By Dov Kornits
There’s a scene about halfway through Early Winter where our protagonist, a carer in a nursing home, is doing something in the back of frame, whilst a rat suddenly appears in the foreground, and stands there for an extended time unspotted, except by the viewer. There is no narrative significance to the rat – he’s just there, and then we move on. “It was in the script,” laughs Michael Rowe over Skype from Mexico. “It took me about forty minutes to get the rat right, and the rat wasn’t in agreement with what I needed it to do. I had to move and start another scene because I’d run out of time to get the rat to do what I needed it to. So we set up the camera for the next shot, and then I thought about it for thirty seconds, and I said, ‘You know what, let’s cancel the next shot. I’d prefer to go without this than without the rat.’ So we went back and set up again, and I spent the next twenty minutes on the rat. It finally did what I needed it to do. For me, it’s very important. I sacrificed something else that was narratively more clear, but the rat was more important.”
The anecdote is particularly appropriate considering Michael Rowe’s ambition as an artist to represent truth on screen, which he believes will transcend race, colour, or sex, and which has allowed him to become one of the most exciting filmmakers on the planet; a long way from his beginnings in Melbourne. “I was a very strange child,” he tells us today. “I believed that I was on earth to change the way that poetry was written in English.” Eventually turning to theatre, the 22-year-old Rowe won a playwriting competition at La Trobe University, and was offered work with a burgeoning theatre company. But when their project turned out to be TV, he balked. “If theatre was prostitution for me, then TV was no condom in the dark and unnameable.” Too scared to tell them that he wasn’t willing to do it, he bought a ticket to the furthest place that he could think of: Mexico City. “I arrived on Good Friday 1994 with $76 in my pocket, and eventually learnt Spanish and took a course in screenwriting. I was determined to get one of my screenplays filmed, but after seven years of no one wanting to film them, I decided that if I didn’t learn how to direct a film myself, then I would never have a screenplay credit on the big screen. So I bought a couple of books on how to direct films, and wrote a screenplay about two people in a room, which was Leap Year. The rest is history.”
An Australian/Canadian co-production, Early Winter (which picked up the Venice Days Award at last year’s Venice Film Festival) explores a seemingly typical marriage in Quebec where the protagonist is a shift worker and his wife is at home with their two young boys. Without spelling things out, small details inform the characters’ inner lives, and we’re drawn into their existence, which reflects our own. “I met a Canadian producer at a film festival and we got drunk,” Rowe says about the origins of the project. “He sowed a seed for me; he talked about the effect that winter has on people. By the end of winter, there is an increase in the rates of depression and relationship break-ups – because people have been stuck in a house together for four months without seeing sunlight. I was quite amazed, coming from Australia and then Mexico – I never thought of weather affecting your emotions.”
For this fan of Raymond Carver’s short stories, the setting opened up all sorts of possibilities, which he threaded with personal details. “I’m a Mexican citizen, and I’ve lived here for 21 years,” Rowe says. “I was married here, I’m divorced, I’ve got a nine-year-old daughter.” Early Winter deals with a crumbling union, pre-teen children, albeit boys, and the lead character’s wife is an immigrant. “One of the recurrent themes in all my work, even though I don’t plan it that way, is social and cultural displacement and isolation,” Rowe continues. “All of this comes out of, obviously, the experience of arriving in Mexico and speaking no Spanish, and looking out the window and seeing 23 million people and not being able to communicate on any level. It’s something that has affected me profoundly to this day.”
When we ask the inevitable question of whether Michael Rowe will be returning to Australia to make a film any time soon, the director is surprisingly optimistic, but equally cryptic. “I have got an upcoming project that I’m working on for 2017/2018. I’m interested in working in Australia. The Australian funding bodies will have no problems in letting me work on my terms and my kind of film. I have a track record now with a couple of decent prizes that will allow them to justify that.” Is he writing and directing this project? “Nooooooo. But if it comes off, and we’re not quite there yet, it’s going to spin Australian cinema in a different direction to where it’s been going for the last thirty years, and I think it’s a good thing.”
FilmInk Presents will be hosting a series of Q&A screenings of Early Winter with Michael Rowe, taking in The Nova Carlton in Melbourne (October 4), Dendy in Canberra (October 5), New Farm Cinemas in Brisbane (October 7), Dendy Newtown in Sydney (October 9), and The Regent Cinema in Ballarat (October 10), which is where Michael Rowe was born. The film will then be released in cinemas nationally on October 13. For further information on screenings, head to FilmInk Presents. Click through for the second and third parts of our interview with Michael Rowe.
