When the Seattle International Film Festival wrapped up last June, it ended with the crowd-pleasing costume drama The Dressmaker. A hit in its home of Australia, it is now getting a proper release in the US. As a fan of the movie when it played at SIFF (including having given it the prestigious Golden SunBreak Award), I’m delighted that it is getting to play in theaters here now because 1) it’s a really good movie, and 2) I’ve been sitting on my interview with director Jocelyn Moorhouse for months and she was a lot of fun to talk with.
Kate Winslet stars as Tilly, who returns to her 1950’s small town, Australian hometown after being banished when she’s suspected of killing a classmate. Her mother is ailing (and played by the exquisite Judy Davis). The town is full of gossiping ninnies but Tilly thinks she can charm her way back into their good graces by sharing her keen fashion eye and dressmaking skills with the town. There’s also a cross-dressing sergeant, played by Hugo Weaving, and Liam Hemsworth plays the love-interest.
This was Moorhouse’s first film since 1997’s A Thousand Acres, and it marks a welcome return to filmmaking. When The Dressmaker played at SIFF as its closing night gala film, Jocelyn Moorhouse was in town to promote it and appear at its screenings. She also spoke with me about the making and casting the movie, her long absence from filmmaking and more.
How did you get involved, or how did The Dressmaker come to be?
Well, the producer, Sue Maslin, got the rights to the book. She actually knew the writer (Rosalie Ham) because they’d grown up in the same town. The same small little town in the middle of nowhere. Sue had always been a fan of my very first film, Proof, with Hugo Weaving and Russell Crowe, and she’d always remembered it, and she just got this idea that she wanted me and no-one else. At the time, I was living in America, in Los Angeles, and because we’d made our home there, for a while actually, my husband (director P.J. Hogan) and me. But little did she know I actually couldn’t direct at the time because I’d been spending a lot of time… well, years, looking after my kids, two of whom have autism, which is a pretty serious disability.
It’s very serious. And they had it pretty badly. So, my job really was not just being a mum, but kind of being a therapist as well, teaching them and just helping them cope. And that’s what I still do a lot of, but back then they were little and they needed a lot more attention from me, and I just said to her, I can’t. I’m really sorry but I just can’t consider doing anything right now. So, I gave her a list of, you know, what about this one? You know, other directors in Australia, because she only wanted a woman. So, I gave her a list, and then she said, OK, well thanks. That’s sad, but I’ll go ask these other women.
For one reason or another, they didn’t click, or they didn’t want to do it, and then she came back to me like a year later. By that point, actually, my kids were getting into a good place and I said, oh all right, let me read it. And then I read it, and I just fell in love with how crazy this story was, and with the crazy old Molly, and Tilly with her beautiful clothes, and Sergeant Farrat (Hugo Weaving) with his cross-dressing. And I went, oh yeah, I think I want to do this. I get this stuff. This is right up my alley. From then on, I said, well look, I’ll write it, but I can’t promise you anything. But then once P.J. – that’s my husband, he’s a filmmaker too – once he and I started adapting it, of course I fell completely in love with the material and said OK, I’m going back to directing. This is it. So, that’s how I got involved.
I’m so glad it worked out that way.
Yes, me too. I’m glad she didn’t take no for an answer. So, I always say to her, thank you for not listening to me and just coming back.
Was Kate Winslet always the first choice for the starring role?
For me, yes. Yes, she was. I mean of course, it’s an independent film, so it had to go to all the investors and everyone had their lists, and she was always on the list, but she was the top of my list. I had no idea if she would say yes. You go for these things. I always thought you’ve got to try. Aim for the stars.
Let her be the one to say no.
That’s right, and so I sent her the script. Didn’t hear anything for a while. We started calling the agents, is it a no? And then, after a while we heard, no, it’s not a no, but it’s not a yes, because she hasn’t actually read it but we have and we like it. Anyway, it kept going, and I waited like nine months to get an answer. And then she sent me the most beautiful e-mail, out of the blue. Oh, I’m so sorry it took me so long to read it. I adore this character, I know her, I am her. Let’s figure out how to do it. And I just sent it to the producer, to Sue and went, can you believe this?
