Jindabyne

Jindabyne Movie StillIn director ’s , four friends set out on an annual fishing trip in isolated high country where they find the naked body of a young Aboriginal woman who’s been murdered. But instead reporting the crime the next morning, the men carry on with their trip--and report the murder at the end of their fishing weekend. Thereafter, all hell breaks loose as public opinion turns against them and they are forced to examine themselves and the decision they made.

Hollywood.com: Do you enjoy movies where you get to travel around? Laura Linney: Absolutely!

I’ve never really understood Australians when they say how far away they are from everything. You never understand that until you go. You are really far away.

FAR away. Ray used this to a huge advantage to the movie. The landscape is unbelievably powerful.

Gabriel Byrne: When I went to Australia I realized apart from certain stereotypical impressions and images I had absorbed mostly from movies over the years, I knew nothing. I found Australia to be an extremely complex, conflicted and contradictive society. I realized how limited we are in knowledge of each other’s countries, and how little we actually know about each other.

HW: Did you find the Australian actors had a different approach? LL: Nah. Good actors are good actors.

They were fun. It was a fun group. GB: I actually try not to use words like Irish film, or Norwegian film, or Australian film.

Outside the U.S., very few people say American film.

They say a “John Travolta film” or an “Adam Sandler film.” But, film is very universal. And is a universal film that deals with really profound themes that effect not just Australia, but almost every country in the world.

HW: It’s powerful that a complex feature-length film is based on a succinct, four-page short story, So Much Water, So Close to Home by Raymond Carver. GB: What’s brilliant about Raymond Carver is that the story sounds like a ridiculous premise, but what it sets off in terms of the community and the relationship between people is what makes him a genius writer. He writes in a language that is completely accessible and yet so incredibly profound.

LL: Sometimes it [having a story to work from] is terrific and other times it can lead you in the wrong direction. Because it [the film] is not the book, it’s a different medium. You have to give yourself permission to let it take on a life of its own.

And that’s hard to do. Particularly if you love the material, you want to nail it to the original source. And, a lot of times film just doesn’t work that way.

It’s fantastic because you get information. You can be very secure in your choices about a character, physically or emotionally, because it’s stated right there. HW: What do you think this film says about life and death?

GB: Ray [Lawrence, the director] had this thing about fishing being lyrical and poetic. And I said, “I don’t believe it’s lyrical and poetic.” The truth about it is that fishing is a violent act.

There you are, and you’re a fish going home, and everything is cool…but there’s a hook in your mouth! At one point, I said to Ray, “If you don’t believe that [it’s violent], then let’s put the fish on the rock.” And you can see that fish will struggle for his life.

And Ray said, “Fish don’t really have central nervous systems.” And I responded, “How do you know? Why is he fighting for his life?

Why isn’t he just saying to himself, ‘I really don’t have a central nervous system? I’m just a fish.’” But what you could see in the breathing of the gills was the desire that every living thing has: to keep living.

HW: You’ve referred to as an “unsettling ghost story”? GB: In the beginning of the film, evil is waiting to happen. And at the end of the film--despite all the forgiveness and all the trauma and all the suffering--evil is still waiting in the same place…in a beautiful innocent landscape waiting to happen.

HW: The men never meet the young woman when she’s alive, but we as viewers do--and form a connection with her. Is this in part why they can leave her in the water? GB: Take that early scene out where you [as a viewer get to] see her alive.

Are you saying you’d be less sympathetic to the woman floating down the river? HW: In other words, it comes across that the four men use that ‘disconnect’ as an excuse; that they don’t know this girl--she has no background. It’s a rationalization to leave her there.

GB: Exactly. On the other hand, the women around also say, “what would have happened if four women had found that body?” What would have happened if a young man had been found in the river?

What if it had been a white person? What’s so brilliant is that it brings up all those questions, for which really often times there’s no answers. HW: What if three women went fishing and found a dead man?

LL: To me it’s just an easy answer. They’d immediately report it. Immediately.

I mean, you just would. I don’t understand that choice [not to come forward] at all. It is a completely foreign thing for me.

I am very much like Claire in that regard. I have no understanding of how they could fish for three days while a body is floating in the water. A woman who has been clearly sexually assaulted.

And is floating, naked, face down in the water. How do you do that? GB: What’s really interesting to me is the notion of male macho behavior in crisis situations.

The women in the film respond tremendously clear headed. To them it’s about taking action. Taking positive action.

The men traditionally in the male world they inhabit their reaction is silence, withdraw, distance, defensiveness. The women are the ones who say, something has to be done here! HW: The female detective surmises, “Maybe she was asking for it.

” You would think she’d be more sensitive regarding a mutilated body? LL: Well [inhales], the dead girl is Aborigine, and there’s a whole other layer because of the historical context of how Aboriginal people have been treated in Australia. I think that police officer was completely hardened and unsympathetic.

HW: Do male/female reporters asking questions have different reactions to the movie? LL: That’s an interesting question. Umm, I haven’t noticed a difference.

