Kodak/Atlab Cinema Collection

Director's notes on The Love Letters from Teralba Road

I wrote this film in about 1974 for producer Richard Mason at Film Australia. Film Australia was about to do a series of short dramas on the theme 'city life'. The film was originally to be directed by Brian Hannant. I told Dick Mason I had found some letters which seemed to me to reveal something about city life.

I had found the letters (and a small note) in a bundle in a small $19-a-week flat I had rented in Birchgrove a couple of years before. They were in a drawer under some newspaper and had been there, untouched, I calculated, for about 11 years. They were letters (dated 1959) from a Ron Moran in Newcastle to his wife Barbara and came from an address in Teralba Road, Adamstown. They were actually addressed to somewhere in Leichhardt so they'd been brought to this flat later.

I had lived in Newcastle all my teenage years so I identified with a lot of the sentiment in the letters. I liked the dramatic idea of a man doing something wrong (in this case beating his wife) and then fruitlessly trying to get her to forgive him. When I told him the idea Dick Mason decided to give me a chance. I set about writing the script with Moya Wood as script editor. I only ever did two drafts and Moya was very helpful, telling me to leave it mostly as I'd first written it.

When I'd finished writing, Dick told me that Film Australia was no longer interested in doing the series. I sent the script to ABC drama (Kip Porteous) and received a letter back saying he liked it but no one at the ABC was capable of making it!

After trying to sell it to a few other TV companies I took it to a friend, independent producer Richard Brennan, and we applied to the AFC to make it ourselves. We received a grant of $25,000, which even in those days wasn't very much money but it was enough to somehow pay off Film Australia and make the film.

We cast the film from Richard's flat in King's Cross. I remember a young Kris McQuade doing a test for us and then bursting into tears, saying she didn't have enough money for the bus fare home. I gave it to her, not that I had much more, thinking she was playing an emotional trick on us. Later, I realised she'd been serious and out of work for a long time.

We found the then unknown Bryan Brown at the last minute, acting in a play "Here Comes the Nigger" at the aboriginal theatre in Redfern. A crew member, Sandie Richardson, recommended we see the play. I remember being quite frightened of him, as he was extremely violent in the play. We tested him on video and Richard, who'd been pushing hard for someone else, looked at the video and said, "Stephen, this man is a star. If we cast him it'll be to our eternal credit."

We also found a young Gia Carides who did a simply wonderful test for us.

We shot the film in January 1977 in two weeks. My main aim as a director was to capture the feel of the Western suburbs, which I knew well from living in Fairfield in my father's pub for five years. I also remember thinking I wanted no artifice in the film, no tricky shots and no tricky linking between scenes. And we concentrated particularly on the dark lighting which was, for those days, very bold. The film was edited a few weeks after we finished shooting, by a nervous Henry Danger, who told me later that when he saw the rushes he couldn't see a 'film'. The voice over was read flatly by Bryan, reading from the original letters.

When the film was released, a zealous reporter from The Australian found the real Barbara, who threatened to sue us, until she saw the film and we did a financial deal with her. We became quite good friends. Her husband had died from a congenital heart disease some years before and had never changed, she said. She told me that the only thing really inaccurate in the film was the lack of bruising on Kris McQuade.

Love Letters won several AFI awards and was invited to the Forum of Young Filmmakers at the Berlin Film Festival in 1978.

Stephen Wallace
August 2001