Interview #210 — Tony Ayres

by Adolfo Aranjuez

Tony Ayres is a prolific, award-winning showrunner, screenwriter, producer and director. In 2008, he founded Matchbox Pictures—the production company responsible for the acclaimed series The Slap, The Family Law, Nowhere Boys, and Glitch, among others.

His feature films include The Home Song Stories (2007), Cut Snake (2014) and the Teddy Award–winning Walking on Water (2002), while his latest and upcoming projects include the series Stateless (ABC), Fires (ABC) and Clickbait (Netflix).

Tony speaks to Adolfo Aranjuez about art-making, responsibility, and identity clash.

You’ve come incredibly far from your budding days as writer/director in the early ’90s to your most recent milestone: Clickbait, the second Australian original drama series commissioned by Netflix. What first got you into filmmaking?

I didn’t get into filmmaking until my late 20s. Before that, I’d gone to university to study philosophy and literature, then switched to art school, where I did photography and silkscreen printing. Basically, I was scratching around to find the right path—I knew I wanted to do something creative or academic, but I wasn’t sure what. I decided to give film a try because I loved working with both pictures and words, so I thought: Why not combine the two?

I did a graduate degree in video production at the Victorian College of the Arts, then worked for a year making pop clips, working in a café, writing and directing a short film called Cruel Youth, and completing my original Bachelor of Arts degree. At that stage, the jury was still out about me and filmmaking. It wasn’t until I studied at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), where I specialised in screenwriting, that I finally found my calling. After years of circling around writing—diaries and poetry in high school, essays and short stories at university, then putting words into pictures at art school—the focus on the act of writing itself drew me completely and finally into the film and TV industry.

Filmmaking encompasses a wide range of tasks, and you’ve taken on a lot of them. On the writing front, though, you’ve tackled some heavy subject matter: the personal and societal repercussions of social-media use (Clickbait), asylum-seeker issues (Stateless), parochialism, patriotic myths and historical repression (Glitch), among others. Does your drive to write go hand-in-hand with a desire to ask the big, tough questions?

My first impulse to write came as I was grappling with the things that had happened to me in my childhood: trying to understand my family history and its tragedies. I ended up writing a short film for television, 1993’s The Long Ride, about the relationship between my mother, my sister and me. It was about growing up as a Chinese Australian immigrant in the ’70s, being dirt-poor and living above a fruit shop, and my mother’s battles with mental health and lovers. The film was well received (it won the 1994 AFI Award for Best Mini Series or Telefeature), and I followed it up with a second family story, Ghost Story, which was part of the 1995 ABC drama series Naked. I completed my ‘family trilogy’ when I made The Home Song Stories in 2007. That film was my greatest success to date, winning a slew of local and international awards.

Around the same time, I was also exploring issues arising from being gay. Typically, I did this through my work—I made short films and documentaries like Double Trouble (1992), Exposed (1997) and Mrs Craddock’s Complaint (1998) on queer subjects, as well as a documentary called China Dolls (1998) that was about my struggle to reconcile my two ‘identities’ (gay and Chinese). In 1999, I made a follow-up documentary, Sadness, which was a monologue by William Yang that covered questions of race and sexuality through the lens of the HIV pandemic.

So my early work was characterised by attempts to unwrap the social forces that shaped me—to find my place in the world—with the hope that, by telling those stories, other people could also relate to the questions I was asking and feel affected by what I was feeling. As my career progressed, I remained interested in telling stories from underrepresented communities, such as Asian communities, Muslim communities, queer and refugee communities. Perhaps because I had grown up as an ‘outsider’, I found myself moved by and emotionally drawn to telling ‘outsider’ stories. And, as I gained more influence in the screen industry, this felt like my particular contribution to a larger cultural conversation.

My work is both personal and political, absolutely. But I would argue that my contribution to any political issue comes from the perspective of being an artist/dramatist/storyteller. For me, the role of the artist in the political conversation is to challenge and test the limits of ideology because our purpose is to look at the who (the human being) rather than the what (their identity). I think we speak a different kind of truth to power as a consequence. In the writers’ room, we are always looking for ‘truth’ of character—for what feels real, believable, credible, insightful. We look for the complexity of the human condition. Ideologies, on the other hand, tend to be reductive, and not great at tolerating contradiction or factoring in the human id. I’m interested in putting three-dimensional characters into political contexts, and examining the ways that human beings perversely defy categories.

