In a Savage Land

Cinefile, July 9, 1998
Bennett 'Mad' To Do It
A.L.U.

"In A Savage Land", a love triangle set against an anthropological background 50 years ago, is set on the Trobriand Islands in New Guinea, where a newly married couple (Stange and Donovan) of anthropolgists crashes into the different culture of the islands, and the young wife falls in love with an American pearl trader, (played by Rufus Sewell, who took out an Australian passport on the strength of his convict ancestors; and his Australian born father).

The 22 year old Stange is making her feature debut, and her character will age a dozen years in the course of the story.

Trobriand has no water, no electricity, no accomodation

The enormity of the task facing Bennett and his co-writer/wife Jennifer, shared by the cast and crew, was pressed home when Bennett explained the production had to hire a small cruiser and anchor it off the island main beach for accomodation. Trobriand has no water, no electricity, no accomodation....... but it does have rats, pigs and cockroaches, and is strikingly beautiful.

Asked how they will cope with the isolation and difficult conditions, Donovan quipped that he was doing the movie because he needed some isolated time with a small group of people, and he was "determined not to become an arsehole."

"This film has to be done properly, not Hollywoodised." Bill Bennett

Bennett said that despite some pressures to shoot the film in a less risky and more accessible location - such as Fiji or Vanuatu - in the end "all the investors understood that this film has to be done properly, not Hollywoodised."

The investors include PolyGram Filmed Entertainment for Australian rights, Beyond Films for international sales rights, German film investor, Hollywood Partners, South Australian Film Corporation, and the Australian Film Finance Corporation; who was very supportive from the very first draft, said Bennett.

"What is primitive and what is civilised."

A love story and a cultural adventure, Bennett said the film asks "what happens when a couple in what we now call an old fashioned marriage intersects with a matrifilial society.......the film also questions what is primitive and what is civilised."

The six week shoot on the islands will be followed by a two week shoot in Adelaide.

Sydney Morning Herald April 8, 1999
No sex please, we're Aussie filmmakers

Bill Bennett wanted no misunderstandings when he was filming on the Island of Love. Howard Feinstein reports. Film-maker Bill Bennett sits atop a large boulder half-buried in the beach of Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands. The shore and the dense greenery behind are nearly singed by the harsh tropical sun.

He wears a wide-brimmed hat and strong sunblock, and long sleeves to ward off mosquitoes bearing malaria and, occasionally, Japanese encephalitis. He doesn't seem to mind. "Everywhere I walk, I look up and see lizards copulating on walls," he says. "I look down, and I see butterflies copulating on leaves. This is, after all, the Island of Love." Island of Love is the term coined by the Polish anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, in his 1929 book The Sexual Life of Savages, an account of his field-work in the Trobriands from 1915 to 1918. An avid observer of the native population's sexual rituals and mores, he described their explanation of the sex drive: "The eyes are the seat of desire and lust. They are the cause of sexual passion. From the eyes, desire is carried to the brain... and thence spreads all over the body." Bennett first heard the expression at the age of eight, after coming across pictures his war-photographer father took around New Guinea. "I heard that the women were incredibly promiscuous, and thought, `Wow, that sounds amazing'." His decision 36 years later to shoot a movie in the Trobriands may be an example of what Freud called sublimation. The camera lens is, after all, an extension of the eye; it allows us to be voyeurs, looking into intimate relationships we are not otherwise privy to.

Bennett has begun shooting his $10 million "In a Savage Land" just after the annual yam harvest, a festive period when, according to Malinowski, both men and women freely take multiple sexual partners. To prevent any misunderstandings, he has put in all 35 contracts of his cast and limited crew that no sexual liaisons with locals are permitted during the 12-week shoot. The irony is twofold: locals consider dim-dims (foreigners) unappealing; and, thanks to El Niņo, the yam harvest fell so short on this corally, vegetable-unfriendly island, that nobody celebrated.

A former journalist and documentary-maker, Bennett has created "a fusion between documentary and feature forms" - reality-based fiction, if you like - using foreign actors and crew, but with locals as extras and in small parts. With the help of his wife and co-producer, the actress Jennifer Cluff, Bennett wrote a story about a couple of anthropologists who leave Australia for a prolonged stay in the Trobriands in the 1930s, two decades after Malinowski arrived - a credible, if sometimes overused, narrative device to throw two conflicting cultures together. Most of the cast and crew stay on a tacky catamaran, which the Bennetts call The Love Boat, hauled up from Cairns and anchored offshore.

Bennett, his family, and a few key crew members are ensconced inland at a lodge, a minimal facility without hot water, and with virtually the only toilets on Kiriwina. Both boat and lodge are in marked contrast to the open wood-and-thatch huts that form concentric rings in each village around the taller, elaborately decorated yam hut, storehouse for the villagers' main staple and their spiritual centre. "The culture is everywhere," says Bennett. "The way they dress, the things they carry, the colour of their lips. To try to recreate it some other place would have looked so artificial. If this were done by Hollywood, we'd be shooting in Hawaii."

Following the debacle of his Hollywood movie "Two If By Sea", Bennett, who had originally conceived of "In a Savage Land" as an American project, decided to find all of his financing in Australia, with Beyond Films as backer. "We had enormous pressure from the financiers, the completion-bond people, to shoot some place safe, but many of our story points are predicated on the peculiarities of this culture. I'm interested in the inherent darkness of the place, the nooks and crevices where all sorts of things can happen - the crevices of the psyche. We wanted to give the film a dirty look. But every place we put the camera is so beautiful that we use seven filters. We wanted to take the romanticism out, to diffuse the sentiment, to avoid the cliches of the tropical islands. At the same time, we want to give it a caress. We want to avoid anything aggressive, because this is about a woman who finds her sensual self."

