australian television information archive

Fire power

A new ABC miniseries about East Timor could mark a resurgence in local drama from the public broadcaster.

East Timor may be thousands of kilometres away, but in the humid Gold Coast hinterland, just 45 minutes' drive from Dreamworld, I'm suddenly surrounded by thickets of rainforest, thatched-roof houses and people chattering in Portuguese. I'm on the set of Answered By Fire, an $8 million Australian-Canadian co-production starring David Wenham, about the events of 1999, when the East Timorese braved intimidation to vote for independence from Indonesia in a UN-sponsored ballot.

Everyone is happy: an important scene has been shot this morning and the cast and crew, including dozens of grinning East Timorese extras, are chowing down on lunch.

East Timor and Australia are bound by blood, as Wenham's character explains: "The East Timorese saved our arses in World War II against the Japanese and then in 1975 we just stood by and let the Indonesians walk in and take this place. We owe these people, big-time."

The cash-strapped ABC has delivered with this beautiful two-part miniseries, an increasingly rare foray away from panel chatfests and British cop dramas. Artfully

shot and with gut-wrenching performances, Answered By Fire inspires hope of a public-broadcaster-led renaissance in Australian drama.

The story revolves around Mark (Wenham), an Australian policeman who has volunteered for the UN mission. Together with a Canadian officer, Julie (played by Canadian actor Isabelle Blais), and a young local translator, Ismenio (Alex Tilman), he supervises the registration of the East Timorese and ensures conditions are safe for the vote.

Mark is challenged and enchanted by the headstrong Julie. She sulks at his decisions and takes matters into her own hands, at one point attending a Fretilin pro-independence meeting and compromising the UN mission's neutrality.

Once the referendum result is announced, the UN team is forced to evacuate East Timor as local militia, backed by the Indonesian military, begin to butcher thousands of pro-independence supporters. In one scene, screaming villagers, one clutching a baby, scramble over barbed wire to enter the UN compound and escape militia gunfire.

Guilt-stricken and unable to resume a normal life in Australia, Mark returns to East Timor months later to seek justice and reconnect with the survivors. Julie, on the other side of the world, does the same.

The story of Mark was inspired by David Savage, an Australian UN official who kept a diary of his five years in East Timor. Save for a real-life televised appearance by the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer (whom Wenham, as Mark, calls a "dickhead" in an apparently unscripted ad-lib), the characters in Answered By Fire are fictional.

"Mark's a good man, a veteran of several missions. It gives him a rush to help people and feel part of the bigger picture," says Barbara Samuels, the Canadian co-writer. "He has a fair idea [the mission] is not going to be a walk in the park but his sense of self is almost destroyed. He usually polices and protects people, but he couldn't do what he came to do."

East Timorese amateurs were recruited for several parts, following an Idol-like casting blitz around Australia by director Jessica Hobbs. Particularly impressive is Tilman, in his first acting role, who plays the intense Ismenio.

A pro-independence "do-gooder" who has just returned from university in Jakarta, he clashes with his cousin Sico (Jose De Costa), a militia member who nurses a toxic family grudge.

Authenticity was always the priority for Samuels, who conceived Answered By Fire after meeting a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer just back from East Timor. She admits she "came to the issue late". Unlike Australia, where East Timor's history is seared into our psyche, in Canada it remains a boutique cause.

Sniffing a script, Samuels teamed with Australian writer Katherine Thomson and visited East Timor in 2003. The pair interviewed everyone from political heavyweights to "widows in the hills", she says. "We'd knock on someone's door, they'd pull up chairs and we'd talk. People would say, 'Documentary?' and we'd say, 'No, movie,' and they were astonished.

"People were amazingly forthcoming in talking about stuff that was absolutely raw. The idea of the world watching their story was very important; they kept saying, 'Please tell our story.' Katherine and I were thinking, Jesus, if we don't get this right, we're going to have a lot, morally, to answer for."

Through interviews, the pair also gained a more nuanced understanding of the former militia. Some had pro-Indonesian sympathies, but most were mercenaries, coerced or simply garden-variety ratbags, Samuels says. "You feel like shit, you don't have a lot of self-esteem. Put a gun in a man's hand, show him he can cause fear in other people [and] for a certain type, this can be quite satisfying. That's what we tried to show with Sico."

Wenham hopes Answered by Fire will shatter Australians' complacency about our northern neighbour. According to this year's UN Development Report, half the population there lacks clean drinking water, 6 per cent of infants die before their first birthday and the life expectancy is 55 years. What's more, the miniseries airs against a backdrop of renewed tensions, highlighted by last week's riots and looting in the capital, Dili.

