Article - The Australian, August 2nd, 2008

The Face: William McInnes
Rosalie Higson August 02, 2008

WILLIAM McInnes insists we top and tail our conversation with highlights from his circa 1980s KennyG tape, especially the track called GForce, which sets him cackling like mad.

"What a bizarre fellow he was ... the hair! Every 10 years or so we get one of those Euro people. Remember Yanni?" Sometimes McInnes laughs so much at the world, at himself, that he snorts. His conversation fires off in all directions, and he talks to himself, too. Some people might need medication for that, but with McInnes you know he's just thinking aloud.

At the moment, McInnes is all over the shop. He's the lead in the successful Australian feature Unfinished Sky, the story of a lonely farmer who takes in a beautiful illegal Afghan refugee. And his latest memoir cum history is just out: That'd Be Right is a rambling yarn about the link between sport and politics, a trend that, he points out, began long before former PM John Winston Howard put on his Wallabies tracksuit. It's his third book, after the well-received A Man's Got to Have a Hobby and the novel Cricket Kings.

I didn't want to write a memoir: my life in art, I just don't like that sort of thing, it's a wank, and I haven't done anything worth writing about," he says. "What I was trying to do in a boof-headed male way was show how a political or social break occurred in a person."

The story begins with his childhood in then almost bucolic Redcliffe, near Brisbane, when his parents examined politics and politicians with an acerbic eye, and their youngest child did everything to avoid handing out how-to-vote cards on election day. "The first chapter is when I was a kid, involved or not in world events, my failings as much as anything else.

"It's pretty broad brush strokes. I'm not a historian, but memory is so finite. Politicians always harp on about the previous governments, Howard was always banging on about the Depression ... this guff just falls over you, and so I thought I'd try to write about Australian life, from the times when sportsmen and prime ministers were the biggest names in the news."

McInnes may be prolific, but he's a reluctant sort of artist. Is he busy? "Naow," he says, drawing three notes out of one syllable in the best Aussie tradition. "Most of the time I'm sitting on my great barge-arse," he laughs. "Writing's hard, you just have to do it. Acting I'm enjoying more than writing."

Not surprising that such a sociable bloke prefers being on set to sitting in front of a computer all day. His television roles include Max Connors in SeaChange, for which he won his first silver Logie as the shirtless hunk who got very personal with Sigrid Thornton.

He's particularly good as the tight-jawed, angry, emotionally stunted Anglo-Australian father in miniseries My Brother Jack (silver Logie No2), and in The Shark Net.

He was the eponymous prime minister in the miniseries Curtin, and vulnerable as a man just diagnosed with cancer in the feature film Look Both Ways, directed by his wife Sarah Watt (whom he describes as "one of those people who are generous and open about what they do and their appreciation, just good people to have in the world").

Marriage, family life, maturity have changed the way the 47-year-old approaches acting, which he's been doing since he left the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 1989: "If you're going to work, you don't want bloody arguments every 10 minutes," he says.

"When you're a young actor, or writer, or just young and vaguely creative, there's that idea of being the angry artist, the fierce defender of the vision. And actors are great at bullshitting, they're great at spinning stories. They say they've done all this work, and half the time they've rocked up, vaguely learned the role, then come out with one of the great lines actors say -- and I've been guilty of it -- "My character wouldn't say this, I can do it with a look".

Ego and insecurity go together, because "in eight out of 10 films you see, the performances are created by the director and the editor in the edit booth. I can be like a plank sometimes and then see (the film) and think, well, that looks all right, they must have done a lot of surgery in the edit suite," he says.

"But it's one thing to recognise that and another to accept it. The best thing I ever heard about actors was said by (Marlon) Brando: 'An actor's a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, he ain't listening.'

"And writers festivals! Huge egos. Writers have probably got bigger and more fragile egos than actors."

So that's a double whammy for McInnes, whose ego should be swollen like a ripe Bowen mango. Luckily he has his mother (and, one suspects, wife and children) to keep him in line should he be tempted to engage in wankerism. Iris McInnes takes a central role in That'd Be Right as a sort of chorus, critic and fervent booster for everything Queensland.

"I got really slagged in a review for Unfinished Sky (I looked it up: the words 'stilted' and 'pompous' were utilised). Everyone else liked it, and it's done all right. So I told my mum, and she was laughing. She said, 'Oh, you should take it on the chin.'

"I said, 'Why do you always say that to me, Mum?' And she said: 'You're a 15-stone, six-foot-four, middle-class white male, vaguely smug and self-satisfied: you should accept a bit of humbling now and then because your type of person has a lot to answer for. You've owned the world for a couple of hundred years and might have another hundred yet, but you just wait, your type will get its comeuppance."

Before that happens, McInnes hopes to write a few more stories, bag a few more decent roles.

"The Australian film industry needs to make more films, on more realistic budgets, and without the box office being the sole judge of success," he says. "But it's important to tell Australian stories. Don't write about assassins and ex-SAS men. Have a crack at writing about where you come from, that reflects a part of your society. I think that's valuable.

"I feel like I'm bagging everyone, but if you give someone a story to hook on to, then that's a good thing. I'm happy with That'd Be Right, it's good that it's out there, failings and all."
So, does McInnes have an ideal role in mind?

"I'd like to initiate and make an Australian character resonate within the community. It would be fun to be a character that people latch on to: not violent, not a serial killer."

But right now he's gone blank. He promises to be in touch and cues up G Force again.

The next day, his publicist rings with a couple of names: The first is Cliff Hardy. Yes, McInnes would be note perfect as Peter Corris's working-class detective, with all his frailties and morals.

The other? Margot Fonteyn. Somehow, the dancing plank rings true.

That'd Be Right: A Fairly True History of Modern Australia by William McInnes (Hachette Australia, $35) is out now.