Sue Brooks, Sue Maslin and Alison Tilson. LISA FRENCH

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by RMIT Research Repository Thank you for downloading this document from the RMIT Research Repository 7KH50,75HVHDUFK5HSRVLWRU\LVDQRSHHQDFFHVVGDWDEDVHVKRZFDVLQJWWKHUHVHDUFK RXWSXWVRI50,78QLYHUVLW\UHVHDUFKHUV 50,755HVHDUFK5HHSRVLWRU\KWWSUHVHDUFKEDQNUPLWHGXDX Citation: French, L 2003, 'Shared visions and creative partnerships - A team approach; Sue Brooks, Sue Maslin and Alison Tilson' in Lisa French (ed.) Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia, Damned Publishing, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 295-308. See this record in the RMIT Research Repository at: http://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit:18778 Version: Published Version Copyright Statement: © 2003 Australian Catalogue Company Ltd Link to Published Version: http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/22998307 PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE THIS PAGE LISA FRENCH SHARED VISIONS AND CREATIVE PARTNERSHIPS A ‘team’ approach: Sue Brooks, Sue Maslin and Alison Tilson. LISA FRENCH n my final year at school, the honour of being one of a triumvirate was bestowed upon me. What this meant was that I was part of a team of three girls, the head and two Iothers—the key idea behind this structure being the team—‘the triumvirate’. We were responsible for being responsible, for being role models, mentors and champions of the school ethos. The idea of a triumvirate came from ancient Rome and referred to a board of three ruling men. I liked the play on this given that I attended a school for girls. I was offered a freethinking and feminist education (for which I will be eternally grateful). I can still remember a teacher telling us not to compete with each other, to work together and support each other. I’ve been a team player, committed to team approaches, and interested in them ever since. Film-making is a process that necessarily involves a team working together; it is by nature collaborative, but it is also generally hierarchical. This chapter considers a way of working which is genuinely collaborative and non-hierarchical. It explores the idea that when people form collaborative partnerships over a body of work, the work is influenced by this process. It investigates creative partnerships, the ‘team approach’, and takes up some of the issues for this way of working with particular focus (following the introduction) on the team from Gecko Films: Sue Brooks, Sue Maslin and Alison Tilson. 295 WOMENVISION INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS At the 1999 AFI Awards Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin jointly won the Byron Kennedy Award for their work as a creative team; they acknowledged the other members of their film family—people with whom they had consistently worked. Byron Kennedy after whom the award was named, was himself part of a legendary team (Byron Kennedy with George Miller). Overseas teams provide strong models for the team approach; English director Anad Tucker (Hilary and Jackie, 1998) has claimed that ‘if there is a strength in the English film industry it is that there are these teams—producing, directing, writing teams that believe in each other and stay together and that’s how you produce films which have a distinctive voice’.1 An English example of a strong team is the one that made Trainspot- ting (1995) and in 1994, Shallow Grave: producer Andrew MacDonald, writer John Hodge and director Danny Boyle. Successful teams in Australia include Working Dog Inc., who produced the features The Castle (1997), The Dish (2000) and many other creative outputs.2 Working Dog appear to exemplify ‘true collaboration’3 with the team working across all projects in a variety of ways. Jane Kennedy has said that ‘there is something about a group dynamic that is really healthy … there is no hierarchy within the company. If someone is passionate about an idea, the rest of the group will be supportive’.4 The way in which they work is that ‘on all the major projects two people write and the other two edit. Directing duties are shared’.5 Kennedy also points to a key problem for collaboration, that of finding and maintaining collaborative partnerships, saying that: ‘In the entertainment world, not too many partnerships last 15 years’.6 Finding the right balance in a team is notoriously difficult. Producer Sue Milliken character- ised industry relationships at the 1999 WIFT Conference saying that, ‘a large percentage of producer/director relationships “don’t work” and this is more of a problem, or happens more frequently, with larger, fully funded features’.7 Choosing the right collaborators is important, but difficult, and it is not always smooth sailing. While film-making involves collaboration, there is a difference between collaborating and working collaboratively in the ‘true’ sense that