Sonic Temple
Julien Temple is an unlikely expert on Sydney - the punk film director who dreamed
and directed The Eternity Man, one of the highlights of the Sydney Film Festival
It was during a long walk through the perfumed evening, from Waverley Cemetery to Circular Quay via Paddington and Darlinghurst, that Julien Temple fell in love with Sydney.
"I was lucky enough to have a splendid historian with me, and it was almost like discovering the songlines of the city," he recalls.
The excitement led the British film, doco and TV director best known for his shotgun rides with punk rock (The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, The Sex Pistols: There Will Be An England), to compress six decades of Sydney bohemian history into the life of one man, our most famous urban ghost and graffiti artist, Arthur Stace... and filming it as opera.
"People think of me as a punk filmmaker," says Temple (who has also directed features such as Absolute Beginners, Earth Girls Are Easy, and Pandaemonium). "Which I'm proud to be. There is a strong element of punk in Stace's life, actually."
The result is The Eternity Man, and even if modern opera leaves you cold, the visual storytelling of this film is sensational. Temple has tapped into the mythology and subterranean currents of the city with an acuity most Sydneysiders would be hard pressed to emulate. Has any local filmmaker yet captured the mysterious architecture of Sydney's Moreton Bay figs?
"If you come from the northern hemisphere the first thing you notice here is the extraordinary vegetation," says Temple. "And I know most Australian directors would rather die than shoot the harbour bridge," he adds, "but I wasn't ashamed to."
Nor was he too shy to take advantage of the unique configuration of fireballs which burst from the bridge and glitter on the harbour each New Year's Eve, creating one of the film's most stunning sequences.
But a greater challenge than illuminating what locals overlook, was making a film about a man who was almost a shadow, or at his most garrulous, a chalk mark.
"Stace lived by night, and didn't have a whole lot of interaction with other people [except for his harridan sister], so we had to work hard to express his emotional state," Temple explains.
"I was very lucky to find Grant Doyle who could sing those arias, but also find the intimacy. A lesser actor would have turned the libretto, (which was beautifully written by the poet Dorothy Porter) into a comedy."
Shooting at night for five weeks also presented many logistical quandaries, but Temple says the pay-off was colossal. "We had the city to ourselves. It was like a huge opera set."
In fact it is the hallucinatory quality of Stace's world that The Eternity Man captures so exactly.
A shell shocked WW1 vet who never recovered, Stace sought refuge in the bottle until making a pact with God.
"Here was someone trying to overcome his demons, to repair the damage he'd suffered, through this strange repetitive act of writing the word ‘Eternity' all over the city," says Temple.
The Eternity Man's producer Rosemary Blight says working on the film with Temple was "phenomenal." Temple probably knows more about Sydney than the 4.5 million people who live here. "I have this whole new fascination for Sydney after working with Julien," Blight enthuses.
"He was tremendously inspiring."
Temple, who is about to shoot a feature based on Angela Carter's magical novel Wise Children, returns the compliment.
"Sydney may have been wild and brutal in the past," he says, "but it was a more human place, even with the slums and poverty and drunkenness and violence. There's something in Arthur's journey through the twentieth century, that captures the spirit of this place."
The Eternity Man Screening Sat 14 June, 5pm at Sydney Opera House