The release of Damage has been a long time coming. You completed the film quite a while ago. I’m curious to know more about the timeline of the film. This was shot before COVID, right?

We shot the film prior to 2020, then the post-production was interrupted by COVID. We screened an unfinished version of Damage at the Adelaide Film Festival in 2020, which was in October. My mother plays the character of Esther, and she had cancer. I’m really glad that we screened it at that festival because she was able to come and see it, even though the sound design was done. It was really fabulous that she was able to experience that, seeing the film in that context, because she’s done an incredible job. After the Adelaide Film Festival of 2020 we slowed down because of COVID, and also because of course, I had the death of my mother. And we then did the sound design and the final mix. We cut a couple of scenes, we recut, and then we did the post-production.

I was fascinated to learn that your co-lead here, Imelda Bourke, is your mother. Is this the first time you’ve worked together creatively?

Yes, absolutely. And this was her first feature film. Mark Constable cast my mother in a short film called Breathe. That was her only acting role before Damage. I always knew she was an actress. I always knew she could do it. She was a very popular jazz singer. She was fabulous on stage. She was very at home performing, and I had no doubts that she’d be able to do this role. And I wanted her to do it because a lot of Australian actresses speak with the plum in their mouth, and she doesn’t. I really love her as a character, and she’s got a really expressive face, as does Ali. So when you are shooting something in a car where you’ve got to use closeup all the time, you really need to use the face as a palette. And I just knew from the word go that those two faces could carry it, because I could look at those two faces for hours. I really could. I never got sick of watching that film right through all those years and years of production.

How was the experience for you to work with your mother? Does she take direction well when it’s coming from her daughter?

[Laughs]. I’ve never been asked that question before. Funnily enough, she was always so spot on that I actually didn’t have to direct her that much. She really understood the character. In fact, when we went over the script in the early days, she was able to pick weak spots in the script and say, “Are you sure about this line?” And we’d adapt it and change it. She really did understand where the film was going. In the beginning, we’d often did too many takes. It was a big learning curve for me as well. But look, she did take direction well. She got a bit impatient with me at times, but it was difficult being out late at night. I mean, she was eighty-nine when we finished shooting. It was difficult for her. But she took direction very well. We were a real team. It was fabulous. I enjoyed every minute of it. [Laughs].

Throughout this experience, did you learn things about your mother that you may not have known prior?

I loved seeing her work with Ali. She just connected with him on a human level immediately. The two of them got along very well. You can’t force or fabricate those things. I think that was a key to the success of the film, actually; the fact that those two found great solace in each other when things were dragging on, and they’d chat away. I’ve got lots of footage, offcuts where we are driving, and they’re just chatting, and we haven’t got the mic on in the car. And you just see them chatting away. They really did create a wonderful team.

Not only is this your mother’s first acting role, it’s also the first acting gig for her co-star, Ali Al Jenabi. How long before you started shooting did these two meet?

I saw Ali in 2015 when his book called The People Smuggler: The True Story of Ali Al Jenabi by Robin de Crespigny was launched at the Sydney Writers Festival. I went to it and saw him on stage with the writer, answering questions about his life and the book. When I saw him speaking about his life, I just knew immediately, this is the guy for my film. This is him. And it took me some time to persuade him. At one point, he said no, and I had to go looking at other people, and I just couldn’t take anyone else seriously. I was really committed to Ali. I went back to him and said, “Look, Ali, these are the people that I’ve spoken to,” and I showed him some actors that he might recognise. And I said, “I don’t want to work with them. I want to work with you.” And then he agreed to do it. I just didn’t let him say no. And then we flew him down to Adelaide to do an improvisation with Imelda in her garage in the car, and it was really beautiful. It was great. I remember one of our producers looking at me going, “Yep, this is good.” We were just filming it with our phones. But you could really feel the silence between them, which was really important. Neither of them are people who have to fill the silence. They’re quite strong individuals in their own rights. There was this lovely kind of weight about their silence.

How prepared were you if Ali said no?

I will tell you frankly, when I downloaded this film into my mind, I personally made a commitment to making this film then and there. I felt like the film had already been made, and I had to remember how I’d done it. I was in a time warp. It was so clear that Ali was the person in this film that I never contemplated seriously doing it with anyone else. It’s kind of a bit weird as a film. It’s certainly not a traditional film industry model of working. I come from a background in theatre and community-based theatre, and I’ve done a lot of performance work inside communities where you meet wonderful people who venture into storytelling and performing. I just really love that space. I love that sense of being that you find in some people, and Ali has bucket loads of it. It’s really extraordinary.

Damage is a powerful two-hander. Tell us about developing this story.

