Creating Change
Hello and welcome to the first official Women to Watch post! Thanks for your support.
This month I’m focusing on women who have created the change that they wanted to see - either personally or for the industry - and I’ll be recommending the work of two directors, a book and an exhibition!
Rachael Antony + Laurence Billiet
In the lead up to the recent theatrical release of Australian documentary The Giants I had the honour of hosting a series of Q&A sessions with co-directors/producers/writers Rachael Antony and Laurence Billiet, and the inspiring subject of the film, Bob Brown.
Antony and Billiet have an tremendous amount of combined experience across the screen industry, around the world, and on multiple platforms, and in recent years started their own company General Strike:
“We create screen-based experiences that engage curiosity, challenge preconceptions and celebrate beauty in unexpected places”
They saw a gap in the market, and an opportunity to direct their own content, making the unique type of documentaries that drives their passion.
They recently sat down with me to talk about their work in more depth, including the excellent, highly successful documentary Freeman. Please enjoy the transcribed conversation with these excellent Women to Watch at the bottom of the page.
Dying of Politeness
Speaking of women who saw a need for change and went ahead and did it, I highly recommend Geena Davis’ recently released autobiography.
It’s an earnest and funny account of her life and career, on becoming “the most badass badass to ever badass”.
She also details how, after having children, she was shocked by the under-representation of women and girls in children’s TV and films. And decided to do something about it.
Her admirable passion and focus (and, let’s be honest, position as a gigantic Hollywood star) turned this seemingly insurmountable hurdle into something she felt she could make an immediate impact on, by establishing the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. The data collection and analysis done by the institute has seen real, quantifiable changes in the way women and girls are represented in screen content for children in the US. (To read more on just one of the ways we are working on addressing these issues closer to home, check out Screen Australia’s Gender Matters initiative).
While very much an account of her own personal development and career in Hollywood, it’s also an inspiring read to see action turn out such positive, tangible results. And to have confirmation that Susan Sarandon is, in fact, also a badass!
Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion
I heard Geena (first name basis now, obvi) talk about the work of her institute as keynote speaker at the Being Seen On Screen conference hosted by ACMI in April, which showcased an incredible line up of conversations around representation on screen, including gender, cultural diversity, disability and ageing.
This tied into the launch of their current exhibition Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion, and if you have the chance to see it before it closes 1 October 2023, you absolutely must!
Through iconic stories, characters and moments from over 120 years of moving image history, Goddess celebrates the women and gender-transcending superstars who shaped their own roles, took creative control and fought a system that tried to exploit them.
It’s a space for celebration of the iconic, and discovery of the new, featuring awesome video installations, props, sketches, interviews, costumes, and the stories behind them.
Expertly curated by Bethan Johnson, the content is diverse, reflective and contemporary, and the design is deliciously engaging.
Finally, don’t forget to support Australian cinema and go check out The Giants in cinemas while you still can, or at a local community screening! To find one near you, or host your own, visit: www.thegiantsfilm.com
Thanks again for reading. Chat soon!
Karina
Interview: Rachael Antony + Laurence billiet
Karina Libbey (KL): Thanks so much for joining me for this conversation. I'd love to start with a bit of background around how you started your company General Strike.
Laurence Billiet (LB): We both worked in Melbourne for about a decade in television, and we both worked at Lonely Planet. I was involved in setting up Lonely Planet Television, and we were both very involved in the travel documentary, the factual entertainment end of things. Then we went to Europe and worked in the UK and France for a few years with elite models, which was quite another kind of a travel experience, if I may say, but it made me work with people who are really great at visuals - the more commercial end of filmmaking and photography.
So when we came back to Australia, we tried to make these things marry. The strong appeal of documentary narrative and of storytelling that we have skills with, and a slightly more evolved aesthetic and creative world, which I thought at the time was slightly lacking in the space [with people] quite siloed creatively - people who work in documentary are not the people who work in commercial content and they're not the same that work in photography.
We were interested in exploring ways that we could create content and stories that would be fantastic and exciting and compelling but would also stimulate you on a visual level.
