When Don McAlpine began making movies in Hollywood, his biggest challenge was appearing relaxed around screen legends.
“It took me a long time to stop stargazing,” said McAlpine, who filmed Paul Newman in Harry and Son (1984) shortly after making the leap to Tinseltown. “Now, if people ask me what it’s like to work with Jane Fonda, I say, ‘I think she enjoyed working with me a lot’.”
McAlpine, one of Australia’s most distinguished film-makers, is now preparing to shoot a big-screen adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in New Zealand. He celebrated his 70th birthday yesterday at his home at MacMasters Beach.
In many ways, McAlpine’s journey from teaching sport in country NSW to becoming the cinematographer on a string of revered films – they range from Breaker Morant to Moulin Rouge!, the movie that earned him an Oscar nomination – mirrors the evolution of the local film industry as a whole.
Born in the NSW town of Quandialla, McAlpine was working as a physical education teacher in Parkes when he began using a 16 millimetre camera to record athletes preparing for the Melbourne Olympics.
He has never had a real career plan, but admits to studying Italian in the 1960s with the idea of working on spaghetti westerns.
“Hollywood appeared totally closed to Australians back then,” he said. In 1969 the director Bruce Beresford asked him to shoot the classic The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.
Two weeks later he was on a plane to London. America came calling in the early ’80s, when three of McAlpine’s films – My Brilliant Career, Breaker Morant and The Getting of Wisdom – were released in New York. The director Paul Mazursky offered to fly him to Greece for a two-week trial on the movie Tempest.
McAlpine passed the test and began an eclectic Hollywood career that has ranged from the sci-fi carnage of Predator to the comedy of Mrs Doubtfire and the stylish action of Patriot Games.
Asked to pick the films he is most proud of, McAlpine nominates The Getting of Wisdom and Romeo + Juliet.
And the worst? “I did Anger Management to get the chance to watch Jack Nicholson at work,” he said. “You do [a film like that] as well as you can, but you don’t get much satisfaction.”