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

It evolved from a short film that I made a few years ago.  I was making a short about the lives of two war survivors from the war in Singapore in 1942 and as a part of making that film I ended up interviewing a lot of war survivors and POWs, and it sort of sucked me into this world of individuals sent off to foreign, hostile lands where they had no idea what was gonna happen.  What I found in all these stories they told me, was a common through line of young people feeling vulnerable and not knowing wether they were going to survive.  I felt that was something quite universal.  Most of us have never been to war, yet we could possibly tap into the sense of fear, unknown and the vulnerability that these young people were experiencing.  For me a lot of war films are the big events, the big spectacles but their stories were all about the intimate; the personal; the universal.  And that was something that really attracted me as a screenwriter to this story.  

And so how did you meet these veterans?  What was the experience of actually getting in touch with them like?

It just sort of evolved.  I randomly met Bill Flowers who was an ex-POW from Singapore, which then evolved into me speaking to more of his friends and then at the time I was friends with Bud Tingwell, who was a pilot in Europe during the Second World War and he introduced me to some of his friends, “you should speak to these guys, they’ve got great stories”.  A lot of these people have stories about either being shot down and isolated by themselves in a foreign land, or as soldiers off in journeys where they were by themselves or with one other friend.  There was such a connection between all these stories - the more I heard, the more connections there were between their experiences on a very intimate, individual level.  

The film is somewhat impressionistic.  How did you feel the audience would respond to its particular style?  It is rather mute - not a traditional film in that sense - it works great as a film, but I wonder what you were intending from that choice.

I guess I didn’t really think of it as a film without dialogue when I first started writing or making the  film.  It just felt very natural, given the stories I heard, they were about people, individuals in a world where they wouldn’t be talking to somebody.  There wouldn’t be a lot of dialogue; it’d be down to a lot of body language or different forms of communication with the world they were in, or maybe the other person they were with.  It felt very organic and when I wrote the script  it evolved out of how those stories felt to me - I wanted the world to be a character as well.  I wanted the jungle to be not just a backdrop, but a character that has a voice, through the sounds around us; as day turns into night, how the sounds shift or how sounds that are foreign to us at night sound quite imposing and threatening.  They play with the minds of the character in that situation.  And if you add the sounds of war to that, it’s an extra dimension of the unknown.  Is it a threatening sound that could cause my death, or is it just the jungle playing with my mind.  I really wanted to explore the world as a character with a voice, rather than consciously thinking of not having dialogue.  

Speaking of sound, this was the first Australian film to use the Dolby Atmos mix.  Why did you go for that particular format?  What did it offer?

We spent a lot of time in our sound design, about seven months, we recorded a lot of sounds in Singapore and brought them back and manipulated them to add to the voice of the jungle.  We’d already created such a rich soundscape but the opportunity to do the Dolby Atmos mix came up when we were approached by Dolby, because they’d heard about our film and felt it’d be a good starting point for launching Atmos in Australia.  Because the film relies very little on dialogue, it allows us to play with the world and give it a voice; similarly giving it depth and layers.  The Dolby Atmos has so many tracks and opportunities to play with placement of sound that we can separate a lot of these sounds, be it the war, the jungle, the humans moving through the space, that it gives us the chance to make it really dynamic and something quite, not necessarily unique, but quite special.  I think our desire to make it a rich sound piece, plus Dolby’s interest in our film as something that would really showcase the technology, those things really came together and that’s how we came to be doing the mix.  We had a lot of support from Soundfirm, in putting this all together over the last few weeks.

Was there something specific to it, something you were really drawn to?  It felt like there were sounds moving over the top of you throughout the film, but was there a particular thing that took your fancy?

I think in general, there’s a lot more speakers in roof and subwoofers in the back and there’s more speakers in the front sides, so if a sound is moving from the front, beside you and around the back, it’s a lot smoother.  For example, there’s a scene where we’ve got our Australian soldier burrowed into the undergrowth, and then there’s soldiers moving around him, it’s a tense moment where we hope he doesn’t get discovered.  I guess the new technology allows us to pan that sound and spread it around the sides and the back a lot more seamlessly than would have been achievable.  It just makes it a lot more immersive for me as director in placing the audience in the space with out character.  At the same time you can have sounds moving overhead, dropping from the roof to the floor - so if you’re in a jungle and you’re hearing a log fall, that might be catching the attention of the solider, you can achieve that a lot more realistically in the space of the cinema than you could have previously.

