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. 

Galipoli Photo by Glendyn Ivin

You’ve come from a graphic design and advertising background, how did you first make leap into drama?

I studied documentary at film school. I had no interest in doing drama. Zero. I thought it was the dirty end of filmmaking. But one day I told a friend a story about something that happened to me when I was a kid and they said it would make a great short film.

I had never had an idea for a short film, I wasn’t interested in making drama, but when they said that, it kind of clicked, “Maybe I could make a short film, actually write something and create characters rather than as a documentarian try and ‘find a story’ with real people.” I ended up making the short Crackerbag. My producer and I entered it into The Cannes film Festival and it won the Palme d’Or for short film in 2003.

Cracker Bag was a very quick entry into the world of drama and that opened my eyes to the idea that you could ‘fabricate a story’ and it was OK. It seams like such an obvious thing, but to me who was only interested in documentary, it was a revelation. This lead to making my feature film Last Ride and on the back of that I met John Edwards and Imogen Banks, who had seen the film and wanted to talk to me about doing some episodes of a new show they were making Offspring. I remember going in there and them telling me what Offspring was about, which sounded to me like a romantic comedy. I said “I don’t know if you’ve seen Last Ride (2009), it’s a pretty heavy drama, I’m not sure I’m the rom-com guy…” and they said, “Don’t fight the material, we want you to be the filmmaker you are, but have fun with it. If it’s comedy, make it funny. If it’s dramatic, make it dramatic.” They encouraged me to bring my point of view to the show. I learnt so much from that experience. From there I went on to make the telemovie Beaconsfield (2012) and from there Puberty Blues (2012-13) and then Gallipoli (2014)

You have some really great photography that you’ve taken on the sets of your shows, and have produced a number of books, as well as an amazing blog Hoaxville.com. I was particularly struck by the shots of the working class faces from the town in Beaconsfield. How do you feel your photographic work has influenced how you approach directing?

While making Last Ride, I found that during the making of a film, I generated gigabytes of photographs and some of them were really beautiful. It wasn’t really a conscious thing, they were just the photos I took of locations and cast or images to suggest what something was going to be visually or perhaps a dramatic approach.

Definitely between Beaconsfield and Puberty Blues I became more interested in photography and in particular street and documentary photographers as a more grounded reference than looking at other films. Now 90% of the reference I’d look at before going into a project would be stills. Great photography is all about reduction and finding one image that tells a story, as opposed to a sequence or ten shots to make up a story.

Now taking stills and directing have become hand in hand for me. I sometimes joke about Puberty Blues being a very expensive photo shoot. It was on Puberty Blues where it really clicked for me. I would roam around whilst blocking a scene and take stills, and that would become a sort of ‘in the moment’ storyboard on how we were going to cover the scene.

I really try and build scenes around single images. My process is to try and find a single image during pre or while shooting and go “this is the heart of the scene, we should build the scene around this shot”.

Puberty Blues Trailer

Speaking of Puberty Blues, during the first season particularly, I’ve heard it was a bit of a challenge for the young male actors speak as derogatorily to the females as their characters did. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you approached getting them comfortable with the idea of performing those scenes?

The boys in Puberty Blues were a great bunch. There was really only one or two ‘actors’ amongst them, most were street cast or beach cast. We really needed to have boys who could be cruel to the girls. They were really conscious I think about being horrible on camera, and how they would be perceived in the real world, particularly the non-actors.

We had a session one afternoon where I took the boys to one room and the girls to another and I had Di Smith who played the headmaster in Series One, have a chat to the girls about what it was like to be a girl in the Seventies. I took the boys aside and we had an afternoon discussing the cultural attitudes especially towards women then and now. It was about givning them permission to misbehave, “…whatever we write for you to say, it’s going to be fine to say on camera, but you need to do it with conviction and with confidence so that you’re not second guessing how people are going to perceive you.

I know even on the day it was really hard for them to say some of those things, because of course they’re not those guys in real life. But all those kids were really conscious about how they’re perceived on and off camera. I’m really happy with where we ended up. There was a lot of trust between us all.

