TV Feature: Truth, Lies & Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Truth seeker - Carmel Travers

It was a “spooky” atmosphere in which madness prevailed says writer, director Carmel Travers when the seeds of her latest documentary Truth, Lies & Intelligence were first laid. 

Rewind to March 2003, Australians were being warned to ‘Be Alert, Not Alarmed’ as the Government poised troops to join their US and British counterparts in the invasion of Iraq. Senior Intelligence Officer Andrew Wilkie resigned from the Office of National Assessment with the prescient view that a war based on questionable intelligence would lead to a humanitarian disaster.

“In that couple of months after Wilkie resigned everyone was swept away with the events of the war,” says Travers.

“It was as if people had forgotten the warnings that he was uttering, as were other intelligence analysts in the United States and the UK that ‘Hold on, we don’t really have proof of weapons of mass destruction’.”

Truth, Lies and Intelligence is an incisive investigation into how erroneous intelligence was used by the US led coalition of the willing to reconstruct the truth as an agenda for the Iraqi invasion. It explores the aftermath and lifts the veil on the intelligence community which became a scapegoat to what could be “the biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam”. 

Travers secured interviews with top level intelligence analysts, including retired US State Department Intelligence Chief Greg Thielman (a direct advisor to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell), US Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Wilkie, all of whom confirm that there was no concrete evidence that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction or had any link to the 9/11 attacks.

She acknowledges the courage it took these whistleblowers, few of which have escaped vilification, to convey their knowledge on film. At times during the documentary, the strain becomes awkwardly apparent.

“Their personal lives had been thrown into turmoil.” says Travers.

Scapegoat - US Ambassador Joseph Wilson

“That was certainly the case with US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, not only had he been publicly vilified but his wife had been outed as a covert CIA agent which forced her to resign. How often do they really want another film crew to come into their lounge rooms?”

The documentary shifts gears from the political to the deeply personal as Travers accompanies Sydney based Iraqi refugee Guzin Najim back to Iraq in what ultimately becomes an aborted attempt to enter Baghdad. Here Najim spent three years under house arrest and a further three in Jordan, after her diplomat husband was killed on Saddam Hussein’s orders. 

“I decided to include someone like Guzin Najim because she came at it from a completely different perspective to say an Australian woman like me,” says Travers.

“She was prepared to kiss the feet of George Bush for going into Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein. She didn’t care what the reason might have been behind doing that. It was really important to me to not just be sailing off on my own western liberal bandwagon but to actually stop and listen to the point of view of someone like Guzin.”

Travers whose credits include the ground breaking science series Beyond 2000 and the award winning documentaries Refugee Like Me and Climate In Crisis, says she was compelled to make the film because of her own “instinctive disbelief” in the Australian Government’s claims that Iraq posed a national security threat. 

“It was this whole question of what happens to the truth when you have clear government policy imperatives that seem to be so determined to push us to engage in a conflict?” she says.

“I felt that yet again as with Operation Desert Storm we were not going to be told the truth.”

The director admits she feels vindicated that the views expressed in the film have been corroborated by high level independent inquiries in Australia, Britain and the US. But in the end, Travers says she’s disappointed the documentary couldn’t find a more positive outcome, that for Iraqi nationals like Najim, their country’s future remains bleaker than ever.

“What resolution has there been for Guzin? Absolutely none. It’s been ten years since she left Iraq and I don’t think that she really will get any resolution until she finds a patch of earth north of Baghdad where she allows herself to believe that her husband’s been buried.”

This article was first published in The Guide, Sydney Morning Herald, September 5, 2005.

TV Feature: Kramer vs Kramer

Without doubt, Seinfeld’s Kramer is one of the funniest and most original characters to ever stutter and shake his way through a TV sitcom. Filmink’s James Mitchell met Michael Richards, the man behind the myth, in Sydney recently.

Undoubtedly the defining comedy of the 90’s, the gloriously unsentimental Seinfeld tattooed itself on popular culture with phenomenal success. Branded as a show about nothing, it was really about the minutiae of sex, dating, friendship and a myriad other life matters.

TV Feature: The Silence

Two of Australia’s biggest names in cinema – Somersault director Cate Shortland and in-demand actor Richard Roxburgh – team up for the striking TV crime drama The Silence. By James Mitchell.

While you’ll only see it on your television screens, don’t be surprised if The Silence, the new ABC mini-series from Somersault director Cate Shortland has you convinced you’re perched in a cinema.

It’s another in a growing line of television dramas – think Love My Way and Remote Area Nurse - with a depth of character, nuanced script and high production values that rival any quality film.

