Streetsweeper Q&A

Liam O’Brien

14 August 2009

http://www.projectorheads.com/2009/08/streetsweeper-qa/

streetsweeper 001

Dom and I recently attended a screening of Neil Mansfield’s Streetsweeper which played at the Front Room Art Gallery at the Hunter st TAFE, Newcastle. Following the film was a Q&A session, which I recorded and have now transcribed. Streetsweeper won Best Film at the Anchorage International Film Festival in Alaska, 2008.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: I may be ignorant, but did you shoot it in three days?

NM: Yep. We shot it in three eighteen hour days, so we started the first morning at four o’clock at the beach, and we filmed till ten o’clock at night, and then we got up at 4 o’clock in the morning and filmed in Islington Park. When we filmed in the park there was a man sleeping on the bench… we were filming on this bench and there was a guy sleeping on that bench, with his little bag.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: There were a couple of shots I’d seen, and it seemed like you were bringing the public in there.

NM: No, they walked in.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Yeah, that’s what I mean, like -

NM: The businessman in the back of the Civic, in the bit where he’s got the big map? The businessman came out of the door of the back of the Civic mall… I don’t know, it’s an empty shop or whatever. He came out, walked up to Marin (Mimica) and said “You right, mate?” and he said “Yeah, I’m OK.” And he walked off. He didn’t see us, and here, where we are with the camera, there were ten people.

(laughter)

NM: And somebody had to run after him and get him to sign a release form. He didn’t even know we were there!

(laughter)

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: So none of this -

NM: No, we didn’t stage any of it. The woman walking the dog at the roundabout, the cat, the dog: none of it was faked.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: The end of the mall?

NM: Yeah, they just turned up. They just rock up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: The dude on the scooter, that was like… man, you totally controlled my mind. And I thought -

NM: Well, that’s editing.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: That was brilliant.

NM: That’s why, you know, after doing it for a long time – making music videos and stuff – I realised that if you turn up… 95% of success is turning up. It’s what you do with the other 5% when you’re there. The story is this: I was talking to my next door neighbour about making this film, and he allowed some of the crew to sleep on his floor because we had less room at my place. And anyway, he asked, “How many actors are there?” I just said “one” and he goes, “Who’s he gonna run into, is he going to talk to other people?” And this was the day before, so I thought “Ahh, yeah, maybe I should get a few people to come in and be fake extras, like, lost tourists or pedestrians, just to pump it up a little bit. I was thinking of bringing in a few people and say to them, “at this time, can you be on this corner and walk across the road?” Just so we had this contrl of some of the extras, but I then I thought, “Nah, we’ll just turn up and see what happens,” and he was going “Well, you know, isn’t that going to be boring?” I said, “Well, it may be,” but as we were standing talking, there was a woman down my street who’s a… I don’t know, she’s a Buddhist nun or whatever she is, she wears those white purple robes. She went past on a motor scooter, and as she went past these two African guys, African refugees who looked like gangsters – white tracky-dacks, white tops, the caps, gold – they walked past the other way. We stood there watching them, and I went “There you go, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to just rock up and these things will appear.” And they did. The dog on the bridge, when he walks off the bridge and that little dog runs across the bridge… I mean, we couldn’t, you can’t… if you scripted that you’d be there for half the day trying to get the dog to do what you wanted.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: I just wanted to throw in this: you had the train rolling that way and it was asymmetrical; that was the craziest shot I’ve ever seen of a train.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: Have you watched the trains a lot, to see when they rock up?

NM: Nah, they just rock up, that’s what happens in Newcastle. All the money’s going straight out the harbour. We should be rich! What are we doing? One of the resources that everyone in the world wants, and we’re just watching it go, ripped out of the ground and sold. And it’s like, if we were in the Middle East, we’d be multi-multi-mega-millionaires, ’cause they sell oil the same way. Where does the money go? That’s what I don’t understand about Newcastle. I just think, shouldn’t it be a wealthy city?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: You just showed the back of my hand, my whole life… like, no joke, from Georgetown to Warabrook to… mate, I grew up here, born in Newcastle Hospital, and that was special, man.

(laughter)

NM: Well, there’s a zillion great locations out there. I could shoot this film again and not re-use any of those locations.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Totally. And you wouldn’t know.

NM: Sorry, there’s a question right there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: Yeah. I was more interested in your other Q&A sessions – especially at the Anchorage Film Festival – where the questions were directed to the character, the city or the symbology and the iconography, I guess. What is more important to you? In this film.

