Luke Davies Discusses His Books That Inspire Him At Sydney Writer's Festival (Transcript)

At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival a number of prominent Australian authors talked about what they read and the books that have inspired them.

Luke Davies is a novelist, poet and screenwriter currently trying his luck in LA. He's the author of the recently published God of Speed and his book Candy was made into a film. It focuses on young lovers who are in a spiral of heroin addiction.

Luke Davies was himself an addict 20 years ago and in this talk he guides us through the books that penetrated his drug induced haze and re-introduced him to the world of emotions and feeling.

Ramona Koval: On The Book Show we often talk to authors about what they've written, but what about what they like to read to nourish their own writing and for enjoyment? At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival a number of prominent Australian authors talked about what they read and the books that have inspired them in their work.

Luke Davies is a novelist, poet and screenwriter currently trying his luck in LA. He's the author of the recently published God of Speed and his book Candy was made into a film. It focuses on young lovers who are in a spiral of heroin addiction. Luke Davies was himself an addict 20 years ago, and in this talk he guides us through the books that penetrated his drug induced haze and re-introduced him to the world of emotions and feeling. John Steinbeck's Cannery Row opened the door to literature for him as a teenager.

Luke Davies: This is the opening paragraph of Cannery Row:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and the scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

There's something that I now recognise as being intrinsically corny and a bit twee about that. I was a precocious little kid; within a few months I had moved on to Faulkner, which kind of blew my mind, and I understood then and I understand now that Faulkner and Steinbeck...we're talking about completely different things, but my emotional contact with that moment of feeling like an adult and an autonomous person who discovered a new world, the same world that Christos talked about with the Bergman films, that feeling has never gone away. It was kind of like Steinbeck was the door and then three months later, down the corridor, Faulkner was when it opened out into the palace and I've been roaming around in that palace ever since.
So I jump forward many, many years, I'm a heroin addict and things have been very bad for very, very many years. I was a pathetic criminal in many ways. All of my criminal endeavours ended in disaster basically, but an area that I was comfortable with was books, and so back in the days before they had those electronic things on the fronts of bookshops I just used to steal a lot of books and sell them the next day, and I'd steal the best books possible, the brand new books that were in the most demand that second-hand bookshops in Carlton would love to buy off you and turn a blind eye.

So, books very rarely lasted more than 24 hours. The books I was reading were second-hand books that weren't really sellable. But this book Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez in the middle of that horrendous misery touched something inside me that was to be the thing that reconnected me with the idea of the capacity for becoming human again after I had become so dehumanised for so many years. I started reading this book, this passage that I'm about to read to you:
[reading from One summer evening I was camped... to ...she stared back resolute as iron.]
In that instant in reading that book I burst into tears for the first time in so many years, because as a heroin addict tears are a luxury and you become really cold and really hard, so something in this writing cut through, something in this remote region that I was living in, some kind of possibility of hope reconnected me with my life. And what I was reading in this literature, in this very brilliant book, was the sense of presence, of how to be present here and now in this body at this moment in these extraordinary circumstances of being rather than not being, the more likely alternative.

This is a real 'writer's writer' book. It's very popular amongst writers. It's a really great book, and I got it...and I wrote in the movie that I co-wrote, Candy, there's a scene where the Heath Ledger character is reading the book, and I convinced the director Neil Armfield to have a close-up shot of the book, so it gets in there, and you see that beside the alarm clock on the bedside table.

I'm going to totally bypass the stuff that I wanted to say, apart from the fact that I'm going to say it, about how great Roberto Calasso is. If you check him out you will be rewarded. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a wonderful book that sort of reaches down into the fundamental mythic meanings of this question of what it means to be alive. And the book Ka by Calasso. The first one is retellings of the Greek myths and legends, the second one is retellings of the great Hindu and Sanskrit myths and legends. You go backwards through these books it's kind of like getting a really vivid glimpse of the history of our Western consciousness.

So we're running out of time and I'm going to move on to poetry, stuff that is about presence. This is Yeats:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cup on the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazed my body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or less it seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.

It's just a poem that I love, I guess, because...the theme of this thing that I'm talking about is the journey from...the gap between the life you are leading and the life you ought to be leading being immense and on the journey towards death trying to narrow that gap by becoming a better person.

