovative combinations of documentary and newsreel footage, home movies and fictional films. Swastika (1973) depicted Hitler’s rise to power, and Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? (1975) is an acclaimed documentary on the Depression, both of which he wrote and directed.

Mora returned to Australia in the mid-'70s. In January 1974 he and his old friend Peter Beilby launched the periodical Cinema Papers, which has been Australia’s premiere film magazine for nearly three decades.

In 1975 Mora wrote and directed the historical bushranger drama Mad Dog Morgan, starring Dennis Hopper and David Gulpilil. Based on the life of Daniel Morgan, a poor Irish bushranger who roams the Riverina and northern Victoria during the gold rush days of the 1860s. Morgan is driven to a life of crime as a reaction to a brutalising society and after witnessing a senseless bloody massacre of Chinese on the goldfields. With an Aboriginal youth, Billy (David Gulpilil), as his only ally, he is hounded to more desperate acts of retaliation by a sadistic police superintendent, Cobham (Frank Thring, excellent). It was the first Australian film to receive a wide American release and was instrumental in bringing Philippe, and the early films of the so-called "Aussie New Wave," to the attention of American studio executives.

After co-writing the screenplay for Phillip Noyce's acclaimed docu-drama Newsfront (1978), Mora became one of the first Australian directors to relocate to Los Angeles. Two years later he directed the horror film The Beast Within and many of his subsequent films have been in the horror or sci-fi genres.

In recent times, as well as his film work, Mora has contributed to Art Monthly Australia including an article detailing his observations on Australians in London in the Sixties, and an essay on the relationships between film and Australian Modernist art.

Mad Dog Morgan has been given a new DVD release by Troma Retro, available for the first time in North America completely uncut and uncensored in a two-disc edition featuring Interviews with Philippe Mora, Dennis Hopper and other members of the cast and crew. Philippe Mora sat down recently to discuss Mad Dog, the Aussie New Wave, and other varied subjects. Read on…

An early Australian poster for Mad Dog Morgan.

I’d only seen the truncated version of Mad Dog Morgan prior to this DVD release. In addition to it being more coherent, it’s much more brutal.
Philippe Mora: I’m obviously thrilled that the uncut version is being released. I’ve no idea why it was cut to pieces here. In those days, ’75 when it was released here, distributors would just cut stuff out without even telling you. There were no rights. Directors certainly didn’t have the rights they have now. We never really knew what was going on. But the original version was released in L.A. and New York. I remember this because The New York Post said “This film is so violent that everyone involved should be locked up, and the key thrown away.”

Pretty ironic, coming from The Post.

Well, they’re always sanctimonious, these hypocrites. But it performed really well here. Some of the reviews were great. Kevin Thomas, of the L.A. Times, was a big supporter, and that was really important.

The other thing that really made it stick out was the fact that you took a Neo-realist approach to the film’s production: you cast “real” people in a lot of the roles, as opposed to actors, many of whom had bad teeth, bad skin and looked like they lived in the Outback of the 19th century.
My head wasn’t there to make a glamorous picture at that point, because I was a documentary filmmaker up to that point, so my primary concern was ‘What was it really like (then)?’ I had made one underground movie in the in the ‘60s, in London, called Trouble in Molopolis, which was a narrative musical running 80 minutes starring Germaine Greer, best-known as the author of “The Female Eunuch,” a very famous feminist writer. So I had done a feature, but this was my first proper one, with a crew and everything, and my D.P. Mike Malloy, who was camera operator on A Clockwork Orange, among other films, was responsible for giving the film a really tremendous look. The only reason I was able to get him was that we were all mates, although he was a generation older than me. Mike had come to my father’s restaurant in Melbourne when I was a kid. He was a newsreel cameraman and I really looked up to him. He’d just been to Vietnam, and I just thought he was the coolest guy I’d ever met. He’d held real cameras, which was a big deal for me. And John Seale, our camera operator, became very famous, won the Oscar for shooting The English Patient. Jeremy Thomas, who produced it with me, won the Oscar for producing The Last Emperor. So we were all Mad Dog veterans. (laughs)

Philippe Mora in London, standing before one of his paintings, circa 1970.

One interesting, and chilling, touch in the film was the idea that criminals were somehow biologically-different from normal people, and people sought to literally dissect them and take souvenirs from their bodies.

That’s all based on fact, this twisted sort of Darwinism gone mad. The idea of making the tobacco pouch from a man’s scrotum derived from when they used to make them from kangaroo scrotums. But once this notion, which was very sort of pre-neo-Nazi, was that criminals had different-shaped skulls and brains, not to mention other bits of their anatomy, and if a notorious criminal was killed, they’d sever the head, and it would be sent to scientists and biologists and hospitals and universities, who’d then dissect and “study” them. Really scary stuff.

