Editor's Note: Yesterday this blog published a note drawing attention to a project to restore the films of Paul Cox. In brief it called for tax deductible donations to be made, via the Australian Cultural Fund, in order to bring Paul's films back to the international public. Details of the project can be found if you click here The post yesterday prompted critic Tom Ryan to send through this note below, written just after Paul's death, in which Tom remembers Paul and his work.*****************************
Paul seemed to have a pathological resistance to giving direct answers. That reluctance came from somewhere deep inside, and its effects were often as winning as they could be unnerving.
In an official capacity, I’d interviewed him many times over the years. The first was in the late 1970s, when I was hosting a film program called Talking Pictures for radio station 3ZZZ. “Hello, Paul. It’s nice to have you on the show. Let’s talk a bit about Kostas.” He grinned, a warning sign. Undaunted, I continued: “How much of Paul Cox is lurking inside the character (a Greek immigrant, newly arrived in Australia)?” A reasonable question, I’m sure I was thinking at the time, designed to draw Paul into conversation about the autobiographical aspects of his film work.
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| Kostas |
At which point, Paul got the giggles. The kind that burst through even the bravest attempt to resist, that bring tears to the eyes and make it impossible to speak except in splutters, and that transformed my simple follow-up – “Is there any way we can continue this?” – into the most hilarious thing ever said, and that are wholly contagious to all in the vicinity. Including interviewers.
To this day, I have no idea what I did to provoke such a response. Perhaps it was the earnestness of my introduction that tickled his fancy? But, whenever I raised this with him, he’d patiently explain that he’d always believed that there was too little laughter in the world and that he was just trying to pitch in. Or something like that. Needless to say, I never got an answer to the original question I’d innocently tried to ask him, or any of the others I’d prepared for him that day. Or any afterwards.
The last time I interviewed Paul was in 2015, this time for a feature I was writing for The Australian about his latest – and final – film, Force of Destiny. I asked him if he had any regrets about his professional career. This is how he shaped his reply: “Well…,” he said, before interrupting that eloquent Coxian flow with an extended silence. Then: “They say that life is fate and that you don’t have much choice. It happened. You know, we’re here [at the office for Illumination Films, which was downstairs from the Albert Park home Paul shared with his partner, Rosie Raka] because I put my hand up at an auction… I was holding an apple.” Bearing witness to this was Paul’s longtime friend and collaborator, Tony Llewellyn-Jones.
“Tony and I were shooting My First Wife in Williamstown and we had a little office down the road. We were driving back from the shoot one day and there was an auction happening here. I was having the apple for lunch and we were just walking past. We had looked at this place and we knew it was for sale, but I didn’t know the auction was on. I was living in a motel at the time. I had no money. My life was fucked, it had fallen to pieces. I was paying $16 a night.
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| My First Wife |
“The bid was $240,000 and, to surprise Tony, I put my hand up. It was a joke! The area was full of derelicts. And the smell that came from this place was terrible. Anyway, the estate agent went inside. Tony said, ‘Let’s go.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute.’ And then they came back and started again. But nobody bid. And, before I knew it, they were congratulating me. I’d lost the plot. I had absolutely nothing, I promise you. And we had to give them a cheque for $24,000. I remember: all my blood went into my feet and I couldn’t walk. Tony was holding me.” Paul is laughing at this point, the tears running down his cheeks.
“It was a Friday afternoon,” he continued. “Jim [Khong], my Chinese doctor friend for 50 years or more was working in Phillip Island and he knew the bank manager there. Over the weekend, he managed to get hold of him and by Monday we had $24,000 in my account. And we had three months to get some proper money together and get a loan. We then realised that it wasn’t such a bad deal.”
Then came his oh-yes-your-question moment. “But we’re talking about what I regret,” he continued, as an aside. “I regret now that I wasn’t tougher with business because a lot of my films are still working; they still go around. It’s the same with these photographs [a new batch had arrived during the interview]. I should have had more belief in what I was doing. That’s what I regret. It sounds silly, but often I just let the films go. People have made millions out of Vincent. Innocence made $90 million, I hear, and I was never even paid. I regret my stupidity because I thought it would all work itself out.”
