Director shares his insight into Matilda
After eight years, hundreds of interviews and countless shows (not literally of course, but you try counting them), it’s hard to believe that composer Tim Minchin has yet to tire of talking about Matilda the Musical.
At least, not in general terms. Specifically, right here and now as he sits opposite me in the splendiferously baroque surrounds of The Civic’s Wintergarden, Minchin does seem a little jaded, and understandably so.
Having risen at 3.30am the previous day to fly here from Melbourne, Minchin is reaching the end of a very full two days worth of interviews – for print, television, radio, online – to promote the New Zealand premiere of Matilda, coming up on August 18.
That’s just a drop in the globetrotting bucket however – the week before, he interrupted a family holiday to fly from Los Angeles to Chicago to London to do a Facebook Live interview with Sir Paul McCartney announcing the former Beatle’s Australasian tour. He then flew to Melbourne later that same day.
‘‘It’s so bad for the environment,’’ acknowledges Minchin, who is currently Los Angeles-based, but planning a move to Sydney.
‘‘I’ve flown LA-to-Europe 10 times this year already. I’m literally the cause of global warming.’’
With good reason though. ’’You’d have to be Paul McCartney to get me to do that,’’ he explains. ‘‘It was so very nice to meet him, and I just don’t understand how he’s such a normal, nice bloke after everything he went through. I mean, even just the loss of his mum at 14 and the loss of his best friend to a gunshot at 40 – how is he OK?
‘‘Not to mention being one of the most famous humans on the planet. Bigger than God. He’s really nice, and he listens. He’s 75 – most 75-year-old men don’t know how to listen anymore anyway, even if they’re not the most famous person in the world.’’
So, well aware he’s had a long day – and an even longer week – I decide to preface our conversation by asking if there’s anything he’s particularly tired of talking about. I’m just adding, ‘But you can’t say Matilda‘, when he replies with the obvious answer, before breaking into a weary laugh.
‘‘Actually, it surprises me how much I don’t mind talking about it,’’ says the England-born Aussie, who was first approached by director Matthew Warchus to write the music and lyrics for Matilda in December 2008.
‘‘It’s such a joyous thing in my life, Matilda, and such a f...ing wholesome thing to have in my life. With all the stupid s... I’ve made, it’s just this lovely thing that’s good for everyone, you know?’’
This is typical of how Minchin talks – casually profane, he swears as a matter of course rather than for effect, and has never been one to temper his language for the sake of some perceived audience, even when promoting something as ‘‘f...ing wholesome’’ as Matilda.
For an entertainment reporter used to hovering publicists and well-rehearsed answers, it’s an approach that’s rather refreshing.
‘‘It gets me in trouble every now and then, but long-term it’s much better than having a script isn’t it?’’ says Minchin.
Born in the English town of Northampton to Australian parents – the father-of-two once tweeted, ‘‘My poor pommy babies suffered the same fate. Although my da’s a surgeon, theirs a pervert’’ – Minchin was raised in Perth, Western Australia, and started piano lessons at the age of eight.
He gave up piano a few years later, but returned to it in his early teens, thanks largely to older brother Dan, who played guitar.
‘‘’Go on, work out the beginning of Light My Fire and we’ll play it’, he’d say,’’ remembers Minchin.
By the sound of it, Dan was instrumental (ha ha) in developing his younger brother’s musical sensibilities – an early creative influence for sure.
‘‘If you got me on the piano now and put 100, 200 people in this room and said, ‘Just play a set of the songs you want to play’ – covers, you know, songs you love – they’d almost, without exception, be songs that my brother said, ‘Listen to this’.’’
Those beloved songs include Kiwi ditties like Crowded House’s Four Seasons In One Day and Better Be Home Soon, but Minchin’s taste ranges well beyond his Antipodean background.
‘‘I also like doing this cover of a song called Feel Like Going Home, which is an old Charlie Rich song that was covered by The Notting Hillbillies, who were a side project of Mark Knopfler.’’
There were other family influences – an uncle who played bluegrass in a band called The Sensitive New Age Cowpersons for instance.
‘‘He was a very, very good musician – and actually a musical comedian too,’’ recalls Minchin. ‘‘We used to go to my other uncle’s pub in Freo [Fremantle], and sit under the tables and watch him play.
‘‘That’s come back to haunt me now – there’s a lot of bluegrass in Groundhog Day.’’
Which reminds me – there’s far more to Minchin’s CV than merely Matilda.
In 2012, he started working on a musical based on Groundhog Day, the now-classic 1993 Bill Murray comedy about a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck repeating the same day over and over again in small-town USA.
Interestingly, the Groundhog Day gig came about thanks to Matilda director Warchus, via an introduction to the original film’s screenwriter, Danny Rubin, who had been wanting to make a musical version for years.
‘‘He always thought it was a good idea,’’ says Minchin of Rubin. ‘‘In fact, he was kind of writing it, and we had to go, ‘Awesome, but just put that away’. Because I can’t do my job if someone else tells me what the songs should be. I need to come fresh.’’
Four years later, Groundhog Day opened to critical acclaim at London’s Old Vic Theatre in 2016, before moving to Broadway earlier this year, where it received similar approbation.
‘‘It’s the most complicated piece of musical theatre I’ve ever seen,’’ says Minchin.
For all his successes though, Minchin can’t help but dwell on one very recent – and clearly very painful – failure.
Observing his many highs, I ask what he thinks his lowest low might have been. It’s not something he has to think hard about.
After five years of work – as director, as songwriter, as lyricist – Minchin’s US$100 million animated musical Larrikins was abruptly shut down in March this year after Universal acquired Dreamworks Animation.
‘‘They didn’t think it was worth the risk basically,’’ says Minchin.
It feels an awkward way to end our chat unfortunately, but as he gets up to leave – another interviewer already waiting in the wings – Minchin does have a caveat to add.