Category Archives: Film

Film news with a particular orientation towards Australia.

Number of women directors up slightly in 2017 but still only 11%

Directing, Diversity, Film, Latest News, Television

This article from Screen Daily by Orlando Parfitt (11 January 2018) indicated that there has been virtually no change in the participation of women directors.

Patty jenkins gal gadot clay enos dc comis

Source: Clay Enos, DC Comics. Patty Jenkins directing ‘Wonder Woman’

Women directed 11% of the 250 top-grossing films in the US last year, rising from 7% in 2016.

The figures come from an annual report by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

The study, entitled ‘Celluloid Ceiling’, shows that women comprised 18% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 domestic grossing films, a rise of 1% from 2016 but unchanged from 1998.

25% of all producers for the top 250 films were women, (up 1%); 16% of editors (down 1%) and only 4% of cinematographers (a decrease of 1%).

The number of women writers was down two percentage points, to 11%.

Once again, the report also flags up that almost all blockbuster films are directed by men. Only one film directed by a woman made the top 20 highest grossing films: Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, the third highest grossing film of the year in the US with $412m.

The next highest was Pitch Perfect 3 directed by Trish Sie, at number 34 in the US chart.

Some more statistics from the study:

  • 88% had no women directors
  • 83% had no women writers
  • 45% had no women exec. producers 28% had no women producers
  • 80% had no women editors
  • 96% had no women cinematographers
  • 30% of films had no or 1 woman in the above roles

As in 2016, no women directors were nominated for a Golden Globe or a Bafta this year.

The Celluloid Ceiling report has been published annually since 1998.

Read more: Baftas 2018 – full list of nominations

By 11 January 2018. Screen Daily

3 Female Screenwriters on Crashing the Blockbuster Boys Club: “I Want to See a Female Darth Vader”

Film, Latest News

You would think that female screenwriters would be in a powerful position to put more female characters in their movies. But since Hollywood is dominated by males, it’s not that simple.

This article by Mia Caluppo in the Hollywood Reporter explains why:

A trio of top writers whose credits include big-budget movies — the ‘Tomb Raider’ reboot, ‘Planet of the Apes,’ ‘Transformers’ — discuss biased notes, creating great heroines and why Judi Dench should be an action star

Writers Lindsey Beer, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Amanda Silver are on a mission worthy of any of the other superprotagonists they’ve helped shape: bringing a woman’s voice to Hollywood’s most testosterone-fueled boys club, the big-budget blockbuster. Of the top 100-grossing films in 2016, a mere 13 percent had a credited female writer, but incremental change is afoot.

Beer’s upcoming credits include Doug Liman’s Chaos Walking and the Lin-Manuel Miranda-produced film adaptation of Kingkiller Chronicle; Robertson-Dworet penned March 2018’s Tomb Raider remake and is writing the Brie Larson-starring

Captain Marvel, Marvel Studios’ first female-fronted standalone; and Silver, who works with husband Rick Jaffa, rebooted Planet of the Apes and Jurassic Park and has spent the past year and a half working on Disney’s live-action Mulan.

In between doing their best to bring a feminist bent to interstellar conflict and heavy explosions, they gathered to discuss being members of an exclusive club of women they desperately want to help grow.

From left: Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Amanda Silver and Lindsey Beer

On notes from men about women

GENEVA ROBERTSON-DWORET I got really frustrated with a male director because he kept saying, “I just want her to be a normal girl.” Male executives and filmmakers are still scared to give women warts — to give a woman the same specificity they’d give a male character.

LINDSEY BEER With female characters, I always get the note that they need to be “likable.” They will say she seems like a … well, they won’t say the B-word, but they imply the B-word. A female character can’t have a chip on her shoulder the way a man can. We have so many lovable male protagonists that are the grumpy antihero, but that character as a woman is hard to push through.

On being the only woman in the writers room

AMANDA SILVER I was in a room, and there was this guy, and I don’t think he was a jerk or he was even aware of what he was doing, but every time I started to say something, he would cut me off. So the next time he interrupted me, I called him out on it, immediately. It’s like the bully at school: You’ve got to punch him in the nose.

BEER I am smaller, and my voice is quieter than these men. Geneva and I were in the Transformers room, and we were all pitching to Steven Spielberg over Skype. We were sitting at this long table, and the men had these deep voices he could actually hear.

ROBERTSON-DWORET Oh, God, that was so embarrassing. We had to get right by the camera and mic.

BEER It looked like I was making out with Spielberg over Skype. But he couldn’t hear me, so I was like, “Fuck it. You and me Spielberg — we are going to have a moment.”

On what makes a great block-buster heroine

SILVER Growing up, we all had favorite movies that were made by and starred men, but you squint and take on the male point of view and you enjoy it. It should work in the reverse. The female heroine should be allowed to be just as relatable for everybody, which means she will be flawed. Perfection is boring, man.

BEER Female characters also need to have motivations that aren’t just a man or children. I know a male screenwriter who said he could think of 300 motivations for his male character, but all he could think about for his female character was that she had kids to go save. It’s just a subconscious bias. I fall into the same thing.

ROBERTSON-DWORET I hate the setup [for men] where the nuclear weapon is about to go off, and you can either stop that or save your girlfriend. And they go save the girlfriend! Of course, they also stop the nuclear bomb. But I always think, “Wouldn’t your girlfriend want you to save the city? Or is she the most selfish person ever? Why do you even date her?”

On changing the equation
SILVER You can’t really define the “female perspective,” but simple math tells you

that if more women are writing and directing, a female perspective will emerge.

ROBERTSON-DWORET My first four jobs, I was only hired by female executives at various companies. They took the risk on me.

BEER In general, studios need to be less risk-averse. You give a female a chance, and you get Wonder Woman. You give diverse voices a chance, and you get Get Out.

On industry double standards

BEER You can only get your movie made if you get one of three or four actresses attached to it because there are only so many female stars who are considered bankable. There would be a lot more if we made more female content.