To give you an example: I was drawn to adapt Benjamin Law’s beautiful memoir The Family Law for the screen because he had told a funny, moving story about the effect of a divorce on a group of siblings. The political act was setting it in an all-Chinese world, but the foreground of the story was a drama narrative centred on a diverse range of flawed, imperfect, idiosyncratic people.

These points remind me of a passage from your contribution to Wakefield Press’s Living and Loving in Diversity anthology (2018): “To prioritise one identity over another is always a reductive act … While the cultural background may influence the texture, flavour and nuance of the central narrative, it is not the story.” From your vantage point as an industry veteran, what is the most constructive approach to diversity and representation?

I think the current diversity and representation discussion is an important one to be having. It’s always been a bugbear of mine that Asian Australians are the least-represented racial minority on our screens, and I’ve always wondered why there hasn’t been more noise made about that. In part, that’s why I keep telling stories set in those worlds.

But I would also say that any conversation about identity needs to acknowledge that human beings are made up of a multiplicity of identities that shift and change over time. The world would be simpler if we were all born with just one fixed identity. Any metanarrative that springs from that single identity would have a chance to accurately capture and explain the world. Unfortunately, none of us are ever born that way, and none of the ‘identity’ narratives I’ve read describe the world as I see or experience it.

Quite simply, there’s not just one form of systemic inequality in the world. It’s not just about race or gender; there’s also questions of class, what kind of body type you have, your access to education, what your relative mental and physical health is, etc. Each different identity is accompanied by a different system of power in which that identity is situated, so I see human beings more as a matrix of contradictory identities rather than being comprised of one or two self-identified labels. In my experience, one identity sometimes becomes more significant than the others because that’s what I’m rubbing against the most (for example, right now, I’m thinking more about being Chinese because this is an interview with Liminal). But that doesn’t mean my other ‘selves’ aren’t simultaneously contradicting things, or messing things up. Each of us has to grapple with these shifting, ever-evolving strands of selfhood, in an attempt to navigate or imagine some kind of self-acceptance, some kind of wholeness made from the fragments.

I guess this is literally what being ‘multidimensional’ means, and that’s something that I apply to my work in drama. Fictional characters that hold the most enduring appeal to audiences tend to be complex and multifaceted because this is also what makes them recognisable, relatable and human.

Earlier, you said that The Home Song Stories was inspired by your childhood, and the film movingly depicts heritable trauma. What motivated you to create such an intensely autobiographical work?

After I’d written The Long Ride, I knew that I hadn’t finished with those characters, and that I wanted to tell a fuller story of my childhood. In part, it was for selfish reasons—I was still working out my fucked-up feelings towards my mother and how her death had impacted on both me and my sister. However, I also felt a responsibility to keep telling stories about the Chinese Australian experience, as my generation had very few Chinese Australian storytellers/filmmakers.

After The Home Song Stories was released, I found it surprising how many people came up to me after screenings to talk about their parents’ immigration journey and the mental-health implications of their massive life upheavals—how much damage it had done to them as families, the inherited trauma that they had lived through. What I thought was individual to my mother, my sister and me turned out to be a much more universal experience.

Queerness is another prominent aspect of not just your identity, but also your practice. Your partner of 40 years, Michael McMahon, is one of your regular collaborators; Law and Yang are but two of the many queer luminaries you’ve worked with; and you’re outspoken about LGBTQIA+ issues. What’s it been like for you to move through the world as a gay man?

When I was a kid, I used to walk along the suburban Perth streets and bogans would shout out of their panel vans some racist thing or other—it seemed to be one of the favourite pastimes of bogan Perth. That never really affected me because I didn’t want their approval, nor did I have any great interest in them as human beings. But, after I came out, started having sex and going to gay bars, one thing I noticed was that there were a lot of gay men who had no interest in me because I was Chinese. I found that quite shocking because it wasn’t what I expected; back then, I naively believed that I’d be welcomed in the gay scene with open arms. I soon learned that there was a ‘racial hierarchy’ in the gay male world. Being Chinese meant that you were somewhere near the bottom—you were considered unattractive, small-dicked, not masculine enough for the archetypical gay (white) male fantasy.

