Red Stewart chats with filmmaker Geoffrey Wright…
Geoffrey Wright is an Australian filmmaker who has been working in his country’s film and television industry since the 1980s. He is best known for his independent films Romper Stomper and Metal Skin, with the former getting a sequel in the form of a television series of the same name, which Wright was involved with.
Flickering Myth had the privilege to speak with him, and I in turn had the honor to conduct it.
I began by asking Mr. Wright about his intentions behind the original Romper Stomper, which came out in 1992. Not being familiar with the history of Australia, I was interested in learning why he felt he had to make a movie about violence and neo-Nazis.
“Well, back at the time of the movie, we’d probably peaked in terms of social friction or social concerns about a wave of Vietnamese immigration that took place from the end of the Vietnam War on to the early 90s.
“To understand it, you have to go back into history. Since the 1850s, Australia had a ‘white Australia policy’ that restricted non-white immigration. This was instigated by the Australian Labor Party after fears that the Chinese, drawn to the country during the gold rush, would stay and create a cheap labor force, driving down wages.
“This was compounded later during World War Two when the country feared invasion from Japan and later again in the Korean War, when we feared communist China. The Vietnam War, for us from 1966 to 1973, was seen as just another in a line of ‘Asian threats’ but other things were starting to go on at the end of this time.
“We realized how wealthy we’d become through European immigration and the more progressive part of the country saw the Vietnamese immigrants, and refugees, as bringing another wave of prosperity.
“From the mid 70s to the mid 1990s, a cultural shift took place, but right up until the end of that period there were some nasty reactions and that’s what Romper the movie depicts. Hando, the character Russell Crowe played, represented the most blatant race-fear mongers still at odds with a changing society.
“Racing forward to the present day, almost everyone in the country now regards the Vietnamese community as very successful, very peaceful, and rather enriching. You simply can’t stir up fear by pointing to the Vietnamese!”
But that begged the follow-up question of what made him want to revisit that world over 20 years later with the Romper Stomper television series, which premiered on the Australian streaming service Stan in January 2018.
“Well, for the racists, a fresh target to hate appeared around the time that Islamic extremism grew from the ashes of failed western policies in the Middle East. They could point to any Arab or African Muslims and label them as a threat. It didn’t matter that the vast majority wanted nothing to do with radical Islam.
Wright was not one to mince words. “Bitter and divisive points of view of all sorts were sneaking their way back into the margins of the mainstream and trying to present themselves in a more acceptable way. Small, ultra-nationalist parties could take root, trading on fears of ‘the other’ just as ‘white Australia’ had done in the past. One of them, One Nation, entered parliament with a few representatives. They would not disclose nakedly racist policies they knew the public would have a serious backlash against, but kept trading on the idea that Muslims en masse wanted to usurp political freedom.
“All of this was going on at the same time as BREXIT and the rise of Donald Trump. I think people go too far in their criticism of Trump in calling him a Nazi, but he is someone who appeals to the far right. If Trump can imply that white America has lost security, jobs or freedoms because of non-whites, the far right can do the same here.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, Wright was quick to warn that we should not demonize him, lest we ignore some of the genuine concerns he represents: “Trump is really an independent that’s taken control of the Republican Party, because I think he’d make classic Republicans like Ronald Reagan, spin in his grave. I think both the Democrats and classic Republicans ignored working-class people in the ‘heartland’ (middle) states. With the rise of high technology, no one made an effort to reeducate these people on how to adapt to the changing economy. I actually think the U.S’s problems are all about education, and the same goes for Australia and the Western World.”
It’s an interesting theory that does capture a lot of the anger faced by citizens in western countries. And that made a Romper Stomper revival all the more perfect. However, the series has notably expanded beyond the film’s scope of just neo-Nazis. Antifa and radical Islamists play a large part depending on the episode, and I was curious as to why Wright chose to incorporate them.
“Because extremes have now appeared at all ends of the political and cultural spectrum. Neo-Nazis, Antifa, ISIS, and other groups have appeared in Australia and most of the west. They’re part of the landscape. If you think about that you realize that if Hando could come back to life he’d look around at the situation and find it more than interesting.
“My old producing partner Daniel Scarf, and I, thought that the time was, therefore, ripe for revisiting Romper Stomper’s themes through a new movie or series. Simultaneously, we got approached by a couple of TV producers, John and Dan Edwards of Roadshow Rough Diamond, who had the same feeling. There were other TV production companies interested as well but we ended up going with John and Dan because of their connection to the Stan streaming service, which we had a very high regard for.”
Wright is credited as one of the creators and an executive producer, but I wondered how much input he himself had on the TV series. That is to say, what was the difference between being the director on the original film versus directing a couple of episodes now?
“There’s a substantial difference. For someone in my position on a film set, the writer-director is really acting as an auteur. You’re controlling every layer of it and you’ve got lots of power.
“But when I teamed up with the Edwards to make the series, it became a team effort. We started out with my few pages of series outline and then all of us, plus a room full of writers, expanded it to six one-hour episodes. You have to do it this way, it’s essential.
“Having said that, as we progressed, I regret we didn’t have a ‘show runner’, a creative ‘final filter’ across everything, like the Americans do. We really don’t see this role activated in Australian TV very much. Therefore, the showrunning duties were effectively undertaken by whoever was directing on the set, on the day, and there were two other directors beside me, James Napier Robertson and Daina Reid. Their calls were great, but we could have had more communication to compliment each other’s efforts.