NM: Every time I see it I see something different. And it’s funny, because I had the idea for a long time. I directed and I edited it mostly, and I got someone in to help me at the end because I was just going to end up in a technological hell with all the edit decisions I’d made, and how to unravel it properly. And ahh, I think I can watch it removed from that, because so many things happened and because of the nature of the film. A lot of it was spontaneous. And it was very well structured, but then we had to kind of… go with what happened. And then I manipulated it in the edit room to tell a story. But sometimes when I watch it I just look at the trees, and sometimes I look at the birds, sometimes I… you know, look at the circles, sometimes I look at the arrows. You know, it’s always different. I grew up near Botany Bay, and when I was in Anchorage, which is a city not very dissimilar to Newcastle; it’s a small-ish city built on a gas pipe. That’s why it’s there, you know. They were trying to introduce me to Captain Cook, and I was like “I know who Captain Cook is, he discovered Australia, man,” and they said “Oh no, he discovered Anchorage”. And then they showed me a statue of Captain Cook which is exactly like the statue that I grew up with when I was a kid, when we’d go on school excursions. So it was uncanny, the similarities between the cities, you know, because they’re not THE major city in America. They’re a much more frontier kind of thing, but they seemed to respond to that kind of… emptiness. They all thought “Wow, where was all the people, where was all the traffic?” Ironically I got a lot of my friends up to work on the film; they came up from Sydney. I planned to shoot between Christmas and New Years because I knew I could get people who were available: they’d either be away on holidays or they’d be sitting around doing nothing, recovering from eating too much or whatever.

(laughter)

NM: So I said “Come up, we’ll shoot,” It was just an exercise in film-making. We’re all around late-thirties, forties; we’re not twenty year olds who are trying to go somewhere, we’re all people who actually have lots of experience. We just get sick of talking about films, so we thought we’d make one. And I told them how quiet it was going to be, but it was the opposite. It was actually busier than I’d ever seen it. The first day when we were filming down around the city, people were everywhere! I was really getting angry because there were too many people walking through the frame.

(laughter)

NM: And the people at Anchorage thought “Does anyone live in that city, Newcastle?” Yeah, it’s like anything. I walk around a lot. It’s funny, some of these things occurred to me: I grew up without a car, my parents didn’t have a car, and I grew up in suburbia in Sydney. I just walked everywhere and it’s completely natural for me to walk to places. When I was in Alaska I walked to a lot of places, and they couldn’t believe it. When I turned up at that pub, they couldn’t believe that I’d walked there. I didn’t get there until 10:30 at night. And I said, “Well, it wasn’t that far,” but you know, they wouldn’t even walk three kilometres. That’s why I notice these things. That’s why I have this big monstrous collection of found notes. These are all found notes, packaged. I’m going to do something with them one day, but they’re all packages of notes I’ve been collecting. And every note in the film is real, I didn’t fake any of them. We obviously chose what part of the story he would find them in, but yeah. Sometimes I thought it was a bit arch, like the “God Hates Me” one. I kind of regretted that later on, but then I think with the way we did the sound, we made it work. I don’t know, it’s hard when you’re doing that kind of thing. It’s hard for me to explain because the only thing we had was the three stages of this guy, this character, and too us he was three distinct characters. Never one thing. We wanted him to keep disappearing, and actually, sometimes I watch it and think “He should have disappeared a bit more,” because I wanted him to be kind of… well, that’s why I showed you that video of the Hawaiian streetsweeper, because… I also remember, I saw one in Sydney, a very busy section of Sydney, sweeping this really steep street. And it was like he wasn’t there. He’s mopping the footpath. Mopping it. Tourists and people are around buying bad, tacky things, and not one of them seems to notice that this guy is cleaning up their rubbish. And people tell me, “Oh, but we don’t have streetsweepers anymore,” and I go, “Well, who cleans the streets?” Magically it just cleans itself? And then ever since, friends of mine have seen the film and gone, “Oh yeah, I saw a streetsweeper the other day,” and I go “Yeah, they’re there! You just haven’t noticed them.” And people will literally… that couple, who walk across the road, that middle class couple who just peel off and go around him like he’s not there, I mean, that was not planned. We were looking at him, we were in a car park looking at him, and they just walk out. And I love the way they walk around him and go back as if he’s not there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Did you ask him to slow down or anything like that?

NM: I did ask him to slow down.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: I thought you may have done that.

