written by A.L. Vincent
Acclaimed film director, Phillip Noyce, has been making films since he was 18. He’s won several awards in his fifty-plus years since then including the Australian Film Institute award for Best Film, Director, Actor, and Screenplay. His movie Newsfront (1977) was the first Australian film to play at the New York Film Festival. His most recent project is The Desperate Hour, starring Naomi Watts.
“I’ve done nothing else except direct movies,” he stated. “When someone told me in the middle of the pandemic that I could go to Northern Canada and work with Naomi Watts outside predominately, in an area that was COVID-free. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a gift’ It very much got me over the hump of being locked up at home.”
Not only did it get him through the COVID pandemic, but it also offered him an opportunity to direct a film different from his other movies. He said, “I certainly hadn’t previously directed a film that predominately featured just one performer; a performer that I’d known for decades but never worked with, someone that I had admired greatly as I watched her career catapult into super-stardom. For all those reasons, mostly about Naomi, but in part about relieving the inertia imposed on us all by the lockups that we were enduring just a year ago.”
The movie focuses on Naomi Watt’s character, Amy Carr, a widowed mother who finds out her son is in danger during an active shooting at his high school. How did he approach this film and its characters? “How I approach each film is to try and put myself in the position of the audience. I always make films for audiences. The first thing is, is the audience connected to the story? And am I, the storyteller, connected to the story, as the father of a 14-year-old boy who’s just entering the wildness craziness of puberty. I was very much connected to the relationship between Naomi’s character and her son. Her constant questioning of what he might be doing, What he might be feeling, and so on.”
He recounted stories of his own children as they grew up that helped him direct this film, “I’ve now got two sets of children. The oldest is over 40, the youngest is just 11, and I’ve lost them all at various times. At the department store or at the airport, they’ve gone missing. When you lose your kid, if it’s one minute or one hour, you just go into this reptilian panic. I think the worst thing I can contemplate is that one of these still-growing children, these still-forming humans, can somehow be hurt or damaged by violence. I’m driving along here in New Orleans, and they’re in Los Angeles, and suddenly I get the shivers through my body as I see in my own mind something I can’t prevent happening. That happens to all parents, I think.”
Noyce has directed many movies of different genres in his over fifty years in the business. So is there a genre he hasn’t done yet? He gave us a sneak peek at his upcoming film Fast Charlie, “It combines action and character with very dark comedy, and that’s something I haven’t done before.”
What movies influenced Noyce? “Apocalypse Now. I can remember watching it for the first time and then going to the 5:00 session. Psycho is one of the top films that had an enormous influence on me. Just Hitchcock’s manipulation of the audience, his use of tension and music, his camera placements, and cutting patterns. I loved Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist for the complexity of the characterization and the beauty of the compositions. I also loved The Last Tango in Paris for Brando’s extraordinary performance. And I must admit that I’m a fan of George Miller’s Mad Max films.”
He continues with more praise for the movie filmed in his native country, “Particularly the very first ones starring a young, early 20’s Mel Gibson, and that movie as it was made by a doctor, Dr. George Miller, is rough and raw, but just brilliant in its execution and the way it was filmed.”
What are the favorite movies he’s directed? “My favorite one is easily Rabbit-Proof Fence. The story of the three mixed-race children who are running away from a reeducation center in Australia and travel 1,500 miles across the Australian Outback to get home to their mums.” This movie with Kenneth Branagh won the AFI Award for Best Australian Film in 2002.
Another favorite is Dead Calm. “It was so much fun making it, and we made it in the Great Barrier Reef off the Southeastern Coast of Australia and during whale mating season. So, that was an experience to remember.”
He also credits Harrison Ford, who starred in the movie Clear and Present Danger, as an influence, “He was a great, great teacher to me as well because he taught me a lot of things about how he maintained that popularity and his connection to the audience, and it was also a quite sophisticated story as well.”
The very first project he ever filmed made the list as well, “It’s a story of newsreel cameramen in the 1940’s and ’50s in Australia, and it was the first Australian movie to open the London Film Festival.”
While wrapping up the interview, he was asked if he had any guilty pleasures regarding watching movies. He replied, “I don’t feel guilty about watching movies. There’s nothing that I would feel guilty about.”
Noyce’s most recent film, The Desperate Hour starring Naomi Watts, releases in theaters, on digital and on-demand February 25th, 2022.