That being said, Mr. Wright is happy about his ideas resonating in the show: “James Robertson wrote my episode 2, and did a terrific job, and I wrote Daina’s episode 6, but I directed episodes 1 and 2 in a way that’s very influenced by the old movie.
Wright learned a lot from doing the Romper Stomper show. While not returning for a possible second season, he said that he did hope to apply his experiences towards future television projects: “I think that the best thing for me is to develop other shows where I can be a showrunner. So that’s the future for me. I’ve got several things in development.”
Now, in the United States, you cannot talk about Romper Stomper without talking about mass shootings.
Without getting too political, in 2014 there was a shooting at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina by a hate-filled man named Dylan Roof. He murdered nine innocent people during a prayer service before being captured by law enforcement the next day. The reason Romper Stomper is brought up is because a photo of Hando covered in blood from the film was found on Roof’s computer.
It should be made clear beforehand that I do not subscribe to the belief that film, and entertainment in general, are the causes of violence in any country, but there is no denying that they can influence individuals to a degree. And so I asked Mr. Wright what his thoughts were on this connection between the movie and the tragedy. He had a lot to say.
“Well personally, I am a huge fan of Taxi Driver, the movie. And I’ve got a picture of Travis Bickle on my fridge, pre-mohawk. It’s a good picture of De Niro and it has not encouraged me to arm myself with guns or blow people away. I like the body language and apparent innocence portrayed in it. The image sums up a lot, for me, about how much a human being can surprise you but it DOES NOT TRANSFORM MY PERSONALITY or make me do things that I would ethically oppose.
“Now Roof, if he’s got a picture of Hando, he may say ‘I see myself as an outlaw being symbolically stabbed by others just as Hando is an outlaw who is literally stabbed by others.’ You know, this kind of delusional or self-pitying thinking. In that moment, for totally personal and idiosyncratic reasons, Roof relates to the image of Hando but it hasn’t ‘transformed’ him.
“What pushes individuals over the line to kill in the name of a philosophy or political view, in his case a racist point-of-view, are dozens, if not, hundreds, of compounding factors, including: education, background, childhood, physical health, and mental health.
Wright was adamant that focusing on nonsensical things like a person’s entertainment interests only distracts from the real issue, something I agree with. I pointed out to him that perhaps one of the reasons the gun culture debate was never resolved in the United States after the Columbine Massacre was because of the media’s insistence on demonizing Marilyn Manson’s music (a tactic that proved even more idiotic when you consider that the perpetrators never even listened to Manson).
Wright agreed: “If you think stealing a moment from a piece of pop culture changes your personality from being a law-abiding citizen to a killer, then you are insane. No single thing will flip someone into a psychosis or murder. And every time we attribute criminal behavior to one factor alone, we are doing a disservice to society because we’re saying that we can solve things by banning this or banning that. Reducing the scope of a culture, especially 21st and 20th century pop culture, is not the solution: you’re ignoring the real problems.
“Roof, for example, was diagnosed as ‘deeply depressed’ by psychiatrists and exposed to domestic violence perpetrated by his father against his biological mother. His half-sister, Morgan, will be facing charges of carrying weapons onto school grounds later this year. There was, too, the huge problem of his relatively simple access to weapons. I would suggest that looking at the history of the Roof family is far more useful than blaming a screensaver from Romper Stomper.
“To look at another example, Charles Manson was a big fan The Beatles song ‘Helter Skelter,’ but does anyone seriously think that made him a killer? The Matrix and The Dark Knight, to name just two of the more contemporary examples, have also been blamed by defense counsels or the accused, to ‘explain’ a murder or murders. I don’t buy it, do you?”
To end things on a more positive note, I disclosed an interesting analysis of mine to Wright: that he resembles an Australian version of Roger Corman. For those who do not know who I am talking about, Corman is a famous indie producer and director who was responsible for giving a start to many filmmakers and actors who would go on to become celebrities in their own right. In Wright’s case, those names include Crowe, Ben Mendelsohn, and Sam Worthington among others.
I wondered if he himself felt that way: “All I can say is, when young actors come to Melbourne and connect with me, they try and tell me who they are and what they’ve done. So I think in certain circles there is that reputation. The thing is I don’t take the casting people’s recommendations as the be-all and end-all: I look around for myself. And I do think that the TV stations and casting companies don’t always do enough work.
“On this series we gave some serious work to people who’d been inexplicably overlooked, like Toby Wallace, Markella Kavanagh and Nicole Chamoun. They’re awesome and all working like mad since the show.
“A lot of good people don’t have show reels, and I tell them, ‘for God’s sake, put something on the Internet, get yourself a website, but don’t sell yourself in a vulgar way: let your talent do the talking. Put together a reel that is lit properly and photographed professionally. All these things add up.
“The problem is the big companies don’t want to take risks- they want to use the tried and true people. But the film and TV industry could learn from the way sporting teams are selected. The best coaches, in my opinion, mix their new players in with the veterans a little ahead of time. The veterans will cover for the rookies’ mistakes and the rookies will re-energize the veterans with their enthusiasm. There’s nearly always a net improvement from the team.”
Adding onto this, Wright had a message for anyone interested in becoming involved in the entertainment industry: “To anyone else thinking about doing work in this field, education is everything! And by this I mean in order to have an output you need an input. You need to know something about how the world operates and be able to articulate that view to other people, because you’re always surrounded by other people in this business and they want to hear about your vision, loud and clear.
Flickering Myth would like to thank Mr. Wright for taking the time out of his day to speak with us. The Romper Stomper TV series is now available on DVD & Blu-ray.
Red Stewart