It is reminiscent of the Nazis, with people like Mengele taking it to the next level 75 years later.

They sure did.

The scourge of Nazism is something that’s always fascinated you, and was the subject of one of your first documentaries.
Yes, it was called Swastika, and what happened was, we located Eva Braun’s home movies in The Pentagon in 1973. That color footage is now in every single documentary on Hitler and the Nazis that’s ever been made. All of that is the stuff we found, which in ’73 had never been seen before. So it caused a sensation. It premiered at Cannes and when Hitler came on in color, in close-up, people started fighting in the theater. Someone screamed out “Assassin!” People were really disturbed by seeming him in color, because before they’d only seen him in these black & white, controlled images, controlled by the Nazis, by the way. But in these images he was just this “guy,” with this kind of funny girlfriend. The film was blackballed in Germany. They said it was “Anti-German,” and “dangerous,” blah-blah-blah. Last month, it was shown for the first time in Berlin, where it opened the Biberach Film Festival, and it was an incredible experience for me. I was literally bombarded by young Germans, under 30, who said “Look, we’d seen clips of this, of the camps, of Hitler’s speeches, but we’d never seen one narrative that explained how the Nazis took control of people’s minds.” So they were thanking me for this movie, which was quite moving. At the same time, I felt bad for them; because I could see they felt guilty about something they had nothing to do with.

Charles Blackman's 1956 painting of Mora's father, Georges.

Your father was Jewish, right?

Yeah a German Jew, from Leipzig. I found out when I was there, which is mind-boggling, is that there were 14,000 Jews in Leipzig in 1938, and by 1945 they’d all been murdered, except for 300, among whom were my family, who escaped to Paris in 1938. My dad’s mother was an aristocrat, but when the whole thing started he joined the Communist party because they were the only ones fighting the Nazis, in the street, because he wanted to get into it. His name got put onto a list and when the Nazis came to power in 1933, they were after him, so he fled to Paris, then got his parents out in 1938. My father became very high up in the French Resistance, because he could speak German and looked French, so he was very useful.

“Mora” sounds like a very French name.

Morawski was the family name. My father was a really amazing guy.

Legendary French mime Marcel Marceau.

You should make a movie about him.

I plan on it. His partner in the Resistance was Marcel Marceau, the mime. They used to smuggle kids across the border and Marcel would keep them quiet by miming to them. If they made a noise, they’d all be dead, so he was literally miming for his life. I think in that situation, we’d all be good mimes. (laughs) Then after the war, my dad survived, and wanted to get out of Europe because he thought there might be another war involving the Russians. In 1951, he immigrated to Australia with my mother and me.

Let’s get back to Mad Dog Morgan. What was the atmosphere like in the Aussie film community at the time? If you look at the documentary Not Quite Hollywood, it sounds as though it was a major cultural revolution Down Under.

The completely different thing about it was the Australian character itself, which was gung-ho and go out and do it. We didn’t really know what we were doing, so we just improvised. I mean, the catering on Mad Dog was just cooking a whole sheep. (laughs) That year that Mad Dog was made, 1975, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Caddie, Devil’s Playground and Mad Dog were all released. None of us even knew each other—me, Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, and a guy called Don Crombie. We didn’t get to know each other until later, but we all just went out and made films at the same time. The atmosphere was exciting, very exciting. We were young, working in the Bush, playing with cameras. We shot for six weeks, there was no national film school at the time, and we just flew by the seat of our pants.

Mad Dog was probably the first non-exploitation Aussie film to be released, right? Because the films prior to that all had kind of a drive-in feel to them, like that biker movie, Stone.

Yeah, I suppose that’s right. I love Stone, that’s a wild, wild film.

Aussie icon Jack Thompson in Mad Dog Morgan.

One of the many recognizable Aussie actors who’s in Mad Dog, and became Australia’s biggest star, is Jack Thompson.
Yeah, Jack is like our version of Robert Redford. He’s an Aussie icon: every Aussie male’s idea of what he should be like, and the man every woman wanted to be with, at that time. It was a very exciting time then, because it was before the government started getting involved. They saw how much money you could make with films. Their primary concern at that point was tourism, and they about had a heart attack during the first screening of Mad Dog, thinking that it wasn’t going to do much for the tourist trade, what with men being raped in prison, and the like. (laughs) I was a real smart-ass in those days, and told them “Wrong. You’re looking at the wrong demographic: this is going to really increase tourism!” (laughs)

Mad Dog is still a brutal film by today’s standards.

Yeah, and I have a theory about that: Vietnam was still fresh in our minds at that point. We’d been used to seeing incredible violence being broadcast into our living rooms when they’d show footage from the war. And keep in mind, there were a lot of Australians who fought in Vietnam.

