Both of us love watching trailers on the internet. To us, great trailers don’t tell you the whole plot of the film or reveal all the best jokes and set pieces. They make you desperately want to see the film and talk it up in anticipation of its release.

Some of my favourite trailers over the years have stayed with me, despite the hundreds and hundreds of trailers I watch. One of the best trailers I have seen is for Brian de Palma’s “Femme Fatale” – a film that is definitely for fans of de Palma’s style-over-substance thrillers, but very much one of my guilty pleasures. The trailer itself is a work of genius – check it out here:

There are other trailers that just perfectly captured the tone and mood of the film and watching the trailer again, can stir up the emotions you had watching the film itself. The best example I have for these types of trailers is the “Magnolia” trailer – I imagine this was a difficult job for the trailer editor to encapsulate 9 interweaving stories and multiple characters. I re-visit this trailer a lot – I am very time-poor now with twins, so watching the 2 minutes trailer is quicker than watching the whole 3 hour movie, but I can still get my PT Anderson fix. Here is the trailer:

Finally, there are these great Public Service Announcements that David Fincher made as teasers for “Fight Club”.

When we were considering the trailer for “Lucky Country”, we thought about a lot of recent trailers for westerns and thrillers, such as:

“No Country for Old Men” – although not a period film, I think that they had a similar issue of selling a dark film (albeit with stars and the Coen Brothers).

“There Will be Blood” - both teaser and full trailer – I really love how both these trailers use speeches from the film over imagery.

“The Proposition” - I thought this one started well and built to a good action montage from the film, which we could use to highlight the thriller aspects of our film.

“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” - this is a very lyrical, beautiful period film, great use of slow motion to set the trailer up initially and I love the fades to black to set up the pacing of the trailer.

Looking at the various examples Kriv felt the more action, or rather “tension” based, and less lyrically structured trailers were perhaps a good direction to follow. We agreed that we didn’t want people to think this is an Aussie “Jesse James” – a beautifully shot tone poem.

We wanted our audience to think that “Lucky Country” is a thrilling ride filled with suspense and tension and was a bold, unashamedly, entertaining “genre” film – it’s a modern Western and a Thriller. Kriv was really insistent that we use these two “Tags” to our advantage, because no other Australian film this year will or can.

Kriv also liked the trailers that use speeches from the film have a tonal potency that really grabs your attention. Both of us wanted to avoid the use (or over-use in a lot of recent examples that we could cite) of captions explaining the film. To us, it was better that the characters spoke rather than using pithy caption clichés.

We worked with The Solid State on the concept and design of the trailers and I think that the final trailer speaks for itself – they have done a fantastic job! Check out their website for other examples of their work – www.thesolidstate.com.au. Also, have a look at their most recent trailer for “Balibo” which just looks amazing.

Whether we succeeded or not is up to the audience. But we have been getting some great feedback on sites like Quiet Earth and TwitchFilm!

Aden Young

Pip Miller

Pip Miller

Toby Wallace

Neil Pigot

Eamon Farren

Dennis Potter at his macabre and mischievous best. Unfortunately it also stars Sting, who’s largely crap, but the story is still superb.
The complete original teleplay (before Sting got in on the act) is on YouTube, from the BBC ‘Play for Today’ series, which I was hooked on as a kid.
The tale is inspired by the Kierkegaard quote ‘There resides infinitely more good in the demonic man than in the trivial’, and concerns the ‘visitation’ of an apparently angelic boy to the home of a supposedly god-fearing man, his wife and their paraplegic daughter.
The boy gradually gains the trust of the wife and begins to take over as a kind of surrogate son, before starting to undermine the husband and slowly, horrifically, drags the ugly truth out of him.
It was banned for eleven years in the UK, as films starring Sting should be.

I love the idea of visitations – the arrival of strangers coming into a relationship, a place, or a situation, who may be by turns demonic or angelic. It’s what the great North European fairy tales dealt with repeatedly and it’s something Pinter loved to play around with too.
A fabulous psychological thriller, filled with biblical portent, in a claustrophobic domestic
environment.

The trailer’s here.

