Hook: Random film of the day turned up Chopper (2000) by Andrew Dominik — 6.78 rating, Australia, Eric Bana as criminal Mark Read. The description sounded like a standard crime drama: "Mark Read, nicknamed 'The Chopper,' always dreamed of becoming a legend of the criminal underworld." Usually nobody digs deeper than that cliché. But one detail in the plot caught my attention: the protagonist "made his cellmate cut off his ear." So the film isn't about a criminal cutting others — it's about him cutting himself to get transferred to another prison. And then the real-life prototype watched the finished film and told the director something like: "I always thought I behaved normally. I watch the screen — and realize I was insane." This is no longer a film story, this is a psychological detective story squared: a film about a man who was the only one surprised by his own life. Archive check — clean topic, neither the film, nor Read, nor Bana have been covered before.
Let's start with the fact that the real biography of Mark Brandon Read (1954–2013) is in places funnier than any screenplay. Grew up in Melbourne suburbs; father — World War II veteran of Irish descent, mother — fanatical Seventh-day Adventist, in Read's own recollection — the main source of violence in the house. At 15 his mother sent him to a psychiatric institution — and Read left a brilliant explanation of this decision for life: "She thought I was compromised because I stopped being an Adventist. If I'm declared insane — God will forgive me, and I'll get into heaven." So the religiosity of his early years was literally the pacemaker of all his adult mythology.
The nickname "Chopper" originally had nothing to do with knives: it stuck to him in second grade, from the cartoon Yakky Doodle (the character is a dog). Later Read himself assessed this irony murderously: "Where would I be now if they'd called me Fluffy?"
Then — a stereotypical criminal path at first: drug dealers, robberies, blowtorch torture to "motivate" debtors. And then the system produced statistics that make your blood run cold: between ages 20 and 38, Read spent 13 months total at liberty. Not for murder, by the way — for attempted hostage-taking, arson, robbery, escaping arrest, and attempting to take a judge hostage with a sawed-off shotgun. In all that time he didn't get a single murder conviction (but in old age he'll tell everything himself — more below).
In the notorious H-Division of Pentridge Prison he built a mini-state: the Overcoat Gang wore long coats year-round to hide improvised weapons. And then came the episode that spawned the entire film: to transfer from H-Division to the psychiatric wing (by one version — to escape an ambush, by another — to "win a bet"), Read convinced a cellmate to cut off both his ears. Not one. Both. The ordinary life of a man who treated his own body as a negotiation tool.
In 1978 he tried to kidnap Judge Bill Martin to secure freedom for his friend Jimmy Loughnan — got 13 years. Then Loughnan himself would stab him (in detail and beautifully — below), Read would lose several feet of intestine, and Loughnan would burn to death in the 1987 Jika Jika prison fire. In the late '90s Read would get out — and here begins the most unexpected part of the biography.
The first book — Chopper: From the Inside (1991) — Read assembled from letters he sent out from Pentridge. It sold over half a million copies and, according to Dominik, claims to be the most stolen book in Australian publishing history. Then came nine and a half novels, the children's book Hooky the Cripple (2002), the gangsta rap album Interview with a Madman (2006), "Chopper Red" wine, "Chopper Heavy" beer, paintings with self-portraits and portraits of Ned Kelly, stand-up tours.
Meanwhile, behind the writing desk lurked a fact worth reading aloud: after releasing Chopper 5: Pulp Faction he began writing not memoirs but fictional stories. So a man who half his life sold his biography as his main currency at some point honestly admitted that truth isn't the main commodity. His signature formula: "never let the truth get in the way of a good story."
Regarding attempts to ban the children's book Hooky the Cripple (they tried to push it out of schools as too dark for children), Read responded in pure marketer spirit: "Ban it, just ban it, I'll get rich off this."
The most frightening detail of his "civilian" career isn't the signatures on paintings, but that he was justly described not as a "soft criminal" but as a psychopathic killer. The most absurd turn of his late career: the living embodiment of the debate "can you romanticize a criminal" releases a children's book — and the country seriously discusses whether to allow it in schools. There's a reason why Australia still loved him — and it's unexpected.
Read himself suggested Bana for the role — saw him in the comedy sketch show Full Frontal. For Bana this was his star turn: before — TV host and comedian, after — "Hulk," "Troy," "Munich." The shortlist for the role, according to cast colleagues, looked like this: Richard Roxburgh, Ben Mendelsohn, Russell Crowe, Simon Lyndon himself, and Bana. And here begins a funny story: one of the distributors (sales agent) jumped off the project, declaring that "we need a highly experienced actor." And Dominik after the first audition thought "no, not him," but by evening that same day changed his mind.
But the most interesting thing is the production itself. They managed to shoot the film on a budget of around A$2 million only because Pentridge Prison was just being decommissioned: they filmed in the actual H-Division, in those very cells where everything happened. Dominik later recounted: "You can gorge on all the attributes of the filming process, but if you remind an actor that right in this room an actual stabbing occurred — you get a chill you can exploit." Prisoners who returned as extras played prison guards — because "they carried that voice inside them."