Speaking of that immersive quality, there was definitely something about your long, steadicam shots and using that to establish the geography that was otherwise difficult, because it was a shot of dense jungle, but because you had the camera moving in depth through the space, something translated and it almost felt like a stereoscopic shot.  How did that come about?  It feels like a very deliberate choice.

I think that when we first approached the jungle, we didn't want it to feel like an amorphous space - we wanted it to feel like a house with rooms, and as you move from one to the next you're experiencing different textures and sounds.  So to do that we carefully chose each location in Singapore to feel different from the next.  As our character moves through it, as day turns to night, the experience becomes different. It raises the levels of tension so he feels like he’s being manipulated as he moves through the jungle.  The way we captured that, we used a lot of steadicam, but also a few tricks with flipping shots and changing the perspective so it feels a little more disorientating than it would otherwise, from more traditional angles.  We wanted it to feel like the audience is there with our human characters.  In juxtaposing that with now we’re with the jungle and the canopy, then back to humans.  To make it a little more hypnotic but also at times consciously reminding people this isn’t a safe haven - you rip them out of that and make them aware that there’s more to fear in the jungle than first thought.

In terms of the jungle, the film was very obviously shot on location in Singapore, how did that come about, and as a director, how was the logistics of actually getting over there and assembling a crew over there?

I’d worked in Singapore for a bit before we shot the feature, with Singaporean crew, so it was a natural choice to work them.  The film itself symbolically connects Australia and Singapore and our shared history that predates WWII, and really climaxed during the war.  I wanted to explore that sense of connection throughout the filming, so we had probably a quarter of the crew Australian, the rest Singaporean and at some point there were about four or five different languages being spoken on set, which was quite an interesting mix of people.  It was a really great collaborative project.  As far as locations go, I’d scouted the locations for three or four years.  We’d gone through all the natural spaces in Singapore and Malaysia to try and find the right feel.  We settled on Singapore because apart from the locations being close to each other, there is a lot of Chinese graves scattered throughout the jungle and those graves themselves have a strong presence in the story.  There’s a strong spiritual side of the story that we wanted to explore; again this is not just a backdrop of jungle, it is a character with a voice that affects the mood of our characters through the space.  The inclusion of the Chinese graves lends something a little more spiritual and mysterious to this world, something that maybe the Chinese character of the film is conscious of, or has a respect for but the Australian character doesn’t appreciate or even realise until the film moves on and he subconsciously becomes aware that there’s something else at play; some other presence other than the literal humans moving through it, or the war beyond what he can see.  Something otherworldly perhaps.  For me that’s really intriguing because I wanted the overall experience to feel like the individual is immersed in this foreign world, but almost from the beginning, he pierces the world as a pilot who crashes through the canopy.  From that moment, it’s almost as if he’s reborn and has to learn the skills to survive.  Everything he does is almost instinctive and he has to learn how to survive in this new world.

Following up on the idea of scouting a jungle, does it change a lot over time?  I imagine over months, years and even seasons as you go there it’s going to be vastly different.  Did you find that to be a challenge?

A little bit.  There are some areas where people manicure the jungle and we had to ask them not to, because we want it to feel overgrown.  The Chinese graves have been there since the late 1800s, so we wanted it to feel like this was an area that had human interaction with it - it wasn’t totally a wilderness, but at the same time we didn’t want it to feel like manicured Singapore.  Despite what people think there’s still a lot of natural wilderness to Singapore and we really wanted to capture the scale of that in the film and make it feel like we are in Singapore.  It was a conscious choice to shoot there because we wanted to be in that world and utilise the quality of light that exists there.  It’s very different to Australia.  The foliage is different, the sounds are different.  If you’re from Singapore, you going to hear the sounds in the film are from there.  They’re not general jungle sounds.  So as much as we could, we wanted to feel like we are in that space where these soldiers and servicemen were placed during the Second World War.

In terms of directing through a language barrier, how did you find that process?  What was that like and how did you work around it?

So one of my key cast members is from Taiwan, his name is Tzu-yi Mo and he speaks English not terribly well and my Mandarin is pretty bad.  We’d fumble through talking in both English and Mandarin but ultimately what we found was that we developed a short hand, a non-verbal form of communication, which is interesting for me because you adapt and you learn new things as a director.  You find what is the most efficient way to communicate what you want in a scene.  We found that once we got into filming we were communicating through gesture and he could read my wants.  That was quite enlightening for me.  Also it mirrors the connection between the two human characters in the film in the sense that they can’t really communicate for fear of alerting the enemy around them to their presence.  So their connection and communication would be non verbal, which again is something that happened on set which relates to the story.