Shane

Well, just one of the best westerns ever made, and interesting again as with many great westerns it involves a stranger coming to a homestead.
The western landscape was always great for that – a lone gunman or a group of potentially dangerous men on horseback coming across an isolated farm. And of course there’s the frisson of suspicion rubbing up against the unspoken rules of hospitality in such a lonely, brutal place, and that collision of idealism with stark reality.
I love the idea of landscapes that are so filled with a sense of themselves that they could conceivably just conjure something or somebody up.
Good versus evil, right versus wrong; all that great, gritty stuff that gets washed away in so many films of our times that tiptoe around the grey areas afraid to get their hands dirty.

This film’s interesting from a technical writing perspective too as it’s really about the boy, who is the central character of the film, while Shane the gunman is the protagonist. Lucky Country was constructed in much the same way, except that Tom gradually learns to act as the story progresses and becomes more of an active force in it as he sets out to confront his father’s nemesis.

Here’s the trailer. ‘Acclaimed’!

Straw Dogs

Gentle, law-abiding, decent, moral people suddenly faced with an inexplicable explosion of violence. And perhaps the most unvarnished depiction of Peckinpah’s belief that violence is a necessary rite of passage.
It’s set in an isolated dwelling and a landscape in which everything is alien to the naïve couple, including the local characters who invade their home and who seem to have been manifested from the inherent violence and menace of the place itself.
It was filmed in St Ives, Cornwall, where my fabulous Uncle Alan lives, and who was around at the time, trying to get a glimpse of Susan George in the buff. I spent a lot of my childhood down there and it’s not half as bleak as Peckinpah makes it out to be. Peckinpah perhaps did for Cornish tourism what Kriv managed to do for Mount Bold.

I just love Sam Peckinpah.

And once again, the trailer’s here.

Unforgiven

No surprises there. Of the ‘modern’ westerns I could watch this and Andrew Dominick’s Assassination of Jesse James over and over again.
The opening and ending of this film were a huge influence. Again an isolated dwelling going to wrack and ruin, and a man trying to cope with a young family after the death of his wife.
Although it’s fundamentally about different subject matter the elemental visual textures of this film really got to me, from the bleakness and cold of the start to the rain, mud, bare wood and lamplight of the finale.

It’s also a film that’s just chock full of memorable lines and characters, as I think great movies should be. Gene Hackman’s Little Bill taunting Richard Harris for being the ‘Duck of Death’ is absolutely priceless.
I wanted Lucky Country to be filled with the same kind of characters – archetypes yet oddities at the same time – and lines that remain in the mind after the film has ended.
This film also masterfully plays around with the other great western theme, which was seeded all through Lucky Country: the death of the pioneer dream and the encroachment of modern technology.

Here’s one of a couple of trailers. Interesting difference on the takes. ‘It’s a helluva thing killing a man…’

The Night of the Hunter

Another laugh a minute movie. At the fragile heart of Lucky Country is the vulnerability of the children, and there’s perhaps never been a greater menace in that regard on film than Robert Mitchum as the traveling preacher from hell, ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on his knuckles, hounding down the kids for the money that’s hidden in the doll.
There’s a great scene, a snippet of which is in the trailer, where Mitchum has taken over the family home and is sat in the kitchen with the kids pretending to be their father, trying not to lose his temper, but exploding at the little girl when she won’t tell him where the money is.

Here’s greed again, and also that convoluted religious aspect to it all; the great dramatic element of trust undermined and appropriated.
Robert Mitchum on horseback in silhouette singing ‘Children…children…’ as the two kids huddle in the barn is one of the most enduring and terrifying images in cinema for me.

Great trailer. And it’s here…

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.

To that end I tend to write a very large number of short documents in advance of the draft. This is something a lot of writers hate doing, but it’s become so much a part of my process that I don’t think I could do without it. It makes a massive difference when it comes to keeping the integrity of the draft intact and I find the process invaluable.
This means a lot of beat outlines, breakdowns, synopses and treatments. Between the second and third draft when Kriv and I were huddled down together I wrote four separate treatments. It makes a world of difference.

Here’s one of the earlier breakdowns:

This is a rough sequence breakdown from first to second act, accompanied by queries. I tend to print documents out pristine clean and ordered and then fill them up with commentary until hardly anything is visible anymore, and then move on to another document.
I think I probably get this from early painting and sculpting days – a fascination with Indian sand painters and the idea of a work containing its own history as a palimpsest. It allows you to almost physically work the page, like a sculpture, layering it up and ‘filling the cup’. Then emptying the cup.

