I had the very recent pleasure to sit down and chat with The Jungle Book director Jon Favreau.

Below is the transcription of our interview, which you can listen to at screendirector.org

Welcome to Screen Director Jon

My Pleasure.

How did you know you wanted to be a director?

Wow. I started off as an actor then I became a writer when I wrote Swingers but I had wanted to direct Swingers and I guess I had always wanted to eventually become a director, thinking that maybe if I worked my way up as an actor I could get into a position where I could get a small film made. But I thought it was going to take a whole career to get there. I thought I was going to be maybe an actor on Saturday Night Live, maybe a sitcom, maybe supporting roles in films. Then maybe once I built up a name, I would have enough leverage to try and get a script made or something like that. Have a career like Woody Allen.

But when I wrote Swingers I kind of leapfrogged through all those steps and found myself in a position where I was being offered things as a director and though none of those things really came together I did work as a rewriter and made a living that way. That was very helpful cause I learned to sit in development meetings and get notes, talk to other directors who were giving me guidance as a writer.

None of the stuff I wrote got made until Elf and I had been working about a year as a writer on that and part of the deal was if it got green lit then I would direct. I had done a small film called Made between Swingers, but Elf was the one that really, because of the commercial and critical success, it put me on the quote unquote lists that you have to be on to be considered a director.

And back then a lot more movies were getting made than are getting made now, so there was an opportunity to do that both in the independent world and smaller studio films.

That leads me to The Jungle Book, and I guess that given the gamut of your career, how have you found the process directing a largely animated film? And how does that differ from live action. I guess I’m particularly interested to know with the animated process, you can see the whole film in its entirety in an edit before you actually go on set and shoot something.

Do you want a really complicated version of this?

Yes please. Our audience is working directors

I figured it’s for directors, so here’s a little inside baseball.

We took the front end of the animation pipeline, and I’ve been watching the way they do it at Pixar, for many years and really impressed with the work that they’ve done and every time I’d hear interviews or talk with people like John Lasseter, who I’ve known for many years, they would always say the same thing. I would ask them technical questions and they’d always go back to story.

How do you do the visual effects? How do you render this and that?

Story. Story. Story.

That’s all they care about. And the way they explore story is through both writers and the story department.

In a live action film, what tends to happen is, they kinda hold back the green light. The way it was told to me is that before you have the green light, the studio has the gun to your head, but then once you’re in production you have the gun to the studios head. You’re off and running.

Whether that’s true or not, it is safe to say that a point of leverage shifts once the studio commits to making the movie. Up until the point they green light the film, they limit the amount of resources they invest in something so that if they decide to back out or make a different movie they’re not caught losing a lot of money.

Now if you look at the way Pixar does it, it’s a much different process. They put a lot of money into pre-production. They bring on a story department to do pencil sketches, storyboards, gag ideas. They bring on writers and production designers. They start designing environments. You could walk into rooms and between the storyboards, the illustrations and the colour studies, you really get a sense of what this movie’s going to be.

So they do pre-production as though they’re gonna make every movie.

That’s a much more expensive process and it takes more people and requires more of a commitment. But when they do finally go forward with a movie, they have a story that’s been stress tested. It has a lot more care and understanding and a lot more vision has gone into it as opposed to most live action movies that get green lit.

So when you’re working with a company like Marvel you have a release date that you’re rushing towards. You have a writer you’re working with. A director. Maybe there’s some illustrations being done but there’s a sense that you’ll discover a certain amount of it. You try to get a script as good as you can, but you allow for the fact that you’re probably going to learn something through the process. You’re gonna make discoveries in production and when you edit the movie, you’ll put some temporary visual effects in and put it in front of an audience to bounce it off a crowd and see if they like it. If there are parts that aren’t working out, you might shoot some additional days.

It’s this organic process that progresses all the way up to release.

You don’t have that luxury with an animated film. With an animated film, and this is dating all the way back to Walt Disney’s days, they would sweatbox showreels and put together pencils and really scrutinise this thing before you ever went to ink and paint, because even though it’s low tech compared to what we do today, was still a very expensive technical process. So if a scene ended up on the cutting room floor after it was inked and painted... they still talk about Snow White and there’s a scene where they’re scrubbing up and you can see the outtakes, but it was a big deal that there was one whole sequence that was removed whereas in a live action film, sequences disappear constantly. Sometimes whole reels disappear for the purposes of making a film more playable. But that’s all resources that end up on the cutting room floor that could have been invested in the film and when you dealing with a studio like Pixar or Disney Animation, you’re going to see a much more precise version of planning so that you don’t end up going through the expensive process of rendering these shots if they won’t end up in the film.

And so, I think that the reason the batting average oil animated films is so good versus live action is because so much care is put into the front end. So that’s part of what I presented as my vision for this thing as I approached the people from Disney who were interested in making this and hiring me.

They agreed.

Fortunately Disney’s a company that’e enjoyed a lot of success through animation, both in Pixar and Disney Animation, so they understood this workflow and they committed those resources before we were green lit. So I had a head of story and a story department, who were developing scripts and character tests. Animation tests would see how the talking would work and how photo real we could get things. We had engaged MPC (The Moving Picture Company) and Weta to be our partners and in helping with the technique I brought on Rob Legato who had built out the front end. And Joyce Cox who had worked on Avatar so we had an understanding of motion capture. Andy Jones, who was one of the lead animators on Avatar was our lead animator. I had a lot of people who had a lot of experience in motion capture and animation and so the long answer for one short question is that we planned it as though it was an animated film and then when you would normally go to layout and start laying in cameras and moving the characters, that’s when we went to motion capture. We treated this as though we were doing film like Avatar.

With Neel Sethi who is our Mowgli, we did a motion capture with a scratch track and pencils. When we went to the next phase we did a full motion capture version of the movie. On sets, with the motion capture suits we laid cameras in, we worked with Bill Pope and Rob Legato and our full crew and we came up with a cut of the movie.

That cut of the movie looked like a video game version of the film with all the voices and camera angles.

Once we signed off on that cut, that’s when we took a page out of the book of Gravity. Alfonso had planned all those shots and when he filmed his leads in there, it was almost like an element shoot. You had already committed to camera, lenses and lighting. By having all that information and having visual effects involved from pre-production through to the set, and having our editor cut each shot in, and having everybody sign off, look each other in the eye and give the thumbs up we knew that these elements we were shooting were going to work in a bullet proof way when it came to the photorealism.

Once we put that together and I looked at all the performances and did another pass at editing. Then of course you could do another pass at the animation and adjust what some characters were saying if something wasn’t working quite right. So you’d try to show it to crowds, it’s tough cause it’s in such rough form. Sometimes scenes are just in pencil.

You’d use your intuition and experience to make some final adjustments then you’d turn sequences over and the magicians would go to work. The visual effects people would do their thing.

Now you’re an animation director!

Andrew Stanton gave me some really valuable advice - we had gone up to Pixar to talk to the brains trust and show them cuts of the film, and they were very helpful and cooperative - and the one piece of advice he gave me, from working live action on John Carter, was have direct interaction with your animators.

Often times a director would deal with the visual effects supervisor and animation will fall under that umbrella. But in the case of this movie, so much performance is indicated by the animators that I would have sessions just with the animators everyday if I could and several times a week with Andy Jones, the supervisor there and I would deal directly with them. I’d often fly out to London to meet with MPC. As an actor I could give very specific notes and would sometimes act it out on videotape, where I’d lip-sync to the performances and we’d use the animation based on cameras we had on the actors whilst they were recording their voices, very often together.

I wanted to get their performance to come out in a natural way. Sometimes we’d find clips from old movies that these actors were in and I’d say look at that expression! “That’s the Bill Murray moment that I want there. Or see Chris Walken was in this scene, let’s see if we could get that type of eye contact going!”

So was there something particular about translating those performances to the film that was a particular hurdle but that you found some way around?

There were certain discoveries we made along the way. We went way out of our way to get either motion capture or what ILM calls Eye-Mo-Cap where you set up several cameras and create motion capture data from video images by triangulating multiple cameras.

So we would take the performances that they actually gave us with their facial expressions. For certain characters it was more important than others. For King Louie who’s a Gigantopithecus primate, it’s more important than a snake, than Kaa for Scarlett. But we always wanted the performance to dictate the performance of the animal, but we tried to transpose that through the physical language the animal would use.

A snake uses the way their body moves, whereas one of the wolves used their eyes a lot - very anthropomorphic eye movement.

With the cats like Shere Khan or Bagheera it’s more their body language. Big cats don’t really use their eyebrows in the same way humans do. We really didn’t want to overlap with the uncanny valley when it came to the expressions of the animals. But once we got a language for them we would take the performances the actors gave us and we’d layer them directly on, like King Louie, or the animators would interpret them to the language of that particular species.

Finally, what did you learn from this film that you’re going to take forward into the next project?

I was speaking to Edgar Wright when I was making this film and he’s a wonderful friend and fantastic filmmaker and he remarked that when filmmakers go through working in animation or something approximating animation it forces them to use a different set of tools and you see that the movies they do after they’ve dealt with animation show a different style of filmmaking that’s generally a bit more decisive than previously.

