Get Your Boots On: The Making Of Romper Stomper

By Erin Free

“It’s still got a real punch,” Geoffrey Wright tells FilmInk of his blistering debut feature, Romper Stomper. “Especially because the environment that we’re in these days is actually more politically correct than it was back in the early nineties. My only regret is that there haven’t been more films like it subsequently.”

While Australia has certainly turned out intense, tough-minded films since 1992 (the likes of Snowtown and Animal Kingdom instantly spring to mind), few stand tall with the same kind of brutish fury and violent lack of compromise as Romper Stomper. The ripped-from-the-streets tale of white supremacist skinheads wreaking havoc on the streets of Melbourne, the film was the brainchild of then 32-year-old Geoffrey Wright, a Swinburne graduate and one time film critic who’d made a minor splash with 1989’s Lover Boy, a stunning 58-minute mini-feature about the bruising love that develops between a listless young man (Noah Taylor) and an older woman (Gillian Jones). Though equally tough and tender, and staggeringly realistic, Lover Boy could only hint at what was to come with the rampaging Romper Stomper.

Geoffrey Wright had been developing the script for a number of years, and when he started to take a serious stab at getting the project up, he instantly turned to producer, Daniel Scharf, with whom he had worked on Lover Boy. The pair had known each other since the mid-eighties, and “had a very similar appreciation of the types of films that we liked, and the way in which stories could be visualised,” Scharf tells FilmInk. “Though Romper Stomper was still in development, it was a very brave, confronting and strong story. I remember saying to Geoffrey that we should do this together, and I had no hesitation at all.” Not surprisingly, considering its brutal violence, and the fact that its central characters are bigoted thugs, Romper Stomper was hardly a kiss on the cheek to local funding bodies and investors. “There was enormous resistance to the project,” Scharf tells FilmInk. “Although the script was well received, those in the market – sales agents and distributors – were not keen to jump in, so it was difficult to finance. In the end, The Australian Film Commission and Film Victoria provided the funding, and between them, they invested the total budget.”

That budget, however, was barely there, and Wright and Scharf were basically running their production on fumes. They were blessed, however, with a crew short on experience, but long on energy, commitment and talent. After a number of television projects, cinematographer, Ron Hagen, was an inspired pick to lense the feature, with his sense of ragged daring ultimately giving Romper Stomper a singularly gritty look and stand-alone brand of visual intensity. Shot cheaply on 16mm “short-ends” (a partial roll of unexposed film stock left over from a previous production, and kept for use later), Romper Stomper saw Hagen working ingeniously on what he had at his disposal…which wasn’t much.

Another key player in the film was casting director, Greg Apps, who had been successfully working in the industry since the mid-eighties on films such as Death In Brunswick, Mull, and Heaven Tonight. Apps had corralled the young actors for Wright’s Lover Boy, so the director naturally turned to him once again for Romper Stomper, another film that would require a rogue’s gallery of fresh faces. “The director, the producer and I would meet, chat, and agree on a cast,” Apps tells FilmInk of the far looser attitude to casting that was prevalent in the early nineties. “And that was the decision. There was no sales agent or distributor dictating a name. It was filmmaking by the filmmaker, and not by a committee, or a suit. The good old days!”

The biggest decision that Apps had to make was the casting of Hando, the leader of the film’s skinhead gang, and the big, brooding presence that hangs powerfully over the entire film. The choice eventually came down to two young actors: Russell Crowe, who Apps had cast in a scene-stealing role in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s acclaimed 1991 black comedy, Proof; and Ben Mendelsohn, who had appeared in Lover Boy after bursting onto the scene in the 1987 classic, The Year My Voice Broke. “The choice was between Ben and Russell,” Apps tells FilmInk, “which was exactly the position that we found ourselves in when casting Proof. Ben or Russell. It was line ball. We knew that both of them could do it. Both would create a memorable Hando. But we knew that Russell would create a screen presence of an absolute leader – Hitler-esque in the effect that he had on those around him. And that’s what Geoffrey captured: a community dominated by a central figure.”

