DFF’s Alexandra Fanning interviews Tony Morphett about his exciting film script, Return Engagement
Alexandra Fanning: Congratulations on your feature film script Return Engagement being shortlisted for the Australian Writers Guild romantic comedy competition! We at DFF are so excited to have this script as part of our next session of In The Raw. As this program encourages constructive comments and criticism, do you as a writer feel you need an audience perspective in order to produce your best work?
Tony Morphett: An audience perspective is always good to have but, unlike the theatre where you can adjust things, it’s rare in screenwriting because by the time the audience sees it, the film is locked. The In The Raw program therefore affords the rare privilege to see the screenplay walk and talk before an audience.
AF: Tony, can you tell us a bit about what inspired you to write the sleeping beauty story Return Engagement? Why a feature film script? Why not a television series or a novel?
TM: This screenplay has been in work through years and many drafts, and I’ve never tired of it. Many of the films I’ve most loved and admired have been musicals, romantic comedies and what I think of as urban fairytales like Moonstruck. And one day in a meeting on a very different project I got a vision in my mind of a beautiful young woman in a glass casket. So there I had Sleeping Beauty and if you have Sleeping Beauty she’s going to have to be awakened with a kiss, which raises the question of who is the kisser? Well, obviously a cat burglar who’s broken into this abandoned mansion in search of loot.
My lifetime love affair with the musical and Fred Astaire musicals were my particular inspiration - I first saw him in The Belle of New York in the Parramatta Astra as a teenager and never looked back – then kicked in and Frankie Turillo, aka Franklin Tyler III, came into being. So, Sleeping Beauty, 1920’S flapper Amanda Lane, put into suspended animation at the time of the great Wall Street Crash in 1929, is awakened in the present by a Sleeping Prince who lies about everything and loves everything retro and it’s love at first sight, a fact which he denies because he’s due to marry a socialite heiress of dominatrix tendencies. And while you could do this as a novel or a TV series, its real roots are in MGM musicals, the classic screwball comedies and the more recent modern romantic comedies by the hugely gifted Nora Ephron. Ergo a feature film.
AF: Is having your feature film script read aloud by some of Australia’s brightest acting talent an exciting prospect or is it nerve racking?
TM: Both. Exciting, nerve racking, but ultimately the feedback will be extremely useful for the next draft.
AF: Very true. So if Return Engagement were to be picked up as a feature film, would you want to be involved in the process of filmmaking?
TM: I’ve been working with Megan Simpson-Huberman for some years on successive drafts and that’s the kind of involvement in the process that I like. Megan really gets the genre – her Dating The Enemy with Guy Pearce and Claudia Karvan is a perfect romantic comedy. Collaborating with the director and/or a creative producer like Gus Howard with whom I worked on the ABC miniseries Rain Shadow (co-writer Jimmy Thomson) is as far as I want to take it. I want to spend my time writing so whenever I feel the impulse to produce or direct I take my medication and lie down in a dark room until the impulse goes away.
AF: Return Engagement has everything! From science fiction, car chases, cat-burglary and plot twists, to romance, comedy, drama and a big Italian family. Who is your desired audience? Do you think that the In The Raw session will help to target this audience?
TM: My desired audience is everyone. I see myself as an entertainer. I’m not here to preach or propagandise, I’m here to entertain. A show like Packed To The Rafters gets close to 2 million viewers, which means it’s appealing to a very wide demographic – people aged 10 to 100. The movies used to be like that and some still are. When I was a kid, people had permanent Saturday night bookings in the Parramatta Roxy and Astra even though they didn’t know what was going to be showing. These were mostly Hollywood studio films but the audience knew they were going to be entertained. It was an unspoken contract between film-makers and audiences.
AF: You have a very long history in television, writing for several of Australia’s most beloved shows, from Certain Women to A Country Practice to Water Rats, Blue Heelers, Sea Patrol and more recently Packed to the Rafters. Script writing must be second nature to you, is there anything in your field today that you find daunting?
TM: I’m not daunted, but I do know that there are certain types of shows that I’m not going to be invited to work on. This is partly because I’m not considered suitable for the sex and killing genre, and partly it’s an age thing - there’s a perception that when you reach a certain age you can no longer be trusted to write young people, though when I was young I wrote many old people. This perception is nonsense of course. Writers observe all the time and as the father of six and the grandfather of 11, I have many young or young-ish people in my immediate circle. I also travel on public transport, a practice I would recommend to all writers. Spend two hours on the Blue Mountains train and you encounter a very wide selection of people both young and old. You hear their voices, see their wardrobe, their body language, get into conversation with people you would otherwise never have met, have your preconceptions challenged. Spend two hours in your car and the only person you meet is yourself.
AF: Apart from writing for television, you have enjoyed a multifaceted career with beginnings as a journalist at ABC Radio and the Daily Telegraph to theatre, novel and freelance writing. What advice would you give to someone wanting to follow in your footsteps?
TM: It’s very hard to say because so many things have changed. When I was starting out there were no film schools, no screenwriting gurus, no access to old films except through cinema clubs or film festivals. Now if you see a movie you love (or hate) you can get a DVD of it and view it analytically to see what worked and what didn’t. It’s a golden age for film study. Having said that, the sure sign of a writer is that they write. If they say they are going to write a novel “one day” or a screenplay “when the grant comes through” then you’re not dealing with a writer but a wannabe. So write. Try different forms. Find good mentors. Film school screenwriting courses can be useful but they may not be for everyone. Many of the films you like best were written by people who never attended a film school, never read a screenwriting guru book, never made their work conform to someone else’s rules. Be wary of the seductions of the auteur theory as taught in many of our film schools. Writing and directing are very different skills, and it’s a very rare person who can do both equally well. Write from life, not from other films, respect your audience, and follow your heart.
AF: You seem to have ‘done everything’ in the journalistic and literary fields. What comes next? Are there plans for the future?
TM: I’d love to see Return Engagement made. It’s been with me for a very long time and it’s time it left home to make its way in the world. There’s another romantic comedy in my bottom drawer – written for a French director, Charlotte Brandstrom - and I’d like to see that one realised. A current project The Diary of Jimmy Porter (producers Lisa McCune and Gus Howard, director Nadia Tass) is about to go into 3rd draft and is planned to shoot next year. And then there’s my old love television drama. My plan for the future is to keep writing until they take me away in a box.
Tony, you have some very busy years ahead of you! We look forward to hearing Return Engagement’s live script reading session at Sydney Theatre on August 1st 2011. For more information click here.