For example with myself, I encourage a lot of freedom and improvisation, a lot of camera angles and I tend to discover things on the set and even moreso in the editing room that shape it. With animation it’s very hard to do that. You have to plan ahead of time. You can allow for certain spontaneous moments, but for the most part every blade of grass in this film is something set in by an artist that I’ve approved. Every performance, every shot. It’s very mannered and I try very hard to give it a freedom, but it forced me out of my comfort zone of allowing things to be discovered through collaboration on the set, where happy accidents happen, but now I actually had to plan things in a way that looked like they were happy accidents.

As Edgar pointed out, when directors come out of that you see a different version of that director.

The one he pointed out to me most recently is George Miller.

You look at Mad Max, Road Warrior and even Thunderdome which are very exciting, energetic and entertaining films. But then he goes off and does Babe and Happy Feet and here he comes out the other end and Fury Road is, I would say the finest piece of cinema he’s done and certainly the best in the Mad Max series.

So that level of care and planning and storyboarding and when I was talking to him about he did it, he created it as a visual story moreso than a script. There was a script, but he’d designed reams and reams of storyboards. Each moment was planned out and thought through which just adds to the energy of that movie but it also makes you feel like you’re sitting and observing a master director doing this tremendous piece of cinema. The fact that it came very close to winning Best Picture means it was very well embraced. I was around for awards season, and involved with the DGA, I got to introduce him and the film when it was nominated, but now that the smoke has cleared, and other films may have won the awards, there certainly was a rousing ovation and sense of support and love of this guy.

The fact that a genre movie like Fury Road fought its way all the way through and won a slew of awards, just not the top one, were well deserved. Even the editing is a testament to how refined his filmmaking had become working through this medium.

Fantastic. Thank you very much for your time and we look forward to seeing your Fury Road in the very near future

Me too!

Bryan Unger with Director Ang Lee. Photo credit Directors Guild of America

G. Bryan Unger is the Associate National Executive Director of the Directors Guild of America. In our conversation we discussed the relationship between the DGA and ADG, how it’s changed since the ADG’s unionisation and the challenges facing directors guilds now and in the future.

How do you see the relationship between the ADG and DGA? Has it changed over time?

The ADG formed as a fraternal organisation (the Australian Screen Directors Association) early on.  They weren’t certified as a union, but they got a lot of Australian Directors together, going back to the first wave of Australian films – the Peter Weir, Philip Noyce, Fred Schepsi and Gillian Armstrong group. They were making films in Australia, which were then getting noticed in the U.S., and a lot of those directors were coming over to work for American studios, and eventually joining the DGA.

The relationship between the DGA and the ADG began when the ADG started taking on a more formal structure in the 1990s (again, as ASDA at that time).  There were some meetings with the English-speaking directors organisations:  Directors Guild of Canada, DGA, the former Directors Guild of Great Britain and ASDA – we have been in communication and exchanging ideas for some time.  The recent activity to become a union has sparked a renewed interest and opportunity to talk to people again and to help the ADG to facilitate its union’s formation.

Having now unionised do you think that’s going to help the current generation of Australian Directors coming to America and vice versa? Or is it more about guidance and the working relationships with producers, studios and production companies?

We’ve always had a great relationship with Australians – there are a number of people working here now who have fostered that. I don’t know that it affects the individual so much coming from here to there, though it does help.  For instance, with the Directors Guild of Canada, we have a more formalised structure because there is a sister organisation to talk to if there are any issues.  I do think it changes the way we deal with productions from the U.S. going to Australia. 

There are really three things going on in Australia: One is local production for Australian television and films. Secondly, there is international production – a great example is the recent announcement of Disney and Fox producing films that content-wise are not inherently Australian, they just happen to be filming in Australia. This is an area where we have a lot of experience dealing with conglomerates and at those budget levels. I think we can help add value to the ADG’s relationship there. 

Third is the re-use issue, which always comes up.  For example, the re-runs of Friends that end up on Australian TV and of course the Australian Directors always say that the local producer can’t produce original content cheaper than they can buy the re-run of Friends. Our directors share in some revenue of the sale of U.S. content to other markets, just like we hope Australian directors will one day share in the revenue streams of the projects they work on. On the other side of the coin, we want to encourage and promote Australian production. There’s a bigger international market that’s opening up because of online platforms like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. These companies are looking to acquire content and people are interested to see it. Top of the Lake was not Australian – but from New Zealand – and is an example of something that really found its audience through online platforms.

“It’s important to recognise and I believe the ADG recognises this too, that if you produce good content, people will watch.”

It’s interesting considering online, in terms of the Australian quota systems for broadcasters - yet the online players aren’t beholden to the same system. How do you see that as a challenge - particularly for Australian directors?

Each country has to look at where they are and what they want to promote in terms of their broadcasting. In some countries, it was found that without some form of government intervention, re-use and sports dominate.

In Australia, people are sports fanatics and watch of all kinds of sports. If you don’t have some protected space for dramas, you might not ever get them on television.

I look at much of the US programming in Australia as akin to dumping of agricultural produce - because we lack the language barrier that operates as a certain filter in many other markets - sure there’s the flip where our talent can come and work here with greater ease - but it does bear some focus on not the free speech issue, but rather the transformation of the economic models

It’s important to recognise and I believe the ADG recognises this too, that if you produce good content, people will watch.

When all they have are re-runs of Friends, we find that the audience will watch re-runs of Friends.  But if they ever have a choice – and this is as true in Canada as well as Australia – local productions are almost always more popular in terms of ratings, because people want to see their own culture.

But it has to be well made.

And the caveat is that the broadcaster has to put up the money, hire the people, and develop the scripts, as well as pay directors who know what they’re doing to make it good. The director plays a critical role in making good content that people will watch.

I’m curious in terms of craft - we have Thomas Schlamme coming to Australia to talk about his craft and hopefully be the first of many directors who visit - is there something that we can do to face some of these challenges? And the overall sharing of knowledge?

That is really the goal of this first step that we’re taking.  There are two levels, the first of which is that there is a lot to share in terms of the craft. Tommy is a great example of someone who has directed a lot, and at a very high level. His experiences will be helpful to other directors around the world, but particularly Australia. We have always been interested in the cultural exchange. It’s evolved naturally with people from Australia being involved with the DGA, such as Philip Noyce, who has been on our creative rights committee for many years.

Despite all the evolution in technology, at its core the process of a director taking a script, breaking it down, visualising it, guiding the actors through and covering it to make it visual - remains largely the same. 

The tools around it have changed significantly; editing, lighting, cameras. But the core hasn’t really changed.  Directors have found new and exciting ways to work with actors to elicit better performances and if you look back at older shows, there’s a much more naturalistic style now.

On that level, we’ve always been interested in sharing the craft. 

In terms of the business, there is an internationalisation of the broadcasting business. Film preceded this.  Our experience in international productions can be helpful and some of it translates to local production – but then there are things like the economics of Australian television, which are different.

The goal is really to be in a position to leverage our experience to offer assistance both on the business side and on the craft side. 

“A union helps to protect the director not just economically but by creating a framework within which they can do better artistic work.”

What else do you see as advantages of union recognition?

It’s very important that the ADG is being recognised as a union, and that they are being allowed to represent directors as artists. Our experience, which goes back almost 80 years, shows that artists in the entertainment industry need representation. This is a complex business in which large corporations with a lot of money are in in the position to potentially exploit the talents of an individual. Without some collective protection, and this is true for actors, writers and directors – the individual artist can have a very hard time surviving in that environment.  In the freelance environment, a director might be hired for an episode, but if the producer doesn’t happen to like her or him, they just don’t hire them again. They don’t even have to provide a reason, it’s just “see you later.” So it’s very difficult in that environment – and we see it in other parts of the world where there isn’t union representation for the director to say “Hey wait a minute, you paid me $3000 last week and now you want to pay me $2500, well I’m not going to accept that,” and instead the producer can just say “I’ll just get the next guy or woman to do it.”  We understand that collectively bargained protections, including minimum rates, terms and conditions are paramount.  

It is also important for the protection of directors as artists.  A union helps to protect the director not just economically but by creating a framework within which they can do better artistic work. They can be more creatively bold when they’re not worried about having their payments cut.

It’s an exciting time for the ADG to be moving into this representation area, which is long overdue.

What do you see as some of the most immediate challenges going forward? It almost feels like in Australia it’s evolved in a business model more akin to the Silicon Valley model, in that it is individuals against corporations. Going forward from Australian directors’ slightly weaker position do you think that the entrenched culture will face different hurdles? Is there some catching up to do for the ADG to be at parity with the DGA in terms of weight? And are there aspects that because we have had 80 years without a union, that will be harder to reverse?

The ADG has some catching up to do, but they’re starting now and they have taken a big step forward. Australia does have unions in the entertainment industry, MEAA is very powerful, so it is not like the ADG is starting from scratch.

The DGA in the United States is the product of eighty years of work, of coming from a different time when there were studios and the directors were their employees. As the entertainment industry workforce has moved towards the freelance model where the individual moves around from employer to employer, some of the social protections they might have had as an employee of a single employer were lost. 

What the Directors Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild of America, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and the Teamsters do in the U.S. is fill in that gap. They become a social safety net by negotiating for and maintaining health and pension plans, and providing many other protections and services to their members.

