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For years Hollywood told Gillian Armstrong that period films were not commercially viable. She wanted to cast an obscure British actor in the lead (Ralph Fiennes), and English stars (with the possible exception of Gary Oldman on a good day) were considered dead meat at the American box office. She was adapting a very thick book into quite a long movie. Her screenwriter Laura Jones was not yet famous for The Piano. And the American popular perception of Australia was still dominated by deserts and kangaroos.
All up the project seemed "too arty and too difficult" for Hollywood.
"It was all very disheartening," Armstrong recalls. "Not only for me. I had a whole team who'd made a commitment to the film. I was juggling their lives each time the project faltered."
But the winds did change. "[At first] I danced with joy," she says, "when Dances With Wolves was a hit." Next, the success of another long film, Sense And Sensibility, turned period dramas around. Then, after his superb performance in Schindler's List, Ralph Fiennes' star began a rapid ascent, culminating in The English Patient which turned him into a marketable romantic lead. Armstrong herself glittered in Hollywood after the success of Little Women, starring Winona Ryder. Finally, a world-wide response to independent films encouraged the major studios to start competing, and Twentieth Century Fox set up Searchlight to develop riskier material.
One thing that didn't change, even after the $US13 million film got the green light, was the American perception of Australia.
"When we sold the script to Fox they thought it was set in the outback," Armstrong recalls. "Even when the colour grading was done on the final print, it came back all red and brown.
"I had to say No! this is set in the tropics," she says. "It looks more like the Amazon than a desert."
In fact one of Armstrong's major responses to Peter Carey's novel was the sense of "these Victorian figures in the Australian landscape. The picture of Oscar in his English clothes surrounded by weird green bush. The image of Lucinda swimming in the harbour. It's so beautiful and exotic. Once it was all like that."
But it's not just the vivid river-indigos and rainforest greens which make the story of Oscar and Lucinda exotic, even to Australians. It's the story of two compulsive gamblers, who through various twists of fate meet on the ship from England to colonial Sydney, and for various complicated reasons pertaining to their unique personalities, decide to build a glass church and float it down a river.
Even to those who have read the book, and the opposite is more often the case, Ralph Fiennes, the star of the film is the Oscar of the book.
"White and frail", with eyes "like freshly peeled fruit", "a frizzy nest" of Titian red hair, and a set of nervous tics to match, this passionate pagan clergyman is the sort of guy, as the film's co-producer Timothy White has observed, "that a lot of men just want to give a good bop."
Fiennes could almost be in character when he walks into the room, a vision in cream. Even without Oscar's red hair and restlessness, he's a genuinely strange bird. With eyes as odd as glass, he talks in a poet's whisper.
"I sometimes feel I'm constructing things for journalists," he murmurs, looking warily sideways, as if about to fly away. "I'm always puzzled that people want to know how and why. Often there is no logical reason."
There is probably nothing so irksome as having to explain something you've already done beautifully. But the actor gently concedes he must. Oscar is a character he says, "who is destined to be swallowed up by the unknown and everything he is afraid of". A man "who is always in a quandary", to whom "the existential moment is always a thrill. A man completely devoted to the danger of chance. It's almost psychotic, this relentless need he has to work out the odds. He's never still inside."
Obviously, not what you find in a nutshell.
Fiennes was hooked by Oscar six years ago after reading the script, and remained Armstrong's ideal throughout the long gestation period. The demands of his burgeoning screen career, not to mention the exhaustions of a transatlantic tour of Hamlet, on top of a divorce and a new relationship, made Fiennes far from a sure bet when Armstrong finally got her money.
In the end, despite exhaustion, it proved irresistible because he says "I understand that anxiety, that aspiration in Oscar, towards something fine and poetic and clear".
Having secured Fiennes, Cate Blanchett was perhaps the final test of Armstrong's will. Rumour insists that everyone from Sharon Stone to Uma Thurman wanted to play Lucinda, the heiress who builds a glass cathedral to love. But Armstrong was convinced this fresh new Australian starlet could carry the film, and forfeited a bigger budget to have her in the lead.
"The production was so beautifully conceived and organised," an ethereal Blanchett reveals, as she floats into the interview suite, all but wearing the halo of the newly canonised star.
Having just returned from playing Queen Elizabeth I opposite Geoffrey Rush in a new film shot in England, she probably does feel a little light-headed. But her serenity could be deceptive.
"Often with people who seem very composed, the antithesis exists within," she says. "Lucinda is not a conventional period heroine. She and Oscar have a love which cannot exist in concrete, and no-one understands them. When they meet, it's like coming home." In fact when these two oddballs meet in the most exciting scene in the film, and begin to gamble, there is something of that dangerous spontaneous combustion that anyone in the grip of an addiction - be it love, or drugs, or gambling - will recognise.
Fortunately for Blanchett, up for her first film lead and playing opposite one of the most extraordinary actors, "Gillian is the most reassurring director to work with".
Although most people's idea of a general may not be a petite, protestant, blonde mother of two, the calm, rather dry efficiency with which Gillian Armstrong makes her films does evoke the military comparison.
In life, as in art, Armstrong prefers a melodrama-free zone, but bringing such an impossible book to the screen was, she admits - "a drama from beginning to end".
The central metaphor of a story about two people who want to construct a transparent vision of ecstacy, rather than a concrete one, was always going to be the floating of a 15 tonne glass church down a deep fast river. It was something she says "Peter Carey had the genius to write. I had to block it out until we were finally in pre-production."
It required the rekindling of an all but dead glassblowing tradition in Australia, the construction of an entire Victorian glass factory, and like any battle, the orchestration of vast and disparate energies.
But to Armstrong it will all have been worth it if the film prompts people to read the book. She was delighted to find American journalists stayed up all night reading it in order to prepare for an interview with her.
"It's just so beautifully written," she says, revealing some of the enthusiasm she felt as a student when she wrote Carey a fan letter after reading his extremely sharp short stories, The Fat Man In History (the letter sparked a lasting friendship).
"Peter's gift is very poetic, but he also has the wonderful, dry sense of humour of an old fashioned fable teller. His observations on human nature are so acute."
Armstrong and Laura Jones did change the ending for the film, but
Armstrong insists "it's the ending Peter now wishes he'd written
himself. He was a cruel hard young man when he wrote it. Now he's
a little more optimistic. He's had kids."
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 21, 1998
EL STEPHO