Monthly Archives: August 2015

Force of Destiny feature

Director Paul Cox on his latest work, Force of Destiny

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Paul Cox is self described as being accused of always making films about his own life, to which he says, that’s the closest source of inspiration we have. Paul’s latest film, Force of Destiny, is arguably the most personal yet. It follows Robert, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer, as he starts a new relationship and is put on the transplant waiting list.

After screening at an Opening Night Gala at the Melbourne International Film Festival, Force of Destiny is currently screening around Australia.

We ask Paul a few questions about his latest film and his prolific filmmaking career.

Screen Australia: In 2011 when you were in a similar situation to the main character in Force of Destiny, Robert, you wrote a book, Tales From the Cancer Ward. What relationship does the book have to the film? What drove you to document this difficult time in your life?

Paul Cox: My book Tales From the Cancer Ward was a guidance and helped with the chronological order as well as the inner dialogue of David Wenham’s character.

At the beginning of the book it says “There might not be a final page, but I can’t let this happen to me without doing something constructive”. This was when I was having treatment for liver cancer and could not foresee an outcome, I did not believe I would be lucky enough to get a liver transplant.

I believe that life is not just for living, but what you do with it.

SA: You’ve had a long and prolific career, and it seems that you’ve been drawn to stories about people involved in art and religion. What is it about these that have inspired your characters for so long?

PC: There’s not much about religion in my films except Salvation was a kind of send-up and didn’t really get to the core of the matter.

I believe art as part of history is interesting. The only things that remain from any lost civilisation is the art. Everything else crumbles and destroys itself. So the arts are very important and should be at the forefront of all our endeavours. Why aren’t they?

SA: Your films also often deal with highly-charged emotionally and sometimes morally ambiguous situations. What drives you to tell stories that question our societal values?

PC: Every thinking, feeling, struggling individual has the duty to question society.  We live in extraordinary times. Man has no history of being able to control power. Power has always been abused and misused throughout the centuries. Man now has enough power to blow himself off the face of the earth. A logical conclusion is that this will happen.

I’m glad I have no skills in the art of compromise. I cannot simply accept what is presented to me and therefore I question my life and everything that happens around me. I still believe that man has the capacity to rise above all the misery he has created. A large part of the population of this earth still has no running water or electricity whilst others live in pathetic luxury. We all want to live in peace don’t we? How can you possibly achieve this when there’s no… let’s call it justice?

SA: And on filmmaking generally, how would you describe independent filmmaking in Australia now, compared to when you started out in the late 60s? What’s changed and what’s the same?

PC: There’s great diversity in Australian filmmaking and there are some very fine young people doing wonderful things. If we’re lucky we see some of these films at festivals and special occasions, but rarely on regular screens. All the films that had an impact on my life and consequently on my film making would never get a release in this country, not now. They fall in the non-commercial category.

Force of Destiny is in cinemas across Australia now. Many of these screenings include special Q&A sessions. Find out where and when the film screens near you.

Randy.

The popular puppets of Aussie TV

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To celebrate the release of Sammy J and Randy in Ricketts Lane on Tuesday 1 September on ABC iview, we’re looking back at some other well-known Australian puppets who have made it big on the small screen.

Randy from Sammy J and Randy in Ricketts Lane

Half of popular Australian comedic duo, Sammy J and Randy, Randy makes his TV sitcom debut on 1 September, when Sammy J and Randy in Ricketts Lane is released on ABC iview. The series will air on ABC TV too.

Mr Squiggle from Mr Squiggle

Australia’s longest-running kids TV series, Mr Squiggle was created by Norman Hetherington and first went to air 1 July 1959 on ABC TV. The last episode aired more than 40 years later, on 9 July 1999.

B1 and B2 from Bananas in Pyjamas

Bananas in Pyjamas first aired on 20 July 1992 on ABC TV. It was inspired by a popular Play School song of the same name. Today, Bananas in Pyjamas is an animated kids TV series.

Johnson, McDuff, Diesel, Alfred, Squeaky and Victoria from Johnson and Friends

Johnson and Friends aired from 3 September 1990 to 30 October 1995. It followed Michael’s toys, who unbeknownst to Michael, got up to hijinks while he was asleep or out of his room.

