Questions of authenticity and authorship in cinema – who gets to tell what stories — are thorny ones. With his trilogy of films on the Aboriginal experience, The Tracker, Ten Canoes and Charlie’s Country, Dutch-born white Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer has managed to avoid charges of cultural appropriation. This is due in large part to de Heer’s obvious respect for Indigenous culture and traditions and to his working method, which involves deep collaboration with the communities involved, as well as the on-screen talent, most famously with the late, great Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil.
For his new film, The Survival of Kindness, De Heer again takes on the ugly legacy of racism and colonialism. The film, which premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, is the story of a Black woman (identified in the credits only as Black Woman) and her harrowing odyssey out of captivity. Shot entirely without intelligible dialogue, and with only the barest sketches of plot — the setting is dystopian and looks clearly Australian, but feels somehow outside place and history — Survival of Kindness is arguably De Heer’s most radical film since his 1993 breakthrough Bad Boy Bubby.
De Heer spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the film’s origins in the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, his choice to cast an African refugee and non-actor in the lead role, as well as what it was like — in his 1991 feature Dingo — to direct jazz legend Miles Davis.
What was the starting point of this film for you?
Ah, this could be a big, long, complex answer. The starting point was to make a film. Just that. And then, because COVID and the lockdown were happening, the previous project that I had financed, fell apart. It still hasn’t been resurrected. No one knew how long COVID would last and what would happen, so I started to think about how to make a film in a different way. To make a COVID-nimble film, meaning a very small crew, shooting mostly exteriors, in a way that whatever happens, you can navigate it. So I had a model of how to do the film but I didn’t have a topic. Now I live in Tasmania, but I’ve never really made a film here. I’ve made bits and pieces, but not really a full film. And there is Mount Wellington, kunanyi, right there. It’s big, it’s terrific and about 100 kilometers from where I live. I just drove there and began to look and to think, can I do something here with this location?
Now when I’m forming a story, or a script, I try not to think about it intellectually, I try not to articulate it. I just let ideas guide me and trust the process will take me somewhere. That I’ll end up with a story and a script that works. And that was the case here.
At the time I was thinking about Mount Wellington, there was COVID and, Black Lives Matter was just exploding at the time, and there was an intersection between them. In Australia, we had our own sub branch, I guess, of the BLM moment. That was all going on in the background, but I wasn’t trying to put it into the film. Then, one day driving to the mountain, I got an image in my mind. An image of my friend, Peter Djigirr, who’s an indigenous bloke I’ve worked with quite a lot [in Charlie’s Country, Ten Canoes] and is a good friend. The image was of him in a cage, on a trailer, on a clay pan in the desert. There was just this image that came into my mind and it wouldn’t go away. I thought, Okay, well, that’s it. There’s your beginning. Now, there’s no desert in Tasmania. So I thought I’d better go to South Australia. So I had the journey, starting in the desert in South Australia, leading to the mountain in Tasmania.
When did you shift, and make the main character female and how did you cast her [first-time actress Mwajemi Hussein]?
Peter Djigirr couldn’t do it, so I had to find someone else. While trying to find someone, I came across this Ethiopian woman who was working in a place in a refugee center. Speaking to them, I said: ‘I want some bloke, just like this woman.’ And I thought: ‘well, why not this woman?’ But when I asked her, she said no. She had come out of a very traumatic place, and very happy to have been accepted as a refugee into Australia. She didn’t want anything to change. Bu both for me and my co-producer Julie [Byrne] after thinking of the role as a woman, we couldn’t go back. Without changing the script at all, the film became really interesting. We worked with a casting director and found Mwajemi, who also came to Australia as a refugee from Democratic Republic of the Congo and now is a social worker.
I’ve read that not only had she never acted before, but she’d never been to the cinema before. Was it a challenge to direct her?
I understood, particularly having worked with indigenous non-actors, that if somebody is right for a role and has a depth, you can put the camera on them and hold it. And it’ll be interesting. Having worked with David Gulpilil, who was such an extraordinary actor. So much goes on in just a close-up of David. If you cast a role right, you can trust the camera will find it. By the time I cast Mwajemi, I knew about the depth of life experience that she has. As somebody who as a child was forced out from a village and had to walk endlessly, as a young adult was forced out of home with three children walking 600 kilometers to a refugee camp. All the brutality that has happened around her. She’s got a depth of life experience, she’s lived it. It’s there in her being. You put the camera on her and, if you’ve talked about it beforehand, and if she’s allowed the freedom to think to go with it, she’s going to give you something interesting.
