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

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.

Jessica Hobbs directing The Slap

How did you get your start in directing television?

I was a first assistant director on a show called Heartbreak High, and I had just found out I didn’t get into film school (AFTRS) for the second time, and I was very disappointed. AFTRS were very nice, but they said “we feel like you’ve done too much now”, and I was like “aaarghh”.  I couldn’t figure out how to make that jump from 1st ADing to directing.  I’d made short films and I’d made a half hour and a one hour for television  in New Zealand and I knew I wanted to do it. After the disappointment of the phone call I was sitting in the tea room at Heartbreak High when the Producer, Ben Gannon, came in, and I found myself saying to him  “I direct as well”   He asked “have you got anything to show me” and I said “Yes”, and he said “great show it to me and maybe we can give you some episodes”.  It took about three weeks and he came back and said “I’m going to give you a block” which I thought was great, I was very excited.  He gave me a piece of advice I’ve held onto, which was “I don’t actually care how brilliant it looks.  If you tell the story well, I’ll give you another two episodes.  If you don’t tell the story well, it doesn’t matter what else you do well, I won’t.”  So I thought, Ok.  It started me on the track of storytelling being the primary function of what I was trying to do.

Fantastic.  And how long were you an assistant director for?

About eight or nine years.  I started when I was twenty, and I started directing full time when I was about twenty seven.

Has that had an impact on your directorial style?  Have you been able to split the two halves of that process?

I think initially, I focused on the practical aspects of it, and I had to unlearn that, and realise everyone else will take care of the practicalities. Your job is to work creatively, and understand creatively, whether you’ve got the moment that you’re looking for or not.  You do have to be responsible for your use of time but you do have to be able to say, we don’t have it yet, I’m not moving on.  And that was a gear shift I had to make.  And I also distinctively remember, and perhaps it’s embarrassing to admit, but I remember thinking on set, the very first scene I did on Heartbreak High, because I’d been a First AD and suddenly was directing, we did two or three takes and everyone looked at me and they went “Great, great” and they started moving on, and I thought “Ok”, and then as we walked out to do the next scene I thought, “Oh… I have to decide!”.  I knew that, but I realised that there was no one else to help me know if I’d got what I needed or not.  And it was good I had that early on.  I just thought, it’s not about how it works for the technicians, it’s not about how the light is, it’s not about any of those things.  I just have to know whether I’ve got what I’m looking for, and I have to understand what I’m looking for.

Just looking at your more recent body of work, I’m interested in the shorter run, and the new formats and how, where there are eight to thirteen episodes of a show, how does that shorter series influence your directing, and the change from a bigger series, if at all?

I think longer running series are delivering a different thing to the audience, in the sense they need to be ongoing, a story that can be endless, so it can go over several years.  And in that structure, the script producer, the producer, and the cast in many ways have a bigger function than the directors, in that they are maintaining a look, feel and style of a show that you need to slip into, to work with and come out of.  When you set up or come on board a short run series, you can be more distinctive in your style, you’re taking different risks. You’re telling a story that will be complete, you know it’s got an ending, so you’re working towards that ending.  When you’re working on long run series, there is no ending.  These characters are on going.  They could be going on for twenty years, if it’s very successful.  Or six, eight, ten years, I’m thinking of shows like All Saints, which went on for a long time, and I went in and out of directing.  I like those two different disciplines, but as a director you do have a different role in ongoing series from short run series.  

Jessica directing Devil's Dust

Following on from that, with a project like “The Slap” where you only have four directors, does that influence what you do?  Does it give you a bigger voice in the show?  How does that collaboration work?

They did a brilliant thing on “The Slap”;  Helen Bowden and Tony Ayres, who were the two main producers of it, a number of people produced it, but they were the people we had the most contact with; they were the on the ground producers.  What was brilliant about working with those two, was they set up a situation where they brought all four directors, the designer and the cinematographer down to Melbourne, and we had three days together.  We all brought films, books, images; and sat down and we talked about style and tone and content and shooting styles, and we did that four months before we started shooting.  That was a fantastic investment. I don’t think it cost that much, but it was a really great thing to do because we all came onboard on the same page. When I started directing the first two episodes, even though Tony was already on board, I knew what Rob Connolly, who was directing the third block and starting weeks later, had thought from that initial discussion.  We were each given a lot of directorial freedom on, “The Slap”. It was different in the sense that they were individual stories so we were allowed to approach them as individual films, that had to have a unifying thread, but they could have a distinct style and voice that had to do with that character, that we were representing in each episode.  

It was a unique format in how it separated the episodes and wasn’t something I’d seen much of either here or abroad.

I think you’re very lucky when you get to do your episode from an individual point of view.  And very much it was that idea of not having to have a universal point of view, but a very distinct singular point of view from one character that was freeing thing as a director.  It’s slightly more filmic in its approach. 

You’ve worked on fictitious and historical projects, in terms of “Curtin” and “Devil’s Dust”.  What responsibility do you find as a director, to the source material, whether it’s to a book, or former property, or someone’s life?  Where do you see that delineation?

Obviously when you’re dealing with straight fiction, in some ways there’s more freedom, but you still have to spend enough time with the writer to be clear of their intent.  You’re working as a team.  They’re part of that filmmaking process.  You need to understand what they’re trying to convey, and what you can do to add to that visually, and what you can do to help convey that thing.  And sometimes you uncover things the writer didn’t intend but they’re happy for you to have uncovered.   When you’re working on historical projects there’s more of a consciousness of ‘this person’s family might still be alive’, you have to be acutely aware when you might be defaming someone, and where those lines are drawn.  What they actually said and what they didn’t.  When we were making “Curtin” for instance, nearly every piece of dialogue and everything that was structured in there came from the actual back room briefings that the writer, Allison Niselle, had researched meticulously, over a number of years, When we ran into script problems Allison and I would work together. I said to her at one point to her, “Dramatically we need a way to introduce characters on screen, I don’t want to have their names written on screen (as it was in the early drafts), I don’t want it to feel like a docudrama, we’ve got to be in the world of the drama” and she said “What do you need?” and I said “I almost need a conversation where they’re talking about who’s going do what in the new Curtin cabinet”.  She said “Oh, I can do that.  Because I know they had a discussion about that, and we can set it in a corridor as the guys are walking past.  And can you shoot it so we know who they are?”  And I said “ Yes. I can put the camera on people, so we’re aware of who’s being discussed, without their names having to come up.”  And it was about how you introduce characters, which is a big thing when you’re setting up a series.  Audiences need to know who to follow; you can mislead them slightly if that’s the intent, give them red herrings, but you need to be clear about how you’re directing them to watch.  

