The definitive mini-series of the tragedy ('Through my eyes')

Here's the other article, which I mentioned in my first post:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/TV--Radio/Through-their-eyes/2004/11/17/1100574519902.html


Through their eyes
By Debi Enker
November 18, 2004


[Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton returned to Uluru for the last week of shooting of Through My Eyes, which retells the story of the disappearance of her daughter Azaria.
Photo: Supplied]

The story requires no introduction. Everyone knows it. Many people have strong opinions about it. News about the Azaria Chamberlain case will snatch headlines around the country decades after the nine-week old baby disappeared from her family's tent at Ayers Rock.

Items associated with the case have assumed totemic significance: the matinee jacket, the camera bag, the foetal blood in the family car, the black dress.

Details of the case and gossip surrounding it have been etched into the national psyche: the meaning of the name Azaria; the cry in the dark of "A dingo took my baby!"

In this country and beyond, there's an abiding fascination about what happened on that cold August night in 1980, and with what followed: the inquests, the trial, the Royal Commission, forensic evidence presented and debunked, the spectacle of a frenzied media pack, the images of a family at the red-hot centre of a maelstrom.

Now a two-part miniseries, Through My Eyes, written and produced by Tony Cavanaugh and Simone North, takes a fresh look at the case, with the benefit of distance and from an array of angles.

[The five-hour, $8 million production was shot over nine weeks earlier this year, mostly in Brisbane, and features 155 cast members.]

Made on a scale and at a pace that the director describes as "crippling", the miniseries aims to provide a comprehensive overview.

After the avalanche of newspaper, radio and television stories, the books, the films and an opera, the challenge for the producers and the Seven Network is to persuade people that there's more to the story they already think they know so well.

As with any production, the people involved came to it for a range of reasons and with a variety of goals. Some were attracted by their strong feelings about the case, others by the prospect of a challenge.

The adviser: Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton

After the court cases, the jail term and the apparently insatiable public interest, after she's written her autobiography, seen Meryl Streep playing her in Evil Angels and considered Frank Cole's revelations, why would Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton want to go back there? Why would she want to dredge through the events surrounding the disappearance of her baby and the trauma that followed?

Because for her, it's not a question of going back. That night and its aftermath never leave her; they are a constant component of her life and she imagines they always will be. "It's 24 years to you, but it's not really to us," she explains.

"There was the opera (performed by Opera Australia in 2002). Before that was the 20th anniversary, before that there was something else. It doesn't go away. It's part of who we are. Always there. And any misconceptions that arise, we live with for the next stretch in our lives. That's one reason why you have input, so you get the minimum number of misconceptions possible."

When Azaria disappeared, Lindy was the 33-year-old daughter of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor who'd married a Seventh Day Adventist pastor and quickly became a mother to two boys and a baby girl.

She was a devout woman who'd led a sheltered life. She'd read two books and one of them was the Bible.

Today, she's an author who looks you straight in the eye and talks expansively in a much-imitated flat Australian drawl. She has a precise memory for detail - so precise that production designer Peta Lawson describes it as photographic - and a hearty laugh.

She's found a way of dealing with the omnipresent interest in her story.

"My theory is: if somebody is doing something - and anybody can do anything - and you have a chance to have some input, to at least try and get things right, then you're stupid if you don't."

In this case, she was initially approached through agent Harry M. Miller to be involved in a documentary. The producers wanted to focus on the workings of her family. "And we said, 'That's not going to happen,'" she recalls, relaying her response in a tone immediately recognisable as a no-further-discussion-will-be- entered-into edict.

But she did agree to attend a meeting with Cavanaugh and North to discuss the possibility of a drama. They settled on a miniseries, which the producers then spent three years researching and writing.

"I was a consultant, not a dictator, and this is a drama, not a documentary," she explains.

"I've had input and Tony decided what he wanted to do with it, because this is their project. It's not a minute-by-minute account of what happened over nine years.

"And people will have their own perceptions. They'll all look at it and say, 'That's what I thought; this is what I think now' ... It's what we do in life. We make a decision on this, until we get more input, and then we change it. It's the people who don't look at all the information who are the narrow-minded ones."

The writer-producer: Tony Cavanaugh

"This is the hardest show any of us has worked on," says Tony Cavanaugh (The Day of the Roses) with a sigh.

