Interviews and Articles
Do you have any original interviews or articles about Starstruck? Please, drop me a line so I can include them on the website.
Interviews with Jo Kennedy
For a selection of post-Starstruck interviews with Jo, visit the dedicated Jo Kennedy page.
Interview with Ross O'Donovan
The National Film and Sound Archive interviewed Ross O'Donovan, who spoke about his life before, during and after the production of Starstruck. The full interview is available here.
Interviews with Gillian Armstrong
Directors Series (1983)
American director John A. Gallagher interviews director Gillian Armstrong for the US cable television show The Directors Series, not long after Starstruck's American release.
Australian Womens Weekly - 26 May 1982
New Directions for Gillian Armstrong
Gillian Armstrong is one of that class of director who really gets into her work. When she was making "My Brilliant Career", her first feature film and Miles Franklin's autobiography, she could have been a 1970s manifestation of Sybylla, the quietly independent and determined heroine of the story.
On the set, she was neatly dressed, her long, straight, honey blonde hair tied back in a sensible bun, her face free of make-up. Her achievement in that film, acclaimed by critics at the Cannes Film Festival in1979, has put her into the forefront of the Australian film industry.
The neat and restrained young woman who made "My Brilliant Career" has given way to the up-to-date starlet promoting her latest film, "Starstruck".
"I went on 'The Don Lane Show', and my friends didn't recognize me. They were amazed that I was so outgoing. I even did a little dance at the top of his stairs. I was a little amazed myself," said Gillian, who now looks as though she could have starred in her rock musical comedy rather than directed it.
Her hair, cut spiky on top, trails from a bun at the back. For television appearances, such as that on "The Don Lane Show", all the hair is down and teased to such an extent that the American host was moved to comment that Gillian looked as though she had put her finger into a power socket. In fact, she looks as though she would be quite at home in Hollywood, dressedas she is for this interview. She is wearing a pink and black shirt painted with a gold kangaroo over khaki trousers and definitely purple eye make-up. Only the directness of her gaze disturbs the popular film image of a rock star.
It is suggested that with her passion for taking on the persona appropriate to her films to market them, that the public should beware the day she decides to make a horror film. She laughs, delighted at the prospect of selling a film such as "An American Werewolf in London". None of the three scripts she is working on at the moment is a horror film.
Sitting in the slightly raffish and frayed offices of Palm Beach Productions (the house which financed "Starstruck"), she is working on the first draft of Alan Seymour's adaptation of Sumner Locke Elliott's novel, "Eden's Lost". This project will be produced by Margaret Fink, with whom Gillian worked on "My Brilliant Career". She is also working with the playwright Stephen Sewell on a script entitled "Dingo" which deals with a pariah in society. "I think we'll have to change the title," said Gillian, her gaze solemn. So, the work of genius is called "Her Eyes Looked Left" at the moment.
With Stephen MacLean, the writer of "Starstruck", she is working on "Intermission", Anne Baxter's autobiography about her life in Australia. "It is so nice to finish a picture and still be talking to the writer," said Gillian.
On her current trip to the US, on a scholarship from the Ladd Company, she will be travelling the country for three months, looking at films being made, meeting writers and talking to the company about her forthcoming projects.
"The only thing the company wants in return is to be allowed to look at my projects first, before I go to other investors," she said. "I think j this is the only company in America that I could wori for. It's vital and original. Il was the company which released 'Chariots of Fire' in the US. It's investing in Bertolucci's new film whicn he will make in Italy - in Italian."
She smiles as she considers the Ladd Company talent roster at the moment: Bertolucci, one of the greal film makers - and her.
"There has been soma thing of a honeymoon for Australian films in the last couple of years with overseas audiences - they have been art house releases. If the honeymoon is over, I would hope that directors resist the temptation to make bland, stateless co-production films. One of the major reasons Australian films have succeeded is because they have been Australian."
Since her films have become popular, Gillian Armstrong has not been categorized as a feminist director but her concerns about women are obvious. Her first was "100 a Day", a film about a girl in a shoe factory during the Depression. She has also made a short called "Lollies and Smokes", about 14-year-old girls living in Australia with no real hope for the future. She worked on Tom Cowan's "Promised Woman", and then "The Removalists" as assistant director before undertaking "Career" and "Starstruck".
Gillian's life is relatively unchanged, she said, despite the success of "Career and the launching of her new film. She still lives in Balmain, where she lived while making "Career", still doesn't believe in marriage and has enough uninhibited spark to send a cheerio call on national television to her Nana - "I hope she was up that night, watching," she said.
Facing a future with any number of options. Gillian Armstrong is certain of one thing in her volatile life. "My next film will be made in Australia."
