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Keep Off the Grass
by Stephanie Bunbury

John Duigan's Lawn Dogs cuts a swath through restrictive social attitudes.

Sam Rockwell is cute as a button. He's scrunched up on the couch, just a little bloke, telling me that the thing about John Duigan is that he's got amazing honey at his place, New Zealand honey he puts in tea, that is better than drugs. Better than drugs! He also says I remind him a lot of Duigan.

"In fact," he says with an enthusiasm that is a tribute to the director of Lawn Dogs, "you could be his sister! Really!"

John Duigan only has the less hallucinogenic Australian honey on hand when I get to his flat in Bloomsbury. It certainly isn't potent enough to convince me of a family resemblance; there is something languid about Duigan, his measured speech punctuated with sighs, his face impassive. Actors like him, though. Rockwell says he is a wonderful director because he never loses patience, even after weeks of shooting.

Duigan, who moved to Australia when he was 11 to go to boarding school - his father was in the RAF, serving in Malaysia - has been back in England for seven years. His pedigree as a prime mover in Australia's film renaissance goes back to the '70s, when he acted at the Pram Factory in Carlton.

Lawn Dogs, his new film, describes, with great delicacy, a relationship between an unhappy girl of 10 and a young man of 22 - played by Rockwell - who join forces in a society that neither can bear. The society - and, for much of the time, the audience - looks at them together, imagines the worst.

Young Devon's parents are a kind of Stepford family living on a fortified estate in Kentucky. A fly would have trouble penetrating the pristine respectability of Camelot Gardens. Security is tight and surfaces are clean - even the lawns, thanks to constant mowing by Trent, who lives in a trailer in the woods.

As far as the moneyed folk in the mansions are concerned, Trent is white trash, but Devon likes him. She starts sneaking off to hang out with him at the trailer; she shows him the huge scar left by the heart surgery that has kept her at home for much of her life. They understand each other. They are asking for trouble.

Lawn Dogs was written by Naomi Wallace, who grew up in Kentucky where the film is set; it has a sense of decency that hearkens back to Duigan's best film, The Year My Voice Broke. He likes stories about people on the margins.

"The people who don't fit in," he says, "are the way you see how the mechanisms of conformity work."

The fact that it was such an American story didn't worry him. An outsider, he says, can often see obvious things in a fresh way. And anyway, we all have a view of American culture, like it or not.

John Duigan's view is definitely negative. He has spent much of the last 10 years making films there, but his agent's urgings will never persuade him to live in Los Angeles. Being surrounded by people who talk about film deals all the time is too brain-numbing. "It tends to give a distorted idea of the importance of film in the world."

A little like Camelot Gardens, in fact, where the rarefied atmosphere produces its own distortions. That is certainly how Duigan saw it when he found the real estate where Lawn Dogs was filmed. It was safe, but no one was on the street. "It's quite eerie. Even on weekends you rarely see anyone, any children playing in the garden."

It is a particularly American approach, he thinks, to a process becoming universal to the Western world: the isolation of rich from poor. "I think it inevitably produces a siege mentality," Duigan comments. "It is not simply keeping out something that already exists, but it actually strengthens it, creates the kind of thing it is supposed to negate."

Fear, especially. The people in Camelot know they have much to fear. Nature itself is terrifying.

Devon understands that, too. Lawn Dogs is related in the context of one of her fantasy books, where the monster lives in the wild woods. John Duigan, who tells me he is a pagan, loved that idea because it made the separation between the two worlds, the hyper-civilised world behind walls and the world of nature, so clear.

"There is this corralled world where nature and spontaneity have been flayed out of life and the world of the forest, where everything grows wild. And the wicked witch scenario is an ideal one for the bogeyman that the threat of child abuse has become in today's society."

"Devon, by moving from one world to the other, shows how different they are. When she's in the community world she's always in a uniform of one sort or another. And when she gets out, the first thing she wants to do is take off her shoes or take off her hat. In a way, she's much more a child when she's outside. She's almost obliged to be a sort of adult in the other world."

Devon is played, with an extraordinarily hard edge, by 10-year-old Mischa Barton. Duigan had thought they would have to use an older girl, but it quickly became clear that wouldn't work. "As soon as we began auditioning 12 and 13-year-old girls, the chemistry in the scenes with Trent's character became completely different. It became like a Lolita story."

Between takes, he says, Mischa was absolutely a 10-year-old, wanting to play hide-and-seek or running off to catch little fish in the stream. But there was nothing, he thinks, that she did not understand. She is a happy child, but she knew what it was like to be lonely or bullied. She is a little girl, but she recognised the dark lure of sex, of what it might mean to be friends with a man. How could she not? Films, advertising, television: images of sexual desire are their staple.

"But sexual feelings are not something she is experiencing in the primal way that someone going through puberty is," says Duigan. "So we focused on it from that angle. I worked with her as I would with an adult and she would come up and discuss the character in the third person with me. And her perceptions were very astute."

Playing scenes of implied sexual threat with a child sounds terrifying, but Rockwell says Mischa was "gold". There had to be, he says, a degree of sexual tension in their affection or the sense of taboo would be lost.

"We had to gauge that relationship throughout the film. I hope that tension is there, because I think it exists in any brother-sister or mother-son relationship. Just for a split second, maybe, but those moments are there and you have to be aware of it as an actor." And Duigan, he says, made it easier by giving him confidence. "He made me feel I could drive this car, you know what I mean?"

Devon and Trent can't hold out against all that fear; their friendship is consigned to that better world of fantasy. In the end, says John Duigan, Lawn Dogs is a lament - that the world should come to this. "The film is not, by any means, denying that fears of child abuse are valid. It's probably rather saying that the world is the poorer if friendships between adults and children cannot take place," he says.

It would not be like this in his pagan world, I think. In that world of benevolent nature, little girls would never have to dress up in uniforms again, frat bullies would be eaten by their own pit bulls and the trees, like Birnham Wood, would surge forward to cover the lawns forever.