Random Awesomeness

Interview with Jonathan Teplitzky

Jonathan Teplitzky's semi-autobiographical drama Burning Man is released in Australian cinemas today. The film follows British chef, Tom (Matthew Goode), as he struggles to keep himself together in the wake of tragic events which aren't entirely clear from the start of the film, but are gradually revealed over the unfolding, disjointed narrative. With an 8-year-old son, Oscar (Jack Heanly), relying on him in the midst of a whirlwind lifestyle of food, sex and death, Tom's out-of-control behaviour results in some startling revelations about grief, the process of healing and what it takes to move on. SnarkHunters sat down to chat with Teplitzky about making sense of the chaos in Tom's life, while getting some good dish on behind-the-scenes restaurant behaviour and how closely Tom's path mirrors his own.

SnarkHunters: I just wanted to start by asking about the opening scene, how it's very chaotic and disorienting.  Were you worried about alienating the viewer at all?

Jonathan Teplitzky: I think when you make a film like this you need to throw the audience into the deep end. We underestimate what audiences are able to deal with and also what they're able to cope with and what they're interested in. It's almost become an unwritten law, which is ridiculous, that you have to spell out to audiences, in a way, exactly what's happening otherwise they won't enjoy the film. Suddenly, the audience isn't given the intelligence that I think they bring with them. When I decided to make the film like this I think the worst mistake you can make is to pretend that it's something that it's not. To start in a very gentle way and then take it into another realm, I don't think an audience is going to forgive you for that, but if you go to them, 'look, I've got this story to tell. It's along these lines, this is the world we're living in', that's the whole idea of the chaos of that first 3 or 4 minutes. It's to give the audience time and opportunity to take on board these images that come at them and go 'right, this is the world I'm dealing with.' At no other time in the film does it become quite so chaotic. From that moment on, it still follows the fractured narrative, but it slowly, as the film progresses, calms down.

SH: It reveals more as you go along...

JT: It's a puzzle, you know. It's saying to the audience the film is a puzzle to solve or discover or reveal. This is really just the first bit of it.

SH: I like to say that it's a little bit of a culture shock. You're being thrown into this new world and so it's obviously going to be disorienting.

JT: The idea is to make it disorienting because the whole idea of the structure is not because it's cool or whatever. The idea is that it reflects the emotional and psychological state of Tom, that's what he's going through. Living through that experience fractures your life and so I wanted to make a visceral emotional movie that was also a love story that really gave the audience a way of experiencing, not just observing, what Tom was going through.

SH: You've described him as a bit of a rock star and he does come across as a dick in those first few minutes, so it's great that it goes along you're finding out more about what's going on with him.

About the title, "Burning Man", do you know of this festival...? [Burning Man is a gathering in the United States held in the Nevada desert each year for one week, with thousands forming a temporary community to experience "radical self-expression and radical self-reliance". It's also known for its association with hippies, public nudity and recreational drug use.]

JT: Yes, of course.

SH: Were you trying to draw any kind of association with that?

JT: Not really, no. Once I'd cottoned on to the idea that I wanted to put a whole lot of images of life into the film; of fire, water, sex, food, love, intimacy and all these kind of things. Tom's behaviour, particularly early on in the movie, is very incendiary. I wanted a title that reflected that, so my first idea was "Man on Fire", which of course is another movie [starring Denzel Washington from 2004] and a recent one. I know about the Burning Man festival, but I thought it was succinct, it was very much what the film was about, so I went with that.

SH: I describe his nature as combustible. Not only are you seeing things catching on fire, literally, in the film, but his behaviour is also volatile.

I like that you mentioned the images of life (food, love, sex, etc.) There's definitely a lot of sex going on! Were you trying to make a visual connection between food and sex in the film?

JT: I think food, water, sex and love - without them, there is no life. In a film where you're dealing with this sort of material, you need to counter-balance, where it's all about the juxtaposition of images, scenes and ideas, you need to have the flip-side, which is about life, as the fundamental texture of the film. All that stuff and the energy that goes with it is a really important ingredient of Tom's experience. The place that Tom is at, particularly early on in the movie, is a place where because of what's happened, because of the extreme emotional landscape and roller coaster that he's on - his desires, his senses are all in a very heightened state. He's in a very deluded and self-destructive state, but he's also in a very exhilarating place as well. The freedom that comes with being able to do and say and behave in any way you want, there's no consequences. No one's going to say 'stop', certainly not for a while, until it becomes too much. By the time that anyone would think about doing that, he's started to calm down anyway. I think it's a natural part of the grief process that he's going through. That's what interested me in making a film about it, because it's not an area - that part of it, that energy, that exuberance - is not often what we see in how grief is explored.