Rachael Antony (RA): One of the ideas behind General Strike was this idea to get people off their screens to an extent, because we felt that people were becoming very addicted to it.
Not so much a concern about addiction, but [people] very much in their own world on their screens, the political climate was becoming very polarised, and we felt that people really needed to connect. And the way that people often connect is in a crowd, in a public space - feeling that connection with others that you don't necessarily get in the virtual world.
So one of the ideas was to get people to come together and that we wanted to do these events that would arouse people's curiosity and would be joyous in some way. That was part of the idea behind it - to assemble people around certain ideas or stories.
LB: Yeah, to get people to see things in a new light and revel in the joy of being inspired.
So we started with some work with Fed[eration] Square in Melbourne and then this film about Cathy Freeman's race at Sydney 2000 [Olympics]. I'd worked with Cathy Freeman previously, I did a series with her called Going Bush on SBS and we had remained connected. She's a very inspiring character, but I felt that her story hadn't been shared widely, even though it’s one of those very rare events that everybody in Australia who was alive has actually seen, it would be really interesting to explore what the experience felt like for her.
At first it was going to be a live event, on the footsteps of the Sydney Opera House. It was something that was very hard to finance [...] and quite hard to pull together from a business perspective, to get the funding for it.
In the process of doing that, I contacted Stephen Page at Bangarra [Dance Theatre] and we started talking about ideas. Then with COVID, the whole idea of doing a live event became completely ridiculous. One thing led to another and it being a film for the ABC is sort of an incredible, you know, it's a story of how sometimes you just end up doing exactly what you wanted to do, but in a completely different way.
The idea with Freeman was to create an experience that people could reconnect and ask themselves why that race, why that moment and those 50 seconds had moved them so much, and potentially reconnect with that beautiful feeling. It happened that because it was on TV and it was in the middle of the lockdown, everybody watched that film with their family. It was like this kind of analog 1982 watching TV with your dinner tray.
[…] it was completely random but it did exactly what we were hoping for, except it used the medium of traditional TV, which was unexpected, but an incredible delight.
KL: Congratulations! It's a beautiful film and so easy to see that through-line of your philosophy. I’d love to hear a bit more about the collaboration with Bangarra and if Cathy was involved in that. It's such a beautiful, artistic and unique way to convey these emotions.
LB: When we start working on the film, it became quite clear that Cathy's experience was a very physical one, and it became a story about bodies and connection; between her body, the body of the other eight runners, the bodies of those 100,000 people in the stadium and the bodies of the 20 million Australians watching. And that something happened, it felt extremely tangible.
To explore that, we thought that it'd be interesting to work with a choreographer because it felt like it was an important dimension of the story. So I naturally approached Stephen who had an incredibly personal experience with Cathy because he was one of the lead artistic directors of the [Olympic] opening ceremony, where she lit up the flame, and he stood next to her.
He also wrangled all those extraordinary ladies from Central Australia who were involved in that massive performance to tell the story of the dreamtime in the Opening Ceremony. […] he trained them for a couple of years, and they were telling them how important it was to present modern Australia and traditional Australia, bring that story of the new face of Australia, bring the Indigenous culture into it. And they were like “ we're just doing it for the girl”. Basically the real the reason they did it was for Cathy Freeman.
He was really keen to be involved, and then it was really through Lillian Banks, his dancer from Bangarra, who really brings to life the spirit of Catherine, and obviously the depth of the Indigenous spirituality, which is a big part of Cathy’s story.
RA: I think also at the time [of the film], under the previous government there was so much hostility around Indigenous issues, coinciding with the rise yet again of Black Lives Matter, both in the US and deaths and custody here in Australia, and the film in itself, reminds us of how great and how joyous it is when we are connected as people and look after each other and have compassion for each other.
Historically there's a lot of wrongs in this country and they are ongoing, and wouldn't it just be wonderful if we just dealt with these problems and stood up for each other. It is interesting in a way that sometimes film or books or any kind of cultural product can create an alternative dialogue and speak directly to the public, because the public is usually ahead of government on everything.
