Andrew McMurtryINTERVIEW: Julian Shaw - 'All Blacks Don't Cry'
I saw the film earlier today and I really liked the way you used file footage with re-enactments...
Julian: Yeah, what’s kind of interesting about it, and in a way the most flattering thing, is that people are saying, I didn’t know this about John Kirwan and they’re talking about all the stuff that is I guess a re-enactment essentially. The stuff that has myself playing John Kirwan, they are talking about it like it’s the real guy and that’s the most pleasing thing from my perspective, that it is quite seamless and obviously flattering as well because I guess people know me more as a writer and director and acting is another thing I’ve had a big passion for. It’s something I did a hell of a lot of when I was younger. But acting is something I’m not really as known for. I guess the most pleasing thing is that the illusion is kind of kept alive and i mean, it was definitely interesting because I pitched the idea to John Kirwan to make this film and really go deeply into his experiences and make a drama about it. Ultimately I had to sit down and show him so I flew to Japan, where he is based because he is the coach of Japan and sat down. It was interesting sitting right next to the guy you are playing and doing these scenes where you’re doing the haka and things like that and some pretty intimate scenes. But the most important thing was that he was happy with the portrayal and that meant everything to me. It was a big relief.
Julian: Which is kind of cool you know. To be honest I have always wanted to do a film about John Kirwan. I’m an Australian citizen as well and this is my home and I love it here but I was born in New Zealand and I absolutely love the All Blacks and I always will. JK really was my all time hero. If you were a kid in the 80’s, he was just the man. He was an incredible player and a World Cup winner and he was kind of like the most famous person in New Zealand for a few years there. He was a very high profile sportsman, and you know how much they get into Rugby over in New Zealand so I was always kind of in awe of him when I was a kid. And then later on hearing that he wasn’t just this unbelievable sportsman, he was really a remarkable person too. I mean he really has broken this cloak of silence by opening up about this stuff and you kind of have to remember that it was a very different era. Now you see billboards about depression and it’s kind of is reaching a tipping point where people will all talk about it and discuss it openly, which is a great thing. I still think there is a long way to go but it’s definitely come a long way. If you look at when John Kirwan was experiencing this kind of stuff, and particularly in New Zealand, which can be a very stoic society and at worst, I can say, a very closeted society and a very quiet society where stuff doesn’t come out in the open and he would’ve just been going through hell. It’s like if you were meant to be this macho, stoic All Black, you aren’t meant to have any kind of weakness, you aren’t meant to have any kind of frailty. I think having that really exacerbated his problems so it’s pretty interesting if you look at that era, to open up in that kind of climate, you really are breaking a really very powerful code of silence. In terms of playing him, at the end of the day I kind of thought, ‘there’s enough of a resemblance there and I really know this guy’ - I got to meet him and form a sort of personal connection with him. I really know the New Zealand team, being from New Zealand myself. And I’ve been making a film about the All Blacks so I’ve also been in this world and felt it and lived it and breathed it and I thought at the end of the day, I don’t know if I trust anyone else to do it, I think I should go for it myself. And the fact that he was really happy with the performance was just fantastic.
I thought the scene with the first person he opened up to was a great example of that.
Julian: The guy that I acted with Jamie Irvine is a really talented actor, i think he went to NIDA, he really brought something to it because that was exactly the predicament where it’s just kind of like ‘don’t be a sook mate, there’s only something wrong if you think there’s something wrong’, which as we now know, and we know scientifically it really isn’t like that. It is a genuine illness and kind of the worst thing you can do is sweep it under the carpet. That will only make it worse. That’s great if that scene kind of showed that struggle.
How did you meet John Kirwan originally?
Julian: I kind of always wanted to meet him because he really was, I can’t stress enough, how much of a role model he was. When I was a little kid I had posters on my wall; he had a book out in New Zealand which i read cover to cover; he had a film, well really more of a video doco called John Kirwan: Running on Instinct which had all of his great tries and I must have watched it like a thousand times – it was my favourite video as a kid. I was kind of always looking for a reason to meet him and then i kind of just ran into him when I was back in New Zealand filming the All Black for this other documentary, Cup of Dreams and I didn’t really have a chat with him or anything but i saw him around the All Blacks camp and it just triggered off this thought that I would really love to do a project with JK about depression and i think there was really a film in that and I don’t know if it will be a feature or a short film. So I considered going up and introducing myself but i thought when the time’s right i’ll do it instead of just meeting him as a fan maybe i could actually work with this guy. So i just got a contact for him through a rugby journalist who’s a mate of mine and just wrote him and pitched the idea. John Kirwan wrote right back and had had a look at my website and my other work and he said ‘that sounds really exciting and give me a call’ so I gave him a call over in Japan and we ended up talking for ages and ages. With athletes, sometimes it can be a bit disappointing when they look like gods on television but when you meet them they’re just absolute boofheads. John Kirwan is just the opposite. He’s an incredibly intelligent guy, he’s coached Italy and he coaches Japan and so a very astute mind analytically but also he’s a massive reader and he reads everyday; he watched a lot of movies, we talked for ages and ages about movies. I think the big thing in a weird way was that we just kind of had this personal connection. He just said, ‘put a script together, send it to me and I’ll tell you what I think’. I went away after interviewing him and he had a look and said, ‘just go for it’. That was it, that was all I needed.
