COLD COMFORT

To mark 30 years since the Australian premiere of the award-winning film The Tale of Ruby Rose, the cast and crew reflect on the challenges and thrills of shooting in the freezing Tasmanian highlands

Cast and crew return for the 30th anniversary of award-winning Tasmanian Gothic film The Tale of Ruby Rose which was shot in the freezing wilderness of the highlands

Life imitated art in some uncomfortable ways for the cast and crew of the iconic film The Tale of Ruby

Rose, which was shot in the Tasmanian highlands 30 years ago.

This story of a young woman living in isolation in the wilderness, battling memories of past trauma as well as a crippling fear of the dark, won four prizes at the 1987 Venice Film Festival, including best actress for Melita Jurisic and best director for Roger Scholes, as well as a nomination for the prestigious Golden Lion Award. It also went on to pick up an AFI Award for Best Original Music Score.

Set in the 1930s and made on a budget of just $1.2 million, the film showcased the Tasmanian wilderness in a way that few outside the state had seen, and has gone on to become an Australian classic.

But during principal location filming, high up in the Walls of Jerusalem, the cast and crew found themselves plunged into a situation that would have tested the hardiest of hikers.

It was the winter of 1986, the year of record snowfalls across Tasmania.

“It was the biggest dump of snow in 25 years, about a metre of snow fell over two days,” director Roger Scholes says. “At least it meant we had snow everywhere for filming, which was beautiful, but it was intensely cold and the weather was too bad for helicopters to fly our supplies in, so everything had to be carried in.”

The lead actor remembers the big chill vividly. “It was the coldest winter in 200 years – or so the locals told me,” says Jurisic, who played the title role of Ruby Rose. “And it was impossible not to know it, as we were living pretty much like the characters we were playing. I don’t remember ever being warm enough to get any sleep at night or warm enough to stop shivering during the days.”

Actor Chris Haywood, who played Ruby’s husband Henry, recalls the supply situation. ”We didn’t have enough food and we were getting a bit low, but we had to wait for walkers to bring our next lot of supplies in, so we even resorted to eating wallabies,” he says.

“There was a little vegie patch that had been planted next to the hut where we were filming. It had been planted several months earlier so the plants would look established and mature for filming. So I picked a whole heap of vegetables from the sides of the plants that wouldn’t be visible on camera and we cooked those up to make soup.

“As part of the job we were being taught by survival experts about how people survived in these conditions back in the 1930s, which was quite fitting. We were all dressed in period costume, which was completely inadequate. The crew were in Antarctic gear, looking happy and warm while we couldn’t feel our own feet.

“Even sitting around the fire in the shelter of a big rock waiting for the next shot to be set up, one guy was picking up red hot embers and rolling them in his hands to stay warm, and he couldn’t feel it.”

While the cast and crew certainly suffered for their art, the sacrifice was worthwhile, with the film going on to become one of the most significant made in Australia, memorable for its striking visuals, Tasmanian gothic tone and solid dramatic performances.

And now, 30 years since its Australian premiere in 1988, the cast and crew are reuniting for a special anniversary celebration in Hobart, featuring screenings of the film, Q&A sessions and conversations with cast and crew (including Scholes, Jurisic, Haywood and Rod Zuanic), and a special exhibition and workshop at the Mawson Place Waterside Pavilion showcasing

Clockwise from main image: Lead actor Melita Jurisic in a scene from The Tale of Ruby Rose; film director Roger Scholes, whose work helped introduce the world to the beauty and brutality of the Tasmanian wilderness; actor Chris Haywood in a scene from the award-winning 1988 film; and the crew working in the freezing conditions of Tasmania’s highlands during filming. the crafts and skills of European settlers in the highlands in the 1930s.

When Scholes, who now lives in Taroona and is still making films, wrote and directed The Tale of Ruby Rose, it was not only the Tasmanian filmmaker’s first feature film, it was one of very few feature films to have ever been shot in Tasmania.

It came at a time when film funding was relatively easy to secure in Australia, thanks to the generous “10BA” tax incentives provided in the late 1980s. So it was one of a small boom of Australian films to be released around the late ’80s and early ‘90s, the period helping forge the careers of household names such as directors George Miller and Baz Luhrmann.