That sounds terribly esoteric when really what it boils down to is that I’m a bit daft and need to keep repeating things until it stays in my head, shunting out other irrelevant stuff like remembering how to tie shoelaces, put my pants on before I leave the house, etc.
This was back when the first act included Nat’s wife Emma, who dies in childbirth. How we eventually came to take that out is interesting, and I’ll come to that in a later post.

The document below is a series of scribbles I found on the back of a draft page taken from one of the pamphlets that described how to work a farm. Pieces of sage advice such as ‘Do not plough your land in wet weather’, ‘A horse needs fresh water’ and a recipe for ‘Bush Soup’. That’s how basic this stuff was – how little the selectors knew when they arrived on their land.
All this stuff is great for incidental detail, but also more importantly to allow myself to understand what these people were doing every day. These are the actions they’d be concerned with while they’re talking. I feel there’s much more to be gained in terms of character creation from a writing perspective by these little snippets than reading entire histories of life at the time.
I also scribbled down a few contemporary rhymes that kids would sing to each other while playing, such as ‘Captain Cook chased a chook…’
There were a number of early scenes that showed Tom and Sarah together playing and these were supposed to inform that.

There’s also a photograph of a lovely old lady cut out of a newspaper. I tend to surround myself with images and objects that I pick up while writing. I have no idea at all what the point of this one is but I must have figured it was vital at the time. The oddest things can trigger some of the most important ideas and when I’m deep in the writing process almost anything I lay my eyes on has a way of relating back to the story.
But really I haven’t a clue what this picture must have meant. It becomes even more obscure and surreal when you read the caption underneath it:
‘Whetham…elephant rides’
Answers or suggestions in the comments box please.

The following continues the basic breakdown of the sequences and the core movement of the story:

It’s interesting here that there’s a reference to an ‘upturned pail’. There were originally a number of objects like the pail and the knife that changed in value as the script progressed. Very much in keeping with David Mamet’s theory of ‘three uses of the knife’ (almost literally here), where you first see the knife as it’s used to hunt and kill the food you bring to your lover’s table. The same knife is then used to lovingly prepare the meal. And then after eating you use the same knife again to cut their cheating heart out.

Anyhoo…
The pail was going to be a hiding place for the gold, in much the same way as the trunk is used in Hitchcock’s Rope.
Rope was a big influence on the early middle sequences of the first draft. There are in fact a number of film references that some people might find surprising. The locker is certainly inspired by Ben Hur, and the dungeon scene when Judah discovers his mother and sister have leprosy. The scene of the jailer dipping a lamp into the tiny dungeon and then recoiling in horror has always stuck with me for some reason.
Equally the line from American Werewolf in London where one of the pub locals says ‘I’ll just check on the dogs’, to Brian Glover’s response ‘The dogs are fine’. No idea why that’s stuck with me. Something about the tension and the suggestion of unspoken history between the characters.

Movement and rhythm are really a fundamental matter for me. It has to be musical. I spend many months writing these breakdowns and trying my best to get into the rhythm of the story and a feel for how it’s moving. I do a lot of these and it’s basically a little like muscle memory – you keep repeating something until it’s ingrained. It means that when it comes to writing the draft it tends to move quite quickly and there’s a definite instinctive understanding of when to put the foot on the accelerator or brake. It allows the engine to run smoothly without having to worry about it.

This is actually a sequence outline from the third draft, trying to keep my eye on Tom and evaluating what kind of emotional changes he’s going through at each stage. It’s very easy to lose track of this and is really the core of how a story works – making sense of the characters’ changing emotional states.
I seem to have scribbled a suggestion for ‘comedy’ in there too. Ha.

Oddly, when Kriv and I were working through this draft we were mostly in hysterics. That does of course make us sound a little deranged given the subject matter. But more often than not you’d find us at a table outside one of the many cafes in Surry Hills with tears of laughter rolling down our faces. Hoo ha! Who we gonna kill today!?