I was in Auckland last week at the writers' festival and I heard Junot Diaz talk about...he's just a great guy, the Pulitzer Prize-winner guy, and he talked about how talent is not enough. It doesn't make us write better books the next time around, you've got to strive to become a better person, and to me that means just always making an effort to become more present.

So I really love...I have investigated, I guess, in God of Speed the questions of people whose lives are really lost and who don't come out the other side of that thing. I guess John Berryman is one such person, and in recent years, the last five or so years, John Berryman has been my great discovery as someone who is exceedingly difficult and dense but the rewards are immense, and he has become bedside reading. Well, I dip in and out anyway. I've moving through the collected now, but The Dream Songs is a great book and this is a poem called 'Op. posth. no.13', and I assume that the Randall that is mentioned in this poem is Randall Jarrell, I'm not sure.
In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces,of liberations, and beloved faces,such as now ere dawn he sings.It would not be easy, accustomed to these things,to give up the old world, but he could try;let it all rest, have a good cry.

Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing cannot restore one instant's good to, rest:he's left us now.The panic died and in the panic's dying so did my old friend. I am headed west also, also, somehow.

In the chambers of the end we'll meet again I will say Randall, he'll say Pussycat and all will be as before when as we sought, among the beloved faces,eminence and were dissatisfied with that and needed more.

I wanted to rave on a bit about the Australian poet Vivian Smith because that journey was about...I was 13 years old and the door opened, in the middle of that the glimpse into the Barry Lopez thing was about finding the turning point that made things change, and then this is kind of like about presence again by a senior Australian poet who is one of my favourite poets, and this is a mature poem. I guess emotionally it's a place that I love, because it's certainly not a place that I live in emotionally but it's a one that I think would be nice, to be an old guy like Vivian Smith and experiencing a reality like this and writing a poem this beautiful, which I will finish on. It's called 'Happiness'.

They tell me that the novelist next door is working on a new book full of fight with all the characters named after colours:Rose and Pink and Black and Brown and White.He's the kind of guy who knows the ropes.He is so at home in his own skin.(Of course it could turn out a load of shite).

And I, today, have reached a small peak of cloudless unconcern,With no demands, and no calls on my time.

I'm standing at the window with a coffee,the first flush of spring on view.I know that in an hour you will return and I will have this greeting ready for you.

Thanks

Ramona Koval: Luke Davies at the recent Sydney Writers' Festival talking about writing that's influenced him. Thanks to Slow TV for making that audio available.

Source: ABC Radio National Australia

"God of Speed" Review From Malcolm Knox Sydney Morning Herald

God Of Speed
Malcolm Knox, reviewer
April 18, 2008

Luke Davies climbs up a notch by stepping into the shoes of one of the 20th-century's most intriguing characters.

AuthorLuke Davies
GenreFiction
Publisher Allen & Unwin

When I read this fever-dream of a book, I was laid up in a darkened room, my sweats and aches salved by codeine, my stubble growing into an unkempt beard, my fingernails long, my mind on germs - where I had caught this thing, how I could avoid it next time?

There, and precisely there, my assonance with Howard Hughes stops. I have greater concerns about Luke Davies, that is, if a successful Australian writer's attuning to the moods, memories, habits and intimacies of America's strangest and most corrosive 20th-century plutocrat is a matter for concern.

Davies, born in 1962, is the author of several volumes of poetry and two previous novels. Candy is one of the best novels of the past 15 years and Isabelle The Navigator one of the most underrated.

Why Davies would be so compelled by Hughes, the oil-money heir who built an empire in film, aviation, electronics, media and hotels, who set records on land and in air, is a question that will be raised and I mention it only in order to get it out of the way. Firstly, there are no passport controls on art. Secondly, Davies reinvents Hughes with a sure artistry that quickly puts such questions in the shade.

Davies's Hughes narrates from a hotel in London, one of his temporary tax shelters, in 1973. He is 68, three years from death, cared for by his retinue of Mormons, in the full grip of his addictions to drugs and obsessive behaviour. The time is momentous because he has decided to pilot an aeroplane again.