I was working for months and months with a group of women, particularly one elderly woman who’s amazing, a refugee advocate named Narita Rossell. I would go to her place every Tuesday, and she would tell me all the stories, show me all the case studies. She had been working for many years with a small group of other people, most of them retired, and they were devoted to not just making it nicer out there in the detention centre for refugees, but really helping refugees get representation, helping them get media, helping them be able to use the very few resources that were available to them. When I heard the stories that this woman told me, I was pretty overwhelmed. You would have to make a ten-part miniseries to cover just the beginning of these stories. They were so unbelievable. I knew as an Australian that not many Australians know this stuff. We don’t know about this. How do you tell the story? It’s just so extraordinary. I must have soaked in so much material that one night I had a dream of two people in this taxi, and he was an illegitimate. He wasn’t the real taxi driver, and she had forgotten where she was going, so they were in limbo. And I wrote down the twenty pages in the middle of the night, and even some of the dialogue in the film is exactly word-for-word as it was in that dream. So it’s just that mighty power of the unconscious in the act of creation. I tend to surround myself with an experience: like the experience of being with Ali, of talking to him, the experience of being with those refugee advocates, the experience of going into Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, the experience of reading a lot of the material, and then you just trust the process that you don’t have to work too hard. It will come because you have a desire to communicate something very, very important. It’s hard to do that within the framework of dramatic convention because we’re so used to entertainment. We’re so used to the beginning, middle, and the end, and everything neatly concealed within those forms that in the end of the film, during the titles, when Ali and Esther look up at the camera inside the taxi, and she asks, “What’s that?” And he says, “It’s a camera”. She says, “What?” We all know what a camera represents. In our day and age, surveillance, the construction of narrative, how people are framed, who’s got the power to film them and frame who they are and define them. So I just wanted to disrupt that neat little kind of narrative with that. I love the films of Michael Kerr who’s someone who really challenges the notion of believability in cinema and resolution and cohesive psychological characters. I like that these two characters are more like Beckettian Clowns. It’s more like Samuel Beckett’s world where they’re a series of ideas. They’re symbols as characters. They’re bigger than just two individuals who’ve got backstories in psychology. They’re actually speaking about our times. So that’s why the language is very natural, but it’s also very elliptical. It’s quite ambiguous.

Many Australian films have centred around the refugee’s journey. How do you think Ali, the character, is unique compared to some of those other films?

Matthew, have I told you how hard it was to make this film? [Laughs]. I haven’t sat down in front of a TV with a cold beer for about ten years. [Laughs]. It’s still turning out like that. But going back many years, one of my favourite films is Lucky Miles. I think it really is a wonderful, wonderful film which gets the message right. I really want to see Shayda because I’ve heard that’s another accurate portrayal of the refugee journey.

It’s not easy for anyone to put a feature film together. Was the biggest challenge here finding the right crew that believed in your vision?

Yeah, that was big. I didn’t have a first AD. That’s always a real problem. I didn’t have a production manager, and I didn’t have an art department, and I had to do all three of those things myself. So that was really, really difficult. It’s kind of impossible, really.

And you produced the film as well, didn’t you?

I did. When I started out, I asked over twenty producers, and everyone knocked it back. I wasn’t prepared to put this one in the drawer, along with a few other projects I’ve written. And I just thought, “No, I’ve got to do this myself.” So I raised a hundred thousand dollars through crowdfunding, and I thought I could make the film for that. And I started, and then I ran out of money. Eventually, Sharon Cleary and Peter Thurmer came on board as co-producers. They stuck with me the whole way, which was a great relief, but I couldn’t actually get any support from mainstream producers. It’s hard to sell a film like this, and I totally get that. It’s also really hard for a producer to take on someone who’s been in Australia for over fifteen years and still doesn’t have a visa. He’s on a pending removal visa. It’s hard for a producer to write contracts with somebody like that. And my mother starting to shoot at age eighty-eight. It would’ve been a nightmare for a real producer. So I had to take great risks. I just had that dream. I had the script. I believed in it. I just couldn’t put it down.

I’d love to know more about shooting the car wash sequence. Was this the toughest scene to shoot for you?

Originally in the script, she actually did drive through the carwash for him when he asked her. So they changed seats, and then she drove it through. It was the first scene I shot in the whole shoot. We had a break because I had a job at the time where I would have to go off and do my job over two months. I took the rushes with me, and in the end, I just couldn’t accept the scene, so we shot it again where she refuses to drive the car for him, and he has to drive it himself. Obviously, it was a much better dramatic choice. But I have to admit that because I was the writer, the director, the producer, normally you can’t do things like that, but it just needed to be done. So I changed the script and it just worked so much better. But having shot that scene first, it was my big learning curve, and I did some rewriting after it.

Was it a technical shoot as far as the actual car wash went? Did they actually go through a carwash?

We went through the carwash quite a few times. We had two cameras, one outside, one inside. Most of it was shot on one or two nights. But there were a lot of pickups to get the water on the windscreen and stuff like that. When you go through a car wash, it’s such a visual world, and it was really hard to please when it came to getting the impact of the metaphor of torture water. It was a very, very difficult process. Look, when you have no money, you really have to rely on storytelling. I would’ve liked to use a different lens and shoot it in slow motion with a different camera. We were very limited with what we could do. Everything came down to budget. Ali’s performance was quite difficult for him as well because he was very generous. He never speaks about his experiences. But if you read about his life in that book, and he spent a very long time inside Abu Grey prison. He spent a long time in detention in Australia. The guy hasn’t had an easy time of life, and so it was very, very generous of him to share such emotional depths in his performance.

Now that you’ve had this experience of making your first film, how eager are you to jump onto your next film?

I’ve got projects that I want to do. One always has, but it was very difficult to make Damage. I do want to take a break, and I’m really using the distribution as my holiday because I’m really loving sharing the film with audiences, having Q&As, traveling around. But I do have another project in mind that I’m working on.