Agro from Agro’s Cartoon Connection

Agro was the host of popular kids cartoon show, Agro’s Cartoon Connection, which aired for almost ten years – from 1989 to 1997 – on Channel 7.

Rattus, Modigliana, Mixy and Derryn from The Ferals

The Ferals ran for two seasons on ABC TV from 1994 to 1995. After the show, Mixy the rabbit went on to host ABC kids shows, Rattus the rat and Modigliana the cat were featured in Numbers Count, and Modigliana also co-hosted Creature Features.

Humphrey from Humphrey B. Bear

Humphrey B. Bear was first broadcast on 24 May 1965 on Channel 9. In 1994, Humphrey was named Citizen of the Year. The show finished up on Channel 9 in 2009. An animated reboot is in the works.

Sammy J and Randy feature image

Sammy J and Randy on pilots, cults and fart jokes

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Aussie comedic duo Sammy J and Randy mark their TV sitcom debut with Sammy J and Randy in Ricketts Lane. Out 1 September on ABC iview and later on ABC TV, we chat to Sammy J and Randy ahead of the show’s release.

Screen Australia: Can you talk us through the genesis of Sammy J and Randy?

Sammy J: We really wanted to create a fun, vibrant, groundbreaking show that included elements of sitcom, live comedy and musical theatre all in one.

Randy: Then we ran out of time and wrote this instead.

SJ: Those deadlines really did sneak up on us, didn’t they?

R: I mean, we’re still proud of the show, don’t get us wrong.

SJ: It’s just that it took a bit of a turn. I mean, one minute you’re writing a cheeky six-part comedy series …

R: And the next minute it becomes a dark, black and white drama set during the Boer War.

SJ: With no dialogue.

R: With no dialogue.

SJ: Or images.

R: Yeah, it’s pretty much just white text on a black screen.

SJ: I’m still shocked nobody stepped in and cancelled it during the development phase.

R: I blame the director.

Screen Australia: Ricketts Lane is an award-winning live stage show, at what point could you envisage it being adapted for TV?

SJ: We’d actually wanted to do TV from the very start.

R: But nobody was particularly interested, so we decided to write a stage show instead of making a pilot.

SJ: This is completely true – we originally wanted to call the stage show “Ricketts Lane: A Blatant Sitcom pitch”.

R: If you go back and watch the original live show –

SJ: Which you can’t, because it’s never been released –

R: Sure, but IF you did, you’d see all the building blocks for the TV show were in there to begin with.

SJ: I was playing a terrible lawyer …

R: I was Sammy J’s unreliable housemate …

SJ: I was devilishly handsome …

R: I don’t remember that bit?

SJ: But somehow the plan worked, because here we are promoting our new TV show!

R: Suckers!

Screen Australia: What was your favourite part of making the TV series?

SJ: My favourite part was having someone on set who would write their name on my water bottle.

R: Really?

SJ: Yep!

R: Why?

SJ: Not sure. But every day somebody was paid to do that.

R: My favourite part was when I got to convince the entire crew to join my new cult and move to rural New South Wales with me.

SJ: How’s that going, by the way?

R: Not bad! Only three fatalities so far.

SJ: Please tell me the caterer is still with us?

R: Of course. He’s keeping us all very well nourished as we pledge allegiance to the Sun God.

SJ: But does he write your name on your water?

R: No.

SJ: I win.

Screen Australia: How did you find writing a sitcom compares to writing for the stage?

SJ: To be honest we never really write for our live shows. We just get on stage and make it up.

R: And hope that people laugh.

SJ: So there was definitely a change in process for TV, because the fat cats in their suits apparently needed to see “Scripts” and “Episode Overviews” and so on.

R: SO BORING!

SJ: Seriously, why can’t they just let us turn up, start filming, and let us work our magic?

R: But no, apparently the “Producer” needs to know “details” so they can “organise the shoot”.

SJ: I was close to quitting by the end of it.

R: It’s nothing but an assault on our artistic freedom.

SJ: Things are going to have to change for Series 2.