(laughter)

NM: Because my thing about streetsweepers is that they have a route. They have a whole day to fill. And you watch them, they kill time. Like most people do. Most people if they’ve got an office job, it’s very easy, ’cause you can just google crap or you can look busy, but when you’re out on the street, it’s very… you know the thing, “Oh, Council workers, they just stand around doing nothing,” and I go “Hey, let’s go to the CBD and walk around inside all these offices and see who’s really working hard.

(laughter)

NM: They’re just visible. I remember one of the last meetings we had was in Sydney at King’s Cross, because Marin lives up there, and we were sitting there having a drink in this beer garden. And we could see these two streetsweepers; one was on the footpath in front of us and one was on the footpath on the other side, and they both had different techniques of cleaning the gutter and picking things up, and just pacing around. And they both had different broom techniques. Some are pushers, some are pullers. I could talk about the buggies forever, but yeah. Any other questions?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: Yeah, just on influences, were you influenced by any of the late 1920s city poetry kind of films? Like Symphony In Berlin or… ?

NM: Well, I like montage films. I like Man with a Movie Camera. I wanted it to be about the city as much as it was about the character. And I like that kind of silent, observational movie kind of thing. We had a character who had no… he had the scripted monologues, the poems Marin had written… That was my idea because when I worked in Sydney, I used to go and sleep on his floor. He acted in my first movie, playing a very different character, and he spent most of the last ten years working as a cleaner. He used to get up early to go to work and I’d be left in his apartment, and ahh, I’d ruffle through his CD collection or whatever, and ahh… the day I met him, ten years ago when I cast him, he was writing poems in these exercise books. But he never showed them to anyone. So I got to know him over a decade, and I knew he had all these books of poetry that never saw the light of day. So I knew he was going to be the streetsweeper. But then it occurred to me, why don’t I have him as this kind of amateur poet?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: Like a bush poet.

NM: Yeah. So that’s what he became. A lot of the people who did the voice-overs are just neighbours of mine and friends of my neighbours, and one of the guys wrote me this letter about his uncle… or his grandfather’s brother, I think. He was a swagman. He used to walk along the side of the highway, he was homeless. To him, this character was a swagman. I like making ambiguous films; you know, it’s up to you to watch and make up your own mind.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #5: At the start of the movie, the sound of the cart was quite loud and in-your-face, and then towards the end it sort of drifted off. Was that a conscious decision?

NM: We did no foley-ing. The thing was: Pip, who was the sound recordist did a brilliant job because it was all improvised and had very few second takes. Marin’s quite volatile, so sometimes he’d be whispering and sometimes he’d be screaming and muttering to himself. Pip was really good natured, and… classic sound thing, we all took it for granted that he was getting good sound. He put a microphone on Marin and also was booming it, so he had both. That’s why when we had that long shot from a distance, you can hear the old guy on the buggy. The intention originally was to go and foley – the rattling of the buggy and the wheels – and to layer it up so there was a very distinct sound to the buggy, Then Andy, who did the sound design and also did the sound design on my first feature film, he was working in Bollywood, and I sent him an email basically saying “Hey, you know that film I was talking about? Well, we shot it, and I’ve kind of been editing it, and ahh… do you know anyone who might be able to knock off the sound design in very short time for no money?”

(laughter)

NM: I was hoping he’d say, “Oh, just send it over, I’ll squeeze it in amongst all these Bollywood films,” because he has a studio. But he sent me an email back a couple of days later, saying “Oh, I’m coming to Australia, so I’ll come up to your place and I’ll have a look at it.” …I didn’t realise he actually paid for his air fare to come to Australia to DO the sound design. He stayed on my floor in my office for four weeks. While I came to TAFE he did some soundtracking, then when I got home, we did some more soundtracking, we did some drinking and then went to bed, and we did that for four weeks! And he did the sound design, too. He decided, “Nah, we don’t need foley, there’s enough character there. It’s not that kind of film.” Foley is when you hear the rustle of the clothes in those American movies; everything’s been added later on. We didn’t do any of that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #6: Some of the scenes not only made me feel quite removed, but that he was quite removed from himself.

NM: Yeah. I wanted to do a portrait of a man who wasn’t a superhero, who wasn’t a murderer, who wasn’t a blokey, aggressive bloke or a weak kind of… all of the cliches of masculine portrayal in cinema. I just didn’t want to make a film like that. A lot of men who worked on the film really responded to it. I heard one guy say “Now I want to go and live on the street!” and I said, “I don’t think it’s as easy as we showed it; we didn’t see the toileting, we didn’t see the other things…”

(laughter)

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: The fruit.