On The Slap with Essie Davis and Oliver Ackland

In that sense, who ended up in that relationship, being more specific to the source material, the documents and the research?  Was it a case of moving away from that when necessary?  Or did you stick very close to it?

With “Curtin”, we stayed very close to it, with “Devil’s Dust” we were trying to compact thirty years of history into three hours of television.  So we knew we were condensing.  And Kris Mrksa who wrote that, did an extraordinary job.  There was one day we got close to a meltdown. Both Kris and I and the actor, John Batchelor who was fantastic as Jack Rush QC, got sent sixteen new pages of dialogue which had been overwritten by lawyers to accommodate what was actually said in the Commission. Kris then had to rewrite it overnight and make sure the scenes still had enough dramatic content that the audience could understand it while keeping it legally ok and John and to try and learn it before the next day.  That was what was difficult, we had to make sure we got it right. We could never have exactly what was transcribed in the commissions, because we weren’t going to have a five hour show straight out of the transcipts, but we needed to show dramatically what had happened.  We had to  make sure we didn’t make leaps which would mean that any kind of assumption could be made that we were taking sides in the way we were reflecting it.  It was tricky, it was really tricky. 

Cause it seems like there was a lot of characters to balance, and when we jumped forward in time, to when Bernie was the mortician, it was a case of “ok, we’ve moved along”.  And particularly in the introduction of Bob Carr.  It was interesting how Drew Forsythe was able to capture Carr’s distinctive mannerisms that defined him before he was fully introduced.  So what sort of insights did you want to capture from the people themselves and make that translate?  

We talked a lot about the essence of the people, rather than imitation. I didn’t want actors to feel they were going into a situation where it was all about the external.  In certain situations we would say “Look, you don’t look anything like that person, it doesn’t matter”.  We joked a lot with Matt Peacock, Ewen Leslie was playing him, and I said “He’s not having a bald cap” because Matt’s bald in his later years, because that’s not the point of who you are.  What Ewen did so beautifully was when he played him young he had this incredible energy, and when the ten year jump happened he came back on to set, it all happened one day on set, we’d filmed him ‘young’ in the morning and when he came back to play the older Matt in the afternoon, it looked like he’d been physically beaten down by life.  I felt this great sadness, and I was talking to the designer about it.  She had a similar experience watching him transform.  When you get older there are things that defeat you and you think “Oh that’s right, I remember what it was to have that youthful energy” and we saw this in one actor in one day, and I thought hopefully we can capture some of that on screen.  It’s a testament to what Ewen is able to portray.  He has the ability in his inner being to just really be that person in that period of time.  It was in all the tiny details, the way he slightly slumped and stood, but his whole energy had gone from being very out to being slightly more cynical and back.  And I thought it was a great reflection of what happens, what can happen in life as you age.  

So in terms of performance and you’re relationship working with actors, how has that changed over your career?

For me it’s very much a trust relationship, and as much as you need them to trust you, you also have to trust them.  You’re not the one up there doing it.  They are.  And you have to understand that at a really fundamental level.  A lot of the time in rehearsal is spent on coming to an agreement about the story that you’re telling.  Then starting to look at the details of how that might be reflected. If you do enough of that work in rehearsal you start to shape who that person is, and I tend to try and look at the key emotional shifts in the story for them.  And we talk about those key moments and everything else that has to be woven in around that.  It means we have a shorthand when we get on set of “this hasn’t happened yet, so you know this has happened to you, but this hasn’t.” I talk with the actor about “where are you at emotionally with this person?”  A lot of it is about looking at those emotional cross channels but leaving the actors on the day to be open to what actually comes up between them.  So they’ve got the given circumstances of what’s happening, and they’re properly informed by the script, and then you allow them to take it wherever it’s naturally going to go.  It provides more excitement than me going, ”I’ve blocked this out in my head, and this is how I think it’s going to be.”  What I tend to do is say “these are my initial thoughts, you can try starting here, or try starting here.  Let’s have a look at how this feels”  And then you very quickly start to work something up with them where they go “Look, I’d actually rather be standing up rather than sitting down.  You know, in terms of energy, I think I need to be here, or I think I could play this differently, if I was sitting down, it might give me more power, and if I use the shift differently.”  You’re just trying to explore where the material seems to work best and what you’re bringing out of it dramatically, and you can see it as it happens in front of you, you can start shaping it with them.  

With Ewen Leslie on Devil's Dust

In terms of time generally, and with rehearsal, is that something you get a chance to do in every project?  Do you get a lot of time with the actors?  And do you find with the shorter series you get more time or less?

I just take the time.  I ring them up, talk to them.  I give them my number.  You can rehearse in lots of different ways.  You can rehearse over a cup of coffee.  You can rehearse by just having a conversation.  My main thing initially is to let them know I’m incredibly open to what they need and however they want to work, how whey might approach it.  There are very different ways of approaching performance, and you need to be open to those with actors.  You need to understand where they’re coming from, how they might work.  And then whether you need to shift that into perhaps something that’s more physicalised or more concrete or cerebral, depending on what you think might help what they’re doing.  And it’s also accessing from them, you know I like to try and draw out, “what are you most scared of, what are you worried about with this?”  And once you start to share those things, and I’ll often share “this is what I’m terrified of.  I’m terrified that the piece will come out and the audience will think this, this and this.  And if that’s all we give them, what a waste of time.  This is what I’m hoping they’ll think at the end of this.  What are you hoping that they’ll think?”  So I try and start those conversations.  But I don’t think rehearsal is an expensive thing, and I’ve never met an actor who doesn’t want to rehearse at all.  They’re all happy to have a conversation.  Sometimes they’ll say “I don’t want to get up on the floor” or “I don’t want to do it with other people, I just want to converse with you” and I’ll try and make that work.  Sometimes it’s just individual time.  Sometimes it’s group time.  But producers that I work with are very aware that’s part of the process that I do.  I don’t like and won’t have situations on set where an actor arrives that I haven’t met yet. I need to have spoken with them at least the night before, even if they’re playing a small role and have some prior conversation.  And with casting too, I’m part of that process because to me in an audition situation I get a very quick feel of the flexibility of the actor and their possibilities and what they might bring to it.  And we start our communication from that very first meeting.  

It’s really good that it happens, you occasionally hear horror stories where that opportunity isn't afforded.  