SILVER It’s totally a chicken-before-the-egg situation.

ROBERTSON-DWORET [Male stars] can be into their 50s, but you are going to have a hard time selling the studio on making a $120 million action movie with a 45- year-old actress. You have Liam Neeson, but you would never have people say, “Judi Dench should really star in this action film.”

SILVER I am totally on for that.
BEER It’s the Bond spinoff we really need.

On the blockbuster they would like to gender-swap BEER I want to see a female Darth Vader.

ROBERTSON-DWORET For me, it’s McClane in Die Hard. He is so dry and funny. Female characters in action movies are so serious. They never seem to ever have any fun kicking ass.

11 December 2017 by Mia Galuppo, THR

Phillip Noyce: Man Of Action

Film, Latest News

Phillip Noyce, one of Australia’s most interesting and inventive directors, is giving a talk next week in Sydney.

FilmInk has posted an article about Noyce here:

https://filmink.com.au/phillip-noyce-man-action/

The article by Philip Berk & Erin Free has some fascinating insights into the workings of Hollywood. According to Noyce, ‘the suits’ have no idea how to make a film and so they leave the director alone until the preview screenings. If those screenings are a success, they keep leaving you alone, but if they were less successful the Hollywood executives jump in with comments.

Noyce suggests that Hollywood has been an even more successful coloniser than ancient Rome, since Hollywood has won the hearts and minds of its subjects while Rome was forced to rule by the swords as its subjects would only offer grudging support.

In the FilimInk interview Noyce explained that his father had been a spy, and that is one reason why he makes excellent thrillers such as The Quiet American (2002) and Salt (2010).

Phillip Noyce will be appearing in The Artist’s Room at Event Cinemas George Street in Sydney on December 13. Mr. Noyce will be live and in person for a one-hour conversation in the cinema followed by a screening of the director’s acclaimed Australian drama, Rabbit-Proof Fence. To buy tickets, click through to the official website.

2020 Vision Feature Film Forum by Film Victoria

Directing, Film, Latest News, Screenwriting

Last week Film Victoria hosted an all-day 2020 Vision Feature Film Forum. It was well attended by local writers, directors and producers.

The event provided Film Vic’s take on the current state of the local feature film industry. It was an attempt to encourage filmmakers to ‘go the extra mile’ on script development, as outgoing CEO Jenni Tosi suggested that often scripts go into production before they are ready.

As others have noted such as producer Sue Maslin, this is in part because producers need cashflow to survive. It is difficult for producers to draw cash from government funding agencies during the development phase, which often takes years.

The task for writers in the audience was to take on board the sobering figures dished out over the day and yet remain positive and optimistic enough to put in the necessary work to refine a screenplay to the point where it is as good as it gets.

Over the day, a number of interesting points were made. Kristian Connelly, Manager of the Nova in Carlton, expressed surprise that despite the success of Animal Kingdom (2010), no similar works have emerged. Connelly also thought that New Zealanders have a much more worked-out sense of their national identity than Australians, who struggle with the notion of what it is to be Australian.

The point was also raised that today’s female-dominated cinema audiences are provided with few titles that star a strong female character who drives the action. Of course this is as true of the world as it is of Australia.

My final takeaway was a personal one; coming from Singapore, where the focus is so international, I was surprised to hear only about Australia, with a bit of Hollywood tantalisingly added but seeming somehow far away. The words China and India featured on a single slide, a reference to the number of films from these two countries being released on Australian screens.

No mention of 2017’s gamechanger and my personal fave, Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) directed by and starring Jing Wu, which managed to gross nearly US$900 million at the Chinese box office earlier this year. The film is set in Africa and 20% is in English as it was hoped to do well internationally. However its triumph with its domestic audience more than made up for its lack of international reach (it took only $2 million in the US).

I asked several of my producer films at the session whether they were thinking of approaching the expanding markets of China and India, but they felt that was too much of a stretch. And yes, despite our multiculturalism we are still a predominantly white Australian (and male) industry. But there is also an increasing number of Chinese and Indians who have settled in Australia, and hundreds of thousands more who come here to study. Can’t we access their contacts?

IF’s Don Goves has posted these two articles on the day:

Filmmakers challenged to aim high and know their audience

PG-rated films are increasingly popular in Oz while frequent moviegoers are going less often

 

Luc Besson on the Risks of ‘Valerian’ and That Time James Cameron “Took Me for a Moron”

Directing, Film, Screenwriting

As the EuropaCorp mogul — and THR’s International Producer of the Year — prepares to release the most expensive film of his career, he opens up about his arm’s-length relationship with Hollywood (“I do ‘Leon,’ they send me four ‘Leons'”) and his lifelong obsession with an “impossible”-to-film French comic book.

Luc Besson was 8 years old when he fell in love with the French graphic novel Valerian and Laureline, about two young adventurers who travel through space and time. Now, half a century later, the 58-year-old French producer-director is bringing his childhood infatuation to the screen. At $180 million, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is by far the most expensive picture he has ever made, with double the budget of his last sci-fi feature, 1997’s The Fifth Element. The STX release (which

opens July 21) is the biggest bet yet from a man who has made a career of them — from directing 1985’s Subway to 1990’s La Femme Nikita (one of the first action flicks centered on a woman) to 1994’s Leon: The Professional and 2014’s Lucy, not to mention producing franchises like Taxi and Taken.

But no matter how much Besson has riding on his new picture, he gives no sign of being perturbed when THR sits down with him in mid-May in the rather impersonal, two-room suite he maintains several floors above his high-tech studio just north of Paris, La Cite du Cinema. (It has an accompanying film school, L’Ecole de la Cite.) This is where Besson spends most of his time when he’s not at home in Beverly Hills, where he has lived for the past three years with his producer-wife, Virginie Besson- Silla, and their three children, ages 11 to 16.