So then I gathered all my frequent flyer points together and got a trip to the UK and said, I’m coming over so we can talk. Because I wanted her to know that I really, really loved her and wanted her to do it, and make sure she didn’t back out. She was never going to back out. She said, I wasn’t going to back out. I don’t just say yes, I’m going to do it and then not do it. So, it was great. Except she got pregnant right after she said yes, so then we had to wait another ten months. But to me, it was worth it because she’s pretty remarkable. There are not many like Kate Winslet.
No, there are not.
No, and I thought, well, I’m just going to have to wait.
No, I couldn’t imagine having had to have come up with a Plan B.
There isn’t one, no. There wasn’t one, in my mind. I would have been very disappointed if I didn’t get her, so that was pretty miraculous.
I’m so glad it worked out, and I know with it being an independent film that sometimes you might not have the luxury of waiting ten months for the star.
No, but we had some very patient investors, and my producer, to her credit, did not panic. I think it made her gulp a bit because waiting did actually add a bit of money to the budget. Well no, we lost money because the Australian dollar crashed a little bit.
That’s not good.
No, so it was not perfect, but we made it work.
You’ve got to be happy with how the movie looks.
I’m so happy. And she was gorgeous, and she was just such a delight to work with. She’s a pro. She’s also deeply creative and hilarious. Naturally hilarious.
You mentioned when you introduced the film how you just love Judy Davis. That’s something I think we have in common. I always loved her when I saw her in all the Woody Allen movies that I loved from the 1990’s.
Exactly. I fell in love with her in My Brilliant Career a long time ago. And I told her that. She’s like, “Please. That was a long time ago.”
How did she come on board with the film? I ask because she doesn’t really appear in a ton of movies.
No, she doesn’t. I had actually offered Judy many things over the years. I’ve been trying to work with her, both as a director and a producer. And she’d always been very nice when she’d turned us down. You know, now is not the right time, or I don’t want to play that character because she doesn’t seem like me.
Anyway, so P.J. and I both offered her things, and this time I wanted to make sure I had Kate before I offered it. Because her agent kept going, “I know you want her. Why aren’t you officially approaching her?” I went, I want to make it so irresistible to her, because I was terrified she’d turn me down again. I sent the script to her and said OK, how about it? You’ll be working most of your scenes with Kate, and she said yes. And she loved the character. She said it reminded her of her own mum, who was pretty wacky. So, she did all these impersonations of her mother for me, and I knew she was going to be perfect. Not that I had any doubt, but it just gave me a little preview. And she was exactly like Molly by the sound of it. Yeah, so she said she knew how to play this. She and Kate had a lot of fun just experimenting and working out how to do the scenes with me.
They were perfect together, and they were just a joy, as a director, they were a joy to work with. Because they are very creative, very brave.
I don’t want to give away the ending when I transcribe this, but I thought it was one of the most satisfying moments I’ve seen in a movie in a long time, but it fit in perfectly with how the story was told.
It’s so shocking, but I loved it. Of course, what else… what else could she do at this point? [redacted] I remember when I was first getting ready to make it, and I’d just written the script, and a few people, a few investors were like, are you sure? It’s a bit wild. I mean, is it going to turn the audience against her? And I went, I don’t think so.
I think that if they weren’t with her then, they were absolutely then. I found it really cathartic.
I think it’s kind of sublime and it’s a sort of purification. She can start again now. She’s exorcised her ghosts. She’d lost her mother, she’d lost her lover, her best friend’s been arrested. Let’s just destroy it. And of course, luckily, everybody’s away. Most people are away at the Eisteddfod, and the little old lady has been sent up to the sanitarium, so she isn’t going to kill any nice people. In fact, she didn’t kill anyone.
When I was waiting in the lobby for my chance to talk with you, one of the film’s publicists was telling me there’s an amazing story with the fire scene that I should ask you about. Can you tell me about that?
