Andrew Dominik on 20 years of Chopper: ‘Ethics have nothing to do with it’
Few would be unfamiliar with Chopper – both the criminal, and the movie. The former is Mark Brandon Read, the notorious Australian gangster, bestselling author and serial shit-spinner, who committed many crimes and claimed he committed many more. The latter is the New Zealand-born writer-director Andrew Dominik’s terrific 2000 drama, supercharged by an astonishing performance from Eric Bana. The film returns to Australian cinemas on 26 August in a pandemic-delayed celebration of its 20th birthday.
Making a good biopic is never easy but making one about Read posed all sorts of challenges – including how to accurately represent the life of a compulsive liar. Dominik, speaking to me over the phone from the UK, says Read “sold the myth of himself as being a kind of Robin Hood character who robbed drug dealers and gave to himself, and was protective of women, animals and small children – which was patent bullshit”.
The film-maker drew on a massive police dossier that “basically accounted for Chopper’s movements for a full sixmonth period of his life”, giving him the confidence to depict things the subject claimed he didn’t do, such as using narcotics: “Chopper totally was a drug user – he just claimed that he wasn’t.”
An even trickier similar dilemma was faced, in different ways, by the 2018 film Acute Misfortune (about the artist Adam Cullen), and the forthcoming Martin Bryant biopic Nitram: how to depict the personality of difficult, toxic and even lethal men without glamourising their behaviour.
Guardian Australia’s obituary of Read, who died in 2013, details a difficult, crime-filled life that involved many arrests (one for kidnapping a judge, for which he was sentenced to 17 years). Some people claim Chopper got his nickname because he cut off his own ears; others attribute it “to his habit of cutting off his victims’ toes using bolt cutters”. Read once told the New York Times: “Look, honestly, I haven’t killed that many people. Probably about four or seven, depending on how you look at it.”
The 2018 miniseries Underbelly Files: Chopper was a sobering reminder of what not to do, with its crudely simplistic backstory and its suggestions that Read – seen kissing a baby at one point – was a helluva great guy if only you got to know him. Dominik’s
film is different. It’s deep, dramatic and sophisticated, deftly fusing together facts and myths.
It zeroes in on Chopper and his Chopperisms, delivering quotable lines aplenty (“Do I look like Mark Brandon ‘Medicare’ Read?”) without OKing his actions. So it’s surprising when Dominik describes the film as “very much sympathetic to [Read]. It’s on his side.”
The director continues: “At the same time it’s not blind to his failings as a human. It’s trying to show you those failures from a very human place. I think you can relate to Chopper – that people in general can relate to him – in an uncomfortable way. His behaviour was incredibly strange. But there had to be a logic to it, an emotional logic.”
When I suggest it would have been disastrous for Dominik to have made a film that was truly pro-Chopper Read, he won’t have it: “I’m telling you, as the director, that it ispro-Chopper Read.
Having said that, it’s not pro his behaviour. The truth is the truth and ethics have nothing to do with it, in a way.
“You can look at anybody with empathy or you can look at them with judgement or condemnation. What would be unethical would be for me to either whitewash him or condemn him.
“I guess it’s not pro-Chopper Read in the fact that it depicts the uncomfortable part of what he does. But that just makes the person more interesting to me. More lovable, in a way. I find the virtuous to be dull. Most virtue is untested anyway. Most people are virtuous until they are given the chance to sell their soul, then they do it.”
Dominik tells me that Navy Seals “love Chopper” and “used to draw little cartoons of him on their fucking equipment”. These people, he says, “are mass killers; one guy I was talking to had killed over 100 people”.
Could this be an example of people embracing the film for the wrong reasons?
Dominik pauses. “I don’t think so,” he says. “You’re like a 20-year-old kid, you’ve been trained to be the best of the best. Then the world goes to war and you’re flying in on a helicopter to go and face 300 armed insurgents. I think whatever gets you through the situation … A lot of people like Chopper. I’m sure not all those people are wonderful.”
Dominik is known for crafting nuanced explorations of the humanity and mythology of criminals – from Chopper to Jesse James (in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) to Charles Manson (in the
TV show Mindhunter). “I’m a dramatist,” he says. “And drama frequently is about dealing with the so-called baddies.”
Was he ever uncomfortable about being “on the side” of the morally dubious?
“I know very few people who aren’t morally dubious,” he responds.
“[Are there] degrees? Yeah. But in answer to your question: no. He’s a character in a movie. I’m not getting married to him. I’m not trying to get him elected to public office.
“I wanted to make an honest film exploring the consequences of violence for the perpetrator of violence. If you want to deal with the violence, and you’re interested in solving the problem, the person you have to come to grips with – the person you have to understand – is the person who is violent. Not their victim.”
• Chopper will roll through Australian cinemas from 26 August, with specific dates for each city dependenton Covid regulations. Andrew Dominik and Eric Bana will be in conversation after a screening at Melbourne’s Palace Dendy Brighton on Sunday 5 September