Relaxed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, music wafting from his iPad, the filmmaker is expansive when talking about his family and personal life, but more reticent when it comes to addressing the business aspects of his career and company, EuropaCorp, in which he’s the largest shareholder. Perhaps that’s because, after years of success, EuropaCorp will post a loss of $136 million in 2016, just a few weeks after our meeting, the result of such misfires as Nine Lives, Shut In and Miss Sloane. Besson leaves talk of business to his company’s CEO, Marc Shmuger.

“EuropaCorp experienced significant losses this past year,” acknowledges Shmuger. “Over the course of the past year, we took necessary measures to strengthen the company’s treasury position. These measures include restructuring our first and second lien debt, a new capital raise from [Chinese production and distribution firm] Fundamental and sales of noncore assets [among them, theaters in Paris].”

They also include bringing in outside financiers to defray some of the cost of Valerian, whose downside already has been covered, he says, thanks to $30 million in French subsidies, outside equity and presales, reducing EuropaCorp’s investment to about 10 percent of the total budget.

The company signed a three-year exclusive (in the U.S.) distribution and marketing services pact with STX in early 2017 after extricating itself from a problematic joint venture with Ryan Kavanaugh’s Relativity Media. In leaving Relativity, it tightened its focus, going from an original plan to have up to 12 domestic releases per year to about four — all at much lower budgets than that of Valerian.

Those projects include another Taxi sequel, a follow-up to Lucy (possibly starring Scarlett Johansson again) and such European productions as Kursk (with Matthias Schoenaerts, Colin Firth and Lea Seydoux) and the horror film Underground (with Ben Kingsley and Peter Franzen).

It is for this prodigious output — and for his willingness to risk so much — that THR has named Besson its International Producer of the Year.

When did you start working on Valerian?

When I did The Fifth Element 20 years ago, the designer Jean-Claude Mezieres was saying, “Why are you not doing Valerian? Why are you doing this stupid Fifth

Element thing?” I said, “Because [Valerian] is impossible.” But then, little by little, the technique went up. I started to write, and I wrote for a couple of years just to see: Was it good enough? Was it worthwhile enough? And then it came to maturation.

How much of your own money is in the film?

My entire salary. [The budget is] not my money, but at the last minute, the financing fell short, so they asked me, “Can you put your entire salary in?” And I said yes.

When you saw Avatar, you threw away the Valerian script. Why?

Because it wasn’t good enough. Avatar was on such a [high] level that [I thought], “You’re not qualified. Go back to training,” like with the Olympic Games. You can’t go and ask for $180 million [without being ready].

Did you discuss Valerian with James Cameron?

He invited me on the set of Avatar in L.A. because I said, “I’m writing something sci- fi,” and he said, “Come and see how it’s working.” Being there, in the middle of the factory with nothing, and seeing the world on the screen — he took me for a moron at the beginning, because it was kind of complicated for me to understand. He looked at me like, “This moron doesn’t understand anything.” I don’t have a computer. I have this, an iPad, with music. Then we went for lunch, and I asked him a lot of questions, and he gave me some tips. He was such a gentleman, so secure. You know, the people who are secure are generous.

Are you secure?

Yes. Now. A little bit. But the first few years, you’re like, “Grrrrr.” You’re going to bite anyone who comes close to you.

When did you first realize you wanted to make films?

My parents worked [as SCUBA teachers] at Club Med, so I was watching shows every night. I started to write at 13, to take pictures at 14. It just came to me, like some people love baseball — me, it was photography and writing. I built my skills without noticing. Later, I said: “Hmm, movies, that’s probably a good way of expressing for me because I’m not good at anything [else].”

Was there a particular film that influenced you?

I never fell in love with films because I was not watching films at all. [After his parents split up] I had a stepfather who didn’t want TV and music at home; he didn’t want any way of expressing art in the house. He was working on Formula One, so it was all about cars. I was kind of frustrated.

Did you ever want to be anything other than a filmmaker?

When I was 16, I wanted to study dolphins, because I was in love with dolphins. And I got in a diving accident and the doctor told me, “You will never dive again.” This

guy broke me in two. He didn’t even realize what he had done because that was my life, diving, dolphins. And the day he said “forget about it” [was as if] basically you want to be a dancer and then you have no feet. I was very desperate. It was my worst moment. You’re 16, you’re in boarding school, and you’re broken by this doctor. I was really, really down. I remember asking myself, “What are you going to do with your life?” I took a piece of paper and I put a line down the middle, and on the left I said what I loved and on the right what I hated.

What did you love and what did you hate?

I can’t remember exactly. But when I read the left column, I realized almost everything was artistic. And it was the first time I said, “Wow, maybe cinema could be good.” And then a friend of a friend was shooting a short film in Paris, and I took the train and went there. And I arrived on the set and fell in love. I stayed two days, I slept on the set to keep an eye on the material, and I went back home to see my mom. I said, “I know what I’m going to do.” And the day after, I came down to breakfast with my suitcase and I said, “I’m leaving.”

Leaving home?

Yeah. Home and school. I came back from the set on a Sunday night, and on the Monday morning I went back to Paris. A friend [put me up] for a few nights. Then I was going from apartment to apartment, living on the couch, eating what was in the fridge — and usually on set they’d always have food. You eat twice a day and then you sleep. I really loved it. But the more you see on a set, the more you see other layers. You think it’s just a door, but no, after the door there are two other doors. I was so naive, I had no [frame of] reference, but I was not blocked by anything. I was like a kid who is not afraid of dogs and puts his hand in their mouths, you know? And I did my first short film 12 months later. I started my first long feature film at 19 [The Last Battle, about humans in a postapocalyptic world]. I turned 20 years old during the shooting. Sometimes we were shooting on the weekend — because when [the studios] have a big film shooting, they don’t shoot on the weekend, so you take the [equipment] and put it back on Sunday night. We did films with nothing, nothing. I was asking my mom to prep food for the team, because I couldn’t pay for the lunch. She’s a very good cook, so they were happy.