Expanding that more, you’ve worked with quite large casts in Puberty Blues and the rest of the shows. So how do you find tailoring your directing style to better suit the needs of the different actors?

For me working with actors is all about finding a specific language that works between you and specific actor. The trick is though, every actor requires a different language. For example in Beaconsfield, you’ve got Shane Jacobson and Lachy Hume side by side in a cage for seven days of fairly intimate shooting. Two wonderful actors, who are a similar age, but are very different people. You have to talk to each person as an individual. The way I would speak to Lachy about a scene and the way I would talk to Shane about a scene would be totally different. I’d have to find a way how to communicate my single idea in two separate ways, each one specific to that particular actor.

In Last Ride where I worked with Hugo Weaving and Tom Russell. Hugo is an experienced actor and has been acting for years, and Tom, who’s ten had never acted before. You have to have a really different way of talking to each actor. With Hugo you could talk about subtext, theories, literature and life experience. But with Tom, it was much more direct, “If do this, you can have something to eat”. Well not exactly, but you get the idea. Once you have those separate conversations and put them in the scene, hopefully they’re in the same world, but you have to approach it in two very different ways.

With Gallipoli, there’s 135 speaking roles so I had to find 135 different languages to speak to people. But when you see them all together on screen, there’s a cohesiveness to it. Lachy Hulme, who I’ve worked with a fair bit, he’s got a part in Gallipoli, I normally am very quiet with actors, I’ll try and stand close and whisper when giving direction so it’s very personal. But with Lachy I can stand behind the monitor 20 meters away and bark three words at him and he’d know exactly what I meant and usually he would respond and the performance would be totally different. But there’s no way I would do that to other actors. There’s no way I’d speak to Ashleigh Cummings in that way for example. You need a different language again to help her bring out her best performance.

When you extend that to the editing process and you’re trying to unify all these actors, with such a diverse array of performance styles, do you find your editing process not only a case of picking the best performances, but reshuffling scenes around to keep the show flowing and being consistent, or are you tackling that in the writing process before you shoot?

I work very closely with my writers. Trying to shape the story as much as I can before we start shooting. Trying to trim anything away that might take up time and not provide any real consequence to the story or the tone of the piece.

I’m a strong believer that you get three chances to make your story on screen. Once in the writing of the script, once when you shoot and once when you edit. I’m always fascinated in the edit suite by what scenes work and what scenes don’t; sometimes you’re on set thinking “this isn’t working” or “this isn’t right for the show”, but in the cut they come up beautifully. Then there’s other sequences where you’ll write and rehearse and explore and plan things right up to and during shooting the scene, and in the end the scene doesn’t make the cut, or it becomes half as long, or perhaps you use just a single shot from the whole sequence.

What I’ve found particularly interesting doing television, because the editing process is much shorter, I tend to make very different decisions as opposed to cutting a film. The decisions are bolder, more brutal very early on. Things get cut out much quicker. If it’s not working up front, I throw it out and only go back there when and if it’s becoming apparent that the episode needs that scene.

I have also found that good editors can assemble and episode very quickly, bashing it into a loose shape. And after watching it through, it may not work for whatever reason. But by only swapping the order of a couple of scenes the whole show changes. Or within a scene you take a few frames off someone and use a close up of someone else. It’s very simple things that change the whole emphasis of a scene. But you never know what that’s going to be until your in the edit.

Last Ride Trailer

Jumping back to the writing, for Gallipoli, you had Christopher Lee writing eight episodes. That seems like a massive chunk of stuff to get through. How did you eat that elephant, so to speak? You directed all the episodes and in it’s own way seems like you were headed into the trenches.

Four feature films back to back, is how I approached it. Because I’m still working on it there’s still things coming up in the next week that I have no idea how I’m going to accomplish it, but I’ve become a firm believer in ‘process’ and that everything works itself out in due time.