Actually there is, yes. It was all to do with the production practicalities. In Australia, every summer, just like California, it’s a tinderbox. We have very serious total fire ban. Obviously we weren’t going to burn our set down before we’d filmed in it, so we had to be at the end of the shoot, which was summer and we knew that wasn’t going to work. Also, we were filming on an animal sanctuary where endangered animals were being brought back to good numbers, and so we promised we would actually take our set down piece by piece and make the place go back to how it had been before we arrived. But, on that land, there was another set, which was the Ned Kelly set that Heath Ledger had been in. I think that was about fifteen years ago… maybe ten? (Ed. note: Ned Kelly came out in 2003, according to IMDB.)
Yeah, a long time ago. And they said, we let them keep it up because we thought for a little while about turning it into a little conservation education area, but we never did, and now it’s rotting and there’s wallabies living in it and it’s dangerous. It’s going to be dangerous for the animals. We want to get rid of it, but it’s not total fire ban yet, so would you like to burn that down? OK… that feels really wrong to be burning someone else’s set down, but as we can’t burn our own. And we did. And we did it at the beginning of the shoot.
But the firemen, idiots, didn’t bring any water. They thought they’d be able to control it with little foam things. They went, well we’ll just do little bits, so tell us what you’d like to see burning, and we’ll just burn a section of it, and we’ll do it in a very controlled way so it doesn’t get up. They didn’t. They did not do it in a controlled way. The entire thing turned into an inferno, which of course is fabulous for me. So they showed me the footage, and I’m like, there’s firemen in the footage, because they kept running in to try and do what they could, and I’m like, get the hell out of there! Because I was actually shooting something else when they burnt it down, and it was just a bunch of crazy second unit team. Luckily though, in between the firemen freaking out, there was this gorgeous stuff that ended up in the film like things collapsing, so that was great. That was the Ned Kelly set going down.
But it looks… once it was burning, it’s just structure, you don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s just fire and timber, and luckily, they had the corrugated roofs that we had. That’s very common in Australia, those rusty corrugated iron roofs. So yeah, that worked out well.
And so we got a real fire. So some of it is real, like Molly’s house blowing up is real, and some of it’s digital, like the fire coming down the red fabric is digital. But we had a ball. I think secretly I’m a bit of an arsonist. I like it. It’s so visual, isn’t it?
Yeah, it was perfect.
And it represented what was in her heart. It had to. And what was in my heart.
So, were you kind of like Tilly then, in some ways?
I’ve had some tough times, yes, over the last eighteen years. There are times that… I think when you have bad memories of places, and I know that there are parts of Los Angeles that I have… it’s mostly to do with autism, actually. Just having my heart broken, and fear, tremendous fear, like when my kids were first diagnosed. I didn’t know what to do, and I would be seeing cold-hearted psychiatrists to talk about how to help them and I realized I was on my own really. Until I found a great group of people who guided me. But in the beginning, it was terrifying. Sometimes when I drive around LA, I see those places where I first was traumatized and I would like to burn them because it’s like they still have the ghosts of my trauma living there, but if I burnt them… Don’t worry I’m not really going to… I’m not going to burn any of Los Angeles. But, I get it, I get that feeling. When I read the book I went, yeah, yeah, I understand this feeling, this desire to just destroy and purify by fire.
Well, I saw this movie at SIFF called Life, Animated about…
Oh, God. That was at SIFF, was it? I heard about it. I want to see it.
Yeah, it’s fantastic. With Ron Suskind, the political journalist, and he having an autistic son. I’m not a parent but when I saw this movie, I’m thinking was thinking that every parent of an autistic child, they deserve sainthood.
I think so, yes, actually. You really have to just give up everything, really. And all expectations, all those things that you got comfortable with in the life of pre-autism, you have to get rid of them, and just accept your child for who they are, and that takes a while. Because when I started, it was at the stage where people felt you could cure autism through diet or through certain types of therapy. I mean, we tried everything. Our house became like a lab of just intense therapy. Six days a week, six hours a day, we were involved in it. So intense. We tried early intensive intervention. It certainly helped both my children, but it took its toll on the family. We stopped being a normal family, we just became sort of therapists and autism experts.