- CHRISTINE HOGAN
Gillian Armstrong is one of that class of director who really gets into her work. When she was making "My Brilliant Career", her first feature film and Miles Franklin's autobiography, she could have been a 1970s manifestation of Sybylla, the quietly independent and determined heroine of the story.
On the set, she was neatly dressed, her long, straight, honey blonde hair tied back in a sensible bun, her face free of make-up. Her achievement in that film, acclaimed by critics at the Cannes Film Festival in1979, has put her into the forefront of the Australian film industry.
The neat and restrained young woman who made "My Brilliant Career" has given way to the up-to-date starlet promoting her latest film, "Starstruck".
"I went on 'The Don Lane Show', and my friends didn't recognize me. They were amazed that I was so outgoing. I even did a little dance at the top of his stairs. I was a little amazed myself," said Gillian, who now looks as though she could have starred in her rock musical comedy rather than directed it.
Her hair, cut spiky on top, trails from a bun at the back. For television appearances, such as that on "The Don Lane Show", all the hair is down and teased to such an extent that the American host was moved to comment that Gillian looked as though she had put her finger into a power socket. In fact, she looks as though she would be quite at home in Hollywood, dressedas she is for this interview. She is wearing a pink and black shirt painted with a gold kangaroo over khaki trousers and definitely purple eye make-up. Only the directness of her gaze disturbs the popular film image of a rock star.
It is suggested that with her passion for taking on the persona appropriate to her films to market them, that the public should beware the day she decides to make a horror film. She laughs, delighted at the prospect of selling a film such as "An American Werewolf in London". None of the three scripts she is working on at the moment is a horror film.
Sitting in the slightly raffish and frayed offices of Palm Beach Productions (the house which financed "Starstruck"), she is working on the first draft of Alan Seymour's adaptation of Sumner Locke Elliott's novel, "Eden's Lost". This project will be produced by Margaret Fink, with whom Gillian worked on "My Brilliant Career". She is also working with the playwright Stephen Sewell on a script entitled "Dingo" which deals with a pariah in society. "I think we'll have to change the title," said Gillian, her gaze solemn. So, the work of genius is called "Her Eyes Looked Left" at the moment.
With Stephen MacLean, the writer of "Starstruck", she is working on "Intermission", Anne Baxter's autobiography about her life in Australia. "It is so nice to finish a picture and still be talking to the writer," said Gillian.
On her current trip to the US, on a scholarship from the Ladd Company, she will be travelling the country for three months, looking at films being made, meeting writers and talking to the company about her forthcoming projects.
"The only thing the company wants in return is to be allowed to look at my projects first, before I go to other investors," she said. "I think j this is the only company in America that I could wori for. It's vital and original. Il was the company which released 'Chariots of Fire' in the US. It's investing in Bertolucci's new film whicn he will make in Italy - in Italian."
She smiles as she considers the Ladd Company talent roster at the moment: Bertolucci, one of the greal film makers - and her.
"There has been soma thing of a honeymoon for Australian films in the last couple of years with overseas audiences - they have been art house releases. If the honeymoon is over, I would hope that directors resist the temptation to make bland, stateless co-production films. One of the major reasons Australian films have succeeded is because they have been Australian."
Since her films have become popular, Gillian Armstrong has not been categorized as a feminist director but her concerns about women are obvious. Her first was "100 a Day", a film about a girl in a shoe factory during the Depression. She has also made a short called "Lollies and Smokes", about 14-year-old girls living in Australia with no real hope for the future. She worked on Tom Cowan's "Promised Woman", and then "The Removalists" as assistant director before undertaking "Career" and "Starstruck".
Gillian's life is relatively unchanged, she said, despite the success of "Career and the launching of her new film. She still lives in Balmain, where she lived while making "Career", still doesn't believe in marriage and has enough uninhibited spark to send a cheerio call on national television to her Nana - "I hope she was up that night, watching," she said.
Facing a future with any number of options. Gillian Armstrong is certain of one thing in her volatile life. "My next film will be made in Australia."
- CHRISTINE HOGAN
35mm Dreams Interview (1984)
Excerpt from the book 35mm Dreams: Conversations with Five Directors about the Australian Film Revival - Sue Matthews (Penguin Books Australia, 1984)
Your decision about a second film was a difficult one?