Was the idea for All Black Don’t Cry yours or did an organisation like Depression NZ approach you to do this film?
Julian: What actually happened was, and I haven’t really talked about this much, was that I self-funded this film. I just really, really wanted to make it and once I had John Kirwan’s blessing with this script, it was then how do you it, how do you get it funded? I went to a few charities and thought about raising money through them but at the end of the day I didn’t feel confident that enough of the funds raised would actually go towards the film. What happened was that I was lucky enough to win an award over in England for my last film Darling! which had a cash prize, and I thought ‘I’m just going to use it on that and recycle it’, so that was the majority of it and I really just saved up the rest of it myself because it was just something I really wanted to do at the time and I didn’t want to wait and it was a great opportunity to do it and i had John Kirwan’s blessing. I didn’t want it to be something i thought about years later and think I never really got around to doing that so I just made it happen. It’s an interesting thing with short films because people say they’re calling cards and I kind of think that’s true. I think you probably end up losing money making them. They are there to have a message; they are also there to showcase you; but also with this one, i had the desire to get people talking about it, talking about depression. What’s amazing about this decision to make this film available for free, I’ve had all these people saying, ‘are you sure you want to do this? You’ve put so much effort into it’ and the more I thought about it, the more I thought absolutely. It’s fantastic to get awards for a film and fantastic to go to festivals but i don’t think there is anything better than having it seen and people talking about it. I know it’s only been available for a few weeks but just looking at the comments section on the website, people have just been writing amazing responses to it. It seems to have really touched people and done what I really wanted it to do which was really just to get people talking. I think the exciting thing with the internet is that it is so immediate and you do get immediate feedback and you know, sometimes when you are making a film, you can make the film in a vacuum and even if it shows at a festival or whatever, no matter how prestigious it is, you can kind of be a bit insulated from the experience. One of the most fun things for me has been to make the film free, to get that immediate feedback, to get people sharing it.
Why did depression in particular resonate with you?
Julian: To be honest, it’s something I have gone through myself. I’m extremely lucky it’s not something that I have experienced clinically but I definitely think I’ve had environmental depression. My parents broke up when I was a teenager; definitely went to that place you know and it was extremely frightening and I didn’t actually know if I’d get through it – I can honestly say that. And what’s scary about that is that I really am, for the most part, a really happy person and a very driven person and really love what I do and really love my life. So to kind of feel like you aren’t yourself is particularly frightening so i guess it was just that fact. I bounced back and got through it with a bit of counselling and leaning on my friends and family and again, opening up. The minute I said, ‘I might be depressed’ that was when it started to end. I think universally, talking about it, meeting a counsellor, getting support from loved ones and really just being open about it seems to help people and then whatever else you do beyond that is really up to you and is really a personal decision. But this film is really all about talking about it, getting it out there. It draws some really big parallels with another film I made called Darling! The Pieter Dirk-Uys Story which about this guy Pieter Dirk-Uys who is a political satirist but really also an AIDS awareness activist and in some ways it’s not about finding a cure for AIDS, it’s about talking about it, it’s about awareness, and that has been the biggest thing that has helped. I’m a really big fan of just talk about it; get it out in the open. It removes the stigma, it removes the fear and once you start doing that you’re on the way to beating any problem. For me it was about having had that experience myself and the John Kirwan factor, the fact that I learnt that this amazing All Black who I looked up to had gone through what I had gone through and probably much worse than what I’d gone through. It just really shows that it can happen to anyone, and that’s the thing, it can happen to Presidents, movie stars, athletes and World Cup winners; it’s something that just happens. Something that people have been saying about the movie is the way depression is portrayed, it just oozes into your life and I’m proud of that depiction.
Did you use your own experiences in the film?
Julian: I don’t think I could’ve given this performance if I hadn’t gone through it myself. Talking to John Kirwan - we had a pretty big talk about our experiences with it - it’s amazing just how many similarities there are with it. When you’re going through it or when you are in that place, and it doesn’t matter if you are in that place for three months or a year or a week, it’s so scary and the scary thing is you think you are the only one in the world who has ever gone through it. You feel very much alone and helpless, that’s just part of it. It is kind of a distortion of reality that you are experiencing. Everything can seem as if the glass is half empty. I don’t think I would have been interested in doing a film on this subject matter and I don’t think that I would have been able to write a script and do a performance that was true if i hadn’t had a taste of it myself.
I saw that you won the INSIDEFILM independent spirit award a couple of years back...
Julian: Yeah, it’s still one of my favourite experiences. In terms of my proudest achievements it’s probably right up there. It just meant so much because you are always trying to make work that can be easily understood by everyone. You might make a film about a Kiwi Rugby star or whatever but you shouldn’t have to know anything about New Zealand Rugby to like it and I guess with the film Darling!, on paper it seemed like a quintessentially South African story, but really I made that film for Australians and for people all around the world and to get that kind of recognition at home was something very special and something I cherish.
