Stories We Tell

"When you're in the middle of a story,

"it isn't a story at all,

"but only a confusion,

"a dark roaring,

"a blindness,

"a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood,

"like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat

"crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids,

"and all aboard are powerless to stop it.

"It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.

"When you're telling it to yourself or to someone else."

How far am I gonna go up?

- Uh, three flights. - Just keep going.

Take a break when you need to.

Jolly good.

Here we are, then. Hi.

Hey.

All right, you two.

So this is where you're sitting.

Oh, right. It's here.

- Right, then. - Okay.

Oh, let's have a look and see.

Oh, my God.

So this is the first half.

This is what, love? The first half of what we're recording.

Are we gonna do the whole lot?

Yeah, there's another...

All this? Yeah.

It's the whole of the thing that I wrote,

it's a severe punishment, that.

Whose tea is that?

Okay, so, and oh...

I just think that I might be sweating through my shirt.

Yeah, I'm ready. Okay.

I don't like this.

Are you nervous? A little.

Yeah, it'll get worse.

I hope that you'll explain to me some time

what all this is that you're trying to do. - Huh?

The two cameras and me recording it visually and...

I mean, it's not the normal way of doing it, is it?

I don't know. Hmm.

We've told you it's a documentary,

but it's actually... It's an interrogation process.

What?

It's an interrogation process that we've set up.

Okay.

I honestly need pills.

Do you really? Are you really? I'm so nervous.

Are my teeth okay?

I feel like I'm sweating.

And how far down... What's my frame?

Okay.

How are my breasts?

Okay, show time.

Me? Do you want me? Oh, I'm sorry.

Okay, Dad, so, um...

We can start anytime. Are you rolling? Yeah.

Okay.

We're off.

"In the beginning... The end.

"I am unique.

"From that precise moment when I was dragged

"out of my mother's womb into this cold world,

"I was complete.

"An amalgam of the DNA passed on to me by my mother and father.

"And they, too, had been born finished products

"with their DNA handed down by their respective parents

"and so back ad infinitum.

"It is clear to me that I was always there,

"somewhere in my ancestor's DNA, just waiting to just be born.

"So this unique I has always existed,

"even in the mystery of nothingness.

"So where to start?"

So, Dad, can you tell the whole story?

The marriage to Mum and everything that happened since.

Good God.

Yup.

The entire story?

I'm gonna ask you now to tell the whole story

as though I don't know the story

from the very beginning to the very end.

Shit. Um...

from beginning to end in your own words,

like, as though you're telling a story to someone?

Like a medley.

A medley. Yeah, okay.

Can you describe the whole story

from the beginning until now in your own words?

What?

Wow.

I guess I better pee first.

Wow. Yeah, give me a moment. - Yeah, go pee now.

What do you think of this documentary being made?

Um...

You can be totally candid. Can I?

A lot of you have been, so...

You know, I guess I have this sort of instinctive reaction of,

like, "Who fucking cares about our family, right?" Can I swear?

Like, who cares about

our stupid family and...

Like, I'm sort of embarrassed.

'Cause I think, "It's our family and every family has a story and..."

But I do think it's really interesting to look at

this one thing that happened

and how it's refracted in so many different ways

and there's so many different angles.

By describing Mum in as much detail as possible.

Oh... Well, Mum...

Mom, I will refer her to as Mom, not Diane.

She was... She was the most fun I could think of as a child.

She was infectious, enthusiastic and excited

about everything.

My memory of Mom is,

uh, of someone who was very loud.

She walked very heavily

and made the record skip, actually.

And my impression is she was a fun person at parties,

that she was a fun person to have in an audience

'cause she laughed loud.

You can't...

You can't talk about Diane, I don't think, without talking about her laugh.

It infused every situation that she was in.

What attracted people to her was a sense of joy.

She had a contagious personality, I thought,

and when I was really young I used to, um,

watch I Love Lucy and I actually thought that was her

because she was sort of fun and goofy and...

She was very warm, she was, you know, full of life

and loved to dance and loved to party and laughing a lot

and she loved to sing and she was the worst singer,

I mean, there's a big tent within which you can enjoy life with her.

There are people who just light up the life for those people around her.

And people gravitate to them

like a moth to the flame, you know? And that was her.

And she also was very productive.

Got a lot of things done, she was a very busy person

and managed to juggle lots of different things.

I remember her being on the phone a lot, for example,

and I remember the hand saying,

"Hold on. Shh! Shh! Hold on."

Whenever I would meet Diane,

I always found that she was in trouble.

Something she'd done. She'd left something in a cab,

or she'd arrive saying, "Oh, you have to come with me. I have to go there

And as we were walking, you know, she'd be ahead of me

trying to tell me why everything was in disarray.

Whenever I would see her it seemed as though...

Oh, something was going wrong,

um, it was her fault

and she was trying to sort it out and correct it.

As I understand it, um,

Mum was doing plays

and she met Michael in one of those plays

and she instantly, sort of, fell in love with him.

"In 1965, Michael played Mick

"in The Caretaker's North American premiere.

"He recalled an audience member

"coming around to the dressing rooms later

"to congratulate the lead actor

"and that he was introduced to her.

"Her name was Diane.

"And she loved the show so much

"that she came back twice more during the run."

I think Diane

fell in love with... Not with me,

but with the character I was playing on stage.

The character is something that is so different from me,

it's such an exciting and dominating character.

You can't take your eyes off that character.

That's absolutely nothing like me at all,

but you can see why I would want to play it.

That Diane turns up to watch a performance by an actor

and as she watches that performance,

she sees that person

is exactly what I'd been looking for all my life,

somebody exciting, somebody full of intrigue.

That's what I'd been looking for all my life.

"She was an actress herself

"and few months later they'd play together in The Condemned of Altona.

"And that changed their lives irrevocably."

Diane was playing the part of the actress

and me as the German officer.

Once again, this is a fascinating character.

So, even in that play, we were playing two roles

rather than Michael and Diane.

And they talked at a party afterwards

and they got into some weird discussion

where Dad offered her a drive home

and Mum said okay.

Yes, I did offer to drive her home.

I said, "I got a Mercedes-Benz sports car sitting outside

"if you want a ride home."

Dad admitted that he didn't have a car there.

In fact, he didn't even drive.

And Mum was the one that had a car there.

So somehow, in the story, they're both lying to go home with each other.

"And then they made love, Mick and Diane."

"Now, let me continue by telling you another from Michael's artistic pursuits.

"At about the time of his marriage to Diane,