Tell us about one of your titles on the website

Dogs in Space (1986). So these are the colour proofs. That was one of the sign writings on the road that were all over Melbourne. Michael [Hutchence], in character. The photographer for most of this was a guy called Steve Pike who was at that time, quite a big rock 'n’ roll photographer. So a lot of them have that rock 'n’ roll look. If I’d been a more experienced producer, I’d probably – it would have been good to do a book of the photographs because he became a name and we had Michael. But that was always a good shot, that became used as key art. A version of that shot appeared on a number of the international posters. It’s nice to see them again. See, as try as hard as I might, I can’t actually, you know, divorce myself from it all. I’d quite like to.

Where are we?

This is the under the house – what we call under the house, and this is where – I mean, thank God for the National Film and Sound Archive, because if it wasn’t for the National Film and Sound Archive, everything’d be under here, and at the moment, actually, only some stuff is here.

OK, so in this box we have Dogs in Space (1986) colour proofs, press clippings, the completion guarantee, because who knows who’s going to sue us 30 years later? It’s all got to be kept. And one runs – one literally runs out of household space and the cost of keeping that much storage, so, really, I’m lucky I’ve got un – you know, 'under the house’.

Let’s see, what’s here? Body Work (1988), so the original 16mm prints. Print number two. I dare not throw these away because someone, sometime is going to want a 16mm print. Here’s, I think, the original British poster for Dogs in Space (1986). What’s this one? Having to dodge the central heating tubes here, but that’s the Australian Idiot Box (1996) poster, which I’m very fond of. I loved it, and we did – I think we did two versions – one in blue and one in pink. We also manufactured these T-shirts that said Get a dob – 'Get a dog up ya’, which is a very horrible thing. I don’t know what that means, but it was something that someone from AC/DC said once. There was also one that said 'Bon Scott RIP’.

All of these boxes, all of these things wrapped up, are the work of a film producer, and keeping them is also the work of a film producer. Inside one of these boxes, there are Dogs in Space (1986) metal badges. There are Feeling Sexy (1998) T-shirts and underpants. You know, I’ve just given away the last, um, R-rated Feeling Sexy (1998) tea towel, which – which had this really very kind of risqué thing written on it. And when my mother came to visit, we sort of had to hide the tea towel in case she found it because she would hate it so much.

How did you get started?

I was working in distribution with Ronin Films, with Andrew Pike, who’s someone I respect enormously, and we had done the release of Strikebound (1984), Richard [Lowenstein]’s first feature film, and Richard had thought the promotion for that was good – again, the selling of it – and that’s when he asked me to produce Dogs in Space (1986). I read the script – it was the first script I’ve ever read in my life. I thought it was extremely funny. And I thought, 'Sure, that sounds interesting’, and that was as much thought as it had. And then I had to find out how to do it.

On collaboration

The funeral film, Body Work (1988), which was the beginning of my work with David Caesar, came about through a conversation. It was quite a rewarding film to make – conversation with a girlfriend. My grandmother had died, and I’d found the whole funeral thing very unsatisfying, I suppose is the word, that didn’t seem the measure of the woman, and I was talking to a girlfriend, Chris Pip, and she said, it’s the big taboo now. Everyone’s endlessly talking about sex, they go off, but no-one talks about death. Who even knows what happens when you die, you know, to your body and everything?

And so we came up with the idea of making a film about the whole – the business of dying, and what happens to your body. And, you know, in retrospect, that film now is – I wouldn’t make that film now because I’m older and more people are dying. I was young and hadn’t had a direct experience with death except Nanna dying and I was a little more remote from it in that way that you are when you’re young.

An interesting working relationship

I’ve had that experience working with Jack Thompson. Even, you know, when we used to make the bank commercials together, because Jack was the figurehead for the Bank of Melbourne. He used to do the famous cut – 'Bank of Melbourne cuts the cost of banking’, which, you know, all of Victoria knew. But, to watch someone like Jack work, I mean, this is, you know, is a very poor example of his craft, but, you know, we would have to make a 30-second commercial – has to be 30 on the knocker. Scripts would be written that were not always that long, and you could say to Jack, 'Jack, can you do it, but could it be, um, a second and a half shorter?’, and he’d go, 'Sure’. And then he would do it. On the knocker. It was breathtaking, and so that – that kind of thing – you know, I remember that sort of craft, I suppose, and the pleasure of that.

What do you do when you're not making films?

