In the late 1980s, filmmaker Geoffrey Wright noticed an increase in hate crime in his home town of Melbourne. Gangs of skinheads were targeting Asians, particularly the Vietnamese. Skinheads were hardly unusual where Wright grew up, in the working-class northern suburbs of Pascoe Vale and Strathmore. "If you sat on the Broadmeadows train line then sooner or later you'd find yourself in a compartment full of them," he says.
They had been, by and large, apolitical. Their attacks on the Vietnamese, however, signalled a lurch to the right, where they made common cause with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Intrigued, Wright sought out former gang members, collecting hours of interviews that he considered turning into a feature film, tentatively titled Skinheads. The only thing missing was a living, bleeding protagonist, a black sun powerful enough to pull his material into a meaningful orbit. Which was when Dane Sweetman came along.
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"Sweetman was a Melbourne neo-Nazi who axe-murdered a fellow skinhead at a party to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday, which sounds ridiculous but is true," Wright tells me. Wright read all the reports on Sweetman, and even talked to people who knew him, eventually drawing from his story the rudiments of Hando, the character at the centre of what would become the film Romper Stomper. Shot in abandoned factories and underpasses, the film stars a young Russell Crowe as Hando, a trench-coated neo-Nazi who leads his gang of racist sociopaths on a rampage through Melbourne's underbelly.
Released in 1992, the film became an instant sensation in Australia, a kind of cultural acid bath, peeling back layers of collective denial to reveal an unwelcome glimpse of home-grown extremism. It won three Australian Film Institute awards, and helped launch Crowe on a career trajectory from which he shows no signs of returning. It also launched its writer and director Wright, then aged 33, who became known as the enfant terrible of Australian independent cinema.
![Geoffrey Wright has never been one for political correctness. “These days the most interesting conversations you have ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20180209032138im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/z/l/q/v/a/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gzgadi.png/1510925703017.jpg)
Twenty-five years on, and Wright is no longer an enfant, terrible or otherwise. He is small, almost gnomish, with a slight paunch, glasses and a silvery head of freshly shampooed hair that he wears in something approaching a pageboy. Russell Crowe tells me Wright was "intense on set, but the subject matter was due that intensity". Jacqueline McKenzie, who played Gabe, Hando's girlfriend, says Wright was "feisty – right in the middle of the action".
His directorial modus is more circumspect these days: when I meet him on the Melbourne set of his latest project, he is hidden at the back of a small stuffy room crowded with crew, sipping chilled water from a paper cup. If the publicity woman hadn't pointed him out, I might not have found him at all.
Though Wright has made other films since 1992 – a teen slasher flick called Cherry Falls in 2000, an updated Macbeth in 2006 – it's fair to say Romper Stomper was the last time most Australians heard of him. It's both exciting and unnerving then, to find him on the set of another Romper Stomper, a reincarnation of his breakthrough classic as a six-part TV drama for Australian streaming service Stan (part-owned by Fairfax Media, publisher of Good Weekend).
The series, which producer John Edwards describes as a "contemporary, socio-political commentary", is one of a growing number of film remakes and spin-offs for TV, including a serialisation of Picnic at Hanging Rock, for Foxtel, and an adaptation of the 1971 dystopic thriller Wake in Fright, for Network Ten, which seek to capitalise on the cachet of their originals.
![A scene from the original Romper Stomper.](http://web.archive.org./web/20180209032138im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/z/l/q/u/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gzgadi.png/1510867409909.jpg)
Romper Stomper is different, however, in that some of the actors featured in the first film reappear as their older selves in the series, including McKenzie, whose character, Gabe, has morphed from a disturbed teenager into a calculating corporate executive; and Dan Wyllie, whose Cackles has gone from skinhead underling to white-supremacist overlord. (Crowe's Hando does not reappear, having been stabbed to death at the end of the first film.)
As Wright is anxious to make clear, new Romper is not simply old Romper after a few minutes in the microwave. It's longer, obviously, and more nuanced: instead of being immersed for 92 minutes in Hando's clammy, Mein Kampf-y little world, the revamp features multiple characters and multiple points of view. It's also snappily contemporised, picking up all the themes from the original – extremism, xenophobia, urban disaffection – and inserting them, virus-like, into an age of iPhones, Islamic State and a "pussy-grabbing" US president.
"Donald Trump changed everything," Wright tells me during a break in filming. "I had been thinking about doing a Romper Stomper sequel for a while. I'd written some notes and stuff, but I hadn't committed to it. Then Trump's ascent made revisiting the film all the more relevant."
According to Wright – who co-wrote the series with Omar Musa, Malcolm Knox and James Napier Robertson, and directs the first two episodes – Trump has helped mainstream the cultural trolling that once festered on the fringes, transforming the current moment into a kind of Belle Époque for bigots. Rather than hide in an abandoned warehouse, like Hando and his mates did, today's haters have their own TV shows and newspaper columns, their own political parties and Facebook pages.