Did you ever study film?

No. But when I arrived in Paris at 17, I didn’t have a lot of money, and there was a [bookstore] just for films, near the Champs-Elysees [with anything that] you wanted to find on movies or how to make a script. And I stayed for hours and bought [a film industry version of the Yellow Pages], which was the most practical thing to get. Then I still had 20 francs in my hand, and I said to the girl, “For four bucks, do you have a little something I can buy?” She said, “In this big basket, there are used books.” I took a very small book, a treatise on directing [Notes of a Film Director]. I studied it, and it was quite complicated. I liked the book very much. What I didn’t know was that the writer was [Russian master Sergei] Eisenstein. And the treatise was very pragmatic and simple and clear, which is exactly what I needed at the time. So my basis is Eisenstein.

Do you watch films a lot now?

No. Cooking and eating are not the same job. My job is cooking.

Are there any filmmakers you particularly admire?

Actually, almost all of them, because it’s a hard job. Every time you feel the heart of the guy, I like it. What I don’t like is when you feel the studio too much and you don’t feel the guy. There are a couple of Marvels where I don’t feel the guy. The films are pretty good, but I don’t know who cooked them.

Are you friends with other filmmakers?

I am very friendly with them. I say “friendly” because I don’t see them enough. There’s a couple that I see: Ridley Scott sometimes, Darren Aronofsky. But I can’t say I am friends with them. What’s interesting is, I’ve never felt a [sense of] competition with any director. Never. The directors’ family is very, very friendly. I have a funny story: I had a film, I don’t remember [which one] but I was in New York, and I saw the poster [outside] the theater. There were two screens, and my film was playing [in the theater next to] a Pedro Almodovar film. I went in, just to smell the ambience, just for curiosity. And I opened the door and Pedro Almodovar bursts in. I said, “Oh, my God, Pedro, what are you doing here?” He was doing the same thing as me. We were laughing so much.

You’ve avoided working in the Hollywood studio system. Do they come after you?

I’ve received a script per week for 20 years. I’ve never stayed away from Hollywood. I always answer very politely, and I’m very honored. But no one comes with an Amadeus or something that I would love to do. When I do La Femme Nikita, they send me all the Nikitas — three, four, five. When I do Leon, they send me four Leons. When I do The Fifth Element, they send me all the sci-fi. That’s not interesting to me. I mean, if someone gave me Raging Bull, I would be thrilled.

The Fifth Element seems more of a success today than when it came out. Why?

Maybe the film at the time was too weird. Twenty years ago, there was no internet. And the film was wild. It was not conventional. The hero who saved the world [was] a girl with orange hair who doesn’t speak English. A classical singer extraterrestrial in space. It’s like, what the f— is this thing?

What do you do outside filmmaking?

The biggest thing is writing, in the morning. I love that. If I don’t write for a few days, I feel bad. I’m nervous and I’m not agreeable with people. It’s my gym.

Do you read a lot as well as write?

No, I don’t. Except scripts. I can’t concentrate on a book. You start the book and the guy is talking about a garden — and after two pages, I’m in the garden of my grandmother, and I think about my grandmother and that’s it, I’m out. For me, a book is a house without walls. I get in, and I can’t get out. And that’s what I love about film: You have to follow the thing; you can’t go backward or forward.

Do you enjoy producing as much as directing?

It’s not the same job. Producing is being on the bench and screaming to the players on the field, “Faster!” (Laughs.) Being a director is painful. It’s the hardest job, because you’re responsible for everything, you have people asking you questions every three seconds. You have to manage the emotional DNA of everyone on the set, especially the actors. You have to be the general of an army. And then you’re in the editing room. And you see an image of your film that is not your film, and when you’ve finished, you push the film out to the press, who most of the time kill you. It’s a hell of a job.

What makes a good producer?

I don’t know if I’m a good producer. Because a good director makes a good film, even with a bad producer. A producer is really at the service of the director, understands the qualities of the director and maybe the bad parts, and can tell him, “No, you are lying to yourself here.”

What’s the worst part of being a director?

You need to have an extra sensitivity, permanently, from the morning to the end of the day. It’s almost like you take your skin out and people are touching you all day. I remember going back to the hotel at 10 p.m. and watching TV, and they were talking about the opening of a salon of flowers, and you see some old people going there — and I’m crying. It’s terrible. And it’s terrible because you take the skin out and then every morning you put on armor, because you need both. You need to be absolutely nonsensitive. You need to be a general of an army and at the same time, if a flower [touches] your arm, you scream. It’s painful. And honestly, every time you start to film, you remember that. You say, “All right, OK, I’m going to make the film,” and you take the decision, you accept the pain. You never go, “Oh, my God, it’s going to be great! We’re going to do a film!” You know it’s going to be painful.

by Stephen Galloway THR July 17, 2017

Through a woman’s eye: Ari Wegner and the rise of our female cinematographers

Film

The UK-based agents of Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner often forward job offers via email. “We’re just enquiring about his availability,” they say. Nothing unusual in that – except Ari is a woman.

Ari Wegner is one of the youngest members of the group of Australian female cinematographers making a big mark in feature films both here and abroad.

“Ari isn’t short for anything, it’s just my name,” says the Melbourne-raised director of photography, whose latest work, on the stunning low-budget period drama Lady Macbeth, is now on the big screen. “People always associate it with the [Arri] cameras. ‘Oh, yeah, I haven’t heard that one before’.”

At 32, Wegner is one of the youngest members of a little-noted group making a big mark in feature films both here and abroad – Australian female cinematographers.

Their numbers are small, but growing. The Australian Cinematographers Society has 272 accredited members, of whom just nine are women, but more than 13 per cent of student members are female. “That’s still way too low,” says the ACS’ Warwick Field.

“But it’s going the right way.”

If it had never occurred to you that women were increasingly calling the shots behind the camera, don’t worry too much. You’re not alone.

