Aussie actor Jack Thompson on his soft spot for Brisbane

After a tough year in the arts, the Brisbane International Film Festival is due to kick off next month. BIFF patron Jack Thompson talks about the top films to see, and his love of Brisbane.

If you had to choose a voice to represent Australia it would have to be Jack Thompson’s. It’s a sonorous voice, almost a drawl at times, unmistakably laconic, the tone a tad world weary now but no less warm for all that. Thompson, 80, is an icon, no doubt about that. Maybe legend would be a better word.

Festival show where social distancing non-existent

Queensland scores huge coup with major art exhibition from The Met

He’s one of the patrons of this year’s Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF 2020) presented by The Australian Cinematheque at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). Thompson will serve as patron along with legendary film editor Jill Bilcock. The pair worked on BIFF’s opening night film this year, Stephen Maxwell Johnson’s High Ground, a confronting story about frontier violence in colonial Australia with Thompson starring as a policeman.

Iconic Australian actor Jack Thompson, patron of the BIFF 2020. Picture: John Appleyard

We know Thompson from so many films – Breaker Morant, Sunday Too Far Away, The Man from Snowy River, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and many more. Hell, he was even in a Star Wars flick – Star Wars: Attack of the Clones in 2002.

Bilcock, 72, is respected and loved in the industry as a masterful film editor. She is not as well known by the wider public but her resume is impressive and includes films such as Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet, Elizabeth and The Dressmaker.

QPAC gets its gear off with raunchy show

Hollywood royalty in audience for return of Queensland Ballet

The pair (who will no doubt, henceforth, be referred to as Jack and Jill) will have to attend BIFF 2020 virtually for obvious reasons. Both have chosen a program of their own work to be screened at the festival and the films will run with video introductions from them. Bilcock is stuck in her hometown of Melbourne.

“It’s like a prison but it’s okay,” she muses.

“I love the idea of being a patron with Jack. Working with him was a dream come true because we all grew up seeing him on screen. It’s an honour.”

A scene from documentary film, Jill Bilcock: Dancing the Invisible Image.

Thompson is disappointed he can’t be here in person. When I get him on the phone that deep, resonant, broad Aussie accent is so familiar. We have a couple of conversations a fortnight apart. He’s on his property near Coffs Harbour in northern New South Wales lamenting the fact he can’t come to Brisbane, particularly since he says he has a soft spot for the city.

They all say that, right? But Thompson is sincere. Brisbane holds a special place in his heart for personal and professional reasons. He actually started his acting career in Brisbane in the early 1960s when he was based in the city serving in the army and, later, seguing from a science degree to an arts degree at the University of Queensland.

“I think very fondly of my early years in Brisbane,” Thompson says. “My acting interest goes back to childhood but my involvement in theatre in Brisbane where I lived for three years was so important.”

When we chat, Thompson says he has recently caught up with Michael (“how’s the serenity”) Caton who also started his acting career on stage in Brisbane at the same time Thompson was learning the craft. The two are still firm friends and for decades have wanted to make a film together but haven’t got around to it.

Actors Jack Thompson and Michael Caton.

Thompson, from Victoria, and Queenslander Caton, from Monto, in the North Burnett region, worked together in Brisbane in those early days.

“We met acting at Twelfth Night Theatre,” Thompson recalls. “I was in the army and Michael was a windmill salesman, a story he’s fond of telling. I remember us both being in the Scottish play (Macbeth) together. I played Banquo, he played the fool and when he came on stage I remember the audience came alive. It was an exquisite comedy performance from him.”

Who wouldn’t love to time travel back to see those two treading the boards in Brisbane? The city was, Thompson says, “provincial” in those days, which is quite polite of him really.

Of course both went on to become household names on the small and big screens – Thompson becoming famous for his rugged individualism in a string of films and Caton much-loved as Uncle Harry in the long-running TV series The Sullivans.

Thompson was more adept at grabbing headlines though with his rather colourful personal life. There was the famous nude photo shoot for Cleo magazine and the rather bohemian polyamorous live-in relationship with sisters Bunkie and Leona King. The relationship with Leona lasted and she and Thompson are still together.

Actor Jack Thompson on the cover of 'Cleo' magazine in 1975.

Thompson was at the forefront of Australian cinema’s renaissance in the 1970s and went on to have an international career. He has chosen one of his Hollywood favourites to screen at BIFF – the 2004 film The Assassination of Richard Nixon, in which he starred alongside Sean Penn and fellow Aussie Naomi Watts.

