Gillian Armstrong and the pineapple

Gillian Armstrong had been moved half a dozen times around the luxurious Stamford hotel before I got there in my ZZZ journalist capacity. One of the first things I did was get her moved again. She was drinking black tea. I emptied a glass of water into the pot plant nearby, having forgotten my mike stand. I glanced upwards at the speaker churning out Amy Winehouse, not awful but not great.

'You don't like it do you,' Gillian Armstrong, one of Australia's foremost film directors asked and since I said nothing she was the one to suggest, 'let's move'.

Although Jill from the Dendy was the one to direct us up the staircase, wider than a small Queenslander with lots more carpet, we all knew who was directing this little event. 

Gillian Armstrong is a straight talker and knows how to get things done.

'I've got the pineapple,' she said, precariously balancing the plate of chopped up tropical fruit in one hand, her other hand carrying a nice new Mimco red handbag.  

'We used to come up here on holidays,' she said, 'to Maroochydore. The pineapple was the first thing we bought. Then my grandparents moved up there.'

'Did they like it here?' I asked.

'They lasted six years,' she said and I felt guilty lasting more than twenty. 

'What did you think of the Q&A last night' she asked as we sat down and I untangled the various wires for the minidisk player.

I wasn't thinking. I don't know why I said it except that there were knots in the wires.  'Not great'. That was my answer. I couldn't stop. 'That man who asked you how you got such good actors and then you listed them all.' I started to list them, 'Judy Davis, Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson, Winona Ryder, Gabriel Byrne....'

She stopped me at last. 'Apparently he's an event stalker, goes to everything,' she said and sucked on her pineapple.

'Like the cricket?' I asked and she shrugged. 

Gillian Armstrong's latest film, Death Defying Acts, according to her is a 'what if' story; what if Harry Houdini, the world's greatest escape artist and also a mummy's boy met and fell in love with a Scottish con artist who claimed to be able to speak to his dead mother.

Guy Pearce plays Houdini as a muscled, self destructive, charismatic showman who likes nothing better than to balance on the ledges of Edinburgh gothic castles and imagine falling off.

Mary McGarvie, the love interest, as played by the Welsh Catherine Zeta Jones is a single mother who makes a living as a psychic but when the manager of her latest show skips with the cash, she is left living in a graveyard with her 12 year old daughter, Benjie, the psychic's side kick. Benjie is played by the Oscar nominated Saorise Ronan. She took on this role before Atonement but then had to wait for her to finish that role.

'She is at the heart of the film,' Gillian said. 'It is through her eyes that we watch the behaviour of the adults.'

So thinking about this and her previous films, High Tide, My Brilliant Career and Unfolding Florence, all with women at the heart, I asked her whether it was important for her to put women's perspectives front and centre of her films.

'No, no, no, no, no,' she said, bending with annoyance, her hair dangerously close to becoming pineappled, unable to even look at me now. 'People must stop saying this. I do not spend my life only worrying about the female character. The Harry Houdini character was just as important. The story was written by a large ponytailed Scottish man and he's the one who most cared about Mary and Benjie and that was the beginning of the story, this mother daughter duo of psychics. 

She gave a similar answer to a question about her penchant for costume dramas. 'NO, no, no, no. Why would I prefer them? They're much more complex, much more expensive.'

We paused then as the tea trolley went past. I fiddled with the buttons of the mini disk and tried to think of some non insulting questions for the next 5 minutes of allotted time. 

'What about the documentaries?' I asked. 'Is there a truth to those stories that informs the rest of your work?'

She paused then, looked meaningfully at the pawpaw. 'I see myself as a feature film director,' she said with a tone of finality. 

 'Do you ever get sick of it?' I asked, pretty sure that when I fiddled with the buttons I taped over the best bit about reading the first 10 pages of the script for Death Defying Acts and having no idea where it was going. This was what stood out, she told me, from all the other ordinary scripts out there.

'No, I never get sick of it,' she said, 'because I never believe that I get it right. It is a constant challenge but when the light is just right or you're putting the music behind a scene, or a thrilling moment in the cutting room or best of all, the laughter of the audience in the right places; these are the moments that make me love it.'

One last piece of pineapple and she was right. It was good.