They are just rehashing the same old story, but instead of Asians, the targets are now Muslims.
Wright explores this new normal from both ends of the political spectrum, through characters like Blake Farron (Lachy Hulme), the leader of a far-right group called Patriot Blue; Laila Taheer (Nicole Chamoun), a secular young Muslim woman and law student; and Jago Zoric (David Wenham), a lizardy shock jock who hosts a TV show called No Quarter.
The day I visit the Melbourne set, Wright is directing a scene in which Farron and Laila appear on No Quarter, ostensibly to discuss a clash that took place, at a recent halal-food festival, between Patriot Blue members and hard-left activists. Naively, Taheer expects an actual debate. Instead, Zoric and Farron double-team her, Zoric strafing her with barbed non-sequiturs and random misogyny ("There have been 475 Muslim-related terrorist threat investigations this year; what do you say to that, young lady?"), while the poisonous, finger-wagging Farron lobs in jibes about burqas, beheadings and sharia law.
By the end of the scene, Taheer is speechless; she has been skinned and filleted, live on prime time. For Zoric and Farron, however, it's all in a day's work. It strikes me that, compared to these guys, Hando was a perfect gentleman.
Wright is 58 years old. He lives in a flat in St Kilda with his 11-year-old daughter, Nevada, and a poodle cavalier named Lucy. (He separated from wife Ruby in the late 2000s). He is a private person, in a refreshingly old-fashioned way, reluctant to talk about anything even vaguely personal or, for that matter, domestic. (He refuses to let me see his apartment.) According to friends, he lives a modest, largely uneventful life.
"He doesn't travel much. He never talks about going to parties, and he doesn't socialise a lot with people in the film industry," says friend Frank Lipson, who worked on the sound on both the original and new Romper Stomper, and who has known Wright since the mid- 1980s. "When I ring him up, he's always writing something. I'll text him late at night and say 'What are you doing?' and he'll say, 'Writing.' That's what he does, looks after his daughter, and writes."
During my time with him, Wright often appears preoccupied, as if engaged in some ongoing interior dialogue. Yet he is also notoriously pugnacious, with a molotov-cocktail conversational manner that combines adamant and incendiary opinions with the bare flame of indignation. Even relatively benign exchanges inevitably lead to superheated indictments of "idiotic" conspiracy theorists or film critic "poseurs" or, his perennial peeve, political correctness.
"Oh I loathe it!" he says, wincing. "People censor themselves all the time now! You walk into a room and the first thing you think is: what can I say and what can't I say? I mean, get stuffed! Honestly!
"These days the most interesting conversations you have about things like race are in the back of cabs and with friends, never in the public realm. When the most interesting conversations have to happen in private, then something is seriously broken."
Wright is nostalgic for the 1990s, which he sees as a less politically correct time. "As a storyteller, I don't feel as free as when I made the original Romper Stomper," he says. This is an odd statement, given that 2017's Romper Stomper is premised largely on Donald Trump's gleeful disdain for political correctness, and how those previously shut out from public debate are now so freely and frequently speaking their minds. It is also odd given the moral panic that surrounded the original Romper Stomper, which was criticised for licensing neo-Nazism and glamorising violence. So "dangerous" was it that critic David Stratton refused to give the film a rating on his then TV show, The Movie Show. (Wright took his revenge two years later, throwing a glass of wine on Stratton at a premiere in Venice.)
"[Romper Stomper] made my life a misery," says Lynn Gailey, who was then director of film development at the Australian Film Commission, which backed the movie. "I copped heaps of flak for it, with the media saying it was an inappropriate use of taxpayers' money."
It also proved problematic for the actors, particularly Russell Crowe. "I was advised more than once not to play the role," he says. "I was repped by ICM in the US at the time, and a senior agent there, Ed Limato, was highly offended by [the film]. He called a special meeting to discuss it. Directors like Ed Zwick refused to audition me because he'd been shown the first three minutes."
Crowe describes the film's American debut as "a debacle. It was pulled off screens a few days after release because of some unrelated white-supremacist plot."
![Geoffrey Wright with Russell Crowe on the set of the
1992 movie.](http://web.archive.org./web/20180209032138im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/z/l/q/u/y/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1510710530687.png)
Geoffrey Wright with Russell Crowe on the set of the 1992 movie. Photo: Peter Leiss
Criticism of the TV remake, which goes to air in January, has been less about its racial content than its perceived laziness. "It's exploitative," says Muslim playwright Saman Shad, of the decision to revisit it. "They are just rehashing the same old story, but instead of Asians, the targets are now Muslims. It really highlights how conservative the media is here. We're not willing to take a risk on new writers and new creatives. It's just the same old guys getting the same old chances."
