“A Tradition of Reinvention”: Lorin Clarke on But Also John Clarke
Charting John Clarke’s time as the most popular comedy figure in New Zealand, in the iconic guise of Fred Dagg, through to becoming a decades-long staple of news and current affairs shows in Australia with his satirical interview segments with Brian Dawe, But Also John Clarke is a documentary that’s more personal than most: it’s directed by John’s daughter, Lorin Clarke, who brings an intimate understanding of her father’s life and wit to her investigation into how he connected with his audience.
In the lead-up to the film’s upcoming screening as part of the MIFF Autumn Film Series at Bunjil Place, MIFF Publications Manager David Heslin speaks to Lorin about the challenges of documentary storytelling, the changing cultural footprint of television and her own journey in making the film.
The film is a beautiful tribute to your father – it really captures what was so wonderful about his humour and his immense cultural importance in two different countries. What were the challenges of simultaneously telling this very personal story and directing a feature film for the first time?
It’s interesting, because the experience of getting a film up and funded and getting everyone to sign off on it is basically, for the creative person, complete gaslighting! [People are] like, “You’ve never directed a feature documentary before,” and you go, “Oh my god, I haven’t.” And then you think, well … prior to my last project, I’d never done that project before either.
When I showed up, I realised that the big challenge was going to be that you could tell this story in a whole lot of different ways – it could be a 10-part series on New Zealand comedy or what makes a nation’s personality, or it could be about [neither]. Part of what I wanted to [communicate] in this story was the creative imperative that you have when you are just some dude sitting next to your mate in class, giggling because you’re bored. So it was that connection that Dad had with his audience that I wanted to validate and celebrate and interrogate a little bit – sort of find out what that was, and step out of the way of it – which is both the simplest idea and extremely difficult, because you’ve got to tell a story in 103 minutes and you can’t include everything. I’ve tried to nod at things all the way through, but when you’re putting it together, it’s a storytelling challenge.
So, it’s all about the problem solving that you do when you’re trying to make the storytelling work. To me, it was really important that audiences who knew Dad’s work, who did have that connection, would feel it in that opening. That thing where he says, “The Games was a secret between the people making the show and the people watching the show” – that was what I wanted to allow his audience to feel. I freaked myself out a few times about whether or not that act of directing the film would be something that I felt overwhelmed by, but it felt like every other creative project I’ve ever worked on.
On a personal level, it felt like that too, except on two occasions: one was when the edit finally felt right – it was like, here’s my Dad. I saw him; he was there. The other time was when we took it to New Zealand, where the opening night was at his hometown of Palmerston North. That was so lovely, because half the audience turned up in gumboots – the kind of grassroots tomfoolery that I’m trying to celebrate in the film was served back to me. Again, that’s that secret between your audience and the people making something: they were his collaborators, and they showed up in their outfits.
Speaking of collaborators, it struck me that your film differs from many biographical documentaries, which tend to feature talking heads paying homage to someone they admired; here, instead, it feels a bit more like we’re hearing from friends and colleagues of John’s, which lends the documentary a more personal atmosphere. Was that something you considered when thinking about whom to approach?
Yeah, we couldn’t speak to enough! We had far too much material, and there were people we didn’t even get far enough down the list to speak to because everyone was so generous. But you’re right, and it’s part of the reason I ended up being in the film. I’ve interviewed people my whole life – mostly on radio – but relaxing the person you’re talking to and defining what it is you want to get out of them [requires] you to be in the same room together; sometimes you need to be sitting next to each other, not opposite each other. It needs to feel like we’re chatting.
This is going to sound a bit weird, but one of the things that was a challenge was that people are lovely about Dad! I was like … “So, when did he give you the shits?” But I ended up realising that’s not really the story here; there are lots of stories about people who aren’t how you expected them to be. I don’t need people to tell me he was funny; but I love it when, like, Ben Elton suddenly remembers an article [John] sent him about the structure of a sentence – all of that stuff comes out when you chat to people.
If we’d done these interviews seven years ago, they would have been much sadder than they were. There was sadness there; but, because time had passed, we were talking about the things that you come to over time that are slightly different formations of that.
That really makes it a fundamentally different project than, say, a journalistic one where you’re trying to uncover the gap between the public persona and the private persona.
100 per cent! One thing I had to get over was my own ego; I had to go, “You need to stop apologising for the fact that you’re making [the film], because it is going to look like you’re celebrating him and that’s okay.” People were interested in [John] everywhere he went; so, what is it that’s interesting? It’s not that he’s funny, because lots of people are funny – it’s more than that.
I was thinking about my own childhood in the early 2000s, when the Clarke & Dawe segment on The 7.30 Report was regular viewing for my family, and how John was one of these very few people on TV – Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton also come to mind – who was just this nationally recognised and beloved figure. Do you think the era of that kind of TV personality is already something of the past?
Dad always said, about his work, that it was always a product of what it’s in. So that’s why it was so good that he was in news and current affairs and not inside comedy – because as soon as anybody called it comedy, he was like, “Nup, we’re going home.” It [needed] to be in a serious context, and, in a sense, that context did a lot of the work.
Now, that seems to be different; it’s like, you know, the Taylor Swift thing, or the podcast that you identify with that your parents would rather die than listen to. So, I do think the media environment’s changing a lot. But one of the things I wanted to do in the film is to say, “The next thing’s going to be different.” Dad’s thing was always different; nobody had done anything like Fred Dagg; nobody had done anything like The Games; nobody had done anything like Clarke & Dawe. So, whatever the next version of that is, it’s going to come at us sideways, and the context is going to be part of what’s interesting about it.
When [John] did Fred Dagg, for instance, he would borrow the news camera from the NZBC, go and stand in a paddock, put the camera in front of it, record the thing, take it back to the newsroom, hand the camera in, get scissors, and edit it; the whole thing would be edited down and it would be two minutes inside the news. And that’s not that far from what you would do if you were making a TikTok.
I feel like we can get distracted about all the bigger stuff, but one of the things I wanted to say was: yeah, it’s a tough gig being a creative person, but those are skills that there is a tradition of, and there’s a tradition of reinvention; doing it your way sometimes does end up being the answer.
As you mentioned earlier, you play a significant role in the film yourself in archival footage, in voiceover and on camera during interviews. This is your father’s story, but do you feel in some way that it’s your story as well?
Yeah, I do feel like that. When Dad died, I went from finding out that had happened to being on radio; it was leaked on Twitter, and that’s how my friends found out. And so there was an element of: this is the biggest and worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my life, but also it’s been taken away from me and it’s not mine. There was an element when he died of … like, it felt like a library had burned to the ground. That felt panicky to me – like, “I’m going to lose it all, and I’ve got to hold on to it.” So there was something very personal about that project for me because I was able to make sense of my own journey and my own connection to him, as well as that audience connection to him. I do feel all these clichés are true about the creative thing being a bit cathartic.