Hughes has summoned Jack Real, an old flyer and friend, to come from America and assist him. God Of Speed is narrated over a single night while Hughes waits for Real to wake up. A single bow of tension holds up the novel - will Hughes be able to take the controls? Between those two points it warps in short chapters back and forth over Hughes's life. These episodes, often disordered and rambling, are threaded together with the story of Hughes's record-setting round-the-world flight in 1938.

Davies is not attempting an act of perfect ventriloquism. As much is clear from Hughes's real memos, spliced through the text. The real Hughes, on the page, is a stranger and colder creature than Davies's Hughes. A faithful re-creation of the real Hughes would be, I suspect, wild and unreadable, if "Memo, 1959: On retrieving my hearing-aid cord from the cabinet" is any guide: "The door to the cabinet is to be opened using a minimum of fifteen Kleenexes" and so on.

Davies's Hughes, on the other hand, is warmer-blooded and poetic, and most importantly is talking to someone other than himself. By carrying Hughes's story out to Jack Real, Davies is engineering its carriage to us. His Hughes has some of the weirdness of his disorder, repeating himself, losing his way, obsessing over "setting the controls" as if every moment is like flying a plane, mistaking Jane Greer's "softness" for her "sadness" but then deciding that the mistake is as apt as the intended word. Yet he is self-aware: 'You see, Jack, there was a loop, and it was hard to get out of ..."

His rhythms are more fluent and accessible than those of the real Hughes, and they prise open this self-awareness about his inner life, and his regrets, in a way that the real Hughes probably never articulated, certainly not in his memos.

Those regrets circle around the women. From Carole Lombard to Ava Gardner, Hughes bedded a full quorum of Hollywood beauty from the 1920s to the 1950s. In God Of Speed, their intimacies are rendered with the juiced-up lushness of erotic art, Hughes projecting each memory onto his mental screen, a voyeur of his own past. His final epiphany, that he didn't take enough account of the separate existence of his sexual partners, escapes triteness because of the surreal sexual heights at which Hughes flew. If anyone was entitled to monstrous flaws, it was a man who bridged the gap between the metaphoric American dream and its realisation. It is in exploring the outer limits of this consummation that Davies reaches his own heights.

The sexual avidity and cruelty are far from the worst of it. When filming Hell's Angels, Hughes would search the sky for "f---able clouds". The shot he wanted was a zeppelin plunging into a fat cumulus breast. How Davies translates this - from yearning for a woman, to yearning for many women, to yearning for some spirit that captures all those female essences, to yearning itself, involuted and arid - is one of this novel's triumphs.

God Of Speed is one of those memorable novels that is more strange than perfect. It has its patchiness. A late chapter on Hughes's financial manipulation of Richard Nixon is, while amusing, more an assemblage of facts than the strangulated outburst that the rest of the narrative has become by that point. The short-chapter structure is mostly satisfying but in the early stages there were times when I wanted it to slow down, allow its weirdness to unravel at a slower pace. Like a beautiful yet over-modest person, it didn't seem to want the attention it merited. But to let his Hughes ramble too weirdly would be a risk, as would letting his Hughes wander off and enjoy the sexual favours of men, as the real Hughes did. These untaken paths don't detract from the novel but pose interesting speculations.

"I was everything, Jack, I was everywhere, for a while." And Hughes was. God Of Speed is a novel that left me dizzy and a little altitude-sick - more codeine, nurse! But Davies strains for, and I think captures, the subjective essence, the anxiety and megalomania, of being - and knowing he was - an avatar of a whole century. Others will decide whether God Of Speed cements Davies where he deserves to be, among the very top echelon of our novelists. For those readers who are tuned in to what he is doing, it certainly will.

Australia Council For The Arts Bio

Luke Davies

Sydney-based Luke Davies is a poet and novelist, whose work has been widely published both in Australia and overseas.

Luke Davies is the author of two novels, including the cult bestseller Candy (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1997), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 1998 and has since been published in Britain, the United States and translated into German, Spanish, Hebrew and French. A film starring Heath Ledger was released in 2006 and won Davies the (AFI) Awards, Best Adapted Screenplay, 2006. Davies' other novel is Isabelle the Navigator (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2000).

Originally a poet though, Davies was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry in 2004. He has published five books of poetry, including Running With Light (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1999), winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2000, and Totem (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2004), the 2004 Age Book of the Year winner.

