Many of his contemporaries have stepped back from filmmaking but, even aged 85, Bruce Beresford is still being offered films to shoot overseas, and he’s still knocking them back despite handsome pay cheques.
“My agent sent me a script a week ago along with a firm offer and a huge, huge fee,” said the prolific Australian director, whose films include Don’s Party, Breaker Morant, Puberty Blues, Driving Miss Daisy, Mao’s Last Dancer and Ladies in Black, says.
“He said: ‘They’re all set to go and they really want you to do it.’ There was a letter attached and they said: ‘We really love the way you deal with characters.’
“But I read the script and said to my agent, ‘I don’t really like it enough’. The fact is, I don’t think I’d know how to direct it.”
While Beresford turned down that film, about “two women friends who were dying of cancer”, he is gung-ho about The Travellers, his first film since Ladies In Black seven years ago.
It’s a comic drama about an Australian set designer (Luke Bracey from Elvis) who returns from Europe to see his dying mother (Christine Jeffery) and deal with his ageing father (Bryan Brown).
Beresford wrote the script in Sydney during COVID-19, originally calling it Capriccio after a Richard Strauss opera but changing the title because “everyone thought it was about a drink; they confused it with cappuccino”.
After growing up in a housing commission home in western Sydney’s Toongabbie, Beresford’s filmmaking career began after he fell in with a creative crowd that included Clive James, Robert Hughes and Germaine Greer while studying at the University of Sydney. He had early success directing two Barry McKenzie films, Don’s Party and The Getting of Wisdom in the 1970s.
For Beresford’s first American film, the 1983 drama Tender Mercies, he was nominated for best director at the Oscars; for the 1989 drama Driving Miss Daisy, he was famously overlooked for a directing nomination when it won best picture.
Having worked on more American than Australian films since, Beresford would happily return to LA for the right film. “Mr Trump is mad but he wants films made in the States,” he says.
But one of the themes of The Travellers is what people in creative fields lose – and gain – when they leave Australia to work overseas.
While Bracey’s character, Stephen Seary, has an opera to design in Germany, coming home brings emotional reminders of family bonds, past loves and the simple pleasures of life in a country town surrounded by nature.
It’s a personal theme for Beresford. While he found it exciting to work on big American films while based in Los Angeles, his wife, fiction writer Virginia Duigan, eventually wanted to return to Australia.
“In a way, I’m glad I did because being born here, growing up here, educated here and knowing Australia, it comes more naturally to me,” he says.
“If I’m doing things in America, even things like Driving Miss Daisy, it’s more difficult than it looks. You’ve got to make sure you really create an American society and not bring all your Australian ideas to it. You’ve got to make sure that it is what that writer put in the script.”
In The Travellers, Brown’s character, Fred, is struggling to live in an increasingly rundown family home without his wife. He is surrounded by clutter, eats baked beans out of a tin and carries around a torch at night because none of the lights work.
“The trigger for the story was that I did come back years ago when my mother was dying,” Beresford says. “It was a country town like it is in the film. Then I realised I had to deal with my father.”
Beresford’s advice for anyone going through a similar experience? “You’ve just got to cope,” he says.
The always self-deprecating filmmaker says the rest of the story in The Travellers is made up. “I don’t know where those ideas come from,” he says. “In some ways, scripts write themselves.”
As well as all the benefits of working in Australia – “I’ve been very well treated here; I’ve had nothing but support” – Beresford recognises there is a downside. “If you want to be a big international film director, you’ve really got to be based in Los Angeles,” he says.
“A friend of mine, who was the head of the Directors Guild, said: ‘If you want a real career, stay here.’ Because if you’re there, floating around, you meet people at parties, you meet them at get-togethers, your agent calls and says” ‘Your name came up talking about a film.’
“They tell you the name and you’d be in their office in half an hour. You’ve got your finger on the pulse.”
Directing his own script for The Travellers made it easier in one sense on set.
“You don’t have any rows with the actors,” Beresford says. “If someone else wrote it, they say: ‘Oh maybe, Bruce, that line’s not quite right and I can change it to this.’ But when I wrote it myself, they hesitate to come in and say: ‘I don’t think it’s correct.'”
After more than six decades making films, Beresford baulks at reflecting on which ones he feels are his best.
“I never watch any of them again, so I don’t really know,” he says. “I see them when they’re released once or twice and I never look at them again. People have said that’s a bit strange, and I’ve said: ‘Do you think novelists sit down and re-read their old books?’ I don’t think so.
“It’s better to move on because there’s always more stories you want to tell.”
Whatever Beresford does next, it definitely won’t be a comic book superhero film. “I think they’re really for very small kids,” he says. “I just get very bored.”
The Travellers opens in cinemas on October 9.
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