Stephen Wallace
| Stephen Wallace | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Stephen Henry Wallace 23 December 1943 New South Wales, Australia |
| Occupation |
Film director Screenwriter Producer Actor |
Stephen Wallace (born 23 December 1943 in New South Wales) is an Australian director. His 1984 film The Boy Who Had Everything was entered into the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. His 1986 film For Love Alone was entered into the 37th Berlin International Film Festival.
Stephen Wallace made several short 16mm fiction films and worked at Film Australia as a production assistant and director of documentaries.
Wallace made a series of feature films. His first short feature film was The Love Letters from Teralba Road (1977). His feature directorial debut took place with Stir in 1980, a film based on incarceration and a subsequent Royal Commission. The film proved popular and Wallace stated that it made a profit. In 1984, Wallace directed The Boy Who Had Everything. Wallace's experience of this film was to be one of his first difficult encounters within the directing field; he was unhappy with the casting and found one of the actors hard to work with:
Diane Cilento tried to play working-class, but it just didn't work. Robyn Nevin wanted to play that part, and I think she should have. Jason Connery was very young then and he was very nervous about the film and thought it would ruin his image, and he was never very friendly to me. He did the film, but he thought I was ruining his career.
In 1986, Wallace directed the film adaptation of Christina Stead's novel, For Love Alone. The film was beset with budget and rewriting issues, and Wallace was disappointed by its reception, especially in reviews from feminist and women's magazines. Wallace harboured a regret that he didn't handle the treatment of this film more boldly.
Wallace made Olive in 1988 and Prisoners of the Sun (also known as Blood Oath) in 1990. For the latter film, Wallace felt the writers were not true to the original story, which rendered the film less interesting than the real-life story.
Wallace's final feature film before taking a hiatus from directing was Turtle Beach. Wallace was hired because the financiers who had invested in his movie Blood Oath loved his work and saw him as a good choice. Yet, Wallace said:
I loved the book and I really wanted to make the film. I think in the end the script really wasn't good enough and I had a terrible run-in with the producer on it. It was just a nightmare. I wanted to make a film about Asia again, because I thought Asia was misunderstood in Australia and I thought the more light we can shed on Asians, the better... But unfortunately in the film, it all went haywire because the reason to make the film was wrong... The producers all wanted to make Pretty Woman. I said, "It's not Pretty Woman, it's a film about Asia." I had to fight to get an Indian to play the Indian; it was a struggle from start to finish. There was plenty of money, but I kept compromising on it. I kept compromising about the place where the beach was, about the roughness of the set. I wanted it really rough. Then there was this whole thing about the disco place, which was actually the producer's idea, something he'd seen in Thailand... Also the massacre on the beach. Everyone was worried, the massacre had to be built up, whereas the massacre was wrong - emotionally and morally wrong. All this was pushed and I felt I'd lost control of the film.
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