So this is my epiphyllum collection. Rare plants. They – they flower for one day – once a year. I’m a pretty keen homemaker, you know, I like to cook, sew.

How do you relate to the digital era?

These DVDs will not exist in seven years’ time. And so part of the way of – the part of the thinking is the obsolescence of this, so you can now also download – very soon. You can’t do it in Australia, but in other places you can download movies, and we are future-proofed to that extent. And – but – I don’t know how better – how to explain it, but essentially, it’s just layers of availability. So, yes, these are going out to retail stores that you can also go to a zillion different websites, and click on the VAS [Video Action Sports] 'click’ button and buy these directly through your computer.

What is your strongest personality trait?

In a way, you’re asking the wrong person. I hated every minute of it [aspects of working on Dogs in Space (1986)]. It was horrible. There were people – you know, there’s that whole rock 'n’ roll – it was groovy to take drugs. It was – you know, I didn’t understand why people behaved so badly. I was – I was naïve. I didn’t know about drug taking. There was a lot of, you know, at one point, when someone told me – I actually put up a sign saying 'No drug taking on set’. I was serious, I was so naïve. I didn’t know anything. Essentially, my skills were the skills of a salesman.

I come from a family of people who market. They know how to do it. It’s in – all of my family are marketers in one way or another, and that’s what I knew how to do, so I could sell a film concept. I didn’t understand why I’d have to go and get actors out of bed, to turn up on set. And so, there’s been a lot of myth making about the film, because it had elements of pop mythology about it, and now Michael Hutchence is dead. I mean the film happened. It’s probably the best film Richard [Lowenstein]’s made. It’s the film that’s – it’s still extremely well known – and I’ve still got posters in the – under the house.

Advice for young players?

[If I started over] I probably would have been a director. I mean, you know, I grew up thinking, you know, I grew up in the western suburbs. I would have been lucky to be a hairdresser, so it’s all, kind of, been very, um, you know, haphazard and accidental. I would have concentrated more on loving a wider audience.

I’d probably advise against it. I mean, it’s very exciting and it’s great work and it probably beats working in a bank, but I don’t know that it’s a better life. You know, there are a lot of pitfalls along the way. A lot of people have fallen down, you know. I’ve given up twice.

First mentor

The first mentor I had, I suppose, was my father, who was a gun marketing person. He once did a campaign that I remember now, because it was such a good one, for a product called Carbon Black. And he did a campaign for Time Magazine, and it was just a square of colour. There was a red one, and then further down in the magazine, there was blue, and then there was yellow and there was green. And it just said 'Red – post office boxes, fire alarms, fire trucks, and -’ la la, all these red things. And then it said 'Think red’, and then it listed all these red things. And while you’re looking at the square of red and it said, 'But when you think of black, think of us – Australian Carbon Black’.

And it was – just this really simple, well-executed advertising campaign, and I’m just sort of – and I loved that. And so there was this – some combination of graphics and words that worked for me. So, Dad knew – Dad had that skill and somehow I’ve – you know, the rest of the family, kind of, picked up on that.

Andrew Pike

Andrew Pike taught me a bit about showmanship. Mostly by historical reference to people like Ken G Hall, who used to sort of march up and down with a sandwich board advertising the films on at the cinema, and stuff like that. And just as a way of doing business with people, I enjoyed – I learned a lot from Andrew about that, and how to sort of run with something, and he was very supportive.

Promotion

When I first left university, I’d got lucky. I got a job with the National Film Theatre of Australia, running the South Australian branch, with a man called Michael Zerman who was – had been a print journalist. And he knew how to lay up copy – I mean these skills have gone now in some ways, but he knew how to lay up copy for newspapers, and taught me how to write ads and stuff.

That’s always been a lot of fun for me. I’ve still got Idiot Box (1996) matches, and box of matches the – you know, the stuffed cane toads – all that stuff. That – you know – there’s a lot of fun in that. Um, but equally, I’d never found a way to commercialise that, where … and meeting Michael Lawrence, who’s my partner with all of this, has changed that. So whereas once I would give away a stuffed cane toad as part of the promotion of Cane Toads the movie [Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988)], now I would have cane – stuffed cane toads paperweights for sale in every shop.

