Sunday, September 21, 2008

Article - The West, September 1st, 2008

Leading ladies team up for new film

Some of Australia's leading ladies, including Frances O'Connor, Miranda Otto and Deborra-lee Furness, are teaming up for a new film about the depth of love between mothers and children.

Based on the award-winning play Who's Afraid of the Working Class?, Blessed interweaves four moving stories which follow the misadventures of six children as they wander the city streets through a day and a night.

Otto, O'Connor and Furness, who are all real-life mothers, star in the movie about “the depth of love between mothers and their young, and the life force that ultimately connects us all”.

The film, which also stars Victoria Haralabidou, William McInnes, Monica Maughan and Tasma Walton, will be shot on location in Melbourne from October 6 until November 21.

Blessed marks the third collaboration between director Ana Kokkinos and writer Andrew Bovell (Head On, The Book of Revelation), and has been adapted for the screen by Bovell, Melissa Reeves, Patricia Cornelius and Christos Tsiolkas.

The foursome wrote the four stories in the play first performed at the Victorian Trades Hall Council in 1998.

Who's Afraid of the Working Class was the winner of a Melbourne Green Room Award for Best New Play the same year, and a gold Awgie Award in 1999.

Book Review - That'd Be Right - SMH - August 25, 2008


That'd Be Right: A Fairly True History Of Modern Australia
Reviewed by Gary Maddox
William McInnes celebrates his home, warts and all.
WITH the memoir A Man's Got To Have A Hobby, William McInnes emerged as a talented writer of comic and touching stories about suburban Australian life.
He sketched his Brisbane childhood, dominated by an eccentric father, with the same kind of laconic decency he often brings to his other job - acting in Blue Heelers, SeaChange and Curtin on television, Look Both Ways and Kokoda on film and as himself on Australian Story.
After the novel Cricket Kings, McInnes has turned to more comic and touching suburban stories pegged to landmark moments in recent Australian history in That'd Be Right, which opens on the morning of the 1975 federal election that pitched Gough Whitlam against Malcolm Fraser.
With one eye on Ian Chappell's buccaneer batting against the West Indies quicks in Perth, the country is ready to vote. Posters of local candidates with mutton-chop sideburns and walrus moustaches adorn front yards, shop windows and telegraph poles.
The young McInnes is already politically aware enough to be suspicious of a friend's father who considers Whitlam a communist and Chappell crude.
"The government, which was the caretaker one headed by square-jawed Mal, was expected to romp it in against the government that had been headed by smirking Gough until he'd been sacked by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr, a silly man who drank too much," he writes.
As that suggests, any thoughts from the book's subtitle that McInnes is taking history too seriously are quickly dispelled.
Reading That'd Be Right to understand the country's past is like dipping into Manning Clark for the jokes.
Still, there are reflections - mostly irreverent - on the political careers of Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, John Hewson, John Howard, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd.
The country might have fallen for Hawke in early 1983 but to McInnes's dad, who features prominently again, he is Old Runty. On the soon-to-be PM's alleged sexiness, his mum declares: "Oh good God, him and his cackle … it'd be like a bit of slap and tickle with a rooster."
Aunty Rita is more dismissive: "No, thank you. He's too much like an old kelpie, all dick and bone."
McInnes sketches famous moments in Australian sport, including Stephen Holland swimming at the Montreal Olympics as the country's last hope for a gold medal, Rick McCosker batting heroically with a broken jaw at the Centenary Test, Australia II's victory in the America's Cup and Pat Rafter's first US Open win.

