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Clip description
After his morning run, architect Steve West (Richard Moir) celebrates with his partner Vicky (Anna Jemison) and business associate Philip Lawson (John Gregg). The squatters, occupying a disputed row of terrace houses, are being chased out as they toast the fact that West’s $200 million Eden Project can now go ahead. On the roof of the terraces, activist Kate Dean (Judy Davis) protests as the developer’s hired goons chase her. Publisher of the community newspaper Mary Ford (Carole Skinner) takes photos. On television later that day, local resident Jim Taylor (Don Crosby) calls the protestors a mob of idiots and show-offs.
Curator’s notes
The second scene of the film shows how innovative Phillip Noyce and his team tried to be on Heatwave. The subject matter was very contemporary, especially for a Sydney audience, but so is the style – a demanding rhythm that uses ellipses in time very casually, and a sound design that’s thick with information and nuance. There are often two or three distinct sound sources in each scene, with competing lines of information. The news reports are a constant hum, almost a chorus used to comment on the action and advance the sense of complexity and tension. Cameron Allan’s largely electronic score gives the film a floating atmosphere that was highly unusual in Australian cinema in 1982.
Noyce was heavily influenced by the techniques and ambience of American and European film noir. He and his team watched several films over and over in the preparation stage, including Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Mean Streets (1973), The Conformist (1970), The Big Sleep (1946), Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and The Fountainhead (1949, a film about an architect). He has also acknowledged the documentary Woolloomooloo, made by Sydney-based filmmaker Pat Fiske in 1978. ‘You draw inspiration from many sources’, he told Cinema Papers in June 1982.
