Background
Frederic Alan Schepisi was born in Melbourne, Victoria, the son of Loretto Ellen (née Hare) and Frederic Thomas Schepisi, who was a fruit dealer and car salesman of Italian descent.
(In the New Yorker, Stephen Schiff has described Fred Sche...)
In the New Yorker, Stephen Schiff has described Fred Schepisi (b. 1939) as �probably the least-known great director working in the mainstream American cinema�a master storyteller with a serenely muscular style that can make more flamboyant moviemakers look coarse and overweening.� Schepisi�s launch in Australia during the country�s film renaissance of the 1970s and his ongoing international work have rightfully earned him a reputation as an actors� director. But he has also become a skillful stylist, forging his own way as he works alongside a talented team of collaborators. This volume includes twenty interviews with Schepisi and two with longtime collaborators, cinematographer Ian Baker and composer Paul Grabowsky. The interviews trace the filmmaker�s career from his beginnings in advertising, through his two early Australian features�The Devil�s Playground and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith�to his subsequent work in the United States and beyond on films as various as Plenty, Roxanne, A Cry in the Dark, The Russia House, Six Degrees of Separation, Empire Falls, Last Orders, and Eye of the Storm. Schepisi�s films are diverse thematically and visually. In what is effectively a master class on film direction, Schepisi discusses his creative choices and his work with actors and collaborators behind the scenes. In the process, he provides a goldmine of insights into his films, his filmmaking style, and what makes him tick as an artist.
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director producer screenwriter
Frederic Alan Schepisi was born in Melbourne, Victoria, the son of Loretto Ellen (née Hare) and Frederic Thomas Schepisi, who was a fruit dealer and car salesman of Italian descent.
He began his career in advertising and directed both commercials and documentaries before making his first feature film, The Devil's Playground, in 1976.
Throw in the attempt at a Western (Barbarosa) and science fiction (Iceman), as well as the trip to Japan for Mr Baseball, and one can view' Schepisi's journey as adventurous or wayward, in search of something, working with American money but never yet coming to ground in Hollywood. The coziness of Roxanne seems the more out of place once one grasps Schepisi’s interest in misplaced people driven to violence or irrationality bv contusion. Jimmie Blacksmith was not just a film about race and sex, but a study of Australia’s muddle. A Cry in the Dark had the same impact and the same inner concern: it was about disinte-gration, and the woeful attempt to impose plastic- order on unheeded or denied savagery.
Most intriguing of all, Plenty is a kind of aghast celebration of a woman who will not settle for popular answers about what she wants or what it is to be English. With Hare’s text, and Meryl Streep’s very brave performance, Schepisi showed us a woman helplessly drawn to terrible, dangerous gestures. Perhaps one needs to have been or to have wanted to be English to feel the movie’s pain. Plenty seemed to me at first a failure, too tied to self-pitv and too blurred in writing and casting. But I cannot get the film out of my head, and I’m still not sure how much of that comes f rom 1 hire, Streep, or Schepisi. My only answer so far is that there are three profound, unstable talents, drawn toward difficulty and discomfort.
Sean Connerv’s Barley in The Russia House could have been should have been? as much of a disaster as Susan Traherne in Plenty. That the film winds slowly toward a happy ending seems finally a little unworthy of Schepisi. But along the way we see so many unexpected tilings there is something effortlessly wandering in Schepisi. He is like an absentminded surgeon. The Russia House is a fine Cold War thriller, and one of the gravest recent love stories.
Wandering became a very intricate dance in the exhilarating Six Degrees of Separation, a small story that explodes in range and implication, and that showed Schepisi’s unexpected capacity for comedy.
By now, though, one has to see that Schepisi has never really made a successful American film. I.Q. was a strange piece of whimsy coming from him, while on Fierce Creatures he was brought in late as a rescue act and how rarely that works. But then he took Graham Swifts novel, Last Orders, and made a superb, very touching picture of it with an assurance that suggested (yet again) that Schepisi has to feel comfortable with the social setting he is examining. Which British director has made three films that get Englishness better than Plenty, The Russia House, and Last Orders?
(In the New Yorker, Stephen Schiff has described Fred Sche...)
(Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith: Tommy Lewis, Freddy Reynolds,...)
(Devil's Playground: Arthur Dignam, Nick Tate, Simon Burke...)
(Buy Six Degrees of Separation: Read 291 Movies & TV Revie...)
(Buy The Eye of the Storm: Read 21 Movies & TV Reviews - A...)
(Buy Barbarosa: Read 111 Movies & TV Reviews - Amazon.com)
(Buy I.Q.: Read 774 Movies & TV Reviews - Amazon.com)
Fred Schepisi has been married three times and has seven children. He had four children with his first wife Joan; his second wife Rhonda died of cancer, after they had two children. His third wife, Mary, whom he married in 1984 and with whom he had a seventh child, is an American.
He supports Australia becoming a republic and is a founding member of the Australian Republican Movement.