JOHN FRIEDRICH: Catch Me If You Can
Script Editor report from David Tiley
I have provided a variety of forms of support to Philippe Charluet, the writer, director and producer of this project.
We have conducted extensive discussions, which have covered the range of the research, the credibility of the allegations, the order of the story, the meaning of the film and its conventions.
On a more practical level, we have written and rewritten the various support documents extensively. I have read, commented on and contributed to the re-ordering of many drafts of his detailed script, which has been painstakingly built up from the interviews. I have contributed to the narration as well.
It is a very interesting example of an important kind of film, which the independent documentary community usually avoids. It is the story of an extensive financial crime, which played out over many years, in great secrecy. There are hundreds of witnesses, most of whom are still alive. The area is rife with speculation. The truth has never really been brought together. The existing books are deceptive, and the case never actually came to trial. Important players lied in public, and significant strands of the narrative involve the defence and security establishments.
Philippe has come a long way on the support from Film Victoria, and has shown great tenacity as he deployed his own company time and resources. It is inherently a film which requires a great deal of research, and the patient deployment of sceptical journalistic standards – to some of which I am able to contribute.
It is clearly much more than a journalistic investigation of the facts, or even the full story. Philippe is telling it from the point of view and through the words of the people involved. It is a significant cross section of Australians, from gung-ho parachutists to the legal and financial fraternity, and the astonished general public who saw it all play out.
It is a picture of folly, social seduction and tribal loyalty in an intensely masculine community. It is a journey through deception, and the slow unravelling of ordinary life into something much more confusing.
It is also the study of a man gripped by a certain kind of deep folly. When we say, “For this he paid first with his mind and then with his life”, we are being literal. He was consumed, on the deepest possible level.
It is too easy to say he was a sociopath, because it deploys a label to stop thought and empathy, and drop him into the too hard basket. He left some wonderful archive footage as he duelled with journalists and fought off disgrace in the last year of his life. We can puzzle over who he seemed to be, where he found the resources to be so convincing and so positive, and why he would deploy such talent in such a doomed adventure.
But we are going beyond this exterior point of view, to sense and sketch how he seemed to see the world through his own eyes, in his own strange universe, which grew and formed and solidified and then came crashing down.
In many ways, this is the most interesting part of the project, which turns it from an account into art, and ask deeper questions about the human spirit.
- David Tiley, SCRIPT EDITOR