“It feels like there’s a lot more of us now,” says 40-year-old Katie Milwright, who shot Looking for Grace and has just wrapped Ben Elton’s forthcoming rom-com Three Summers. “But when I say that, even this year I was out on a shoot and a bunch of people said, ‘Wow, I’ve never worked with a woman doing this job before’. It’s definitely not the case that every second DP is a woman.”

The first accredited female member of the ACS was Jan Kenny, admitted to the society in 1988. The second, Mandy Walker, was accredited in 1999 – slow progress indeed.

Of course, women have been shooting movies since the earliest days of the Australian film renaissance. It’s just that few people noticed, and even fewer remembered.

Justine Kerrigan is determined to do something about that. She is working on a documentary about the pioneers in the field, women such as Jan Kenny, Erika Adiss and Martha Ansara.

They are far from household names, but what inspired Kerrigan to make her film was that few of the women in a filmmaking class she was teaching a few years ago had even heard of them.

And as a result, none of them had even thought about becoming cinematographers.

“They didn’t really know why they’d never considered it,” says Kerrigan, 48. “But there were no visible role models for them to suggest it was possible, because they just didn’t know about that first wave of women.”

Kerrigan says many of the pioneers have now left the industry, and few of them ever got the opportunity to work on big feature films. (For a variety of reasons, female DPs have tended to work more often in documentary, commercials and low-budget features.)

She cites the case of Jane Castle, who shot videos for Prince in the early 1990s and made some feature films in the US (including the schlocky horror flick Leprechaun 2) before dropping out of the industry in frustration. Now, Castle is back, making a documentary about another Australian female cinematographer – her mother.

Lilias Fraser knew early on that she wanted to be a director of photography but was told in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t women’s work. So she became a director instead. She made her first film in 1957, and is perhaps best remembered for directing the land rights documentary This is Their Land (1969).

The notion that cinematography is not appropriate woman’s work has largely subsided, say the women I spoke to for this story, though most had encountered it at some stage.

“Film sets have changed since I started,” says Bonnie Elliott, 40, who shot These Final Hours and the television series Seven Types of Ambiguity. “I very rarely see any real sexism on set, there’s a very good culture to work in now. I haven’t seen anything overt for a very long time, though there are always subtle things that go on around gender. But I try not to dwell on them too much because I feel there’s a lot of positivity about working with a female cinematographer now.”

Like many others, Elliott cites Mandy Walker as a major inspiration in her career. “It was incredibly important for me that Mandy was out there shooting features when I first studied film,” she says. “Knowing there were women out there, doing that work, made it feel tangible and possible.”

Walker, 54, remembers that when she started out there was only one woman shooting drama regularly, Jan Kenny. “So I went to see her when I was about 18 and told her what I wanted to do.”

Walker, who grew up in Melbourne but now lives in Los Angeles, where she shot the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures, approached Channel Seven looking for work and was told “we don’t really have girls” in the camera department. “That’s OK,” she says now. “I didn’t want to do TV anyway.”

Her break came when she attended a film class at the CAE run by the legendary John Flaus. After class, she and her father stopped to talk with their teacher, who asked the 18-year-old what she wanted to do. “I told him I really wanted to work in film, and he said he had a friend who was making a film, he’d give him a call.” Days later, she started working as a runner.

At 25, she shot her first film, Return Home, the 1990 feature debut of Ray Argall, a former cinematographer himself. In 2008, she became the first woman anywhere to shoot a film with a budget of more than $100 million, when Baz Luhrmann picked her for Australia.

In 2013, she shot Tracks, in which a gruff old character actor named John Flaus had a small role. “It was so nice to connect again,” she says.

Walker attributes her success to having never allowed her gender to be an issue, and to always being confident and ready to take opportunities.

It probably doesn’t hurt either that her husband gave up his career as a chef to become a stay-at-home dad when their daughter was born 19 years ago. Because more than sexism, it is the issues around work-life balance that present the biggest challenges to female DPs.

Few film sets have child care, the working hours are insane (for everyone), and DPs are often on set for at least as long again as the shoot, all of which pose immense challenges to a healthy home life.

“What’s hard for women as cinematographers is that there’s a certain momentum for careers and that makes it very hard to know when to stop and have a baby,” says Bonnie Elliott.

“For men or women it’s really challenging to make time for your family,” says Katie Milwright, who has a four-year-old daughter and a partner who is also a DP (they try to alternate assignments).

“I’ve done quite a few long projects since my daughter was born – and I do sort of sign off for a couple of months, and parent on the weekends, which is kind of tough.”

For Wegner, those issues are yet to arise. She’s single, doesn’t have children, doesn’t have a mortgage. “I’ve got a lucky window at the moment where I feel I have the freedom to be wherever I need to be, wherever the most interesting project is.”

I ask her, as I do the others, if she thinks there’s a “female eye”, a way women see the world through the lens that’s different from the way men see it.

“I’ve thought about this a bit lately,” she says. “I don’t think there is. I think men and women operate on a spectrum of female and male. I think everyone’s got a bit of both in them.

“I certainly don’t wake up in the morning and think about being a woman,” she adds. “When I look through a camera there are plenty of other things there as questions.”

Karl Quinn – SMH – July 2 2017

Anatomy of a hit: IF speaks to the brains behind ‘Lion’

Film, Latest News, Screenwriting

Oscar heavyweight Lion has earned more at the Aussie box office than all of last year’s local films combined – not bad for a filmmaker making his feature debut.

Garth Davis was approached about the project by See-Saw Films’ Iain Canning and Emile Sherman at the Sundance Film Festival, where the trio were premiering the first season of Top of the Lake.

Davis heard the story and raced off to his lodge to read up on the extraordinary case of Saroo Brierley, a small boy adopted by an Australian couple after falling asleep on a train and waking up on the other side of India, unable to find his way home.

Angie Fielder, Luke Davies, star Dev Patel, Garth Davis and DP Greig Fraser.

