Australian Film

Jim Schembri has written in the Age about three recent releases in Australia - 'The Reef', 'Griff the Invisible' and 'A Heartbeat Away', which seem likely to throw away most of the millions spent generating them.  The Reef sounds like horror/drama, which I would not normally go to see.  'A Heatbeat Away' seems like warmed over dead heartwarming underdog story. 'Griff the Invisible' though, seems interesting and new, and I'd like to see it.   I will try to persuade the blog wife on that idea.

The interesting question is 'why does this ever happen?'  Not just in Australia, but everywhere, creative people of considerable talent tell horror stories of being unable to produce their great idea, and of ideas that seemed great but turned out to be terrible, and of ideas that started out terrible, were pushed and sank without trace. Why would something so financially horrific persist?  How can we do better at making good films?

I think the only people who I would trust to answer that are Pixar and maybe the Coen brothers, and the only difference I can see is that the people in charge take pains.  Their commitment to a story with a human problem, a real, earned resolution of it, is not just lip-service.  But although commitment means you can fight through difficulty, you have to be finding fairly elevated things difficult. That means you have to be very good, to know it when you have it. But it's hard to hold on to that in a world that will break all records seeing Avatar.

(I didn't like Avatar, but in fairness, it hit all its story marks. It was predictable and trite, characters were reduced to instruments (poor Michelle Rodriguez), the world was foolish, the resolution didn't resolve anything deeply, but it setup and paid off, it had a balance of humour and so on.)

Australian film production is greatly constrained by scale.  You can't get much money, so you can't do spectacle. You can't have many locations, many actors, many cameras, many microphones, long and careful editing. You could make Primer, The Magician, Paranormal Activity and similar - stories where ordinariness is exploited and subverted. My idea would be a RomCom set at a Uni, in which the big human experience is failure to communicate - the experience of floundering in a bewildering contre temps when you try to communicate with another human living in another background. But that needs crowd scenes. The whole bewildering contre temps thing is probably what goes wrong when creative people deeply love a film that bombs. So maybe a film school project.