Screen Australia: How did you change the scope or arc of the stage show to transform it into a six-part series?

SJ: Actually, and I’m being honest here, it was pretty much a case of starting from scratch.

R: We did try to turn one of our stage shows, “Bin Night”, into an episode, but all the jokes and narrative were so theatrical it just wasn’t working.

SJ: So then we pretty much approached it as a new project, but with the same characters, and sense of humour.

R: And fart jokes.

SJ: And fart jokes.

R: But on the upside, we got to do a lot more on telly than we could ever get away with on stage.

SJ: Yep. It’s quite nice being able to have a whole team of talented people working to build your world up for you.

R: Like, when we wrote a scene in prison, we had a location scout find us an actual prison, then the art director and his team dressed it all, and the costume designer made all these prison outfits, and the whole unit took over a prison for a day.

SJ: Whereas on stage we would probably just do a voice over that says “OK guys, everyone pretend we’re now in a prison.”

Sammy J and Randy in Ricketts Lane will be available on ABC iview from 1 September. It will air on ABC TV later in the year too.

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Creating a four-part divorce

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In the scheme of things, there really haven’t been that many operas written specifically for TV. The most enduring have been the seasonal favourite, Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, Britten’s Owen Wingrave, Stravinsky’s The Flood and, in Australia, Peter Sculthorpe’s Quiros (written for the 50th anniversary of the ABC in 1982). Apart from being in select company, the opera The Divorce, currently in production for imminent screening on ABC TV, goes two better: it will also exist as a limited cinema release and will be available for catch-up viewing on iview, where you’ll be able to watch it on anything from your mobile phone to a flat-screen monster. Moreover, unlike the predecessors listed above, The Divorce is the same shape as a mini-series: the story is told over four episodes.

Is the composer of the music for The Divorce, Elena Kats-Chernin, fazed by these brave new worlds of music drama? Not a bit of it. Challenged yes, fazed no. Elena, after all, is no stranger to opera (four original operas so far and a fifth in the works for Berlin’s Komische Oper) or film (her scores for silent films include Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage).

“Early on I realised that the structure of the piece had to be very different to any stage work I’d written before,” she says. “Just as you can’t do a close-up on stage, so I realised that in The Divorce, a song might only need to be 25 seconds long to make the kind of impact that would it would take three minutes to achieve on stage.  And the idea of writing it in episodes made us think very carefully about the shape of each scene, how the story arc would play out in a multi-part structure, when the audience might be away from the piece for a week at a time before they join up with it again.”

When Elena says “us” she means her collaborators, for all of whom she has high praise. The piece has been bubbling away for some time (just as not everyone makes a quick decision to get divorced.) Opera Australia’s Artistic Director Lyndon Terracini first approached Elena in 2011, at which point she began working with director Simon Phillips (who subsequently bowed out of the project due to other commitments) and playwright Joanna Murray-Smith. It has been quite a journey to get to the point where The Divorce is now in production as an operatic mini-series.

“One of the things I’ve learned in being part of this team is the need to be exceptionally flexible. As the idea for the way the piece would be “delivered” changed over time, our ideas about it changed too, and that was incredibly exciting. Even after I started writing the music – which was quite late in the process, really – there were moments when I would get a call from Joanna, or the director Dean Murphy, and realise that if we changed a scene in a particular way it would play better. I remember re-writing one scene on a flight to make a recording for the next day. The music director, Vanessa Scammell, has been absolutely amazing in moments like that…I mean this way of structuring a piece was completely new to me.”

In this musical soap era, wealthy couple Iris (Marina Prior) and Jed (John O’May) are getting a “modern” divorce after a long and satisfying marriage, and are throwing an elaborate party at their elegant home to celebrate. But by the end of the evening, Iris and Jed’s divorce has triggered a renegotiation of all that had seemed certain, and the characters are each set on an unanticipated course. There are eight main characters in the story and Elena had created musical identities for each of them. But the sound of The Divorce is very different to the sound it might have had if it had wound up as a theatre piece.

