Australia Quotes

[ Rajiv Gandhi] was very reflective and rueful and regretful about the fact that his children’s education…He wanted them to get educated outside of India, but he said to me the only place that he found where they would be safe was in Russia, and he didn’t really want them to be educated there! So, I said, “Well, send them to Australia. I’ll look after them.” And my security bloke went absolutely bloody bananas, and I said, “We’ll look after them.” But, in the end, he didn’t send them.

I had a good personal relationship with Lee Kuan Yew and I used him, in the sense, that he… He made a statement in 1980, and he said in that statement that, “If Australia keeps going the way it is, it will finish up the poor, white trash of Asia.” And he was right, because we were just going backwards.

In fact, soon after that [South African sanctions], I was going on an official visit to the UK and Margaret Thatcher instructed every minister to clear the decks of any outstanding matters between us – Australia and the Brits. And she went out of her way to make sure that that was as successful a visit as it possibly could be.

I read the Phantom comics when I was in Australia shooting ‘Dead Calm” and when one of the crew told me that there were plans for a movie, I went for it. That was in 1987 and I told (producer) Graham Burke I was going to be the Phantom. We had a laugh about that recently because you usually get what you deserve, not what you desire, and that is especially true in Hollywood!