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Tue 1 May 1979 - Filmnews (Sydney, NSW : 1975 - 1995)
Page 7 - Talking to Albie Thoms
Talking to Albie Thorns
attached to it One of the problems I found was that
the principals who knew the story wanted to tele
graph what was going to happen to some extent, in
other words they are trained or believe somehow that
any action must signal its consequence. I guess you
must get that from studying Shakespeare, or from the
way Shakespeare is taught It is claimed that in the
tragedies everything that's going to happen is there
in every word, every aspect of die character. I rather
felt I didn't want that, but that I wanted those things
to happen the way they do in life, that mostiy you
don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, and
you're often surprised at things that happen to you,
and also with things that you find yourself doing.
Why did you have to tell them the whole story?
Well, to get the co-operation of the actors — I mean
they have other things offered to them — they want
a script Most of them were rather surprised when all
they got was a scenario, but they had sufficient con
fidence in me to accept that. But if I had nothing to
give them, I don't think I would have got much co
operation. Whereas with the bit players, when I just
asked them to do a scene, that was quite sufficient
for them. But people who you are going to work with
week after week really want an idea of what they are
going to be doing. I think that's a pity in a way,
because you lose a lot of spontaneity as a result of
them already knowing what the consequences of their
actions are going to be.
Then your non-actors presumably work better on
that level than the actors?
Well, the other problem is that a non-actor is a non-
actor until the minute you start shooting. The minute
you start it's as if they are learning on the job, and
after a couple of days they are a different person than
the one you started with.
The continuity of the two who played the two surfies
seems to work really well, probably better than with
anyone else.
Well, what I did there was cast two people who know
each other quite well, knowing I could utilise that
rapport without having to force it. The same with the
Bryan Brown/Julie McGregor characters, utilising the
rapport between them to develop something on the
screen. And the lack of rapport between John Flaus
and all the others was deliberately used - he lives in
Melbourne and had to be brought up for the film -
he really was the foreign person intruding on die
scene - that's brought out in the film in his char
acter wandering around Palm Beach.
How did you find working with the actors — well,
particularly with the mix of actors and non-actors?
Well, it was difficult, but then I knew it would be.
But I was pretty happy working with most of the
people.
Why did you choose to do it like that?
Well, it's the way I've been working over the years.
The last lot of theatre work I did was improvisation
which was with professionals and semi-professionals.
I was very interested in treating the performers as
creators rather than interpreters. I got very bored
in directing television series with the way the actors
took the text and just spouted it back at you and all
you ever saw was the written page on the screen.
I've always been fascinated by the notions of acting
that de Sica and the Neo-reaiists had, also the notion
that the Russians developed of typage — a type that
embodies deeper meanings — by putting it on the
screen you can let the audience create the character
as much as the actor or the script.
What was your purpose in shooting each scene all in
one shot?
It seemed the right approach to get the investigation
of the subject that I wanted. It's something that I've
been investigating for a long, long time. It worked
extremely well in Bolero, and then in Marinetti I
went right against it, used the obverse of it, cut, cut,
cut, and optically having shots within shots. And then
in Sunshine Gty I compared and contrasted those
two formal devices within the one film. So, having
begun a degree of characterisation in Sunshine City,
where the characterisation was all taking place within
the one shot of fixed duration, I then wanted to see
how that could be developed over a series of shots,
still keeping it within a single shot so the eye could
read the picture without the imposition of a cutaway
to tell you to consider something else, but letting
that reading process become a residual memory that
would be developed on later on. Various scenes lead
the viewer to ask questions which aren't immediately
answered, but are. usually answered about five scenes
later by quite a different scene to that which would
provide the answer in a normal dramaturgy.
What about the sound which appears to work like
another element in a puzzle? How did you work
that out?
Once again that was worked out from Marinetti
and Sunshine City. There was simultaneous sound in
Marinetti and the overlapping sound in Sunshine City.
I saw the potential in maintaining a dynamic beyond
the physical shot. In other words, rather than having
a punch line at the end of a scene to get you into the
next scene I kept it going, penetrating into the next
scene. This notion of penetration was a futurist idea
that I developed in Marinetti, and I wanted to take it
much further than I had in that film. In Palm Beach,
each action, each bit of sound, each thing that's
happening in the film, is penetrating into the other
streams of the story. The radio is used as a constant
to tie them together, and to allow comparison and
contrast as to how the different sounds penetrate into
that constant sound.
Are you happy with the sound as it is?
Well, it's not easy to listen to. A lot of people get
very upset if they're not hearing everything that's
on the sound-track. In the way that years ago people
used to dislike pull-focus shots because they couldn't
see all the shot They got used to that, and now
there's an adjustment to be made in terms of sound.
The technique of the sound that I employed, if I
can use a visual analog, is rather like a dolphin, rising
and surfacing. While you're watching a school of
dolphins, the one you're watching goes under the
water, and you notice that behind it there is another
just emerging. The audience is constantly being asked
to make that shift from listening to one sound to
listen to another. There are about twelve different
tracks of sound there that are mixed so that the
dominance of their elements are constantly changing.
It seemed to me as though the sound track was
almost functioning as the narrative, drawing all the
images together.
Yes, it was. That's how it's structured. The one con
stant is the radio sound, and the overlapping sound
maintains the dramatic dynamic of one scene in the
next, so you've always got two things happening.
You're not losing the stories when the picture is off
the screen, you've still got the feeling of the story
continuing. It keeps on going beyond the pictorial
image, and then disappears only to come back again
before the next pictorial image. It is an elaborate way
of maintaining three stories and keeping them going
without getting a feeling of stopping and starting.
These investigations of yours, which you've been
pursuing for the last fifteen years —
Well, twenty years if you take the theatre into
account —
You've been pursuing these investigations for the last
twenty years, as is generally known throughout the
world, along with perhaps your more 'respectable'
career as writer and director of Skippy episodes,
and working with GTK and that sort of tiling. You've
taken your films overseas where they have been very
well received, they've been written about inter
nationally. How does it happen, if you got this idea
in 1973, you've only completed the film in 1979?
What was the response of funding bodies to your
approach?
It's had a very checkered career. I've gone through
Bryan Brown & Julie McGregor in Palm BeachHelp
Bryan Brown & Julie McGregor in Palm Beach
Article identifier
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article213734751
Page identifier
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page23023066
APA citation
Talking to Albie Thoms (1979, May 1).Filmnews (Sydney, NSW : 1975 - 1995), p. 7. Retrieved April 5, 2025, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article213734751
MLA citation
"Talking to Albie Thoms"Filmnews (Sydney, NSW : 1975 - 1995) 1 May 1979: 7. Web. 5 Apr 2025 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article213734751>.
Harvard/Australian citation
1979 'Talking to Albie Thoms',Filmnews (Sydney, NSW : 1975 - 1995), 1 May, p. 7. , viewed 05 Apr 2025, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article213734751
Wikipedia citation
{{cite news |url=http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article213734751 |title=Talking to Albie Thoms |newspaper=[[Filmnews]] |volume=9, |issue=5 |location=New South Wales, Australia |date=1 May 1979 |accessdate=5 April 2025 |page=7 |via=National Library of Australia}}

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