SH: It's not a total downer!

JT: No, it's not at all. Hopefully the film is about life. Tom is driven, in a sense, by this desperation to hang on to life. He doesn't know what that means, he's just responding to these desires that are all life-affirming and life-giving things.

SH: When you say that no one's really telling him to calm down, then comes Karen (Essie Davis), Tom's sister-in-law, who gives him a wake-up call and reminds him he's got a son who needs to be looked after. I was really impressed with Jack in this film, he's phenomenal. What was it like working with him?

JT: Working with him was easy is the answer to that! He's an amazing kid. It's one thing to work with a kid in a kid's film, but another where the young actor can actually relate to the whole film. We had to work very closely with his mum and dad, who were fantastic, because there's a lot of adult material there he'd want to be kept away from. The thing with kids, and Jack in particular, is they have fantastic radar. They don't intellectualise things, they just go with the tone and the mood. When he knew it was a sad scene, when his mum or I would explain what the scene was about, he was able to channel that emotion in a very real and spontaneous way. The tone of his performance was really spot-on about this brave little kid who's trying to deal with the big picture of what's happened to their family, but also that his dad's out of control.

SH: It's interesting that he's one of the few 'adults' and male influences in Tom's life. I noticed there's a lot of women in his life, but not many present males, aside from Brian (Anthony Hayes).

JT: My experience of it when my partner passed away 10 years ago was that you feel and become more and more isolated. A lot of the little things that connect you to your male friends, you lose interest in. There's a lot of intensity to those things and, in a way, that dynamic of man/woman is a more fundamental thing to collide with. You also get to a point where you just can't fit any more characters in there!

SH: It's one of those things where Australia's a bit of a 'blokey' culture and I'm wondering if it's just not as acceptable for guys to go to other guys and say 'I'm hurting here, man.'

JT: That wasn't a conscious decision, because when events like this happen, people become people. They transcend their culture to a certain extent. In saying that, the real interesting energy was the way that women turn to a character like that - are drawn to, attracted to, collide with in all those different ways - that set up a really interesting dynamic.

SH: There's that one woman, Lisa (Marta Dusseldorp), who immediately gloms onto him and says, "if there's anything I can do for you...".

JT: Exactly.

SH: Another woman who interested me in particular was Miriam (Rachel Griffiths). I'd like to know how she found out about the project and came on board.

JT: I really wanted strong, powerful women in each of the roles, because even though some of them are small roles, they needed definition by a good and powerful actor. We were really keen on Rachel for one of those roles. We were able to get her the script for her to read, she loved it. She was going to be in Australia at that time, coinciding with the hiatus on her TV show [Brothers and Sisters]. It was fantastic to have her for the time we did. Having her there for the week was wonderful, because apart from anything else, she's a wonderful actress and just got into it straight away and bonded really well with Matthew.

SH: You've talked about the international appeal of the film, having these actors that are internationally recognised...

JT: That's a part of it, but that wasn't the reason we chose Matthew. We chose him because one of the things I found and kept hearing about was going through this sense of isolation. I didn't want to address it as a literal thing in the script. What I liked was that an English chef would just feel that much more removed from the local environment and culture.

SH: Believe me, I know all about that being from the U.S.

JT: [laughs] It really builds that tension in a spontaneous, seamless way.

SH: So it wasn't originally set to take place in Australia?

JT: I just wrote it. I certainly had ideas about shooting in Los Angeles, because I love that landscape and thought it would suit the film really well. I started working with my producing partner (Andy Paterson), who's English, and we talked about New York and London, but then for all sorts of reasons it just made much more sense to make the film back here.

SH: And it does look gorgeous. You do great things with the landscape in the film. Every time I go to Sydney I find it one of the most beautiful places in the world.

JT: It was really important that it look great, but I didn't want to show Sydney in a parochial way, like a postcard. In America, you do such a great job at shooting films that look like New York and it's actually Memphis, so that's the sort of thing I wanted to do with this.

SH: I have to ask you about your experiences in hospitality as "Sydney's rudest waiter". I just wanted to know if you have any good food service horror stories?

JT: I'd been overseas for 2 years and came back to Australia for a year in 1983 to work in my brother's restaurant (he's a chef). It's much easier when you're working for someone who you know. In those days, cooking and restaurants and food in Australia was an evolving thing. A lot of my brother's contemporaries, guys who've gone on to become superstars of cooking - it was a real rock 'n' roll foodie era. A lot was changing and a lot of young chefs were opening their own restaurants. There was a change in that very conservative, very traditional idea about what service was. Chefs were going, "This is how I cook it, f*** you. If you don't like how I cook it, f*** off." We adhered to that as an iron law.

