Soft-spoken and reflective, the Australian director John Duigan amiably discussed his new film, Lawn Dogs, during a flying visit to Dublin last week. With previous offerings like The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting and Sirens, Duigan has set the virtues of innocence, freedom and youth against the evils of cynicism and strait-laced morality. In his first American film to be shown here (another, The Journey Of August King, is still awaiting a release), he returns to the same oppositional theme, this time filming among the affluent suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky and in the adjoining countryside.
Duigan was sent the screenplay, by Kentucky-born playwright Naomi Wallace, just a couple of months before filming started. "I think it's a very unusual use of fairytale as a way of conjoining a modern story, showing how the old fears of the witch and the forest can be borrowed and used with just as much resonance."
In Lawn Dogs, 10-year-old Mischa Barton takes on a highly demanding role with remarkable aplomb. "It's the most complex role that I've ever seen for a child," says the director. "It avoids that kind of tweeness which is so common in children's characters. I did think at one time that this film might be impossible, because you wouldn't be able to find the right actress."
An atmosphere of sexual ambiguity pervades the film, in the relationships between the suburbanites and in the physicality of Sam Rockwell, who plays the young working-class man whom Barton befriends. Duigan is aware that at times in the film he's walking a delicate line with that relationship, but is happy he succeeded.
"She's aware of sexuality in an abstract sense, but she's not experiencing it yet. I was aware that the audience would be watching that like a hawk. Sam's character is very conscious of how this might look to other people, and at times you sense that he's drawing back precisely because of that. His behaviour is impeccable throughout that, though. The film on that level is saying that the world is impoverished if friendships can't exist between adults and children. I think it's appalling that this has happened, but of course I understand why it had to happen."
Rockwell will be most familiar to audiences from Tom DiCillo's Box Of Moonlight, released earlier this year, in which he also played a poverty-stricken young Southern man. "I think that it's a superficial similarity, in that they both live in trailer homes," says Duigan. "But he's a contented buffoon in Box Of Moonlight, whereas here he's a deeply damaged individual, who finds himself being humiliated every time he goes to work. I'm interested in people who live on the margins of society, because it's in how those people are allowed or not allowed to live that you can shape a comment on the conformism that society imposes."
The suburban "community" of Camelot Gardens, where Rockwell works and Barton lives, is a desert of manicured lawns and mock-Tudor housing, rendered in the film as a kind of semi-comic horrorscape. "We didn't do very much to that place. It's pretty much as it is. We went out looking for one of those gated communities, so new that there hasn't been time for the trees to grow. Without having to alter the colours a la Edward Scissorhands, you get that sense of heightened absurd reality anyway."
He agrees with my suggestion that Lawn Dogs and his other films reflect a concern with the divide between the natural and urbanised worlds that recurs regularly in Australian cinema. "I'm always interested in stories that deal with moral questions, and that express that in some way through geography and the physical landscape. That pantheistic sense of the world is a central element of Australian aboriginal culture. For me, all human beings can experience that sense of unity - we all feel it as children. That has been a preoccupation of mine, and I like to remind people that there is a world out there of physical beauty and magic. I think as we become more socialised we become more cut off from that."
