Acclaimed director sends ‘The Leading Man’ overseas

Monday, March 9, 1998

Acclaimed director sends ‘The Leading Man’ overseas

FILM: Australian sensation hopes Americans embrace his latest
work, which contains universal themes

By Tommy Nguyen

Daily Bruin Contributor

It’s a shame that some things as small as continents and oceans
should separate people. Fortunately, good movies travel pretty
well, and we’re lucky that a handful of films by director John
Duigan have been delivered to this side of the hemisphere.

Still, Duigan’s status in mainstream America doesn’t come close
to what he has in his native Australia, where two of his films have
won Australian Film Institute Awards (AFI, the country’s equivalent
to the Academy Awards) for best picture. However, with his latest
picture, "The Leading Man," Duigan gets another shot at penetrating
geographical barriers.

"I think the film has the capacity to cross over. Audiences (in
Australia) have really enjoyed the film," Duigan says. "It’s just a
matter if we can get enough people in the theaters and start a word
of mouth."

The two films that won Duigan the AFI best picture awards are
two of the most richly observed dramas about angst-ridden
adolescent love: "The Year My Voice Broke" and its sequel
"Flirting." Told through the eyes of a young boy named Danny
Embling, a soft-spoken geek who dreams of poetry and sweethearts
while being the school’s punching bag, both films explore with
lilting magic the perfect innocence of sexual love – in all of its
fervent tenderness and quiet audacities.

Duigan would carry this subject over to the adult side of human
relationships, more explicitly and more playfully, in "Sirens," a
movie famous for having Elle MacPhearson cavorting about in the
nude. And Duigan even takes note of the darker, more carnal search
of sexual desire in his film "Wide Sargasso Sea," a boiling
over-the-top adaptation of the same-name novel.

"Sexuality is a huge part of our lives," Duigan says, "So if
your making a film about characters, it’s inevitable."

He explains it further. "Probably at all times in history, but
maybe much more now, people feel a great amount of confusion, a
questioning of male and female roles, perhaps brought on by the old
extremes of puritanism."

In his films, Duigan has a charming way of merrily sticking out
his tongue at the respective social norms which dictate sexual
morality. Though most of the stuffy societies his films deal with
are set in Australia, Duigan wants to locate a certain hypocrisy
that is universal rather than specific.

"Actually, I think Australia is pretty relaxed country when it
comes to sexual morality, probably more so than most countries I’m
familiar with," Duigan points out. "But essentially, I think that
people on a more universal level find it quite difficult to
negotiate their way through the given confusion of prevailing
images.

"Countries like the U.S., for example, where sex is used in a
great amount of advertising: you pick up any magazine and there it
is," Duigan continues. "Yet a lot of people feel a great amount of
guilt when it comes to their own (sexual impulses), uncertain how
to relate to one another. It’s an important area of human
engagement for the arts to comment on."

Duigan’s "The Leading Man" seems to also be commenting on the
"human engagement" problems of this argument with a more
concentrated focus, rather than the peripheral social critiquing he
usually dabbles with.

The movie follows a playwright named Felix Webb (played by
Lambert Wilson), supposedly England’s greatest living playwright
and on the verge of having one of his masterpieces staged: a play
about an assassin unexpectedly falling in love with the woman he’s
supposed to kill.

Oddly, Felix’s play would find some footing in his own private
stage. He hires a hunky actor, who ironically plays the assassin in
Felix’s play, to get rid of his wife. Felix doesn’t want the wife
killed, however, but rather seduced so that she would leave their
marriage freely. The feckless Felix feels too much moral guilt to
leave his family on his own terms, even though his lover has been
waiting for him for quite some time.

"I found a lot of ironic humor in the script. The concept of a
writer who starts to believe he can manipulate the world the way he
can manipulate the characters of his plays – the Faustian dimension
of the script I found very interesting," Duigan comments.

The script was written by his sister, Virginia Duigan, and the
story indeed creates more connections between Felix’s life and art,
that is until all the connections snap at the film’s sobering
conclusion. But Duigan found his sister’s script attractive beyond
its storyline.

"I also thought this would be fun to do because I like ensemble
casts. And we’ve got together a very interesting group of actors
for the film," he explains.

The ensemble cast includes "Jefferson in Paris" alum Thandie
Newton, a Duigan film regular ("Flirting" and "The Journey of
August King") who plays Felix’s lover in the movie. Later this year
she has a starring role in Jonathan Demme’s highly anticipated
"Beloved."

"I think she’s as good as it gets," Duigan says of the rising
young actress.

International star Anna Galiena, whose heart-pounding radiance
in "The Hairdresser’s Husband" made it one of the stand-out films
of 1992, plays the wife in "The Leading Man" with equal
elegance.

"I wanted to have someone who was innately sensual in herself,"
Duigan says of his casting of Galiena, "so one could draw this arc
of this woman seduced by this grotesque manipulation, but then
finds herself completely liberated anyway."

But the most interesting choice was Jon Bon Jovi, who plays the
"leading" man both in Felix’s play and in his wife’s unexpected
romantic affair. Although Jovi has already entered the acting world
in such films as "Moonlight and Valentino," Duigan was unaware of
these talents.

"When Jon was first suggested, I didn’t take the idea too
seriously – as far as I knew he was a rock-n-roll star," Duigan
admits. "But I discovered that he had a real understanding of the
character from the first time we talked about it. And I thought
this could be good, the fact that he’s a star from another medium
gives his role a little extra bite, because (the character in the
movie) is a star from Hollywood coming over to London as well."

But Jovi isn’t the only talent of the movie who’s involved in
ironic exchange between life and art. For the first time, Duigan
will soon direct a studio project, for MGM. This resembles Felix’s
decision to a write a screenplay for Paramount at the end of "The
Leading Man." Perhaps this will give Duigan the opportunity to
reach a wider audience in the United States.

"(Working for the studios) was something I resisted until quite
recently … but I’m actually looking forward to the opportunity to
do something with a larger budget than the ones I’ve had before,"
Duigan says.

Let’s just hope that directors travel as well as films do when
coming to the States.

FILM: "The Leading Man" is currently playing at the Mann Theater
in Westwood.

BMG Independents

Award-winning director John Duigan (right) directs "The Leading
Man, " starring Jon Bon Jovi.

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