this chapter seeks to discuss. Writer and director Jackie McKimmie has described the difficulties of the collaborative process with the example of her first film experience on a film she wrote called Madness of Two (1981). She worked collaboratively on the script with the director (Hugh Keays-Byrne), and his partner (who became the production manager). She recalled that they ‘opened my eyes to what real film-making was about. Passion and commitment … They’re real collectiv- ists … Hugh involved me in everything … we’d have all night sessions sitting up rewriting it’. McKimmie described it as a ‘ a truly wonderful process. But when we got into production it all changed’.8 She was left disillusioned because the film was not made the way she thought it should have been and she vowed to have more control with her next film experience, a path which lead her to directing. She had assumed that the vision she had was shared, and the articulation of that vision would be a careful one. However, despite the wonderful initial collaboration, this did not happen. It is an illustration of the way in which film-making is generally hierarchical and of the way in which writers are sometimes not offered full courtesy 296 LISA FRENCH C ATHERI once production starts. A process that begins with the triumvirate N E M of the writer, director and pro- ARTI ducer sometimes moves from the N A time the production starts to the N D director, producer and editor. B A Z LU COLLABORATIONS AND FUNDING HRMA IN THE AUSTRALIAN FILM NN INDUSTRY WITH Currently in Australia the govern- THEIR ment film funding agencies have 1999 focused significantly on the idea B of teams. Ros Walker wrote when Y RO 9 manager of Film Victoria, that N K E the projects that get up ‘tend to NN 10 have a strong team attached’. In ED Y her travel report following her AWARDS attendance at the 1999 Austral- ian Screen Directors’ Association (ASDA) Conference, she stated that one of the points the conference reiterated was that ‘the three positions of writer, producer and director are all pivotal to making a good film’. That ‘great films require great creative teams and all three roles [should] be involved in developing projects’.11 In response to this per- spective on film-making, Film Victoria built into their 2000 funding arrangements for script development, that producers’ and directors’ fees can be included if they are working on the draft in question. Similar processes are in place in other states, such as Queensland for example, where the Pacific Film and Television Commission (PFTC) will fund teams, offering feature script development via an application from a writer, director or producer or, with emerging projects, assist to bring teams together where none are in place. On a national level, the emphasis on teams has been more emphatic and prescriptive than it has been for the states. The Australian Film Commission’s (AFC) 2002 guidelines for feature development which have categories (Strand C and D) that are ‘available only to Writer/ Producer or Writer/Director/Producer teams’.12 Current AFC production investment does, in general, favour team approaches and the guidelines express a preference for funding writers or directors on ‘projects with a producer attached’.13 The support of teams might lead to the development of a more ‘truly collaborative’ film-making culture, a model exemplified in the rest of this chapter by the Gecko team. 297 WOMENVISION THE GECKO TEAM: SUE BROOKS, SUE MASLIN & ALISON TILSON INTRODUCTION Film-makers Sue Brooks, Sue Maslin and Alison Tilson14 formed the production company, Gecko, in 1992.15 Gecko are however much more than a production company, they are a creative team. As the following pages illustrate, their team is characterized by equality and a collective ideal. They have a determination to make ‘films that matter’16 to them and which share what might be described as like-mindedness. Although they do not always work together, they have collaborated (and continue to collaborate) on several films and the formalizing of a company was the result of their desire to work together as a team. In 1987 Alison Tilson said that she had ‘discovered that it’s important to work with people I like and trust and who share some basic political and aesthetic views’.17 Tilson still works this way, as do Brooks and Maslin. When they work together, they do it as a creative team. Working collaboratively can be difficult but can also offer advantages. What follows here is an exploration of collaborative, creative partnerships—the ‘team approach’ as seen through the eyes of the Gecko team. One of the features of Gecko is that they are all female. They say that this is something they don’t really think about. Gender is only one thing among fifty things but it inevitably comes up and they concede that one of the ways they are regarded is as a female team.

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