The unions and guilds actually serve a function for the producer too. In our case, we do a lot of things like education, where we take on a lot of expenses to train our members, which the employers really benefit from. The ADG is the same. We’re bringing Tommy, who will talk with directors and maybe a couple will hear something that will make them better. Who’s going to benefit from that? The Australian broadcaster is going to benefit, having spent nothing for it.  The guilds all work on professional development which is in service to their members and the industry. 

There is a broader context that you have to look at, which really goes to the protection of the artist. Think about Australian culture and the filmmakers I mentioned, and their impact on the perception of Australia domestically as well as abroad. Those movies were exported and people around the world saw the Australian experience through the eyes of the filmmaker. That filmmaker – the director – created an experience for them and that’s really powerful. They certainly deserve to be fairly compensated and credited for their efforts.

Do you have any thoughts on the changing models of distribution for films in Australia, given the disparity in scale between most Hollywood films marketing budgets? Especially given the rarity of studio backing in Australian films?

Advertising and promotion, at least in terms of the budgets available to them, have really hurt independent films in the U.S. and it is a similar case for the Australian film. 

There are influencers in the media. There are people who, like Pauline Kael, could write a review about somebody and make or break them. Literally. One review could make or break a filmmaker. 

That still exists today in a certain way, through social media. One of the things that we have to do, to support independent film is to help our people find those influencers and reach out to them to steer people in their direction.

A lot of independent filmmakers are using social media. As the world has changed, it has become the go-to means to promote film. They start pushing out (tweeting) promotion stills and little leaks about something that happened on the set, so that you get social media talking about the film, because it’s free… well maybe it won’t be forever, but right now it’s free!

In terms of promoting films, directors have to think in a different way. Then there’s the reality of deciding whether you want your project to be seen in the theatre, or go with the home experience. 

Again it’s that issue of creating the experience that’s going to draw people in. We also have to support the infrastructure. You can make the greatest film in the world, but if there are no theatres to show it in, then it’s probably going to be only on television, because that’s the only outlet. You also have to look at the theatre owners in Australia and decide if it’s viable for them. 

In Los Angeles we have a pretty good theatre-going audience and it’s not just because the business is here, people in L.A. like going to the movies. We also have some of the best theatres in the world. In fact we happen to be sitting on top of one of them. But when you go outside the major cities, it becomes a little harder for people to drive to the local cinema – and then if the experience isn’t really good, if the projection isn’t really high quality, or it’s out of focus a little bit or the sound’s a little off, then people start to question why they paid all this money for the experience. 

Australia is definitely one of the highest saturation markets though, with several billion in box office each year. Especially with 2015 being the biggest box office year ever, with Mad Max and The Water Diviner carrying over and other films really helping to boost the numbers. That said, I can already see the headlines for 2016 which will promote doom and gloom, simply because it won’t be as big as this outlier year.

Definitely. For English language audio-visual products it’s a very big market.

How is that looked at from a guild’s perspective? Is there any way we can approach theatre owners and try to collaborate on achieving a better result?

With the ADG, you have a collective voice where you can go and meet with the theatre owners and voice concerns collaboratively. Should we go to the government together? How can we help each other? It opens up strategic partnerships and alliances, and where you have the strength of the body of directors. The opportunity the ADG has is to become the voice of filmmakers in a much more powerful way than it has been in the past.

“There are great stories of the founding of the DGA – which was established not by people who were struggling for work, but by people who had become very successful and said “We need to do this because of the people coming behind us.””

We have quite a lot of directors in Australia who have grown up in an everyone-for-themselves kind of framework. How should directors who have grown up in that environment see the value in coming together?

It’s not just Australians in the everyone-for themselves-situation.  There are great stories of the founding of the DGA – which was established not by people who were struggling for work, but by people who had become very successful and said “We need to do this because of the people coming behind us.” They recognised that without a guild, they would just get cut to ribbons by themselves.

When directors get together and start talking about the issues, they find the commonality of the things that they encounter to be very compelling.

It’s important in today’s society to remember that artists need to be able to make a living to continue to be artists. That’s why coming together gives a little bit more power, along with professionals who can advise the organisation. The pooling of the collective wisdom is important. In the U.S. for instance, residuals are a good example. By pooling resources and using economies of scale, the DGA is able to track, collect and distribute money to the directors much more efficiently than they could on their own. 

Sullivan Stapleton and Alex Russell in Cut Snake

How did you get to where you are today, where two television series Devil’s Playground and The Codeare currently airing, and your feature Cut Snake premiering at TIFF?

It seems like a crazy combination this particular year. Some of those projects, Cut Snake for instance has taken seven or eight years and Devil’s Playground was much faster than that, it was about three years, The Code about four years but they all seemed to go to the same board meeting and be filming at the same time, so it was incredibly exciting to have that. For friends it seems like everywhere you look it’s me right now but next year’s gonna be a different case. But I’ve been writing for about ten years. I had other careers before that and sort of got an office job on a TV show and just really found that I was quite good at doing it. With those TV shows the turnover of staff is high and I had that great experience of someone pulling out. That was a show called Breakers, where someone pulled out and I was given the chance to write and discovering that’s what I was good at. 

In terms of starting out, how do you think the highly serialised TV format influenced your style of writing? Has it been a process thing where you’ve been able to turn things around quickly?

I think that process stuff is really important. You know what deadlines are about, you know how to manage your own time. Within that though, there are still many of my colleagues who leave things to the last minute and then doing an amazing all nighters and nail it. I’m not like that. I have to treat it like a job, which sounds pretty dull, but you get used to it. Also there’s a particular visual language that no one teaches you, even at university you don’t learn that, television as compared to film. The great thing about working on those shows was you got to see what you write shot that week and then take pleasure when you get it right, but mostly learn from it. I really liked it and don’t have any judgement on it. It’s a certain kind of thing but you write your bum off for two or three years when you’re young and it was a terrific experience for me. All of my peers from those days are now are working on other programs as well.

So did that have an impact on the sort of stories you tell? I’ve heard it referred to that drama is about progressing the story, whereas you’re successful in a soap if you can spin the wheels

Gregg Haddrick from Screentime was my first boss and he said “Forget about ends, we’re all about beginnings and middles; beginnings, middles” you have to keep going back to the beginning and middle. So I think that if you’re really curious about writing, and you have ambition, then you know there are certain kinds of stories you won’t be able to tell within that half hour format. But as far as work habits and learning what it takes to write something to be filmed it’s really good and one of the only paths you can take as a writer if you’re not a writer/director and making shorts. 

In terms of approaching scenes and how characters are getting in and out of them, do you have any go-to habits? With Cut Snake there’s a real effort to bring an energy to it as people enter and exit scenes. Is there a workflow you approach with that in mind?

When I wrote my first episode of Love My Way I remember John Edwards saying “You always start scenes the same way”. Everything was in a hurry, and you had to catch up, but John’s point was if every scene is like that then there is no pace, there is no hurry. You have to vary the kinds of scenes you write. I suppose what I’m much better at now is trying to think the story through emotionally with the character. Finding the times where the character will need to be still and times when the character needs to be in the middle of an argument. There’s always those great notes of “coming in late and leaving early”, but I also think there are too many rules. Try it out and you’ll know whether it works or not, but overall you have to vary your scenes Some scenes have lots of people in them, some have few. You’re trying to give a texture to the reader’s experience I think. You’re writing for producers to read and directors to get excited about. It’s not a film yet.

In recent years, we’ve seen you move into producing as well, has that been a tactic to keep more control on the work or to get a better understanding of the process overall? Or is something else behind that?

It’s probably a couple of answers. If there is a downside to working on serial TV back when I did, and I think television’s changed a bit since then, it was that the different aspects of filmmaking were quite separated, even to the extent that you were in a different building. The writers building was in one place and they would film in another part. So when you were a writer who was meant to be on set, you’d get a call and you’d have to physically go quite a way to get to set, which meant there was a suspicion between the different departments. There was a chip on your shoulder from the writers, that the actors were going to stuff things up or the directors were going to take your script from you. That’s crazy! We’re all making the same thing, but there was a tradition in Australia as well where producers, for whatever reason, would exclude writers from the final parts of the process. There are still shows, I won’t name them, where you send a script away and they send a message and tell you that your episode is on this Friday, which would be the first time you’ve seen the episode. You don’t have that in the United States, where writers are on staff, and writers have producing responsibilities because the writer is viewed as someone who can contribute. On Devil’s Playground Matchbox, for the first time, engaged me as what they call a showrunner, which is slightly different from what a showrunner does in the states. I wasn’t the head banana, but I was involved in the whole process. I was on set and involved in all the edits and post. It was incredibly useful and I’ll find it hard to go back to the other way again. Not because I was a control freak, but just when you are emotionally and artistically invested in a project, you are a very good person for people to consult regarding what was intended and certain decisions that needed to be made. Unless you’re someone like Matchbox who would pay to keep a writer on when not writing, you finish your script and that’s that. You go onto another project, which is quite frustrating.

Devil's Playground

Do you think that’s becoming the norm? With their success from The Slap adopting the showrunner model, along with shorter run series. Do you think other companies will adopt Matchbox’s model?