Wenham hopes Answered by Fire will reinvigorate another dire cause: Australian content on the ABC. Here, at least, there are reasons for optimism. Last week's budget gave the national broadcaster an $88 million cash injection over three years, including $30 million to set up a commissioning arm and invest in more independently produced drama.

Admittedly, the ABC is coming off a low base. This financial year, it will broadcast 16 hours of new Australian drama, up from three hours last year, but still a far cry from the glory days of the early 1990s and hits such as GP and Police Rescue.

Wenham, who came to prominence as Diver Dan on the ABC's iconic SeaChange, urges the industry to back itself and be given "permission to fail".

"Everything one attempts can't always be a winner," he says. "We've got to accept some Australian dramas do fail.

"My greatest wish is that people see Answered By Fire because it's a wonderful story, told fabulously well. Will it be leveraged to assist local drama on the ABC? One would hope so. Hopefully we've bottomed out and can turn it around."

By Alan Mascarenhas
May 15, 2006
Sydney Morning Herald

Stars answer worthy call

THE church walls are stained with blood. Pews have been torched, crucifixes have crumbled.

On the church steps, a candle burns inside a stack of stones sprinkled with pink bougainvillea petals: an East Timorese memorial for the dead.

On the charred rear church wall, above a bloodstain the size of a human head, a Timorese phrase has been partially scorched: "Pai Nosso (Holy Father)".

Outside, the village of Nanura, East Timor has been ransacked.

Homes have turned to cinder, stores have been pillaged then burnt, cars have been firebombed.

Valuable aluminium roofs have been stripped from houses.

A United Nations flag has been torn from a flag pole.

Members of an East Timorese militia group ­ the Indonesian-backed men responsible for Nanura's total destruction ­ are huddled outside a ruined grocery store.

They lean on rifles laughing. They drink from whisky bottles.

One militia member ­ a shifty-eyed man wearing a bandanna and a sleeveless denim shirt ­ rubs his thumb along the thin edge of his machete.

Then, in a wrecked United Nations compound, surrounded by armed Australian Army officers, there is the peculiar figure of David Wenham ­ Diver Dan from SeaChange, Johnny Spiteri in Gettin' Square, Faramir in The Lord of the Rings ­ arched over touching his toes with his fingers.

He springs back up and stretches his arms. He takes three deep breaths and shakes himself loose like a boxer preparing for a title fight.

He's now ready for Scene 98A of Answered By Fire, listed in his call sheet as: "Mark watches as Jose makes a phone call."

East Timor-born extra Julia Magno giggles at Wenham's odd stretching ritual.

"Quiet on set," calls first assistant director, Ian Kenny.

Magno covers her mouth with her hand. Wenham throws her a cheeky grin.

Kenny looks across at director Jessica Hobbs.

Hobbs views the scene through the camera frame. The landscape is a destroyed East Timor, circa September 1999.

There's no telling the scene is being shot at Rudy Maas Marina, a canefield-covered marina at Jacobs Well, 20km off the Pacific Motorway. Hobbs nods her head.

"Action," Kenny says.

Answered By Fire is a three-hour miniseries set around the 1999 referendum in East Timor which saw 78 per cent of East Timorese voters choose independence from Indonesia, causing the Indonesian military and East Timorese militia groups to go on a bloody rampage, murdering an estimated 2000 people and forcing 250,000 Timorese civilians into camps in Indonesian-controlled West Timor.

In January this year, an independent UN-backed report, the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation report, estimated 183,000 East Timorese were killed in the 24 years of Indonesian repression that followed the 1975 Indonesian invasion.

Wenham ­ who'll do a few more stretches today ­ plays an Australian policeman, Mark Waldman, who volunteers for the UN mission to East Timor to oversee the 1999 referendum.

Today is day 35 of a difficult, 36-day shoot.

The team has been filming a three-hour-plus film in less time than would be comfortable for a two-hour film.

Early in the shoot, torrential Queensland rain caused the loss of an entire day's shooting. And money is tight.

"We're making this on 50¢ and a bus ticket," says screenwriter-producer Barbara Samuels.

The set has been built on a cheap canefield the filmmakers bought at the start of filming.

The canefield was mowed down and transformed into a village with a dirt soccer field and a series of shacks acting as East Timor homes, stores and UN buildings.

But the project's subject matter has proven most emotionally draining.

In casting East Timorese leads and extras, director Hobbs met with more than 400 members of Australia's Timorese community. She found a community aching to share its story.