It is, but it does depend on where your priorities are.  For me, I love it.  It’s one of my favourite things.  Working with the cast, choreographing the physicalisation of the drama that’s going on is something that I really love and am very comfortable with, and so maybe I lean towards that.  But it’s also where my strengths are, so you also play to your strengths.  

There seems to be a lot of female directors leaning towards television as opposed to features, such as Rachel Perkins, Emma Freeman, Jane Campion and yourself.  What do you think is conducive about television and the longer format that appeals to female directors and has that been your experience?

No.  That hasn’t been my experience.  I think all of those directors are extremely good directors and who make both feature films and television.  But features have become,  maybe it’s always been a hard market, but it seems very difficult to get films made, get them financed.  What I’m really thrilled about is that I’ve been a big lover of television for a long time and it’s really exciting to see all these film directors coming into television because I think they have a whole other, unique way of looking at things that they can add.  You see that in “Top of the Lake”, but I don’t think that means Jane’s going to stop making films, and I certainly know Emma Freeman will make films, and Cate Shortland, who is a great feature director is also a wonderfully successful TV director and, you know there are all these people, when you talk to them they love longer form drama. In a film you’re telling a story over a couple of hours, when you get to tell a story over six, eight, ten hours, you get more things to explore.  There are more possibilities.  There are different things within ensembles.  It’s a different form.  It’s got more money in it now.  It’s got more international recognition, and people are responding to it as a form in itself rather than a poorer cousin.  I’m thrilled with that because I’ve always thought television’s very cool, but that hasn’t always been the way people have responded.    And in terms of female directors, I think we’ve got an abundance of incredibly good female directors in Australia, when I think there’s Jane Campion, Daina Reid, Cate Shortland, Kate Dennis, Emma Freeman, Shirley Barrett, Rachel Perkins, Leah Purcell, Rachel Ward … there’s so many and they’re all working all the time.  They’re highly in demand.  And I don’t know if that’s necessarily that they’re better with film or television.  I think they’re practical.  A lot of them have kids and they want to work and television is an ongoing thing that you can also self create and fund and in Jane’s and Rachel’s case you can produce as well, so there’s ways of getting an income where you’re funded before you start, whereas with a feature film there’s a higher risk financially.  You may get a smaller audience, and with TV you’re reaching more people.  It’s fantastic to reach more people.  Everyone directs because they want people to respond to the work.  You want as many people as possible to see it.  

It is interesting watching the landscape change, especially with internet delivery, it’s no longer an Australian or American show, it’s the click of a button.  It’s a great equaliser.  

It’s fantastic, that Australian shows, and English shows and Danish shows are making it into America.  Some of them are being remade, but some are being remade with the creators of those shows. Peter Duncan who created “Rake” with Richard Roxbrough and  Ian Collie has gone onto create the American version, which is a brilliant thing for an Australian writer/producer/director to be doing.  And Chris Chibnall who created “Broadchurch” is writing the pilot episode of the American version of that show.  It’s fantastic that these people are starting to criss cross the globe.  Danish television has a whole incredible niche of its own.  

Where do you see your own voice as a filmmaker?  Are you attracted to a particular style of show?  What attracts you to the projects you’ve previously worked on?

I love things that deal with identity, gender, family dynamics and I love political thrillers.  I love things where you can take a personal story to explore a political issue, and that hopefully you can start to, not preach to the converted but preach to those people who may not think in a way you hope they would - Devil’s Dust was like this, you try to reach them through the drama. I think that’s a great thing.  You can actually influence and shift people’s perceptions and ways of looking at the world.  They watch it quite comfortably, because they don’t feel they’re being preached at.  Hopefully.  But it might start to shift the way they think and I think you can have, you would hope that you can contribute something to your community by doing that.  So that’s the kind of thing I look for.  

Has that been your experience?  With Devil’s Dust particularly, one of the most recent things, but also one of the most touchy subjects I suppose, has it been your experience that people leaning one way or another have reacted to your work?

I guess I only know what comes back to me, and there was some very good press regarding it.  But I look at things like my partner’s parents, I did a short feature a few years ago about a young Albanian refugee, and at that stage they were very conservative and struggling with certain issues to do with refugees and yet they loved that film and really responded to that girls’ plight and talking to them about it, I could see they related to her as a person.  I think sometimes when you take a broader issue, but you show it through one individual, people can relate more easily.  And that’s often what you’re trying to do.  I live in hope.

I’ve found that same idea of scope-creep in my own projects, where it’s a struggle to pair back the “issues” and focus on the human story.

But look at “Redfern Now”, it’s a brilliant piece about Aboriginal, urban life.  And there hasn’t been a lot of that reflected on our screens.  Generally Aboriginal characters have seemed to need a reason to be on screen.  They need a backstory.  They don’t in “Redfern Now”.  They’re just part of the story, because they’re part of the life, of the community.  So all those things are helping to shift that perception.  I really loved with “The Slap”, that it was truly multicultural and very, very reflective of those areas of Melbourne that Christos knows and comes from and it was very important we captured that accurately.  That we had actors playing those roles who understood where they were coming from. They understood that world.  And we reflected it in a way that was our experience of Australia.  And I remember when we did “Love My Way”, we all talked a lot about extended family dynamics and what our experience was and how we wanted to see more of that reflected on screen.  What it was to be female, in these kind of interchangeable family dynamics where you might have a child with one person but you’ll be with someone else ten years later, but the child binds you for life, and how does that get played out?  How does that make you feel and how do you manage it?

What do you see as the future of Australian television drama and film?

I think the most exciting thing that’s happening in Australian drama is that more and more we seem to be able to get our dramas into the international arena and I think it’s fantastic that Australian voices and Australian stories are being seen and being bought outside Australia and for me that’s incredibly exciting, while at the same time we’re maintaining our local audience.  The more local product we make the more we reflect our own culture, the more we learn from our own culture and the more diverse our stories can be.  If we’re only buying in content then we’re reflecting cultures to our children that are not necessarily relevant to what they’re growing up with and might influence their view of the world in a way I don’t think is necessarily positive.  This way we’re part of an international arena and I think that we are being viewed, our work is being viewed, very highly and I think that’s incredibly exciting.

From the perspective of a budding director, what advice would you have going forward, and how do you make the leap into the professional sphere? 