NM: Plenty of fruit! Everywhere you look, there’s fruit and fresh water. What I love about Newcastle compared to Sydney, with all the water restrictions, there’s very few bubblers and taps in public places. I do a lot of walking around Sydney; finding water on the street is a lot harder. However in Newcastle, there’s bubblers everywhere! Water is a big thing. Yes?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: How many takes did you do of the roundabout?

NM: One.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: One take?

NM: One take. And we had to hide that; in fact, we did -

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: There are no cuts in that, is there?

NM: No cuts. Actually, I tell a lie, that’s the second take. First take only went for five seconds, ’cause when he came walking down the street, we could see Megan, who was shooting the making of, behind a car.

(laughter)

NM: “You can’t stay there,” I said, so we had to start again. In terms of the monologue, that’s the only take we did.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: Was that scripted?

NM: Yeah. You can hear him; if you watch it again you can hear him mumbling, rehearsing it in some of the earlier scenes. But yeah, it was all planned. Everything he says, apart from when he was talking to pedestrians, everything he says was planned. When he was going to talk on the soundtrack, when he was going to speak for the first time on screen, when he was going to look at the camera; it was all structurally kind of… I wanted it to be like a Peter Greenway film in that way, it was very repetitious in terms of when he cleaned the pedestrian crossings, when he ate the fruit, when he did a poem, when he cleaned the yellow things, you know. Someone said to me, “I wondered who cleaned those!”

(laughter)

NM: I love crossings, I think crossings are revolutionary. I think we need more of them. I don’t understand why there isn’t one straight outside the TAFE here. Why do we allow cars to drive down Hunter St here at 60km/h? I just don’t get it, I just think, “It’s not a friggin’ highway.” They’re not going anywhere. The city’s empty. Why the fuck are we allowing traffic on four lanes going VROOM VROOM VROOOM? We should go out there with white paint and paint a friggin’ pedestrian crossing.

(laughter)

NM: Because it’s ridiculous. It’s just nuts.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Talk to Art!

NM: We’re all pedestrians. Some of us are motorists. But there’s more pedestrians than motorists. I don’t understand why we just let this city get raped by motor vehicles. Anyway, that’s a whole other thing.

(laughter)

NM: It’s very radical for this character to be a pedestrian who doesn’t use electricity in the 21st century, and that was the point, I wanted him to be like a 19th century character who’s actually by sheer existence not playing by the rules. He’s not driving one of these puffy 4-wheel drives that cost gazillions of dollars. He’s not using a computer or a mobile phone. And someone said, “Oh, it sounded to me when you pitched the film that it’s going to be like Kenny” and I said “Yeah, yeah! It’s going to be JUST like Kenny!”

(laughter)

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: So, this isn’t a deranged… he is deranged, but he’s just on the streets, cleaning the streets, he’s not being paid?

NM: I took a photo of a woman the other day in Beaumont St doing the same thing. Cleaning around the bottom of a tree, cleaning and tidying it up and putting it all in her buggy, then walking off. And it’s like, no-one’s paying her. But what’s normal?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: Where is he in the start of the film? Because what I took from it at first, though later on in the film it seems like a very different message is conveyed, is that seen to be more of his home? Like, I guess that’s just where he was swimming, and where he started off in the structure, but where was that? Uhh…

NM: Where? Uhh, physically, on a map?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: Physically and in terms of the story, both.

NM: Nobby’s. Nobby’s Beach.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: OK. But he doesn’t have a home, so he just lives around?

NM: Yeah. It’s funny, because I got a phone call a few months ago from someone who was supposed to edit the trailer. I ended up making the trailers myself; it took me a while to get around to it because I just couldn’t turn 75 minutes… or 10 hours of footage into 30 seconds, so it took me a while to get around to actually doing it. But ahh, she called me a couple of months ago and said, “Oh, I’m at so-and-so’s place, and I just wanted to know how the film ends!” And I said “What do you mean?” and she said, “Well, it ends with him hanging himself, doesn’t it? Or him drowning himself in the water?” And I said “…No?” “That’s how the film ends, doesn’t it?” Again I said, “No?”, then a friend came in and said “It ends with him swimming in the surf,” and I went “Yeah”. And this is somebody who watched the film closely who was supposed to be helping me make a trailer to represent the film. They hadn’t even seen the very last couple of shots of the film. I mean, it depends on how you read it, you read things differently.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: Actually, that last shot where we see him swimming in the surf, is that an actual flashback or is it the present?