Actually one of my favorite Vietnam movies is an Aussie film called The Odd Angry Shot.

Oh, that’s an excellent film! I love that film. The guy who wrote that, Bill Nagle, became a very good friend of mine. I also directed a film he wrote called Death of a Soldier, starring James Coburn. But, we digress…so the violence on television was pervasive, but you couldn’t address the war directly in movies, unless it was The Green Berets, or something like that. So guys like Peckinpah with The Wild Bunch and Robert Altman with MASH, were, in my opinion and many others’ as well, were really addressing what was happening in Vietnam, and my generation was really affected by all those images, as well.



Peckinpah, Altman, Lee Marvin, Sterling Hayden, this whole generation of actors and directors were WW II vets who’d seen the darkest deeds humanity could produce.

Yeah, and it shows in their movies. We don’t really have that sensibility anymore in our filmmakers or our actors, do we? I do find the crop of actors now, some are really good, but they certainly don’t have that toughness and strength that came across with the WW II generation. There’s a theory that since the invention of the Pill, there’s an abundance of estrogen in the water supply, and it’s doing something to the males of the population. (laughs)

Tell us about working with Dennis Hopper in the mid-70s. This was long before he’d gotten sober.

Jeremy Thomas and I came to L.A. and met Martin Sheen, who wanted to do the lead—everyone actually wanted to do it—and Marty would’ve been great. Jason Miller, who’d just done The Exorcist, wanted to do it. So we ring up Dennis Hopper’s agent to see if he was available, and his agent’s head nearly popped through the telephone, like in a Tim Burton movie: “Yeah, he’s available!” So we took this little plane down to New Mexico, in Taos, and we get out of the plane, and there’s Dennis at the end of the runaway, dressed in tattered Levis, holding a rifle, just standing there and I remember thinking ‘That’s our Mad Dog!’ (laughs) So he takes us to his house in this battered old truck, which was riddled with bullet holes. And I said ‘Dennis, what’s with the bullet holes?’ He said “Oh, the Indians have been shooting at me. And that reminds me, you better be in your hotel when the sun goes down, because that’s when the shootings starts. Ha, ha, ha!” I mean it was just out of control in Taos back then: the booze, the guns, just crazy. We were in the one hotel in the center of town, and sure enough, when the sun went down, the shooting started. Dennis was still trying to cut The Last Movie and told us he’d like us to look at the latest version. So he drives us to the local cinema, which he owns, and all it shows is cuts of The Last Movie. (laughs) I found it very interesting, but obviously not commercial by normal standards. So Dennis agrees to do the film, and I mean, he was drinking, but I thought, so what? We were all young and drinking a lot back then, and had a lot more tolerance, not that I’m recommending every film crew should get shitfaced, I’m just saying that it wasn’t that big a deal. We did what we did, and we still got the film done. You know the famous stories about John Ford, that he alternated “wet movies” and “dry movies”?

No, I’ve never heard this.

Well, Ford was a raging alcoholic, and everyone dreaded getting on a dry movie, and John Wayne and all his cast of regulars would go off to Europe or something to avoid being around Ford on one of his “dry” movies, because he was so miserable when he wasn’t drunk. (laughs)

Then his “wet” movies must be most of his classics.
Well, they’re all good, but it’s a topic worth researching, certainly. I know the John Wayne movies were all alternate between wet and dry, and there was one dry movie, I think it was The Searchers, where Wayne showed up on the set one day, obviously hung-over, and Ford was really pissed off about this, and they’re shooting in the desert, in Monument Valley. So he tells Wayne “Duke, get on your horse, and just ride straight out there, and we’ll flag you down when you’re done.” So like, 40 minutes later, they flag Wayne down and he rides back, drenched in sweat from the hundred-plus degree heat, and Ford says “Sorry Duke, the camera fucked up. We gotta do it again.” (laughs)

Dennis Hopper as Daniel "Mad Dog" Morgan.

Let’s hear some more about Dennis Hopper.