Financing Dogs in Space

The first film I made – I produced – when I had absolutely no idea how to produce a film at all, was a film called Dogs in Space (1986), and I knew so little about the world of business that when I went to the investors, I said to them, 'Well, the budget for the film is 3 million’ – no, the budget – I said, 'The budget for the film is one million, but we could make it for less, if you want us to’. You know, thinking we’d give up our fees – you know, you would do anything to get a film made, but of course, what I didn’t understand about the world of investment was that the people who brought the investment together made their living from the percentage of money – percentage of the money that they raised. And so me saying to them, in that noble Australian film industry way, 'but we can do it for less – we’ll work for less money’, you know, they just thought that was ridiculous because they wanted to make the film for as much money as possible because they were taking 7% – you know, the broker would get 7% for raising the money.

Dogs in Space location

That tiny little street, and we completely invaded their space – it was very hard to keep them calm and not want to shut the movie down, because you know we were shooting all night – we were letting off firecrackers, there was explosions, there was all these odd, strange people. But in a way, the role of the producer, you know, at that time, it had to deliver everything so the director [Richard Lowenstein] could have what he wanted and he wanted that house. It was the actual house that he’d lived in, and so, yes, I had to go to this family – I think they were university academics – and convince them with very little money to leave their home, allow us to gut it, which included burning the inside of it, and then restore that house and give it back to them.

Dogs in Space audience

I had the idea that we got a stencil of the title and we silk – spray-painted silver Dogs in Space over everything. You know, we were being threatened by the traffic infringement bureau, all that, and that was enormous fun, and I do have a natural – it’s true, I have a natural inclination to that kind of promotional idea. It seemed great for Dogs in Space (1986) at the time, but press coverage did not an audience make.

The film that people think of now – Dogs in Space as a cult hit, and it’s true, you can buy – the posters are on eBay – you know, you can buy it for – it’s $345 last time I looked, and the film’s coming out on DVD finally, but the film was not a commercial success. It took a million dollars at the box office. Slightly less, actually. So it looked like a commercial success because there was so much press for it, but in retrospect, we overhyped the movie.

On filmmaking

So most people think about filmmaking as the bit where you’re on set and people are calling 'Action’, and – but for the producer, the filmmaking – the actual bit where you shoot the film – is like six weeks in 20 years. It’s – it’s the bit that I’m least interested in.

Neil Armfield

That was the most fun experience I’ve ever had on a film (The Castanet Club, 1990). I did like that one, but then, the shoot was only two nights long. So, you know, it suited me perfectly. More like a TV commercial. Neil and I were really brought in to make that film. It was Hilary Linstead’s baby. She was the Castanets agent at the time, and, yeah, I laughed a lot. It was enormous fun to make. Very good crew, and Neil was – yeah, he’s a good – he’s a good film director. He’s a very busy man, and so a lot of the time… he was off doing an opera by the time, you know, when we were cutting the finished film. And it’s only – mmmm – two months since I sat in our lounge room downstairs – we recorded the audio commentary for the DVD. Very Castanets style, with the TV on, turned down low, and us talking over the top, me having set up my own little sound recorder – we recorded it into there.

Meeting Davida Allen

One afternoon this cowboy walked into the office and said, 'I’d like to make some fillums about my poems’. And I thought, 'Oh, my God, what’s you know, what’s this going to be?’. Anyway, he turned out to be a rather eccentric poet and at the end of the meeting where I said that, 'No, I thought it was unlikely that he would be able to make a film out of his poems’. He said, 'Would you like to come to the cricket at Ipswich on Sunday, and meet my sister-in-law?’ And I was so desperate for something to do in Brisbane at the weekend where I knew no-one, I said, 'Sure, yeah, I’ll come to Ipswich’.

Anyway, that was how I met Davida Allen, because his sister-in-law was Davida Allen, and he took me to her house, which was a grey besser brick kind of barn in the middle of the bush, and I walked in and all around the walls were these big paintings – one of them is there. And all of these paintings were of Davida’s life as a mother, artist, wife, and I just had a visceral response to the work – to the paintings – and then this very uncompromising woman said to me, 'I want to make a movie’, and that was a 10-year process.

Writing Feeling Sexy

Davida could only write what had happened. She couldn’t invent things. She only write – she could write… if I said, 'Really the character needs to, uh, catch a train here’ – Davida would say, 'But she never did. She only walked.’ Because she could only write stuff that had happened, and so it wasn’t a question of a filmmaker not knowing what she wanted – she absolutely knew what she wanted – she could see it, but she saw it as paintings in her mind. And that’s why the film has black spacing because it wasn’t actually conceived in that film director way – it was conceived as a series of interlocking paintings, and until we put the black spacing in, it didn’t really work.