She met Alex Tilman, whose father was a member of the East Timorese resistance group, Fretilin, the long-time opponent of the Indonesian armed forces.

In 1978, Tilman's father disappeared, not to be seen again.

Tilman became a translator for the UN in Timor. Fittingly, he plays a UN translator in Answered By Fire.

Hobbs met Jose De Costa, who lost six siblings after the invasion of East Timor.

An independence supporter, De Costa was arrested by Indonesian police and repeatedly tortured before the Red Cross organised his release, upon which he sailed to Australia as a political refugee.

Not so fittingly, De Costa plays a militia leader in Answered By Fire.

"For East Timorese, to be militia is to be evil," De Costa says. "I had to try and reverse my feelings of pain, anger and revenge against them, to use them for the role."

Such feelings, says Wenham, walking to his next scene ­ a technically difficult one where his character boards a helicopter to fly out of East Timor ­ are starting to show on screen.

"I've had to stop acting," he says. "It shows next to these people. They're real. There's no performance there.

"Most of the cast here has never acted before. But their performances are extraordinary. They're mining personal histories to get what we're seeing.

"It hasn't been a pain-free experience for them. But it's certainly been a rewarding one."

When Samuels heard Wenham was on board to play the lead, she immediately sent a group email out to her friends. In the subject box she typed a message in capital letters: "WE'VE GOT WENHAM!"

On the 35th day of the shoot, Wenham's value is palpable.

It shows on screen as well as off, where he's always boosting morale with a joke or a well-placed compliment.

While the physical-effects crew and a team of set decorators transform the village soccer field into a helicopter landing pad, Wenham plays a game of soccer with a group of younger East Timorese extras.

"He's not like Tom Cruise," says Magno, watching Wenham from the sidelines of the soccer field. "He's not: 'Ooohh look, I'm sooo famous.' He talks to everybody. He has lunch and dinner with us every night."

Before the 1999 referendum, Magno was a medical student at Indonesia's Hasanuddin University.

When East Timor voted for independence, Magno's Indonesian lecturers refused to teach her.

Returning to East Timor, she became a volunteer medic tending to injured East Timorese under the instruction of Australian Air Force Warrant Officer and medical technician, Peter Hind.

In 2001, Hind repaid Magno by finding her a study position at the Queensland University of Technology, paying for her accommodation, books and transportation.

Magno hopes to one day bring her medical skills back to East Timor.

"There are still people dying in East Timor," she says. "In one place, people are killing people. In another place, people are dying of starvation."

Magno looks around this created East Timor, a landscape in ruin.

"This is just 10 per cent of the story," she says.

As the sun sets over Jacobs Well, the physical effects crew turns on a giant steel fan to simulate wind coming from the helicopter's blades. Wenham stands with a UN bag over his shoulder looking toward the fan as though it was a recently arrived helicopter.

He shields his eyes from the very real dust blowing against his face.

Where possible, says physical effects supervisor Brian Cox, filmmakers will simulate helicopter scenes for safety reasons.

A former tradesman in the Australian Army, Cox has blown things up for films such as The Matrix, Moulin Rouge and The Thin Red Line. But he has learnt to be wary of helicopters, recalling a story from one renowned war film, which he refuses to name, where an extra had his head chopped off by a spinning helicopter blade.

Then the real helicopter arrives. This scene will become the final scene in the miniseries, in which Wenham's police officer bids farewell to the world's newest nation, East Timor.

The supervisors tell Wenham to keep his arms down as he boards the helicopter.

It's been a long day ­ 12 hours ­ and accidents happen when the brain is tired. Wenham nods.

Kenny screams, "Action."

Wenham turns to his character's East Timorese translator, placing a hand on his shoulder. "Seeya mate," he says warmly. He boards the helicopter and cinematographer Mark Wareham tracks it as it flies up toward the sun. The scene lasts about 30 seconds. It took two hours to set up.

On the ground and out of frame, the East Timorese extras, who have stayed around to watch the spectacle, wave goodbye to the helicopter. "Cut," Kenny calls. "Time for dinner."

Dinner starts at 6.45pm. Gathered under an army-green tarp, the cast and crew line up for vegetable casserole.

With the shoot coming to an end, this is, for many people here, a last supper.

Wenham taps his plate on his thigh, waiting in line between a gaffer and a grip.

"This is a strange business," Wenham says. "In one career, you don't just do one job. You do many jobs and you're forever forming really, really close relationships. Then at the end of the job you have to say goodbye."