Along the way some good old-fashioned values are endorsed. Taking yourself too seriously, showboating, triumphalism, the lionising of Don Bradman, sport being turned into a spectator event, zealous entrepreneurs and Peroni activists get a pasting. A country is celebrated for all its flaws.
"Australia isn't perfect, it doesn't have to be for it is the sum total of its people," McInnes concludes. "We are all good and bad, eager and indifferent. Some of us don't care, some care too much, most of us go about our lives. That's it."
Big events weave in and out of the comic anecdotes and observations about how the country has changed. But the best parts of That'd Be Right are the small events, such as when the young McInnes pretends to mow the lawn of shortsighted Mrs Glazier, parties with a Georgian theatre company while an acting student in Perth, fills in as Santa Claus one Christmas and shares a communal moment in traffic while trying to coax the Australian tail-enders to an unlikely Test victory.
If you want stories about the author's career in film and TV, you'll have to wait. They must be destined for another memoir.
This one is a bit haphazard but, if you can forgive the shocking bias towards Queenslanders, it is another entertaining read.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

William McInnes on Enough Rope - Link to Excerpt

William was a featured guest on Andrew Denton's Enough Rope on August 11th, 2008. To read the transcript of the interview, and see video excerpts, go to:

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s2331592.htm

Article - Adelaide Now, August 11th 2008

William McInnes Wows Adelaide
Samela Harris

WILLIAM McInnes dismisses his massive popularity among women with a grin, a sigh, a laugh.

"It's all just fun," he says.

After all, much of the content of his three books has been about sport, a subject McInnes loves to write about. Then again, he writes a lot about politics.

He has written about both in his latest book That'd Be Right.

In Adelaide on a national author's tour, he ponders the new collection of memories, observations and anecdotes in the book, subtitled "a fairly true history of modern Australia".

McInnes wants to make it clear that history is an important aspect of life and culture.

"Ask people who was Prime Minister before John Howard and most of them don't know," he says.

"When I played Curtin in a movie, I was talking to someone about Curtin and the war and they said `the Iraq War?'

"You don't have to be swallowed by the past but it is good if you know about it, if you know where you've come from."

McInnes, well known on screen in films such as Look Both Ways – directed by wife Sarah Watt – and on television in series such as Sea Change and Blue Heelers, writes tales of characters and events in his life and the things he was doing during significant moments in Australian history – the election of Malcolm Fraser, Gough Whitlam, John Howard among others.

At the age of 44, the author finds himself growing less judgmental – a good thing, he says.

"It's time everyone was more tolerant. They need to give others a bit of slack – like John Howard. It's not his fault he won all those elections. Now people want a bob each way on him. A lot of people did well out of him." He quickly adds: "I'll be voting Labor until I'm carried out in a box."

The new book, however, hints at his evolving philosophy. He likes people of moderate views.

He dislikes jingoistic flag wavers. He hates "tub thumpers". He loathes winners who pump the air with their fists.

"If the world had more Australian people, people like Australians, it might be a better place," he says.

Then again, there are a lot of "boofheads" in Australia and McInnes wonders if he is one.

He suggests that men should be more sensitive, less blokey, "do more listening".

"This comes from a man who is about as sensitive as a house brick."

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

William on That'd Be Right

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Article - The Melbourne Age, August 6th, 2008


Boofhead with Brains
Michael Lallo
August 6, 2008

He takes politics and culture seriously, but with his own life, actor-turned-author William McInnes finds laughter is the best tonic.
IN HIS favourite Footscray cafe, just around the corner from his house, William McInnes is drinking tea and talking politics. It's a subject he's passionate about, yet he's surprisingly frugal with his opinions, lest he be seen as "having tickets" on himself. And if the conversation gets too heavy, he simply stops mid-sentence and cracks a joke.
"So far, I reckon Rudd is …" he starts, before trailing off and staring into his cup. After a couple of moments, he throws his head back and howls.
The other patrons turn and stare, but the waiters barely raise their eyebrows.
"Stephen Smith looks like a wolf," he continues. "It's like having a really polite wolfman as your foreign minister. He needs to get rid of that Eddie Munster haircut. I was watching Lateline last night and thinking, 'So that's what happened to Eddie Munster! He settled in Perth and became an MP.' "
McInnes is here to promote his third book, That'd Be Right, a part-memoir, part-modern Australian history that combines the milestones of local politics and sport with his own experiences. It sounds like a recipe for self-indulgence, but McInnes has managed to craft a personal, funny history without the egocentricity.
"It's basically just the history of a boofhead arsing around," he says. "It should be called The Life and Times of a Boofhead from Queensland."
McInnes is best known for playing larrikin cop Nick Schultz in Blue Heelers and the hunky Max Connors in SeaChange. He's unpretentious and proud of his working-class roots, and it's hard to think of a more quintessentially Aussie bloke.
But McInnes' brand of patriotism is more cerebral than most. He loves sport, for example, but abhors the idea that "real Australians" must share his obsession. And he's disappointed that feminism has fallen off the radar. Indeed, he sees a relationship between the two.
"We're increasingly relying on sport to define ourselves," he says. "And I think that rise of blokehood is in direct contrast to women being empowered. There seemed to be only a brief flutter of real feminism in the '70s, then it died out as quickly as it started. I still react to women who call themselves chicks and things like that bloody Nando's ad with the stripper. I won't go to Nando's because of that."