“I started listening to the sound of TV,” Elena says, “to find the best way to make the music shine when it came out of TV speakers…and to reflect the fact that the story takes place at a party. So what we have instrumentally is really much more like a big band than an orchestra. And I’ve loved writing for the wonderful diversity of voices in the cast – from Kate Miller-Heidke to Peter Cousens.  You know, if the circumstances were right, I could definitely do one of these again.”

Phillip Sametz presents ‘Screen Sounds’ on ABC Classic FM each Saturday afternoon at 5pm.

The Divorce will screen on ABC TV later this year.

fragments-of-friday-blog-feature-image

The morning after the night before

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Fragments of Friday is a new Aussie web series about three friends trying to figure out what they’d done on their Friday nights. Created by writer and director Kacie Anning and writer and producer Courtney Wise, the series has two seasons – the first of which will be released this Friday, 14 August. The second to follow in late September.

Kacie has been working on the series since 2012. And Courtney came on board shortly thereafter. Having successfully crowdfunded the first season, in February this year the duo were awarded Screen Australia multiplatform funding, and they went straight into production on season two.

We chat to Kacie and Courtney about the series and how it came together.

Screen Australia: How did you come up with the idea for Fragments of Friday?

Kacie Anning: A friend had jokingly suggested that I make a reality show about her life and we laughed about how it would just be her getting wasted on Friday nights and then piecing the night together over the course of the weekend. My own autobiographical elements have later come into it. And while the reality angle never held much interest for me, there was something in that premise…

SA: Why do it as a web series?

KA: I was out of film school and feeling like short films were tricky to get right. Web series were a relatively new idea when I was creating the concept, but I was looking for a short form comedy premise and the idea of ‘day after’ seemed doable, in terms of logistics and containment. The web series format was a good fit in terms of budget, or lack thereof, and the fluidity in the format meant I could play with characters and premise, and throw off some of the formality of film structures.

SA: Courtney, when did you get involved?

Courtney Wise: Kacie and I got introduced through the Foxtel Scholarship for Exceptional New Talent, which we’d both won previously. Kacie had crowdfunded and filmed episodes and I fell in love with what I saw. So I jumped in to help with the edit and post-production. Neither of us was ready to let the series stop at series one, so we started to throw ideas around for series two…

SA: What’s been your favourite part of creating the series?

KA: For me it’s been a three-year process and every stage has been different. Challenging, rewarding and full of learning curves … I always enjoy the development process but when you’re making comedy, it’s hard to go past the weeks on set. Through both seasons, I’ve worn about three hats on set – writer, director and performer – and the shoot can be incredibly draining when you’re multitasking like a greedy idiot, but we’ve worked with a team of comically-gifted people. And if you’re grinning on the drive home, thinking about what you’ve shot, you’re okay I think.

CW: In Fragments of Friday Kacie created a fun, quirky world with hilarious characters. Being a writer, I enjoy the plotting and script process the most. Kacie’s hilarious scripts attracted a wildly funny and extremely talented cast and crew, all of whom I’m honoured to have worked with too. We shot season two in April this year and we had a lot of locations, guest characters and extras. We wanted to create a broadcast quality series for online, which was ambitious, so there’s been a lot of multitasking from development through to distribution. There have been challenges, but that’s part of the fun and the journey’s not over yet.

From Friday 14 August, you can watch the complete first season of Fragments of Friday here: https://www.youtube.com/FragmentsOfFriday

Last-Cab-to-Darwin560

Stage to screen: Australia’s theatre directors on turning to film

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While novels have been a longstanding staple of screen material, this year sees an unprecedented number of stage plays translated to film by some of the most established names in theatre. It’s not a new phenomenon (think of Hotel Sorrento and Traveling North as vintage examples of favourite plays that made on to the screen) but the tradition has been reinvigorated by a new generation. Caroline Baum reports.

These include Jeremy Sims’ Last Cab to Darwin based on a play by Reg Cribb; Brendan Cowell’s adaptation of his own play Ruben Guthrie; Simon Stone’s The Daughter (his renamed version of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck); Lally Katz’s Stories I Want To Tell You In Person and Neil Armfield’s film of Tommy Murphy’s award-winning play Holding the Man.

