LAST WEEKEND

Directed a TV commercial in a carpark in deepest darkest Auckland, New Zealand.

THE LOOK AND THE FEEL

Nice article over on the Digital Pictures website with me and cinematographer John Brawley talking about 'the look' of Puberty Blues. People get obsessed with 'the look' of things, but a lot of the time I think and hope they are talking about 'the feel'. I do love the way Puberty Blues looks, but I'm much more happy with the way it feels. 'JB' is not only a great DOP, he has over the time we have spent shooting 'Puberty' and other things become a good friend. He is a true and valued collaborator and someone who as a director you want and need at your side while fighting the daily battles of film production.

JB with boom swinger Mark Van Kool and cheeky Ashleigh Cummings poking her head in!

Duende

Last week I was in New Zealand casting for a commercial. I met a 17 year old girl who had the word 'Duende' freshly tattooed on her arm. Later, I googled the word and found it's meaning fascinating. A wonderful word which goes some way towards describing the indescribable. The elusive, beautiful darkness we are drawn to in music and film and all art in general. I never knew it even had a word to describe it.

Australian music artist Nick Cave discusses duende in his lecture pertaining to the nature of the love song (Vienna, 1999):

In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it.Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friends the Dirty Three have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualized are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care."

All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil - the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here - so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering. [via wiki]

HEART OF AWESOMENESS!

Super nerdy but inspiring mash-up of Apocalypse Now, and the subsequent 'making of...' epic Hearts of Darkness and more. Includes one of my favourite filmmaking quotes ever at 3:50!

via The World's Best Ever

PUBERTY BLUES RE-PUBLISHED

Just in time for the premiere of Puberty Blues (on air tonight!) comes the republishing of the original book by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey. Long out of print and off the shelves, the new edition has been co-published just in the nick of time by Text Publishing and Random House. "Puberty Blues is raw, humorous and honest: a compelling account of teenagers navigating the chaos of life. It is one of the great coming-of-age stories in Australia, and it remains as relevant now as when it was first written over three decades ago."

Even though the series was developed to expand the world of the characters beyond the pages of the book, it's the brutal honesty with which the story is told on the page that is the very essence of the story and we were very conscience to bring that same essence into the eight hours of TV.

As a huge fan of the book I was very chuffed that one of my photos of Debbie and Sue (taken on set while directing Episode 3) was used as the front cover image!

SOON

A book of my photographs taken while making Puberty Blues. The first image below is of Ashleigh Cummings, who plays Debbie. I took the photo when I first met her at Mullinars Casting for her initial screen-test November, 2011. Second image, Sue (Brenna Harding) and Debbie going nowhere fast in the front seat of a panel van.

More details soon...

SLOW WEEK...

...on Hoaxville. Manic everywhere else.

PAPER EDIT

THIS IS DAVID LYNCH

Sunday night and I'm writing a treatment for a commercial I'm pitching on. Which means a little procrastination... and Youtube gems like this.

POSTCARDS FROM PUBERTY 3

HCB

Watched a wonderful documentary about legendary french photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and some other artists. I've transcribed part of one of the interviewers below because it's so beautifully relevant and to the point and it won't stop echoing around my head... While flicking through a book of his photographs, HCB pauses at what would arguably be one of his most famous photographs 'Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare' (1932). An image which describes perfectly his idea of 'the decisive moment'.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: I shot this one through... in between planks. I slipped the camera through but I couldn't see. That's why it's a bit blurry. The planks were like this, so only the lens went though. I couldn't see a thing through the viewer.

Interviewer: You couldn't see the man jumping?

HCB: No.

Interviewer: That was lucky.

HCB: It's always luck. It's luck that matters.You have to be receptive that's all. Like the relationship between things, It's a matter of chance.

If you want it, you get nothing. Just be receptive and it happens.

... Here it's geometry, the way it's framed. One shouldn't think about it but the basis is geometry. The divine proportion.

Intuitively, I know how it sits. But thats all I can say.

It's the physical rhythm, 1.618... 3.1416... The Golden Number. We know how it sits. A compass will tell you, but it's in the eye.

I go for form more than for light. Form comes first.

Light is like a perfume to me.

It's such a wonderful note on listening, watching and responding intuitively. Not being technical or academic or overly formulaic in an approach. But being present and open to what is actually happening in front of us at the time. Having your eyes wide open and aware of the things around you.

