TM: I was going to ask you if there is some kind of cross-cultural significance to the title.

TA: There is, but it’s an entirely private one. It won’t make any sense to anyone else, but it kind of does to me.

TM: Your film is coming in the wake of another very personal film about an immigrant family, but like Romulus, My Father, Home Song is less about the experience of coming to a new country, and more about interpersonal relationships.

TA: Immigration is the background of the story. Both of the films [The Home Song Stories & Romulus, My Father] are about parental relations, really. Romulus is a film about a father and a son. Home Song is a film about a mother and a son, and a mother and a daughter, and a brother and a sister. Both are films about family, and how children deal with dysfunctional family.

TM: Can you speak to the advantages and disadvantages as a filmmaker of being so personally involved in the story?

TA: The advantages are that you know the story really well, and that you know the emotional effect of the story, that there is potency to it. Your task as a filmmaker or dramatist is to then to find a way of telling that story so it can affect other people, an audience other than yourself. That’s true of whatever the subject is, whether it’s close to you or even if it’s apparently very far away from you.

The disadvantages are that there are certain things that I felt I had to put in the film which needed to be in the film to feel as thought they were truthful. Sometimes truth and dramatic shape don’t always sit comfortably side-by-side. Technically, there are things in the film that are a little bit clunky. If the film was entirely a fiction, I probably could have smoothed it out in certain ways. But part of the film’s ammunition as a ‘thing’ in itself is that it’s telling a story that has a lot of truth in it. I hope that that’s part of the power of the film; that it comes from somewhere very truthful and personal. To do that sometimes you have to live with all the bits that don’t fit into the conventional three-act structure.

TM: Why then make the choice not to go down a straight autobiographical road?

TA: I guess it’s based on a true story, but the truth is I don’t actually know everything. So I had to fictionalize some stuff, some scenes. All the key events happened, but none of the dialogue is real. Some of the more dramatic scenes I made up; you know, where we’re being kicked out of the house by the grandmother. I don’t actually remember that happening, so I just created it.

TM: Do you know that it did happen?

TA: I know that we left the house. What I know for sure is that my mother’s lover—the Uncle Joe character—did come and live with us in that house, with her husband’s mother, and that seemed extraordinary. I do know that happened. Then, I do remember the fact that soon there after, we were all moving somewhere else. So I just kind of put 2-and-2 together and created a dramatic moment from that. There is fiction in it, as well as fact.

TM: I found the film very difficult to watch because I had trouble with the character of Rose. To me, this is a woman whom only a son could love. What is the film about in terms of your relationship with your mother?

TA: The film is about trying to coming to terms with the memory of a difficult woman. I think it’s very interesting in terms of people’s responses to the film, that some people feel compassionate towards her, feel sympathetic towards her, or understand her; other people feel very harshly towards her, that she’s completely unsympathetic. The irony is that I spent a lot of my youth and early adulthood feeling angry towards my mother. Then, in making the film, I actually felt very compassionate towards her; even though she does different things, I felt that through the performance that Joan gave that she was a woman who was struggling to find a home for herself and her children. Even though she acted compulsively and did terrible things, her intentions were actually good. I think that it’s one of those strange ironies in life that the character I’ve created I actually feel very sympathetic towards. I also acknowledge that she does do terrible things.

TM: The moment you explain the story behind May’s father, you shed such a dramatic light on the person that is Rose.

TA: You get some understanding that who she is as much a result of generations of damage. What’s extraordinary is that it’s not just her mother and my mother and how she affected my sister, but I’ve heard so many stories since making the film of Chinese mothers and their daughters who have had this recurring theme of Chinese women migrants who have been frustrated with their life, who felt that they made such huge sacrifices for their children. Then they vent their anger upon their daughters, and it’s like I know that story time and time again, and the number of women who come up to me after various screenings we’ve had around the world and say, “You know, my mother wasn’t as crazy as that, but that was my mother. My mother had those issues!”

As well as her own personal damage, I think there’s something in the displacement of migration. One of the things that was important in making the film was to try to convey a real and familiar sense of white Australia in 1971, because that environment is a player in shaping what happens in the story. For a woman like Rose to come to Australia in that time—actually, the story was [originally] set in Perth, and Perth in 1971 was even more ‘white’ and isolated place than Melbourne was. That added a level of pressure and contributed to the madness and compulsiveness that led my mother to her multiple suicide attempts. For me, whether you like her or hate her, I find the Rose character compelling. She’s very watch-able. She’s both seductive and appalling.

TM: Subverting the conventional three-act structure has allowed you to really influence audience sympathies.

TA: That’s what I meant by life not fitting into three acts. Actually, the revelation of that back-story—my sister and my mother in the same hospital, one floor apart, both having attempted suicide—my mother told my sister the story of her life, and my sister wrote it down as notes. When I was researching the script, my sister actually gave me those notes that she wrote, and I knew nothing about that. I didn’t know that was my mother’s story. That was an amazing thing for me, and I couldn’t see how to tell that story in any other way than in the order of the events.