With Gallipoli, we shot for 70 days on main unit and about 10 days on a much smaller and reduced units. There’s no way I could get your head around it. I still can’t. So all you can really do is surround yourself with really great, really smart people who you can trust and really take each day as it comes. There’s so many scenes I shot in Gallipoli not really knowing now how they fit together in the bigger picture, there was a lot of trust in Christopher Lee’s script, because by the time you’ve shot nine weeks straight and you’ve still got eight weeks to go, there’s no way any director I think could be that conscious to understand what you’re shooting day to day, all I could do was try and make each moment work.

The same with the editing, there’s no way you can walk in on day one and go “Far out, how do I cut eight hours of epic war drama?”. The way you do it, is to start with the first scene in the first episode and you go from there. How do you eat and elephant? One bite at a time. I totally get that now.

Glendyn Photo by Credit Stephen Macallum

So how did the choice to have one director come about? On your other projects you’ve often shared the responsibility, notably with Emma Freeman, co-directing Puberty Blues. How are you building an infrastructure and team together for one big shoot. And next time around would you want to shoot everything? Or would you rather split the responsibility and workload with another director?

As a director, I’m selfish and part of me wanted to do it all, because there’s something about filmmaking and about the authorship that I love. It’s ego driven of course, but I want it to be mine as much as it can be, so that I can invest everything into it. I’m very collaborative, don’t get me wrong, but as a director I want to be responsible for all of the good stuff, and if and when you fuck up, I want to blame myself.

On series it’s inevitable you are going to work along side other directors and when they do amazing things I think ”I wish I did that!”, I have learnt so much and it can be totally inspring. But when a director does things you don’t like, you go “Aww, why’d they do that?”. Of course in most cases it’s not what they have done is ‘wrong’, in fact it’s probably right. It’s just not the way I would have done it. Which reminds me of the joke… How many Directors does it take to change a light bulb? Three, one to change it, and another two to stand back and say ”…Yeah, that was pretty good, but I could have done it better…”

Right up until shooting Gallipoli and even during shooting, we were talking about getting another director to come on and do some of it, but what happened with Gallipoli, was that there were some actors we could only get for certain amounts of time. Kodi Smit-McPhee who plays the lead he’s LA based, he could do eight weeks, then he had to go away for a month to do press for Planet of the Apes, and then he came back and did another three weeks. So there was no way that you could get another director to come on - because what would they do for that month? Because it’s all intermixed, we ended up shooting all of the scenes with John Bach who plays Hamilton, the main English commander, we did all of his scenes in that month. But Hamilton appears in every episode throughout the series, so in scheduling there’s no way you could get two or even three directors working side by side.

Because of the nature of Gallipoli and the kind of shoot that it was, it was never going to fit into the traditional TV block schedule. It was a very different machine to tradition television shooting. We’ve shot this as one big, eight hour feature. Which is kind of dream for a Director! The disadvantage though is you get a director who is totally exhausted and can never get his head around everything. The advantage of course is you have one director who has one vision for the whole thing.

Also in the edit, I was able to take material that might have been reserved for the eighth episode and put it in the first. I ‘owned’ all the footage, it was all directed by me. When we went in the edit, we had eight hours to work with, as opposed to just the eps I worked on.

Shooting elements in Gallipoli Turkey. Photo Credit John Brawley

Were you editing at the same time, so that you could do pick ups and see how you were headed as you were working?

I worked with one editor, Deb Peart for the full eight hours. She was cutting assemblies from day one. When I walked in at the end, I had a full assembly of the series to look at.

The advantage as far as shooting pickups was concerned was that we shot mostly sequentially, the first episode we shot in the first three weeks of our 16 week shoot. That’s a telemovie in itself, a standalone film and we shot most of it in those three weeks. She could see where there was a few problems, because that sat there for months whilst we shot the rest of the series. We looked at the cut a couple of times during the shoot and were able to tweak a couple of issues that arising. We wrote a few extra scenes and reshot some of the ending. It’s better because of it.

