Australian
Screen

Clip description

Australian correspondent Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) thinks he’s alone in his office in Jakarta, but freelance cameraman Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt) has his own key. Billy offers to help Hamilton to get an interview with the head of the PKI, DN Aidit. It’s their first big exclusive. Other members of the international press corps, particularly the American correspondent Curtis (Michael Murphy), are not happy.

Curator’s notes

The casting of Linda Hunt was a brilliant, intuitive gamble on Weir’s part. Hunt succeeds in convincing us that Billy is male, but there’s also a sense of something else about him. Whether we can call it female or not, it’s the idea that Billy cares about different things than these other Western journalists. He knows about Guy Hamilton before meeting him; he has already decided to give him a gift before this scene – the interview with Aidit. He establishes instant intimacy with Hamilton, by sitting on his desk, cross-legged like a close friend, the door opened by Hamilton’s comment about how long he has waited for this job.

Weir uses head heights quite subtly in this scene. Billy is initially shown with the camera at his height; when Hamilton stands up, we see how tall he is and how small Billy Kwan is. When Billy sits on the desk, his head is above Hamilton’s, so that Hamilton looks up at him. In the shot that follows, Kwan looks slightly down as he says 'I can be your eyes’. These shots establish Billy’s intensity and his equality. He is far better connected than any of these correspondents, perhaps because he knows that there is no such thing as objectivity in this place at this time. Billy is not a journalist, in that sense, but a participant. He’s also an expert manipulator, as this scene makes clear.