Morgan Freeman told me: ‘If you don’t cast me ... I’ll hunt you down’

Bruce Beresford, 85, is one of Australia’s most iconic film-makers. On Tuesday he spoke at the premiere of his latest film, The Travellers, which he wrote and directed.

Fitz: Bruce, we’ll get to The Travellers. But let’s have a few war stories first. I see you were at Sydney Uni in the early 60s, and became part of a brilliant “rat pack” of prodigies, among whom were the likes of Clive James, Germaine Greer, Bob Ellis, Mungo McCallum, Robert Hughes and John Bell?

Luke Bracey, Bryan Brown and Susie Porter in Bruce Beresford’s The Travellers.Credit: David Dare Parker

BB: There was a pod of us, yes, who were in acting groups and writing groups, firing off each other creatively.

Fitz: Cue: William Wordsworth. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, yet to be young was very heaven.” Was it like that?

BB: Yes. And I made a lot of friends that I’ve still got now, at least those who have not dropped off the perch.

Fitz: Did it feel like, “I am surrounded by titans of their age, people that are going to dominate their different fields, some globally”?

BB: Certainly it felt like that in relation to Bob Hughes, Clive James, Germaine, and John Bell. I realised they were all very gifted, while I always thought I was hopeless in comparison to that lot.

Fitz: So, what then? When they go off into various fields, what steered you down the path of filmmaking?

BB: Well, from kindergarten onwards, I had thought, “All I want to do is make films.” And I had already started making amateur films, and got into film festivals. But there was nothing much in Australia, so I went to England, lived with Clive James and two others, and after various labouring jobs, eventually got this job at the British Film Institute making a number of low-budget films. In the six years I was there, we made 86 of them.

Fitz: 86!

BB: They were mostly short ones, but it gave me the experience I needed. I used to read all the scripts that came in – hundreds of them – and pick out which ones I thought were technically and economically feasible to finance, before submission to a committee. The scripts that appealed to me were ones where I felt that people weren’t making other people’s films, they were telling their own stories. I was looking for original films with original ideas, where your first response is: “I haven’t actually seen anything like this before”.

And then in the early 70s I read in the paper that a government fund had been set up to make films in Australia. I was friends with Barry Humphries in London, And I said, “Look, we could do a script for the Barry McKenzie comic strip ... ”

Fitz: And so the iconic, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie starring Barry Crocker was born, a film about Australians, by Australians, for Australians – which was a stunning success, commercially.

BB: Yes, but for me it was a big mistake, because I was regarded as “Mr Yobbo”. The reviews were terrible and I struggled to get more work.

Aunt Edna (Barry Humphries) with Barry Crocker in a London taxi in a scene from The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. “The reviews were terrible and I struggled to get more work.”

Fitz: You were having a “Barry Crocker …”

BB: The only work I could get was to do a sequel to Barry McKenzie, with Reg Grundy promising he’d finance me doing The Getting of Wisdom, which is what I wanted to make. But there was no written contract, and he never followed through.

Fitz: You had every right to have your knickers in a knot, your “Reg Grundies” in a twist.

BB: I was, and still am, a hopeless businessman. I should have got all the money up-front from Reg. But Philip Adams saved me in 1976, by sending me the play Don’s Party, by David Williamson – which I turned into a film – and I was able to follow up with films like Breaker Morant, Puberty Blues and Tender Mercies.

Fitz: And yet even though you received an Academy Award nomination for Tender Mercies, perhaps your signature film was Driving Miss Daisy, in 1989?

BB: Yes, the producer Dick Zanuck called me. He’d seen Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies, and he said, “There’s a play I want you to make a film of. It’s off Broadway, a small play with only three people in it.” He flew me to New York, and we saw the production, and it had a fantastic but unknown actor in it, Morgan Freeman.

Fitz: You told me that story in London last year! Remind me, what did Freeman say to you when you met him backstage?

BB: He said, “If you don’t cast me in the film, I’ll be after you. I’ll hunt you down.”

And the other one I cast was Jessica Tandy, the original Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire, but she had been forgotten. Nobody knew her and Morgan. I got most resistance on casting Morgan. They said, “You want that old black man?“. I remember saying, “You should kiss his arse. You’re lucky that an actor that talented wants to be in this film.” Anyway, the budget was so tight, we shot the whole thing in 25 days, not the usual 50 to 60 days.

Fitz: But even then, you were not set? It was not immediately recognised as a classic?

BB: No. Warner Brothers, who had distribution rights, said “It’s an arthouse film. It’s not worth distributing.” And they were only going to put it on in an art house in San Francisco. It was devastating. But then I got this call, “Have you got that film of the old Jewish lady and the black man?” They couldn’t remember their names!