We got one write up in, I can't even remember what magazine it was, one of those glossy food magazines. A very positive review about the restaurant, but also calling me "the rudest waiter in Sydney". I have to say the service was exceptional, but just when dickheads come into the restaurant - I promise you, people are at their worst when they go out and pay their own money for a meal in a restaurant. There's this thing, they've been working and kow-towing to the boss all week, they go out and go 'right, this is my money, my time, I'm in charge.' So often now, food is a fashionable thing. I don't think that's a particularly good thing. People go because they're told it's the cool place, they don't even know what they're eating half the time. They don't even really appreciate it. It's expensive, it's fashionable, it's the zeitgeist at this particular moment in time.

SH: You've got Masterchef frenzy going on!

JT: One side of it is great - people are becoming more aware about what good cooking is. The flip side of it is that it turns everyone into a restaurant critic. It's like stand-up comedy. You don't go down to your accountant and heckle him, "Your whole life is maths and you've made a f***ing mistake with those maths!" The general public behaves so badly in restaurants and if you work in one then you understand. Most people, 90 per-cent, are fantastic. They engage with you, they talk to you, they're there for the right reasons. But there's this core group of 10 per-cent who turn up and they're assholes. In restaurants, too often now, they kow-tow to that mentality and dumb it down. I think there's also a fundamental thing, and it's back to that 10 per-cent, they can't relate to the idea that you pay $100-a-head for this experience and it's disappearing out a pipe at Bondi 24 hours later into the ocean. They resent it in a funny sort of way, but they can't help themselves because they so want to be seen as cool and going to the right places. All that went into why I was the "rudest waiter in Sydney" and it's a very legitimate kind of thing.

SH: The culture's completely different in the U.S. because you're working for tips.

JT: It's an amazing culture there. In some respects it works better because there is an understanding on both sides of respect. In America, you tip in relation to the service, but the service is so good, so often - I mean, sometimes it's so over-the-top you want to say, "Go away! Leave me alone!" I will say the service in restaurants, they're knowledgeable, they're not just doing this because they have nothing better. There's a fundamental flaw with the idea of service. People take the idea of service and bring their own agenda to it. It's not about being a servant. It's also not about specially treating people who come and pay good money. If there's respect both ways...

SH: It's a mutually beneficial relationship.

JT: People being people, both sides bring their own agenda to these things.

SH: One side's going to try and give or take too much.

Who are your inspirations or influences, either other filmmakers or people/things in your life?

JT: My partner is a director as well and we have a very creative and fruitful kind of relationship. I'm sure we inspire each other! The other filmmakers I respect, the list is endless, but someone like Steven Spielberg who's made 30 films in 30 years - even his most commercial films have more than something interesting in each of them. As another filmmaker to observe, other than just being entertaining, as an editor I think he's really fascinating. His ideas about editing, his rhythms. There's a million others but he just springs to mind.

I really Mexican filmmakers and my fellow filmmakers here in Australia, there's a number of them who I really get on with, good friends who I respect. I don't think I've ever seen a movie, no matter how average it was, that I haven't learnt something about my own craft from watching it about the way a film can be made - that's inspiring.

I take a lot of inspiration from photography. I love a lot of art. I collect these Mexican paintings called ex-voto retablos, which are an amazing tradition that comes from the Spanish colonial. When something bad happens to you, like you get caught having an affair with the neighbour's wife, for example - although most of them have to do with a relative or friend being sick - they pray to one of the saints. If the miracle comes true that the neighbour doesn't shoot you, your grandmother gets well from her illness or your brother-in-law got run over by a truck and survived, the tradition is that you would get a retablo artist to paint the scene on a piece of old tin, paint the saint up in the corner and write underneath what it was all about and put it up in a church. All throughout Mexico there are these paintings. It's a dying art form now, but there are cathedrals and churches with thousands of them all over the wall. They're like little movies, because you've got the script, the saint as the director, so over the years I've collected a number of them. They're fantastic little things that relate to what I do, but in a sense, look at it in a different way.

SH: What's the best reason, in your opinion, for an audience member to go and see this film?

JT: I think it's a film that will engage them emotionally. There's a lot of entertainment, a lot of humour. I think they will be moved by the film in a way which allows them to identify with their own life. It's a really visceral, cinematic experience. To experience the film is to have an experience that is different from a lot of other films. It has something to say about the way we lead our lives. I hope there's enough space for every audience member to relate to it in their own way. It doesn't hammer exactly how you should take this movie. There's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of space.

SH: It only benefits the film that you're not giving everything away from the onset.

JT: I think it relates to an audience with intelligence and regards them as having intelligence, so it gives them an opportunity to take from the film what they want.

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