Most of these films depicted a conventional vision of Australia with settings like Sydney and red-sandy deserts, or were war dramas such as The Lighthorsemen. The Tale of

Ruby Rose was set in a very different landscape, one that very few outside the island state would even recognise as Australian. Tasmania’s daunting and rugged landscape had featured in a handful of documentaries, and even in some locations for the silent 1927 film For the Term of His Natural Life, but it had never been shown quite like this.

“I had been a member of the Wilderness Society since the Franklin River blockade and I had made four or five films for them, based around showcasing Tasmania’s wilderness,” Scholes says. “So Ruby Rose was very much an opportunity for me to really showcase the Walls of Jerusalem.

“I took my idea to the Tasmanian Development Authority – who were the only government funding option at the time, before Screen Tasmania existed – and they just laughed at me. In the end the funding to make it came from Victoria and some other investors, and because of that there was a big push to shoot it in the Victorian Alps, but the story was so intimately connected to 1930s Tasmania and the Tasmanian landscape, I insisted on shooting it all here.”

Inspiration for the story came from a project Scholes worked on in the 1970s to collect and record the oral histories from people living in remote areas. As he conducted his interviews, Scholes noticed just how many of his interviewees were women.

“I was hearing stories about these remarkable people who survived with so very little and lived these remarkable lives, but the stories you hear and the photos you see are always about the men,” Scholes says.

“If you ever see a woman in one of those photos, she will be in the background, out of focus or peeking out a window. But it was the women who carried the stories on after the men had gone, they survived as well, so I wanted to tell the story of these women.”

Around the same time, Scholes was also working for the Melbourne University on a research project about phobias, when he heard the story of an incident in the 1940s where a large clump of black and orange caterpillars fell from a tree and into a baby’s pram – 20 years later, as a young woman, that individual still had a deeply rooted phobia of animals, refusing to leave the house. That early childhood experience of trauma formed an integral part of Ruby Rose’s backstory.

The Tale of Ruby Rose was also the first feature film for lead actor Jurisic, who went on to appear in another Tasmanian film,

The Sound of One Hand Clapping, in 1998, and most recently played one of the Vuvalini women in Mad Max: Fury Road. The Croatian-born actor was in her early 20s at the time and says the experience of filming in the Tasmanian wilderness was one of the most memorable experiences of her life. She even had the odd run-in with the local fauna.

“I had a glimpse of a paradise that Ruby herself must have known in spite of her having been debilitated by her traumas and her fears. And the wild animals were everywhere, seemingly not afraid but just a little cautious and ever-present, ever curious,” she says.

“I remember eating an apple down to its core, holding the last of it between my fingers and lips and hearing just a whoosh of wings. Then it had vanished without a trace. Some currawong probably had miraculously swooped it away with precision-like accuracy before I had time to blink.

“As a kid born in Europe whose family migrated to live in a vast foreign land such as Australia I’d always felt like a hybrid. I couldn’t experience a sense of belonging to a land so different. Filming on location as long as we did gave me a sense of connectedness to the specificity of the place.”

The ominous and haunting style of the movie is a perfect example of Tasmanian gothic, a term Scholes had never even heard of when he made it.

“In the intervening years, someone at the Australian National University wrote their PhD thesis on The Tale of Ruby Rose and I found it to be amazing. He really got what the story was about and talked about it as Tasmanian gothic, a term that I’d never heard of.

“Gothic means having that foreground story of the unknown or spirituality. They’re often about complex psychological issues, dark stories, and they generally have a clash between good and evil, dark and light. The land we are on here, this island’s history is a gothic one.”

And he believes the story is as relevant now as it was 30 years ago.

“We still hear stories about people returning from military service suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and even now, in 2018, we still don’t take it as seriously as we should.

Ruby Rose is about that fear, trauma and isolation, and isolation in the sense that we can feel isolated in cities, not just in the middle of the highlands.” The Tasmanian Eco Film Festival is running the 30th Anniversary Festival for The Tale of Ruby Rose, with screenings, discussions and filmmaking workshops, from next Thursday until next Saturday (April 12–14). Screenings will be held at the State Cinema daily, each concluding with a Q&A session with cast and crew. Visit statecinema.com.au and mydoitproductions.com for bookings and information about other festival events including at the Waterside Pavilion in Hobart and Village Cinema, Launceston. The film will also screen at BOFA film festival in Launceston next month