All up though I only had a day of pickups scheduled after the main shoot. Again it was great having all the material to work with and one editor to piece everything together. In the end it was one writer, one director and one editor that formed the whole show. Hopefully there’s a strong visual and narrative consistency that comes through as a result.

I’m curious to find out your experience from the networks’ perspective. Looking abroad, Steven Soderbergh directed, shot and cut The Knick, Cary Fukinaga directed all eight episodes of True Detective, so that seems to be an emerging pattern for television. Do you think from a networks’ perspective they’re going to do that again? I hope and have full confidence that Gallipoli is going to be great, but do you think they’re likely to repeat this? Also is this the first example of it’s kind in Australia?

Apparently I’m the first director to have single handedly directed a shoot of this length in Australia. That’s definitely a nice thing to hear, but then you go “Why hasn’t anyone done this before? There must be a reason why this doesn’t happen!”. Would a network do it again? That’s something you’d have to ask Andy Ryan and Jo Rooney (Channel Nine’s Head of Drama) There’s definitely a greater financial and time cost to it all with one director, because the machine works differently.

But I believe that television can be the new cinema and that’s where audiences are heading. They’re leaving the cinemas and getting true cinematic storytelling on the smaller screen in their lounge rooms, or on their laptops and I think that comes from having good directors, writers, producers. Good ‘storytellers’ and like you mentioned, all those directors and writers are being drawn away from the film world.

I never thought I’d direct television, but I’ve found what I do as a director, be it on the set of a commercial, on a feature film or on a TV show, I’m being a ‘director’. I’m being the same storyteller. I thought TV would be soul destroying, but I’ve found it the opposite. I don’t feel like I’m being compromised or treated as a technician brought in to make the call sheet on time, it’s definitely part of the job, but not THE job. I’m there for my approach as a filmmaker and the way I see the world.

Brenna Harding in Puberty Blues.  Photo by Glendyn Ivin

Does that apply to your cinematography as well? In terms of shooting for the smaller screen, though when it’s a 40 inch plasma, I’m finding it less like it matters. But in speaking with Blake Ayshford the other week he felt that given his longer background in television, his coverage was wanting the close ups more often, whereas his directors bringing their filmic sensibility provided a level of confidence. Was that how you approached it as well?

Whether it’s a small or big screen I shoot exactly the same, I would rarely commit to covering a scene in a wide shot, just because it’s “big screen”, I’ll always get something else closer in. It’s the way I’ve found it works best.

I’ve heard of directors coming back with only wide coverage because that’s all you need to tell the story ‘cinematically’. But for safety in the edit, I’ll always try and get something closer.

I do love treating things in single take though and locking myself into a specific approach. In Gallipoli we have a lot of single take dolly moves, where I try and maintain the whole scene in one shot. Even with a lot of action and battles going on, there’s something very ‘focusing’ about that, by which I mean you get a crew to really acknowledge that we’ve all got to do this just once. It gets everyone on the same page. But I’ll always have a second camera doing something else that I know is going to help me if I get stuck. Maybe I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to that, but I just believe if you’ve got a wide and a close up of a scene, you can generally make anything work in the edit. I love options.

In thinking about a director’s voice and in preparing for this interview, thinking about your body of work, there’s a couple of recurring themes; fatherhood/parenthood, and nostalgia. Even fromLast Ride and Crackerbag, through to Gallipoli which may be the ultimate intersection of those themes. Have you pursued that thematic line, or have you found yourself having a thematic resonance with it and has drawn you to this material?

It’s definitely the themes I’m attracted to. Everything I’ve done is a ‘coming of age’ story of some kind, evenBeaconsfield was a coming of age film. Seeing those ‘boys’ stuck in a situation, transforming and coming out as different people, it’s almost like they entered as boys and exited as men. I like that transition.

Gallipoli is probably the most focused and metaphoric version of that, and if you really look at what I’m most interested in my work, you’ll see similarities or things that are almost duplicate ideas, but strangely enough they’re not things that I purposely put in there. They’re things that have either happened by accident or collective ideas that are out there that become just part of the story.