Working with Kriv at this stage was an absolute pleasure. I’ve been incredibly privileged to work on the development of this script with people who have such a deep and astute knowledge of story. Kriv, Kristian, John and Rob at every stage were bang on the money when casting an objective eye over the narrative.
Kriv essentially worked like a dream script editor, pushing me to places I perhaps wouldn’t have gone on my own, pointing to places in the story where things weren’t coming up to the mark for him dramatically. I’d go away after these meetings and play around with solutions and then we’d regroup and discuss further and it got to the stage where we were so attuned that we’d often pick up the phone with a suggestion at exactly the same time as the other thought the same thing.
It’s really been a wonderful, organic, respectful process, which is an incredibly rare thing.

Here’s a couple of pages from the completed first draft, going back in again and taking it to task so I could pull out a second:

This was the stage I decided to show it to somebody. It seemed surprisingly intact. The shape was there, even it was all a bit rough.
I gave Pat Lovell a call and asked her if she knew anyone who’d be interested in a thriller-western. She said go and have a word with John Maynard. I guess if it weren’t for Pat introducing me to John this would never have happened.
John’s been the angel who has overseen this entire project, the man who first decided to take a punt and who eventually threw Kriv, Kristian and myself together. John and I chatted around just about everything except the script for a couple of hours one afternoon at the Arenafilm offices, before he finally said, let’s have a look at this thing then. I left feeling that I’d just had a great conversation with a fabulous bloke but didn’t hold out too much hope.
He called a week or so later and said we should talk further.

And that’s what we did, over a period of around four or five months in which I pulled out another draft. As I mentioned in an earlier post, a sizeable chunk of this project’s time has been taken up just talking around things, feeling things out, working on trust and mutual respect. It’s paid huge dividends. I think it’s far too easy to rush into a project before this primary foundation is solid first.
I remember I got through the second draft and thought to myself, this is as far as I can go without a director coming on board. It needed to go outside of myself and become real and malleable in order to move forward.
I do think the timing of bringing a draft to a director is essential. A director needs to take creative ownership of a project because it will ultimately be the director’s film. But if that happens too early and the story is still too embryonic it can get really messy. Equally if it happens too late the writer can be too hunkered down and intransigent. You need to do it a time when you’re perversely at your most confident and yet most insecure.
John asked if I’d ever met this fella Kriv. I said no.

Kriv completely nailed the thing from the very first meeting. He just understood it on every level and we found we spoke the same cinematic language, were influenced by the same films and visualised story in a remarkably similar way. It was like fresh air had been suddenly let into a musty room.
And once again we sat around and talked it over, the three of us now, John, Kriv and myself. Kriv then introduced John to Kristian and it all started to seem eminently workable.

Then one afternoon at the Book Kitchen in Surry Hills we were having one of our ambling chats and John turned to Kriv and I and after a pause said, ‘Right, shall we do it then?’

And that, as they say, was that.

On a film such as this, which was predominantly handheld, the Ezy Rig is a tremendous tool. Lucky Country was the first time I had used the EzyRig.

Director Kriv Stenders operates a lot on his own commercials – and he had used the device before. As we were sharing the operating on Lucky Country he was very keen to utilise one and after using it for the first time I was hooked. Helping to set up the camera in the video is Focus Puller John Foster and the guy at the end who looks like a crazy Scandinavian hillbilly is Kriv.

Like me, Lane was born in Bristol, England. Unlike me, and unlike most people I know who were born in Bristol, he was a teetotaller. It’s almost impossible not to be weaned on cider where I come from and it’s perhaps an indication of Lane’s formidable strength of character that he never tipped the apple jug.
Lane, like many writers and agitators of the time, was a keen pamphleteer. I was instantly drawn to the style of the pamphlets and their almost inherent ability to suggest a quick fix, often by harnessing dreams and ideals.

I found a number of these pamphlets while trawling through the archives at the Mitchell Library, and none more harrowing than the Guide to Working a Farm, published some time in the mid 1800s.
This tiny book consisted of around 80 pages and could easily fit in a trouser or shirt pocket. It was an example of what was being popularly published at the time as city families took up the offer of land selections in the country.
These had been stipulated by the colonial governments to break up the squatters’ hold on vast tracts of grazing land. The plan was to get the big landowners to apportion out sections of territory into acre parcels which would be auctioned off or sold for a shilling per acre. These were then to be taken up by the new idealists in the cities, caught up in the Lawsonian dream of the bush and what it meant to be ‘Australian’, at one with the land.

