Tim Minchin talks wasting years on Broadway, battling Hollywood, the magic of Matilda and his homecoming tour
TIM Minchin admits run-ins with Hollywood and Broadway almost broke him. But with a new tour and new album, the musician is looking for different ways to channel his anger.
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TIM Minchin is out of traction and back in action.
The Australian performer, actor, writer, singer, comedian and musician ditched America and moved to Sydney at the start of this year, still licking wounds inflicted by his movie Larrikins being snuffed out by Hollywood and his musical version of Groundhog Day ending prematurely on Broadway.
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“I intend to never ever put a piece of my work on Broadway ever again,” Minchin says.
“I want to say ‘No’. I want to create art. I don’t want to subject it to such a brutal system again. But you watch. If I write something and someone there wants it of course I’ll f---ing try Broadway again. Then I’ll sound like a spoiled wanker.”
Larrikins was an animated musical with Hugh Jackman, Margot Robbie and Naomi Watts “attached” to it, in Hollywood speak.
After four years of work, the project was pinballed around studio heads before being silently euthanized silently, in classic Hollywood non-speak, before Minchin vented online.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Minchin says.
“The songs are mine but the songs are very bespoke. It lives on particular software on particular computers owned by a psychopathic corporation. It’s incredibly sad.”
After his stage success with his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Minchin wrote the score to turn hit movie Groundhog Day into a musical. It got off to an acclaimed start in London, then moved to Broadway where it was nominated for eight Tony awards but closed after just five months last September.
“It sounds like sour grapes but I can’t talk about Groundhog Day, it’s too fresh. There’s actually terrible people wanting our failure and working towards it,” Minchin says.
“I really struggled to feel OK. It was the most significant funk I’ve been in, having all that work taken off me, or taken off us. One of my many not nice attributes is I can be pretty self righteous if I feel like I’ve been wronged. I was outraged, how f---ing dare they? Sitting at the piano in March last year I was thinking ‘I think they’ve killed me. I think they’ve successfully taken my mojo off me’.
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“Of course, two things. One, what are you f---ing talking about you idiot? You’re the most privileged person in the world.
“And two, time and context. I would never say I’ve been depressed, but having had times in my life where I think ‘Now what? Why should I get up this morning?’ I’ve never given up on trying to do it, to take inventory of how privileged I am. My loss of art is not the loss of life.
“But Groundhog Day took three years, Larrikins took four years. That’s fine if they go and run for 10 years like Matilda, but when they do what (Groundhog Day) did you think, ‘What did I just give my f---ing life to?’ I could have been out touring. I like the idea of having an idea, developing it, fund it, make it and move on. I need to make sure I don’t commit to four-year things. One of the things that tore me apart when Larrikins went away was the things I could have done, the things I said no to.”
Minchin, 42, had been mulling over about a move back to Australia for a few years, knowing he wanted to relocate his family before his two kids hit their teenage years “and resented me” for uprooting them.
“As it happens, it’s on the back of all this s--- collapsing,” he says, “but it wasn’t motivated by all this s--- collapsing. I was always coming back.”
He’s working on a new album and next year will undertake his first Australian tour since 2012.
“It’s called Back: Old Songs, New Songs, F--- You Songs because I’m f---ing back and because you’re going to get the stuff you love.
“After my sadness I wanted to sit down and see what came out. I’ve got a new song about leaving LA, one called I f This Plane Goes Down.
“15 Minutes of Shame has the line, ‘In the future everyone will have 15 minutes of shame, 15 minutes where they are unforgivable, irredeemable, inexcusable scum only be strung up in the village square, I will see you there’. There’s a new song called F--- This about the depression we all feel, the burden of the news. It’s how you feel after an hour on Twitter. It starts: ‘F--- America, F--- NRA, f--- progressives, f--- me, f--- my privilege and my wealth, f--- my white arse middle class audience, f--- our dwindling mental health.’”
While he lets his songs do the swearing, Minchin has lately found himself stopping and thinking before he starts potentially controversial debate online.
“I was a polemicist before every f----er was. I feel like I contributed to social media being a place for polemics. I like to think because I make mine rhyme and work really hard on them people like me should be polemicists, but everyone’s a polemicist now, but it’s just screaming and screaming. Outrage. Now I’m trying to work out where my role is in that. We’re so hysterical us progressives, righteously so. You put one foot wrong and you’re the baddie.
“There’ll be anger in the set but I’m trying to contextualise it. Generally I tilt funny. My job is to entertain the f--- out of people and I take that very very seriously. I’m not going to do a ponderous evening with Tim Minchin. I want people leaving thinking they got everything they could have possibly wanted.