Has working with limited resources helped you in your FILMMAKING career?
Julian: You aren’t going to go out and make your first feature film and get three million dollars straight up. If you are asking me if I want to make films on that level for the rest of my life then the answer would be definitely no and i think you would get very stale. For me I’m always trying to work on a bigger scale and obviously the goal is to make films with a much higher budget in the future because it gives you a much bigger opportunity to express yourself and tell a story on a world stage. However, i think the experience you get from working, especially with limited materials. Going back to that first film Darling! i was a kid really, but what it showed me was that the story is everything and personality is everything. Actually you don’t need millions and millions of dollars if you have heart and you have a really good story and a well crafted story you can actually touch people everywhere. It’s helpfully if you have a lot of money in the back kicker, but it’s not essential.
How is Cup of Dreams going?
Julian: Really well we are finishing it right now, it’s just getting the last sound mix and we’re doing the grade and final effects so it’s kind of that wonderful part of it where you’ve done the hard work over the past few years and now it’s like putting the paint job on a car. I think if you ask any filmmaker they’ll tell you it’s their favourite part of it, the point where you’re doing the final touches and just trying to make it as beautiful as it can be. But i’m really particularly pleased with that project and how it’s come out. To be really frank, I almost lost it, it almost didn’t happen a number of times. I actually thought Cup of Dreams would be done a couple of years ago. I thought I was going to be making this topical sort of film that was just about New Zealand Rugby and it was very much about the experience of the last World Cup. What happened subsequently was that the All Blacks had a rather catastrophic loss, which kind of set my film back and took it off the rails and I had all these producers withdraw funding that I thought was there and thought was as good as gold, but it turns out that that wasn’t the case. It was almost like i didn’t have a film anymore because the All Blacks lost. Even though I was disappointed as a fan, it was probably the best thing that could have happened because it gave me time to go back and rethink it and I thought, ‘maybe I should take my time with this project’. I thought, ‘maybe I was going to make a film that would only appeal to people who were fans of Rugby’. You don’t want to do that. You can make a film with very little subject matter and there is no reason why that film can’t have universal reach. In rethinking Cup of Dreams, I’m pretty sure I’ve made something that doesn’t just appeal to sports fans or people who are interested in Rugby. It’s something that has that element and I hope it will really please sports lovers but it has a human narrative too. It is a social realist documentary and it has a whole cast of characters. It’s really about the human side of this game and it’s about how this game holds all these people together in this country where i come from. So really, in a lot of ways, it’s not about the sport at all and pretty much a human narrative. I think f you detested Rugby or were indifferent, there would definitely be an emotional access point. You’ve got to make films about things that you know and obviously that world of New Zealand Rugby is something very close to my heart, something I really enjoy and am passionate about but you’ve got to approach it in a way where you are opening it up so really anyone in the world can watch it and that’s really what I’ve been doing with my projects. And that film will be shown on the Movie Extra channel next year but there may also be a few theatrical screenings of it.
So are you looking for a DVD release as well?
Julian: Yeah, that is definitely something we are going to look into. We just have to find the right partner to do it with. I think we just focused on getting the film done and making the film we want to make and that is definitely the next stage. The big thing is to release it before the World Cup next year, which is in September, so we have a little time up our sleeves but we just want to play it right because I feel like we’ve made a special film and we just want to get it out there in the best way possible. It’s very possible that there may be some sort of online release as well, I mean, I’m very excited about the possibilities of the internet. Really there are two options: you can be excited or you can be terrified so I try to be excited about it. To me, the internet doesn’t replace things, it’s just an avenue and it’s really silly to ignore that avenue when there are so many eyeballs on computer screens these days and mobile phones and everything else, it’s crazy to ignore all those avenues but, you know, for me it’s still about television and the big screen is what i aspire to, that hasn’t changed, but i think the internet brings in another dimension to it. We’ve got to look at how we can exploit that as well.
Finally, do you have any other projects you are thinking of working on, other than your holiday?
Julian: [laughs] Funny enough, I call it a holiday but I will probably be sorting out what is next. I’d have to say; probably not another documentary is on the cards. I think you’ll be looking at me doing more fictional stuff in the future. I love documentary and it really has taught me so much about filmmaking and i think that does translate across to the world of fiction. It is just an incredibly time consuming projects, you really do have to put your heart and soul into them. It’s just the nature of the beast. They take an awfully long time to make something half decent. So while I am incredibly happy with the two docos i have made, i don’t really think it’d be good for me to take another step down that path. Definitely in the future but i think i’ll be having a little break from it for a while. To be honest, and this isn’t meant to sound too mercenary, but I’d definitely direct a script that someone else had written, i’m not someone who only feels like I can do my own stuff. I think going forward is really about opening it up and going to a new level of collaboration and I am just really excited about working with other people a lot. These have been a couple of very intensely personal projects that I’ve done which has been the nature of them and that is right and proper, they need to be realised. But I honestly have a sense of bigger things coming on and collaborating on a bigger scale which is really exciting for me and could be the next step for me as a storyteller.
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