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FROM THE DIRECTOR Birthday,
the play, was in its second week of a very successful premiere season, when I
invited some acquisition executives from a successful sales and distributor
company to a Wednesday night performance. This particular performance of the
play seemed to really strike a chord with the audience. I recall one comment,
which summarised the audience reaction perfectly; “It was well written; it was
confronting, but moving and unexpectedly intimate.” Soon
after that, I was encouraged to begin adapting the material to screenplay.
Australian actor Travis McMahon, the star of my previous film Shot Of Love, was
also in attendance on that Wednesday night. We went out for drinks afterwards
with the cast and he told me how much he loved the material. “It’s beautiful,” he enthused, “I could really see this as a film.” I was completely
overwhelmed by the good will surrounding this material. The same word was
almost always repeated in any appraisal of Birthday: the word intimate. I was
touched by this, because it had been my life’s ambition as an artist to
celebrate, in my work, the pricelessness of human intimacy. I believed the
story of Birthday so excited distributors, fellow artists (movie stars) and, of
course, the audience because when all is said and done, human intimacy is what
every one of us value most in movies. If you close your eyes right now and
think of your favourite film of your entire life, and, if you are totally
honest with yourself, there will be a little bit of your heart; a little bit of
who you really are in that film. The
story of Birthday emanated from research with real sex workers and the urgency
of one particular woman’s message, drove the film; “I
hate being a lawyer… It’s the most immoral profession. I’d go back to full-time
sex work but the industry has changed so much that it’s not sex people want
anymore – it’s love. Sex is easy to give, love isn’t.” The
thought instantly arose; the world’s oldest profession has changed so
dramatically… what does that say about the world? When two sex workers attended
the debut performance of the original stage play, an affecting closing sequence
saw them rush to tell me that M’s story was the most “honest and inspiring”
account they had seen of the work they do; this was the most gratifying moment
I’ve ever experienced as a storyteller. Similarly, when best-selling author,
Kate Holden, expressed how much it reminded her of her own life as a
sex-worker, it confirmed Birthday was destined to be the story I’d always
dreamed of telling. In
understanding the appeal of Birthday, I, myself, am constantly reminded of all
the reasons why I wrote this story. The world is such a predatory and
judgmental place these days. The curious way the masses still seem to judge the
world’s oldest profession is a clear example: prostitution or sex work is still
thought of as unholy, but not because it allegedly encourages sex before
marriage, or infidelity (the good old fashioned reasons), but because it is
seen as dirty work by the snobs some of us become when the only moral compass
we have is materialism. It is a world where intimacy, or love, is no longer a
right; it has become a privilege. I
was taught not to judge. Being raised Catholic, I’d been brought up to believe
“the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”; in other words, the soul is
holy, but the body is inherently sinful. In truth, perhaps I’d always known:
the body is holy too. I wrote Birthday because I’d rather not see the
world this way, if I had the choice. I’d rather have faith that the “world is
holy!” and I’d much rather live in a world where this was really true. To me,
M, Lily, Cindy, Scarlet, Father Phillip and Joey represent the beautiful, blunt
truth of uncensored, dissenting voices. They say things with their mouths and
their whole bodies that most Australians do not. In particular, M earns her
living in a profession that’s still strangely illegal in some parts of
Australia, yet we see her giving and receiving kindness so unexpectedly that it
reminds us we live in times where the smallest act of human kindness is
subversive, perhaps revolutionary. – J.Harkness |