Well, Dennis arrived in Australia, and he was arrested almost immediately over some sort of incident in a bar. (laughs) The reality was that Dennis was incredibly famous as Mr. Counterculture and Mr. Easy Rider. He made Easy Rider and it was still playing in cinemas at this point, so every drug dealer and hippie in Australia gravitated to Dennis. They’re almost parachuting in to meet Dennis Hopper. (laughs) And Dennis, this is one reason why I’d rather emphasize his art rather than his personal habits. For me as a director, as soon as I said ‘action,’ he was totally locked in, and even if I knew he’d had a few things or whatever, he was incredible on things like continuity. I said to him ‘How do you do that? How do you remember all that?’ And he said “Well, I signed a contract with Warner Bros. when I was eighteen, and they put us through the equivalent of Marine training on technique.” So he was like clockwork, no matter what. I let him improvise a lot, which I enjoyed, because he’d always come up with great things. For me, it was a joy to work with someone who was that good. He told me a lot about James Dean, because he obviously loved James Dean, and could actually do this uncanny thing where he’d actually turn into James Dean, his face would change and it was just really weird. That’s how well he knew him. I also remember him telling me that because of his very traditional training at Warner Bros., when he got on set with James Dean for the first time, he couldn’t understand what Dean was doing. When the camera was running, that’s when Dennis learned about the now-cliché of “being in the moment.” I think Dennis had come from doing Shakespeare down in San Diego, and then what he saw Dean do, it just put him into an entirely different frame of mind. I’m probably biased, but I think his performance in Mad Dog is really extraordinary. I think he identified with the role, with people thinking he was that crazy.

I thought the film was really a social commentary about Imperialism and the class system and, like Bonnie and Clyde a century later, Morgan was the product of the times that created him.
Yes, exactly. He became famous because he didn’t go after the little guy, really. He wasn’t the typical outlaw. Then the political aspect of that turned later into the outlaw Ned Kelly, who was much more famous later on than even Morgan was. Twenty years later, Ned Kelly would ride into battle screaming “This is for Mad Dog Morgan! This is for Dan Morgan!” Ned Kelly got the social aspect of what he was doing. In fact, I shot a scene of little Ned Kelly looking at a waxwork of Mad Dog. I don’t remember why it didn’t make it into the final movie.

David Gulpilil in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout.

We should also talk about David Gulpilil, the famous Australian Aboriginal actor, who is wonderful as Morgan’s sidekick.

I cast David because I’d seen him in Nic Roeg’s Walkabout, and thought he was fantastic. He was like magic to watch because he was so…close to the earth is the best way to put it, I suppose. I’ll tell you a funny story, ten days into shooting, David asks me “Can I go for ten minutes?” And I said ‘Sure,’ thinking, yeah man, take ten minutes, no worries. Then, David disappears. The second most important character in the movie, gone. It was a nightmare. So we called the police and they said that the only way to find him was to bring Aboriginal trackers in to go look for him in the Outback, and they brought these old Aboriginals in, guys in their 60s with these incredible faces and white hair. The Australian Aboriginals talk in an exaggerated, very fast, clipped form of Australian English like “Where’s ‘is bed at, mate?” And they’d go into his room, and sort of go into all this mystical stuff and pick things up, and then they left. Two days later, they come back with him, after literally just walking into the bush, and we’re talk major bush here, uncharted, tough terrain. And I said to David ‘Mate, you can’t just leave when you’re making a film,’ because I knew he didn’t understand. When he said “ten minutes,” they don’t know ten minutes from ten years. He was pretending to talk our language. So I said ‘Why did you leave like that?’ He said “I had to talk to the Kookaburra birds, which are snake eating birds who laugh, and I had to ask the trees about Dennis.” And I said, ‘Oh, and what do they say about Dennis?’ because I was really pissed at this point. And in all seriousness he said “They say Dennis is crazy.” (laughs) I said ‘David, I could have told you that.’ (laughs) From then on, they got on famously, because Dennis was mortified that he’d somehow upset David. They even slept in the same room together, so they got very close, and that’s reflected in the movie. Australia was so racially screwed up at the time, still, that they wouldn’t serve the crew if David was with them. And the crew wouldn’t have it, so David ate with us. I mean, it was out in the Bush, but not that far out, you know?

What was it about Mad Dog Morgan that made it so uniquely Australian when it came out?
I think because it wasn’t trying to be English. So many Aussie films before that were trying for that BBC, Masterpiece Theater, drawing room drama genre, and our film was gritty, shot on location in the Outback, and unapologetically Aussie to its core. At the time, being the smart ass that I was, I said that Mad Dog was Hanging at Picnic Rock. (laughs) But Hanging Rock is a terrific film, so I feel bad about that comment now.


The real Daniel Morgan, post-mortem.

What was the reaction in the U.S. when you brought the film here?

Well, United Artists practically interrogated me because they couldn’t believe we’d done the film for $350,000. They were also very impressed by the amount of horrific bloodletting in the film, so being studio executives, they said “Let’s give him a low budget horror film to direct,” and that was The Beast Within.


Mora (right) and fomer flatmate Eric Clapton in London during a recent retrospective of Mora's art work.

Looking at your filmography, you’ve dipped your toe into every conceivable genre from period western, to horror, to sci-fi, to satire, to courtroom drama.
Well, I never wanted to make the same movie twice, so I made the decision not to be typecast, which it turned out was not a good decision career-wise. Career-wise, you better get typecast as a director. But it takes so long to get a film made, I would just assume not be typecast, ever.