Can you go into a bit more detail on that?  I’m really interested in how you direct through gesture, what sort of gestures are you describing?

Not so much physical direction, but moreso my body language.  If I’m energetic and manic when I’m directing a scene, it would translate into what I wanted the performance to be and if I was really steady and calm, and maybe I’m gesturing something or I’m stopping to think about something, I thinkTzu-yi Mo would respond with something that was equally as meditative or calm.  He’s very instinctive as an actor and his style is very different to Khan.  I think he was able to respond to how I was around him.  We’d have moments where we’d stop and we wouldn’t say much.  We’d just be around each other, thinking.  We’d walk around the spaces, seeing where we’re gonna film and when we’d come back, he’d nod and jump in the scene and it’d be what we created by just being in that space.  It’s something that really evolved from being and living in that space; being in the jungle for weeks.  Also responding to the sounds we were hearing, what the jungle was saying to us.

So did that follow through to Khan? What was his experience, I imagine he wasn’t in quite the same situation, but did that change his performance or needs from you as a director?

A little bit.  I think it was interesting because Khan and I were obviously speaking in English, and  we did a lot of rehearsal where we were talking, but there were time when I’d put him in the jungle, just so he could be alone and not have to talk to absorb the space without people being in his ear.  What I found interesting about how I worked with Mo, he would adjust his way of responding.  He would adjust his way of coming to that way and I think Mo did the same.  I think that was also because I kept them separated during rehearsals, I let them explore the jungle separately, but I brought them together when we started filming, almost like as their characters meet in the film and have to learn to work together, so do these two actors, who have to adapt their acting styles to work in the scene.  They were constantly evolving, because we filmed mostly in sequence, over the course of the film, so that by the end, it feels like they’ve got a nice shorthand going on. It’s symptomatic of filming in that space.  We let the world as a character inform how the actors work with the space and together.

Does that looser directing style present a lot of challenges in the editing process?  I feel like your continuity person may have found that approach quite a challenge.  How did that translate further down the line? 

I think you’d say it’s a creative challenge for my editor Cindy.  I guess when we started editing we approached it as something a bit more poetic.  We didn't approach it as a linear narrative and we had certain beats, emotions and themes we wanted to convey.  But we let scenes speak to us, we let them play long as opposed to cutting them short.  We wanted it to feel organic as these characters move through the jungle, how does their journey evolve as they move through the space?  It isn’t just two guys moving through a jungle, as the film moves on its them changing as people as a consequence of being in the space.  So I think our editing was a little more unconventional but it was a lot more creative in terms of  Cindy and I finding what each scene was telling us.  What each landscape was telling us.  Was it different to the scene before?  Does it look quite different?  Does it need to?  That sort of thing.

How did you get this  off the ground with your producers, in terms of financiers?  I imagine it was something of a difficult sell in some regards.  Not that it’s entirely your area of focus, but it seems like a fascinating process and one you’d have to fight for in order to align everything.

Yeah, the interesting thing about the film is that it began as something much larger.  As a story about legacy and the war experience spilling out over three generations.  As we developed and started filming, we realised it was a story that could be spread across a few films, so what we’ve come up with is, if you think of Canopy as a film about the experience of an individual at war, the birthplace of trauma.  The second film which will be my next, will be about the effect of that trauma on the family when our soldier returns home.  Upon the next generation after that.  The idea being that when people return from war, it doesn’t end there, it continues in some form and in the generations that follow.  I think it evolved organically because we had time to refine the script and then find money, which is a bit of an unconventional approach to the story.  We ended up funding the film piecemeal.  We had a bit of money, did some filming, we stopped.  We got a bit more money, did some more filming, stopped, got more money and completed post production and so on.  That became a protracted experience over several years.  Because we were using private funding, it allowed us to more organically come up with how the film would look and feel, and allowed us to split it up into these two films. 

What influence did splitting it up have on the production itself?  It’s a very continuous film set over a condensed period of time, how did you keep the consistency when you were splitting it up so much?

I think there were distinct chapters.  There was the experience of war, and there was the return home.  As we were filming the Singapore chapter, it became clear that we needed to obviously retract the scenes and the action in the jungle to make it feel like a more immersive experience, but it was like you say, over one night, but to make it feel very immersive and claustrophobic, so that when you are released from this world, you can breathe.  It feels very different from what we take people into in the next film which will be Australians in a small country town, with a story told over several months.  It’s a different pace from where we’ve come from withCanopy.  It’s almost like Canopy, for people who’ve been to war might think back on as a memory fragment, or collections of memories. It’s not one clear memory, but something they might return to repeatedly.  That will stay with them as an experience.  So I wanted it to feel all encompassing over the period of one night; it was relentless as a film and as a memory in their minds.

