Talking in the Library Series 1
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Andrew Upton is an Australian playwright with the easy manner of an Australian cricket captain who has just enjoyed England's latest batting collapse. He has translated two plays from the French into Australian English: the stories of Cyrano de Bergerac, who never got the girl, and of Don Juan, who got them all. Disarmingly, he identifies with Cyrano: a pretty large act of self-deprecation when you consider that he is married to Cate Blanchett.
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Collaborative British artists Olly & Suzi work with photographer Greg Williams in remote polar, desert, jungle and ocean environments. They track, paint and – to use their word – interact with predators and their prey. Some of the interacting can look perilous if the creature is a Great White shark or a charging rhinoceros. The idea is that the animal will leave an impression on the painting, if not on the painters. In my library, the intrepid duo faces one of the less formidable primates.
Bruce Beresford is the Australian film director who transformed the film industry in his own country with the Barry Mackenzie films, consolidating the breakthrough with The Getting of Wisdom, Breaker Morant and Don's Party. He went on to become one of the most adventurous international directors. No matter how big the financial hit – Driving Miss Daisy or Double Jeopardy – he will always follow it with something risky, even suicidal. He is also a funny talker, who has been amusing me since we were students together more than forty years ago.
Ruby Wax is not only one of the funniest women in the world, she is a maker of documentary films for television who ranks in originality with the great founders of the genre. On location, she can create a situation like nobody else, and then use her formidable skills as a director to make sure that it is captured on film. It isn't enough to coax Imelda Marcos into revealing the secrets of her walk-in wardrobe, you have to get the lights and camera in there too. You have to be Ruby Wax.
Peter Porter is the leading Australian expatriate poet of his generation. During fifty years in London, he has built an unassailable reputation as a poet, critic and broadcaster who combines erudition with a brilliant colloquial manner. One of his gifts is to talk the way he writes: always learned, yet always entertaining, his conversation has had a profound influence on younger writers, not just because of his enthusiasm about literature but because of his generous appreciation of music and the plastic arts.
Deborah Bull is currently moving on from her prominent role as a prima ballerina of the Royal ballet to take her destined place as a spokesperson and impresario for the dancing arts. The new Covent Garden studio theatres to whose command she has just been appointed were largely her creation in the first place. In addition, she heads London's outstanding company for modern dance, and is the author of one of the very best books about her art, Dancing Away. She is also a natural television performer who doesn't even have to write it first: she can just say it.
Martin Amis has achieved such celebrity as a stylish icon of his age-group that the coverage in the media threatens to cloud the picture of his clean-edged originality as a master of the English sentence, of which he has reinvented every part while further focussing its melody and rhythm. Celebrated among his friends as one of the great talkers at the lunch table, he has rarely enjoyed talking on television, which he finds intolerably artificial. But when he talks in my library, with a drink and a roll-up to hand, it's a different matter.
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From his earliest days as a director, Bruce Beresford was intermittently active as a writer about movies. His articles on the subject were invariably informed by his thorough knowledge of the medium — he had seen almost everything, in all languages — and made especially vivid by his congenital inability to hedge his bets. If he thought a laurelled classic was a dud, he would say so. Similarly, he could spot the hidden success lurking in the work of an otherwise unfortunate name. Above all, he never fell for the auteur theory in any of its forms. What counted was the actual film, not the reputation. Unfortunately his written work about other people's movies had to be bludgeoned out of him by desperate editors who found that a promised article had to be postponed until one of Beresford's own movies was finished. I was one of those editors.