The Brag

Romper Stomper
The Controversial Australian Classic Returns
By Alasdair Duncan

It’s two decades since Romper Stomper arrived in Australian cinemas, but the film has lost none of its visceral impact in that time. A confronting story about a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads in the Melbourne suburbs, it shocked audience and divided critics; some worried that the film glorified Nazis, while The Movie Show’s David Stratton famously refused to give it a star rating, saying that it should never have been made at all. Director Geoffrey Wright was dismayed by this backlash, but realised it was unavoidable.

“Romper Stomper was told from the perspective of the neo-Nazis, and a lot of people resented that, they felt we’d humanised the characters too much,” he says. “The number-one complaint we got about Russell Crowe’s character, Hando, is that we humanised him too much and made him too heroic. You know what, though? All you need to do is look at Shakespeare to see that very bad people can still have one or two good qualities.”

For Wright, the defining moment came at an early screening of the film in Melbourne, when a group of skinheads turned up and sat in the front row. “I kept my eye on them, and when the film finished, they turned to each other and they were bitter and twisted and angry because Hando had been defeated,” he says. “They weren’t happy with how the film ended, but they weren’t supposed to be happy about it. In that moment, I could see very clearly that the film had charted the correct course in its navigation of what it was aiming to do.”

Wright remains proud of the film’s ambiguous morality, and maintains that taking a preachy approach to the subject matter would have made for a boring film. “People would switch off, and the film would become another bit of Spakfiller in the pop-cultural walls around us,” he says. “I wanted to do something that was a bit different, and when you do that, you’re going to create some enemies.”

The world of Romper Stomper is an intensely violent and physical place, and Wright remembers that the atmosphere on set was similarly so. “One night, when we were in pre-production, the guys playing the skinheads actually did end up getting arrested, and had to be bailed out,” he tells me. “They went to a hotel in South Yarra, which is, you know, an upmarket suburb of Melbourne, and they caused a ruckus with some of the locals there, so the police came in and took them away. I got a call from the producer in the early hours of the morning telling me about this, and we basically had to get them out by any means necessary, because there’s no way we could have started the film with them behind bars!”

The pre-production process may have been boisterous, but when it came to the shoot, there was so much to do that it required constant focus. “I’d say that the actual shooting of it was the most intense part,” Wright says. “Keeping it all together required the focus of a chess game.”

Wright’s keenest memory of the time, however, is of working with the young Russell Crowe. “He was intense and ambitious and worked incredibly hard,” says the director. “I do a little bit of teaching with actors, and I always say that Russell’s attitude and approach in those days, when he was starting out, is a model for anyone aspiring to act. He was wonderful to work with – he’d demand the best from everyone around him, and everyone would lift their game around him. He was delightful.”

What: Romper Stomper: 20th Anniversary Edition on Blu-ray and DVD
When: Available from October 3