There are more stage to screen adaptations in the pipeline with Benedict Andrews currently shooting his adaptation of UK play Blackbird and Kate Mulvaney five years into the process of adapting her 2006 play The Seed at the suggestion of acclaimed director Peter Weir.

So what is happening?

“The producers deserve the credit,” says Stone, currently writing a new play in Munich prior to screenings of The Daughter at the Venice and Toronto festivals.

“They ( Jan Chapman and Nicole O’Donohue) not only had the faith in me as a novice to be able to take the success of the stage production to the screen, but had to trust me when I said ‘oh and by the way I am going to have to rewrite this and make it completely different.”

Jeremy Sims is characteristically outspoken in his analysis.

“We should have been doing more adaptations of plays given the paucity of skill in scriptwriting in the past thirty years. But the key is not to just put what’s on stage on film, as they did with productions like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?”

But there are no shortcuts.

Sims shared Stone’s approach saying “I had to rewrite the play with Reg (Cribb) after having originally produced and co-written it for Black Swan theatre twelve years ago. And yes, road testing the material was very valuable when it came to the film. We knew what would make people cry, which bits they would relate to. But it still took five years to get the script right and turn it into a romance comedy drama road movie. We’ve taken the classic hero structure and turned it into something anarchic and chaotic, added some characters who are amalgams of others from the play. Overall only 20% of the original stage dialogue and story has survived but the heart of it has stayed the same. The process was ruthless.”

Location is often a key point of difference. Stone’s stage version of Ibsen was performed in a glass box, symbolic of a timeless, non-specific void.  In his film, the story is set in a logging town, where the patriarch of the family (Geoffrey Rush) is a wealthy forestry industrialist about to remarry to a younger woman following the suicide of his first wife.

“The play is Scandinavian and I was brought up in Switzerland. I wanted a location that would reflect that and yet be universal. In my head it was Tasmania but then Screen NSW came on board and we decided to shoot in NSW.

“We used a location manager called Colin McDougall whom I knew from working on Jindabyne. He took us to Tumut and Batlow in the Snowy Mountains. Tumut was a logging town before that industry’s demise. In Batlow there was a cannery that had closed down, meaning there were lots of abandoned factory buildings we could use.

But the biggest find was the handsome mansion where some of the film’s most uncomfortable scenes take place.

“Would you believe it was outside Batlow and built by a Scandinavian logger in the late nineteenth century above the snowline to remind him of home? It was too perfect!” laughs Stone.

Mulvany finds the process of adding locations to her screenplay liberating: “It’s such a joy to bust apart the limitations of the stage. It’s led to a more potent complex story than the one in the theatre. I have two vastly different locations in mind, with extraordinary geography. Now there are crowd scenes, airport scenes, scenes in the Sherwood Forest.”

In adapting her one-woman show Katz has opted to stay within its original theatrical setting and magical effects.

“It’s still a stage show with a set and that was a deliberate decision on director Erin White’s part,” says Katz. “The main difference is that before, I was playing all the characters, and now I have five new characters played by other people.”

Casts rarely transfer from stage to screen, with notable exceptions. In The Daughter, Ewen Leslie reprises the role of Oliver while in Last Cab, Jacki Weaver (a member of the original cast who also helped build the sets), undergoes a radical transformation, playing a role which, in the stage version, was a man.

“She said to me ‘Darling, I’ll be there’,” says Sims. “So we wrenched her back from Hollywood for two weeks!”

Sims sees the current cluster of adaptation as nothing more than a coincidence.

“We’re all mates, we talk to each other about material but it’s just a fluke” he says.

“But everyone agrees; the play’s the thing”.

Last Cab to Darwin opens in cinemas around Australia on Thursday 5 August.

Holding the Man screens at the Melbourne Film Festival on 8 August 2015 and opens in cinemas around Australia on 27 August.

Stories I Want to Tell You in Person premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival on 4 August, it screens at the festival again on 16 August before it starts on ABC on Thursday 20 August.

The Daughter screens at the Toronto Film Festival and Venice Film Festival (Venice Days) ahead of general theatrical release later early 2016.