It’s no surprise then that a top notch team of Australian cinema are attached to the production. Shortland reteamed with Somersault collaborators, the producers Jan Chapman and Anthony Anderson while Richard Roxburgh (Moulin Rouge!), Essie Davis (Girl with a Pearl Earring) and Emily Barclay (In My Father’s Den) lead a talented cast.

The Silence tells the story of Richard Treloar (Roxburgh) a Sydney police detective still reeling from the gruesome death of an informant and now relegated to curating an exhibition of crime scene photos from the 1960’s at a Police and Justice museum.

Added to that, he’s facing a relationship on the skids and has to endure enforced counselling sessions in an attempt to get his old job back. As the photos become his obsession, one crime begs to be solved leading Treloar on his own journey of self discovery.

While it may sound like just another police drama, The Silence is a taut, strikingly atmospheric production that expertly weaves murder mystery, relational drama and film noir into one striking whole.

For Roxburgh, the decision to return to television after compelling performances in 2002’s The Road from Coorain and Blue Murder was heavily influenced by The Silence’s script and talented director.

“I thought it was a really complex script, really quite tense,” he says “It was a script that had obviously had a

lot of work done on it. That’s pretty rare. Also the fact that Cate and Jan were involved in it. I really admired what Cate brought to Somersault.”

Roxburgh’s role, says Shortland was far more challenging than she’d envisaged.

“He brought a real fire to the role,” says Shortland. “He didn’t want the character to be passive and neither did I. Part of the reason it’s called The Silence is because his character doesn’t speak or can’t speak about his feelings. 

"It was kind of a struggle. Richard’s incredibly smart and nothing was easy because he wanted to be pushed. He said to me ‘I want to be vulnerable’. He’s not usually vulnerable in his roles.”

In a powerhouse performance which is amongst the actor’s best, Roxburgh believes it was Shortland’s craftiness that contributed to his getting under the skin of the emotionally muted Treloar.

“I had a really strong contract with Cate from the beginning,” says Roxburgh. “She knew where she was allowed to take it, that I was happy to be pushed around a bit. She’s a very psychologically crafty director.

“On a few occasions in the middle of a scene she would either whisper something to me, or to the actor I was working with. She would slightly change the situation and throw a depth charge into the middle of it that surprised either me or the other actor. There were pretty terrific results from that. She’s a very clever director.”

Roxburgh, no stranger to police related characters – he played infamous dirty cop Roger Roberson in Blue Murder and can be seen as a detective alongside Toni Collette in the forthcoming Like Minds – was intrigued by the psychological stress endured by policemen.

“I’d met a couple of police officers for this project,” he says.

"There was one officer in particular who had to leave the force because of trauma and so meeting him and talking to him about what he went through was a revelation in the way that he dealt with it and the way the police force dealt with it.

“You really go through all the phases of grief that you go through when somebody close to you dies, this whole period of uncontrollable depression, rage.”

But Roxburgh says he learnt not to bring the angst of his character home.

“What I find now, and this is quite interesting, is the only time I take angst home with me is when I think the project is crap,” he laughs.

“That is really when I go home with a lot of angst.”

Indeed, the gifted actor has had plenty of call for home-angst appearing in forgettable Hollywood popcorn flicks from Mission Impossible 2 to the vapid Stealth and his most prominent role as Dracula in the horrifically awful Van Helsing. At least on that production he met his now wife, Italian actress Silvia Colloca.

“Everything has a silver lining,” Roxburgh says diplomatically.

“Although I would temper that by saying not everything! Playing a detective concurrently is infinitely better than “playing the undead,” he quips.

The actor and budding director is heavily in the midst of refocusing his attention on passion projects such as his feature directing debut Romulus My Father which begins shooting this month with Eric Bana.

“I hope I don’t fuck that up!” he laughs.

Asked whether he hopes to spend more time behind the camera he replies;

 “I’d be asking me that in three months time! What I can say is that I absolutely love it so far.”

So don’t expect Roxburgh to pop up in any dire Hollywood fare any time soon.

“It’s just that I’ve come to a point now where I’ve been there and felt the pain of doing projects that I didn’t believe in,” he reflects.

“Even though those projects might be allowing you enough security to do things that you dearly love, there’s a lot of pain involved in that. It’s a real trade off. I’ve found that a genuine conflict at times.

“Whereas with something like The Silence, I thought ‘No matter what I have to go through when the cameras are rolling, at least I can go home thinking this is a beautiful story’.”

This is an edited extract of a feature first published in Filmink Magazine, May 2006.