To map out Brierley’s story, the producers turned to screenwriter Luke Davies, an old collaborator.

Davies had worked on Candy, based on his own autobiographical novel, with Sherman producing, while Canning was the film’s European sales agent and an executive producer. Canning and Sherman became friends, formed See-Saw and went on to make The King’s Speech.

On Lion, the producers turned to Aquarius Films’ Angie Fielder to lead the production process and work closely with Davis. Fielder jumped on-board in late 2013, before there was a script.

Davies’ work on the film began with what he describes now as “a really intense research trip.”

Over two and a half weeks, the writer travelled to India to with Saroo to visit key locations, then on to Tasmania to meet Saroo’s family and friends with Davis.

“About two weeks after that Garth came to LA and he and I sat down with a whiteboard for about a week or ten days,” recalls Davies. “Very casual, cups of tea all day long, filling up his whiteboard, throwing ideas around.”

Davis remembers “lots of conversations about what we liked about the story, [and] the rhythms of it. There’s a lot of emotional engineering going on. Obviously the more practical question was: what’s the structure of the film?”

After that initial session, story meetings continued via conference call, with Davies back and forth between Sydney and LA, Davis in Melbourne, Fielder and Sherman in Sydney and Canning in London.

“There were a lot of calls at odd hours of the day and night,” says Fielder. “We started out with a beat sheet and then moved to a treatment and then moved to draft.

The film’s chronological structure was decided upon early.

“It would have been much more conventional and probably much safer to start the film with Saroo as an older man,” says Fielder. “So you start the movie with Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman and flash back to what happened to him in India.”

“But Luke was very committed to the idea of trying to tell it in a linear way. We really wanted to put people in Saroo’s head, and when you tell the story to other people, you don’t start with: ‘there’s this guy living in Tasmania and then one day he decided to look for home’. You tell the story from the beginning – there’s a little boy from a small village in India and he gets stuck on a train and gets lost.”

“We knew it was a risk, because we were essentially making a film in which the first fifty minutes were in India with very little dialogue and what dialogue there was was in Hindi or Bengali. But we were very lucky in that we found Sunny Pawar, who plays little Saroo, and his performance is so compelling that I think the audience doesn’t actually realise that they’re in a non-English language film.”

Davies wrote the first draft in less than twelve weeks, then another after notes, in what he describes as “a really rapid, compressed, six month period. Six months, two drafts,with gaps in between.”

That draft was shopped at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2014, where The Weinstein Company snapped up international rights, completing a financing pie that included Screen Australia, location attraction money from Film Victoria and a distribution advance from Transmission.

The filmmakers spent 2014 scouting India, did a large-scale tech recce in September and began official pre in November.

“We wanted to get into production as soon as we could,” says Fielder. “We were a little bit limited by the weather in India and not wanting to shoot in monsoon season.”

For Davis, the realisation that a five-year old had to hold the first half of the movie was “a pretty sobering concept.”

Finding the right child to play Saroo took around five months, with casting director Kirsty McGregor enlisting a local casting agent, Tess Joseph, who suggested the team focus on three cities.

“We went to schools over four months,” recalls Davis. “We couldn’t go to the streets because the kid we cast had to go to Australia, so we had to get them a visa and they had to have some sort of paperwork. So our net was a lot smaller, and we needed a kid that was quite streetwise – that was tricky.”

Visiting schools, Joseph would film 30-second scene with kids who would come in, do a scene, take a photo, then move off.

“Hundreds of children would arrive in my Dropbox every week, and I’d go through and put little coloured dots on good/bad/fair whatever, and over the months we developed a shortlist of a few hundred children,” says Davis.

Davis and McGregor later flew to India with Miranda Harcourt, an acting coach from New Zealand.

“We met up with Tess and her team and we workshopped the children for about two weeks in three cities,” says Davis.

“And if we found someone we liked, we’d bring them back every day for three days to see if they would return; whether the parents would cope with it, kind of testing their filmmaking stamina. Because so much rested on this performance.”

The Lion team tapped production services company India Take One Productions, an old hand at servicing foreign productions such as Slumdog Millionaire, Eat Pray Love and Zero Dark Thirty, to help them navigate the bureaucracy and work through the preparation time.

“They provided us with all the crew and helped us cast the whole thing,” says Fielder. “They were invaluable.”

When it came to crewing up, Fielder adopted the “mirror system”.

“This is something I’ve done on all the foreign shoots we’ve done at Aquarius: Wish You Were Here was Cambodia, Berlin Syndrome was Berlin. You bring your own HODs, your own first AD, your own cinematographer, your own production designer, costume designer. And then you also have a local working in a similar capacity but reporting to your head of department. Because they come with their own team, they’ve got their own networks and contacts.”

The one exception was the camera department, which was brought over wholesale from Oz, right down to the data wranglers.

“That’s a department you don’t really want to hand over to anybody else,” says Fielder.

Lion began shooting at the beginning of 2015, with six weeks scheduled in India and four in Oz.

Fielder describes shooting in India as “Great. Not without its challenges.”

“You’re dealing with language barriers, cultural barriers, a really harsh local environment, and a system that is heavily bureaucratic. It means you need a lot of lead-time in your preparation, which is why we spent the whole of 2014 going back and forth to India setting everything up.”

While editing the director was also on the hunt for a composer, listening to music endlessly.

“I landed on Hauschka [Volker Bertelmann] and Dustin O’Halloran. Both beautiful musicians but different. Hauschka had this childlike, raw quality, and I thought he really suited India. And then Dustin had that emotional quality.”

“I love movies like The Mission and The Piano where the music is very front and centre, which has been lost a little bit in cinema. Everyone’s very anti-music. I wanted to bring back that emotional music, and I thought Dustin did great melodies.”

Bertelmann happened to be playing at the Melbourne Recital Centre while Davis was in post, and the director went along.

“I was sitting there and he goes, ‘this piece of music is like being in a train with the window open and the landscape flashing by’. I thought: that’s so weird.”