Keep making your own stuff.  I think that’s really important.  Try and figure out where you'd like to end up.  So if there’s a show being made you really like, look at the production companies that are making those shows directly and say “I love this show and I love what it’s saying and this is the kind of thing I’d like to do.  Is there anything I can do, even if it’s not on this show, do you have another show, that maybe I could start on, that may not be as prestigious, where you would take more of a risk on me as a starting director with the view to me then crossing over to doing something higher profile?”  And it’s just building up people’s confidence that you can deliver the work.  There’s a lot of pressure on you to be able to deliver.  They want to know you can deliver within time and budget, but also that it’s going to be good.  So the more your work gets better and the more you’re able to take those opportunities to do that; it is hard - I asked, I got lucky.  Ben Gannon could have just said “Look, we’ve got a full slate of directors and we’d prefer you as a First” and I don’t know, I was still probably ambitious enough and would have found a way to do it, but that was just a great opportunity.  Sadly shows like that don’t exist anymore, because Heartbreak High was brilliant for that, because they were young actors and the producer was prepared to take risks. There are lots of amazing Australian producers who are prepared to take risks.  John Edwards is someone who’s given a lot of people breaks.  He’s absolutely fantastic at doing that and he continues to do that.  I think there are a lot of companies out there who are willing to do it, you just have to keep going forward.  And if you have good film work to show them they will respond to it.  

I’m curious about your experience as a First AD and translating that, because there is a very pigeonhole culture around that as well, in terms of are you a first AD or are you a director and there’s a temptation to ask, “Can’t I be both?”

I’d try doing one thing at a time.  If you’re writing a series, focus on the writing of it.  If it goes ahead you will get the opportunity to direct it.  By being in there, by being in the right place, you don’t need to necessarily discuss that, you don’t need to say I’m writing it to be able to direct it.  Say I’m writing it to get the best directors I can on board to do this, but I would also like to be involved as a producer, because that’s what I’m trying to learn, and I’m bringing the project to you, but I want to work with experienced producers; and you want to match up with someone who will let you do that.  And then, it’s kind of one step at a time, and then bring the directing in.  If you go in saying; “I’ve written this to direct”, it’s not such a good proposition for them, because they’re going “We’re going to take a punt on you as a writer, but as a director as well?  Well we feel less secure about that.”  It’s a business, you have to understand what you’re putting forward.  

In terms of the business, has that changed over time, working for both commercial and government broadcasters, and the projects they’ve commissioned?

Yes. I think the most interesting shift is that producers used to dominate and run the television industry, and the shift from that is now writer-producers, are starting to have more influence, which I find very exciting creatively.  There’s a lot of very good creative producers who have worked like that with the writers for a long time, but writers are also taking producing credits which are giving them much more say on the outcome of their shows look and feel and tone. My hope is that directors also start to produce as part of that collaborative team.  

In terms of the power of the director, you’ve been fortunate to work with some high profile projects, with genuine artistic merit.  Has it been your experience that there are times when you get shaken off as a director?  That you can become a cog in the wheel?

It’s a creative industry, it can happen in any circumstance.  There are combinations which are good, some which are less good.  It’s hard to know.  You’ve got to look at it carefully before you go into it.  The real thing is being true to yourself about, “Do I love this project?  Is this a story I really want to tell?” rather than “Is this good for my career?”.  I think if you start thinking that way, you might find yourself in a situation where “I don’t really relate to the material” or “I’m really struggling with this” or “I’m not sure about the dynamics”.  If you really love the material then you look at the team and think, “Do I think we’re going to be a good combination?”.  When you’re younger and starting out, you have less choice, but I still encourage people to look at, you’ve got to have a real engagement with the story, not “I’ve got to get runs on the board” but that it’s a story I’ve really got to tell, and I can contribute something.  There’s something that I can bring that’s unique about the way I tell stories to that”.  So that’s what I’d encourage people to look at.  

Have there been situations where the collaboration isn’t as strong and you’ve had to fall back on your craft to get through?

There have certainly been situations where I’ve looked back and thought “It would have been better in this situation, rather than me try and facilitate a number of different points of view to be clearer about what my point of view was.  And stick with that.  And then try and work that in with what other people wanted.”  Sometimes when you’re trying to serve too many different points of view,  I’ve experienced losing track of what my point of view is.  And my experience is my work isn’t as good when I do that.  I’m better to hold onto my point of view.  I don’t mean in a dogged way, but  to be able to sit down with people and say “This is why I think this” they might not agree, but then they put their point forward and you try and talk about it.  I think what’s challenging is it’s often emotional in a creative situation.  You feel very strongly.  You’re tired.  They’re tired.  It’s a subjective point of view, but you work through that.  You just try and keep working through that.  

I’m interested in your relationship with your key collaborators, your cinematographers, and other heads of department.  What sort of relationship have you had with them and has that sustained throughout your career?

I’ve shifted around a lot with cinematographers.  It’s often got to do with circumstance.  You work with someone for a couple of years and then you’re not doing something.  I’ve had children, so you have breaks, and they move on to doing other things, so when you want to work with them again they’re not available.  I like working with new people, I find it exciting, and great things can come out of it.  After I’d done “The Slap”, I really wanted to work with Andy Commis again, and I was trying to get him to do “Devil’s Dust” but he wasn’t available and then Toby Oliver turned up and Toby was fantastic.  And I might not have worked with Toby if that circumstance hadn’t happened.  I worked with a producer on that who was just a genius, Antonia Barnard who was really, really fantastic, and one of the things I learnt from her was she talked about who’s right for this project.  They don’t have to be right for everything you do but what’s the right person for this project?  On “Devil’s Dust” we had limited time and budget for what we were trying to achieve.  Who’s going to cope best in those circumstances and deliver the best outcome?  It’s just thinking all the time about how those relationships can work and what’s going on.  And being very honest upfront in your early meetings about how you see it and then listening to how they see it.  It’s the same with actors.

In terms of casting, you had what seems open slather of top tier actors in the country.  How does that come about?  Daniel Henshall is a minor role in Devil’s Dust…

They were great!  I’ve been in love with Daniel Henshall for quite some time, but once I’d seen him in Snowtown I was like, “Please!  Can we get him in?” And I was just trying to figure out any place to put him in.  I thought he would be beautiful in that role because he’s extremely memorable and the effect of him passing away would really ricochet with the audience in a way that I thought was important.  So when I spoke to Dan about that he was really up for it.  Sometimes it’s about saying to actors “This is what I’m hoping to achieve by asking you to play this role”  and they finish at this point, but this it what it would give the audience.  Dan is incredibly generous, he just wants to work.  And he has fun and when he finished filming with us everyone was so disappointed he wasn’t going to be there the next day, because he’s just brilliant.  