Wright grew up in a white weatherboard house that his father, Joe, built on the top of a hill in Pascoe Vale South, in Melbourne's north. Joe was a meter reader for the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works; he also did shifts driving taxis and cleaning offices. Wright's mum, Mary, worked as a caterer. There wasn't a lot of money around. "My parents saved their money scrupulously, which meant we never, ever went on holidays, so I used to go on holidays with my friend's families." Both his parents left school before they were 15, but were naturally bright and curious. "Dad liked taking 'contra' positions, and arguing for its own sake," Wright says.
Wright attended Strathmore High, where the different suburban tribes, both ethnic and cultural, didn't so much melt together as violently collide. There were frequent scuffles; one of Wright's favourite teachers was known for dangling troublesome kids out of the classroom window by their ankles and frequently referred to the students as "Strath-morons".
Movies had always fascinated Wright: each Friday night the family would watch a classic black and white film on TV, or The Golden Years of Hollywood, with Bill Collins. Soon he'd discovered Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick. Still, his decision to study film baffled his parents: "Dad wanted me to become a teacher, mainly because of the amount of holidays they got."
In 1977, he started at Swinburne film school in Hawthorn, where he studied with Richard Lowenstein, who later directed Dogs in Space and He Died With a Felafel in His Hand. "Geoffrey was clearly very talented, and very opinionated," Lowenstein says. "He had a real presence and a group of people around him." For his graduation, Wright directed a short film called Arrivederci Roma, about a young Italian immigrant, which Lowenstein describes as "a visual tour de force".
Wright had studied 1960s Australian cinema, most of which left him cold. "Australian films in the 1960s were very passive: things happened to the characters. Events were imposed on them. I didn't want to make that mistake." He set about writing driven, focused characters who "wanted things", like Mick (Noah Taylor), the adolescent misfit in his 1989 film, Lover Boy, who falls desperately in love with the 43-year-old Sally (Gillian Jones). Then came Hando, in Romper Stomper, surely one of the most propulsive, and repulsive, characters in Australian cinema.
![Geoffrey Wright discusses a scene with actor Lily Sullivan (Petra)
on the set of the Romper Stomper TV series.](http://web.archive.org./web/20180209032138im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/z/l/q/v/6/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x0.png/1510710537026.png)
Geoffrey Wright discusses a scene with actor Lily Sullivan (Petra) on the set of the Romper Stomper TV series. Photo: Jackson Finter
Romper's success was, of course, a huge boost for Wright. "It lifted Geoffrey's confidence to produce works that make their mark," says the film's co-producer, Daniel Scharf. But it also increased exponentially the weight of expectation. According to Gailey,"one of the unfortunate consequences of the film's success was that the Film Finance Corporation rushed him into his next film [Metal Skin], and it wasn't ready to go. The whole process was wrong."
Released in 1994, Metal Skin was a love-gonewrong story involving a bunch of dysfunctional revheads and a Satanist named Savina. It was generally regarded as a disaster: Variety called it "overwrought" and "lacking appeal on virtually all aesthetic levels". Cherry Falls (2000), and a noirish, gangland retelling of Shakespeare's Macbeth (2006) starring Sam Worthington and Lachy Hulme, were better received. But by 2007 the global financial crisis had hit, cruelling independent film financing. Wright's marriage also broke down, and he found himself with a daughter to raise.
Most crucially, the industry largely abandoned him. "The Australian film industry is particularly unforgiving," says Richard Lowenstein. "In the US, Geoffrey would have been nurtured, but here they love you when you're hot and literally ignore you when you're not." When Lowenstein's third film, Say a Little Prayer, failed, "I would go to film functions where producers would literally turn their backs and walk across the room to get away from you." Wright, he adds, "was definitely a victim of that".
Despite this, Wright kept busy: he taught screen craft at the Melbourne Acting Academy, and directed graduation and training pieces. Since 2010, he has worked extensively for Deakin University's psychology department in the filmic recreation of major crimes – murders, theft, sexual abuse – that are used by legal professionals both in Australia and overseas as "best practice" guides to forensic interviewing. "It's fascinating work," he says. "It's all about challenging assumptions." In some ways, he says, "it may end up being the most important thing I ever did."
In terms of features, Wright has, until now, been keeping his powder dry. "I have never been a journeyman," he says. "Some directors are brought in the way you bring in a tradie to paint your house. It can be a well-done job, but it's never going to be exciting. Good directors never do this – they deliver an eye and a pulse."
Creating that kind of atmosphere is difficult on TV, which is faster and more proscriptive than film. But Wright sees the new Romper as the perfect vehicle to push the possibilities. "Film and television should be more than a tranquilliser," he tells me. It should "make things happen creatively that enter your psyche. If we can capture just some of the boldness that Russell Crowe showed as the star of the source material, it'll be so cool."