With the emerging Russell Crowe (he was a familiar face from films such as The Crossing, Spotswood, Blood Oath and TV’s Brides Of Christ, but hardly a household name) in the leading role, Apps and Wright went even further afield for the other roles, casting then-unknowns like Daniel Wyllie and John Brumpton as members of the skinhead gang, and the largely untested Daniel Pollock (who’d had bit parts in Lover Boy, Nirvana Street Murder and Proof) as Davey, Hando’s more sensitive second-in-command. “Many directors set out to find exactly what they have pictured in what I call their ‘screen eye,’” says Greg Apps. “It can then be hard to introduce them to anything tangential. We had Russell and Daniel Pollock in place, and I said to Geoff, ‘When you shave their head, they’ll all look the same. They’re all 5’10. The audience will have a tough job identifying the individual characters.’ So we went looking for different physical shapes to fill the gang. We did improvisation not included in the script, always in pairs, because we wanted to see a group/gang dynamic.”

The toughest role to cast was that of Bubs, the barely-teenaged tagalong who acts as the unofficial (but scarily participatory) mascot for Hando’s skinhead gang. “With about a week to go, we had an open call of kids,” Apps explains. Part of that casting process involved a session of improvisation, where Wright and Apps would pretend to be cops, and then go about hassling the assembled youngsters. “We were at the production office, in a low rent part of town, underneath the expressway, ‘threatening’ the young kids. Geoff had a length of rubber hose, whacking the wall next to their head. One of the kids pushed Geoffrey away, grabbed the rubber pipe, and threatened him with it. That was James McKenna, who we ended up casting. He was fifteen at the time.”

Casting the role of Gabe, the fragile young girl who comes between the imperious Hando and the more introspective Davey, however, would provide Apps with his biggest thrill. “The most satisfaction that I received personally was casting Jacqui McKenzie,” he tells FilmInk. “The AFC wanted a different actress, and we offered it to her. Thankfully, she turned it down. From the moment that I read it, I saw Jacqui in the role even though she hadn’t done any film. I’d seen her at NIDA, and I was fascinated by her vulnerability.”

Though she was appearing in a stage production of Rebecca (adapted from the Alfred Hitchcock film) at the time, the young Jacqueline McKenzie asked her director – who just happened to be veteran film and television helmer, George Ogilvie, who had directed Russell Crowe in 1990’s The Crossing – if she could skip rehearsals to audition for Romper Stomper. Ogilvie not only said yes, but encouraged her to go. “I knew that this film had almost gotten up a number of times, and then fallen through,” the warm and engaging Jacqueline McKenzie tells FilmInk today, on the phone while kicking a tennis ball to her dog somewhere in Sydney. “I knew that Nadine Garner had been cast in the past, and I was the last in a long line of people to be cast in that role. But it just so happened that this time it got up, so I was lucky. I was also cheap! There were other names in the mix who had a fee that this film couldn’t pay, so I was just a good minimum. You never know why you get cast for these things!”

Though Geoffrey Wright and Greg Apps were on board, McKenzie was far from a done deal for the role. “Because I was an unknown, and because Russell had right of approval, Greg had a bit of convincing to do, I believe.” McKenzie still had to be given the nod by Russell Crowe, who had some say in the casting process too. “He saw Rebecca, which was on by that stage,” the actress explains. “I met him afterwards. Now, I didn’t really know much about film in this country, or film anywhere. I didn’t really come from a film tradition, and I didn’t really watch movies growing up, so I wasn’t a film buff. But it was nice meeting him; I knew that he was another Aussie actor, of course, and I’d seen him in The Crossing. He was brilliant in that film, so it was nice to meet him, and that was that.” Obviously duly impressed, Russell Crowe gave McKenzie his stamp of approval, and the young actress (whose on-screen experience at the time was limited to a few TV roles) was thrown into the cinematic maelstrom of Romper Stomper. “I remember the screenplay being very, very spare, and I knew that it was really violent,” McKenzie says, “but it was really well written. It was different to anything that I’d ever read.”

