YOU’RE THE VOICE, JACK
FILM ICON JACK THOMPSON HAS PUT TOGETHER A LINE- UP OF FILMS FOR BIFF, WHICH INCLUDES NEW DRAMA, HIGH GROUND
If you had to choose a voice to represent Australia it would have to be Jack Thompson’s. It’s a sonorous voice, almost a drawl at times, unmistakably laconic, the tone a tad world weary now but no less warm.
Thompson, 80, is an icon, no doubt about that. Maybe legend would be a better word.
He’s one of the patrons of this year’s Brisbane International Film Festival presented by The Australian Cinematheque at the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art. Thompson serves as patron alongside legendary film editor Jill Bilcock. The pair worked on BIFF’s 2020 opening night film, Stephen Maxwell Johnson’s High Ground, a confronting story about frontier violence in colonial Australia with Thompson starring as a policeman.
We know Thompson from so many films – Breaker Morant, Sunday Too Far Away, The Man from Snowy River, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and many more. Hell, he was even in a Star Wars flick – Star Wars: Attack of the Clones in 2002.
Thompson and Bilcock (who will no doubt, henceforth, be referred to as Jack and Jill) are attending BIFF 2020 virtually for obvious reasons. Both have chosen a program of their own work to be screened at the festival and the films will run with video introductions from them.
Thompson is disappointed he can’t be at the event in person. When I get him on the phone that deep, resonant Aussie brogue is so familiar. He’s on his property near Coffs Harbour in Northern New South Wales lamenting the fact that he can’t come to Brisbane, particularly since he says he has a soft spot for the city. But they all say that, right?
But Thompson is sincere. Brisbane holds a special place in his heart for personal and professional reasons. He actually started his acting career in the Queensland capital in the early 1960s when he was based there serving in the army and, later, seguing from a science degree to an arts degree at UQ.
“I think very fondly of my early years in Brisbane,” Thompson says.
“My acting interest goes back to childhood but my involvement in theatre in Brisbane where I lived for three years was so important.”
Thompson has chosen one of his Hollywood favourites to screen at BIFF, 2004 film The Assassination of Richard Nixon in which he starred alongside Sean Penn and fellow Aussie Naomi Watts.
He also includes a typically Australian film, Burke and Wills, from 1985.
“I chose it because I think it’s a very good film and it is not seen a lot,” Thompson says.
“People know me from The Man from
Snowy River and that’s a great family film but the Burke and Wills story is an important part of our history. It’s a typical Australian story about a country that was founded on failures.”
The Jack Thompson Performs program also includes a new comedy about army veterans, Never Too Late, which also stars James Cromwell, Jacki Weaver and Dennis Waterman, as well as Yolgnu Boy from 2001, the moving story of an Aboriginal boy on the cusp of manhood caught between two cultures. That was also directed by Stephen Maxwell Johnson and is a companion piece to High Ground in which Thompson appears with lead actor Simon Baker and some talented Indigenous newcomers.
BIFF will mark the Australian premiere of High Ground, a film which has already had an international screening early this year at the Berlin Film Festival where Thompson and Baker walked the red carpet together with first-time actors from Arnhem Land, Witiyana Marika and Jacob Junior Nayinggul.
Thompson, the once grizzled shearer of Sunday Too Far Away, is now the grizzled veteran actor who is proud to be telling a story about the origins of our nationhood, despite that story being a painful one.
“It’s a very relevant film, particularly in
light of the Black Lives Matter movement,” Thompson says.
“It took many years to get it together and it wasn’t easy to make. Everyone knows about my renal failure during shooting and how the purple truck came to save me.”
Thompson, who is about to undergo one of his regular dialysis sessions after our second chat, famously fell ill during the shooting of High Ground in the Northern Territory and was saved by the mobile dialysis service run by the Purple House, run out of Alice Springs to service remote Indigenous communities.
BIFF 2020 artistic director Amanda SlackSmith says she is thrilled Thompson and Bilcok agreed to be patrons of BIFF 2020.
Thompson is familiar to all of us. He’s a star but an unassuming one and a very generous one too, Slack-Smith says.
Thompson has been involved in more than his fair share of film festivals but he isn’t jaded.
“I still love film festivals,” he says.
“I think a lot of my early education in the depth and breadth of world cinema came from attending the Sydney Film Festival regularly. You have to be a bit selective about what you see though because otherwise by day three it all becomes one movie.”
This year’s BIFF features more than 70 features, documentaries, short films and
special events.
There are some unusual offerings including a film about the fantastical adventures of a female sky pirate in the restored and tinted film feature, Filibus, which was made in 1915.
“That film will be accompanied by the world premiere of a new score by David Bailey played on the gallery’s 1929 Wurlitzer organ,” Slack-Smith says.
The film festival program will be presented across several venues: QAGOMA, Dendy Cinemas Coorparoo, the Elizabeth Picture Theatre, New Farm Six Cinemas, Reading Cinemas Newmarket and at the State Library of Queensland.
But why not just hold a film festival virtually in the age of a pandemic? We can all watch things streamed at home, after all.
Slack-Smith says it is more important than ever to hold the festival in cinemas.
“I think there is more value in gathering to see films, even with social distancing,” she says.
“You can’t hit pause in the middle of a cinema screening, or go and make a cup of tea or take a phone call. You have to be present and there’s joy in the experience. That’s what we all need now.”
BIFF 2020 runs until October 11.
Buy tickets at biff.com.au