Even more infuriating was an incident involving an inflatable sex doll at the cricket, which McInnes recounts in his book. "The doll was bounced from group to group," he writes. "I looked at the doll. At how the crowd were 'giving her some'. Young men, quite a few of them as full as ticks, were thumping and kicking and pounding 'her' into the air … I felt uncomfortable, even ashamed. Of blokes. It was if every woman and little girl had been pushed aside and told, 'You don't belong.'
"This idea of 'being a bloke' — what does it mean?" McInnes continues. "Is it just about being some moron who eats pies and drinks beer?"
Clearly, it's a rhetorical question: McInnes is not about to tell other Aussie blokes what to do. Still, he wonders if he should be more like his late father, who "never hesitated to stand up and say, 'F--k, this isn't right.' "
Col McInnes, who made several unsuccessful runs as the Labor candidate for the federal Queensland seat of Redcliffe, features prominently in the book. His son obviously inherited his political sensibilities — "I'll vote Labor until they put me in the box," he says — but took longer to outgrow the knee-jerk aggressiveness his father despised. McInnes recalls boasting to him about telling Malcolm Fraser, whom he spotted in a local mall, that he wanted to cut his throat; his father, in response, was livid.
" 'What a bastard of a thing to do'," he said. " 'He at least stands up to get his head kicked in. But you, you pie-can, don't even know why you yell out, save for the fact you think it's funny.' "
McInnes learned his lesson. "I couldn't stand how people attacked John Howard personally and said that they hated him. How can you hate someone?"
Worried that the conversation is getting too serious, McInnes changes tack. Soon, we're discussing the time he published his own death notice in the local paper for a laugh; the absurdly sycophantic fake fan letters he wrote to his castmates, some of whom were vain enough to believe them; and how he would sneak up behind John Wood on a packed train and yell, "Look, everybody! It's John Wood from Blue Heelers!"
"You can't take yourself too seriously in this business," he says. "In fact, you can't take yourself too seriously in life. Because once you do, you're in trouble."

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.

Article - The Daily Advertiser, August 4, 2008



Reignite the love of reading
REBEKAH HOLLIDAY
4/08/2008 10:47:00 AM

WAGGA and universities go together like peas and carrots in the mind of Melbourne-based author-actor William McInnes.
Best known as the character Max Connors from the ABC acclaimed series SeaChange, McInnes was in Wagga on Saturday for his first visit in almost two decades.
McInnes also starred in the 7 Network’s Blue Heelers, playing Sergeant Nick Schultz.
He joined fellow author Michael Robotham, originally from Gundagai, as a guest speaker at the Books Alive 2008 lunch at the Wagga Country Golf Club.
“Wagga’s changed a lot. I think the last time I was here was about 15 years ago. I often get invited but usually can’t make it,” McInnes told The Daily Advertiser.
“It’s a lot bigger these days and Charles Sturt University has gone from strength to strength. It’s definitely known as a uni town which can only be a good thing for the city.”
More than 180 people attended the lunch with all money raised going to charity.
The event, Books Alive, is a Federal Government initiative to encourage or reignite a love for reading in adults.
McInnes promoted his new book That’d Be Right while Robotham, the national ambassador for Books Alive 2008, showed off his literary work, Shatter.
“To anyone who says they don’t like books or reading, it’s like saying you don’t like sex – you’re just not doing it right,” Robotham said.
“There’s a book to suit everyone.”
All money raised will go to Northcott Riverina.