HCB was 92 in this docco. He died in 2004. The whole film is fascinating, but you can skip to 16 minutes 09 seconds for the gold!

PUBERTY BLUES SNEAK PEAK...

I arrived back home in Melbourne today after locking off my last episodes in Sydney yesterday. And tonight Network Ten aired a three and half minute (!!!) 'sneak peek' of Puberty Blues. I think we were all a little nervous of what a 'first look' might be like. But I think it sets a nice and inviting tone. It feels like the show in that it's ultimately warm and character based and there is just a sniff of some of the darker territory the actual show delves much deeper into. Cool that Ten are supporting the series so early on with such a generous chunk of airtime!

Both Ashleigh who plays Debbie and Brenna who plays Sue called me immediatly afterwards shrieking down the phone giddy with excitement!

LAST RIDE'S JOURNEY CONTINUES

It's been a long time since I posted anything about my feature Last Ride. The film was actually the genesis for this blog back in August 2008 in the lead up to it's June 2009 release here in Australia. Even though Last Ride has travelled around festivals and sold steadily in territories all over the world, a U.S theatrical release seemed a distant if near impossible reality. Well it took some time but this weekend Last Ride opened in cinemas in the U.S (Chicago now and New York from Jul 6th).

Big thanks to Content and to Music Box Films and also to the legendary reviewer Roger Ebert for giving the film such a glowing review!

The U.S artwork takes a very different approach to marketing the film. There is a great contrast between the two pieces of key art and not just in the colour pallete. Infact I don't think you could get two more different approaches. The Australian poster which featured Hugo Weaving and Tom Russell sharing equal billing with the stunningly poetic landscape, whereas the U.S version sees the stars in close-up and and treated in a far more 'rugged' way. Interestingly they also added a rifle to Hugo's hand in the image below the title as well. (There was an interesting post discussing the pros and cons of the different posters here on Madman's Facebook page.)

I like them both for different reasons. The U.S poster definitely feels like it sells the film harder and for a 'small film' like Last Ride, perhaps thats exactly what it needs.

Last Ride also available on Video On Demand.

POSTCARDS FROM PUBERTY 2

Wrapped shooting on my last two episodes of Puberty Blues during the week. I found directing this block (Eps 5 and 6) different to my first (Eps 1 and 3). The first eps were all about finding what the series was. What it looked liked, how it sounded, how the scripts translated, how the drama worked, where the performances should sit and how to work with each actor. It was such an exploratory process yet at the same time we were making the series as we went along. Which I love.

But by the second block a lot of the things I didn't know the first time, which kept my eyes open wide, I now knew. This made it a little less exciting, or because it was more familiar it didn't feel as 'special' maybe and perhaps even trickier than usual to remain aware and in the ever elusive moment. But on the other hand, because we had edited and finished the first two eps, we could refine what was working and push harder on the elements that  we wanted to see more of.

In some ways this was a little like my dream model for making a feature film. Where you shoot the film, cut for a period and then go back out and shoot more. The idea being, that the first shooting period is all about finding the film, the second is about refining and adding to what you have already discovered. Building on what the story has become rather than what you thought it might be.

The downside here is that everything that was once exciting, new and fresh, isn't so much the second time round. There is a tendency to become complacent or just used to whats going on around you. I had to remain focused and often remind myself just how beautiful it is what we are doing and within the tight schedules and budget there are wonderful opportunities still there ready and waiting and well worth exploring!

JUST THE BOYS

Just spent the coolest few days with my son Ollie (9). Rather than me fly down to Melbourne for the weekend, he flew to Sydney (unaccompanied!) and we had a fantastic boys long weekend. We have never hung out together for such an extended period of time where it's 'just us'. Went to Luna Park while the sun was out and spent the last day or so days indoors out of the heavy rain. Watched Hugo and Real Steel (which was surprisingly good, much better than that trailer makes it out to be and beautifully shot I thought!). Interestingly even though they are very different films, both are very good stories of ten year old boys reconnecting with their fathers/father figures. And they both feature robots! I photographed Ollie in the reflection of the triple glazed glass at the gate lounge while waiting for him to board his flight home to Melbourne. Felt very weird handing him over to the flight attendant and seeing him strut off down the flight bridge. Such a cool kid. The apartment seems a little empty tonight.