It’s still a new concept in Australia so some people are more or less interested. Everyone pays lip service to the idea but it is about giving a writer a voice and letting them in the room and for many people the writer hasn’t been in the room. I’ve just been to Toronto, and it was so great that they invited me to be there because writers aren’t present by and large, unless you’re a writer/director, and you realise that the press and especially the audience have lots of questions about the story and intentions behind the story. A director will know those, but a writer can provide an interesting angle. I found a lot of questions were coming to me and in most cases the way the film industry works, the writer’s not really present. Now it’s becoming a question of the writers being more assertive about asking to be part of it, or maybe it’s just a recognition that we have something to contribute and we’re not sitting there thinking “you stuffed up my story”.

It feels like it’s along the lines of give a director 120 blank pages and tell them to film this, it’s pretty hard to do.

You’re a writer/director so I can really understand, not being a director, I was really suspicious of writer/directors until I realised, if I did have the chops to make it, I would want to make it too. A director really transforms it into their film.

Blake Ayshford photo by Fahim Ahad

That brings me onto the directing process and I’m more familiar with your recent work. With Cut Snake being your first theatrical feature, yet having also written Rachel Ward’s telemovie An Accidental Soldier, how did those projects differ for their formats?

In those cases, it was partly a pragmatic decision. I might sound silly, but coming from a TV background, I love having an audience see what we make, and so we knew that we’d have a million people see the telemovie, but we’d be lucky if a million people see a feature film. It was an important story at a time when politically, there were a lot of people talking about the first world war, and we wanted to be part of that conversation. It seemed that the producers could make the money work in a way that a feature wouldn’t have. I didn’t really rewrite it, except for the ABC, they have a commissioning process, where they offer notes, so I was getting their feedback rather than from a distributor or Screen Australia. But as far as Rachel’s shooting style and getting Germain McMicking to film, we didn't really change anything that way from film to TV. It was also quite an intimate story that I felt could work on a television screen.

In exploring a bit more of that ABC angle, what were their notes, how were they approaching story and trying to guide it?

Because it’s about a war deserter, there was initially some worry that the ABC was not just a broadcaster, but it lends its aura to any work. They made us aware that “you do know people will think this is the ABCs position on the war” and so, I thought it was very brave of them. In hindsight, some people were interested in that element, and a lot wrote supportively towards us but they were excited about it. It was a crazy experience, I wrote a script on spec, the producers buy it and the ABC says yes all within a few months. And WA is keen to make something and this is what they want. So from the first meeting through to filming was less than 12 months. It was incredible. I mean that because TV shows often take longer than that and feature films sometimes take many years. I’ve worked with Rachel Ward several times, and recently I’ve worked with a lot of writer/directors and all three are incredibly sensitive to keeping the writer engaged, but all three are pretty rigorous in ensuring the script is what they want to film and answers all the questions they have. So Rachel was a draw as well. She’s made a feature and a few shorts, but she was still approaching this as a learning thing for her.

Moving onto Cut Snake then, for Tony Ayres, coming off The Slap this was a big project for him. How did he reach the conclusion that this was what he wanted to direct?

I knew Tony from his first film Walking on Water and Cut Snake won an unproduced screenplay competition and Tony was the judge, so we went down to the Adelaide Film Festival and had a rehearsed reading which he directed, and at that stage he expressed an interest in it but we couldn’t make it work then. I was incredibly new to the industry and didn’t know what it was all about, but I gave the script to him a year or two later. It was quite different to what it is now, it had different time periods, I was trying to do a few things at once, but he saw through to what he believed was the most interesting, original part of the story, and said “if you can write that, that’s what I want to make”. I’ve been working with him for eight years or so and we’ve become friends through it and I respond to his instincts. By the end of filming, you didn’t know what he’d suggested or what I’d suggested, it’d all mixed together.

Regarding actors, with someone like Sullivan Stapleton who’s at the top of his game and becoming a massive star...

Yeah, I can’t wait for you to see the film, his performance is amazing.

And even Alex Russell and Jess De Gouw, I’m fascinated about your relationships with them. Do you become, because of your relationship with Tony, both pillars of support for the actors? Does that continue on set?

Not really. I wasn’t on set very much. I was busy with Devil’s Playground when they were filming, which was shooting in Melbourne whilst I was in Sydney. So I met with them all and they were all great. I know writers are often really worried if performers change lines, I can live with that. An actor once called a line ‘wooden’ and I was quite upset, but he meant “I wooden say it like that” and he put it in his words and that was fine. Tony worked with the actors himself. He cast Alex, but he was too young, but by the time they got the film up two years later, he was perfect fro the role. Sullivan said we didn’t really need to change anything because it was all there. I think Alex has a tough role because he’s playing someone who’s got two things he wants to happen at the same time. I don't know if you would agree but the other characters are much clearer in their desires. 

He has a massive transformation in the film, becoming the alpha male, which is interesting and I’m keen to see how it plays in the film. Especially since Alex and Sullivan are so physically different, that it must be quite a shift for the film.

What interested Tony I think was that he himself doesn’t have a background in crime movies or anything like that, his other films are focused on family dramas. He told me before filming that “You know the most aggressive thing I’ve directed was someone slapping someone” but I think that without giving it away, there’s a different kind of love story in the middle of this, and that’s what interested him and I in writing about it. Why hasn’t someone written this story before? Sullivan really breaks your heart in it which is interesting because he’s so violent and rageful.

Lucy Lawless as Alex Wisham in The Code

I’m curious in terms of that story two, there must be something in the water, where we’ve seen a lot of Australian dual protagonist crime films, such as Son of a Gun and The Rover. That they’re elemental films, which perhaps is a budgetary consideration, in trying to keep them contained, or do you think it’s something more thematically resonant throughout our culture?

I don’t know. The films that influenced me when I was writing this and I started a long time ago; I tried to write it as a novel; were things like Chopper and this Aussie two-part crime series called Blue Murder where the most engaging and interesting emotional relationships are between two guys. It’s not a romantic relationship but it almost is, because they offer the missing part to the protagonist. So I thought why does Australia tell that story so often. I don’t know if it’s necessarily budgetary, but when you see the film a lot of the supporting characters are kind of lost in the final edit it seems that the three way is the most interesting thing and we do stay with them much more. I think Tony and his editor Andy Canny, I think just every time they were on screen you wanted to be there and every time we went away it lost something; sometimes in scripts you put an architecture in of stuff to keep people interested and then realise you don’t need the stuff. If you’ve got people interested in the central relationships you don’t need the mafia poking in the window trying to get them for example. There’s a story about American Beauty where the shooting script was all set in a courtroom, so it’s the trial of the guy who does the shooting. They felt like we need that drama and Sam Mendes made the decision to just cut it all out and have the story. Obviously the right decision to make, but in the case of Cut Snake we had some more genre elements that we wanted in there because maybe I was concerned about the power of the central relationship, but it’s what makes the film interesting.

On the set of An Accidental Soldier

What was your involvement in the editing process? Were you editing Devil’s Playground and Cut Snake in similar locations?

I was all through the editing of Devil’s Playground which was amazing just to see the way how the different aspects of filmmaking were. So I had written ten or twenty hours of film and TV and never had been in an edit suite before. To realise, I was working with Martin Connor who was the editor of The Railway Man, just how an editor writes the film again and how they create meaning within the cut. It was amazing. That’s why I thought it was good for me to be in there because sometimes they’d make a decision to drop a line for performance and then you’d have to say “If we drop that, we’re gonna have to add some ADR in another scene, because that’s important”. Just to have that, to be there, given I’d read the script so many times was empowering. I didn’t get to see the editing on Cut Snake because it was done in Melbourne, so I saw a rough cut and gave notes on that. In a couple cases it was like they’d been in the edit room for so long that they didn’t see what I had seen. I have had the realisation that writing for TV is much more satisfying for writers than film. I think film really is a director’s medium. So I trusted Tony, he knew the script I wanted, I knew he was going to make his movie and I could help, but it would cease to be mine by that stage.

In exploring that particular delineation in your experience. If film is more a directors’ medium, and you’re working with directors who have completed features; and personally I’m of the perspective that I’m less concerned these days where the line between film and TV is so long as it’s compelling and good; but between Tony Krawitz and Rachel Ward, what was your relationship like between yourself as a writer and the directors?

I think it’s a question of the writer being able to play with the script for a lot longer in television. Directors are brought on later in the process. You get to write more, and tell a story over six hours, there’s a lot more words and a lot more writing and it feels like you can take smaller steps. There are some stories that are only ever going to work as film, but I’m starting to feel that for me anyway, the stories I want to tell, I want to take more time with and I want to explore different avenues. That’s what you do in a feature, you’re constantly pruning it back to the 90 or 100 minute experience, whereas in TV, the things I’m writing at the moment they’re 4-6 hours, that’s a lot of time to go off on tangents. So Rachel Ward was the set up director on Devil’s and Tony Krawitz came in to do the second half and they were extraordinary. Quite different people. Tony loves an argument, but he leaves the argument when it’s over, he’s not as sulky as me. He wants to get into it. Also Rachel’s not Catholic and Tony’s Jewish, I’m Catholic and in the show there was a lot of us catching up about details. Brothers and Priests aren’t the same thing for example. Just some really basic things, such as church hierarchy, what communion and confirmation is all about. For them you could tell it was like learning another language. Tony really jumped into it. They sort of come in at a later stage I suppose. With Cut Snake Tony Ayres was there pretty much from the second or third draft, so it became his story pretty soon. In the case of Devil’s Tony Krawitz is there three or four weeks before we shoot. So it becomes his version of our scripts. It’s much more collaborative I suppose, we write a version of the story and they film a version. 