We’ll never go back to being normal people, but then again, we’re filmmakers so we’re not normal anyway. It taught us a lot about ourselves and there’s a lot of self examination. I must have caused this and it’s obviously come from my genes. I don’t believe it’s anything we did. Thank heavens those days are gone where they used to blame the mother. I think there’s still a little residual in some older doctors judging from the way I was treated in the beginning, you know, working mother, oh a babysitter, oh yes, often I see… I mean it was amazing, the judgmental stuff that I was subjected to, and my whole role of being a mother was brought into question. Have I done things the right way? Oh, it was terrible. Luckily, I found great support. Other mothers, and my husband was an amazing support, and we got through it, and my children are in a really good place. They’ve just come so far since those early, scary days.
They’re great, and we love them and they love us, and actually that’s all that matters. They don’t have to be rocket scientists or get PhDs. I just want them to be happy. And they are.
I’m so glad to hear that. I’m sure I’m going to be told to wrap this up any minute now…
I’m sorry this ended up being about autism and not the film.
No, no, no. We talked a lot about the film, we talked about arson and everything I love. But what’s going to happen with this movie now?
Well, the exciting thing is that Ted Hope and Scott Foundas and Bob Berney from Amazon Studios have really got behind it and they love it, and they’re going to push it and give it a good release in September.
It’s already been a giant hit in Australia, which was a big shock to me. It was a giant hit. I think I even managed to beat Muriel’s Wedding, which I love telling my husband like, ha, I finally eclipsed you. And he’s like, “I’m happy to be eclipsed, it’s OK darling.”
I love that movie, but I think I like The Dressmaker even more.
Thank you. Well, I produced Muriel’s Wedding so I’m proud of that too. So yeah, they’ve taken it to their hearts in Australia and it’s sort of gone around the world. It’s still opening… I think it just opened in Russia last week. So, I think the US is going to one of the last places.
You’ve had a lot of movies that have done really well here [in the US], though.
I have, but this is my new baby, so I want it to go well. I’m very proud of it. And it’s such a wacky, crazy film, but it’s still emotional, though. And I’m proud of it.
So, is it going to get a theatrical release and then play on Amazon?
They’ve got a partnership with Broad Green Pictures, and they will give it a theatrical release for, I think it’s like forty five days on a large number of screens in most of the major cities, so people will be able to see it as I intended it on the big screen. It is a wide screen movie, it’s got a beautiful soundtrack, so I’m really happy that people are going to have a chance to see it. And then they’ll do SVOD. Yeah, so it’s good. To me, that’s great, because it will have a bigger audience. I just want people to see it. That’s all that really matters.
Before I’m given the play-off music, is there anything you want people to know about that I didn’t talk about?
Well… Liam Hemsworth is really gorgeous. They should go along and have a look at him. Especially all the women. And men, of course. He’s a good actor. In the trailer of course, you see him take his shirt of and it’s very funny, but he’s actually… I think he shows a different side to himself, besides having his natural Australian accent, which is pretty damn gorgeous. I think he shows a gentler, sweeter side than people are used to seeing, so it’s a really good reason to see it as well, to see how good Liam is.
Yeah, he was great in the movie. And I’m not going to lie, I did not mind having to watch Kate Winslet for almost two hours, especially in the cool dresses her Tilly designed.
No, well she’s rather beautiful. Her skin is like cream. And of course, Sarah Snook, I think she’s a little bit of a break out star, Gertrude. She goes from being the ugly duckling to the gorgeous goddess.
She’s one of our rising stars in Australia, she’s really funny. She reminds me of a young Shirley MacLaine. She’s got a real quirky, gorgeous quality to her. She and Kate got along really well. I think that’s how she scored the role in Steve Jobs. I think Kate said, look at this girl! She’s great!
{The Dressmaker opens today, September 30. Check here for show times.}