What happened was that because My Brilliant Career had been such an extraordinary success - and I felt a lot of that was a fluke, I think success is so much to do with timing - it put a terrible pressure on me to do the follow-up. I just wanted my first film to be promising, not to be held up there and revered, and I really do feel that some of the American reaction to the film was very overblown. Having gone out and proved I could do it, my biggest worry was 'what if the next one is a total failure: they'll say "there, we knew all along that the cameraman or the first assistant directed it.” I almost felt that to fail on the second one was going to be worse than if I'd failed on the first. And thirdly, I was offered a lot of projects and I realised I was already categorised very neatly: she makes women's films that are beautiful and lyrical, with a main female character fighting for identity. I was sent every possible story that had a main woman character doing something extraordinary in every part of the world, and always set in the past. That started to irk me and I thought 'I'll show them, I'll do something very different.' So I initiated a project that I thought would be a really heavy political, contemporary film. But as often happens with original scripts, by the end of the year it had gone through a number of drafts but hadn't really got much better. And at that stage Starstruck, which I'd already seen once and been tempted by, came back under the door.
What decided you to take it?
I heard through some friends of the writer, Stephen MacLean, about this fantastic script that was unlike any Australian film, a musical about a precocious fourteen-year-old boy who managed his eighteen year-old cousin. And it was originally set in the sixties so I thought it sounded like fun - obviously it was my era - so I managed to sneak a copy of the script to read it. I got my agent to ring the producers and say that I was interested in it and they said 'oh no, we don't want her, she does those period pictures. She'd be totally wrong for us. It's a high-energy rock musical.' So it was just a fluke that I ran into Stephen, who'd been living in England working as a rock journalist, at a party. I was a bit drunk so I was brave and I shook him and said 'I wanted that script!' And next day I got a phone call saying that the producer wanted to meet me.
A lot of the dialogue in Starstruck seems very stylised - it's full of classic thirties musical-type lines like 'life is what you want it to be' and you can do anything if you just believe it enough'. Was there a deliberate attempt to be part of that genre?
Stephen MacLean was an Angus. He grew up in a pub in Melbourne where his mother was a barmaid, and rather than dreaming of rock and roll, he used to dream of the movies and watch Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. So yes, that was another level within the script.
What sorts of stylistic issues did that present for you? Obviously it's not naturalistic.
Well, it was difficult. The script could have gone a number of ways. We could have gone in a more extreme direction, doing a total send-up and been much more cynical. But I feel that that genre of film only works in a very limited way, because finally you don't care about anybody. I felt that the kids had to be really believably young and naive, because within Stephen's writing there was always a great love for his people, he wasn't laughing at them.
It was something that I had to be very clear about. On the design side, for example, I had to say 'it's not Rocky Horror. 'The first time l went to see a dressing of Aunty Pearl's parlour, it was a sort of kitsch dream. I had it pulled back, saying 'you've got to think of the character, so she's still believable. This shouldn't be like walking into a shop and wondering "will I choose a black lady lamp or three flying ducks?"
You've said that as a teenager you were a rock and roll fan. Had you had a continuing interest in rock music and the music industry?
Yes, I have been a continuing fan. I was sitting next to a guy on the plane between Los Angeles and New York and somehow we started talking about music and he said 'you know, some people move with the times but I just stay liking the bands that I used to like at eighteen.' Well, I didn't just keep on liking the bands I liked at eighteen. Not that I've got highly sophisticated musical tastes, but I've always listened to what's been going around and things like the advent of 2JJJ in Sydney have kept my listening up to date. In the late seventies there suddenly seemed to be a lot of interesting music in Australia.
There are two strands to the treatment of the music business in Starstruck. One is to do with kids' obsession with rock and roll, and the other is to do with the fascination with fame and stardom and celebrity. Were those the things that attracted you as themes?
The thing that most interested me in the script was the relationship between Jackie and Angus and their family. For a long while I was in two minds about whether Jackie should even be a success at the end, but I felt that the whole sense of the film was the optimism and a real love of people so it was important that there was a happy ending - t though I think now it was maybe a trifle bland.
Finally I think that the film in a very simplistic sense was in praise of free spirits. There are a lot of rock movies about the fame and the pill-popping and the selling-out for the record contract but that at really wasn't the purpose of Starstruck. I would have liked just a slightly more bitter twist. I thought you should feel that once Jackie had got fame, that she had grown up and left Angus: their closeness and their relationship had finally got her where they both wanted her to go, but that meant that their relationship was over. I'm sure that comes out, but I would have liked it to be a little bit tougher.
How was the decision made to use the Swingers as the band and to get Phil Judd to do the music?
One of my greatest regrets about the entire film was that the music was got together in a very chaotic way. There had to be a band that was Angus' favourite band and I pushed very strongly to find a band that fitted in with Angus' personality: it shouldn't be a band that was built around a sexy male lead, they had to be a bit bent. I very strongly pushed for Split Enz, but that turned out to be impossible. But I certainly don't want to denigrate Phil Judd's talent because his getting involved was very fortunate for us and I think his input to the film was wonderful.