I’m curious on a side note, who won most of those arguments? Given your Catholic upbringing, did you have to be the guiding force in the detail oriented stuff? Was that something that was important to the overall show?

With the details, you know you’re making it for a broad audience, but one of the other producers is Penny Chapman who made Brides of Christ and she’s Catholic, along with Brian Walsh the commissioner at Foxtel. So with that stuff you just have to get it right. I would hate for someone even with a passing following of Catholicism to be distracted by that. Tony wanted to get into conversations about God and what these mens’ relationship to faith is, obviously because he’s working out how he’s going to be talking to the actors and that was a real treat, being on set and able to see within a couple of weeks how he and Rachel talk to actors. Not to be frightened of actors and directors input because they’re all trying to solve the same problems.

An Accidental Soldier

An Accidental Soldier

I’d like to talk a little about the writers’ room. It’s not quite the same here as it is elsewhere, particularly in the states because we hear more about it but how did that work on a show like The Code and how were you breaking story with the team? Dividing story and figuring out who’s gonna do what?

When I did Love My Way which was ten years ago that was the first show that used what they called the US model, which was quite exciting at the time because before then, you’d have a script department, which was frequently how people started, there’d be a head writer, script editors and some assistants. You’d make up the story of the week and then get a writer in, pitch the story to them and they’d go off and write it. That doesn’t happen in the states and it’s peculiar to Australia. What Love My Way did was all of the writers werethe script department. We met at Jaclyn Perces’s house and there was a whiteboard and we just came up with stories and then there was this sort of unseemly pause of like, “Who wants what?”. Of course there’s gonna be kick arse ones and there’s gonna be, you know, not as promising episodes. I was the total junior so I had to go, “No, you choose Tony McNamara” so we divvied it up, then we went away and all wrote scene breakdowns. In that case, there were three or four going on at the same time, so we’d read each others. Continuity wise I have had them end, here, you need to adjust that sort of thing, so there’s a bit of fluidity there. We’d go off and write our first drafts and that’s pretty much how every show is done now. So with The Code, Shelley’s was so complicated cause it was this political show and ends nowhere near you think. It’s quite a complicated conspiracy that unfolds. So we did the first four and it’s really a question of on the first day, you really broad stroke it, and then ask “where do we want to get to with this?”. Generally you’ll have a day or two on each episode, banging out points which will end up as a scene breakdown. You’ll go backwards and forwards with stories, which is what we did on Devils’ Playground, we realised that we pulled one whole story from an episode and put it in an earlier one, which is hard to do, but much easier at a document stage than if you’d realised when filming and you’d have to change things on the fly. 

Just for my own interest, which came first? Devil’s Playground or The Code

They were both happening at the same time.

So how did you transition from being a show runner on one, to a writer on the other?

It was very hard. You asked before about do you think people will continue to adopt the show runner thing, so if you’re life’s not a showrunner, which is what I’m doing at the moment, it’s writing three shows at the same time. That’s just your life as a freelance writer, because they’re all at different stages of development and you only really get paid a living wage when a show goes, so you have to be on a couple to make sure one does go, cause frequently you’ll write a draft, it might not get up at the Screen Australia board meeting and it’ll be put on hold for a while. But it was so much better to just concentrate on one thing, I could give all my creative energy to just the one thing for a year and a half. It’s exciting to be on lots of different shows but I don’t think it’s really good for your writing. 

When looking at the differences between the Australian and American approaches to writing a series why do you think there’s a seeming disconnect between certain audiences and shows, and whilst Australian drama does rate quite well, there are still certain US premium cable shows that rate higher?

I think it all comes down to time. Breaking Bad has eight full time people working on one episode for two weeks. They’re really going to explore the boundaries of that episode quite well. In Australia, the money around is that you get three people, for three days to do the eight episodes. If you’re really on song, and you’ve got really talented writers, with good underlying subject matter, I think you can capture lightning in a bottle. You can. But what you can’t do, is backtrack. You can’t afford to say “that was awesome yesterday but maybe we should just chuck it away and see if we can come up with something better”, which is what I’ve heard they always did on The Simpsons. The first days’ jokes they’d never use because they were the first things that popped into their heads, they had to think of the second things and they had the time to do it. Game of Thrones is interesting because obviously there’s this great appetite for fantasy, but Australia doesn’t make any of that. None. Kids a little but, but you cannot pitch sci-fi or fantasy in Australia. There’s a residual idea on networks that Australian people don’t won’t buy it if it has an Australian accent.

Ashley Zukerman as Jesse Banks in The Code

But even for dramas like House of Cards, and maybe I’m thinking of it wrong, and also that the commercial realities are changing, but if we’re able to spend more time on a show if that’s what’s needed to make it even better, in cases like The Slap where it gets remade abroad, wouldn’t that have a definite commercial benefit to the producers?

I don’t know. It does feel frequently like we need more time, but the great thing for Shelley Birse who created The Code; and it was a terrible thing too because she nearly went broke doing it; but taking the time to develop it meant that she could make the idea much better. But sometimes you’ll pitch a concept, especially for commercial networks and they’ve got a broadcast window, which might be nine months away so you’ve got to write, film and edit it in nine months and I just don’t know if you can do exceptional work. There was a feeling ten years or so ago where you were only judged by other Australian programs, but I think we’re now judged by American cable standards. If you have a choice and only one life to expend on watching drama then we have to make it better. It is frustrating and you do feel like you have to turn some things around faster than you’d want to.

It’s definitely not from a lack of talent I suppose. We have David Michod and Adam Arkapaw working on US shows, as well as Jane Campion with Top of the Lake. It’s wonderful that Devil’s Playgroundexists, it’s definitely a show on my wavelength. I do hope that with the introduction of services like StreamCo and possibly Netflix into Australia, that there will be an increase in the amount of drama that will be made. Do you think it’ll push the quality of drama higher?

Well look, if you think about it now, you can get Cate Shortland to write for you and Tony Krawitz to direct. That wasn’t the case a while ago, and when you have their names attached to a project, you can get good actors to read that script. When I started, the shortest series were 22 episodes. At that length, you can’t get Toni Collette to commit, but you can get her to commit to four. So on Devil’s Playground we could get her. Suddenly the cast know she’s in the show and everyone tries really hard. I’m not saying people don’t, but it’s suddenly as if everyone lifts their game. Since she’s in the show, it makes sense to Americans and I’m hoping more of those situations happen with shorter run shows, so we can get a higher profile cast involved which in turn gets a bigger budget. Though sometimes you just have to be lucky in what you choose to write about. We do get to see the best American shows, but when you’re over there you realise there’s 99 our of 100 stupid turkey shows that aren’t any good. Most of them are terrible ideas.

In terms of cinematography, I’m beginning to see less of a distinction between the cinematic language of film versus TV, given the improvements in cameras and big screens.

Andrew Commis was our cinematographer on Devil’s Playground and Simon Chapman shot Cut Snake, and I realised to call them cinematographers as well. I think I referred to them as DPs once and was quickly corrected. But now you’ve got people who are used to lensing stuff for film, so they don’t have as much time, which is hard for them, but it does look like a film. It makes you so much more excited about what you’ve made. Visual language makes up, it feels to me like 60% of the screen experience, so if you create that dark red, black, world of the church it does a lot of storytelling for you already. 

I think that’s having such an impact on how both the audience and the filmmakers see the process. Too often shows will feel rushed, but nowadays, we’re getting closer to looking like films that there’s a real increase in the quality.

Well looking at the working relationship between Rachel and Andy, which is how we benefitted from the success of those Scandinavian dramas is that TV is all about close ups, mid-shot and then straight into the close up all the time. There’s very few close ups in the show. It’s shot like a film would be. That was a discussion with the broadcaster regarding that style because even that is a bit revolutionary for TV. Whilst TV is influencing film, film is definitely influencing TV. You don’t have to hit every close up all the time anymore which is very exciting.

Do you think that’s changed? How is it different from the past? Are networks increasingly lenient toward the show having a cinematic feel?

In the case of Devil’s Playground we had quite vigorous discussions and sometimes, I realised I was being a Home and Away hack, where sometimes I wanted to know why we weren’t seeing the face, but Rachel is very persuasive and she thought we’ve got a chance to do something really different. We can really announce this as a show that’s worthy to be on the same channel as True Detective. But you realise what prejudices you’ve absorbed on commercial TV until you start having a conversation about close ups and shots. We did have the big chats and then our investor NBC and Foxtel were very good in allowing us to do it. And if it worked, great, if not we’d talk. But we still had a lot of coverage so there were options, but by and large we trusted the filmmakers.