His office is lined with books, court transcripts and photos of dingoes, police and campsites. There's a large framed colour photo of Lindy lovingly cradling Azaria.

With Simone North, he's tried to interview as many people as possible connected with the case and figure out how to do the story justice on the screen.

"It's not fiction, so you have to be really tough on the actors," he says.

"They have to be word-perfect, particularly the court transcripts. We're dealing with real people and real stories. Everything we're putting on the screen has been told to us and verified.

"It is huge logistically and there are about 20 different stories. It's a story of medicine, of forensic science in 1980, of a police investigation. It's the story of a journey through the courts, and it's a story of a nation's attitude towards a religion that they're not really that aware of.

''It's the story of Uluru and how a white community grew up there. But at its heart, which was what we had to remind ourselves, it's the story of a woman who lost her baby, and of her trying to hold her family together with this tsunami of public opinion and legal and police movement towards her."

The director: Di Drew

For the past year, Di Drew has been engaged in some ad hoc research. In a gathering of friends or a group of miniseries extras, she'll ask. "Lindy: guilty or innocent?"

She says the response is invariably the same: the group divides 65/35 per cent, with the majority verdict being guilty.

That outcome intrigues her, as does this story.

"If that baby had been taken by a pit-bull terrier in a backyard, it would never have captured public imagination the way it did," she says.

"It was all about that landscape and that place, it was about spirituality and it's been about religion, and a baby's name, and behaviour that's not typical. All those things captured our imagination.

"My metaphor is that there was a pebble dropped in the pond, which was the baby being taken, and then the rings of activity around that started off with some odd behaviour from Lindy and Michael and their religious beliefs, that they were not typical in their behaviour on the night.

''Then came ineptitude, inefficiency, people looking after their reputations, people looking after their ambitions, people looking after tourist dollars, people looking after the government. It builds out like that, all these rings of intrigue around this central activity."

An experienced director, Drew had been working as a producer on All Saints when the offer to direct the miniseries came, and it represented a challenge.

"I'd grown up with the Lindy Chamberlain story. It had always fascinated me. I love a good mystery. I knew it was going to be a massive project and I knew that all those director's muscles could come out in force. Mind you, I didn't know how massive it would be."

Drew says that "one of the biggest kind of challenges was to see all the elements of Lindy, not to turn her into a heroine who was above reproach.

''It's a warts 'n' all story, where you understand that she was kind of abrasive and somewhat affronting to people, that she was disarmingly honest, that she was extremely outspoken.

''She wasn't always the most pleasant person in the world. But on the other side, this terrible injustice was done to her and you see the pain of that."

With that in mind, Drew was keen to cast Miranda Otto, whom she'd taught at NIDA.

"She's that kind of chameleon actor who can immerse herself in a role. She has the intelligence to find a very complex character. We also needed a brave actor, because this character is flawed.

''She's slightly anti-social and doesn't fit, for all the reasons that half of Australia convicted her, because of her personality and behaviour. Not because she was a criminal, but because she didn't behave in a conventional way."

The lead actress: Miranda Otto

Miranda Otto was cast in the miniseries after her husband, Peter O'Brien, who plays prosecutor Ian Barker.

Fresh from her roles in Lord of the Rings and In My Father's Den, she was attracted by the challenge of playing someone so different from herself, and by the prospect of exploring an unconventional character.

"I'm always interested in people who don't behave in the way that people expect them to," she explains.

"I suppose I wanted to test myself, to see how far the talent goes. You put yourself up against it and see where you fall short, where you surprise yourself and succeed, rather than making easy choices of things that you know that you can do."

Otto says that in the miniseries, "You see Lindy as a mother, which a lot of people didn't focus on much at the time. They were more focused on her relationship with Michael, her clothes and her expressions. They tended not to think very much about the fact that she was a mother with two children."

But if there's a side of Lindy's personality that doesn't come through clearly here, Otto observes, it's her humour:

"We don't get to see as much that as I'd like, but it's very hard to find the places for humour in the middle of the story that we're telling, these terrible points in her life."

What you do get a sense of, though, is something of her nature: "You see her determination and her faith in God," says Otto.

"And ultimately, you see her faith in herself as a good person."

Like her co-star, Craig McLachlan, Otto, in wig, period wardrobe and coloured contact lenses, makes a remarkable transformation.

