Upping the antipode

Great Movie Mysteries. While history and the outback would seem to provide a fitting backdrop, excepting several bushranger biopics, there are curiously few kangaroo westerns or Aussie horse operas.

Partly, it’s just a question of bad timing. During the ‘70s, when the Australian film industry would find its feet, the western was a spent force, already lamented in John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1962), demythologised by Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), and re-mythologised by Sergio Leone.
Oddly, even the post-Unforgiven flurry of half-arsed revisionist westerns (Bad Girls, anyone?) didn’t precipitate a full-scale bushranger revival, although recently we’ve seen Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly (2003), a fourth major feature on the life of the outlaw. Still, The Proposition, a lyrical transported western from Australian director John Hillcoat, written and scored by Nick Cave, makes for wholly novel viewing.
“It’s a strange thing,” agrees Mr. Hillcoat. “The bushranger film actually predates the western. The Story Of The Kelly Gang from 1906 is probably the world’s first feature film. But because the bushranger film was largely based on this one character, Ned Kelly, it became like a colonial costume drama.
“Even during the ‘70s, when Australia stopped burying its head in the sand and became interested in its own history, those films were reasonably romanticised. But Nick and I have been working on this idea for 18 years, on a brutal wider picture of those times, and we were surprised that a genre didn’t appear in all that time.”
With distinct echoes of Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid and indeed, Murder Ballads, The Proposition presides over a melee of rogues and blackhearts hunting one another in the harsh Australian outback of the 19th century.
When Ray Winston’s Captain Stanley, a pom peeler nursing a fierce tenderness for his wife (Emily Watson) emerges victorious from the film’s ferocious opening gun battle, he makes captured outlaw Charlie Burns (Guy Pierce) an offer – if he tracks and kills the literate, psychopathic elder Burns sibling (Danny Huston), he can save his younger simpleton brother from the noose.
“The traditional Western is mythological – bad cowboys wear black hats,” says Hillcoat. “We were more interested in the westerns that emerged in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, particularly the films of Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman and Terrence Malick. Those films still exude that mythic quality, a relationship to the landscape, while revising and opposing the genre.”
Though not overtly politicised, like the recent drama Rabbit Proof Fence, The Proposition forms an incisive guide to the day-to-day business of dividing and conquering. Providing an accidental riposte to John Wayne’s colonial-happy quip – “Why shouldn’t things be in black and white?” – Hillcoat’s film is less concerned with historical victimisation than with presenting a series of tragic paradoxes.
“It’s a shared history between Ireland, Britain and Australia,” explains the director. “As with all empire building, Australia was founded through extreme conflict and the infliction of wounds that would take centuries to heal. So we were keen to be truthful about the levels of brutality required for one nation to subjugate another. Newer nations tend to romanticise their history and hide these dirtier truths, but from whatever view you take, everyone is morally compromised by that process. Even the idealism and righteousness and might of the British Empire comes undone. But it’s a very complex thing. You see black on black violence between rebel tribesmen and aboriginals working for the Empire. In that respect there’s overlap with Irish history, and with the incredible arrogance of the modern American empire – a situation where there can be no clear cut winners and losers.”
The Proposition is but the latest in a long line of collaborations between Mr. Hillcoat and Nick Cave. The director has presided over most of the singer’s promotional videos since ‘The Ship Song’, while Cave has previously contributed a cameo appearance and music to Hillcoat’s impressively bleak prison drama Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead.
“We have this dynamic where I listen to music all the time and Nick watches movies – more than anyone I know in fact. We’re both interested in turning genres on their heads so when I eventually just asked him to write the screenplay I knew he could, having listened to his narrative songs and the lyrical quality and the Australian-ness throughout could only have come from him. Also that perverse black humour is something we both share. You can see it in videos we’ve made together and in this film. More certainly than you’ll find in Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead.”
Fans of either dark talent will not be surprised that The Proposition, like the unforgiving, fly-besieged landscape that inspired it, is simultaneously savage and romantic. Civilisation plays like a ridiculous folly. Emily Watson unpacks crystal Christmas decorations while an apocalypse looms. Elsewhere, murderers quote poetry, blurring the already fuzzy frontier line between barbarism and polite society.
“Like most, I see both civilisation and brutality as going hand in hand,” says Hillcoat. “I think examining the headlines in the world today verify that. With Danny (Huston) especially, you can sense a bush myth in the making. He’s vilified, but we wanted to give him a humanity without sentimentalising him or telling people he had a brutal mother. Ultimately, there’s an impenetrability about a psychopath so simple explanations are ridiculous. ”
The land would prove a potent adversary throughout the shoot.
“I’ve never been to the interior before,” Mr Hillcoat admits. “Bizarrely, you’ll find Australians all over the planet but not there. But, even though the land provided the catalyst, when you go to the remote outback it’s such a bleak, demanding location. A week before the shoot I nearly lost my life with the art director and production designer. We rolled a four-wheel drive three times. It was always difficult to work there, but that difficulty bonded everyone together. Then a strange thing happened during post-production. My father discovered photographs of his father and grandfather. It turned out they had driven cattle through the exact station we had shot the film in. I now feel I need some distance from that place.”
John Hillcoat hopes to make his next film
indoors.