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between myself and my father.
    What are the things that you feel most guilty about now regarding your relationship with your father?
    Mainly, I just think he was dealing with a precocious child. Can’t have been easy, and especially when he found himself trying to do it all alone. I just feel . . . I’m angry about . . . there was a sort of father-son tension, that I probably just let go of in the last few weeks. Ali said to me that since his death, I haven’t been myself, and that I have been a lot more aggressive, and quicker to anger, and showing some of my father’s irascible side. The Italians take a long time to grieve. You see them wear black for a year. When my father died, I went on a short vacation, which turned into a euphemism for “drinks outing.” I don’t like to abuse alcohol—anything you abuse will abuse you back. But it’s fair to say I went to Bali for a drink. With my friend Simon [Carmody, screen-writer], we just headed off. I wanted to blow it out a bit, get the monkey off my back. But when I returned, funnily enough, it was still there. I think it’s been around with me a lot. And so just on Easter, I went up to the church in a little village where we live in France, and I just felt this was the moment that I had to let it go. An emotional volcano had gone off during the week before Easter, and I just wanted to find out. I wanted to deal with the source of whatever it was. In this little church, on Easter morning, I just got down on my knees, and I let go of whatever anger I had against my father. And I thanked God for him being my father, and for the gifts that I have been given through him. And I let go of that. I wept, and I felt rid of it.
    Once and for all?
    I think How to Dismantle . . . also allowed me to vent all that stuff. The atomic bomb, it’s obviously him in me. Yeah, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” is my swan song for him. I sang it at his funeral [recites, but does not sing] : Tough, you think you got the stuff / You’re telling me and everyone you’re hard enough/ Well, you don’t have to put up a fight/ You don’t have to always be right/Let me take some of the punches for you tonight/Listen to me now: I need to let you know you don’t have to go it alone/Sometimes you can’t make it on your own. It’s like a Phil Spector kind of a deal, very fifties. There’s a verse I left out of the recording: When I was a young boy in the suburbs of Cedarwood / I wanted to be great because good would not be good enough / Now that I’m older, I don’t see things any clearer/ We’re closer now but still a long way off/I need you to know you don’t have to go it alone/Sometimes you can’t make it on your own. And then it goes into this middle eight which is amazing. I scream and it goes: Sing, you’re the reason I sing/ You’re the reason the opera is in me/Still I need you to know a house don’t make a home/Don’t leave me here alone / Sometimes you can’t make it on your own. So it turns around at the end. It’s a sort of simple song, but it’s, I hope, the last song I will be writing about him.
    So what did your father really see in your work, do you think?
    I’ll tell you what I think. The spiritual journey was interesting to him. Because he wasn’t a believer; he didn’t believe in God towards the end. He was a Catholic, but he lost his faith along the way.
    Was there a specific event that led him to lose his faith?
    I don’t know what it was. I think the Church wore him down, all the scandals, and all that stuff. I would give him a Bible, or I would offer up, if hewas interested, any kind of insights I might have had to some of the Gospels, or the way they were written, or the context of a particular passage. But finally he didn’t buy into it. Yet he seemed to think this was the most important thing I