Tony Hayes I’d worked with on “The Slap” and I’m a big fan. He’s such an interesting actor, but I wanted him in a role which I felt, really would showcase just what a breadth of talent he has.  I knew having to cast it to play across that many years, he could do that.  It took a little more convincing for some of the investors. To me it was obvious from the start, but that was my point of view.  I’d worked with him and totally knew he could do it.  To his great credit he came and auditioned and did an outstanding audition.  I don’t think I was going to back down on my choice of him as Bernie Banton, but he trusted me enough to come and audition and he did it and it was a great thing.

Don Hany was another person I’d wanted to work with for a long time, and Ewen and we just asked these guys.  I find sometimes if you know who you’re looking for you can go directly to them and say “this is who I’d like to play the role, can we offer it to them?”.

So how much time do you generally have on these projects and how has that influenced your skills?

I’m looking at working over in the UK next year and they were dumbfounded with how much time we had to shoot “The Slap”.  They thought I’d made a mistake when I said we had eight days an episode.  And they said “No, no, no.  How much time did you actually have for shooting?”  and I said “Eight days”.  There was a long silence and they kind of went “Right”.  But I also think that’s a testament to the crew and the cast, and it’s what we can afford here.  You have to shoot to what you can afford.  There’s not more money than that.  Budgets are quite open when you understand what you’re working with.  I just never want the audience to look at it and you never want a card going up that says “We did the best we could in the given circumstances”.  I don’t want them to think about any of that.  I just want them to think it’s a great show.  

So what do you think the extra time would get you?

My partner who directs feature films, talks about how there’s just never enough time.  You will always extend what you’re doing to fill the amount of time possible.  I think when you get very constricted in time, sometimes you feel like you’re making economical decisions rather than creative ones.  And you have to look at yourself and go “would this be better if I made a more creative decision?  Is there a more creative way to approach this scene rather than thinking I need to cover everybody in it, or that I have their moments?  Who’s scene is this and what is it actually about?”  So I find the less shooting time I have the more I prepare, I think about what is the essence of what I’m trying to do here and what’s the clearest and simplest way to give the audience that sensation.  Is there a more lateral way I could approach it to give them that sensation without having to spell it out?  I think the hard thing is that sometimes there are moments you’d like to have in there that you know don’t mean anything necessarily, in terms of plot or structure but you just know it’s a moment that would give the audience a sensation or a breath or, a feeling about what that character’s life is like.  I fight for those. 

And how do you collaborate with your writers?

Generally in television the writers are on board before the directors.  A script comes to you and you read it and then you sit down and you talk about it.  Again I’ve learnt that the most important thing in that initial meeting is to be as honest as possible about what is working, but also what’s not working.  So you don’t then come to blows further down the track. I’ve learned how to try and be upfront about what I’m responding to and what I’m concerned about, but it’s also about finding ways to talk about that, in the same way it might be hard as a Director in the cutting room to have someone come in and go “well the cut’s not working, and this, this and this!”, but if someone says to you “I’m just wondering what you’re trying to convey here” then you can talk to that.  It’s the same when you’re approaching scripts, try and really understand what the writer’s trying to convey and if it’s not clear to you it may be that you’ve missed something or it may be that they’ve assumed something that’s not quite there on the page.  I think that relationship’s really precious and I love it.  The writer’s the person I’m most anxious about seeing it as soon as we’ve finished a cut.  I want the writers and producers to feel, when they see that first cut, that it’s as good as it can be and hopefully surprising to them.  That there are elements they didn’t foresee that they like.

Does that process extend to the editing phase - and do they ever come in and you collaborate with them at that stage?

Oh yeah.  I like them to come in. Absolutely.  

And how is that interpreted by the producers?

You have to work with the producers as to what it is.   Sometimes you bring writers in, sometimes a producer will say; “Look I would like the writer not to come in until the later stage.  We’ve got a lot of opinions coming in” or “Let’s show it to the writer separately”  I’m trying to remember what we did on “The Slap”, I think because as Tony was the show runner and producing, he’d run the writing room and he was the main conduit for all the writers.  He would watch the cuts and he felt confident that he was in communication with the writers about being able to convey things he felt weren’t on screen, that they’d wanted that you might be able to shift. On “Devil’s Dust” I got Kris Mrksa in really early and said “Can you look at this? The opening we all thought was going to work isn’t working, and this is what I’m suggesting we change it to”.  I remember with Kris there was a section I felt I really couldn’t get in, I couldn't make work.   He came up with a great suggestion that I was so grateful for.  And the editor and I kept trying it and I rang him the next day and said, “I found a way to make it work and I’m really glad you pushed me to put it back in because it’s such an essential story element”, I just needed to keep thinking it through.

Regarding the show runner role, is that something you think should happen in Australian drama?

I think shows do function well if you have a multitude of writers and directors to have a creative head.  Essentially at the end of the day, someone has to make the call.  If it’s a director, writer and producer all arguing, who’s going to make that call?  I think it works well in a structure where that person’s been given that creative head role.  Choosing that person is very important and understanding what the ramifications of that are.  I think it’s a good structure to work with because again it’s so subjective.  Then they can defend what you’re trying to do to the broadcasters or the investors.  You just hope that you and they have a similar viewpoint and you have an open communication.  

Is it specific to certain projects, or do you think that should happen more or less?

It depends.  I don’t think the committee thing really works.  On Devil’s Dust, we worked as a team.  Two producers Stephen Corvini and Antonio Barnard, the writer Kris Mrksa and myself, but they gave me a lot of freedom in the cutting room.  I presented a cut and then they would come up with what their issues were and the editor and I would go off and rework on the cut. They’d come in and work with me sometimes but I never felt they were taking my hands off the reins. We were trying to work together to find the solutions and make it the best we could.  That’s what you want, it’s a collaboration and I talk to people a lot about finding the best collaboration you can and understanding what that is, without letting go of your vision.  You don’t want everyone just to agree on the least controversial outcome.  It is better to have the fight, even if one idea wins over another and I didn’t agree with it.  I’d rather it was a more controversial idea than a weaker idea that we all agreed on.  

What’s next?  What are you working on and what’s in store?

At the moment it looks like I’m going to to a project in the UK, but it could all fall over tomorrow as negotiations do, but I have been going there on and off for the last couple years, and have been offered a number of projects and I haven’t been able to do them because of family commitments and things here.  But it looks like we can now, our son’s just finished his HSC and our youngest is going into year two and we feel like we can afford to travel now.   I’m excited about working in a different arena.  I’d like to be able to work in other parts of the world and if that’s possible I feel like now’s the time to do it, then you can reinvest that back into what you do here.  It’s a lovely career path in the sense that you do have a lot of freedom within it.  You don’t have to stay in one place - you can explore the possibilities.  I think there’s some great television coming out of the UK and if I spoke Danish I’d be over there in a second, knocking on doors, trying to get a job.  I think what they’ve been doing is amazing.