Bana's preparation was methodical: two days living with Read on his farm in Tasmania, where Read essentially ignored him, but practiced "demonstration models" of his crimes on director Dominik: "and this is how you cut a man in the face!" — with demonstration. Dominik after that weekend slept three days. Bana spent two to three hours daily in makeup: prosthetics for the "severed" ears required shaving his head bald, and the hand-drawn tattoos lasted on the body a maximum of two days, so they were applied only on shooting days with a bare torso. Bana gained weight during filming — in the second half of the film, when Chopper is already free, he visibly gets fatter (incidentally, there was a break between the halves of filming, and the cinematographer changed during it — which is why the film looks like two different works).
On set there also occurred an episode that has already become legend: filming went on in winter under a tin roof, and the crew feared rain that would drown out the sound. One member of the team reassured everyone: she's a "white witch," and there would be no rain. And it didn't rain. Not a drop all day.
This is perhaps the most interesting place in the entire story. Read refused to watch the film in a cinema — Dominik offered to fly to Launceston and rent out a theater for the two of them, but the prospect of "an empty theater just the two of us" scared him. He asked for a tape. Dominik sent it and spent the next 24 hours in suspense.
Then he called. And said: "You must be telepathic... Who did you talk to?" Then explained that it was "incredible" to watch the film: in life he always thought his reactions were normal, but watching the screen where another person does the same thing, he understood for the first time that he was insane. Dominik added that he "even seemed moved."
This is one of the most honest things I've heard about cinema in a long time: the work not of an image but a mirror. And simultaneously — the best praise for a director you could possibly imagine: Read said that in the film "he didn't look like a hero, but he looked real."
However, there was also the reverse. A few years later, Lyndon accidentally ran into Read in Collingwood when Read was walking with his son. Read, instead of "hello," delivered: "Gudinski made $50 million worldwide, and I'm bankrupt" (in reality the film collected around $6 million in Australian box office, and Read himself in 2007 actually declared bankruptcy — $80 thousand in credit card debt and $140 thousand in private debts to twelve people). Lyndon countered: "Don't look at me, I'm on welfare."
Read's own formula, by the way, entered all the reference books: "100% lies and 100% truth, mixed into 100% nothing."
Victoria State Police publicly called on citizens to boycott the film. Dominik considered this the best advertising: "You couldn't come up with better if you paid for it." The right-wing press portrayed the project as "unacceptable romanticization" of a man who was still recently dangerous. And the public went wild: in Australian box office Chopper collected around A$5.9 million — more than it cost, and with an "18+" rating managed to become the country's box office number one, knocking off Mel Gibson's "The Patriot."
Among declared fans figured Leonardo DiCaprio and, more importantly, actual representatives of Melbourne's criminal world. A couple years after release, a political cartoon appeared during the Afghan campaign: the Australian Prime Minister calls the American President and says: "No, I won't send helicopters — I'll send Chopper." The criminal's nickname became part of the country's political lexicon. Few biographies are honored this way.
There are three reasons. First — Dominik made from this material not a gangster action film (the first drafts he, by his own admission, rewrote because they came out "middle class jerking off on fantasy violence"), but a study of the consequences of violence for the one who commits it. He's interested not in the victims but in how violence works from the inside: that a man who cuts another in the face will immediately ask anxiously "you okay, Keithy?" — and this isn't hypocrisy but real internal conflict. The formula "killer without remorse" in cinema is a cliché; the formula "killer whose remorse is as strong as his desire to hurt" is rare dramaturgy.
The second reason is that the film raised a theme that cinema usually hides under swearing and stylized gangster gloss: violence as a symptom of family structure. Read grew up with an abusive parent, went through institutional violence of psychiatry, and his own internal voice is his mother's voice, in Dominik's words, "something grandmotherly in his resentment, something feminine in his rage." In the film this isn't stated directly, but the scene where father and son drink beer while a "Welcome home, Mark" poster hangs in the living room does more psychological work than pages of dialogue.
The third reason is the genre itself of "film about a living person," which Dominik honestly calls "a strange thing." Read saw the film 24 hours before it went out into the world and didn't know what he would think of it. This is the rarest ethical experiment in mainstream cinema: not posthumous biography but a mirror shown to the prototype in real time. Read endured it — and that's possibly the greatest award the film received.
My personal opinion after digging: Chopper isn't a crime classic and not a portrait of a criminal. It's a film about how a person sees himself from the outside for the first time — and is horrified not by the violence seen but by the fact that it was "normal" for him. Thirty years of promoting his own legend shatter against 94 minutes of honest cinema, and a man who never apologized once in his entire life was for the first time in that life cornered by a mirror. He didn't go back to prison after becoming a writer — and humanly speaking, that's possibly the most heroic thing he did.
There's also a second layer that seems very contemporary to me: the 2000 film essentially invented a format that culture is only now getting used to — not hero and not villain, but a person who rationalizes his actions just as we all rationalize ours, just in an extreme manifestation. Dominik spoke about this directly: "people have an amazing ability to rationalize their own behavior, and with Chopper this ability is simply hypertrophied." In a world where every second person streams their own mythology in real time, a 25-year-old film about a criminal who recognized himself in cinema and was horrified is perhaps the most honest self-portrait of the era, made long before the age of selfies.