I’ve always been fascinated with hunting and boys hunting rabbits in particular, because I did a lot of that as a kid living in the country. Last Ride opens with a sequence of a little kid hunting a rabbit and I don’t know how it happened, but Gallipoli now starts in a very similar way. It’s very different, but it’s not something I went “Hey, I really want to do this!”. I think all those things are in stories but where one director might read it and think “Oh ok, he's going to go off and hunt rabbits”. On my radar it’s like that sentence is in bold and in capitals and it’s flashing on and off on the page, “What do you mean? He hunts rabbits! We’re going to make a whole sequence out of this!” So it grows and you pull out the things that you’re interested in. Ultimately they’re the things that become very symbolic, almost spiritual in story telling for me. There’s something about innocence, and the loss of, and there’s so many stories about that, and I'm interested in it at a core level. If you look at everything I’ve done, it’s always there as the underlying theme.

Isabelle Cornish in Puberty Blues.  Photo by Glendyn Ivin

In summing up, what things have you learned on Gallipoli, acknowledging that you’re still in the thick of it at the moment, would you repeat or avoid next time?

What I found with Gallipoli is that it’s ‘big’. It’s such a huge story and there’s just no way you can do it, production wise, in a small way. But the material I always feel so much more gratified with as a director and a story teller, is just when it’s one or two people in a room. No matter how big Gallipoli gets visually, politically or historically; when you see it, it’s the stuff where it’s just one person on screen doing something or thinking about something, or even two people talking, that’s where I get most excited. What I’m was leading to, is we couldn’t have made Gallipoli without 150 people on set at most times; there just has to be camera and sound crew, cast and extras, hair and makeup people, wardrobe, visual effects, special effects; it’s a huge machine and there’s something quite cool about that and you have to have it.

But there’s got to be a way, and I found it occasionally on Gallipoli and often in Puberty Blues, where it’s just a camera person, a sound person, myself in a room with an actor. That to me is where real truth and honesty happens. Perhaps it’s because I started in documentary where it’s all so simple. I yearn for those shooting experiences. I wish there was a way you could structure a shoot where you had a main crew for three weeks and then you had three or four weeks with ten people. I know the heart of the film would be shot with those ten people, similarly I know the heart of Gallipoli and Puberty Blues was always shot when it’s just the core people in a room and it’s extremely intimate and personal. It becomes very much like you’re making it on the spot. There is true immediacy and intimacy. It’s something I REALLY crave a director!

Do you think that’s what you’re going to do next? Do you think you’d prefer to go with a smaller film?

I still feel having gone through Gallipoli I feel really well equipped to work on something of scale. During pre-production of Gallipoli, I’d look at alot of war films, and battles on film, and would think “I have no idea how they do that…”. How would you ever pull that off? How do you get coverage? Where do you put the camera? But some how we manage to get through it as a team. I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out.

Part of me now feels like I’m ready to take on something like that again that has a huge amount of extras, effects and everything. I guess with Gallipoli I found something I’ve always wanted to do, that feels operatic in scale but intimate by nature. Even though it is the full blown war epic, when it comes down to it, its a about individuals who have very rich emotional lives at it’s core.

For me it’s finding the contrast in cutting from the really big to the really small. Form the complex to the simplex. That’s what I really like doing. To find something like that again would be great. Other than that, I’d be quite happy to go off and be a photographer from now on. That’s the thing I like about photography, you can still create beautiful stories, but you don’t need 150 people around you, just a camera. You take the shot and create something very simply. It’s pure.

In the end though I like making stuff, whether it’s a simple photograph or a war epic, it’s kind of all the same to me.

Crackerbag Directed by Glendyn Ivin

Issue 02 of the iPad Magazine I publish on behalf of the Australian Director's Guild has been published to the Newsstand.

Inside I interview director Jessica Hobbs, Bob Connolly has included his Harvey Weinstein address, Stephen Wallace shares Part 2 of his history of the ADG and Mike Hoath's film Crosshairs is featured.

You can check it out here.

https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/screen-director/id689927170?mt=8