Hello and welcome back to Women to Watch!

It has been a while between posts, but I am excited to share this update with you.

This edition focuses on women who embrace art to explore and develop their identity.

Back in June I had the pleasure of hosting a Q&A session at Sydney Film Festival for new indie Australian drama Three Chords and the Truth, with writer/director Claire Pasvolsky, her husband and collaborator, producer Steve Pasvolsky, and the stars of the film Jackie Marshall and Maisie Owens.

The film is a moving story of two lives intersecting at the just the right time, two women at different stages of their lives in need to support, and who find that in each other. Partly inspired by Jackie’s own experiences as a musician, it features wonderful original music created for the film, and a standout performance from newcomer Maisie Owens.

This week, the film opens in 32 theatres around the country, and I was lucky enough to sit down with Claire once more to chat about her film.

I am also sharing an interview from back in 2019, where I had the privilege of talking with incredible Wiradjuri woman and professional dancer, Ella Havelka. Scroll below to check out that conversation and for more about her documentary Ella.

Thanks again for reading, I hope you enjoy these conversations with and about excellent Women to Watch!

And don’t forget to get out to your local cinema and support Australian cinema and Three Chords and the Truth this week.

Chat soon,

Karina

Interview: Claire Pasvolsky

Karina Libbey: Thanks so much for taking the time to chat to me at this busy time Claire!

You have talked about the film being a portrait of an artist, of Angie and Jackie, but also about the power of kindness and connection and the healing of trauma through music - I think that is what makes the film so beautiful and special. It is a tremendous achievement that you directed and wrote your debut feature film. I'd love to dig in a bit more about how you came to first write the story, where that started, and then we could talk about how you got to make it.

Claire Pasvolsky

It's been a long road for me to be getting my first feature out at this point in my life, I have been trying to do it for a long time and lots of things nearly happened - I've done a lot in theatre and documentary and other drama as well. My husband Steve and I, we collaborate on most things together, and we'd been working on a true crime documentary with Narelle Fraser, which we had planned to be filming in 2020. Then of course, what happened, happened and she was Melbourne based, so that all went.

And every morning we sit and have our coffee and we talk about well, what projects are we doing, what what's good, what's bad? Have you had an idea... and Steve had had this idea of a young boy who is coming from a horrendous situation. Not sure what it was, but a bad situation, and he is taken in by an older man who then is like a father figure to him and mentors him, which changes the course of his life. And I said, “yeah, I think that's an awesome idea. But I think it'd be better if it was a young girl and an older woman takes her in, and it should be a musical, and Jackie Marshall should play older woman.”

Steve and I both worked with Jackie recently, just in very small ways, him for a special for the ABC and me for my documentary Big Sky Girls. So we’d sort of met this incredible musician, she's very charismatic, but she's also quite mysterious and unusual. At the same time we thought “Why haven't we heard about her before? And why doesn't the rest of the country know?”.

So that then sparked this idea, and he's like, “that's brilliant, but don't ring her”, because I tend to get a bit over excited and jump the gun... So I sent her a text message, instead of calling her and said “random question, have you ever acted before and what's your thought on independent cinema?”. Then we were on the phone that day and then she organized childcare by 6pm that night.

And it was a very loose idea for this story, but all of a sudden things were moving very quickly. And we had a little bit of money from a private investor and then we had our crew that we normally work with commit to a couple of weeks. We had Jackie from Brisbane. And we're like, we better make this happen!

And so I did a scene by scene, really breaking up that script and moving things around. I would say it started off as quite a simple story. And then I started to interview Jackie about elements of her life, what it's really like to be a musician, and little elements of her story, and most of the illness stuff, because the character, Angie, that's based on Jackie, but is definitely a character. And wrote the script based on all of that.

Karina:

What was the process like, of talking through where she pulled those personal elements from her life into that story, and was there ever a boundary not to cross? How did you get through that territory with her?

Claire:

It's quite interesting in retrospect, because I hardly knew her at all, and it was like I had that idea of the way the two characters meet, is that the younger woman is homeless and Jackie's character, Angie, has left her car door unlocked. And then the next morning, she discovers this young girl has slept in the car, so she deliberately leaves her car open and puts the sandwich in the drink and the note in. And I said that to Jackie and she said “I'd totally do that”. And it was like, OK, that tells me something about her character. I would say she was completely open about it.