Davies has completed several residencies around the world, including at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts, Ireland 1998, the Australia Centre, Chiang Mai, Thailand, December 1998-March 1999, Centre d'Art I Natura, Farrera de Pallars, Spain, June 1999, and Schloss Wiepersdorf, Germany 2004.

Davies was awarded the Dorothy Hewett Memorial Fellowship (Writer-in-Residence) in 2003, Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry (2004) and in 2004 won the Age Poetry Book of the Year and Book of the Year.

His works have been translated into German, Spanish, Thai, French, and Hebrew.

Source: Australian Government - Australia Council For The Arts

2008 Auckland Writers & Readers Festival 2008 - Luke Davies Bio

Luke Davies is the Australian author of three novels, the cult bestseller Candy, Isabelle the Navigator and his recent novel, The God of Speed. He has also written numerous books of poetry. Of these, Running With Light won the 2000 Judith Wright ‘Calanthe’ Poetry Prize at the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, and Totem won the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the Age Poetry Book of the Year and overall Age Book of the Year in 2004. The same year Davies was awarded the Philip Hodgkins Memorial Medal for Poetry.

He adapted Candy for screen, with director Neil Armfield. The film version stars the late Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush, and was released to critical acclaim in 2006.

The God of Speed takes the reader on a fictional journey through the internal life of Howard Hughes and is due for release in April 2008.

Luke Davies On Writing "God Of Speed"

Around 1987 I'd written a poem, "The Lucky Women of the Lady Shore", which came out of an anecdote in Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, about an all-female convict ship bound for Botany Bay on which the crew mutinied "in the name of France" and sailed instead to Montevideo, where the convict women eventually became serving-women for wealthy Uruguayan families.
I was interested in the notion of one's destiny being so fundamentally changed by a single act. That's something that happens all the time, of course, every instant of every day; but Hughes had touched on a particularly vivid instance.

At the beginning of the poem I placed an epigraph by the French philosopher Paul Virilio that I'd jotted down in a notebook some years earlier, and that seemed apt. It read: "An aesthetic of disappearance that is probably all of history."

Jump forward six years: in 1993 my book of poetry Absolute Event Horizon (1994) was soon to be published, and my publishers were asking for more Virilio details so that they could get copyright clearance. At this point I no longer had any idea where I had found the Virilio quote that I had noted down years earlier; thus began a trawl through all his works, looking for that single line, quite a needle-in-a-haystack task. Virilio had even written a book called The Aesthetics of Disappearance, in 1991, but since my quote came from the eighties, that couldn't have been it.

I never found the line, and in the end the publishers didn't include it in the published book. (Many years later, going through a box of old stuff, I found it, in a small piece by Virilio published in an obscure and long-defunct magazine that came out of Sydney University, circa 1983, called Frogger.)

But through all the 1993 trawling for the quote I came across Virilio's writing about Howard Hughes. Virilio was interested in the speed of light, global communications, power, speed, and what he saw as Hughes' "polar inertia". All of this somehow struck a chord with me. I knew the basics about Hughes, the broad brush-stroke stuff about the eccentric billionaire. But until I read Virilio in my search for a missing quote for another book, I hadn't realized Hughes was a drug addict. It was something of a light-bulb moment. My own experience of addiction made me understand, at some profound level, that Hughes' obsessive and compulsive neuroses were not after all so strange when viewed through the prism of his addiction.

Thus began a decade of obsessive research. I immediately knew I had a novel. I wrote a couple of chapters in '94: Hughes breaking (or rather, creating) the round-the-world record in 1938; his spectacular plane crash in the streets of Beverly Hills in 1946, and an imagined piece of what went through Hughes' mind another time, as he switched off the engines and masturbated in the cockpit, hurtling towards the ocean. (Fourteen years later these embryonic pieces found their way, in different forms, into the finished novel.)

I also knew immediately that this was a "big" book. Coming out of poetry, I had a very vivid sense of being on my "L" plates as a novelist. And Candy was the L-plates book that was looming by 1994, that was demanding it be written. I consciously put Howard Hughes on hold. I told myself I'd write it after Candy. Then Isabelle the Navigator pushed into the queue; it seemed the proper book to write as the "P" plates novel.