In the first act, Rose is this impulsive, but quite lively creature. In the second act, she gets dark and angry, and you feel alienated from her as the son—whose point-of-view this all is—becomes increasingly alienated from her. Hopefully in the third act, you feel conflicted about her because you know more about her, but she’s still difficult. And that’s the truth—our mother was a very difficult woman.

TM: You’re dredging back over so many decades, and trying to cast these memories through the prism of a child’s eyes. What was that process like, ascribing motivation to Rose’s actions as a child?

TA: The framing device of having the adult tell the story was actually quite important to me. In the original script—it didn’t make it into the film—there was a much greater contestation between the brother and the sister over the memory of the mother. The sister was the keeper of the memories, and absolutely unconditional n her love for her mother; whereas the brother was quite skeptical of the memory of the mother. Because the film was so much Joan’s film, I found that I couldn’t go into the adult’s story at the end of the film. It felt like we were going into another film, so I had to cut that part of it out. For me, it was always important to frame the story as an adult trying to remember his childhood, and through excavating those memories come to an understanding of someone who is essentially unknowable. For him, it’s a kind of tussle. He probably feels the same way that you do about her, that she’s understandable, but infuriating. He wants to find the love that he felt for her as a child. I mean, in that first act, there’s a lot of love between him and his mother. He understands her better at that point; it’s really only when she crosses the line and attacks his sister that he turns.

It was tricky. I talked to my sister a lot to find out what she thought. It’s amazing what you remember, as well. Not all of those memories can fit into a film; but as much as I could, I tried to be true to those memories.

TM: How much did the revelation about your mother’s background affect the story?

TA: It was always a turning-point in the story. Unfortunately in earlier versions of the script when it was more a story about adults contesting the memory of a difficult woman, that particular revelation was even more of a turning-point. You see the son realising this is what happened. I think for me, it gave a context to my mother. The whole film is a step towards forgiveness. If I had done the Hollywood ending, it would have been a total act of forgiveness. For me, it didn’t feel truthful. As an adult, Tom wants to feel, to reach out and find her again. For myriad reasons, that’s what he wants. For me, that was more poignant, more moving than to have the more sentimental resolution. That’s also my taste as a filmmaker. If I was a different kind of filmmaker, I would have made it more resolved—I’d probably be having a Hollywood career by now!

TM: Tell me a little about the fantasy sequences that Tom constructs.

TA: They were an attempt to lighten the film a little, because I know that there was so much intense material in it. I also felt they were an attempt to show this little boy escaping the reality of what was his life, and escaping into a world where he was empowered, and away from a life where he was a passive witness and totally powerless to affect anything. They were also a lot of fun to do. It’s fun, and he’s got superpowers. I used to love those movies, and read comic books and dream I had superpowers. Probably at an unconscious level it was because I felt so powerless. All these big things are happening around you that you can’t control. What I remember most about my childhood—and I think that this is the positive legacy of my mother and what she could create: the magical realities that she created around her—was that in spite of knowing now as an adult just how impoverished we were, I never felt like I came from an impoverished childhood. I never felt poor or underprivileged. She was working shit jobs in button factories and Chinese restaurants, and living off her lovers, and that was how she survived. But we always had food and shelter and we never felt hard done by; which is kind of weird, really. I know other people who come from those impoverished backgrounds are acutely aware of them’ whereas our mother somehow made us feel as though we were living the promised life that we came to this country for. It was her job to keep us fed and clothed and she did it whatever way she could. That’s how she saw her job, and that was at some cost and humiliation to herself. It was also part of her madness, because she knew that at a certain point, she knew her ability to do that would go when her looks went, and that was part of her fear and terror. Part of why she behaved like she did was because of pure terror at losing her ability to survive.

TM: I think it’s remarkable that Joan Chen is able to achieve all those levels.

TA: Yeah, and that she goes to quite dark and difficult places as an actor. A lot of actors want to be sympathetic; that’s their stock in trade—for people to like them. Joan is a sympathetic actor and that was one of the great things about having her in the film. She’s naturally a warm person, who’s easy to respond to; but she went to some dark places. She also brought lightness and a  kind of caring for her children. When we discussed the film, she knew how difficult the role was. She said that one of the things that she was very conscious of in playing that role was for herself feeling that she loved her children and that what she was doing for the sake of her family, no matter how madly she behaved. Knowing what was in our discussions and then watching the film, I feel that there’s a method to her madness, even when she brings the lover in to live with her husband’s mother—which was totally a mad thing—she was doing it because she could force that woman out of the house and finally have the home that she was promised. When that didn’t turn out, she looked for another way of going. When [Uncle Joe] threatened to leave, she was desperate to keep him, and she tried to do so in all the wrong ways.