Over plastic cups of lime cordial, cast and crew members reminisce. They talk about the rain that turned the set into a mud pit. They talk about the herd of kangaroos that once bounced into shot, not good for a film set in East Timor.

The guys who played militia talk about the day they shot special-effects gunfire. And Magno, scooping up spoonfuls of vegetable casserole, is giggling again.

"I'd love to do more acting work," she says. "Maybe I should get an agent? I might get to meet Orlando Bloom."

Answered By Fire, ABC, Sunday May 21 and May 28

By Trent Dalton
May 17, 2006
The Courier Mail

Fire in their hearts

A story torn from the pages of recent history touched all those involved.

IT'S a strange sensation, driving past Queensland cane fields, through the gates of the Horizon Shores caravan park and the Rudy Maas Marina, and straight into the Timorese village of Nunura. In the sprawling suburb of Steiglitz, amid the waterways at the northern end of the Gold Coast, production designer Nick McCallum and his team of 15 have created a remarkably convincing fictional township. The scattering of buildings includes an open-air market, a bakery, a few shops, a church and a walled United Nations compound. The village looks so authentic that some of the Timorese cast members working on the mini-series Answered by Fire burst into tears on encountering it for the first time.

Nunura is the primary setting for the two-part drama. It is an $8 million Australian-Canadian co-production that deals with the tumult in East Timor leading up to the 1999 referendum on independence from Indonesia and the subsequent bloody campaign of violence instigated to terrorise the population. It's through the events that occur in Nunura that writers Barbara Samuels and Katherine Thomson have chosen to tell a complex story about the recent past. Through their fiction, they propose a view of Timor's broader history.

On a cold day in July last year, halfway through the eight-week shoot, the weather is making a mockery of Queensland travel promotions. Far from being beautiful or perfect, it's cold, wet and windy as director Jessica Hobbs moves through the mud to choreograph a scene in the UN compound involving the frantic efforts of the foreign civilian police and their local aides to protect the ballot boxes. There are fears that members of the militia sympathetic to the Indonesians will try to steal them.

David Wenham is at the heart of the action, playing Mark Waldman, an Australian policeman who has volunteered for the UN mission that is overseeing the referendum process. A senior officer, he's organising his troops, one of whom is rookie Canadian Julie Fortin (Isabelle Blais). Among the locals helping them are interpreter Ismenio Soares (Alex Tilman) and his sister Madalena (Fatima Almeida).

The Soares family represents the experiences of many Timorese. Ismenio, English speaking and university educated, is suspicious of the foreigners and sceptical about their usefulness as protectors of the population. His sister has taken up her dead mother's cause, secretly stealing away into the hills to provide assistance to the Fretilin forces fighting the Indonesian occupation. Their father, Joao (Felisberto Araujo, who is Fatima Almeida's real-life father), a respected village elder, is covertly campaigning for the locals to register to vote in the referendum. Meanwhile, their cousin, Sico (Jose De Costa), a member of the menacing militia, is fiercely pro-Indonesia.

"It's a microcosm story rather than the big picture of the struggle for independence," says executive producer Roger Simpson. Answered by Fire is the final project for Simpson and his long-time producing partner, Roger Le Mesurier, a pair affectionately known throughout the industry as "the Rogers". Simpson says that while an $8 million budget might be considered substantial, it's stretched when "you're recreating the events that we're recreating: UN compounds, the burning of Dili, various massacres and armies and militias going back and forth. It's a big story." The limitations of the budget are apparent when producer Andrew Walker notes that a choice had to be made between roosters or geese wandering in Nunura as the animals required separate wranglers and the budget couldn't accommodate both. The roosters won.

While the experiences of the Soares family form a major part of the drama, an additional focus is on the Westerners sent to Timor as part of the UN force, unarmed and sometimes with scant understanding of the complex and volatile situation that they would encounter.

Mark Waldman is a proficient and pragmatic policeman who discovers that the demands of this assignment are beyond his expectations. "He's confident, he's strong-willed, he's experienced in what he does," says Wenham. "East Timor isn't his first overseas mission and he thinks it's going to be simpler and more straightforward than it turns out to be. They're walking on a razor's edge the whole time.

"The great journey for Mark is that, for the first time in his life, he experiences failure because he can't achieve what he wants to do. He's frustrated by the organisation that he works with, he's frustrated by the fact that he can't help people that he's come to know and feel for. And when they're forced to evacuate and sent back to Australia, he's racked with guilt."