I was fortunate to interview director Kieran Darcy Smith for the inaugural issue of the Australian Directors Guild magazine Screen Director, where we spoke about his career, writing and directing his first film Wish You Were Here

You’ve previously mentioned that a lot of directing is in the writing.  How have you approached that and switched gears between the two?  Does it stop and how do you delineate between writing and directing is there a point where that happens?

It’s funny, because at the moment I’m attached to a couple of project I didn’t write but I’ve also got one that I did write.  And I also used to say that, and I particularly felt this with Wish You Were Here, that such a large element of the direction takes place in the screenplay.  Because you’re sort of really seeing it through as you’re writing it.  You’re sort of feeling the energy, to know exactly when to get in and out of a scene.  You know exactly what the transition’s going to be.  You can kind of picture camera, how it’s working, picture performance levels and so on and so forth.  And I guess it’s not that different from when you come onto a script that someone else has written.  Because you’ll invariably do a director’s pass on it anyway.  So you tend to lay into it all of those transitions and you sort of play it out orchestrally in your head and navigate that as you’re going.  So I still feel a lot of directing goes on, on the page.  In terms of moving between one stage and the next, you go into a different mode I guess, once you’ve  sort of seen it through on the page and you feel like it’s working.  And you’ve got to really feel confident, and you’ve got to see through every sequence.   And every transition and every scene, and picture the whole thing and know that it’s holding up in your head, and then you’ve got to trust that.  Because no one else will if you don’t.  You’ve really got to back yourself and go in there with utter confidence.  And if you have that confidence, you get into preproduction and you test it.  You get into conversations with all your various heads of department.  And I’d occasionally do little previs setups out in the carpark and just test a couple of things to make sure they’re working, but I only did that on three or four scenes.  And they were working, and I felt like I had a bit of a handle on it.  I have to admit I really loved preproduction, because you’re just surrounded by all these incredible people who are just giving so much, and they do trust you, and you’ve got a lot of responsibility then, to really think about the decisions that you’re making.  Cause you don’t want to let them down.  You also don’t want to waste the money, you want to make the film well.  You switch gears and it becomes a lot more visual and then it all becomes about communication because how do you get across what’s in your head really clearly to these people?  It’s like going to get a haircut, you know, you say to the guy or the girl I want this and she says ‘yeah great, I know exactly what you want’ and you walk out and it’s completely different, and a lot of that goes on.  It’s hard at first to convey exactly what you’re seeing and feeling, and I remember that with our production designer Alex Holmes; there was this massive pen drop moment - he’d been coming in with all this stuff and it wasn’t quite right and then it clicked for him one day and he went “fuck, I get it” and he came in with all this stuff and I said “man that’s it”.  It took him a while to figure out what I was getting at.

Because no one else will if you don’t.  You’ve really got to back yourself and go in there with utter confidence.  

Kieran with producer Angie Fielder on set in Cambodia

In the special features on the DVD you were talking about you and Jules’ (DP) relationship with each other and how he was challenging you and there was that back and forth.  Can you talk about a scene or moment that really challenged each other and you butted heads, but ultimately it benefitted the end product.

See in terms of specific scenes, I couldn’t really pull up an example, but in the early stages, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted the camera to do, and I wanted it to be very unobtrusive and very pretty.  I take a lot of photographs and I do love a pretty picture but I also love that fly on the wall sensibility and just capturing something real and being there with the people and not drawing attention to the camera.  And Jules had done six movies by then, and every DP loves their toys, and he’s always be saying “Well look, you know Kiz, you’re using so much handheld in here, and why can’t we put a really nice drift across that or whatever” and I’d say “Yeah, it just doesn’t feel right” and then I’d have to find ways of justifying and contextualising that within the scene and the drama and what was actually going down, and the mood and the feel, and the music of it.  We’d go backwards and forwards and if I’d made my point and it was clear and he got it, he was like “great, let’s do that, let’s lock that in!”  But if he wasn’t convinced, he’d keep arguing and he wasn’t arguing for the sake of it, he wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing.  And the good thing about that was it meant that by the time we were shooting, I remember  the first couple of days, the first couple of days are pretty freaky, you’ve never done it before and you’re just suddenly, you know, in the past, you might have made a short film that’s four minutes long and it took you three days to make and now you’re doing a four minute scene in two hours and you’re moving on and you’ve gotta forget about it and move onto the next thing and you’ve got a whole day ahead of you.  It’s pretty scary, but I remember the rushes came in on day three from the first two days and everything was working, everything was exactly the way I’d seen it.  And it was cutting like butter.  And from that moment on I just trusted myself and Jules, he was already trusting me by then, but I just knew it was gonna work.  And so that’s when you can make really bold choices.  And there were certain times when I really did want a specific move but it was very intentional, very deliberate, very subtle a lot of the time but that was the main thing in terms of camera style.

In terms of collaboration how was your relationship with the actors and what was that like?

I didn’t get on very well with the lead actress Felicity (laughs) - Nah I’m kidding, obviously she’s my wife and she’s just there.  Obviously it’s a very unique situation with Felicity and I, in that I’m working with my wife, and the great thing about that was, and I’ll have to admit, and she’ll probably clobber me, but she’s said this before, but because we cowrote the script, she was always attached to play that role which is great, I’d seen all of her work prior to that and she’s a terrific actress, but she’d never carried a feature film before, and that’s a very different thing.  I’ve worked for years as an actor myself and I’ve done plenty of supporting roles and lead guest roles and stuff like that, but it’s a very different thing to carrying a feature film.  Carrying a feature film is an art unto itself.  It’s not so much that it’s an art, it’s that it takes a particular kind of personality,and that’s why some people become movie stars and others who are just as great an actor will never carry the story they’ll always be second or third billed.  So I wasn’t sure, I didn’t know if she could cut that, but the great thing was, she knew that I was never gonna let anything go that I wouldn’t believe, because she knew me well enough and knew what I was after and all an actor wants is a director they can trust and feel safe, and all a director wants from their actor is trust, and she trusted me implicitly, and she was prepared to walk on fire, to jump off a cliff for me, and it meant that I had this gift, this incredible tool to work with because she is a really terrific actress and when the first couple days of rushes came in I saw that she was just nailing it, she was smoking the stuff and then we just got on with it.  There was never a harsh word between us, writing the script or anything, and Joel’s been my best friend for twenty years; we went to drama school together and we’ve lived together and we’ve got a company together and so he trusted me and I trusted him so there’s no worries there.  It was a love fest, it was a really blessed project.  Everything had aligned and no one got sick, we didn’t lose any days, we didn’t have bad weather, everything just lined up.  It was a pretty lucky shoot.

