Flicking through a hotel magazine, Fred Schepisi stops -‘ that’s it’, he says, finger pointing at a picture of Vasco – the latest Surry Hills drinking hole – ‘that’s where I’ll be tonight’. It’s been a long day of interviews across two states, the 74-year-old director spent the morning promoting his latest movie Words & Pictures in Brisbane. Now in Sydney’s Chinatown, it’s the last interview of the evening, and the Melbourne moviemaker is in high spirits, looking forward to a night testing Sydney’s small bar scene.
Making movies for over 35 years, the Australian director’s back catalogue is an eclectic mix of genres from the western (Barbarosa, 1982) to science fiction (Iceman, 1984), to espionage thriller (The Russia House, 1990). But with Words & Pictures, Schepisi has gone back to the genre that first gained him worldwide attention – rom com (although he doesn’t like placing his latest movie in this category).
1987’s Roxanne, featuring a big-nosed, lovelorn Steve Martin and a stunning Daryl Hannah, made Schepisi a household name. Based on the play “Cyrano de Bergerac“, Roxanne tells the love story of large nosed C.D. Bales (Martin) who falls for the beautiful Roxanne (Hannah) while she falls for his personality but another man’s looks, but true love prevails in the end. Words & Pictures is less light-hearted – functioning alcoholic English teacher Jack Marcus (Clive Owen) falls for the new art teacher Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche) who is struggling with rheumatoid arthritis. The pair play out their flirtation through a school debate, a war between words and pictures, in which the students have to decide which is more powerful.
In the process, an unlikely romance begins.
Premiering in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival this year, the comedy of ideas had very mixed reviews. Defending his latest work, Schepisi hints that today’s audiences don’t have the attention span for Gerald Di Pego’s screenplay of intellectual and emotional swordplay.
“The media has affected the way much younger audiences have a lack of attention span because they are getting so much stimulus,” says the father of seven. “I watch my kids and their friends watching a movie that they’ve gone out and hired or ‘stolen’, and they’re on their Ipad and their phone. “That’s great multitasking but they’re not getting deep into that movie, they think they’re paying attention but they’re missing the whole essence of being drawn in.
“If the movie is a bit of frippery it doesn’t matter. “But you need to get them out to a cinema if it’s an intelligent movie so they are actually just concentrating.
“One of the things I’ve always thought is this generation is unlucky not to have seen Alfred Hitchcock movies when they first came out in an audience of 600 people, because they were designed for a collective experience. “An audience in a Hitchcock film, without realising it they would be drawn in, sitting forward, getting tenser and tenser and then he would do something to break the tension, and you would sigh, and realise 600 people had sighed at the same time as you and you would all look at one another and laugh that you’d got so caught up. “Then you’d sit back and before you know it you are drawn in again.”
“It’s a thing I say about critics, they shouldn’t be sitting at home watching films on DVD. Watching Words and Pictures, sitting in the audience, a couple of times they laughed when I didn’t expect them to laugh, in a good way, not in a bad way, and I thought ‘that’s great’. The bigger the audience, the quicker they laugh because they take comfort when they hear a lot of other people laughing, they go ‘I was right, I should laugh’.”
“There’s a point in the film where Clive Owen’s character is a bit out of hand and is about to do something wrong, and to hear a whole group of people shout ‘Don’t, no’, it’s great, it’s a different experience. And there’s also the scale, you want to get your film up on the big screen, it what it’s designed for.”
Visually impressive, Words & Pictures really is best seen in movie theatres, even if just to marvel at actress Juliette Binoche’s painting skills. Her character, Dina Delsanto, is an art instructor suffering from severe rheumatoid arthritis, forcing her to adapt her artistic process to accommodate her deteriorating physical condition. In filming, Binoche goes through the same learning curve as Delsanto, employing rolling chairs and oversized brushes suspended from ceiling beams to learn a new abstract form of painting, watching the creative process is stunning. Schepisi’s wife Mary is also an artist and usually sets up studio on his film sets, but decided to opt out on this movie.
“On this film she did nothing, at one stage she thought ‘Oh wouldn’t it be great if myself and Juliette had a studio together, and then she came to the realisation that that might actually cause problems, and it would be better if she withdrew into the background, she didn’t want to distract from Juliette’s creative process,” explains Schepisi.
With a career of hits and misses, Schepisi isn’t going to let the lukewarm reception for Words & Pictures affect him. He is already working on his next project, Australian based – The Olive Sisters, adapted from a novel by Amanda Hampson, and set to star Sarah Jessica Parker.
Setting out for a night in the city, Shepisi parts with some wise words:
“You have to learn what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. Don’t get ahead of yourself, don’t believe your own publicity, there’s people who are exceptionally good out there in a different place in a different way. You should be inspired by them not intimidated, you should know in some areas you’re not as good as them but in other areas you are in a different way better than them. So find out what it is that makes you better, and keep learning, learn from them, learn from yourself.”