There was overt racism: you’d see “No fats, femmes or Asians” in the personal ads all the time. But there was also a lot of covert racism, which in some ways was worse. I had many experiences in gay spaces where white friends were valued more highly than me. This wasn’t just in the sexual arena, but also in the social arena, in conversation. Some guys would turn their backs to me, or sometimes even stand directly between me and the (white) friend I was talking to, as if I wasn’t there. Because I identified as gay, it was much more hurtful to be rejected in that way—give me a bogan screaming from a panel van any day!

So the identity clash I kept coming back to when I was younger was being gay and Chinese. The most profound experiences of racism I’ve ever felt were within the gay scene, rarely in my wider social life or in my professional life as a filmmaker. For a long time, I felt that these two identities just didn’t fit together—or that I couldn’t put them together. However, when I learned that other gay Chinese friends had similar experiences to me, and felt similar anxieties and insecurities, it was strangely reassuring. Not being alone in these experiences is important, and I think that’s why people seek out their tribes. I have wondered whether ‘sexual racism’ (a complicated term that needs a lot of unpacking), as I had experienced it, was an issue for my particular generation.

Fortunately, the gay world is big and diverse itself, and you eventually find your place in it, your people, your friends. And I was sheltered by being in a loving relationship with Michael, so I was never at the coalface of the singles scene.

When I first met you in 2017, I was both starstruck and struck by the sense that I was meaningfully connecting with an ‘elder’. Why has it been important, for you, to platform others’ stories and give back to the community?

It’s hilarious whenever people say things like that because you only experience yourself as yourself. I’m obviously very flattered, but I’m also completely, neurotically normal.

A few years ago I wrote a piece for AFTRS’s event 8 from 8—eight talks from eight different filmmakers—that expresses my feeling of how art can contribute to a cultural or political conversation by being emotionally persuasive. The greatest weapon we have, as artists and dramatists, is point of view. By telling a story from a particular point of view, we can help audiences experience the world through someone else’s eyes, and feel what that person feels. If that person is from a minority background, then audiences get to experience what that minority life is like, which ideally creates a moment of shared humanity. When used in this way, drama is a necessarily compassionate medium. And, for me, one of the great challenges for social democracies in an increasingly polarised world is to feel compassion for people who don’t experience the world or believe what you do—to coexist in a civilised and respectful way.

Good drama is very hard to make; it requires a high degree of skill, an understanding of both its subject matter and the craft of storytelling itself. I’m at a point in my career where issues of legacy are increasingly important to me. So quite a few of my new projects involve trying to help less-experienced dramatists tell their stories and show their point of view of the world using the expertise I’ve gathered from 30 years in the industry.

You’ve definitely had much success on this front—The Family Law was Australia’s first all-Asian TV comedy series; Ali’s Wedding (2017), the nation’s first Muslim rom-com; The Slap, so well-loved that it was adapted from Christos Tsiolkas’ novel for both the Australian and US markets. What’s next for you?

My constant anxiety is that my best work is behind me, so I try to position my ambition forwards and try to think that the highlights are yet to come!

I’m focused on Fires next—a show that I’m developing with showrunner Belinda Chayko, and with Andrea Denholm and Liz Watts as executive producers. It’s an attempt to honour the experiences of the people who survived the catastrophic summer 2019–2020 bushfires, and to talk about climate change along the way. As well, there’s a zany New Zealand comedy called Creameries that I’m executive-producing, which I love, plus a deluge of new things, most of them set internationally, that I’m desperate to sink my teeth into.

Do you have any advice for emerging filmmakers?

Have something to say. Have a point of view, something that you feel passionate about communicating to the rest of the world. And think of it as your offer to the world, rather than what’s owing to you from the world. By this, I mean: what is it that you are saying that enriches, enlightens, uplifts, moves other people? Storytelling needs to be an act of generosity, not an act of entitlement.

What does being Asian Australian mean to you?

That’s a tricky question! It kind of means everything—it defines how people see me, which circumscribes my experience of the world. And yet, paradoxically, and perversely, it also means nothing. I don’t go around thinking of myself as ‘Chinese’ and, most of the time, I don’t even know what that means. Maybe it would be different if I spoke a Chinese language, but I lost that in my childhood.

As I mentioned earlier, I feel like I have many competing ‘identities’, which come to the fore depending on context. I’m a different person at the Logies than I am at a dance party. At the end of the day, I am personally most comfortable when I’m not defined by preconceptions of my race, gender, sexuality, etc., be they negative or positive. I am most at ease when people view me as a who and not a what.