By contrast, Julie is a relatively green but keen recruit. The situation she encounters challenges her sense of certainty about the world. To a degree, the pair represent the well-meaning but sometimes clueless Westerners who discover to their dismay that they're out of their depth.

Canadian writer Barbara Samuels, who originated the project, says it was vital for her and Australian co-writer Katherine Thomson (author of the play Mavis Goes to Timor) that this not be a tale of a couple of Westerners finding romance in some exotic foreign trouble spot. "We didn't want the foreground to be about two white people who find love amidst a background in flames," she says.

As well as using David Savage's book Dancing with the Devil as source material, the writers spent two weeks in Timor talking to people about their experiences. The ABC's head of drama, Scott Meek, says that the work that emerged has "two stories that are simultaneous.

"One is from the Australian perspective, the story of the ordinary policeman who goes to help the UN with the referendum and discovers that the world is not entirely the shape he thought it was, that its hierarchies don't always function in the way that he thought they did, and that it's a much bigger, scarier place than he ever imagined. And it's the story of a young Canadian policewoman who is even more naive about the world but, in a strange sense, may turn out to be an even stronger person than he is.

"The other story is about a people's right to self-determination, of the Timorese believing they had a right to the referendum, believing they had a right to vote in it and a right not to be killed for doing so. And the consequences of that belief, both bad and good."

Describing the project as a labour of love, Meek says: "It's not just about the story, it's about three cultures working together to tell the story. If you were looking for a model of what two not-particularly-wealthy public broadcasters can do together, it's here: a story that happened in the real world in which Canadians participated and Australians participated, a story that has meaning in both places."

According to the Rogers, the co-production had a 70:30 ratio — 70 per cent of the money came from Australia and 30 per cent from Canada. Creatively, it was also split: a writer from each country, lead actors from each country, an Australian director, production designer and director of photography, a Canadian composer and editor.

The legislation governing co-productions required that the Australian participants were residents, which affected the selection of the Timorese cast. Hobbs and casting agents Lynne Ruthven and Alex Francis conducted casting calls around the country. "We organised meetings through any East Timorese association we could find," the director recalls. "We met people at barbecues, in homes and churches, and we put them on camera. We looked at 350 people and I made notes on every person and who they might play.

"Then we went around the country again with a bag of lights and a camera and set up workshops. We asked people to bring a personal object, something that was important to them or to a story about themselves, then we'd film some scenes with them." Nine were chosen for the featured roles.

None of the Timorese had any acting experience, although Hobbs and Wenham agree that they displayed an impressive natural ability. "You'd never know that those people had never acted before," says Wenham. "All of them were determined to be involved in the series and determined that the story should be as accurate as possible so people could see what their history has been like."

Hobbs found that she had an on-set barometer for how well scenes were playing: "If a scene was working, they'd laugh or react, and if it wasn't working, they wouldn't do anything. I had a very honest audience right on the set." She adds: "I learned a huge amount from working with them. It pushes you a lot more. With non-actors, you can't make assumptions, you can't gloss over things. They'll say, 'Hang on, I don't understand.' It makes you much clearer about your storytelling because you have to go with them every story beat, you have to explain that 'this is what we're trying to tell the audience', so they understand what it is they need to convey. I talked to them a lot about what the camera was doing, so they felt included in that process, and they responded to that really well."

Beyond the drama, the reality was that many of the Timorese had witnessed or been directly involved in the often horrific events being recreated. Many had lost family members, some had been victims of torture.

Meek recalls: "When the Timorese people joined the production, a truly wonderful thing happened. They were so emotionally invested in the telling of the story, and the necessity of getting it right for the other people of their culture that they completely infected the Australian and Canadian cast and crew with a kind of inspiration that they were doing something that really meant something."

Mindful as they were of the need for authenticity and historical accuracy, the creators of the drama were also keen to produce an engrossing story. "But, if you want to tell a story that has political or social motif, you can't lecture people," says Samuels. "You have to create compelling characters so that the audience can see it through their eyes, not through somebody telling you what's right and what's wrong and giving dialogue to people that explains the political situation."

For her part, Hobbs says: "You don't want it to just be worthy. You want it to engage people to the point where they think 'Oh God, it's extraordinary what happened to those people and I hope it never happens again.' That's what the job of it is."

Come Sunday night, Australians will get to see the results of this cross-cultural collaboration and a story torn from the pages of bloody recent history. Whatever the ratings show, there can be no doubting the passion and sense of commitment that many of the people working on Answered by Fire felt for telling this story. As Meeks says, "It wasn't just like working on any old piece of television".

By Debi Enker
May 18, 2006
The Age