In our search for song writers, the original music director and found that very few people had the ability to write songs around story, a drama, and a required emotion. We'd specify this son should affect people in a pub and get them happy and make them dance', and songs would come in that were like something that you'd play at a funeral. So things were getting very desperate: I soon learned that good songs are a rare commodity.
The Swingers single 'Counting the Beat had just come out, and thought that they would fit the bill, being a little different and a little eccentric. The first time I met Phil Judd he stared at the wall and didn't speak to me. Their manager said 'oh, but they're wildly enthusiastic. But at the second meeting Phil did actually speak and even asked a few pertinent questions about the lead-in in the dialogue. By that stage I'd heard so many theme songs, I was saying 'maybe we shouldn't have a theme song, maybe nobody can write a theme song that doesn't sound corny, maybe it's impossible." So I was amazed when Phil's Starstruck theme actually arrived, and I was thrilled with it because I think he managed it in a way that wasn't too cute.
For me Starstruck would have been a better film if we hadn't had a drama with our first musical director dropping out halfway through. The official statement was that it was a disagreement in musical tastes with me, and he didn't have the sort of patience to work with someone inexperienced like Jo Kennedy, who plays the lead, Jackie. By that stage all the production machinery was rolling, and rehearsals were scheduled with the choreographer, who was only available for a short time.
Total chaos was threatening, so I was thrilled when Phil wrote Starstruck, and they offered to do some more. I sent them off to write the water-ballet music. I said 'I know it's too much to ask, but if you really want to know when we need it, it's tomorrow.' And sure enough they turned up at one o'clock in a taxi with the tape and it was Tough. We listened to it once, the choreographer grabbed the tape, and raced down the stairs to the rehearsal. It isn't the way to make a musical. though I have heard since of similar things going on in even greater projects than our little production. I never want to work that way again. I don't feel it was fair to the songwriters, the choreographer, or to the performers, but it was really desperation in the end.
The look of Starstruck is very consistent and coherent as a style. How did you approach that aspect of the film?
I was very worried about how the kids were going to look, knowing how quickly youth styles change and how long it takes to get a film out. It was something I talked about at length with both the designers. I chose Brian Thomson, who was the designer for The Rocky Horror Show, to do the sets, I wanted slightly heightened reality, and Brian was a great mind for ideas, so his designs say a lot more than just being pretty colours. Luciana Arrighi had done all the original design for Brilliant Career and she wanted to do the clothes for the same reasons as me, I think: to prove that she wasn't just lace and soft candlelight. It was impossible to guess what was going to be in fashion in eighteen months, so we decided to design our own things around the two characters - ideas about Angus playing the manager, for instance, with the Hollywood manager's gilt jackets. With Jackie we really went to town, putting together as many offbeat things as we thought the character would've done but always trying to retain the feeling of something she'd cooked up at home.
How did you approach the cinematography? You were working with Russell Boyd again, as on The Singer and the Dancer.
We wanted a sort of hard edge and brightness in the look. There's a theory that comedy should be brighter on the screen, so you don't do the sort of moody Brilliant Career thing. But I didn't want to go for the total fifties look, where it is absolutely overlit, because we needed some feel of the story being set in a real place. So that was the basic idea, with things like the rooftop pool scene being shot in the evening the Sydney skyline at dusk when all the lights are on is just a fantastic time.
Did you work closely with David Atkins on the choreography of the musical numbers?
Yes, I would watch rehearsals and try and explain what I wanted in my limited vocabulary. What I'd always wanted was for the dance to be original, for it to have a sense of humour and a lot of energy, and I didn't want it to be pretty. Not many choreographers would allow a director to come in and comment on this and that step but we got along very well. He'd go off to put it together and I would go in later with Russell Boyd and the camera operator and look at the rehearsals and talk about the ways to shoot it. No one had ever worked on a musical before, and everybody on the crew was really excited by it. It's amazing the feeling that's created on a set by having music going all day: it got everybody going and even though it was hard work, people really enjoyed working on the dance numbers.
Were you influenced at all by the rock-clip phenomenon, which has really exploded in the last couple of years?
I wanted to react against it. One of the producers suggested using a place in America where you can do a lot of tricksy effects on film, but I felt the thing we had going for us was that it was a real story, with real people, and so we should have real dance numbers, with people really dancing. We tried to capture the feeling that the dance was happening within the actual span of time, and to avoid going into total fantasy.
How was it working with the young actors Ross O'Donovan and Jo Kennedy, who'd never acted before?