We see this with climate change. We see this with the voice as well, people want it and they want to see a pathway to action - whether it's emotional or structural or political, and that can be comforting as well to just be reminded that there's alternatives, and they're positive ones.
KL: I love the way that you decided to end the film because it kind of forces you to reflect on what’s going on now too.
LB: What we have found is that a lot of people underestimate audiences, they think they can’t put two and two together. And our experience shows the opposite, if you always tell people what they need to think, that’s half the fun taken away. What's great when you watch something is to make your own thoughts and have your own ideas, because those ideas are going to be a lot stronger and more interesting than if it's an idea that someone put in your head.
Obviously when you make a film, you are putting ideas in people's mind in a way, but we found with The Giants and Freeman, that there’s something that all audiences really love, which is that they have to use their brain and make their own story, that it's open-ended. It's not something that is too literal and too prescriptive.
I think that triggers people's imagination and it makes them feel alive, and empowered, and ultimately it makes them want to do something or makes them reflect in a way that is really lovely. It’s encouraging for us to think that those films are big commercial successes because it shows that you can do something that’s not the way it would be done in the mainstream, and yet it ticks boxes in terms of audience members, and that opens the door for many things.
KL: I was lucky to do a series of Q&A's with you both for The Giants and we saw that happen in the room every time - there were so many people who felt inspired and called to action.
Can you give me a bit of a background about getting Bob Brown on board for the film and your approach to telling such a huge story.
RA: Should we start with Bob? Basically, we had come up with this idea to make a film about Bob Brown and intertwine the story with trees. We were reading a lot about trees at the time, Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, and we felt that the experience of Freeman had taught us that you don’t have to make a boring documentary. We wanted to embed the story of Bob with something which was really important in our country - our forests - and we were aware around of the issues of our native forest, logging and the extinction crisis, climate change, the bushfires .
We wanted to embed these elements in the documentary, without making it a really boring, depressing documentary that we wouldn't want to watch ourselves, let alone make. It takes a couple of years to do it and generally, we don’t watch boring depressing documentaries!
I think to a point you just get exhausted emotionally, if you're somebody who is already attuned to the issue you don't necessarily want to dive another hour into it because you come out feeling worse.
We wanted to make something that was more artistic and keeping in the spirit of Bob because he's actually a very creative person. He's a spiritual person and he seems to have a real affinity for the arts.
So like many things in life, we started with a PDF - in fact I was saying to Laurence how weird it was that this film used to be PDF! - and send it off to Jenny Weber at the Bob Brown Foundation.
My understanding is Bob has been approached previously to do documentaries, but hadn't gone with it. We had noticed that there wasn't any Australian Story or Who Do You Think You Are with Bob Brown, which we felt was an omission. We didn't know if that was to do with the politicisation of the ABC or just an oversight but thought it was strange because he's such a powerful and interesting person. He obviously has a lot of fans!
So we put this to him and set up this zoom call. He was outdoors, wearing this old woolly jumper with holes in it, with a hen clucking around. We were stuck in Melbourne in a lockdown, and it just seemed paradoxical to be there in the wilderness. And he's just said, straight up: I’ll do it. I'll do it for the trees.
And that was it.
I don't know if he really thought that we would actually pull this off or whether he just thought he'd say yes and see how we went and if so…he may have got more than he bargained for. But once it started to get serious, he really got on board and gave us everything that we needed.
KL: And you could see that on the tour, he was so passionate about supporting the film
LB: It's one of the things that I'm most surprised about, how hardworking he is. You realise that all of the stuff that is in the film is just the tip of the iceberg as far as his life is concerned. We could make another 10 hours about what he has achieved. Just how hard working and committed he is, it's very inspiring.
KL: Truly inspiring! Tell me a little bit about the the animation technique used in the film.
LB: We just wanted to find a way to open people's hearts to [the story of the trees] because the forest is getting more and more removed from our day-to-day life for most Australians who live primarily in cities on the coast. A lot of our coastal forests have already been cut down a long time ago, so the forest is getting, unfortunately, further away from us.