The film has the feel of dystopian science fiction, or maybe a fable…
Yes, fable is a label I’d be more comfortable with.
But it seems to be you are really telling a story of institutional racism, of the endless, repeating history of racial abuse. You’ve made movies exploring similar issues in the Aboriginal community. How did you, a white Australian, born in the Netherlands, come to feel compelled to tell these stories?
Look, I’m clearly the sum total of all the influences I’ve ever had in my life. As a filmmaker, how I got here was having the most extraordinary set of experiences. After the first three films I did [Tale of A Tiger, Incident at Raven’s Gate, Dingo] I had a certain career trajectory. But by the end of the third one, I went, ‘Fuck off, I don’t want this.’ Because you can work as hard as you like, make a half-decent film, and you can have a miserable time doing it. Which is what many people do. By the end, you have something half-decent, and it can sink without a trace. Or you can make a bad film, it goes rocketing up there. I could see no rhyme or reason to the success or failure of my films. Your premiere could be a disaster and you think ‘Fuck, I wasted two years of my life.’ The production, the making of the film, is the only certainty you have. So from that point, I began to look after the process. The process became, for me, the most important thing. I also learned that if, if everybody working on the movie cared about the film, about the content of it, they’re all much happier people than if they were simply making some schlock horror thing for the hell of it. Working that way gave me freedom to experiment with the form. As long as I keep the budget at a reasonable level, I’ve had the freedom to make what I want. I feel like the most privileged of filmmakers, probably in the world. I’ve financed, I think 7 out of 8 or 9 projects at one point before there was a script. Which is great because if you know what your budget is and you know you have it, you can write exactly what you want, do the film exactly how you want to. The writing became a pleasure. And the first film I made that way, Bad Boy Bubby, was a much bigger success than all my previous films. The one after that [Alien Visitor] disappeared without trace. It was a Harvey Weinstein horror show, in the sense that his company bought it, and then it went downhill from there. But it was the most extraordinary film to make, it was a year of film shooting. The first 10 minutes was 64 shooting days. It remains one of the treasured experiences of my life, and of the crew who made it with me.
What was your crew like on The Survival of Kindness?
They were fantastic. It’s the youngest crew I’ve worked with. At one point, I was looking at the costume designer, the production designer, and the sound designer standing together and I thought, Oh, my God, I’m older than the three of them put together. For most, it was their first film, and they brought such an energy and a passion to it.
Because they were so much younger, did they have a different take on the material and the issues in the film?
The answer to that question is complicated by the fact that three of the heads of department were Indigenous, quite young, Indigenous people. Now the film is not about Indigenous people but clearly, they would see some of this stuff a little differently. It was a very diverse crew. Our focus puller was Maori from New Zealand. One of the assistant directors was Nepalese. Everyone’s response to the material was a bit different and on my films, everyone is a collaborator, everyone contributed to the making of the film. I led them, but they were the ones saying “ok, good” and followed very happily.
I think we can wrap up, but I will have one more question, because you’re the only person to have ever directed Miles Davis [in Dingo]. What was he like to direct?
He was very wary, very wary indeed. I didn’t know how to deal with him. And we had a problem because Miles was one of the world’s great jazz improvisers. We’d pre-recorded the music in the film and then we’d shoot to playback, but Miles would never play the same thing twice, he couldn’t. We’d have the music going for the scene, and he’d be playing the counter melody. It was hopeless. But [lead actor] Colin Friels, who plays Dingo, came to me and said: “not many people know this, but Miles is one of the great sight readers.” And it’s true: he could look at a piece of sheet music and be able to play it instantly. So we got the sheet music from the original recordings and put in the directions – “[Davis’ character] Billy Cross does this here, etc.” I was showing it to Miles, going through it quickly: “here’s where he does this, here’s where you do this,” and Miles stops and looks at me and says: “fuck, man, you know everything.” Because he thought I was sight reading too and that I could sight read faster than he could. After that, he was truly respectful. It was a terrific, terrific experience working with him. We were talking about making another film together just before he died. If he hadn’t, my life, my career, might have been different.
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