What I was most worried about is that the filmmaking process is so drawn out and can be very boring. There are long waits and then suddenly you have to come up with instant energy and be the part. And I had them coming to me halfway through saying 'nobody told us to work how boring it would be' and how awful it was to get up at 6.30 every morning. So there were extra conflicts that made it harder for them to be the bright, zestful, energetic young things they were before it all started.
I had to watch Jo go ahead and make major errors and mistakes, a lot of which I felt were damaging to the film - it was very hard sometimes for me to keep my patience. We'd say 'you know it will show on your face the next day if you party all night,' but it wouldn't make any difference. Doing Starstruck was the first time I actually felt old. All these years that I've been doing these youth culture films any and everyone had said 'oh, she should do the one about the fourteen-year-olds because she's a teenager who won't grow up.’ I had thought I should do a youth film before I got too old, while I still understood a bit about what's happening with rock and roll. But going out with an eighteen and a twenty-one-year-old, for the first time in my life I felt 'yes, I have grown up'. In the end I was walking around saying all these platitudes like 'you can't tell them anything, they have to learn it themselves."
It's quite a responsibility, taking inexperienced young people out of their ordinary lives and into that kind of celebrity. That's true. Even apart from adapting to the work process there are the problems of moving two people away from their home and their friends for quite a long time. I knew that the film was going to have an effect on them personally. Suddenly they were up there on the screen and they attracted many more fans than Judy and Sam had in My Brilliant Career because they were reaching a younger fan audience. Poor Jo would be on the bus going to the dole office and people would ask for her autograph. It's very difficult to be getting that adulation while the reality for actors in the Australian film industry is that good parts are very rare in most age ranges, let alone for teenagers. The producers have been extraordinarily responsible to both Ross and Jo and their families: their and my involvement has gone on much longer than it normally would. My advice to most young actors is 'forget it' - go back to school and if a good part comes along maybe do it. But both of them were bitten by the bug: once you've had a taste of that sort of work, you want more.
*
Rock music seems to have been an important influence for you and is central in Starstruck. Do you think there is a distinctive tongue-in-cheek sensibility that runs through Australian rock music as well as Australian films?
It's hard to define. Australian bands in the late seventies had a musical style that had more melody and more humour than most of the music that followed the punk period. They seemed to have picked the eyes of all the styles of music that were around and mingled them all. So there's a sixties pop feel and there's a little bit of reggae, and they've put them together in their own way. That slightly tongue-in-cheek quality has been around for a long time, with bands like Daddy Cool, who were really ahead of their time, and Skyhooks, in the early seventies. It's almost a send-up of the genre, but taking it further and not just mimicking it. There's something very Australian in that sort of humour. I've been asked about the music in Starstruck a lot in America. They want to hear about an 'Australian Sound', since Men At Work have been such a success there - they have that melody and cheekiness too.
There is an interesting trend in Australian clothing and interior design towards Australiana, which as a fashion style also has something of that tongue-in-cheek character. Starstruck certainly seemed to pick up on that.
Yes, it does have that quality. That's grown a lot since we made Starstruck. Then, it was much more an 'in' fringe thing, a sudden interest in Australian icons and images of Sydney, of the bridge and so on. We thought we were very clever. We even thought about using a harbour bridge design as our logo, but I'm glad we didn't because it's to pre become hackneyed - that kitsch postcard send-up look has become quite a popular thing in Australia, at all levels of design. A lot of it has stemmed from the fashion designers Linda Jackson and Jenny Kee of Flamingo Park, who were the first to use Australian motifs on their clothes, such as koalas on the back of cardigans. And that's being mimicked all over. There really is a distinctive Australian look. I think it's great but at the moment I feel like if I see another Sydney T-shirt, I'll scream.
It's interesting the way Starstruck has been accepted overseas. I really thought that nobody would understand that it was tongue-in-cheek. It's a bit of a fluke that an interest in Australia is beginning to catch on: I've been really surprised, because they do get the joke.
Your decision about a second film was a difficult one?
What happened was that because My Brilliant Career had been such an extraordinary success - and I felt a lot of that was a fluke, I think success is so much to do with timing - it put a terrible pressure on me to do the follow-up. I just wanted my first film to be promising, not to be held up there and revered, and I really do feel that some of the American reaction to the film was very overblown. Having gone out and proved I could do it, my biggest worry was 'what if the next one is a total failure: they'll say "there, we knew all along that the cameraman or the first assistant directed it.” I almost felt that to fail on the second one was going to be worse than if I'd failed on the first. And thirdly, I was offered a lot of projects and I realised I was already categorised very neatly: she makes women's films that are beautiful and lyrical, with a main female character fighting for identity. I was sent every possible story that had a main woman character doing something extraordinary in every part of the world, and always set in the past. That started to irk me and I thought 'I'll show them, I'll do something very different.' So I initiated a project that I thought would be a really heavy political, contemporary film. But as often happens with original scripts, by the end of the year it had gone through a number of drafts but hadn't really got much better. And at that stage Starstruck, which I'd already seen once and been tempted by, came back under the door.