We felt that we wanted to bring the forest to people. But this is a hard thing to do because, when you point your camera to a tree, nothing happens. It's extremely un-cinematic. The vitality, the amazing life that goes on in the forest […] happens in a way our eyes can’t see, or at night, so we thought we should try to explore ways to creatively bring to life the wonder of that forest.
We had come across the technology of 3D scanning and scanning forests, and […] we came across the work of Alex Le Guillou a French animator and motion designer who had a pet project scanning trees around where he lives, creating these really cool scans and visual representation of those forests.
We approached him and worked with University of Tasmania to scan the forest, the three trees that we cast for the film - the eucalyptus regnan, one of the tallest trees in the world, the Huon pine, and one of the oldest trees in the world, the myrtle in the Tarkine.
We scanned them and send the data to Alex who animated it and created those magical forestscapes, immersing you as you wander around the forest. Because of the way they look, you get a chance to appreciate the diversity and righteousness of them, it’s rich visually - you can travel through that forest in a way that you can’t as a human being - through the top of the canopy, underground. It’s got a meditative quality where you are exposed to the wonder of the forest.
It's made Australians realise that what we have is extremely special on the world stage. It's not just a bunch of gum trees. It's a bunch of very special trees and we don't always realise that, no one's making us realise that. Our governments are very keen for us not to realise that.
It’s really great to see people being proud of those forests and inspired to go visit them, but also save them.
KL: It’s a really captivating way to bring audiences into it.
RA: I think a lot of Australians are aware of oak trees or redwoods or, you know, it's a hangover of our European heritage for many Australians, but they don't really appreciate or know about their own backyards. It's really fascinating to think that the eucalyptus regnan is just like the redwood, but you wouldn't want to chop them down for toilet paper.
Also to realise how important on a world scale our native forests are because they are primary forests, and there's so little of it left. Despite this Australia is a leading nation for deforestation.
People are aware of the Amazon land clearing. They're not aware of the land clearing here. The WWF put Australia on a deforestation hotspot list, along with countries like the Amazon and the Congo, so it's quite sobering.
And this is such an easy thing to stop - we could literally go from being a deforestation hotspot today to not be on that list tomorrow, by stopping land clearing and native forest logging, and rewilding.
KL: I have a lot of optimism that your film will help bring about that awareness - it really takes everyone working together to raise awareness in the community, doesn’t it?
RA: Unfortunately it shouldn't, though, because the science is so clear. Climate science is so clear. I don't know what the obstacle is in just listening to it.
LB: We were not at all activists, we were environmentally minded, very much like most Australians, but certainly the research that we did to make the film pointed to a massive amount of vested interest that ultimately is captured by political parties. Despite the fact that 80% of Australians have wanted the end to native forest logging, and that’s been going on for 30 or 40 years, those numbers haven't changed.
The fact that it's happening in Tasmania, you could go well, they do have a lot of Liberal support over there, but it's happening in Victoria which is a very left wing progressive state and has been for decades, and shows no traces of changing.
So it is a call to action for people to just be a bit louder, make more noise because we all thought the problem had been sorted somehow and it's not. We are the great majority, we just need to make a bit more noise because logging native forests doesn't make sense. It doesn’t make economic sense. There's actually really no argument for it.
Of all the very complex battles for climate change and climate action, native forest logging is the low hanging fruit. It's the one thing we can do. The rest I don't know, but that is something we can do that has no bearing on anything, neither jobs nor money. We would save money!
I'm hoping the film can be part of that. We can see it with the broader alliance of NGO's and individuals that are pushing really hard on this. We are hoping to help get this done in 2023. Not 10 years. Now.
KL: You can really see audiences rallying behind the film, telling their friends to see it - I’ve seen it a lot on social media.
RA: Well, to quote Bob Brown “there's no stopping a small group of people if their idea’s time has come.”
So the time is now.
“Don’t get depressed. Get active”