Paul was always a stream-of-consciousness fellow. He never lost sight of the bigger picture, but he always had his own unique take on it. I asked him if he felt comfortable with the description of Force of Destiny as a film about illness as a learning experience. I’d expected a reply relating to how his protagonist (David Wenham) learns about himself and about his life in the material world and how people see him in it. But Paul took me somewhere else altogether.
“Of course, that’s very much part of it,” he began before confiding that his head had taken him somewhere else altogether. “You know, while it was all happening to me, I sincerely lived in Venice for three days and they couldn’t get me out. And I know the year: 1743. It’s very complicated. I looked up what happened in Venice then. Nothing much, no world-shattering events. I remember a doctor coming to tell me, ‘You’re in the Austin Hospital and it’s 2014.’ And I said to him – it sounds very silly, I know… I was reassuring him – ‘It’s OK. If I’m in Venice, you’re in Venice too.’”
What we might call Paul’s eccentricities were crucial to his distinctive vision of the world. Key aspects of his gift as an artist were his refusal to bend to others’ inabilities to see it with the same kind of clarity as he could and his impatience with those for whom filmmaking and the other arts were a business before they were anything else.
He’s long been an important figure for Australian film culture and I’ve never understood the disjuncture between his international reputation and the way his films were received locally, in the country he’d made his own and that owed him so much. Not just because he contributed so much to Australian film culture, not just because he made so many good films, but also because of the inspiration he’s been to others involved in the noble art of filmmaking.
In some ways, it’s easy to measure that influence: his films’ casts and crews read like a who’s who of Australian cinema, providing a showcase for so many on both sides of the camera at a time when our industry wasn’t always a happy place to work.
From the outside anyway – and I’ve never come across any insiders who disagree – to work on a Paul Cox film was to feel part of a collaboration, even if your voice wasn’t always heard in quite the way you’d expected. Which is why, over the years, such a loyal team formed itself around him. Paul was creating collaborations from the so-called renaissance of the 1970s through the hard times and right up to the weeks before his death, when he was planning projects such as Sublime (with playwright Daniel Keene and Isabelle Huppert) and Inferno. He was a significant force and it’s hard to believe that (to borrow from a John Wayne line that’s always appealed to me) he’s gone on ahead.
He was important to us in ways you can’t easily measure. Just by being Paul, he showed what was possible even when conservative funding bodies said “no”. On the day after he died, my daughter texted me about the beautiful evening sky she could see from her back window in Castlemaine: “I’ve been thinking about Paul all day,” she wrote. “I think he organised the amazing sunset. He must have gotten funding from St. Peter straight away.” Appreciated by the Big Boys at last!
He was also an inspiration to all those fortunate students who attended his classes over the years: when he was at Prahran working alongside Athol Shmith in the photography department in the good old days, and whenever he spoke to budding young filmmakers.
On a personal note, I’d love to be able to thank him for his friendship over more than 40 years, ever since we found ourselves sitting together on a short film jury in the balcony at the Palais during the Melbourne Film Festival (those were the pre-MIFF days). Back then, I saw myself as leading man material, but he knew better and saved me much future embarrassment. We made each other laugh a lot: there was always a mischievous twinkle in his eye and he was a great person to be silly with. He used to call me “Thomas”, so I always called him “Paulus”.
He could sound like a grumpy bastard sometimes, but that was all a front. He was an artist passionate about his craft and, as his collaborators and others who knew him can testify, he exuded love. That is there for all to see in his work. It’s there in his affection for every one of his characters: even for Wendy Hughes’ nutty evangelist in Salvation, a character who in other hands might have been reduced to a cliché. Can you think of a character in any of his films that he didn’t make you care about, even when you might disapprove of what they said or did?
The love was there too in his ongoing fascination with the eccentricities that make us tick as human beings, and the generosity of his humour. When you laugh in one of Paul’s films, the comedy comes attached to an affection for our blundering ways. He was an astute observer of human flaws, and his sense of our failings as a species was apocalyptic: “The world is fucked” was a recurring refrain. But his comedy was always a humane comedy. It was never about someone’s humiliation. He’d gently poke fun at those who try to find neat explanations for the vagaries of human behaviour, like Tony Llewellyn-Jones’s loony, Confucius-quoting psychiatrist in The Human Touch. But he’d never look down on them.
I reckon it was because he saw himself in them... That’s why I loved him. Farewell, Paulus.