Has their been much industry follow up to the film?  You had a great reception overseas, but what’s been the follow up from the industry more broadly?

We’re yet to have our Australian premiere, that will happen at the Gold Coast Film Festival on the 12th of April, then our Australian cinema release after that.  But from my peers and fellow filmmakers, I’ve shown it to a few of my close friends, who are filmmakers, and their feedback really helped during post production in refining the film.  But I think everybody’s been really good at providing feedback on the films own terms.  Not as “it should be structured like this”,  but assessing it on its own terms, which I think is really bold and  really interesting from my point of view, because we’re a bunch of filmmakers who make different films.  We don’t all make the same pieces of work and for my money we should be supported to make a diverse range of films.  We are a collection of individuals, as filmmakers, who make different things and different inspirations.  For me it’s really rewarding to have peers who are able to engage with what I do and provide feedback on that work, not what they would see done.  That’s really exciting because it sets the tone for a really vibrant community.

What advice would you give to filmmakers who follow your kind of path?

I guess there’s really no rules.  You can go down the line of seeking government finance but ultimately whatever you choose to do and if you believe in it, that you’re pushing ahead into preproduction on a feature, is that you don’t give up, don’t stop.  You keep going.  There’s always going to be people who say you can’t do something or you shouldn't do it. That’s fine, but if you believe in it enough to want to push ahead and make your film, then the only thing I would say is don’t stop.  Don’t give up.  It’s going to be tough because you’ve got to come back to the question “Do you believe in this enough to keep going?”.  If the answer is yes then don’t stop.  There’s risk attached with everything but if you believe in something enough then you’ve got to see it through to execute it properly, despite what people say.  You’ll also find that people will come on board who will support you if you do believe in what you’re doing, which is ultimately affirming for you and your creative vision.

You had a list of crowd funders in the credits, people who assisted with funds in that method.  As a story teller what impact did that have?  You often have to reveal a bunch of the production to entice people to donate.  How did that assist or hinder you as a director?

It’s interesting launching a crowd funding campaign because typically with films, and typically doesn’t make sense anymore, because the world’s constantly evolving, but you wouldn’t release part of your film before you’re finished.  You wouldn’t put part of a trailer out before you’re finished.  It’s just a very odd thing to do.  But with crowd funding we had to create a trailer from an unfinished film, that hadn’t been sound mixed, with incomplete visual effects and show it to the world, and hopefully attract people who might be interested in helping us finish.  The advantage is that it forces you to really think and make strong decisions about what is it that you really want to put out there and tell people.  You distill what the film’s about and focus on the key things that you think are important for an audience to know in an instant.  That’s what we did and we backed up our campaign launch with a strong Facebook presence which we’d already nurtured.  I think that’s important to have a strong following before you launch, so that when you launch you’re not finding people, well you are, but you’re using an existing base to try and reach new people, from a base who are helping promote what you do.  In our case we raised enough funds to complete the film.  One of the added benefits, apart from raising extra finance for the film was that you reach a whole new bunch of people who will come on board to ultimately promote the film in the future, and hopefully fans of what you’re trying to do. They get to come on that journey with you and become a part of your team, and you keep them updated and I think it’s a very interesting thing, because before we were finished we were already interacting with the greater community about what we were trying to achieve.  That’s very heartening for a filmmaker, because you get to see straight away a response to something you haven't even finished creating yet.

What was the hardest thing in this process and what would you take away as a director for future projects?

On a personal level, the benefits of not giving up, that despite what people say, you just keep pushing it.  On each film you’ll do things differently.  You’ll approach them differently, but you learn a lot.  As long as you’re open to learning from what you do, and always surrounding yourself with people who are damn good at what they do and most likely much better at that they do than you are at what you do, it helps you grow and develop your creative vision, so that next time you don’t necessarily do things better, but that you come from a more informed place.  That’s the goal for me.  I think as a director you become more aware of why you make films when you complete a feature.  For me I think that because I’m such hyperactive person, everything in the world is happening so fast, I realised that I make films the way I do because they’re sort of meditative.  For me they allow me to stop and be a bit calmer and analyse the way I actually look at the world, and allow me to maybe make a more distilled approach to the way I look at the little things that happen around me.  They’re the sort of things that I end up building films about. 

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. 

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

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

You can check it out here.

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