Kriv I first worked together on the micro budget feature, “Boxing Day” in 2006. The partnership was initially an arranged marriage by Katrina Sedgwick, the Director of the Adelaide Film Festival. And like the best buddy movies, we overcame our differences for the common goal of making the film and a beautiful relationship was formed.
This is a picture of Kriv and I in the Hollywood Hills. This photo was taken in late May 2008 – at that stage, we still didn’t know whether our film had been financed and were nervously waiting for the call. But we were still smiling – must have something to do with the thin air or the smog.
“Boxing Day” went on to screen at over 20 international film festivals, won an Australian Directors Guild award, was nominated for 2 Inside Film Awards and was released on DVD through our good friends at Siren Visual. And to think that a certain former CEO of a certain state funding body told me that “Boxing Day” was a bad idea and would almost certainly ruin my career as a film producer…
Shameless plug – you can buy the film on the Siren Visual website via this link.
When the opportunity to work with Kriv again on “Lucky Country” came up, I immediately said that I would do it – provided I was paid better than on “Boxing Day” and the script was great. Fortunately, I was and it was.
But like Andy and Kriv before me, I had to go through the audition process with John Maynard. It didn’t help that before I went to the meeting, a distributor said to me “So you’re meeting with the Jack Nicholson of Australian cinema. Hope he is in a good mood for you!” Great. (Having worked with John now, I still don’t know exactly what that quote means).
And like Andy and Kriv before me, I had a very pleasant meeting with John talking about everything but the project. John even gave me a copy of “The Navigator” DVD, one of my favourite films that John produced. So even if I didn’t get the job, at least I got a DVD out of the meeting.
That meeting was in May 2007. In less than 2 years, the film was financed and completed. In less than 2 weeks, the film will be released nationally. I don’t think I will ever have the same smooth journey to completion that this project has had. Kriv and I were constantly amazed during the process that the project has such forward momentum. It helped having a great script that Andy wrote and having executive producers with the experience of John Maynard and Robert Connolly. I can’t claim a lot of credit here. Most importantly, we were all making the same film – the vision that Andy, Kriv and I shared for the film was virtually identical.
This is a photo of Andy, Kriv and myself at one of our SPAAmart meetings in November 2007. The night before was a swim-through involving numerous bottles of white wine. But we were very much in agreement on the film’s vision at the end of the night – although none of us could remember what exactly we had agreed on.
But if the process of developing the script and financing was easy, the actual shooting process was something else entirely. More on that later.
The budget for “Boxing Day” was $174,000 – the cast and crew were paid award wages, it was all shot in one location in one week (with 2 weeks of rehearsal) with 6 characters. “Lucky Country” has essentially 6 main characters and one location. So theoretically it shouldn’t be a stretch to go from producing “Boxing Day” to “Lucky Country”.
But “Lucky Country” is a period film. And it required a complete set build. On location in the bush. Also, it has stunts, guns, horses and child actors. Did I mention that Kriv wanted the set to be 360 degrees, so he could shoot in any direction?
Obviously, we had a lot more money that “Boxing Day” to make this film. Without giving away the final budget, we like to say that the budget is a lot more than “Boxing Day” but a lot less than “Australia”.
One of things that was exciting to Robert and John about this film was the ability of applying everything we learned making “Boxing Day” into a bigger budget genre film. Instead of just following the accepted way of making films in Australia, we should try to do things differently.
Around the time that we were working on the budget for the film, Robert had written a white paper for AFTRS Centre for Screen Business. The paper was called “Embracing Innovation: A New Method for Feature Film Production in Australia”. You can read the paper via this link to the AFTRS website.
In the white paper, Robert offered a 10 step plan for reducing production costs. As “Lucky Country” was never going to be a high budget film, it was a good opportunity for us to see if we could practically apply some of those steps to the production.
The 10 steps were as follows:
1. Create positive incentives
2. Allow a first dollar share for filmmakers
3. Offer cast and crew a realistic share of returns
4. Base fees on value and experience, not on percentages
5. Match budget models to projects, markets and personnel
6. Match cast fees to marketplace investment
7. Adapt insurance requirements to reflect the scale of the project
8. Adopt reasonable reporting obligations
9. Simplify agreements and cap legal fees
10. Create delivery items when required, and as a cost of sale
If I was giving myself a score out of 10 for the number that we ended up achieving on “Lucky Country” it would probably only be ‘4’. Some of the steps listed required a whole industry approach to change them. Others required a buy-in from the various funding agencies involved in the project and a producer of my experience level isn’t about to get these things changed overnight. I put up a valiant fight for a couple of the steps and failed spectacularly.