With their young cast in place, Geoffrey Wright and Daniel Scharf set about immersing themselves in the skinhead culture, which brought them to – amongst others – a young man called Neil Foley, who would interestingly go on to direct the fascinating 1999 curio, Bigger Than Tina. “When I was a teenager in the eighties, there were a significant number of kids calling themselves skins in and around my hometown of Elizabeth in South Australia – myself included,” Foley tells FilmInk. “I did some sessions with the director, the costume designer, and the actors. We talked about skinheads and skinhead culture. They were keen to be as accurate as possible in their portrayal of the skins. They did a pretty amazing job.”

Foley’s work as a researcher on the film even led to him scoring a small role as “skinhead in plaster”, which would be his first screen credit. “It was the first time that I’d been on a feature film set, and the place was buzzing,” the eventual director tells FilmInk. “Because I’d helped out with researching, they wrote me in a little part, which enabled me to get an Actors Equity card, which was a tough thing to get at the time. I did a few scenes with the main skins and Jacqueline McKenzie; most of this ended up on the cutting room floor, unfortunately, although I did see it once in a much longer cut before the film was released.”

Just before shooting started on Romper Stomper, the film’s young cast – all with their heads shaved, and kitted out in the regulation boots and braces – got a taste of what it’s like to be a skinhead. Veteran character actor, John Brumpton, who memorably plays bespectacled skin, Magoo, tells FilmInk the story. “The producer had drinks with the crew on the Friday before we were to start shooting. Us actors went along and had a beer to meet the team. We’d all been hanging out for the last two weeks of pre-production. Anyway, we had a beer, met the people, and then walked towards The Maori Chief in South Melbourne, to get drunk. The jacks drove past and saw a gang of skinheads. They started hassling [actors] Leigh Russell and Daniel Pollock, who I knew was carrying drugs. I told them to fuck off in an effort to pull the jacks away from Daniel. It worked, and then they turned on me. Leigh, Dan Wyllie and me were finally thrown into the back of their wagon and taken to South Melbourne Police Station. Russell stayed at the drinks, and was going to meet us at the pub. I remember looking through the grill on the back door of the jacks’ wagon as Russell arrived. They left me until last. Dan and Leigh were already locked up. Russell demanded that we be released. The Jacks told him to piss off or they’d lock him up too! He just stood there and said, ‘I’m not moving till you let them out.’ They jumped him, got him into a headlock, and dragged him into the station. We were all locked up and charged for being drunk in a public place. Luckily, there’s no criminal record. The producer bailed us out four hours later.”

With next-to-nothing in the way of budget, Romper Stomper – befitting its story – was born from a rough-and-tumble guerrilla-style shoot, with the breakneck action (large chunks of the film are made up of Hando and his gang’s running battles with a group of Vietnamese youths) caught by a small crew on the fly. This ramped up the energy levels, and juiced the whole project with an unbridled sense of intensity and excitement. “They were just running after us half the time,” McKenzie laughs of Ron Hagen and his camera crew. “It was hilarious. It was like playing football, when you’re charging up the wing, and passing the ball, and then someone was passing it back, and then you go in for a try. Hopefully, you don’t get penalised and have to do it again because someone’s offside. Like if there’s a little bit of dust in the gate of the camera, or something like that. I’ll just never forget that; on no other movie have I ever seen such an amazing sense of ensemble work from crew and cast alike. It was extraordinary.”

The leader of this ensemble, however, was undoubtedly Geoffrey Wright. “Geoffrey has a very deep and determined vision of how he wants to bring his stories onto the screen,” says producer, Daniel Scharf. “He works hard to get the best out of everybody on the set. Because he works so diligently and has such passion, everybody follows. He’s a great leader, but he’s also a great collaborator. The atmosphere on set was positive, exciting and inspirational.” Adds Neil Foley: “I remember Geoffrey mainly as being focused and busy. The set had a charged atmosphere, which is pretty much as you’d expect with ten or so male teenagers dressed up as skinheads strutting their stuff.” Casting director, Gregory Apps, succinctly describes Wright as “imaginative, different, and risk taking”, while Jacqueline McKenzie knew that she was “in good hands. Sometimes, you get directors who are good with the technical side, but not very good with actors. Geoffrey worked brilliantly with all of it.”

