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Oi, Oi… Oi?

October 2012

  • D.M. Bradley

While writer/director P.J. Hogan’s Mental is a rather harsher outing than his breakthrough film Muriel’s Wedding (which was itself fairly troubled), what most surprises about his latest pic is the fact that it’s semi-autobiographical. “Shaz is based on a real person”, he explains, “and when I was 12 my mother had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalised, and my Dad was a local politician who was running for re-election at the time. He said to us, ‘Kids, nobody votes for a guy whose wife is bonkers’, and we had to keep it to ourselves – all five of us rat-bags… So, later on, when he was desperate for any sort of help, he wound up stopping for a hitch-hiker, and he trusted her as she had a dog, and we then came home to find this stranger sitting on our couch, rolling a cigarette, and with a hunting knife in her boot, and she said, ‘A bit of a mess in here, isn’t it?’, and she set us all about cleaning.”

‘The Original Shaz’ loomed large in P.J.’s memory for years, and he even spoke to Toni Collette about her on the set of Muriel’s, “although I had no idea that one day I would make a film about her…  Then when I worked out how to tell her story, and I was writing the script, I kept on hearing Shaz’s lines being said in Toni’s voice. I suppose that the part was always Toni’s… We remained friends after Muriel’s and she kept asking me, ‘How’s Shaz going?’, and, while I was prepared for her not to like the script because, as a director, you don’t always get your first casting choice, she read it and the next day said, ‘Let’s do it!’”

Talking about the rest of his terrific cast (Anthony LaPaglia, Rebecca Gibney, Kerry Fox, Deborah Mailman and others) and how outrageous they get onscreen prompts Hogan to both praise them all and offer his sharp thoughts about the very Hollywood notion of characters needing to be ‘sympathetic’.

“The actors all wanted to play the parts and they all loved the characters, despite – or even because of – their flaws. I always have trouble with the word ‘sympathetic’, as I spent so long in the American industry. ‘Sympathy’ and ‘likeability’ are imposed in scripts so much that all character just goes out the window. I mean, how many of us can look around our friends and family – our ‘life cast’ – and think, ‘Wow! What a bunch of sympathetic, likeable, unflawed human beings?’ I love flaws, and I proudly consider myself deeply flawed.”

And, finally, Hogan also feels strongly that he doesn’t have to justify Mental’s (and Muriel’s) often caustic view of Australian suburbia. “You know, I love Australia, and I fielded questions about this back during Muriel’s, when some people seemed to think it was ‘un-Australian’. ‘How can you be so mean to Muriel?’ ‘Australians aren’t like that!’ I must say that I have one sibling with schizophrenia and one who’s bipolar, and I have two autistic children, and so I know that mental health is a real issue, and I’m in the trenches. I see the prejudice and the generosity and the craziness here every day.”

 

Mental opens at cinemas everywhere on Thursday October 4.

 

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