Fitz: Taxi!

BB: So I went over to this big theatre at Warners, that held 600 seats. But there was just one man there, a Warner’s exec. So we sat down together, and they started playing the film. After 20 minutes, he got up and walked out. I followed him out to the lobby, and I said, “You don’t like it?”

“No, I do like it. Is the rest of it as good as the first 20 minutes?”

“It gets better”.

“Ah, OK.”

“What’s all this about?”

“We haven’t got a Christmas film. We need a Christmas film. This is it.”

And they put it on in 3000 theatres. And it got nominated for nine Oscars and won four.

Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy. “The budget was so tight, we shot the whole thing in 25 days, not the usual 50 to 60 days.”

Fitz: Strangely, not including even a nomination for best director for you! And yet, when once asked if you were bitter about that, you said, “No, not at all. I didn’t think it was that well directed. It was very well written. When the writing’s that good, you’ve really just got to set the camera up and photograph it.”

BB: [Laughing.] Yes, I guess so. But, of course, you’ve still got to know where to point the camera!

Fitz: And another quarter of a century of successful films have followed including Black Robe, Silent Fall, Last Dance, Double Jeopardy, The Contract and, perhaps most famously, Mao’s Last Dancer. You’ve worked with everyone from Richard Gere [King David] to Sharon Stone [Last Dance] to Glenn Close [Paradise Road], Tommy Lee Jones [Double Jeopardy], Robert Duvall [Tender Mercies], and you gave Cate Blanchett her start, in Paradise Road. My question is this. Every director wants to do what you have done, and have a 60-year career of hits. How do you do it? What is your technique for making films that has stood you in such good stead?

BB: [Thoughtfully.] I mean, I always have the whole film in my head, from pretty early on, after reading the script. I know the way I want it to look, and have each scene put on storyboards.

Fitz: Well, how are you so blessed as to have such a clear idea?

BB: I don’t know. I mean, many actors will tell you that no two directors have the same technique. I know many directors get the script, the actors and the camera-people all on set and work on their own idea from there, after a lot of discussion. But I never do that. I know what I want, how I want it to look. I prepare all the scenes very carefully, as I have a background in very low-budget films, that have to be shot in a given period. I tell them: “Here’s the shot, this is the angle of the camera, and this is how I want it cut.”

Fitz: Despite being 85, you told me recently that you still feel as strong as you ever have. What are your plans for the future, and even retirement? Do you want to be making films into your 90s?

BB: I’ve never given it any thought. But I feel fine. Ridley Scott’s about two years older than me, and still going – and Clint [Eastwood] is in his 90s, and doing a new film now.

Fitz: Cut! All right, present company excepted – as I need to disclose you’ve written a film script for one of my books – what is the great Australian story yet to be told?

BB: There are stories all the time. But I have written another script about these Australians who, 10 years ago, went to Georgia, near the Black Sea, to try and buy the czar’s wine collection, which has been stored there by Stalin.

Fitz: I love it already! But that brings us to your latest opus, The Travellers, which sees you reunite with Bryan Brown for the first time since Breaker Morant, 45 years ago. How did it come about?

Bruce Beresford: “I wanted a story set in Australia”.Credit: James Brickwood

BB: Well, I actually wrote that script during the COVID lockdown. I wanted a story set in Australia, a modern story. And drawing on my own experience, I remembered what it was like to come back from America, to look after my ailing mother, and to be drawn back into a world I had left, but was still intact – all the friends, former lovers and so forth, still there. I was a fish out of water, but then you get drawn back in. And I also had some friends who had been hugely successful working in opera in Europe, and they had told me stories of having to come back and then deal with family problems. And I thought that’s an interesting angle, so I pursued that. I worked up the characters, with Bryan [Brown] playing the elderly father, Luke Bracey in the role of the successful opera set designer returning home, and Susie Porter as his sister.

Fitz: And I know you shot it in WA late last year. Do you know, as you’re shooting it, whether it works or not?

BB: Absolutely not. I have an instinct for individual rushes, and know whether or not they work, but as to whether or not it has the magic or not, you can’t know until the whole thing is put before the audience and you see how they react.

Fitz: So, you and I are talking just hours before you and Bryan and Susie are headlining at the Cremorne Orpheum, for the film’s premiere, which I’ll be attending. Will you tell me, with your usual honesty, afterwards, whether you think it has the magic or not?

BB: I will.

Fitz: (At the after-party, of the premiere.) Bruce? The cinema was packed, the response seemed strong, but what do you think? Does The Traveller have the magic, or not?

BB: I thought it was very good!

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