‘I didn’t want to’: How John Clarke’s daughter surprised herself with a doco about her dad

Not many people knew John Clarke as well as his daughter Lorin – “we worked together in the same office for decades, on and off,” she says. But she’s as surprised as anyone that she has made a movie about the much-loved writer, actor and comedian, who died suddenly while bushwalking at age 68 in 2017.

“It’s the last thing I wanted to do,” she says. “I didn’t get up every morning going, ‘I must tell his story.’ But then when other people tried to, saying, ‘We think this is the story. We don’t want you to be involved, but we’d like all the rights and everything’, suddenly I thought, ‘Shit, I do want to protect his legacy.’”

The result of that effort is Not Only Fred Dagg But Also John Clarke, a feature-length documentary that will screen in public for the first time at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August. It is one of 26 titles announced on Thursday in MIFF’s First Glance.

It wasn’t the thought of someone dishing dirt on Dad that ultimately got Lorin Clarke over the line. It was the likelihood that they wouldn’t even try.

Lorin Clarke at ACMI, where much of the archive material used in her documentary about her father is stored. Credit: Justin McManus

The thesis of the filmmaking team from New Zealand that in 2020 approached the Clarke family – Lorin, her sister Lucia, and their mother, Helen McDonald, an art historian and author in her own right – was that John was the foundation stone of the country’s comedy. Without him, there would be no Flight of the Conchords, no Rhys Darby, no Taika Waititi.

“It was so wrong, it was hero worship,” she says. “And my mum said to me, ‘If something were to be made and it were a hagiography, that would be a real shame’, because he wouldn’t appreciate that. He’d be so allergic to the idea.”

In crafting her version of his life, Lorin has had access not just to his vast treasure trove of archives (“the man did not throw out an envelope”) but also a series of interviews she conducted with him for a podcast that never eventuated.

The biggest gift, though, was a document her husband, Stewart, (who helped John with his IT needs) found on his computer four days after his death.

“The whole desktop was empty except for a single Word document, about 70 pages long, titled ‘For Lauren and Lucia’,” she says. “He’d written everything down: ‘this is how I felt in primary school’ ... ‘I remember looking out the window in the classroom and thinking this …’ It blew my mind that he did this, that he didn’t tell us, and that there was no instruction. I just went, ‘Holy shit. Well, I guess I’m making a film.’”

John Clarke as Fred Dagg, a caricature of a New Zealand sheep farmer that became so successful Clarke left the country partly to escape it.

The portrait she has painted of her father is intimate, and it straddles the public and the private. Growing up in New Zealand, he was deeply scarred by his parents’ disastrous marriage – “they hated each other,” says Lorin, “as their life project. Really, that was their whole thing” – was expelled from high school, dropped out of university, and at age 22 became a national sensation when his parody of a sheep farmer appeared for the first time on the country’s only television station.

Fred Dagg was at first scorned by critics but was quickly embraced by audiences. When Clarke decided to relocate to Australia in 1977, at the age of 29, it was in part to escape the long shadow cast by his comedic creation.

Lorin’s film, of course, traces the career milestones, but it does much more. “If you went to see a film about John Clarke, and you came away with all the things you could Google about John Clarke, what’s the point,” she says of the task she set herself.

She didn’t expect to unearth tales about a shady hidden life, and nor did she. There was no secret second family, no dreadful kinks. The girls had a childhood that was, Lorin says, “offensively idyllic … it was just creativity, it was like Heide without the drugs and the partner sharing. It was in Greensborough, but it felt like a Tuscan mountainside, a glorious, funny, playful place to be.”

Finding people to say a bad word about John wasn’t easy. But one of Lorin’s favourite moments in the film comes when his nominal boss at the ABC, Kate Torney – who as news director had oversight of the interview Clarke and his co-satirist Bryan Dawe did each week from 2000 until his death – observes that “he didn’t love management”. Given his clear loathing of bureaucracy, that might be the understatement of the century.

The other features John Ruane, director of Death in Brunswick (1990), in which Clarke played Dave, the gravedigger mate of Sam Neill’s bumbling Carl.

Sam Neill (left) and John Clarke in Death in Brunswick (1990).Credit: Alamy

When Lorin asks Ruane to recall his first impressions of John, he stares down the barrel of the camera and says: “When I met your father, I thought he was an arrogant, cantankerous …”

She could not have been more delighted. Nor, it transpired, could John’s widow.

“I called Mum later, and told her what [Ruane] had said,” Clarke recalls. “And she said [of the director], ‘I always liked him.’”

Australia has always liked John Clarke. And thanks to his daughter’s delightful film, it will perhaps come to know him just that little bit better, too.

The Melbourne International Film Festival runs August 7-24. For more on the First Glance titles visit miff.com.au