While there was no real “method madness” on set – with actors staying in character between takes, and so on – McKenzie tells FilmInk that the actors (who didn’t have the benefit of any real decent rehearsal time) naturally fell into a strange kind of rhythm with their characters. Russell Crowe – already a powerful and richly charismatic presence – assumed a leadership role, and the other actors began to defer to him, as their characters did in the film. “I know these actors, and they’re not those people,” McKenzie explains. “Johnny Brumpton, for god’s sake? Who wouldn’t defer to him? He’s a natural leader. They did it as part of the playing because it’s easier. It’s like rehearsing when you don’t have rehearsal. They all formed a bond. If you had any lesser actors around Russell than those amazing boys that Greg Apps picked to surround him, it just wouldn’t have worked. They knew how to work it, and it became seamless.” Part of Russell Crowe’s method was to constantly turn up late, and leave his fellow cast members waiting, often in the cramped confines of a mini-bus at 4:00am (“Half the people were smoking with the windows up,” laughs McKenzie) while they were waiting to go to set. Calls were made to his apartment, and hands were frantically wrung, but Crowe would eventually wander out to nary a word. “We all wanted to give him shit, but we didn’t,” McKenzie laughs. “That’s part of being the leader. It was a status thing, and he knew about playing status, and so did everyone else, which was necessary for that role.”

It wasn’t, however, some prima donna act. When FilmInk asks about Crowe, everybody speaks instantly of his professionalism on set, particularly with regards to his work with the other actors. “He seemed switched on and professional,” says Neil Foley. “He was barely known back then, but he had an air about him – like he knew that he was going places.” After every take in which he’d have to knock around his young Vietnamese co-stars, Crowe would make sure that they were okay, and if they were satisfied with the take. “He was so mindful of this whole racist element that we were depicting,” McKenzie says. “Russell was a total leader. He knew where he was going and where he wanted to go, because he’s just such a force. At that level, it’s not enough to be talented, and it’s not enough to work on the craft itself. You need a couple of strategies. You have to understand the people in the industry, and know how to play that game. Russell had a far more sophisticated level of understanding of the industry than I did, or still have. I so admire him as a storyteller, and I got to see him first hand. It was a real lesson to watch him work.”

While the Romper Stomper shoot had been a hectic, pumped-up, and highly energised affair, the film’s post-production period unfurled beneath a dark, tragic cloud. Young actor, Daniel Pollock – who had shown extraordinary promise and sensitivity as an actor with his deeply moving portrayal of Davey – sadly took his own life while Geoffrey Wright was editing the film. How difficult was it to complete the film under those circumstances? “You know what? It wasn’t tough at all,” Geoffrey Wright reflects thoughtfully, “because Daniel Scharf and I realised toward the end of pre-production that we had an actor on our hands who had a problem. But he was so good in the role that it was unthinkable to replace him, and if we had replaced him, he would have gone over the edge much sooner than he did. By giving Daniel the role, we bought him another ten months, but sooner or later – without some kind of long-term intervention – he would have done himself in. Daniel was a fine young actor who was sadly undercut by the Melbourne heroin scene, but we saw the final product as a way of honouring his memory.”

For Jacqueline McKenzie, dealing with the final film itself was a far more difficult, painful, and deeply anguished experience. “I was in a bit of a state,” the actress tells FilmInk today. “I’d been in a relationship with the beautiful Daniel Pollock, and I was just distraught, and it’s taken me forever. There’s not a day that goes by where you don’t think of something like that, and that was twenty years ago. He was an extraordinary actor, and an amazing spirit, but he had these personal issues that were too much. I couldn’t watch it straight away.”