Finally, is there any advice you’d give to emerging writers and directors, particularly in light of the constantly evolving landscape of distribution and smaller run shows?

It’s something I think about quite a bit, because it is tough. What makes TV exciting now is also what makes it harder to break into. When you did have longer running shows, with a staff, there were more opportunities for people to get a start. To learn and make relationships with people who are going to have work subsequently and trust you. In addition to learning the work habits, if there is any advice I would give, producers respond just as much to a writer who hands something in on time, as they do if they’re the most shit hot writer. Sometimes it’s really good to do those simple things like returning phone calls and getting work in on time. That sounds incredibly boring, but there are some maverick producers there who’ll let you do what you want but that’s not the norm. What I have noticed is sometimes those creative friendships are really helpful as you all go forward in your careers and looking out for each other. There isn’t a career path any more. On Devil’s Playground one of the writers, Tommy Murphy, had a playwriting background, one was Cate Shortland and the other was Alice Addison who like myself who’d worked on various different shows. What’s exciting is that it feels like people are willing to take pitches from people in a way they weren't before. So if you have an idea, the bigger companies are vivacious in looking for new work. They might team you up with someone more experienced and if that’s the case I’d encourage you to not be defensive, because people brought it aren’t going to steal it, they want to help. But I understand that set of nerves around that. Finally, I think it’s important to write something for yourself. As opposed to all the other things you could do with your life, that might be satisfying, even when it happens for you and you’re being interviewed, like right now, no one gives a shit that I was in Toronto, compared to the actors, writing has to be about something you find surprising and energising for yourself than externally.

Josh McConville as Dean

Can you tell us how you got the opportunity to make your first film?

The Infinite Man was made as part of the South Australian Film Corporation’s Film Lab initiative.  They fully financed a number of low budget films basically off one page ideas.  They invited teams to submit ideas and those selected took part in a three week workshop during which we explored the creative process quite broadly.  Following the workshop, we were given some development money to go off and write the script.

How did your producers get involved with the project?  How did you meet and what did they bring to the creative process?

I have been working with the producers Kate Croser and Sandy Cameron in one way or another since we met at university. They're very creative producers and Sandy is also a writer. We wanted to make a film that didn't feel restricted by its low budget. We wanted to create something where having very few characters and locations would actually work in the film's favour, and help to create something rather unique and unexpected. Sandy and Kate were very involved in this whole process.

How do you find the writing process?  What was it like for you and how did you manage a film as complex as this?  How did you track it?  Outlining the loops and understanding the transitions from one area to another?

It was a long and unusually complicated process.  It started with this one page idea that we went into Film Lab with and it changed dramatically from that throughout the writing process.  It did involve some diagrams, because as well as being a time travel film it’s set primarily in the one location so it was important everything was mapped out in a way that would actually work when it came time to shoot it.  It was just a matter of time.  Just spending the time and slowly making it better and better, ensuring that the time travel mechanics added up and it was still an emotionally coherent story.  It was a constant juggling act with those various elements and ensuring they each received proper attention throughout.  

In terms of direction, how were you able to film it - and for your actors, when they were filming against themselves, to be cut in later.  How were they working through that process and getting a rhythm and being able to perform with themselves?

We couldn’t afford any sort of motion control and so it was a very lo-fi approach to those situations. It was often Josh who was acting opposite himself and it was just a matter of getting whoever was free at that point; we were working with a very small crew and certainly didn’t have any dedicated body doubles or anything like that, it was just whoever was free at the time would stand in so Josh could act opposite complete non-actors.  I don’t know how he did it.  I think he performed remarkably well under pretty tough circumstances.  But it didn’t get more complicated than a pretty basic split screen in a two shot and hoping it came together in the edit.  We had done enough takes that I hoped we covered ourselves.  It was a little bit of luck I suppose.  Planning and luck.

In breaking that down, this is a very particular film, for what it does and how were you approaching the scheduling, what were you shooting first?  I imagine you started linearly but then were overlapping and picking up the tail.  How did you decide to shoot this but first and actually process that?  It seems like it presents a lot of challenges.

Yeah, and I don’t think any of us knew what the best approach was.  It was quite a low budget affair and so at the beginning we had to decide between going with a script supervisor or an assistant director - we could only afford one of them and we decided with a film like this continuity would be quite important and it certainly was.  So we got the film scheduled by the very experienced Vicki Sugars, and I believe she found it one of the tougher schedules of her career. And then of course we went out there and started dropping scenes from the very first day and suddenly someone has to rejig the schedule accordingly.  We found that  none of us had the time really to do that and we were falling behind and we just realised we had to scratch up some money from somewhere and get an AD out there as soon as possible.   So that was late into the first week when we got Drew Bailey out there and things certainly changed for the better after that.  Nobody knew exactly how to go about it and we thought, look do we try and make it easy for Josh and try and shoot in some kind of chronological order so that he has some hope of understanding what the hell is going on emotionally for his character.  But that just wasn’t going to work, it was just too impractical.  We just scheduled in such a way that we would move through things as fast as possible to buy ourselves as much time as possible. It was always changing and it was a little bit crazy on set.  We just all hoped it would come together in the edit.

So what did you shoot first?  I’m specifically curious for my own purposes, how did you decide what to shoot in order to put it together?

Another factor in the scheduling was cast and we didn’t want to have the actors up there simply waiting around while we were filming one person scenes.  So we had Josh up there first and we shot everything that involved him just by himself.  Just where he’s kind of waiting around in the first year, a lot of which we cut in the end.

You were the editor on this film in addition to writing and directing.  Why would you choose to adopt that role on your own?  Was it a budgetary or creative decision?

It was a little bit of everything.  I love editing and I do enjoy being that involved from writing through to the very end.  I don't know, there’s just something that I find somewhat comforting about it. But certainly there were budgetary considerations as well, we just couldn’t afford an editor especially for as long as I though we would need on the film, we just couldn’t afford someone for that duration, so it seemed like the best option was for me to cut it. 

Was there a process, given this was your first film, trying to get an appreciation for the flow and understand how it worked?  My hat’s off to you, I can’t imagine being so in my own head for this particularly elliptical film, it’d probably drive me insane.  But did you have other external collaborators, other filmmakers or was it just within your team or did you expand outwards for feedback?

We did.  We had a couple of screenings for the SAFC and invited a few fellow Film Lab participants, who had films in the initiative.  They were mostly local Adelaide filmmakers and we felt it was very important to get those fresh eyes on it to see if people were following and engaging with it.  I did feel that it might be helpful for the film if I went a bit insane during the making of it. I thought it might somehow feed into it in an interesting way.  But especially in those later stages we were keen to get some fresh eyes on it and we got some great feedback that I think really helped in terms of clarity and emotional engagement with the characters.

Jumping back to the actors, how were there processes like?  They come from theatre in some instances,  but how did they find keeping track of the story and how were you collaborating in that regards? 

We did about a week of rehearsals, and a lot of that was just me explaining the plot and exactly where they were at any given moment.  It meant that when we got on set they had a thorough understanding of everything as you would hope.  Ultimately they were three very talented actors and it just makes your life that much easier when you’re working with truly talented performers.  They knew what they had to do and they did it really well.  I just had to keep out of there way, really, and occasionally remind them what was going on in the story and just help guide them through it.

On your relationship with your cinematographer, this film has a distinct look, it’s very Australian but not as typical as you would expect it to be I suppose.  How did you develop that look and how was that throughout filming?

Marden Dean shot the film and we’ve been working together since film school at AFTRS and we’ve worked on a couple of shorts together and I don't know, maybe it’s just a style and working relationship we’ve developed over time and it just made that side of things incredibly smooth.  When there were so many other pressures and stresses throughout production, it really helped to be working with someone who is a) very talented and b) a very good friend, someone who I’ve worked with a number of times in the past.  It was just one of the more enjoyable aspects of the whole filmmaking process, just being able to work with Marden again and do our thing.

I’m interested in your career and how you’re planning that out from this stage.  There’s a lot of people in a similar circumstance to yourself who are trying to plan out what their career is going to do.  What sort of film represents me most as a director?  Is that something you’ve considered to that level, and in making this your first film, is it something you’ve focused on and thought about? 

Looking back I don’t know how calculated it was.  I just wanted to make a film that in some ways was an expression of myself as a filmmaker and it’s entirely natural that’s what one wants to do.  So it wasn’t calculated in terms of building a career but more wanting to make the kinds of films I want to make and would like to see.  I just wanted to make a good film.  You hope that it’s good enough to get the chance to make a second film.  But I didn’t spend too much time thinking about those things.  If you want to make films, you want to make good films.  Or at least films that are as good as you can make them.

OBVIOUSLY YOU MAKE A FILM IN THE HOPE THAT IT CONNECTS WITH PEOPLE.

Director Hugh Sullivan with Josh McConville and Hannah Marshall (photo by Brendan Cain)

That’s more than worthwhile an intention.  We need more good films.  In terms of going around the world, how has the audience response been?  Has there been a difference between Australian and international audiences?

