Roxularium - форум, посвящённый Ричарду Роксбургу и фильму Ван Хельсинг

http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s1912108.htm

Margaret Pomeranz speaks to Director, Richard Roxburgh.

Romulus, My Father Interview

RICHARD ROXBURGH: My sister gave me the book for my birthday eight years ago now and I just read it and called her the next day and said, “I’m going to make a film of this,” and she said, “I knew you’d say that.”

I’ve always been attracted to the migrant story. When I was a kid at primary school there were a lot of sudden, new Yugoslav émigrés and Greek kids who arrived and I was really attracted to their life and their stories and stories about movement of those people through time.

But on personal level, I suppose there was, you know, a kid in the bush and I suppose that appealed to me, and some of the stories about, you know, a mother in some pain, some of that appealed to me as well.

I’m sure that there’s a lot of it that, you know, that has a deep resonance and it may take me a long time to get to the bottom of what they all are.

What I encountered really was Rai Gaita’s probably natural reluctance to have the thing turned into a film because it’s a - you know, it’s a deeply personal family tragedy, and to hand that over to, you know, artists, to make of it what they would, was not something that he would countenance very easily.

I mean Rai is a professor of moral philosophy so he’s - you know, he has a kind of a philosopher’s scepticism of art, as well, that I didn’t even know at the time and I was about to encounter.

So there were a lot of things militating against the film ever getting up but I sort of, for who knows what reasons, I was absolutely determined that it was going to and that I would be able to convince Rai that I could do it without injuring or dishonouring the people in the story but rather to, you know, to realise cinematically the very things that I’d loved in the book.

MARGARET: At a certain point when I met you, you said “There’s a reason that actors only make one film, Margaret,” and you have to tell me about it.

RICHARD ROXBURGH: Oh look, it’s, you know, I mean, directing a film is a kind of a - I just found it a ridiculously painful process.

You’re married to compromise. You are betrothed to compromise from the word go and it’s about the way that you deal with compromises that’s going to determine what the film is like.

And it’s just the astonishing number of them and at what time they commence in the morning and I suppose because, you know, I loved the thing so hard, you know, it - it’s - I found that really a hard marriage.

But, you know, it’s then the thing is kind of forged in extremity as well and it’s forged through pain and in some ways I suppose it’s a bit like childbirth, for God’s sake, you know, it’s not - it’s not a great pleasure in many ways.

You know, it’s deeply painful and, yeah, I found it like that and it made - I certainly don't want to diminish what any of the actors on my film did, but it did make acting seem like it was a bit of a walk in the park. Sorry, actors on ROMULUS, MY FATHER.