"What inspired you to produce animation?"
He had a young director who had never made a feature-length film before. They worked in a spartan conditions through a freezing European winter in an unheated warehouse with camera equipment that the Polish animators had stolen from Berlin after Hitler was defeated in 1945!
Several million for a short film of a breathless, terrible beauty.
If you have heard Sir Peter Ustinov narrate Peter and the Wolf you'll understand that even without images it's quite frightening.
And Dewhurt's version looks even bleaker, so no, the film has not even broken even - he remains undaunted though.
What keeps him going? What inspired him to foolishly go down this insane path?
The answer was Richard Williams, the animator who created the 1971 classic retelling of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
"It was all hand-drawn," Dewhurst cooed.
As a lad, he hunted Williams down and landed work as Williams' go-for.
So I come home, google it and watch A Christmas Carol. I remember watching it on TV as a child.
And, for reasons of my own, I jot notes: "Every person has the power to do great things".
Yes. "Fall seven times, get up eight" - says the Japanese proverb I tore out of a newspaper long ago that sits beneath a magnet on my fridge.
But the difference between the verb "to do" and the verb "to be" is as great as the difference between nouns wisdom and knowledge - I think.
To be great you have to do great things, don't you?
A lot of people aspire to "be great" - add a dash of reality TV to YouTube.
Unfortunately, you can't recoup a few million dollars on a short animation that way.
Perhaps construct an online persona, every time you Twitter you see your photo and every utterance published for the world to read? Nah. Won't work.
Meanwhile, in some back room, in some warehouse, in some laboratory, some eager beaver with a purpose decides to see something through, even if it takes 20 years.
In the past week, I've spoken to several really interesting Australians from various backgrounds.
On Thursday, I spoke to the 2006 Australian of the Year, Professor Ian Frazer, a Scottish immigrant, who talked about the fact that science, progress, is not an individual pursuit. Scientists build upon what others discover. Without Galileo there would be no Hubble. It took Frazer 20 years to get a vaccine for cervical cancer on to the world market. "Every person has the power to do great things". A seemingly insignificant discovery could lead to a huge leap in human knowledge.
On Wednesday, I spoke to a commercial lawyer, Heath Ducker, who's written a book (A Room At The Top) about his childhood. He was raised in abject poverty, one of 10 children, and he also believes in this idea that "Every person has the power to do great things". He hasn't read Charles Dickens. His is Pip's story from Great Expectation
s.
Centuries away from Charles Dickens who wrote "...to hear an insect on the leaf" - another phrase I jotted down from A Christmas Carol.
The founder the Trading Post, who kept self-help group Youth Insearch afloat as an anonymous donor, paid his uni fees.
Friday comes and I'm interviewing an Aboriginal activist, Sam Watson, who has written a play about one fierce woman, a poet who had such a way with words. She was Watson's aunty, blood relative. And even for him, her poems are particularly poignant because they marked the first time the Aboriginal story got a mention in Australian school curriculum. He'd only ever heard Australia's European history taught in school. He learned Aboriginal history around the campfire on Stradbroke Island at the feet of elders such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Kath Walker. In the 1960s and 1970s, a black woman in a white man's world dared to raise her voice and demand justice. Watson's put her words on stage and hopes to tour it around Queensland and maybe Australia to tell the stories and show that "Every person has the power to do great things".
So these scrawls I made while watching A Christmas Carol, I've just noticed them pinned on my calendar.
Ignorance and Want cowered beneath the billowing garments of the Ghost of Christmas Present.
These two things my father always sought to eliminate for his family. These two things Ducker works to eliminate for disadvantage youth.
Kath Walker fought to defeat ignorance and want. The Ghost of Christmas Present - the world grappling with cultural revolution, financial crisis and climate change.
My father died in April. And on his grave he had engraved, for reasons of his own..."Never compete, create".
Our opinions differed on many things but he'd chosen the words of a philosopher I admire, Bertrand Russell, who wrote Education and the Social Order.
Here was a man (my dad) "not educated in this country" - as my dad was fond of reminding us - who knew more about a lot of things than most people.
He knew because he was interested.
He would have liked to have had an education - but I don't think he believed enough in himself to do it.
"I'm a simple fitter and turner," he would say. If something broke, he could fix it. If the house needed painting, he'd do it.
I'd say the equivalent of a 1950s fitter and turner may be a 2009 web developer.
You probably don't know any fitter and turners - there aren't many around these days - but if something was just a millimetre out, if something was not square, if something was amiss ... have you ever tried to get a graphic designer past the fact that something on a draft isn't quite lined up yet? Just line it up and be done! There's no way around it.
My migrant father learned to read English by reading the newspapers. He learned to speak English by going to the picture theatre and watching what are now called "old movies". That's how important popular culture was back then. Today we think advertising culture. I wonder what would Dickens think? All of this is now found in one place on the world wide web.
As a family, we watched every BBC production that the ABC ever showed on a Sunday night.
"You'll never understand me because I'm from a different culture," my father'd say.
It was an argument I could never win because I just disagreed. If he could understand Dickens and Australians, I could understand Tolstoy and him!
Anyone know who Tolstoy was?
A small band of us followed his casket to his grave - my father's not Tolstoy's. There were no songs sung, no fabulous celebration of his life with celebrities galore.
His voice was not heard around the world. He quietly went about his business, he started out in poverty working several jobs to put food on the table, he worked six or seven days a week all his life, and he gave each of his children the best education that was of their choosing.
He died at home, as peacefully as could as a man who could barely breathe. And the last words he heard on Earth were Papa. He provided opportunity. He chose it as his reason for being and saw it through and through all the circumstances beyond his control. So we continue his story. "Every person has the power to do great things." The day before he died, aged 72, I came in to find him sitting in front of the computer opened at the stock market. He also loved to dabble.