Feeling Sexy script

This floor that you see here is where the script was finally put together. So all the way down here, all the way down these stairs, Chris, Davida and I were with scissors and sticky tape, cutting and pasting – literally – the script until it worked. And we didn’t – I think it was 3 am in the morning by the time we finished. But it went all the way down, and scene one commenced here, at the back door.

Editing Feeling Sexy

The worst moment was when, after a week of cutting, Davida said, 'We’ve finished!’. And called me over and showed me a 94-minute version, at which point I thought I’d have to sack the editor. How could they let her even think for a minute that it was finished, because all that had happened was the outtakes had been taken out? But she loved every frame, and so that was – that wasn’t a good moment, because I didn’t know how to – I didn’t really have the – I didn’t want to break her heart and say, no, because, you know, she loved every moment – every – they were pictures to her.

Davida became a filmmaker. She got it like that, in the cutting room. It was really fantastic. And Davida got the filmmaking process – how the film was remade in the cutting room. So we started with that one thing, and it became something else.

Que sera sera

Davida and I knew we wanted to have 'Que sera sera’ (1956) as the final track over the end credits – walk-out music, which is something that Andrew Pike taught me. And this symphony orchestra was not going to play 'Que sera sera’. They don’t do that kind of thing. I said, 'Well, what’s it going to cost?’. And so, I think it was $8,000. Absolute highway robbery, but it would have cost me more money to – maybe it was only five. I can’t remember. Anyway, it was just ludicrous and it was just sheer cultural snobbery on their part.

Feeling Sexy in the garden

This picture is actually the, um, opening frame of Feeling Sexy (1998). Davida hand painted all the title cards. Great, thick paint. Typical, very Davida style. And this mad frame. But, I don’t know, we just thought it looked good there.

More on Davida

Davida is an extraordinary personality and had that capacity to bring everyone along behind her. Everyone wanted to help her – she didn’t pretend to know what she didn’t know, and she was unashamed and unembarrassed to ask for help when she needed it. The vision was so crystal clear, everybody saw what was coming out, and the moment the rushes were there, everybody kind of got it, because it didn’t look like every other movie. There were no establishing shots – I mean, you’ve got, you know – but everyone could see, and the power of Davida’s communication and her extreme generosity with people – it was joyous.

Selling Feeling Sexy

When you look at the poster, it looks just like a feature film poster, and we didn’t tell anyone how long it was, and nobody ever came out going, 'Oh, that was so short’. I don’t think anyone has realised that it’s not a feature. There’s a lot of good energy around it. Davida had a very nice art dealer at the time, and she made these beautiful handpainted ties that were given away to critics, and we had Feeling Sexy (1998) underpants. We had Feeling Sexy – you know, there was a lot of – lot of merchandise for such… you know, it looked like a feature film. There was the – I think the script was published, or the book was published at the same time, and there were multiple postcard editions sold through bookshops.

It was a film that had pleasure at its centre, and so, having fun things – I can’t remember where I was the other day – and someone at that place had a framed – they’d framed the Davida Allen necktie – this man’s tie, that someone – you know, they’d – I don’t know where they’d got it from, but it was on a wall, and I thought, 'mmm…’ and it was a very beautiful thing

Commissioning editor at SBS

I loved making so much – being involved in so much, sort of, creative decision making all at once, but without having to actually sit in a cutting room. Rockwiz (2005-current) was enormously fun, you know I quite like to have fun. East West 101 (2007-current), even though I hate the title, it wasn’t originally called that, it was – it had a better title – Major Crime, I think – I liked that a lot. I like genre work. You know, it was a way of getting the SBS, um, message about multiculturalism into a popular form. The Rachel Perkins, Darren Dale First Australians (2008) – that was extremely rewarding to – you know, I just – I feel proud to have, you know, even touched on that in the smallest way. I think that’s something that, you know, it’s inexplicable that it wasn’t done 50 years earlier.

I enjoyed the audience focus in television. It’s very instant – you see what works and what doesn’t work, so I loved the constant audience factor, so it became less about making and more about the delivery. I liked the world of TV because it was so busy. My day would start at 7 – I would watch two shows as I had a cup of tea for breakfast. I’d go into the network, I’d come back home, I’d watch another four shows. Because at that time, it was a bit mad, but I never let anything go to air without actually seeing it.

