Phillip Noyce: The not so quiet Australian

From political movies to Hollywood schlock and back again. Sheila Johnston meets the unpredictable director

Three years ago, Phillip Noyce seemed like a classic example of a bold and creative director who left home, took the Hollywood shilling and promptly ceased to make work of any great interest. Films in his native Australia had included Newsfront, an ambitious social history of the country seen through the lenses of news cameramen, and Dead Calm, a psycho-thriller set on a boat which launched the career of 19-year-old Nicole Kidman.

Then, discouraged by Australia's ailing film funding system, Noyce decamped to America, where he spent the Nineties crafting such hits as the Sharon Stone vehicle Sliver and the Harrison Ford flicks Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. They were polished, star-driven entertainments. But Noyce himself was no longer a name to conjure with.

Now that has all changed dramatically: the 52-year-old director has not one but two new films – each made outside Hollywood – screening in Britain this month. The first, Rabbit-Proof Fence, was released a couple of weeks ago and received well by critics. The second, an adaptation of Graham Greene's 1955 novel, The Quiet American, arrived on Friday.

Different as they are in many ways, they also have a striking amount in common. Rabbit-Proof Fence tells of three of the thousands of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families by the Australian government between 1900 and 1970. The Quiet American uses a bittersweet love triangle between a jaded British foreign correspondent, a supposed US aid worker and a Vietnamese woman to expose the early but devastating effects of covert American intelligence activities in South-East Asia.

"They're both about colonialism and people who think they're doing the right thing but cause enormous disruption – about killing with kindness," says Noyce. One might add that both are also about paternalistic white men who take over the lives of indigenous women. And, after a decade of churning out cookie-cutter movies, Noyce has found himself with two fiercely controversial films to defend. It could perhaps have been foreseen that the Australian government would not be best pleased by Rabbit-Proof Fence. But the storm which broke over The Quiet American was altogether more unpredictable.

The project began when Noyce went to Vietnam in 1995 with two former US military intelligence officers who were returning to mark the 50th anniversary of their landing there in the closing stages of the Second World War. "A couple of million dead Vietnamese and 55,000 dead Americans lay between their two visits. They were overflowing with regret and asking how it could have happened." Intending to buy a copy of Ho Chi Minh's Prison Poems, Noyce was sold The Quiet American in error. "I thought, 'My God, here is the answer to those old soldiers' obsessions.' Suddenly it was just screaming out to me. Greene replied to questions which had never been even asked, about why America would later prosecute the Vietnam war with such vehemence. And his caustic portrait of the political evangelist imbued with a sense of responsibility for mankind proves two things: how nothing ever changes and how smart Greene was."

Events made the story even more sensitive in the new millennium. Noyce showed an early rough cut of The Quiet American to test audiences in New York in September of last year. Suddenly, responses changed overnight. "The audiences after 9/11 were mightily less appreciative than they were before. It exposes wounds. Both literally, in its depiction of the aftermath of a terrorist bombing, and also in asking, 'Is there any way in which we might have given our enemies justification?'

"There has been a huge cynicism about American political institutions ever since the Watergate era. But that question was considered completely sacrilegious and almost treasonable in the months after 9/11 when people didn't feel like being cynical about themselves. By the end, Miramax [the producers] did not have specific plans to release the film. They were skittish about it."

The Quiet American looked headed for obscurity when Michael Caine, who plays the British journalist, prevailed upon Miramax to take it to the Toronto Film Festival, "as a litmus test of whether the wounds had healed. We held our breath and bit our nails because it was having its world premiere there two days before the anniversary of 9/11 within a mood of speculation about war. But it was very well-received." Well-received enough for Miramax to plan an Oscar campaign, with Caine tipped by critics for his third Academy Award.

Meanwhile, Noyce still gets offered those Hollywood action thrillers. "I had a lot of fun doing them," he says. "But they somehow don't seem relevant any more."