I mean, quite frankly, your [reporter] personalities are all so strong. That’s sort of what I see more than gender. As far as this movie is concerned, there are real differences between how men and women are wired.

What I find interesting about this, the different choices that people make, is how does a relationship survive? It fractures you in a way. HW: There’s a line from both the short story and the film where Claire asserts, “That’s the point.

She was dead, but she needed your help.” Was Claire just talking about the young woman--or was she also thinking of herself? LL: Particularly that line, I tied it into Claire’s breakdown which happened way before the movie even started.

HW: Hardly anyone, including Claire, can accept Stewart’s decision to leave the body in the river for two whole days, so is there any way to defend it? GB: Not only do none of us know how we would react in certain situations, but the definition of macho-ness in fiction demands that man knows how to re-impose order on chaos. Let’s have this man go completely hysterical and not know what to do.

Stewart blesses himself, which comes from a primitive instinct to protect himself before touching the body and turning it over and realizing what’s happened. HW: Why is Claire so desperate to make amends with the family of the dead young woman? LL: Everyone in this movie has something they’re haunted by.

Something that has happened in the past that directly effects how they behave and interact with people in the present day. As we all do. But, for her, the guilt and the shame of what she went through…she is desperately trying to make it all okay.

She will not tolerate behavior like that [from her husband]. She doesn’t accept it in herself, and won’t except it in others. GB: The film examines a different kind of heroism.

What does it take to be married to someone for 25 years? What does it take to deal with someone who has hurt you so deeply by betraying you? How do you forgive somebody?

How do you actually really forgive yourself? HW: What do you think this film says about judgment and blame? Claire seems to be on both ends of it?

LL: She’s extreme. I think Claire being judgmental is in direct correlation with her being judged. I mean, for someone to abandon a family.

For a woman to abandon her child. As an actress, I had to figure out a way to understand why did she leave. I think this is something that people don’t even consider, that it wasn’t a selfish choice for her to leave.

She wasn’t like, ‘I’ve had it with this, I’m leaving.’ You know, I decided it got to a point that she was endangering the life of her child, and she had to go. I mean, that was the decision that I made for her perspective.

HW: So there are always multiple forces at once that we should dissect, when questioning blame? GB: What makes the film unsettling in my mind is that it unconsciously reinforces the notion…that the world we live in is incredibly chaotic and unpredictable. And we like to think it’s an ordered place.

And we like to think we pose our stability and order on the world, and yet a few days ago we open the paper, and 33 people are dead because of the guy down the corridor in this place nobody had ever heard of. HW: How do you feel about the bedroom scene when Stewart returns home to Claire, having just ignored a dead body for days? LL: You mean when he made love to his wife [right then]!

Creepy. HW: The physical position of Stewart sitting and cozying up to Claire, who’s horizontal on the bed near-mirrored the image of him finding the body in the river. LL: I copied it.

HW: So, that was your idea as an actor? LL: That was my idea [pleased]. I didn’t know if anyone picked up on that.

Oh, I’m glad you did. I was there when they filmed the scene with the body in the water. I remembered where she was and I thought to myself, ‘my arm has to go up.

There’s got to be something that unnerves Stewart…that’s got to push him a little further.’ Choices like that, when you stumble across them, they’re really fun. Because you know you’re also helping the other actor, and pushing them a little bit further.

HW: Out of all the people in the movie, why is Claire the one to react deeply? LL: Yeah, she really takes it to an extreme. It’s certainly about the situation; but it’s also about her own stuff that she can’t let go of … If you recognize pain to such a degree.

If you recognize wrong to such a degree. I think it’s very, very hard to just ignore it. GB: It’s an interesting idea of how men and women interact with each other in particular situations.

In this case, it happens to be a crisis that happens in the town where a murdered woman opens up racial issues in the community. This is something that can happen in any place. The idea that innocence can be punished and that guilt can walk free is something that is a very profound question for every country in the world.

HW: Some will say this is a story of race and gender--but, also forgiveness… GB: I spoke to a woman a few weeks ago who survived Auschwitz; and her husband was split up from her at the time because they realized the Nazis were invading Poland. He said to her that they had to get out of there and she said, “I can’t because I can’t leave my mother alone. And my mother is too old to walk.

” She pleaded with her husband to escape and said, “You go to Russia. You go to Tashkent.” And with great reluctance he walked to Russia as the German army came to Poland.

He stayed in Tashkent for five years. His wife and his mother-in-law were taken to Auschwitz concentration camp. Her mother was killed in the camp.

And his wife survived. He came back from Russia and found his entire family had been murdered, except for his wife. I said to him a few weeks ago, “Do you forgive?

Do you forgive the Germans for what they did to you?” And he said, “I’m 89 years of age. No.

I will never forgive them. And I don’t care whether there is a heaven or a hell. I will not forgive them for what they did.

” And the woman who survived the death camp said, “You have to forgive. And I have forgiven them.