At the same time local pastors and traveling preachers were extolling the virtues of going out to work the land for god’s greater purpose – to make it productive and fruitful (something they were convinced the godless natives had never thought of doing).
Men like Nat would heed the call, inspired by the dream of working god’s country in the bush with other like minded families, united in a common purpose.
Many of these men had never done a day’s labour in their lives, and that’s what these little pamphlets were there to help with.
They were split into chapters, each about a page long, containing hints on how to make soap, grow crops such as maize and opium (a high cash crop at the time), make traps, clear land, etc.
Unsurprisingly a lot of the land given up by the landowners was largely useless. The good tracts were taken up by dummy bidders and the rest was fallow, dry and infertile. And these young families – the ’selectors’ as they came to be known – would pack up their possessions and head out to the remorselessly brutal Australian bush, clutching their little pamphlets, and make a total hash of it.

I became captivated by these Australian dreamers. It tied in with the issues I had been trying to explore in the present – the constant debate over what it means to be Australian, and to make a home in such an inhospitable place.
This is never more apparent than now as so many people lose their homes through financial crisis, fire, flood. And the great Australian dream is so fundamentally about owning land and home.
That reaffirmation of some sort of dream is still spoken about daily by politicians, business leaders and entrepreneurs, whether selling policies or products: mateship, the fair go, the battlers. And looking over the speeches and rhetoric around the time of federation exactly the same terms of reference were being used. That surprised me.

The ideal of what it means to be here had already become a very powerful motivator, but the pragmatic reality of the thing was starkly different. While Lawson and Paterson – urban men on sojourns in the bush – attempted to create a romantic ideal of what it meant to be Australian, mythologising ‘an idealised Australia untainted by greed’, federation itself was a stolid, no-nonsense affair, tabled by bureaucrats. Sir Henry Parkes’ Tenterfield address was concerned almost entirely with practical reasoning – defence against an increasing German and French naval presence, interstate tariffs, order, efficiency and uniform rail gauges.

What we ended up with was a kind of uncertain marriage between pragmatism and idealism, and that’s been going on now, continually reaffirmed and reimagined, for over a hundred years.
It’s a stubborn yet elusive myth, powerful enough that even Donald Horne’s biting critical slogan ‘the lucky country’ could be misappropriated by people who steadfastly needed to believe differently – that we’re blessed, and deservedly so.

One such dreamer, just before the advent of federation, was William Lane, who set sail for Paraguay in 1893 with 239 men, women and children and a manifesto intended to underpin a fair and just society; a ‘New Australia’. Here they all are, merry bunch, on the deck of the ship as it was about to sail:

Bloody hell. Look at that lot. The cream of the crop.
It was all terribly Aryan too – Lane picked the most intelligent, the strongest, the most handsome, and off they went to Paraguay to rebuild Australia, or the idea of Australia.
The full manifesto, the document that takes on an almost sacred quality for Tom, was published in the Wagga Wagga Hummer (and why not), and it went like this:

The fabulous Lisa Stonham, Lucky Country’s production designer, pulled a few miracles out of the hat with this material. When it came to production we had to go back and source the documents I had been looking at, of which I’d of course kept detailed and meticulous notes. And I had then lost the notebook.
That happens a lot with me. I once lost an entire salmon on a Melbourne tram.

Astonishingly Lisa managed to track down the original William Lane article in the Hummer, and also the remarkable ’sketch of the future’ that I’d seen in an edition of The Pastoral Times, somewhere between 1901 and 1902. It was a wonderful drawing predicting the future of transport, and had a group of Victorian daytrippers in a propeller balloon, and a dapper gent with a magnificent moustache who had a pair of wings strapped to his back.
The chances of finding the actual images again were next to none, but at the production office in Adelaide Lisa had collected a huge selection of images and there it was:

These images and documents are what formed the basis for the core ideas of the story, and the characters were beginning to take shape and emerge from this core.

As for William Lane’s New Australia, by 1905 it had largely collapsed. Not because of the difficulties of living there, but by internal bureaucratic bickering. It would appear that the tyranny of the administrator, Australia’s other great bugbear, was alive and well even then.
The colony separated in 1894 and another ‘New Australia’ was formed at Cosme, 72 kilometres south. The descendants are still there.

Pip Miller, who plays Henry, talks about the location and the chance of going fishing.