It premiered at SXSW at Austin in the USA, and it was the first time it was shown to the public, and I think we were all very nervous, a) to see how it would be received by the public and b) to see how it would translate for an American audience - if things like the humour would come across. And it was extremely relieving to see how warmly it was received.  It went over very well, we were in the cinema for that first screening and it was great to see it really connect with an audience.  Following that we were anxious to see how it would play to an Australian audience and it was a similar response at its Australian premiere at MIFF.  It was a great response.  We’ve just been thrilled.  Obviously you make a film in the hope that it connects with people.  That’s all you’re trying to do and for it to succeed on those terms, it's wonderful.  

Have you placed much focus on the release strategies? It that’s something you’ve been involved with?  How it’s rolling out theatrically and online?

The producers Kate and Sandy, have formed a distribution company with Johnathan Page so they’re really taking care with that.  I’m involved in the sense that I’m close with them and we work really closely together but it’s just been them taking care of that and keeping me in the loop.  It’s a  small release, but it feels right for the film.  I’m extremely happy with where we’re showing, in the best possible cinemas for this film which is great.  We’ve got Madman doing the DVD/VOD release and I couldn’t imagine a better company to be working with there.  It’s exactly as I would have hoped and feel fortunate in that sense.

I WOULD JUST BE PHYSICALLY FITTER NEXT TIME GOING INTO PRODUCTION.  I WAS SO WORN OUT BY THE END OF IT, JUST HOBBLING AROUND.

Alex Dimitriades as Terry

Have you placed much focus on the release strategies? It that’s something you’ve been involved with?  How it’s rolling out theatrically and online?

The producers Kate and Sandy have formed a distribution company with Jonathan Page so they’re really taking care with that.  I’m involved in the sense that I’m close with them and we work really closely together but it’s just been them taking care of that and keeping me in the loop.  It’s a small release, but it feels right for the film.  I’m extremely happy with where we’re showing, in the best possible cinemas for this film which is great.  We’ve got Madman doing the DVD/VOD release and I couldn’t imagine a better company to be working with there.  It’s exactly as I would have hoped and feel fortunate in that sense.

Are there any lessons from this film you’d repeat or avoid for next time?

I would just be physically fitter next time going into production.  I was so worn out by the end of it, just hobbling around.  Wear more comfortable shoes, I don’t know.  I think really going into production with the best possible script is invaluable and I wouldn’t move ahead until I was entirely happy with that.  I’m sure there are a thousand little things I would do differently but they’re very specific things and deficiencies that I wouldn’t draw people’s attention to that perhaps I would do differently but that’s entirely natural I think.  

In terms of the writing, how long did it take you, in focusing on the script, and how did you know you were done?  How did you feel you were getting the most out of the concept?  When did you decide to put it down?

I thought it was done when we were on set shooting the film.  It was time to stop worrying about the script.  But it was about two years from beginning to end and it was simply we were going into production and we were supposed to be filming a lot earlier but we all felt the script just wasn’t there yet so we pushed it back to a point where we felt we couldn't push it back any more.  I’m glad we did do that, I’m glad we spent that time.  On a low budget film it was the cheapest part of the process, where you’re not spending a great deal of money so I was happy to spend the time getting the script right.  I knew that if we were going to confine ourselves to a single location with a cast of three it was important it was a strong script.  We spent the time on it, but I never felt like it was finished and was rewriting during filming and then again during the edit.

Fantastic.  What’s next?

It's perhaps not in a state to be discussing, but I’ll certainly keep you posted.

Are you looking to work in Australia or abroad?  Has that opportunity arisen?

I’m very confident it’ll be Australian. 

Congratulations on the film and we wish you all the best.

Josh McConville as Dean, Hannah Marshall as Lana

Zak directing Nathan Philip and Jess De Gouw on the set of These Final Hours

Can you tell us how you got to make your first feature film?

[Laughs] Who let me do that exactly?  How it happened I guess, was putting myself in the right place at the right time, and having chiselled away at the last ten years or so before it, with a few backyard features, a few self funded shorts, a few funded shorts.  Constantly trying to develop my craft as a writer/director and I think that there were other projects that I thought were maybe gonna be my first funded feature film that fell by the wayside.  I am a believer that everything happens for a reason and I kind of look back at the disappointment I had in those projects falling over but I really felt like they deserved to fall over, and this one withstood the fire and brimstone of development because there was enough meat on the bone, enough of a cool central idea and enough of an emotional journey that the main character was going to go on.  Just all the right elements and at the end of the day just a really interesting story and a very basic premise of ‘what would you do on the last day on earth?’.  I think all those planets aligned just in the right way.  Ever since we put the first draft, which I call the vomit draft, that I just vomited out of my system into the inaugural Springboard that Screen Australia were running, with my producer Liz Kearney.  Ever since we put that in, literally it felt like the right people read it, the right people gave me the right encouragement and told me to really stick at it.  It wasn’t great on the page, but there was enough there for people to really tell me to “stick with this one Zak” and “you might have something here”.  It was getting into that in 2009/2010 and in being able to make a short film through that development scheme, called Transmission, where I just felt like I was working at a higher level than I ever had before, with the most experienced crew we could get, great actors and everyone getting paid the right way.  Doing a film properly.  It really solidified Liz and my relationship as a director-producer.  I feel making the short and chipping away at the feature, and then the right people then saying “yes” to the feature to get the bit of funding we needed from ScreenWest, followed up by Screen Australia, followed up by MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival), everything just sort of came together, with just enough money to pull it off.  

In terms of the Feature Navigator program, where you make a short first, what sort of impact did making Transmission have on the later feature These Final Hours?

Transmission wasn’t at all a short version of These Final Hours, it was a very moody, tonal, companion piece to the film, almost from an aesthetics style, but story wise they were incredibly different.  It galvanised myself and Liz and our DP Bonnie Elliot, who we found through the process of doing the short, and we definitely wanted to keep that relationship together for the feature.  It was almost like a big dress rehearsal, but it also got me writing for the first time in a  genre way.  I’d never really contemplated doing a sci-fi film before, and These Final Hours and Transmission, they’re not just genre films, I guess you’d call them elevated genre.  The most interesting genre films to me are the ones that focus on the people dealing with the extraordinary situation, be it a horror film, or an apocalyptic film, or set in space, whatever it is.  It’s always the ones that focus on the people and give you characters you can relate to, despite the far fetched situations they’re in, they’re real people.  It resonates with me.  That’s what I was trying to do with this film, my own take on 12 Monkeys or 28 Days Later, my favourite sci-fi films that are fantastic in examples of the genre but also there’s a real human story behind them as well.  It’s just a really simple hero’s journey.

In that way, was there a challenge in going to the longer form?  That presents its own obstacles, but was that a thing you found daunting?

It was incredibly daunting, but I had done three backyard features off the smell of an oily rag leading up to it over the last ten years.  I had already experimented and given it a shot, because you have nothing to lose, everyone was working for free out of the kindness of their own hearts, just testing the waters, finding what it takes to tell a long form story.  So I’d done it three times by the time we got to These Final Hours but it did feel very much like doing it all again.  Because that’s how you feel with every film I guess.  Subconsciously it must of helped a lot, yet being on set, day one, it all counted for nothing.  It was just “wow, I really hope we don’t fuck this up.”

So what were the main challenges in getting it off the ground?  What was the biggest obstacle you found, that once you overcame it, it was all downhill from there?

I think like anyone, writing is just such a… who would want to write anything?  It’s so painful and so horrible, and you’ve really got to have a thick skin and be passionate enough to listen to the naysayers, and take on board what they have to say, but also stick to your guns.  The early drafts of These Final Hours, I would say I didn’t get the encouragement from the people employed to tell you what’s wrong with the script and say maybe you could try this, this and this.    It really was hammered and I really felt like “Oh my god, maybe there is nothing here.  Maybe I’ve got it wrong again.  Maybe it’s back to the drawing board.”  And I really could have given it all away at a certain point, but then when we got into Springboard, a completely different set of eyes and a different set of people read the same exact material and said “hang on, there’s something really good here, it’s not right yet, but stick with this.”  For me it was about that encouragement and deep down knowing that I thought that there was something there with the script.  But then having the right people who could teach me the right set of skills to fix my own script, that was a real game changer.  I would say that the Springboard process and Jonathan Rawlonson and Simon Van de Board, they really smacked the script upside the head, but in the best possible way.  I learned so much through that workshop about something I’d been doing a lot, writing but looking at it in a new way.

What sort of ways were that?  Can you go into a bit more detail about what they were focusing on?

The thing is it was nothing new. I’d read a couple of the screenwriting books, but at the end of the day, I really just write on instinct and then try and fix it after the vomit draft stage, and they really came in with a really simple formula, of breaking your film down into eight short films, eight sequences and making sure everyone of those sequences needs an active question from your main character; Will James leave his girlfriend?, will James go to the party?, will James help the little girl?  And I realised these things were subconsciously in the script, I just had to really make them clearer, to make the audience sit there, understanding that there’s always gonna be that very active question - there is something on the screen happening and that is the immersive part of it.  They’re really rooting for this guy and from one of those eight shorts to the next, that make up the entire film.  It might not work for everyone’s script but for our particular story the process actually really did line up nicely.  They just really simplified the craft of trying to write a screenplay.

So what was your relationship like with your producer, Liz Kearney, in terms of how that evolved over time and then even to the financiers?  How were you able to carry the conviction that you had something great and you could get all the funding you required to make it happen?