We shot another character that was a friend of Angie's but then we ended up pulling that out because we thought it was very important that the two characters be completely isolated, so they needed each other more. What is possibly confronting for Jackie, has been after the film has been made and she's seeing there are elements of her life there, but it's also a separate character. Perhaps she is being triggered by the illness [scenes], but also that people might think she is Angie. And she's not! Angie is very alone. Jackie's not alone, she's got a big community of friends and family around her. So I think it was after the film was made that she thought "Ohh people are going to think I'm a crazed alcoholic”. No, that’s the character. But for some people there is that fine line, and I have to give that explanation a lot – that there's Jackie and then there's Angie.

Karina

And Jackie created a lot of the original music for the film, is that right? Or she already had this in her repertoire?

Claire

Bit of both. The the wonderful thing about working with Jackie is that she had ownership of her own music, so we didn't have to deal with record companies and all of that. For several of the songs she did new variations and versions, and then she also wrote a bunch of new songs for the for the film as well.

Karina

She's so talented and I love this beautiful progression of your relationship with this woman who you've both worked with previously, which as developed into this other scenario. It's lovely. Can you talk a bit about meeting Maisie Owens, who plays Ruby. She is such a fantastic performer, how did you cast her in the film?

Claire

Everything happened so rapidly, and I have got a background in a bit of casting myself, and we didn't have money for a casting agent. So, we saw about 20 girls for the audition and it came down to two or three that were real stand outs. But she was the stand out because she was also that bit older, she was 20 while the others were 16 or 17 and I knew this was going to be a really challenging shoot. We were going to be asking a lot of this young person to not only push themselves to that high level of emotion, but to go on, not dangerous shoots, but they were a little bit edgy – we were going into live pubs and doing that real stuff, getting own trains at night, walking down the street at night. And I thought, this level of maturity is better for Maisie, but also for me as a director to think, I'm going to personally get a lot more out of working with this collaboration.

So even though she's so she's young, she is very wise, she's got quite a lot of acting experience and she hasn't done a lot of music, but she's done singing. She's really an actor who sings. She brushed up on her guitar skills for Three Chords. That scene where you see Jackie teach her the three chords - we had three days of rehearsal and I said “I want you to just do what you would do if you were teaching someone the three chords, I want all the language and all that”. And of course, we did kind of speed that up a little bit, but that was the process and the language around that naturalism, of teaching the music.

Karina

That’s so great. What comes through is that natural relationship between the two of them there is so much charisma between them. Did they have a good time working together?

Claire

Yeah, they did. It was also very different because Jackie is not an actor, so she came into that rehearsal process, she'd also trained as a jazz singer, so she has that improvisational kind of background. We just had three days to work with the script, so it was the three of us just in my lounge room, where actually a lot of the shoot happened, and we were rehearsing in there and it was very intense, but it was fantastic. They worked well with each other; it was great.

Karina

And I love this story of you and Steve and having your coffee and generating your ideas together. (I also love that your response was “great idea, except let's change it entirely”). Have you got other ideas in the works yet that you can tell us about?

Claire

We have a production company together, Film Quarter, and we've got a lot of different things that we're working on; I'm developing my latest screenplay now, which is like a follow up to Three Chords. It's music based as well, but it's a psychological thriller. It's a road movie about musicians on the road - think Thelma and Louise meets Black Swan.

Karina

Sign me up!

Claire

It's much darker, it's again two females one older, one younger, and they're forced to work together in collaboration. Otherwise, a TV series as well. We've got lots of stuff we're trying to get moving!

Karina

Amazing. It was really great to see Three Chords and the Truth have a great festival run, and it comes out in cinemas this week – what is the plan for it after that?

Claire

I think we just see, we are trying to be in the moment of this week. Tomorrow - the 5th of October - being the national release and then at some other cinemas it is coming out a bit later, towards the end of the month. And then hopefully overseas sales. We just want as many people to see it as possible and to take it overseas would be great as well.

Karina

It think the strength of it is that it's very personal and while very Australian, it is also universal, something you can connect to, no matter who you are. I think there's some great success to be had for it.

Claire

Something someone was saying to me the other day was “I just love how there's not that many words in it and that you are in those intimate spaces. With those people, those characters by themselves. And you really feel a deep connection to all the characters” which is lovely. So hopefully, as you say it is, it will travel. I hope so.

Karina

I hope so too! Thank you so much Claire and best of luck with the film!

Finding Yourself

Karina

Interview: Claire Pasvolsky

Creating Change