After the show Davis caught up with Bertelmann and asked about collaborating with O’Halloran on a film score, only to learn that O’Halloran had been the best man at his fellow muso’s wedding. A deal was struck.

The film has racked up award nominations – and big box office – ever since TIFF, even though “a lot of the reviews weren’t great, actually, after that [Toronto premiere],” Davis
admits.

“That’s a wake-up call, as a filmmaker. But I do know we have the audience.”

As for Davies, who’s now working on projects with several Aussie filmmakers, including David Michôd and Kim Farrant, he cries every time he sees it.

“I shouldn’t, because I wrote it, so I know everything that happens, but I do and I think it is because Garth’s a magician. He made me an observer again.”

By Harry Windsor – INSIDEFILM – [Fri 31/03/2017]

Luke Davies on ‘Candy’, mature share houses, and the magic of Garth Davis

Film, Latest News, Screenwriting

Aussie screenwriter Luke Davies lives in LA with director David Michôd, and is repped by UTA’s Bec Smith. Both are former IF editors, and Davies himself used to contribute DVD reviews to the magazine. We spoke with the honorary old boy on the phone from Bondi, where he was staying on a layover in Oz late last year.

Your path into screenwriting began with Candy, is that right?

Yeah. I was always obsessed with film but didn’t know how to break in. So I said to Margaret Fink, the producer, that she could option the book if I was allowed to try my hand at the first draft of the screenplay. That was the beginning of the path that led to here.

Had you been reading screenplays before that point or did you just learn on the job?

No I was really obsessed. There was actually a screenplay store in Sydney that lasted for about ten years. Honest to God, they must have lived on a shoestring, those guys. But I was one of the faithful customers. It was pre-internet, mid-90s, in the city. It was down near Darling Habour. I used to obsessively buy screenplays of films that I loved and I’d watch the film and try and work out what had changed. My first draft of Candy was very much of its time (laughs). Wall to wall voiceover. Very Goodfellas-esque, like a lot of what people were writing back in the late 90s.

Gradually over the years of working on the screenplay with Neil Armfield, we stripped most of the voiceover out of it. We were all busy living other lives, doing other things, the years passed and it really was hard to get that film financed. But then Heath Ledger came along and got it financed very easily. It was a five year period [of writing] where I was learning, and Neil Armfield was a real mentor.

When did you move to the States?

After Candy I went to America to have a little exploration. I really don’t know what I was thinking. I thought maybe I’d get an agent or something. It wasn’t a grand plan. In April it will be ten years I’ve been in LA. The first five years were really difficult. I was poor and I really didn’t know if it was going to pan out. In 2009 I started sharing a house with Alex O’Loughlin (Hawaii Five-0). Then David Michôd, who I had been friends with for some years, and his girlfriend, Mirrah Foulkes, started coming to LA around the time that Crossbow was suddenly leading to all this buzz and to David making Animal Kingdom. They’d be going to Sundance, or whatever, and they would stay at our place. We all got on and we became fast friends. At a certain point we were like, ‘Why don’t we all get a bigger house? We come and go a little bit, and if there’s four of us it’s cheaper’. We started doing that six years ago and two houses later we’re still doing it. It’s a lovely house that’s kind of an oasis in Koreatown. It’s like a mature share house and it works (laughs).

How did Lion come to you?

I had a pre-existing relationship with See-Saw Films and Emile Sherman, who along with Margaret Fink was one of the producers of Candy. Emile met Iain Canning on the Candy shoot.

Iain was the European sales agent and exec producer. They became friends and formed See-Saw Films and went on to make The King’s Speech. We had maintained a working relationship and fiddled around with a couple of things that never really happened. So then they gave me Saroo’s book and asked how I would approach adapting it. I got the job, then went to India to meet Saroo and see the real places where everything happened: the train station, the orphanage, his home town. And then to Tasmania with Saroo to meet Garth and Sue and John, Saroo’s parents.

And Saroo’s friends. Everything mattered at that moment. That’s how it began; a really intense two-and-a-half week research trip.

At what point did you start writing?

About two weeks after that trip, Garth came to LA and he and I sat down with a whiteboard for about a week or ten days. Very casual, cups of tea all day long, filling up his whiteboard, throwing ideas around. From that point I sort of disappeared into the cave and started writing and by then it was September or October. I wrote the very first draft in less than twelve weeks and then there was feedback and notes and I wrote another draft. That draft was what See-Saw Films took to Cannes in May 2014. The Weinsteins won a bidding war, and the money that the Weinsteins paid to secure international distribution rights became a portion of the budget. So then the film went into pre-production and it was shooting by the beginning of 2015. There were still more script changes going on right up until shooting but essentially the first two drafts after the research session were done in this really compressed six month period. Six months, two drafts, with gaps in between.

What do you think of the finished film?

I cry every time I see it. I shouldn’t, because I wrote it, so I know everything that happens, but I do and I think it is because Garth’s a magician and he made me an observer again. We’ve been doing all these Q&A screenings and it’s really, really nice to be promoting a film that you actually love. There’s no feeling of fakery about having to push the thing. Garth’s identified the different kinds of criers now; people who start weeping in the first minute, the people who hold off and have muscular tension for the whole two hours and then cry at the end and then there’s all these gradations in between. We love the fact that it connects with audiences.

By Harry Windsor INSIDE FILM Mon 20/02/2017

Screen Oz boss launches broadside

Film, Latest News, Television

Screen Australia CEO Graeme Mason has given a scathing assessment of many deals for film and TV projects that are submitted to his agency.

Speaking at Screen Producers Australia’s annual conference in Melbourne, Mason laid part of the blame on international sales agents and distributors, accusing some of being “greedy” on commissions, inflating expenses and trying to pass off gap financing as equity.

He was also critical of “rights-grabbing” by unnamed global broadcasters and he complained that Australian commercial free-to-air (FTA) networks are demanding new seasons of local shows to cost less but maintain the same standards.