What decided you to take it?
I heard through some friends of the writer, Stephen MacLean, about this fantastic script that was unlike any Australian film, a musical about a precocious fourteen-year-old boy who managed his eighteen year-old cousin. And it was originally set in the sixties so I thought it sounded like fun - obviously it was my era - so I managed to sneak a copy of the script to read it. I got my agent to ring the producers and say that I was interested in it and they said 'oh no, we don't want her, she does those period pictures. She'd be totally wrong for us. It's a high-energy rock musical.' So it was just a fluke that I ran into Stephen, who'd been living in England working as a rock journalist, at a party. I was a bit drunk so I was brave and I shook him and said 'I wanted that script!' And next day I got a phone call saying that the producer wanted to meet me.
A lot of the dialogue in Starstruck seems very stylised - it's full of classic thirties musical-type lines like 'life is what you want it to be' and you can do anything if you just believe it enough'. Was there a deliberate attempt to be part of that genre?
Stephen MacLean was an Angus. He grew up in a pub in Melbourne where his mother was a barmaid, and rather than dreaming of rock and roll, he used to dream of the movies and watch Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. So yes, that was another level within the script.
What sorts of stylistic issues did that present for you? Obviously it's not naturalistic.
Well, it was difficult. The script could have gone a number of ways. We could have gone in a more extreme direction, doing a total send-up and been much more cynical. But I feel that that genre of film only works in a very limited way, because finally you don't care about anybody. I felt that the kids had to be really believably young and naive, because within Stephen's writing there was always a great love for his people, he wasn't laughing at them.
It was something that I had to be very clear about. On the design side, for example, I had to say 'it's not Rocky Horror. 'The first time l went to see a dressing of Aunty Pearl's parlour, it was a sort of kitsch dream. I had it pulled back, saying 'you've got to think of the character, so she's still believable. This shouldn't be like walking into a shop and wondering "will I choose a black lady lamp or three flying ducks?"
You've said that as a teenager you were a rock and roll fan. Had you had a continuing interest in rock music and the music industry?
Yes, I have been a continuing fan. I was sitting next to a guy on the plane between Los Angeles and New York and somehow we started talking about music and he said 'you know, some people move with the times but I just stay liking the bands that I used to like at eighteen.' Well, I didn't just keep on liking the bands I liked at eighteen. Not that I've got highly sophisticated musical tastes, but I've always listened to what's been going around and things like the advent of 2JJJ in Sydney have kept my listening up to date. In the late seventies there suddenly seemed to be a lot of interesting music in Australia.
There are two strands to the treatment of the music business in Starstruck. One is to do with kids' obsession with rock and roll, and the other is to do with the fascination with fame and stardom and celebrity. Were those the things that attracted you as themes?
The thing that most interested me in the script was the relationship between Jackie and Angus and their family. For a long while I was in two minds about whether Jackie should even be a success at the end, but I felt that the whole sense of the film was the optimism and a real love of people so it was important that there was a happy ending - t though I think now it was maybe a trifle bland.
Finally I think that the film in a very simplistic sense was in praise of free spirits. There are a lot of rock movies about the fame and the pill-popping and the selling-out for the record contract but that at really wasn't the purpose of Starstruck. I would have liked just a slightly more bitter twist. I thought you should feel that once Jackie had got fame, that she had grown up and left Angus: their closeness and their relationship had finally got her where they both wanted her to go, but that meant that their relationship was over. I'm sure that comes out, but I would have liked it to be a little bit tougher.
How was the decision made to use the Swingers as the band and to get Phil Judd to do the music?
One of my greatest regrets about the entire film was that the music was got together in a very chaotic way. There had to be a band that was Angus' favourite band and I pushed very strongly to find a band that fitted in with Angus' personality: it shouldn't be a band that was built around a sexy male lead, they had to be a bit bent. I very strongly pushed for Split Enz, but that turned out to be impossible. But I certainly don't want to denigrate Phil Judd's talent because his getting involved was very fortunate for us and I think his input to the film was wonderful.
In our search for song writers, the original music director and found that very few people had the ability to write songs around story, a drama, and a required emotion. We'd specify this son should affect people in a pub and get them happy and make them dance', and songs would come in that were like something that you'd play at a funeral. So things were getting very desperate: I soon learned that good songs are a rare commodity.