That woman is a young anthropologist, Evelyn, played by 24-year-old Australian Maya Stange in her first major feature role, following her success on stage in the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Closer. "We cast the net wide," says Bennett. "It came down to Nicole Kidman and Maya. Nicole didn't want to be separated from her family for so long. Finally, I drew it to a close; I had to lock down casting." Just out of school, headstrong Evelyn arrives with her former teacher and new husband, Philip, played by American actor Martin Donovan ("The Portrait of a Lady", "Simple Men"), a stiff doctrinaire who tries to keep her in what he deems her place, both academically and sexually. She is at first repelled by Mick, a misanthropic American pearl trader and brooding widower. He is portrayed by British-Australian actor Rufus Sewell, who has starred in such movies as "Dark City" and "Cold Comfort Farm" and, on television, Middlemarch. Her contempt turns to passion, provoked as much by her husband's oppressive behaviour as by her chance observation near the water of an indigenous couple making love, the female in full control. Unfortunately, the pair caught in the act see Evelyn, and the young local woman suffers severe consequences. According to Malinowski, "Sexual intercourse, to be in accordance with tribal sanctions, must be carried on within the strictest limits of privacy and decorum". Evelyn's action breaks a strict taboo. It also propels the story, which involves an illicit affair, native gang-rape of one of the white men, appropriation of native customs and hiding from invading Japanese soldiers.

"Evelyn is a strong woman, but she's responsible for a lot of the tragedies in the film," says the hazel-eyed Stange, sitting in a chair inside her tiny cabin on the catamaran. "She does challenge the social order, but she's flawed. I love the way Bill has made her far from politically correct."

"There's a lot of Evelyn in me," says Bennett. "When I was young I was brash, immature and pigheaded. But there's also a lot of Philip in me: I'm more of a chauvinist than I'd like to admit, more patronising and arrogant. And there's Mick in me as well. I'm romantic and passionate and a chickenshit. Mick is scared, and I'm scared."

The leads have formed a bond highly unusual even for a location shoot. Being confined to a boat after nightfall helps. They eat dinner together, then sit up on the small part of the deck in front of the steering cabin to gaze at the amazing night sky. This is the bonding of foreigners in an alien, pinch-me environment.

Bennett is quick to point out the down side of the culture. "Have you ever seen the Simpsons episode, Hollywood Goes to Springfield? These sharp, money-savvy dudes from Hollywood go to the Simpsons' hometown to make a movie and get fleeced. Then they go scuttling back to Hollywood with their tails between their legs. That's how I feel about this project. Both the locals and the PNG Government are incredibly difficult to negotiate with. Corrupt politicians want to scam us at every turn. They're moving to have us deported: we refused to give a politician a bribe. Some of the locals have been putting up roadblocks and puncturing our tyres. They say we're making a pornographic film, but they just want more money. They could teach Hollywood how to barter and negotiate."

At the same time, he questions the morality of filming here. "We are contributing enormously to this very depressed economy, and we're skilling people. But we're also bringing 21st century technology to this place that hasn't changed in 100 years, which strikes me as so bizarre that it borders on the obscene. There's a side of me that feels we're not much different from the athletic-shoe manufacturers that go into South American countries and use sweat labour. "Jenny and I decided that the only way to shoot this movie was like Kiss or Kill, with a small crew and a hand-held camera, the way an ethnographer would have done it 40 years ago. We couldn't bring in cranes, dollies, and big lighting set-ups, which would have acted like a straitjacket for the actors."

The crew are shooting for several days at Mick's beachfront wooden shack, an authentic masculine hideaway on stilts, courtesy of production designer Nick McCallum. It is replete with cans marked Tasmania Fancy Apples and McVitie & Price High Class Biscuits; on one shelf sits the mortar and pestle and lime pot used for the chewing of buai, or betel nut, a favourite pastime among the locals, who, like Sewell off-camera, appreciate its euphoric effect.

In one intimate scene, Mick and Evelyn, in the first stages of their mutual seduction, dance "Begin the Beguine" to an old record. Afterwards, a washing scene. A local woman, named Big Rose in real life, commands her pretty young daughter (her actual daughter, Rose) not to go into the water, for it will "make babies". Rose's father, John, tells me later that many such beliefs have, under the influence of missionaries, fallen into disrepute. "Half the island has adopted a religion, mainly Catholic. Traditionally, there was no real religion: the people followed the orders of the paramount chief, who was not considered a deity."

"There is a cultural benefit to our being here," says Bennett. "We're recreating customs and practices that are largely forgotten. They will last on film."

The movie will also preserve traditional music. Melbourne-based composer David Bridie and Papua New Guinean-born consultant Ben Hakalitz of the Aboriginal rock band Yothu Yindi ask a youth group leader in one village to arrange auditions for a few singers and dancers for the film's soundtrack. The next day, on a rough field, hundreds of villagers gather to perform, or just to watch. To the accompaniment of a reed flute, several old women sit on the ground and chant an ancient song of mourning Afterwards, handsome, muscular teenage boys form couples, one partner wearing nothing but a banana leaf, the other clothed in a woman's coloured grass skirt. They dance and sing to a traditional mating song, strongly thrusting their pelvises at each other. These boys are not innocent: they know. Unlike the island's young women, whom the evangelicals have made shy about their bodies, they haven't yet accepted the notion of shame.

Bennett is, for the most part, right. This is, still, the Island of Love.