In the mourning light

Burning Man stars Matthew Goode and Rachel Griffiths

Jim Schembri, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports

Jonathan Teplitzky's bio drama Burning Man challenges our ideas of grief.

THE jagged emotions one is forced to work through after surviving a life-inverting trauma are at once complex, subtle, extreme and contradictory. They can also prove maddening, both for the soul at the centre of the storm and those unfortunates caught in its orbit.

Sydney writer-director Jonathan Teplitzky (Better Than Sex, Gettin' Square) learnt all about this 10 years ago when an event turned his life upside down. As grief, frustration, depression and denial raged through him, he found the easiest emotion to vent was anger - and one memorable scene in his extraordinary, powerful, bio-inspired adult drama Burning Man captures that with stinging clarity.

As a head chef, Tom (Matthew Goode) is frantically busy in the fire-breathing kitchen of a swish Bondi restaurant when one of the waiting staff returns with an uneaten duck dish. The customer has complained that it hasn't been cooked properly. Oh yes it has, Tom insists. ''That's how we do it here; if they don't like it they can go to Red Rooster.''

The customer nonetheless presses for the duck to be redone, so Tom acquiesces by plucking a fresh one off the hook and subjecting it to some special preparation.

He kicks the carcass across the kitchen floor, stabs it with a fork, swishes it around a basin full of dirty dishes, drops it in the toilet, hits flush, then duly chops the duck up and cooks away. Handing back the plate with the befouled fowl, Tom quips with a cheeky smile: ''The customer is always right.''

The only rationale for such appalling behaviour, Teplitzky says, is that Tom knows he can get away with it. Teplitzky refers to this as the ''get out of jail free'' syndrome, wherein a grief-stricken person begins taking shameless advantage of the allowances people make in deference to their post-traumatic stress. Teplitzky recalls this experience vividly.

''Once you get past the tragedy and the sadness, there's a strange exhilaration,'' he says.

''Suddenly you can behave like a 20-year-old again but with the life experience of a 40-year-old. There's a fantastic freedom that, in a sense, perverts the rest of your life. It's a deluded state but it allows you to free up your mind and just think, 'Life should be about life, not about fear.' That, ultimately, was the starting point of the film.''

Actually, the starting point for the film, Teplitzky says, was finding an actor willing to embrace the wide range of raw emotions he was determined to convey. After some long conversations in an English pub deconstructing the screenplay, Teplitzky hooked British actor Goode, best known for his outstanding support work in A Single Man (2009), Brideshead Revisited (2008) and Woody Allen's Match Point (2005).

''The thing I needed most was someone who was going to go there,'' Teplitzky says. ''So I said to him: 'Let's not go anywhere forward if you don't feel you can go 120 per cent there.'''

And he certainly does; Goode's central performance in Burning Man delivers a deeply affecting portrait of a man at war with himself and everybody around him. A deeper, richer understanding of life emerges once he realises that the world, as unfair as it is, does not revolve around him.

''I try not to take anything home with me but it was certainly very, very hard [not to] on this film,'' Goode says from London. ''The film was partly based on Jonathan's life but I'd never gone through anything like that before, so we went to some interesting places. That's one of the reasons this film has become the thing that I am definitely most proud of, not just for my performance but because of the entirety of the work. It was so sensitively handled.''

It wasn't an easy sell, however. Teplitzky's defiantly non-linear narrative starts with a blizzard of question marks about why Tom is behaving like, well, such an arsehole.

''It was always written as a very fractured narrative so you're confused as an audience member,'' Goode says. ''I [certainly] was when I first read the script. I was, like, 'I'm not sure how much I like this guy!' Then once we start to learn why his behaviour is so erratic and why he's such a mercurial father your heart goes straight out to him and we follow his story.

''It wasn't just because his behaviour was amusing [that I took on the role]; I liked the fact that an audience is going to go through that same process I did when I read it, which is an enormous arc from disliking someone to rooting for them.''

Burning Man certainly doesn't waste time grabbing attention; its opening shot is not only confronting, it deliberately confounds audience expectations about what kind of film they are about to witness.

''I wanted to make a film that was visceral and emotional but not sentimental,'' Teplitzky says. ''I tried to drain it of every ounce of sentimentality so that it became something people could identify with without going into that completely morbid thing of observing grief and being about the vulnerability of grief. What I wanted, in a funny sort of way, was a celebration of grief.''

Having seen and survived Beaches, Goode was glad the film adopted a full-frontal approach to a topic usually bathed in melodrama. ''There is humour, there are a lot of scenes where you go, 'This doesn't feel contrived,''' Goode says. ''The film doesn't feel like it's trying to manipulate an audience. The emotions were very real and the dialogue was very real, so we were very lucky.''

The experience of making Burning Man changed the career path of Melbourne actor Bojana Novakovic, who stars opposite Goode as his highly sexual, highly strung better half. ''It set a benchmark; I can't do anything less than this now,'' Novakovic says. ''I can't take on any jobs that offer me less than this in terms of personal development in my work … From this point I have to take on things that scare me.

''I've said no to a lot of things since this, and I've been unemployed as a result, but I feel I'm doing it for the right reasons.''

The chemistry the pair exude on screen was, Goode says, the result of some distinctly non-method acting.

''If I was a method actor - and I still don't quite understand, really, how that works - if you're suddenly drawing on your own experience and you're trying to work something out psychologically on screen, that can become very one-note and quite boring,'' he says.

''Where I was very lucky was having an energy with Bojana where we were able to go to the emotion between 'action' and 'cut', then we can breathe, relax, go have a cigarette and come back and do it again. If we had to 'live' it the whole day, that would have been the end of me.''

Burning Man opens on Thursday.