NOW HERE'S MY PLAN...

ON THE CREATIVE POSSIBILITIES OF COINCIDENCE.

“What made you decide to make Disclosure Day?” a journalist asked Steven Spielberg this week.

No stranger to silly questions, Spielberg temporised, disguising the fact that, as with most decisions, there was probably no “defining moment” – just a muddle of hopes, ideas and possibilities from which the do-able gradually made itself apparent.

A friend is just back from Japan. He didn’t ask, “When did you make your first visit to Japan?” but if he had….

Back in the ‘eighties, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had me producing its weekly book program Books and Writing. To its bemusement, I had just made a program about the connection between literature and tattooing, so it was with some trepidation that they asked what I proposed to do next.

Not many people know the Irish/Greek author Lafcadio Hearn. Born on the Greek island of Lefkada - hence his name- he was short, and had a left eye that bulged like that of a horse. Abandoned successively by his Irish mother, his father and a cousin with whom they dumped him, he emigrated at 19 to the United States, where he worked as reporter in New Orleans.

Hearn was always photographed in profile to hide his other eye.

In 1890, he went to Japan, where he finally found acceptance. To the Japanese, all gaijin looked equally odd, so his height and face aroused no comment. He married the daughter of an impoverished samurai. She became his researcher and collaborator, scouring the city for news items, anecdotes and folklore. Western audiences were fascinated by his translations, in particular his collection of ghost stories, Kwaidan

Who wouldn’t want to listen to a program about someone like that? The ABC grudgingly said OK - but if I thought they were paying for a trip to Japan….

My office was on the edge of Sydney’s tourist hub, King’s Cross. One afternoon, I ran into a girl whom I knew from the film business. “We were supposed to be shooting on the harbour,” she explained, “but we got rained out. We’re having a party down the road at the Boulevard. Why don’t you come?”

….which is how I found myself at 3pm on a wet afternoon in a hotel suite with twenty film people, most of them drunk on banana daiquiris. I knew this was their preferred cocktail since each glass came with a yellow paper parasol – which, if you spun the stem with sufficient vigour, and an encoraging “Wheeee!”, would briefly helicopter around the room.

Weaving across a floor littered with parasols, I looked for someone still sober. The lone candidate was seated on the floor, back against the wall, with the look of a non-drinker or at least someone who didn’t like bananas.

“What’s your role in this circus?” I asked.

”I work for…” and he named an agency which specialised in arranging travel and accommodation for film units. This explained his sobriety; he was mentally calculating what this party would cost.

“You’re just the man I’m looking for!”

Some weeks earlier, I’d helped write the script for the Australian Film Awards, the local equivalent of the Oscars. We worked out of Melbourne, and the deal included three first-class return air tickets to that city; tickets which, since I preferred to drive the six hundred miles, remained unused.

“Should I just throw them away?”

“Don’t do that!” he said. “I can’t give you cash but you can swap them. Where would you like to go?

So that’s how my wife and I ended up in Matsue, on the west coast of Honshu, admiring the koi in the garden of the house once occupied by Lafcadio Hearn.

But if you think that’s a stretch, let me tell you about how I met Federico Fellini.

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