When he took the helm three years ago, it was rare for the agency to be offered terrible deals. Now, he said, in some funding rounds “every second deal seems bad – for all of us.”

Noting that commercial FTA revenues are falling as overnight ratings decline, he told attendees that broadcasters “expect new seasons of series at the same quality for smaller budgets. We and others have traditionally been less invested in second series, if at all. Many of you have had to accept smaller fees and cuts to overheads as a result.”

He continued, “Producers are getting caught in the intransigent behaviour of some global broadcasters worried about new players and platforms. Some projects have nearly fallen over because of rights grabs, compromising Australia’s ability to capitalize on lucrative global opportunities. International sales on several of our TV dramas are phenomenal. Should producers try and bypass traditional media at times?”

He revealed that Screen Australia’s biggest ever return on production investment was generated by See-Saw Films’ Top of the Lake.

Some producers are being railroaded into asking Screen Australia to sweep aside its long-held terms, he said, adding, “A lot of money is flowing in from international but please don’t sell the farm to get it.”

Illustrating the pressure on the agency’s funding after government budget cuts, he estimates the number of applications for feature film and TV drama funding in the current fiscal year will be double that of eight years ago.

Given the rising demand for TV drama funding, he flagged a rethink of the agency’s approach, asking whether assessments should be made on the basis of business sustainability, intrinsically Australian stories or whether projects appeal to mass or niche audiences.

On a positive note Mason said attendees at Mipcom raved about Australian talent in all areas, adding, “The expectation is that one of our scripted shows will pop globally and there was surprise that they haven’t yet.”

Don Groves – 17-11-2016 – C21Media

TV industry ‘running out of famous Australians to make series about’

Film, Latest News, Television

The TV industry is in danger of running out of famous Australians to make mini-series about, one of the country’s leading producers has warned. The comments came from Posie Graeme-Evans at the Screen Forever conference in Melbourne. Graeme-Evans, who created long-running Nine drama series McLeod’s daughters, made the comments as she delivered the Hector Crawford Memorial Lecture.

She told delegates to the Screen Producers Australia event that while local audiences are showing appetites for biopics, they have often failed to sell in the international market.

Recent biopics have included retellings of the lives of INXS front man Michael Hutchence, TV presenter Molly Meldrum, media mogul Kerry Packer, magazine pioneer Ita Buttrose and billionaire Gina Rinehart. Graeme Evans warned:

“It’s smart that the commercial free-to-airs and Foxtel and the ABC all want to show our audience high end minis about iconic Australians. They play brilliantly at home. Time and sales have suggested that not all do quite so well in the overseas market. Like the issue of running out of Daughters on McLeod’s… – though, we did find a few more along the way – I wonder if we’ve reached peak ‘Famous Australian’ yet?”

New biopics in the works in the coming months include Nine’s miniseries on businessman Alan Bond and criminal Mark ‘Chopper’ Read. Seven’s pipeline includes the life story of cricketer Shane Warne and singer/actor Olivia Newton-John. Graeme-Evans – a former director of drama for the Nine Network who is now working full-time as a novelist – warned that the networks would soon be reduced to the B-list. She said: “Bio-pics based on the B-list… are not quite the same.”

Reasons for the rise of these mini-series are not just because they rate reasonably well, said Graeme-Evans. The shows are also an efficient way for the networks to achieve their obligatory quota of hours of locally-made drama, and also win tax-payer funding via Screen Australia. She said: “Now, none of us is naïve in this room.

We know that commercial FTAs seek to maximise content points making minis – and high concept is often high success if it’s well made. Or not, if it’s not. Art and commerce do collide in the business of TV – sometimes in the worst way in the world.”

Later in the speech, she said that networks are now more likely to commission based on finances. She said: “Today I think it can be argued that accountants are the most important people in our production landscape.” However, she added that as costs of production come down – and secondary channels and streaming services make new commissions – new opportunities are opening up. She cited examples including ABC’s Bondi Hipsters TV series, Soul Mates, and streaming service Stan’s series, No Activity.

Later in the presentation, Graeme-Evans proposed the creation of a national on-the-job learning program to give future TV makers a chance to serve an apprenticeship.

She said: “Could the screen agencies consider coming together to create a pot of cash from which the Shadow program can be funded? Perhaps the unions and associations can contribute, too. Or, perish the thought, the networks.

“Further, perhaps this becomes the first part of what could develop, over time, into a joint strategic training plan for the whole industry – run over a number of years in areas of perceived need and with agreed aims. At the moment, we all do our own State-based programs and initiatives separately. And the ways things are set up are governed by each State Government’s expectations for its own part of the industry in Australia.

“Now, I can’t see individual State Agencies agreeing to trade away competitive edge where attracting shows to their state is concerned. But training? It might make sense.” She warned: “If we don’t, maybe soon there really will less than 10 writers in the country the networks approve to write their high end shows.”

And she also called for overseas-based streaming services such as Netflix to be taxed and the money used to make more local content. She said: “Could Netflix, or Amazon be tithed to create an alternative source of funds? Support the Australian industry by putting 10%, say, of acquisition budgets ie for the programs they do not originate, into a pot that can be used to commission Australian programming.

“Or, and I reckon we’d love this, what about 10% of the budget of the original drama it shows. Australia’s making money for the SVODs. Some of it should come back home. Yes, I know it’s a free range thought. But, supporting our local producers and our local FTA networks – who must make Australian content as a condition of their licences – out of, in effect, a different kind of license fee is worth thinking about.

“And imagine if we could snare 10% of the value of Game of Thrones, or House of Cards or… I can hear the shrieks from here. Impossible. Ridiculous. Can’t be done.

Robbery! Why? Unpop that box of lawyers, I say, have a go. You won’t get everything but you might get more cash into the industry that doesn’t come from government.”

by Tim Burrowes – mumbrella – November 16, 2016 10:26