As director Drew expected, she immerses herself in the role and has already earned one accolade: "The way Miranda plays me, I can almost hear what she's thinking in some places," says Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton.

"She's a lot better than Meryl Streep. Meryl acted me, but she's got the essence of me. She's brilliant."

The lead actor: Craig McLachlan

For the 38-year-old who made his name during the "Kylie and Jason period" on Neighbours and followed up with a pop-music career, playing Michael Chamberlain offered the opportunity to be taken seriously as an actor.

For the last few years, McLachlan has been working to erase his image as "the mulletted guy who sang 'Mona' on the back of the truck".

"That period of Neighbours was a wonderful experience, but it was as much a curse as it was a blessing," he says.

"I shouldn't whinge, and I'm not whingeing because I'm one of the few who have continued to work and had a really wonderful varied liquorice-allsorts kind of time.

''But Neighbours was almost 20 years ago. In the last few years, it's been very important for me to surprise people and to go for things that people wouldn't necessarily expect me to go for."

So he relished the chance to play the pastor, whom he describes as "physically very fit, broad of shoulder, skinny of waist, a very fit cat."

"I had a couple of theories about Michael, and these are just my theories," he says.

"His role as a pastor was very important to him. And he took very seriously how he presented himself in public. Hence the perfectly pressed shirts, the perfectly pressed trousers, the tie tied just so, and the hair always immaculate. Beyond that, I think Michael almost imagined himself - and again, I'm reading into research - as physically bigger than he was."

The production designer: Peta Lawson

Peta Lawson might be one of the few people lamenting the dearth of '80s architecture and '70s office furniture.

She scoured substantially reconstructed Brisbane to find 89 locations that could double for buildings in virtually every other capital city in the country: court houses, pubs and police stations in the Northern Territory; laboratories in Adelaide, family homes in Victoria, NSW and WA.

"In an ideal world, you'd build Lindy's house, you'd build both courtrooms, you'd build lots of things," she says.

But in this world, she had to find something that could convincingly be used instead, and that extended to recreating the Uluru camping ground in an Ipswich quarry, as it was decided that cultural considerations and cost made it too difficult to shoot the scenes required for the night of Azaria's disappearance there.

Lawson saw it as crucial to convey a sense of Lindy's style. "A lot of the problems that people had with Lindy were to do with her taste," she says.

"Media didn't like the fact that she had different dresses all the time. She was quite a seamstress, so she bought second-hand dresses and sewed them to make them fit because she was pregnant. She was quite an industrious person, but that backfired on her.

"Lindy really loves clothes. Clothing is drama. Everything is drama. She had quite dramatic floral arrangements in her house: peacock feathers, a gold punch bowl. She really cared about the elements in her house. It had a neat, slightly formal look. For some people, houses are just somewhere they live. For Lindy, it was surrounding herself with things she really cared about. Even the car and the tent matched: it was that level of detail."

Lawson also notes that her taste didn't really run to pastels: "Most of her furnishings were deep colours, the lounge a maroon colour. The boys' bedroom was done in navy velvet curtains and all the bedspreads the same, with lace. I think of it as a Scottish influence, because her family has Scottish origins.

"That was one of the things for us: we wanted to tell that story so that she would be a bit more understood. When you see her taste, you can understand that a black dress is entirely possible."

Di Drew believes the miniseries will produce "a shift in what is generally the Australian psyche about Lindy Chamberlain".

But from the woman again in the spotlight, the view is slightly different. Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton believes that Through My Eyes offers perspectives previously unseen about what happened to her and her family, and she has developed an obvious rapport with Cavanaugh and North.

But this is also just the latest chapter in the incessant telling and retelling of her story.

"Viewers will see all sorts of things that they've never seen before, and they'll see them in a way that isn't dry or boring, like reading a court transcript that they may not understand," she says.

"You're seeing Tony and Simone's view of the research they've done into this.

"And in 10 or 15 years, someone else will have a go and it will be a different way around."

Through My Eyes screens on Tuesday and Wednesday at 8.30pm on Channel Seven.

Miranda's accent will work because she is Ausralian??!!! Lindy is a New Zealander! Keep this in mind when criticizing her "bad australian accent" and listen to the real Lindy Chamberlain! Streep sounds just like her!