The Swingers single 'Counting the Beat had just come out, and thought that they would fit the bill, being a little different and a little eccentric. The first time I met Phil Judd he stared at the wall and didn't speak to me. Their manager said 'oh, but they're wildly enthusiastic. But at the second meeting Phil did actually speak and even asked a few pertinent questions about the lead-in in the dialogue. By that stage I'd heard so many theme songs, I was saying 'maybe we shouldn't have a theme song, maybe nobody can write a theme song that doesn't sound corny, maybe it's impossible." So I was amazed when Phil's Starstruck theme actually arrived, and I was thrilled with it because I think he managed it in a way that wasn't too cute.
For me Starstruck would have been a better film if we hadn't had a drama with our first musical director dropping out halfway through. The official statement was that it was a disagreement in musical tastes with me, and he didn't have the sort of patience to work with someone inexperienced like Jo Kennedy, who plays the lead, Jackie. By that stage all the production machinery was rolling, and rehearsals were scheduled with the choreographer, who was only available for a short time.
Total chaos was threatening, so I was thrilled when Phil wrote Starstruck, and they offered to do some more. I sent them off to write the water-ballet music. I said 'I know it's too much to ask, but if you really want to know when we need it, it's tomorrow.' And sure enough they turned up at one o'clock in a taxi with the tape and it was Tough. We listened to it once, the choreographer grabbed the tape, and raced down the stairs to the rehearsal. It isn't the way to make a musical. though I have heard since of similar things going on in even greater projects than our little production. I never want to work that way again. I don't feel it was fair to the songwriters, the choreographer, or to the performers, but it was really desperation in the end.
The look of Starstruck is very consistent and coherent as a style. How did you approach that aspect of the film?
I was very worried about how the kids were going to look, knowing how quickly youth styles change and how long it takes to get a film out. It was something I talked about at length with both the designers. I chose Brian Thomson, who was the designer for The Rocky Horror Show, to do the sets, I wanted slightly heightened reality, and Brian was a great mind for ideas, so his designs say a lot more than just being pretty colours. Luciana Arrighi had done all the original design for Brilliant Career and she wanted to do the clothes for the same reasons as me, I think: to prove that she wasn't just lace and soft candlelight. It was impossible to guess what was going to be in fashion in eighteen months, so we decided to design our own things around the two characters - ideas about Angus playing the manager, for instance, with the Hollywood manager's gilt jackets. With Jackie we really went to town, putting together as many offbeat things as we thought the character would've done but always trying to retain the feeling of something she'd cooked up at home.
How did you approach the cinematography? You were working with Russell Boyd again, as on The Singer and the Dancer.
We wanted a sort of hard edge and brightness in the look. There's a theory that comedy should be brighter on the screen, so you don't do the sort of moody Brilliant Career thing. But I didn't want to go for the total fifties look, where it is absolutely overlit, because we needed some feel of the story being set in a real place. So that was the basic idea, with things like the rooftop pool scene being shot in the evening the Sydney skyline at dusk when all the lights are on is just a fantastic time.
Did you work closely with David Atkins on the choreography of the musical numbers?
Yes, I would watch rehearsals and try and explain what I wanted in my limited vocabulary. What I'd always wanted was for the dance to be original, for it to have a sense of humour and a lot of energy, and I didn't want it to be pretty. Not many choreographers would allow a director to come in and comment on this and that step but we got along very well. He'd go off to put it together and I would go in later with Russell Boyd and the camera operator and look at the rehearsals and talk about the ways to shoot it. No one had ever worked on a musical before, and everybody on the crew was really excited by it. It's amazing the feeling that's created on a set by having music going all day: it got everybody going and even though it was hard work, people really enjoyed working on the dance numbers.
Were you influenced at all by the rock-clip phenomenon, which has really exploded in the last couple of years?
I wanted to react against it. One of the producers suggested using a place in America where you can do a lot of tricksy effects on film, but I felt the thing we had going for us was that it was a real story, with real people, and so we should have real dance numbers, with people really dancing. We tried to capture the feeling that the dance was happening within the actual span of time, and to avoid going into total fantasy.
How was it working with the young actors Ross O'Donovan and Jo Kennedy, who'd never acted before?
What I was most worried about is that the filmmaking process is so drawn out and can be very boring. There are long waits and then suddenly you have to come up with instant energy and be the part. And I had them coming to me halfway through saying 'nobody told us to work how boring it would be' and how awful it was to get up at 6.30 every morning. So there were extra conflicts that made it harder for them to be the bright, zestful, energetic young things they were before it all started.