The good thing about Liz is that we were friends before we worked together as a director/producer, so I really kind of trusted her when we decided to start working together this way.  We’d worked together on other things, other scripts we were getting developed and falling apart.  But this one was good, because we’d been through all of that together, we’d been through these development workshops, and we’d thought we had something and we didn’t.  So we’d been from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.  With this one, when it really stuck and was starting to take better shape, you know, it really galvanised us, and we thought “you know what?  Finally, we might actually have something here worth telling!” and that was exciting, because we had done the hard yards together the years previous, it was great.  We’d come through the ranks together and yeah, finding a good producer is so hard.  It isn't the easiest thing in the world to find and having someone you can trust is such an important part of it.  And having someone that can tell you when they think something's shit, and why, is also so important.  Us making our first film 'for realizes' with a proper budget and everything, we definitely learned so much through making this movie and I really couldn't have done it without her.

And what were the hardest things in terms of the actual production itself?  As a director, what was challenging you the most when you got on set?

Just the day to day battle.  We only had 25 days and trying to pull of a convincing end of the world, look and feel, and it was making sure that everyone was on the same page.  We just didn't have time to fuck around.  We didn't have time to not be a strong unit, working towards the same goal.  Luckily we just had them.  We just managed to put together an amazing cast and crew.  Just looking at the cast, using the little girl and Gary from the short in the feature again was like a great dress rehearsal, and to meet her on that short and go "Oh my god, this is a child prodigy, how could we not cast her in the feature?".  Then getting Nathan Phillips, we cast it all around Australia and we never expected it to be him playing James, but his audition absolutely blew me away.  Again, when people absolutely demand that you cast them by just showing you what they can do, who are you to say no?  He absolutely got the character.  It was a perfect match.  Having the two together to bouncy off each other, you never know how it's going to go; child actor and your leading man, but he was  so encouraging of her and they just bonded so well.  He's just got such a big heart, especially with kids.  If we had an arsehole playing the lead with all these things he's gotta do with this little girl, someone who didn't have that compassion or that ability to just be there for her, it could have backfired horribly.  But the two of them got on like a house on fire and it's one of those situations where you can't imagine anyone else playing those characters, and then you back it up with all the supporting actors who appear in the film.  I still look back and think "How the hell did we get such an awesome cast?"  Everyone blew me away and were so much more experienced than me.  To have Dan Henshall, Sarah Snook, Catherine Beck, Jess de Gouw and Lynette Curran, was amazing to have that cast.

In getting your words on their feet, was there a big rehearsal period leading up to the film?  How did that evolve, and how did you work with them?

There wasn't really too much time.  I had a couple of days with Nathan getting to meet Angourie for the first time, and we'd go out to lunch, then back to the office and we'd run through a few scenes, just basic line reading, just talking about the scene and whatnot.  We did a little bit of rehearsal, but I didn't want to overcook anything for Nathan's sake.  If anything, he's so organic as an actor, I'd rather keep him fresh, as would he.  With Angourie, we would have had to do a lot of that, if she wasn't such a mature soul.  She was just ready to go.  I didn't really overcook the rehearsal period. With the other actors and their schedules, just flying in and out, we tried to get as much rehearsal time in with them as possible, but again,  they were so experienced, it was just a matter of mores talking about the scenes and characters, rather than having to workshop them too much.

In terms of visual style and collaborating with your Cinematographer [Bonnie Elliot], was it a very hands on relationship, or were you very focused on performance and her on the image?  Or was it a constant conversation?

That's where someone like Bonnie Elliot absolutely took the bull by the horns with this movie.  She has such an amazing eye, much more than I have.  I had to get schooled on what a colour palate even was!  I'd never thought about a colour palate!  But with Transmission and These Final Hours, it was like me going back to film school with Bonnie Elliot.  She totally showed me things about cinema and visual style and visual language.  I was like "Oh my god, that's something I'm going to keep forever thank you very much!"  So I guess I am more of a performance focused director.  I've got the shot in my head, but I just love the moment when you talk it through with your cinematographer and your shot becomes an even better shot, or it becomes a completely different shot.  Or their shot is so much better than anything you thought for that scene.  It's just those discussions where its such a collaborative process, especially with your cinematographer, it's just so much fun just getting our hands dirty and thinking through, from scene to scene, what is the best way to cover this?  We had a rising colour palate that constantly changed, from gold to orange to red as it got hotter and hotter throughout the film, so that was great for this film, to always be very clear on what the colour palate needed to be.  Bonnie's just such a talented DP, she just brought so much to this film.  

I suppose your other main collaborator was your editor.  What was that process like?  How long did it take you, what were you struggling with and how did you work through them, identifying the problems of the film and making them better?

Again, Nick Meyers is a genius.  He was doing things to scenes which I didn't think were possible. To walk in and go "Wow, we can actually do that?", "How did you cheat that?", "How did you cut around that problem?"  Again this was me getting schooled with someone who was so experienced but so passionate about the film and even wanting to do the film in the first place was amazing, he's a big sci-fi fan and he really wanted to have a crack at it.  We were able to shoot pickups as well, which we absolutely needed during the editing process and again it was great working with Nick, and in a different way where I wasn't even in the edit suite all the time, I'd just let him do his thing, come in and it'd be amazing, and we'd talk about two or three things that I was questioning, or maybe thought wasn't working.  It was just such an easy way to work, but just handing the keys over to someone, to a maestro who is just that experienced, that was just amazing and very liberating.  

We've been hearing, the film hasn't been widely released yet, outside of its premiere at MIFF, but what has been the industry feedback in response to it so far and how have they responded to you as a  director?

Yeah, we premiered at MIFF, in July 2013 and  that was just a great time.  To have picked up The Age's Critics Award for Best Australian Film, that was some stiff competition!  We went to the awards ceremony thinking "Ok, this is going to be a great night, we'll have some drinks and have some fun" but then we actually won the award and it was very surreal.  We were up against The Turning, The Rocket and the list goes on and on, there were so many amazing Australian films there.  So Liz and I were gobsmacked to say the least and from there, it’s since screened in competition in Adelaide, which was also a great response to the film.  We screened down in Busselton at Cinefest Oz and so far with our domestic screenings we’ve had a great response.  It really couldn't have gone better.

Kingston (Anderson) mentioned you’ve been approached by Hollywood, is that correct? 

[Laughs] I wouldn’t say ‘approached by Hollywood’ but I went to LA before the end of the year and haver since picked up an American agent and manager, and am reading a whole bunch of scripts and writing my own scripts, thinking carefully about the next project.  

And so how did that process eventuate?  You get your first feature under your belt and you head over there, what is that like?

It was amazing.  I’ve been to LA a few times before but never for this amount of meetings.  This manager of mine, he organised meetings with producers and agents and sometimes I’d have three a day driving around town and navigating crazy LA traffic, going from one to the other.  It was insane and full on, but I met some amazing producers.  It was just great being able to start that process, which I’d never really experienced before, and I just hope that now it’s gonna lead to something good.

What sort of projects are they offering you?  There’s the old adage, that they expect you to make the film you just did.  Is that what’s happening in this case or are you looking to expand and challenge yourself in a different narrative style or genre?

I just want to tell good and interesting stories.  I am reading a lot of elevated genre screenplays.  I literally have a pile I’m working through.  So I guess that’s the niche brand that I’m being labelled with after the film, but I would work in any genera as long as it was an amazing story.  Nothing can trump an amazing idea or amazing story.  That much is clear to me now.

So what advice would you give to budding filmmakers who’ve made a couple of shorts and looking to make the next step?  Are development projects the way to go?

I think development is absolutely the way to go, because you can’t keep these things insular.  You can’t do it all yourself.  And if you want the money, you have to do the development.  I think it’s important to listen to enough people when they’re saying this isn’t right, or maybe you should change this or this, and if all that starts lining up, maybe they’re right.  But at the same time, that happened on quite a few of my projects, and in hindsight they absolutely were right.  Until that led me to the one that I did with These Final Hours.  Knowing that there was that thing the others were missing, which was that central core idea that would withstand anything because it was such and interesting premise.  You’ve gotta have a thick skin, but you’ve gotta listen.  But you’ve also got to know when you’re right.  Hopefully other people will also think that you are.

So what’s next?  Can you speak a little about this transmedia project and what that’s leading towards?

So that’s just a really cool way to help promote the film, but to give fans of the film - hopefully people who will go and see the film their own experience of the last day on Earth.  It’s all about that user experience right now with what we’re doing.  It’s going to be a really cool idea and I’m not a gamer, not the person who would have ever thought of this as an idea, but now that we’re here, I think it’s gonna be something really innovative.  I don’t know if an Australian feature has ever done anything as elaborate or ambitious as what we’re trying to pull off with it, so we’ll see how it goes.  We’re really excited about it, because it’s further exploring the story world that you see in such a small microcosm in the film, of the last 12 hours through one characters eyes in Perth, but this is fleshing it out to a worldwide story.

It sounds great and I hope it does really well.  Thanks for speaking to us and we wish you all the best with the film.

Thanks for having me.

Watch Zak's short film Transmission below.