Few Australian films have sparked as much controversy as Chopper, beginning well before it arrived in cinemas in 2000. Why perpetuate the myth of Mark “Chopper” Read, career criminal and self-confessed killer, who was still in jail when he hit the bestseller list in the 1990s with a string of factually questionable memoirs?
But the final product – with a mesmerising lead performance by Eric Bana, previously best-known as a TV comic – was unlike anything that might have been expected. Droll, alarming and strangely compassionate, Chopper quickly established itself as that rare thing, a true cult movie, its reported fans ranging from stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio to actual underworld figures in Melbourne and elsewhere.
With the film set for re-release in a digitally remastered version, we asked some of the key players to look back at its making.
Chopper was the first feature film for both producer Michele Bennett and writer-director Andrew Dominik, whose collaboration began in Sydney in the early 1990s.
Bennett: We started doing music videos back when there was some money in it and when you were allowed to do what you wanted to do, and they were fun. We did a lot of those, and commercials, before we did the film.
Dominik: It was sort of based on his [Read’s] books, originally. But then we got his arrest docket, which I think is in the back of one of the books, and it listed all the cops who’d arrested him. And we started tracking them down, and they started telling us stories about who the guy really was, as opposed to the sort of myth of Chopper Read.
Bennett: He did always say “never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn”.
Dominik: He wouldn’t meet us originally. He’d write letters. He did say in one letter that he wasn’t interested in how he saw himself, he wanted to see how someone else saw him. But he had various caveats about what could and couldn’t be in the movie. There was to be no drug usage, no violence towards women and no poetry. And all three things were in the film in the end.
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