Television vs film

And I think a lot of the time that’s one of the problems Australian filmmakers had with TV is that they were still trying to make 'artist films’ without understanding that television was like the retail environment. And so the film actually did have to be 52 minutes long – it couldn’t be 52 minutes 40 – it needed to be 52 because there were eight minutes of other material that had to be fitted in, and – that was interesting. It took me a while to get that, because I’d come from the filmmaking background, but towards the end I understood that better. And there were people who were better at making work for television than others and people who saw that the medium itself was of interest and could be exploited. Jon Safran’s a perfect example. His work is television. You know, it could only be television.

The SBSi brand

For SBSi (SBS Independent), branding was extremely important because it was dependent on government funds for its continued existence. And so, the actual brand 'SBSi’ on something came to mean something outside the actual product, that you knew it was going to be a kind of – there would be a seriousness of intent, there would be, hopefully, innovation – it wouldn’t just be boring old TV, you know. If it was going to be a crime series, it would be an interesting crime series. It wouldn’t just be crime a week – The Bill (1984-current). And so the SBSi brand was very important. It became too important for the network because, I believe, I think to some degree the SBSi brand overtook SBS brand, and that’s not desirable.

Video Action Sports

After, mmm, what, 20 years of being a film producer, sometime distributor, I’ve now discovered the world of commercialisation. This is our brand new office [Video Action Sports] – we’re still moving in, and I’ll take you through and show you what’s going on. So, come in. Skateboard is relevant – it’s actually being used as a door chock, but it’s actually used. This is our Chief Executive Officer, Michael Lawrence, who’s never off the phone. Fenny, who we’ll just pass over – she’s very busy at the moment organising the launch party with MTV... who works closely with the whole team across the range of activities. Our Chief Operating Officer, Nicholas Cook… Adam is in touch with all of our retailers… how many retailers would we have at the moment?

Adam: On our full database, we’ve got 2,700, but obviously they don’t all buy through us, but a majority of them, you know, get emails and updates every month.

Glenys: And we have currently 3,000 hours of Action Sports DVD material.

Distribution channels

For someone like me who essentially has been a film producer, what all this represents is what I call a distribution channel. This film, for instance, like, you know, Yoga for Surfers, which, you know, you can now buy at Target, Kmart, all the surf shops, whatever, at the end of it, there is a distribution channel through which anything else can go. Equally, when we do Dusty (2009), the 12 x one-hour drama series for SBS, there will be a Dusty stand in each of the stores that we – that act as our retailers. So we have the channel and anything can go down it. So, in establishing the Video Action Sports business, the end game is that we have a sufficiently large channel through which we can place our Australian productions. The difference is not in the product. The difference is in the size and depth of the distribution channel.

Fine Poets

Fine Poets is a marketing and distribution company. We record – we publish, we’re publishers as well – we publish CDs of the world’s most famous actors reading the world’s most famous poets. And so in Australia, that means Jack Thompson reading Banjo Paterson, and Jack Thompson reading Henry Lawson.

Home

Here we are – we’re here at Coogee, which is where I live – downstairs. And this is the office where we run Fine Poets – 'we’ being myself, Jack Thompson who’s not with us, Susie Gahl who’s got a cold and sitting in the corner and hoping we don’t film her. And so this, this used to be the production office for Binnaburra Films, but, um, then it metamorphosed and family took over, then it’s metamorphosed back again, and now that Fine Poets is up and running, we do all the marketing of Fine Poets from here. It’s a very comfortable situation, I love working from home. You know, if I could do it all the time I would.

Posters

These are all the old posters. Right… Nicely wrapped in plastic. Plastic’s a wee dirty, but… So… Oh no, that’s – uh, that’s a Japanese – no, Korean – that’s a Korean Babe (1995). The question is how much stuff should one keep?

Driven to make work

I’ve learned that the desire to be a filmmaker shouldn’t be enough to guarantee you a life as a filmmaker, and I think there are a lot of people now a part of that Australian Idol culture, who just sort of want to be a celebrity, and they like the look of the life, they’re entranced by becoming a name. And there are people who are driven to make work and who cannot rest unless that work is exactly as it needs to be. And they are the people who should be making work and, often, I think that the film industry’s support through the government agencies, supports a different kind of – it’s not conducive to supporting the people that need it.

If I had to look at where the money came from and how I lived during that time, I always had a second stream of income. Mostly, that was making commercials. There was nine years of commercials making, which was extremely lucrative. It takes you away from the business of making films – mostly it takes you away from the discovery end.