by FilmInk Staff
Al Clark has produced a brilliant sequel to his marvellous memoir from 2021, Time Flies.
The first book dealt with Clark’s early life in Spain, his adventures in the music industry – including the scandalous launch of the Sex Pistols in which he served as their PR manager – and his early movie career forged in the ill-fated British film renaissance of the 1980s.
Time Flies Too takes up the story of Clark’s life in film in Australia.
Still probably best known here as the producer pf Stephan Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1994, and serving as executive producer on Chopper (2000), Clark’s reputation as the producer’s producer emerges as richly deserved.
Still, personally, Clark is famously modest, generous and gentlemanly.
And so, readers might be surprised by the book’s tenderness, and its sane, balanced reflections on a crazy business.
Featuring a supporting cast of some of the local film industry’s biggest names – including Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce – Clark pulls few punches, as he recalls the agony and sometimes ecstasy of making movies in a place, he finds delightfully weird.
Still, this often very funny book is more candid, and self-deprecating rather than self-congratulatory – and its love of all things cinema is deeply felt.
Why a second book?
Clark: As some philosopher put it, ‘it’s a life of two halves’ and the first half was covered in the first book. And when I moved here 35 years ago, the second half began.
You can either labour for several years over the 500-page version or you can write two, 250 page accounts because they are separated geographically, emotionally and in the quality of memory.
The first book was somewhat melancholy at times. This is a very different reader experience.
Clark: The first book is about things that happened a long time ago. And it has that quality of a life reviewed after the event.
The second book is about a life I’m still living. And so, it has an immediacy and the detail of a life, that is currently in motion.
It’s hilariously funny throughout. Too many great one-liners to spoil… The book begins with your first impressions on arriving here at the end of 1987 to start a new life with your Australian wife, producer Andrena Finlay. And you seem to be bemused and delighted when you first encountered the bizarre world of Australian politics, our lunatic tabloids and cringeworthy breakfast TV soon after landing… as you write in the book, on hearing an early morning talk-show host talk about the state of a guests ‘poo’ live on telly, you must have thought, ‘where the Hell am I?’
Clark: [Laughs] What I wanted to communicate straight away was the strangeness of Australia to me, because I had never lived here.
In the first book, I’m in places that I understand. As in, I grew up in Spain… as in, I lived in England.
But what I hadn’t done at that point was live in a country that was completely foreign to me. And I think it’s easier to be funny in one’s extrapolation when the place is so strange [laughs].
Time Flies Too has an admirable quality, like the first book, which is one of tenderness… Though in the first book, some readers were surprised about your choice not to weigh in on the big moments of popular history in which you were a first-hand witness. I’m thinking of the still controversial history of the Sex Pistols…
Clark: Their story – and that history – has been written by insiders and despite the fact that I was their Virgin mouthpiece I was an outsider.
And the only perspective I could bring to it was the perspective of an outsider.
Like the first book, Time Flies Too has a ‘supporting cast’ of some very famous people, including Guy Pearce, Eric Bana and of course Russell Crowe and many others… but readers might be surprised to see a side of these stars that does not at all resemble their public profile… there’s a particularly delicious story about Crowe which is very ‘sweet’ – not a word one associates today with the superstar.
Clark: What interests me are the idiosyncrasies of people. To me, it’s not an interesting story unless there is something unexpected about them – something individual.
Still, Time Flies Too, is in some ways a courageous book. For instance, you do weigh in on those things like the ‘character’ as you saw it, of the Australian feature film industry, circa, late-1980s.
At one point, you write how you once observed that local producers ought to try and develop a more ambitious and daring creative spirit and said so during a conference.
‘Australian filmmakers seemed disproportionally drawn towards projects that were prestigious… housetrained… and they should aspire to make some provocative and badly behaved ones as well,’ to quote from Time Flies Too.
Clark: I’m happy with the films I’ve produced. And there are a number of films I wished I had produced. But they were never offered to me.*
I tried to be fair [about my professional and personal experiences]. I’m not a grudge bearer or a resentful long-distance runner.
Yes, that comes through – but a theme in the book is the way filmmaking here can be determined by appeasing certain sensitivities – not always ideological or cultural, but sometimes… to diminishing returns…
Clark: I’m just not interested in that. I don’t understand how a person who sees themselves – however deludedly as a creative – is going to disembowel the vigour of the quest by capitulating to procedure.
I have an impatience and incomprehension of anything that distracts you from the mission – which is, once you’ve decided to make something, you are unyielding in trying to realise it at its best.