NM: I don’t know.

(laughter)

NM: It’s what you want it to be. Well actually, someone said to me… the sandshoe he finds in the middle of the canal, with the pink lace in it? We found that. We found that in the canal. Not in that exact moment but a bit earlier. We brought it with us and then we added that bit where he does the monologue… he was always going to do that, but we made it that he was salvaging the shoelace out of this Dunlop Volley, which was similar to the ones he was wearing, and a friend of mine said “…that could be his, from the end, and it starts again, comes back around.” That was their interpretation. So there you go.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: How long was pre-production? You shot it in three days, but how long was the pre-production?

NM: Oh, you know, I started writing the script, and I rang an editor friend of mine to try and get him to edit the film. He’s a big feature film editor, he edited my first movie. He said “Ahh yeah, I remember you talking about that when we were editing Fresh Air,” which was around 1998. And it was going to be like a Taxi Driver kind of film, or Naked, that Mike Leigh film; a guy wanders around a city, he’s kind of like an outsider. And there are those similarities, with something like Taxi Driver, where there’s this guy at nighttime who sees the world differently and then gets taken for granted by people.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: You made a reference to the rain washing the -

NM: Yeah. There was that, and then we wanted him to be this clowny, kind of upbeat comical nice guy thing, like in the opening scene where he puts the cream on his face. We wanted it to be Australian without being… you know, there are all these clichés. Put Bryan Brown in something and have him going “Ey, g’day mate” and you’re like *makes vomiting gesture*

(laughter)

NM: We didn’t want that. That’s why people overseas seemed to like it; it looks like Australia but it doesn’t look like Sydney.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: One more question, how big can you blast that up on the screen?

NM: Not with that projector. When we had the cast and crew screening in Sydney, we hired a projector for $900, just the projector, and it was big. And if Greater Union and all those people want to buy a big-mother-projector, I’ll go pay money to watch things digital. But if they’re going to project things on top of the range domestic video projectors like this, I’m not going to pay them to do it, because -

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Is that what they’re doing right now?

NM: Some of them are starting to do it. With this huge projector, we saw exactly what we saw when we graded the film. We spent a lot of money with the grader in a professional suite making the film look good. That’s why I’ve gone to the trouble to black it all out, Even watching it now I was like “euuugh”, because I know there were things we shot at nighttime with no lights that need to be seen, like the shots of him in the surf. If that’s washed out you don’t see it. It’s very dark, and we went to a lot of trouble with the grading. We didn’t want it to look like video. I for so long resisted making a film on video. Also, we had the best catering on this shoot. Every two and a half hours we had a half hour break to follow, so we had breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner on location, all these locations were within 20 minutes of my house, and it’s like, people think you have to go to the country to shoot something that looks like it’s in the country. I’m a lazy guy.

Oh and also, Dom and I really enjoyed the movie. He is clearly an experienced director; there is never a dull shot in the film, which is an incredible achievement considering how quickly they had to shoot it. The pacing is hypnotic, the soundtrack fit well (it was probably at its best during the train scenes) and Marin Mimica’s performance was impressive. Also, as Novocastrians, it was surreal seeing so many recognisable areas of Newcastle. In fact, Neil shot a scene in the exact same place I did for my upcoming short film. I swear it’s the same angle and everything. But anyway, stay tuned for an actual review sometime next week.

Liam O’Brien

http://www.projectorheads.com/2009/08/streetsweeper-qa/

14 August 2009

These photos taken by Paul Henderson at the TAFE Front Room Gallery Screening Hunter Street Newcastle NSW.

The high flying life of a difficult but award winning Australian filmmaker.

I invited a bunch of industry types, but it seems that Cannes provides a pretty big distraction! If the insiders aren’t over there, they are preoccupied with it here!

I am also hoping that the fruit shops of Melbourne’s CBD are closed for the day, because I don’t want any fruit available for the discussion after the film! We could just end up dodging some missiles from the audience. TR

I have posted the three designs here, but I reckon we’ll use the black and white one, because it’s really striking and is going to be the best for our limited production style…. i.e. it’s black and white (ish!). That way I can make it when I need to…

I like them all, so here they are in their glory… remember though, that these are only sketches! TR