These delays, operating largely at subconscious levels, were the best thing I could have done. God of Speed was always going to need the "full" rather than the Learner's or Provisional license, novelistically speaking; as well as, ultimately, the permit to operate heavy machinery.
I needed to write Candy and Isabelle before I could make sense of Howard. I wrote more books of poetry, and the whole Candy film process took up a few years, and all the while I learnt more and more about Hughes.

Around 2003 I experienced a clear sense of "now is the time", and I plunged deeper than ever before. I had a messy draft by 2004; then Candy shot in 2005 and I had time to get some selective feedback on just how messy "messy" was. Hughes' mind was chaotic; I had to somehow convey that, without the narrative itself being genuinely chaotic. ("Controlled chaos" became my motto.) 2006 and 2007 were fairly obsessively about reworking and redrafting, trusting my instincts about what was and wasn't working, and trusting also the relentlessly perfectionist feedback and criticism of the wonderful editor I was working with, Alice Truax in New York.
During this couple of years I learnt not to listen to that inner voice that says, "Close enough. That will do." This voice comes from exhaustion, and expresses the sincere desire to rest, or move on. But it is the voice of sabotage, creatively speaking. It's important to tune in to a voice happening at a deeper level that says, however wearily, "Miles to go before I sleep."

I always knew what the book would feel like, in an overall sense. But you have to write it to know what it should look like and be like. I don't expect that any other book I ever write will have a fourteen-year history from gestation to completion. But when I look back at the whole process now, every step taken seems one of absolute necessity: not an event out of place. "Impatience is the only sin," the Buddha said, or so I've heard.

God of Speed
Luke Davies
I will fly at last. I will unfold my wings. I will unpack my head. I will step back outside. One day I may even make love again. But one thing at a time. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.The new novel from one of Australia's most exciting literary talents is a vividly imagined and riveting portrait of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary characters - aviator, film-maker, and billionaire, Howard Hughes.

Source: Allen & Unwin

Candyman: An Author's Journey From Page To Screen

Luke Davies tells Garry Maddox about life on the set of his first film.

TWO young lovers, played by Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, whirl on a Luna Park ride. In the early days of a relationship, they are giddy with passion and possibility. But when she shares his taste for heroin, the lovers take a darker and more confronting ride.

For the poet, novelist and now screenwriter Luke Davies, watching the new Australian film Candy has inspired extraordinary emotions.

"I love watching it," he says.

"I have moments of being distressed, in tears, traumatised but nonetheless totally gripped. And almost side by side are these moments of exquisite joy at the actual sense of achievement - 'Oh my God, I wrote this novel and it got published and it got adapted and the film got made'."

Davies has a unique relationship to the film. It is based on his brilliantly evocative and tender novel that fictionalises his experiences on heroin over the best part of a decade. The worst years were from age 22 to 28.

"But to get to things being bad by 22, you're starting to wind up at 19, 20, 21 into messy territory," he says.

Davies collaborated with the famed theatre director Neil Armfield on the screenplay, has a cameo on screen as a cheerful milkman and was on set filming a "making of" documentary that has been boiled down from 45 hours of footage to five so far. It centres on the writer's anxiety at letting go and the odd-couple relationship between writer and director.

After first showing at the Berlin Film Festival, Candy premiered in Sydney this week before its release later this month. It also stars Geoffrey Rush as a gay junkie chemist and Noni Hazlehurst and Tony Martin as the distressed parents of Cornish's character, Candy.

Speaking in a Newtown cafe - all lounge chairs, groovy decor and thumping music - Davies says he is "bemused, bewildered and thrilled that this thing has grown out of a couple of fragments of prose that I wrote 10 years ago".

The collaboration on the screenplay started in 1999. Davies often typed while Armfield talked and acted through his vision for the film.

"He was like the Queen of Sheba," says Davies. "He was so often horizontal. He's got this little place at Patonga, this little holiday shack, and he'd lie there and I was like the amanuensis."

The big challenge was expanding a first-person novel, a passionate and confronting romance that centres on the daily struggle to make a dollar, shoot up and intermittently kick the habit, into a film.

"The book is essentially a completely claustrophobic interior monologue in which, in a sense, even the title is ironic and the character Candy is a two-dimensional approximation of the narrator's desires, obsessions and his inability to see the truth at any deep level," says Davies. "The focus had to shift around from inside his eyes to the two of them."

