Voss: A film that never was

Russell Drysdale, Tree form, 1945

Voss has been the great white whale of Australian film adaptations, with interest as soon as the novel was published by theatre actor Keith Michell and film actor Zachary Scott. Both offers collapsed.

Around 1967, producer Harry M. Miller read Voss and purchased a ten-year option for $30,000 on the rights. He collaborated first with director Joseph Losey, and then pioneering British filmmaker Ken Russell and screenwriter John McGrath. Talk at the time was of casting Donald Sutherland and Mia Farrow, but PW vetoed both. He felt instead that Diana Rigg had the requisite coldness to play Laura. (A director once described Rigg as having a tone like “a knife coated in icing sugar”.) McGrath wrote a script, but Russell gradually lost interest. As PW became older and more contrarian, he seems to have turned against this project. By the mid-1970s, PW was keen for Harold Pinter to write a screenplay but the theatre legend declined. David Mercer was also considered.

In 1977, with all of the previously attached names long gone, Miller decided to raise money for the film, even doing some location scouting in the Australian outback. Losey collapsed in the desert at one point, which rather put the pin in his interest in making an entire film there. PW was by now thoroughly frustrated with Miller’s inability to make any progress. The issue came to a head in 1979 when Miller went to jail for numerous financial irregularities, and had to sell the rights to filmmaker Stuart Cooper. (Philip Adams reportedly had the film rights for a brief period here, but it is unclear when.)

Cooper had made a documentary about the painter Sidney Nolan, and Nolan was now supporting him in his efforts to make the film. This was odd, as by this time Nolan and PW had fallen out after years of friendship. Speculation was that Nolan took the film rights to cause PW angst, but the painter once told legendary broadcaster Philip Adams that he bought the film rights as a gesture of conciliation – in this case, a failed one.

PW, by this time, was interested in Maximillian Schnell for the role of Voss, and a young Judy Davis for Laura. At one point, the Sydney Morning Herald spitballed that Jack Nicholson might get the male lead. By 1983 (see SMH 16/8), there were rumours that Cooper would take the film to Libya for production in 1984, in part because PW had veto power over the director of the film – only if it was shot in Australia. PW’s agent, Curtis Brown, bothered to correct this in the newspaper of 12/7/1983, advising that PW still had veto over the director wherever filming ultimately took place.

As of 2023, the answer is that filming took place nowhere. Cooper still held the rights in the year 2009, when he was interviewed by Julie Rigg on the ABC’s MovieTime radio program, and still had every intention of making the film – despite many notables, including Sharman and Malouf, the director and librettist of the opera adaptation, believing Voss to be an unfilmable work.

There appears to have been no public progress since then.