The rest of the country, however, was well and truly watching. Picked up for distribution by major player, Roadshow, Romper Stomper was given the benefit of a wide release. “I always wanted and wished for the film to play at the multiplexes,” producer, Daniel Scharf, tells FilmInk. “It was really satisfying to stand outside The Village Cinema in Bourke Street, Melbourne, and George Street, Sydney, and see the film being advertised in huge letters.” Not surprisingly, Romper Stomper was no cinematic shrinking violet, with the media quickly ablaze with talk of the film’s violence and uncompromising depiction of the skinhead subculture. Audiences flocked in large and enthusiastic numbers, and Australia’s critics were divided. One of the film’s greatest detractors was esteemed critic, David Stratton, who wrote in Variety that Romper Stomper was “A Clockwork Orange without the intellect…a disturbing, essentially misconceived pic.” On The Movie Show, Stratton declined to give the film a score on the grounds that it was racist and undeserving of even a minor critical laurel. “I’ve rarely seen a film that troubled me as much as that film did,” Stratton told FilmInk many years later. “Geoffrey Wright, who I’d never met, took it very personally and very badly. He attacked me physically by throwing wine over me at The Venice Film Festival a couple of years later, where ironically, I actually liked his film, Metal Skin.”

Over twenty years later, Geoffrey Wright has hardly mellowed. “It did surprise me that people who normally spoke about the freedom to make any film that you want were suddenly demanding censorship,” Wright says today of the critical wailing that greeted Romper Stomper. “David Stratton, of course, came out with a famous attack on the movie, and that was when the penny really dropped. These critics were coming at the film with their own agenda. They weren’t interested in exploring what the film was trying to do; they just wanted to pump up their own platform.” Wright has never been one to take his criticism lying down, and wishes that others wouldn’t either. “I get disappointed when young filmmakers don’t answer their critics,” he laments. “Why should they stand passively by while someone makes absurd conclusions? They should stand up and answer these clowns back.”

For many critics and viewers, however, Romper Stomper was slapped with instant classic status. David Stratton’s Movie Show co-host, Margaret Pomeranz, gave the film five stars, and it received nine AFI Award nominations, including Best Film and Best Director. Russell Crowe deservedly won for Best Actor, and the film served as the powerful young actor’s international calling card. “I knew from Romper Stomper that he had the stuff to hold the screen, and that he was able to play violence and still keep a character interesting,” director Curtis Hanson – who cast Crowe in his US breakthrough role in the crime thriller, LA Confidential – told The Times in 1997. Even with that Oscar sitting on his shelf for Gladiator, and the raft of staggering roles that have come after it, Romper Stomper remains one of Crowe’s most intelligent and utterly unforgettable performances. He’s equalled by the stunning Jacqueline McKenzie, who set herself up for a fascinating career with the film, and the tragic Daniel Pollock, who displayed such moving soulfulness and undeniable promise.

Despite its low budget and unheralded production, Romper Stomper today stands as a towering, brutal, gut-punching minor masterpiece. “There was a kind of harmlessness about our filmmaking then,” Geoffrey Wright reflects. “It reached its feel-good peak with Strictly Ballroom [which pipped Romper Stomper for the AFI Best Film gong], and then Romper Stomper came along that same year. It was a real slap to all of that. It combined the exploration of taboo themes with high action like no other Australian film. Sure, we’d done action films like Mad Max, but they were fantastical scenarios. Romper Stomper was shot on locations that we walk past, using people that we recognise in our everyday life.”

For Jacqueline McKenzie, Romper Stomper remains a career touchstone. “It was so exciting to have an extraordinary director with an extraordinarily unique vision,” the actress tells FilmInk. “It was a very modern vision, showing a side of our country that we’d never seen, but indeed it was there, and it still is. It was truly bold in that regard, and that was a phenomenal thing to be a part of.”

Romper Stomper is available now on remastered DVD and Blu-ray editions through Reel. Many thanks to Jacqueline McKenzie, Geoffrey Wright, Daniel Scharf, Neil Foley and Greg Apps for generously giving their time to be interviewed for this feature. The Romper Stomper sequel will hit Stan this summer.