That meant including Candy's parents, expanding a minor character when Rush joined the cast and allowing one scene to represent each stage - drying out, for example - rather than repeating events from the novel.

Davies says he learnt how amazing actors are during filming.

"We spent years fretting about really important lines of dialogue that carried information that got you from one place to another. It was, 'We've got to find a way of expressing this, there's no way we can lose that', and we lost that because Heath Ledger would do something with a twist of his face or a glance of his eye.

"That's why actors are so great and why they earn so much money. They take away the anxious necessity to find the right words."

While working on the screenplay, Davies anxiously watched every new film dealing with addiction.

"Every one that came along was like, 'Oh my God, we're never going to get our film made because no one will finance it'. Leaving Las Vegas shits me - it's just a really bad cliched prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold film. Requiem for a Dream shits me even more - it's all fireworks and no substance.

"Trainspotting I loved, but it doesn't impinge on our territory. But Jesus' Son is the film that I really like. As an ex-user, it came the closest to any film I've seen, perhaps with the exception of Panic in Needle Park, the early '70s Al Pacino one, that actually gets the relationship [between the couple] right to some extent."

Davies is convinced viewers will be knocked out by the film despite its dark and troubling content.

"I'm the kind of cinema-goer who doesn't mind distressing cinema. What I care about is good cinema. I don't care if it's light comedy, dark or whatever. The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like Breaking the Waves, or as light as it gets, like Jerry Maguire, Election or Toy Story."

Having had a taste of film-making, Davies wants to resume his teenage ambition to write and direct.

"At about 15 years old, I got my dad to give me an AFI [Australian Film Institute] membership for my birthday. I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw Aguirre: The Wrath of God at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing."

He is making a short film as a precursor to a low-budget thriller.

"Being the writer is merely control freak level two. You've got to get to control freak level one."

"The book is essentially a completely claustrophobic interior monologue in which, in a sense, even the title is ironic and the character Candy is a two-dimensional approximation of the narrator's desires, obsessions and his inability to see the truth at any deep level," says Davies. "The focus had to shift around from inside his eyes to the two of them."

That meant including Candy's parents, expanding a minor character when Rush joined the cast and allowing one scene to represent each stage - drying out, for example - rather than repeating events from the novel.

Davies says he learnt how amazing actors are during filming.

"We spent years fretting about really important lines of dialogue that carried information that got you from one place to another. It was, 'We've got to find a way of expressing this, there's no way we can lose that', and we lost that because Heath Ledger would do something with a twist of his face or a glance of his eye.

"That's why actors are so great and why they earn so much money. They take away the anxious necessity to find the right words."

While working on the screenplay, Davies anxiously watched every new film dealing with addiction.

"Every one that came along was like, 'Oh my God, we're never going to get our film made because no one will finance it'. Leaving Las Vegas shits me - it's just a really bad cliched prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold film. Requiem for a Dream shits me even more - it's all fireworks and no substance.

"Trainspotting I loved, but it doesn't impinge on our territory. But Jesus' Son is the film that I really like. As an ex-user, it came the closest to any film I've seen, perhaps with the exception of Panic in Needle Park, the early '70s Al Pacino one, that actually gets the relationship [between the couple] right to some extent."

Davies is convinced viewers will be knocked out by the film despite its dark and troubling content.

"I'm the kind of cinema-goer who doesn't mind distressing cinema. What I care about is good cinema. I don't care if it's light comedy, dark or whatever. The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like Breaking the Waves, or as light as it gets, like Jerry Maguire, Election or Toy Story."

Having had a taste of film-making, Davies wants to resume his teenage ambition to write and direct.

"At about 15 years old, I got my dad to give me an AFI [Australian Film Institute] membership for my birthday. I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw Aguirre: The Wrath of God at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing."

He is making a short film as a precursor to a low-budget thriller.

"Being the writer is merely control freak level two. You've got to get to control freak level one."

Source: smh.com.au

Sydney Morning Herald

Random Luke Info Tidbit

Luke Davies was born in Sydney in 1962. He has worked variously as a teacher, journalist and script editor. Luke Davies' collection of poetry Absolute Event Horizon was shortlisted for the 1995 Turnbull Fox Phillips poetry prize