Beyond the Multiplex

From the beginning of this film, we know what form we're in. It's Australia rather than the American West, but we've got dust and flies and gunplay and bloodshed, and a story about revenge and sin. And like most westerns, it's about the collision between a violent, lawless environment and the ties of human society. It's not like you invented those themes, but they're evidently things that interest you.

Oh yeah, they are. What particularly interested me in this film was to create characters that were all morally flawed and ambiguous, and to try to write a film where your sympathies for the characters free-floated around as the film unfolded. The acts that they perform may appall you, but they are separate from the people who perform them. One character in particular is Samuel Stoat [Arthur Burns' henchman, played by Tom Budge], who's a little psychopath, just a nasty piece of work. Yet he has this beautiful singing voice, and there are moments where you feel for him. Or at least I do. I don't know if anyone else does. Even with Arthur Burns, I wanted to create an outlaw, an evil character, who you felt for.

Arthur has an appreciation for beauty. For natural beauty, I mean. That's very seductive. We're innately drawn toward any character who seems sophisticated, who appreciates beautiful things. It's like we forget or overlook that that has nothing to do with morality.

Being a moral person doesn't necessarily mean that you have a happier existence. I guess the most morally conflicted character is the Ray Winstone character, Captain Stanley, and his life is a fucking tragedy. Whereas Arthur Burns may be evil, but he seems to be the most comfortable and in tune with the world, in the most positive kind of way.

Captain Stanley and Charlie Burns are similar, aren't they? They're caught between these worlds, between civilization and lawlessness, and they can't find a way to work that out.

What drove the script and moved the characters onward was inventing things for them to do that would pull you back. Whether that meant having them suddenly do something good, when you expect them to do something bad, or the other way around. For example, the Ray Winstone character starts out like a Ray Winstone character, you know? [Winstone is known for playing violent criminals in British films.] But you soon see he's not that character he was forced to be at the start of the film. He's a very tender family man. Then again, in the middle of the film he's quite happy to go wipe out an entirely tribal village of aboriginals without batting an eyelid. I feel that says more about us as human beings than movies where you've got your good guys and your bad guys. That's a reductionist view of humanity.

I couldn't watch this without thinking about John Ford's great film "The Searchers," which is partly about the legacy of genocide and guilt, and also, even more obviously, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

Well, "Heart of Darkness" provides a sort of a basic premise that's set up at the start. Then there was, if anything, an attempt to steer it away from "Heart of Darkness" and not have Marlon Brando sitting up there in the hills. Within "The Proposition" there's a myth about the Arthur Burns character that keeps being reiterated: That he's this monster up in the hills. That was exciting for me in the sense that you could set that up, and then the first time you see this character he's crying like a baby. It takes a long time before you see him other than as somebody who cares for people, cares about his family and loves nature. There were certain financiers who didn't think this was the way to introduce the evil guy you've been waiting to see for so long, but I found it pretty attractive.

I know you lived in rural Australia as a child, in the state of Victoria. Do you feel some connection to that period of Australian history?

Not particularly, except that every Australian is aware on some level of our violent heritage and our violent past. And I suspect that in every Australian there's a sense of shame about it, whether they care to admit it or not. Somewhere that's embedded in the Australian psyche. Australians have not come to terms with their history in the same way as, say, Americans have. Americans have simply seen their history as a history of heroes. In the Australian psyche there's a real ambivalence toward what went on, and these wounds are still very active to this day.

I know that the subject of how the aboriginal people were treated during the colonial period, and well afterward, remains a hot topic. How does this movie relate to that debate?

There's a whole active movement to make amends in some way to the indigenous population, and a movement against that. I guess our film will be criticized by certain people as having a "black armband" [i.e., highly critical] view of history. That's a uniquely Australian term. What we wanted to do in the film was to incorporate the situation with the indigenous people into the fabric of the story, not to have an agenda with that. I think that makes some of the stuff that happens [to indigenous people] in the film more affecting.

I hope it comes across that this aptitude for genocide and racial hatred and murder is not just a historical thing. It's a very active thing these days, if not even more active. The more technologically advanced we get, in fact, the more proficient we are at it, you know? To me there are contemporary resonances in this story.

"The Proposition" opens May 5 in New York and Los Angeles, May 19 in Chicago, and May 26 in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, with more cities to follow.

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