I had to watch Jo go ahead and make major errors and mistakes, a lot of which I felt were damaging to the film - it was very hard sometimes for me to keep my patience. We'd say 'you know it will show on your face the next day if you party all night,' but it wouldn't make any difference. Doing Starstruck was the first time I actually felt old. All these years that I've been doing these youth culture films any and everyone had said 'oh, she should do the one about the fourteen-year-olds because she's a teenager who won't grow up.’ I had thought I should do a youth film before I got too old, while I still understood a bit about what's happening with rock and roll. But going out with an eighteen and a twenty-one-year-old, for the first time in my life I felt 'yes, I have grown up'. In the end I was walking around saying all these platitudes like 'you can't tell them anything, they have to learn it themselves."
It's quite a responsibility, taking inexperienced young people out of their ordinary lives and into that kind of celebrity. That's true. Even apart from adapting to the work process there are the problems of moving two people away from their home and their friends for quite a long time. I knew that the film was going to have an effect on them personally. Suddenly they were up there on the screen and they attracted many more fans than Judy and Sam had in My Brilliant Career because they were reaching a younger fan audience. Poor Jo would be on the bus going to the dole office and people would ask for her autograph. It's very difficult to be getting that adulation while the reality for actors in the Australian film industry is that good parts are very rare in most age ranges, let alone for teenagers. The producers have been extraordinarily responsible to both Ross and Jo and their families: their and my involvement has gone on much longer than it normally would. My advice to most young actors is 'forget it' - go back to school and if a good part comes along maybe do it. But both of them were bitten by the bug: once you've had a taste of that sort of work, you want more.
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Rock music seems to have been an important influence for you and is central in Starstruck. Do you think there is a distinctive tongue-in-cheek sensibility that runs through Australian rock music as well as Australian films?
It's hard to define. Australian bands in the late seventies had a musical style that had more melody and more humour than most of the music that followed the punk period. They seemed to have picked the eyes of all the styles of music that were around and mingled them all. So there's a sixties pop feel and there's a little bit of reggae, and they've put them together in their own way. That slightly tongue-in-cheek quality has been around for a long time, with bands like Daddy Cool, who were really ahead of their time, and Skyhooks, in the early seventies. It's almost a send-up of the genre, but taking it further and not just mimicking it. There's something very Australian in that sort of humour. I've been asked about the music in Starstruck a lot in America. They want to hear about an 'Australian Sound', since Men At Work have been such a success there - they have that melody and cheekiness too.
There is an interesting trend in Australian clothing and interior design towards Australiana, which as a fashion style also has something of that tongue-in-cheek character. Starstruck certainly seemed to pick up on that.
Yes, it does have that quality. That's grown a lot since we made Starstruck. Then, it was much more an 'in' fringe thing, a sudden interest in Australian icons and images of Sydney, of the bridge and so on. We thought we were very clever. We even thought about using a harbour bridge design as our logo, but I'm glad we didn't because it's to pre become hackneyed - that kitsch postcard send-up look has become quite a popular thing in Australia, at all levels of design. A lot of it has stemmed from the fashion designers Linda Jackson and Jenny Kee of Flamingo Park, who were the first to use Australian motifs on their clothes, such as koalas on the back of cardigans. And that's being mimicked all over. There really is a distinctive Australian look. I think it's great but at the moment I feel like if I see another Sydney T-shirt, I'll scream.
It's interesting the way Starstruck has been accepted overseas. I really thought that nobody would understand that it was tongue-in-cheek. It's a bit of a fluke that an interest in Australia is beginning to catch on: I've been really surprised, because they do get the joke.
National Film and Sound Archive Interview with Gillian Armstrong (2016)
Director Gillian Armstrong attended a showing of the Australian National Film and Sound Archives restoration of Starstruck on Australia Day, 26 January 2016, giving an extensive interview on the production of the film.
If you have access to Facebook, you'll be able to see virtually all of her Q&A session, and hear Gillian's thoughts on ...
If you have access to Facebook, you'll be able to see virtually all of her Q&A session, and hear Gillian's thoughts on ...
Interview with David Elfick
Head over to the Australian Screen website for a long profile of producer David Elfick by veteran film critic Paul Byrnes, which covers his career in great detail, including the production of Starstruck.
Further Articles and Analysis
- Dennis Harvey writes about Starstruck and other New Wave musicals for Fandor
- Keith Phipps of The Dissolve interviews Dave Holmes, who rates Starstruck 'a film everyone should see'
- Paul Byrnes provides a scholarly overview for the Australian National Film and Sound Archive.
- The National Film and Sound Archive also has an online exhibition of costumes from the film that are held in their collection.