Speaking of Blue Tongue [Films], what was that like?  I think it’s a really special thing that Australia has the Blue Tongue school of filmmakers, in a similar way to the Mexicans having Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro Innaritu...

That’s good company you’re putting us in...

I really love the Blue Tongue stuff, there’s a real atmosphere that’s present, from The Square, to Animal Kingdom to this, that there’s a mood and sense of dread, that urban noir, and how do you find that collaboration throughout everyone who’s making these separate projects?

I think there’s a modicum of luck and happenstance there.  When it first started out it was me and Nash (Edgerton), Joel (Edgerton), and another friend of ours Tony Lynch and this was like 1995, and we all shared the same sensibility; none of us had ever done anything so we kind of learned how to do all that together on the street, it sort of developed its own voice I guess, but it was something we all happened to be drawn to.  The only parallel I could draw is that you find a rock band like U2, those guys happened to go to the same school together and they happened to start jamming and form a band and they’re completely cohesive and they’ve gone on to be U2 and there’s so many of those bands that have come together and clicked and they’ve found one another, but on the flip side there’s countless others together, but it just doesn’t work, because you’re of a different sensibility.  And I think we all viewed cinema similarly and we had a similar taste.  in the beginning and that drew people to us and us to them, and Spencer (Susser) and David Michod and Mirrah (Foulkes) and Luke Doolan, we all sort of found one another cause they were interested in what were doing and they were interested in us and we all became really good friends.  But they wouldn’t have been drawn if they didn’t like it, so there’s no mystery there.  But no one’s ever discussed a style, a technique or a way, no one’s ever discussed much at all except for the scripts and the cuts.  We all sort of collaborate in a sense if one of us is in town and the other one is shooting something we’ll  jump in and grab a camera or whatever, but I dunno, the majority of the collaboration comes to the script itself, we’re always running it by one another, or at the cutting stage, post production stage, getting people in.  But there’s never been a discussion about style, there’s not been many discussions about much really (laughs) we just sort of hang out together and make movies and fortunately we’ve been lucky so far.  

Kieran and wife, actress Felicity Price in Sundance

There’s a scene in Wish You Were Here where Joel Edgerton’s character is being watched and there’s this sense of voyerism that permeates through many of the Blue Tongue films.  How do you approach a scene or aesthetic like that?

I’ve always been interested in mystery and thrillers and a lot of my favourite films are some of the Australian films made in the 70s, you know all the sort of stuff Quentin Tarantino talks about loving as well.  I just love Long Weekend and Summerville that’s set down in Australia and even Picnic at Hanging Rock, there’s something about those movies, there’s kind of a dark scary, atmospheric thing that I’ve always been drawn to.  It’s tricky because at the end of the day I have a pretty short attention span and so I’m a massive reader but I have real trouble watching television; the only thing I ever really watch is cinema, we don’t even have a TV set and haven’t for years.  I find it hard to sit in one spot, but I read tons.  I’ve read just about everything but I do need story, and I need cause and effect and I need to have that constant thing of ‘what are they gonna do?’, ‘how’s he gonna get out of this?’.  And I think that came from when I was growing up, my dad had tons of great literature but he also had the world’s largest collection of airport novels, like Glenn Dayton, Alistair McClaine, Robert Ludlum and guys like that and I’d devour that stuff when I was like 12, 13, I was just ripping through this stuff.  And I think it developed in me a need to just keep the ball in the air, rather than just waffle on too much.  For example, with Crime and Punishment, I just can’t finish it, it’s my wife’s favourite book and I can’t finish it.  I’ve tried three times.  It just goes on and on and on and on, before getting to the next plot point.  Great characters and great psychology and great intrigue, but I just need story.  And when I’m developing any kind of idea I’ve got that thriller-esque tone in the back of my head.  And I like little drip fed bits of information that keep you wondering, but they’ve gotta pay off.  When we were writing this script, intitially it didn’t have much of that tension throughout the middle of it, it was more of a domestic psychological implosion, but as we developed it further and further and i had this kind of thriller-esque framework I wanted to hang it off, things like that would just pop up.  And you’d know where they tied in and how to make em play.  But I couldn’t have imagined the music of the film not having those little bits of tension and suspicion and fear and danger in them, and they’re really easy things to craft in and shoot too.  

It really does keep the momentum going forward.  Going a bit more broadly and theoretical here, how conscious of the portrayal of Asia and the idea of the ‘orient’ were you going into the film?  It almost seems like at the end of the film when Joel goes into the bar at the end of the film, it’s a bit Deer Hunter like.  It’s really dangerous and scary and it feels like another world.  How did you approach that and on the day, given that you are filming in a foreign country, was there relationship to that an issue, and how did you balance it?  