He also includes a typically Australian film, Burke and Wills, from 1985.

“I chose it because I think it’s a very good film and it is not seen a lot,” Thompson says. “People know me from The Man from Snowy River and that’s a great family film but the Burke and Wills story is an important part of our history. It’s a typical Australian story about a country that was founded on failures.”

The Jack Thompson Performs program also includes a new film, a comedy about army veterans, Never Too Late, which also stars James Cromwell, Jacki Weaver and Dennis Waterman. Also, Yolgnu Boy from 2001, the moving story of an Aboriginal boy on the cusp of manhood caught between two cultures. That was also directed Stephen Maxwell Johnson and is a companion piece to High Ground in which Thompson appears with lead actor Simon Baker and some talented Indigenous newcomers.

Jack Thompson in the movie High Ground.

BIFF will mark the Australian premiere of High Ground, a film which has already had an international screening early this year at the Berlin Film Festival where Thompson and Baker walked the red carpet together with the first-time actors from Arnhem Land, Witiyana Marika and Jacob Junior Nayinggul. Thompson, the once grizzled shearer of Sunday Too Far Away, is now the grizzled veteran actor who is proud to be telling a story about the origins of our nationhood, despite that story being a painful one.

“It’s a very relevant film particularly in light of the Black Lives Matter movement,” Thompson says. “It took many years to get it together and it wasn’t easy to make. Everyone knows about my renal failure during shooting and how the purple truck came to save me.”

Thompson, who is about to undergo one of his regular dialysis sessions after our second chat, famously fell ill during the shooting of High Ground in the Northern Territory and was saved by the mobile dialysis unit run by the Purple House, a health service run out of Alice Springs to service remote Indigenous communities. Thompson’s illness and treatment while working on the film was turned into an episode of Australian Story because Thompson wanted to highlight the good work being done by Purple House.

He has long been a champion of Indigenous rights and is proud that two of his movies about Indigenous Australia are screening at BIFF.

BIFF 2020 artistic director Amanda Slack-Smith.

BIFF 2020 artistic director Amanda Slack-Smith says she is thrilled that Thompson and Bilcock agreed to be patrons of BIFF 2020.

“People might walk past Jill in the street and not know who she is but they will all know her films,” Slack-Smith says. “And we are showing a documentary about her work, Jill Bilcock: Dancing the Invisible, which people will love.”

Thompson is familiar to all of us. He’s a star but an unassuming one and a very generous one too, according to Slack-Smith.

Thompson has been involved in more than his fair share of film festivals but he isn’t jaded.

“I still love film festivals,” he says.

“I think a lot of my early education in the depth and breadth of world cinema came from attending the Sydney Film Festival regularly. You have to be a bit selective about what you see though because otherwise by day three it all becomes one movie.”

This year’s BIFF features more than 70 features, documentaries, short films and special events. The closing night film also has Brisbane connections. Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra, directed by Wayne Blair and Nel Minchin (Tim Minchin’s sister), looks back at the past 30 years of Bangarra Dance Theatre and the role of its dynamic artistic director, Stephen Page, a boy from Brisbane’s southside. Wayne Blair also has Brisbane connections and studied at Queensland University of Technology.

Bangarra Dance Theatre.

There are some unusual offerings including a film about the fantastical adventures of a female sky pirate in the restored and tinted film feature, Filibus, which was made in 1915.

“That film will be accompanied by the world premiere of a new score by David Bailey played on the gallery’s 1929 Wurlitzer organ,” Slack-Smith says.

There are themed strands within the program which will be presented at QAGOMA, Dendy Cinemas Coorparoo, the Elizabeth Picture Theatre, New Farm Six Cinemas, Reading Cinemas Newmarket and the State Library of Queensland.

But why not just have a film festival virtually in the age of a pandemic? We can all watch things streamed at home after all. Slack-Smith says it’s important to have it in cinemas.

“I think there is more value in gathering to see films even with social distancing,” she says.

“You can’t hit pause in the middle of a cinema screening, or go and make a cup of tea or take a phone call. You have to be present and there’s joy in the experience. That’s what we all need now.”

As for the patrons though, they won’t be here. “I’ll be at home in isolation with my wife Leona,” Thompson says with a hint of humour.

“But that’s okay. Isolation is my default position.”

Tickets are on sale now for BIFF 2020, biff.com.au