Stephen Cleary's account of the genesis of Sweet Country
Let me tell you a story.
Tonight, SWEET COUNTRY, directed by Warwick Thornton and written by Steven McGregor and David Tranter, won the Jury prize at the Venice International Film Festival.
In 2012 Penny Macdonald fought tooth and nail against indifference from the Northern Territory government to get a tiny bit of funding for a writer's initiative in Alice Springs. She and I had worked it out, we called it IGNITE. The NT government at the time saw little value in the concept, but Penny stuck at it. So we got some money. And Screen Australia joined in with a small but critical contribution.
We found some writers and started.
One writer was David Tranter. But he didn't write. He drew. And every day he would come into the NT Film office in Alice with an A3 pad and drawings of an event in the past of his family. And I would ask questions, and he would explain, and each picture was one scene in his mind. And when we had talked enough, I wrote it into the laptop and read it back to him, and we'd talk again, and I'd change it until he was happy with it. That way we got about twenty scenes written. Then we looked at them, and saw what other scenes we would need to join these twenty scenes. And we did that, too.
And David would go away and come back with more drawings. I drank a lot of tea. David smoked a lot of cigarettes outside. And eventually there was a story, start to finish. And I went home to France and other projects, and David went off to work, because neither of us was making enough to live off from what we were doing.
Months later we met in Alice again. And did the whole thing again, And again. And again. And finally David had a script he was happy to show. And Steven McGregor and Warwick Thornton and David Jowsey took it, with David, from there and from that birth they made the story into what it is today.The credit is theirs.
I'm writing this because the way Sweet Country was born is important. David Tranter did not physically write, but he was the writer. How many people who cannot, or don't want to, write in the way "the industry" expects, get to tell their stories? Get to have their stories even considered? How often does "the industry" take the risk of going out on a limb in out of the way places to find startling stories that break open the world in a new way for audiences? And I'm not talking about Australia, I'm talking about everywhere.
A big organization, with lots of calls on its time and lots of balls in the air at once cannot do this kind of work. It's unconventional, it's superficially hard to justify and it requires real trust in the practitioners you ask to do it, and if you micro manage it, it will collapse. You cannot design an application process that will bring projects like these to you. And these are exactly the kinds of projects the world wants to see, far more than the ones that tick boxes.
So I take no credit for the film Sweet Country, but I do take credit for the process that helped to birth it, and I demand credit for Penny MacDonald, whose continual faith that the Territory had and has stories and storytellers worth going to bat for, repeatedly, should be saluted.
Oh and what happened to the IGNITE programme? It was discontinued, because people didn't see the point of it, a year or so before the production spend of Sweet Country brought investment into the Territory that paid for the cost of it over fifty times.
Bittersweet country, you might say.
Let me tell you a story.
Tonight, SWEET COUNTRY, directed by Warwick Thornton and written by Steven McGregor and David Tranter, won the Jury prize at the Venice International Film Festival.
In 2012 Penny Macdonald fought tooth and nail against indifference from the Northern Territory government to get a tiny bit of funding for a writer's initiative in Alice Springs. She and I had worked it out, we called it IGNITE. The NT government at the time saw little value in the concept, but Penny stuck at it. So we got some money. And Screen Australia joined in with a small but critical contribution.
We found some writers and started.
One writer was David Tranter. But he didn't write. He drew. And every day he would come into the NT Film office in Alice with an A3 pad and drawings of an event in the past of his family. And I would ask questions, and he would explain, and each picture was one scene in his mind. And when we had talked enough, I wrote it into the laptop and read it back to him, and we'd talk again, and I'd change it until he was happy with it. That way we got about twenty scenes written. Then we looked at them, and saw what other scenes we would need to join these twenty scenes. And we did that, too.
And David would go away and come back with more drawings. I drank a lot of tea. David smoked a lot of cigarettes outside. And eventually there was a story, start to finish. And I went home to France and other projects, and David went off to work, because neither of us was making enough to live off from what we were doing.
Months later we met in Alice again. And did the whole thing again, And again. And again. And finally David had a script he was happy to show. And Steven McGregor and Warwick Thornton and David Jowsey took it, with David, from there and from that birth they made the story into what it is today.The credit is theirs.
I'm writing this because the way Sweet Country was born is important. David Tranter did not physically write, but he was the writer. How many people who cannot, or don't want to, write in the way "the industry" expects, get to tell their stories? Get to have their stories even considered? How often does "the industry" take the risk of going out on a limb in out of the way places to find startling stories that break open the world in a new way for audiences? And I'm not talking about Australia, I'm talking about everywhere.
A big organization, with lots of calls on its time and lots of balls in the air at once cannot do this kind of work. It's unconventional, it's superficially hard to justify and it requires real trust in the practitioners you ask to do it, and if you micro manage it, it will collapse. You cannot design an application process that will bring projects like these to you. And these are exactly the kinds of projects the world wants to see, far more than the ones that tick boxes.
So I take no credit for the film Sweet Country, but I do take credit for the process that helped to birth it, and I demand credit for Penny MacDonald, whose continual faith that the Territory had and has stories and storytellers worth going to bat for, repeatedly, should be saluted.
Oh and what happened to the IGNITE programme? It was discontinued, because people didn't see the point of it, a year or so before the production spend of Sweet Country brought investment into the Territory that paid for the cost of it over fifty times.
Bittersweet country, you might say.
No comments:
Post a Comment