Oh man, we could spend two hours answering that question!  The first place I ever went overseas was Bangkok and I was 25 years of age, I got off a plane at 6:30 in the morning in Bangkok city in 1989 and it was fucking bedlam.  It just blew my mind and I was hooked from that second!  And then I fell into this mad love affair with South East Asia  and I travelled a lot through that area and prior to that I had always been drawn to these shocking Asia videos that were going round in video shops back in the 80s and there was something very mysterious and dangerous and evocative about South East Asia.  And you’d get off a plane and you’d smell it.  It just hits you.  There’s just so much history.  It’s just this fat, thick, smoky, wet air, full of stories and like I say it was like a love affair.  I was just into it.  So I spent years traveling around, well over the years, a month here, a month there, whatever, and ended up spending quite a lot of time in Cambodia.  And back in the day too, when the war was still on and it was crazy in those days and it had a really bad and violent history, these extraordinary people.  It really got me.  And I ended up writing another movie.  The first script I ever got any funding on, this was 1996 I think it was.  I got some money from the Film and TV Office to go and write a script and I went over there and wrote it.  So I spent about eight weeks in Cambodia then and I just kept going back.  I guess the thing about South East Asia back then, and I’m so glad you used the word ‘orient’, cause I always used to think of it as ‘the orient’, ‘the far east’ this other, dark mysterious voodoo-esque kind of world that was just like really on our doorstep.  And a kind of right of passage for Australian tourists too.  So when we started developing this story, we were originally talking about Bali and Thailand and all these different places and it just had to be Cambodia.  Michael Cody who ended up being our line producer for the Cambodian shoot is a very old dear friend of ours and he has spent years in the region working as a journalist and producer on TVCs and stuff, and he’s just shot a movie over there that he co-directed with Amiel Courtin-Wilson who did Hail.  Michael produced Hail.  And I think they’re actually there right now.  So he was our on the ground guy and he found a way of us pulling it off and it had to be Cambodia.  That whole opening  sequence where you see the snakes and the gun and the elephant and the pigs, that was all written in.  Every single shot you see was written in.  And we just went out and chased it down and found it.  But the reason it takes so long to answer is because the shoot itself that was down in the brothel, was the real deal.  We were down in a little place called chicken village, which was a little place down in a tiny place, a world unto itself, out the back of Seenookville Port and it’s where the poorest of the poor sailors and fishermen go to find prostitutes.  And it’s heavy duty.  It’s run by the Vietnamese mafia.  Everything we’d written into the film was based on reality and it was all true.  And that scene that Joel’s character ends up in, is a scene that I experienced in Thailand on the Burmese border many many years before.   And so I just tried to make it as real as I possibly could.   It was the hardest thing to shoot.  We shot that over two nights.  And it was madness.  It was bedlam.  And I had Cambodian cast who didn’t speak a word of English, Cambodian crew who didn’t speak English,  Vietnamese cast who didn’t speak English, three translators, it was crowded, hot and crazy.  There were guys with machine guns coming down the street with police bringing gangsters down the street and taking them to a lock up just round the corner and it was insane.  I could write a book on it, but I don’t know how to start explaining.  

What were the best and hardest parts of the film?

The part I enjoyed the most I guess was preproduction, I used to say, when I was in it I’d love to do this every day of my life.  And I could do pre production 365 days of the year for the rest of my life because it’s such a buzz.  Because you’re just being so creative and you’ve got all these great people coming to you bringing you ideas and I just love that sort of collaboration.  But then the pressure of shooting I really really enjoyed.  And it sort of took me by surprise because I’d always wondered if I’d go to water directing a movie.  Because I don’t know that everyone can do it.  That doesn’t mean that I or anyone who directs a movie is special, but you are under a lot of pressure, but what I liked about it, and I have to admit that I’m quite an anxious guy, I’ve had problems with anxiety since I was 17 and there’s all sorts of things I was worried about.  But at the end of the day I realised I’m the kind of guy that when the pressure’s real and it’s ramped up, I actually change and become more focused and calm than I’ve ever been in my life.  And more leader like than I’ve ever been too.  And so rather than going to water I actually became far more effective, articulate and clear, and just much more on top of things than  had I not been under pressure and so I really ended up just loving thriving on the pressure.  So I loved that element of the shoot.  Even when things were going crazy in Cambodia; we had locations being demolished in front of our eyes, and people not turning up; it was nuts, but even that, I just got off on it.  And even that I just have to say I really loved post.  I really loved the idea that the shoot’s finished and that you go in every day and just keep creating with all these various people.  You know the whole sound design, the music, the mix, the grade and the cut, it’s just so much fun!  And then releasing the thing.  It was so rewarding.  I remember our opening night at Sundance, Felicity and I after the screening, there was this massive party thrown and I remember I walked outside with Flick and we just stood there and this snow just pelting down, these massive flakes of snow and no wind and just snow all around us and we’d realised it was five years to the day since we’d first sat down to write the script.  And it was just beautiful.  We had this whole room of people a hundred meters away just kissing our arses, it was ridiculous, we’d never experienced anything like that before.  I’d always kind of been the guy who missed out when everyone else was getting the glory.  So that was a really special moment.  But there’s been so many.  We’ve got two little tiny kids and they were born whilst we were writing the script and they’ve gone right through the whole thing with us and they’re here with us now and all they’ve known is Wish You Were Here.  It’s brought us here, (to LA), our life is great.  

Gregor Jordan said “get a good pair of shoes”

What would you repeat or avoid in future?

Before we started shooting I tracked down a lot of my director friends who’d directed movies before and I said, “what’s the best bit of advice you can give me?  Give me something” and they all found it really hard to think of anything.  Gregor Jordan said “get a good pair of shoes” which was all he had to say which was better than most people said and I guess if someone asked me the same question now I dunno what I’d say to them except, be prepared and make sure you’ve tested all your choices and you’re confident with them.  To be honest, and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone say this about their first movie, and I guess I’m really proud of it, is that I wouldn’t change a frame of the film.  It’s exactly what I wanted.  And the shoot went exactly the way I wanted it to, and the result has been more than I ever wanted.  So all it’s taught me is to kind of back myself and keep writing and just continue to try and do it.  But I don’t have any regrets and I don’t have any things that I wish I hadn’t have done, and I don’t think that there’s anything that I’d not repeat.  And I think I’d just do it all exactly the same way again.  

So what’s next in store for you?  You’re in LA now, what’s that writing and developing process like and what can we look forward to next?

There was a script that I wrote before Sundance and before Wish You Were Here that I’d been developing for quite a long time.  I remember over the years I was writing that and watching so many friends of mine make their first movies and end up going to a significant festival and films that i’d been in as an actor as well, I’d seen them go off to festivals and the very first thing they’d say to me when they’d got back was “everyone’s asking me what am I doing next, what have I got?” and most of them didn’t really have anything in their back pocket and so I just decided years and years ago whatever happened, if I was ever fortunate enough to get into an international film festival like that  with a movie, that I’d have something in my back pocket so I was kind of lucky that I had this one script good to go.  So we hit the ground running with that and Angie Fielder who produced Wish You Were Here is producing that with an American producer here and everyone wanted to read and talk about it, so it just kicked the ball off and that’s going really well and we’ve got two actors attached and it’s going to market now, but at the same time there’s two scripts I was really lucky to sign onto here, both with really significant companies and both in really good shape and they’re both going to market as well, so it’s funny I’ve got two scripts going to Cannes and to projects going with cast attached.  So I’ve been working really hard on all of those mostly with meeting with actors, doing rewrites, just getting them ready.  And I don’t know which one’s going to go first.  And no one does.  But it feels pretty good.  Something will happen.  I just don’t know what.  They’re all really good projects, they’re all really different. There’s one that’s really different to what I thought I would have done, but it’s such a great script and such a great story I just couldn’t say no.  I’m also starting to write a second draft of a script I was commissioned to write in Australia as a sequel to a movie and I’ve got to finish that off as well.  So there’s always something to do.