In Heaven's Burning, Tristan and Isolde collides with the fatalistic visions of Don Siegal, the road movie hitches onto the multi-cultural train, and redemption is found in a conspiracy of misadventures.

"Heaven's Burning's" director, Craig Lahiff, has led an unusual career, even by the curious paths most Australian feature film directors endure.

After a career in the computing industry, he enrolled in a Master of Arts in Film at Flinders University. He learned the tools of the trade watchng and working (as an assistant in the editing department) on the sets of Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1980)The Plumber (tele-feature,1979), and several locally-made documentaries, before directing and producing a couple of short films.

Having figured out the workings of 10BA, he made his first tele-feature, Coda, in 1987. "In order to direct my own films," he recalls, "I had to become producer and raise the money myself. My background as a computer consultant, working with people like BHP gave me a confidence to deal in finance.

After Coda came Fever (1987), with Bill Hunter and Gary Sweet, Strangers (1990) and another tele-feature Ebbtide (1993), a project with which Lahiff was far from satisfied: "I had to go at different elements of style, trying, even if I was not happy with the script, to make the most of it and learning about working with actors and developing a style."

Making Heaven's Burning was an opportunity for Lahiff to collaborate with screenwriter and playwright Louis Nowra, to work on a scale - not to mention budget - in excess of his previous films and to exercise a greater degree of control over the entire project.

A novel, which Lahiff describes as "very Polanski, sort of The Tenant," was sent to Nowra. That project didn't eventuate, but through their discussions a mutual interest in films noir and specific directors - particularly Don Siegal and Orson Welles - got Nowra thinking about a number of ideas.

One followed the story of Midori, a Japanese woman who is caught up in a bank robbery and pursued by her husband. Another centred on two people from different cutures whose ill-fated love ends ona paradise beach somewhere on the Andalusian coastline in Spain. Scenes from one worked their way into the other, and from that a first draft, which Lahiff hails as being "all there....the first script I've had that you could pick up, go out and shoot."

Unlike many Australian stage-and-screen writers, Nowra's screenplays are not simple adaptations of his stage work, nor do they clumsily metamorphose conventions that work in one onto the other. For Lahiff, Nowra has a great eye for the poetic visuals as well. He is very mindful that it is cinema, and not just words and characterizations. He spends a lot of time thinking the project through; the structure, the dramatics.

"I've found with some writers they get started and say,'We'll see how it goes.' They don't go through to the end, and there generally comes a crunch somewhere later on. It is very hard to go back and restructure things because characters have already developed in a certain way. Both Louis and I like to start with a character who if fairly normal. Then something happens, some sort of incident, a catalyst, where they change,for better or for worse. Generally, they go off the rails, which makes for a good dramatic film.

On the first night of her honeymoon in Sydney, Midori (Youki Kudoh) fakes her own kidnapping, having previously planned a rendezvous with a former lover. The following day she is taken hostage during a failed bank robbery, and saved from certain death at the hands of her thug captors by the conscionable driver Colin (Russell Crowe).

Together, they flee the vengeful Boorjan (Petru Gheorghiu), whose son was the price of Midori's freedom, and Midori's outraged husband, Yukio (Kenji Isomura). They wind up at Colin's outback home, where his philosophical father, Cam (Ray Barrett), tends to a once-thriving, now barren and drought-stricken property. (The events surrounding Midiori's kidnapping and Yukio's elevation to the world's most famous cuckold are based on actual events several years ago in Japan.) A contemporary Tristan and Isolde is one way of looking at it, says the quiet-spoken Lahiff, while Don Siegal provided a perfect model for the characterizations that drive the film:

Charley Varrick" (1973) is one of my favourites, and of course there is Dirty Harry(1971), Cogan's Bluff(1969), Escape from Alcatraz(1979) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers(1956), going back to that genre. Quite often his films tend to be about a main characrter who comes into contact with his darker side. Like in Dirty Harry, one of the characterss tends to be bery controlled and then he is pitted against somebody who has lost control. There is a final confrontation. Generally he makes his statement at this stage: whether it is beneficial for society to be more controlled and emotions contrained, or whether there is something more spontaneous about people who express their emtions more. There's a duality between those two different sides of human nature. I suppose the archetypical film is Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where you get the total pod people."

Heaven's Burning" doesn't settle on just one "dual" protagonist upon which to pivot its unpredictable flights of suspense and action. Nowra and Lahiff bring to their film noir typology a skewed take on ethnicity and Australian multi-culturalism. It doesn't amount to to the message about multi-cultural harmony our political pundits would prefer to hear:

"I wouldn't like to make any implications about that mix of different cultures coming into collision. The important thing is Midori's point of view, being a Japanese woman who comes out here into a different society. She steps outside her own culture and only finds herself by breaking the rules. In the end, it costs her her life, but in the end love is more important...which again ties back into Tristan and Isolde.

Part 'lovers-on-the -lam' romance, part road movie, part-thiriller, Heaven's Burning is infused with the dark poetry of film noir and a free-wheeling approach toward myriad film genres it systematicakly subverts, with a healthy amount of knowing humour.

There have been few Australian films as dark as this. This was an issue for one Australian distributor the producers approached, says Lahiff (and with whom, needless to say, they did not go):

"It was difficult to cast, and difficult to shoot as well. The script moves between suspense and mystery at the beginning to straight action sequences and black humour. But the central element is the love story. Some people originally read the script tended to sympathize with Yukio, the husband. Midori needed to be somebody who was sympathetic, who had only been married for a week or so and was leaving her husband, who appeared to have done nothing wrong."

"For the role of Midori, producer Helen Leake and I wanted Youki Kudoh, whom we'd seen in Mystery Train. We sent the script to her and then went over to meet her. She has such an innocence,a naive quality, which is very endearing. We thought we could get the audience to still empathise with this charcter despite what she does. She makes mistakes; there is a touching scene where she and Colin are in the motel room in separate beds, and she is saying how she is bad luck for the men in her life." The first choice for the key role of Colin was Russell Crowe, and this meant delaying the project to fit in with Crowe's commitements in America:

"We met with him when he was down in Adelaide with his band, and then he suggested I come up and watch the cricket with him. So we spent the day in the box watching the cricket to see if we could get on with each other and last a day, which was a good way of doing it."

The other casting issue, says Lahiff, was the range of ethinic characters. As well as the lead characters, Japanese and Anglo-Saxon, are Afghans and indigenous Australians.

Lahiff and DOP Brian Beheny opted to shoot the film in Super 35, which will end up as anamorphic in the final print:

"I like to somehow shoot in a way where you see the characters in their environment. This was helped by shooting in the wider screen ratio."

Welles, says Lahiff, was an influence, though his trademark shooting style only in part worked its way into this film:

"You try to find a visual style for the film depending on the content, which is what I do with the DOP. I like to spend about five or six weeks with the DOP and go over all the locations, think about different styles of doing the film, and come up with a consisitent approach which will fit the budget. I storyboard all the shots.

But with this film you can pick up the script and have a look at the storyboards on the side of the pages and it is pretty well the same as what we shot."

Lahiff welcomes the breadth of sytles, subject matters and audiences - from niche arthouse films to market-driven genres - with which Australian film-makers are currently engaged.

However, he laments the slickness of many American films and the absence of "stylist" film makers:

"I do get a bit disappointed that there are not too many stylists left; filmmakers who have their own distinct visual style. Particularly American films tend to have a certain look and that is it. I miss the Hitchcockian set-pieces, the Welles visual style.