Ladies in Black: Director Bruce Beresford’s love letter to 1950s Sydney

TAKE a look behind the scenes of acclaimed Australian director Bruce Beresford’s labour of love, Ladies in Black — a film 23 years in the making.

A VOLUPTUOUS woman in a bathrobe and a headscarf, worn 1950s style over an elaborate pinned-up hairstyle, stands alone outside the imposing Stage 6 building at Sydney’s Fox Studios.

“Are you lost?” she asks, bringing a cigarette to her lips, the moment of contact a perfect partnership of matching cherry red lips and nails.

As I start to respond, I recognise the woman. It’s British actress Julia Ormond of Jerry Zucker’s 1995 film First Knight, and Sydney Pollack’s Sabrina. No, not lost.

My impromptu envoy directs me inside, via the production office, to director Bruce Beresford’s film set for his new movie, Ladies in Black.

The film is a throwback to the glamour of the 1950s.

The set is a duck egg blue suite of rooms filled with plastic mannequins wearing vintage gowns of lilac, burnished pink and dark blue taffeta. To the left one wall is lined with racks of sensible mid-century shoes. To the right hangs a large sign making a promise it could be hard to keep — “Model Gowns”. Fur stoles and wooden hat blocks dressed with frothy brimless sprays complete the scene along with a group of tidy ladies in conservative black dresses.

This is the ladies’ cocktail frock department of F.G. Goode’s, a fictional outlet that has “been serving the people of Sydney since 1895”.

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It’s suddenly 1959 and though it’s not possible, one can almost detect the smell of burning light filaments, floor wax, plastics and the flowery perfume of the period.

Actors Rachael Taylor, Alison McGirr and the film’s leading lady, 17-year-old ingenue Angourie Rice — three of the women referenced in the film’s title — stand awaiting instruction from the film’s acclaimed director. Ormond will soon join them.

Australian film legend Beresford, director of Driving Miss Daisy, Mao’s Last Dancer, Puberty Blues, Breaker Morant and more than 30 other feature films, is watching a monitor with the movie’s director of photography, Peter James.

Having collaborated on 11 films together, the men don’t waste words and have, according to one of the film’s producers, an “unspoken language”. If they do, they’ve had time to develop it.

Rachael Taylor (centre), Alison McGirr (left) and Angourie Rice in a scene from Ladies In Black.

Beresford has been planning this six-and-a-half week shoot for 23 years — since he optioned the film rights to novelist Madeleine St John’s book, The Women in Black, with producer,
co-writer and friend Sue Milliken, producer of three other Beresford films, in 1994.

“Bruce is immaculate,” Allanah Zitserman, the film’s co-producer, tells me later. “He is meticulously planned. I’ve never seen anybody work like this. He walks in here, everyone knows what he wants. He communicates it beautifully across the crew, and he moves like a pro. That’s what happens when you know your craft like he does. He’s a master.”

When the direction for “action” finally comes, it is not from Beresford but from first assistant director Charles Rotherham whose voice is a rich theatrical British sonic boom.

Beresford, 77, James, 71, and Rotherham, who appears to be in his 60s, are the film’s “holy triptych” Zitserman says.

The project is a highly personal one for the director so he’s taking no chances with it. He has surrounded himself with the best cast and crew, among them American editor Mark Warner, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Beresford’s 1989 hit Driving Miss Daisy.

Rachael Taylor plays Fay in the movie.

Beresford and novelist St John met at Sydney University in the late 1950s when St John’s story, about a middle class Australian girl who takes a summer job at a department store, is set.

Also among the pair’s university arts cohort was Clive James, the man who introduced Beresford to St John’s novel over lunch in 1993, the year it was published.

Zitserman says Beresford found it hard to cast St John’s young female protagonist, Lisa Miles who, it’s widely held, is based on the novelist herself, who died in 2006.

“Bruce took a long time to make a decision,” Zitserman says. “It was an extremely, extremely important decision for him. That girl is Madeleine in some respects.”

Petite 17-year-old Melburnian Rice, of films The Beguiled and Jasper Jones, won the role following a hastily organised audition in Canada in 2016 where both were located for separate projects — Beresford on the telemovie Flint and Rice on the feature film Every Day.

“It’s fantastic to talk to Bruce about Madeleine,” says Rice, a veteran of 10 films. “He has these fantastic stories about her life and what sort of a person she was.

“He told me she always denied working at David Jones but everyone who knew her said she did. She had a summer job there. She was part of this world and there’s even a person who we think may have been the actual Madga.”

Rice was cast after a hastily organised audition in Canada.

Magda Szombatheli is the mysterious Slovenian saleswoman who runs Goode’s glamorous Model Gowns department. It is Magda who introduces Lisa to European culture and encourages her to expand her horizons, the main plot line of the film.

During the movie’s 23-year gestation, Beresford kept having to mentally recast his movie as actors grew too old for their parts but Ormond is someone the director had long wanted in the role of Magda.

In St John’s book, Magda is described as “luscious … full bosomed … beautifully tailored and manicured”.

Noni Hazlehurst, Susie Porter, Ryan Corr and Shane Jacobson round out the ensemble cast. As the vivacious Henry Higgins of the film, Ormond describes Magda as the catalyst for Lisa’s awakening and transformation.

Beresford on set with Nicholas Hammond. Picture: Lisa Tomasettii

“Magda is a refugee,” Ormond says. “She’s not really made fantastic friends with all of the employees but she takes Lisa under her wing and she sees something in Lisa that makes her introduce her to her husband and the rest of her community and then that opens both of them up — I think it is Magda that kind of brings them all together.”

Milliken suspects St John would have been quietly satisfied with Beresford’s film, the script of which is virtually lifted word for word from the author’s book. “She was very keen for Bruce to make the film. She really wanted that to happen,” she says.

* LADIES IN BLACK OPENS IN CINEMAS ON SEPTEMBER 20

Originally published as Ladies in Black: Director Bruce Beresford’s love letter to 1950s Sydney