Throughout your career, you’ve elected to make films that are challenging, different, perhaps eccentric… there’s nothing quite predictable about say The Crossing (George Ogilvie, 1990) [trailer above] or Heaven’s Burning (Craig Lahiff, 1997) or Siam Sunset (John Polson, 1999) or even ‘genre’ films like The Hard Word (Scott Roberts, 2002) [trailer below] and Red Hill (Patrick Hughes, 2010).
Clark: I don’t know how conscious this was… there was this desire to explore a new country rather than merely to live in it [in making some of those films]. I had this immediate curiosity having arrived and begun work in a new country to find its inner, as well as, outer dimensions.
This means on The Crossing, and Siam Sunset, and Priscilla… and Red Hill I travelled to extraordinary places to make those films.
That exploration became a part of choosing the films.
There is also a pragmatic consideration. You have to try and anticipate the ratio of effort to reward. And if you are going to make an effort you should try and maximise the prospect of a good outcome.
You never know, of course, because that’s one of the features of film – you go into them with all kinds of ambitions and anticipations and you have no idea how they are going to turn out.
Your job is to navigate them, and the first piece of navigation is to decide to do them.
One of the features of the book is that it takes the reader deep into the process of making a film – and without it becoming overwhelmed with detail – you come away with an appreciation of how hard it is to make a film.
You can count two bona fide classics to your filmography: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott,1994) and Chopper (Andrew Dominik, 2000). Both were critical and commercial hits. And Priscilla found another life as a stage musical. But the book makes it very clear that they were long shots. Did you sense they might reach classic status even before they were completed?
Clark: I thought each of them stood a very good chance of being remarkable in some way. That’s as far as you can take it. The idea of being omniscient about audience tastes in your own country [let alone other territories] around the world is… delusional thinking.
But the feeling you can have is sometimes not delusional at all. And then there are those astonishing moments where you see it assembled for the first time and you realise that it really is something different – and that it stands a chance [commercially] – provided that the people taking it into the world understand how to tap into that. The rest of it is just conversation really.
Does that feeling of specialness start earlier than the first cut? When you see the footage come in – is that when the excitement starts? Of course, a million things can go wrong…
Clark: Yeah. I’ve encountered cases – thankfully not many of my own – where people say: ‘the rushes are great’. And indeed, the rushes may indeed look great. But do they hang together as anything of substance?
If films were trailers rather than films, there would probably be more films thought of as having a shot [laughs]. But in the end, many of them don’t.
Because, either they resemble something too closely that exists already. Or, in some mass market [situations], they don’t resemble enough of what’s already been successful [laughs].
One thing that comes across powerfully in the book is the crucial contribution each player makes in the process. For your own part, you seem to take pleasure in helping to shape the material… but it’s a delicate balance of ego, money, technology…
Clark: You have to take responsibility for the outcome. The one thing you seek to avoid is that you don’t impose something on the material. If there’s going to be wisdom and judgement in your contribution, you must take care to not throw your weight around because you can.
Some memoirs – particularly film memoirs – are very combative, cruel, gossipy… but this isn’t your sensibility at all.
Clark: You don’t write them to settle scores or to be a blamer. The important part of being a producer is the simple taking of responsibility. You have to embrace it. You can’t turn it into a chain of blame.
You elected to be a producer. But it’s clear your interests in the filmmaking process are deep and range far from what is casually thought as the producer’s brief… did you ever think you might want to direct?
Clark: I think I recognised that in my intoxication with film, I was an orchestrator, rather than a composer.
Some say that the role of director is determined by personality. But that’s a myth, isn’t it? There are as many introverted directors as there are extroverts?
There is not a single role on a film or in a film that does not require you to interact. You have to be a communicator, even if you talk exclusively in grunts and monosyllables…
What can fans expect of Time Flies Too?
Clark: A bit of fun. It’s an outsiders account of an insider’s life.
*Al Clark says his short-list of films he would have liked to have produced includes Hounds of Love, The Babadook, Judy and Punch, Babyteeth, Nitram, Charlie’s Country, Love Serenade and Walk the Talk. ‘They are all complete knock outs,’ he says.
Al added this thought in a later email: ‘I don’t know the people involved and I was not aware of the films until I actually saw them. None of these projects were ever discussed with me, and in most cases, I’ve never met the director. I just admire the movies and wanted to say so.’
Times Flies Too is published by Brandl and Schlesinger on 1 October
