‘I wanted to do an Australian Mike Leigh film. I was convinced it was terrible – but we showed it at Cannes and they went crazy. Audiences had never seen a character like that treated sympathetically’
The kernel of the story was my family, and my sister’s stormy relationship with our dad. He was a local politician and, like Trump, obsessed with success. I’m one of seven and my sister and I are the oldest. To use my dad’s language, we were the most useless because we wanted to be artists and so were unemployable. He was very dismissive of us.