“Years ago pretentiously I remember saying I want my name to be its own explanation. I’ve almost got there, I think. It’s incredibly pretentious but I want people to come to the gig because they trust me to be passionate and sweat my box off trying to entertain them and say some s--- that will maybe poke a bit.
“These days I can’t help but think I need to poke at the progressive left a bit. I think we have to be careful in Australia to not wedge a divide between these artificial binary sides of bulls--- and we’re doing it. I’ve lived in America, I was up all night listening to the Brexit results roll in in the UK, I was there the day Trump got in. I want to stand on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and scream ‘We’re OK, there’s a lot of work to do, I get why you’re angry, but please, discourse, please!’ ”
Matilda is now in its eighth year of touring around the world, including a stint in Australia.
“Matilda is why I stopped touring. Comedy is ephemeral and fleeting and as we’ve seen with Trevor Noah it ages badly. In the current age of people trawling to try and undo you, the premise of the progressive left seems to be you have to be born woke, you’re not allowed to improve, we can punish you for historical wrongs, and old you represents current you. It’s a tough time.
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“Before all that got really bad I thought touring is bad for my family, I’m getting more well known, part of me wants to be famous, part of me wants to cap that ... so I went off to make this movie and be a composer. What Matilda did is made me think I can actually contribute to culture. I’m just a funny song guy, but with Matilda — thousands of people a week watch that show and get what it has to offer which is joy and laughter and education. Hundreds of people are week are employed by that show, it’s touring around England now with this educational arm attached where kids in schools who can’t afford to go get to see it and then use it as jumping off points to make their own theatre.
“How lucky am I that the thing in my life that has risen up is guilt free and it pays for my house? As far as I know Matilda just does good in the world and in this current age of guilt and examination of everything you say or do it’s such a gift to me to feel good about something. Most comedy hurts someone, which is what Hannah Gadsby’s thesis is. I’ll go weeks without thinking about it and then realised there’s people in London singing my songs right now. That’s absolutely amazing. Now having taken the hits of Groundhog Day and Larrikins, I realise how lucky I was that the first thing I wrote worked.”
Minchin still thinks he’ll get Groundhog Day back on stage in London and then Australia.
“It’s only been destabilised by the perception of what happened in America. They think their taste is the taste. America is a very narcissistic culture, they’ve been brought up thinking they are the peak. They’re profoundly wrong. It didn’t work on Broadway and the only explanation was it wasn’t good enough. When of course there were lots of explanations.
“Everyone in the industry knows Matilda’s done better in the UK than America. Groundhog Day is a similar dark, complex, heartfelt theatrical piece of work, it’s not Disney. It will get up and it will work but God it’s hard. It will live in Australia, whether it’s two or five years from now.”
Before that there’s a show he’s starring in and co-writing with The Chaser’s Chris Taylor, Upright, to air on Foxtel next year.
“It’s a drama that will be funny all the time. It’s about a guy who through an accidental collision has to get across the desert with a mouthy, swearing 16-year-old chick from the bush. It’s a road movie about two people who need to heal each other. It’s been the opposite of a Hollywood experience. It gets funded and we make it.”
Minchin has got a Hollywood blockbuster looming — Robin Hood, filmed in Budapest in the midst of Groundhog Day and Larrkins imploding.
“I’m sitting there being Friar Tuck in Budapest as my movie’s collapsing and Groundhog Day was in trouble! But I think it’ll be good. It’s kind of about a conspiracy to keep the war going and how eventually you have to seize control because the system has lost its moral way. I just want enough people to go to it, it all comes down to a $40 million opening weekend or whatever they need to trigger the sequel because Tuck will grow in the sequel.”
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While he admits he’s happy now he’s busy and creative again, Minchin is most looking forward to being back on the road.
“I decided to pull myself off year to year touring for my family, but it got out of control. I had no intention of leaving seven years between tours but I got acting roles and directing offers and theatre stuff. I can’t believe it’s been so long. It’s what I do best. It’s my job.
“I can’t bear watching myself or listening to anything I do, but I look back on those orchestra shows or (2008 stage show) Ready for This? and I think ‘There’s not many people who can do that, you should do it again you dickhead!’ I felt sad I stopped. I was an idiot. I’ve still got the skills, I’m still young. Well ... young-ish.”
Tim Minchin, Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide March 8-9; Canberra Theatre, March 15-16; Crown Theatre, Perth, March 22-23. State Theatre, Sydney, March 27-29; Palais Theatre, Melbourne, April 5-6; QPAC, Brisbane, April 10-11; on sale Thursday (September 6) at 2pm, livenation.com.au
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