Robert Connolly – In 2009, I took a small film crew to East Timor to make the feature film Balibo, a story depicting the events surrounding the Indonesian invasion of this newly independent nation in 1975.
Twelve months earlier, I had headed to East Timor to meet and attempt to convince Nobel laureate and President Jose Ramos-Horta that making the film in his country, in the places where the tragic events took place, was worth supporting.
This trip and meeting were made more complex because the screenplay depicted Ramos-Horta as the much younger man he was in 1975, an infamous Che Guevara-like revolutionary, consummate womaniser and formidable diplomat.
Ramos-Horta refuses to live in a formal presidential palace; his home is a far more humble traditional structure just east of the heart of the nation's capital, Dili, and a five-minute walk to the beach. Six months later, a failed attack would see him take three bullets in the gut in the very home we visited to argue our case.
I had sent the screenplay earlier, uncensored (despite my better judgment that softening the edges might have made our task easier), together with a DVD starring the actor we proposed to cast as his younger self.
"This actor," he began immediately after we arrived, "I have shown his film to some close friends, women. 'Is he good looking enough to play me?' I asked them. 'No,' they all agreed. 'Certainly not.' George Clooney, I was thinking, would be better – what do you think?"
A cheeky, playful twinkle in his eye betrayed his mischief. He was curious about our first impressions of East Timor. The impact of Indonesia's savage withdrawal in 1999 was everywhere: sprawling displaced-persons camps surrounded the airport, UN and Australian troops patrolled the streets, almost the entire infrastructure remained damaged in some way. At the airport in Darwin that very day, we told him, the Australian government had raised the security advice for travel to East Timor to only one step beneath post-invasion Baghdad.
The travel warnings clearly frustrated him; they discouraged tourism and investment. The US warnings were the same, he said. East Timor was, as we found while filming, as safe as Ramos-Horta had promised us that night over dinner. In one minor public joke to make a point, he had posted an official warning to East Timorese travelling to New York: "Please be advised that if you are dark of skin, using the subway in certain parts of New York is unsafe."
The shoot would require permission to film in the remote town of Balibo, where five young journalists had been murdered by invading Indonesian troops to conceal the truth of a covert military incursion. Ramos-Horta had been in Balibo in 1975 with the journalists and had warned them of the dangers before heading back to Dili to await the full-scale Indonesian invasion that would take place by sea and air only a few months later. The world would turn a blind eye.
Ironically, in the heart of Balibo, a statue looks down on the square where the journalists were killed. A relic from the Indonesian occupation, it depicts a man breaking chains, the shackles of colonial occupation. After 400 years of Portuguese rule, the Timorese enjoyed only nine days of independence before Indonesia claimed this small nation as its own. Ramos-Horta offered that night to tear it down if it would make filming easier, and gave us the permission we needed to move ahead.
Balibo, a four-hour drive from Dili, sits on a strategically high vantage point looking down towards the Ombai Strait and the border with Indonesian West Timor. A 400-year-old fort built by the Portuguese continues to take military advantage of this extraordinary location, with Australian troops stationed there in 1999.
On the evening before we re-created the Indonesian invasion of Balibo and the murder of the journalists, Lieutenant Colonel Sabika turned up with Ramos-Horta's blessing, together with more than 100 of his troops. Not only would they help depict the invasion by playing the invading soldiers, but Sabika himself would be our guide. As a young commander in the East Timor army in 1975, he had defended Balibo on the morning of the invasion. His troops camped in the fort for the night.
Looking down towards the sea at dusk, Sabika showed us where the boats had been positioned, where the troops had landed and the direction they had attacked from. It was humbling to stand there with a man who 35 years earlier had attempted to defend this town. We slept that night next to a small church beneath the fort; the five actors chose to stay in the house the journalists had slept in the night before they died.
On the wall at the front of that building, recovered beneath layers of paint, a picture of the Australian flag has been framed. The journalists had hoped it would afford them some protection.
Together, before daybreak, we all headed up to the fort to prepare to film. Never before had the idea of sunrise held such significance on set. A coronial inquest had explored the reasons the journalists had remained after Sabika and his men had retreated on that fateful day.
The journalists' 16mm cameras required natural light to shoot some footage of the invasion. They had perhaps stayed until the sun had only just broken the horizon in order to film, but by then it was too late and they were murdered shortly after.
Cameras ready, we too waited for that moment, a soft light only just revealing the landscape. Among the many moments in filmmaking that are repetitive and dull, the more sublime moments, rare as they are, can be extraordinary. That morning remains the most moving of my career.
Standing by on that hill with the Australian and Timorese cast and crew poised, Sabika's troops waiting down below to recreate the attack, the anticipation was overwhelming. The sun broke the horizon and we began to film.
[This is an edited extract from Lights, Camera... Travel! (Lonely Planet, $24.99; lonelyplanet.com), a new anthology featuring "rich, raucous, and intimately revealing on-the-road tales by 33 international actors, directors and screenwriters", edited by Andrew McCarthy and Don George. Robert Connolly travelled to East Timor in 2009 to make the feature film Balibo. He was awarded the Timorese Presidential Medal of Merit as part of the nation's 10th anniversary of independence celebrations.]