Encore’s Power 50, 2011

What about Producer’s Jessica Brentnall and Tim White that championed Julia Leigh and got “Sleeping Beauty” up in the first place as a first time filmmaker with no presence, and a script that people didn’t dare touch. There has been no mention of Jessica or Tim anywhere in the press with that film and their acheivements making such a different film in this country.

I think the deal is the film in question is yet to be fully digested by the public and is basically an unknown quantity. I’m not sure that championing unknown directors with no experience making films with scripts that sit in the realm of art house is something that will happen all that often in the future. I applaud them for being able to navigate their way around the proven criteria, (why there isn’t more of it is beyond me) its a pity that if the film bombs, nobody else will be able to navigate the same proven criteria obstacles in the future, in fact they will probably use Sleeping Beauty as ammunition to enhance the obstacles embedded in the selection process, which is absurd because a crap film like A Heartbeat Away meets the proven criteria and look what that delivered..cynical crap

@ Kate O’Sullivan: I think those two Producers will be ducking for cover, Sleeping Beauty is a massive yawn..and I’m a fan of arthouse cinema. Different is one thing, boring is another.

I have a real problem with calling a movie boring or bad. Such things are highly subjective, one man’s bore is another man’s compelling drama. As makers of films, the point is that a film must be completed, it must achieve its running time and get distribution and ultimately, it must make money, show business is a business first and an art form second. Some films which have reputations as utter rubbish still managed to tick all of those boxes. You’ll find Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glitter are available on DVD and while people might think they’re works of incompetence, they probably paid to see the film on DVD before arriving at that conclusion.

By way of a comparison, I once wrote a film and told the director, “it needs to be 80 minutes long or I can’t sell it”. The director cut lots of stuff he thought was boring expositional dialog. And he handed in a finished product that was 31 minutes long. Not one solitary cent of the production budget came back from that film, because a 31 minute film is not a feature film. And yet, it was quite good, in my opinion. Sadly, good doesn’t make money. Feature length and distribution makes money.

I agree with you both, Doug & Frank, particularly what you say Doug in that its going to be used for or against similar projects in the future. At least it was (somewhat) critically acclaimed at Cannes, it’s a start in that it’s not a total disaster (for future parties!). At the end of the day, its producers got up a hell of a budget I would want them in my camp! Anyone that can get that team (first time feature producer, first time writer, first time director) over a $6mil budget …

Emile Sherman and Troy Lum are the cleverest of men that will (continue) to do Australia proud in these next few years.

As far as I can see Emile Sherman and Troy Lum are the only people with their fingers on the pulse. I was very impressed with Troy Lum on the Metro Screen panel a while back, he said it straight “there just isn’t that many good scripts floating around, people have one idea, why not twenty” and that’s exactly it..the problem there is we expect writers to live off nothing and write in lonely poverty drenched rooms and produce something like The Animal Kingdom or The Kings Speech. Well it doesn’t work like that, quality writing takes enormous concentration and determination, and writers need to pay the rent as well. The current funding system we have constructed basically see’s this wall of proven criteria rewarding a certain clique..if you aren’t in the clique forget it. I read a script the other day by a young writer who shows some real promise, this script might not be the script that breaks him in, but its a hell of a lot better than most of the tosh I see getting funded..what’s his pathway forward? Zero.. [comment edited]. If he is lucky enough he might meet one of the “Power 50” maybe, probably won’t happen. [comment edited] I mean well done on the team behind Sleeping Beauty, but from what I can gather this will be a once in a lifetime opportunity, the reviews have been predominately negative, but what do you expect from a culture that is obsessed with telling itself its in a boom..who is actually benefiting from this boom, except people with shares in mining or people who work in the industry? Boom my arse.. we are raping the land for resources and don’t see any worth in exporting ideas..unless those ideas are in the human form of people leaving the country because this place is an idea and innovation dead end ( look at the Kings Speech, could have been Australian..$400 million shipped overseas), [comment edited] We can be an ideas culture that exports high quality ideas and entertainment.. we don’t value this approach, we’d rather import it and saturate our society with imported crap..what have we got is inept leadership all around us.
It won’t be until we really understand the true devastation of what successive crap leadership is doing to this culture will we want radical change..by then our best and brightest will have shipped off..we’ve always been stupid like that.

Some awesome people listed here and some great achievements for the industry.

I know some of these businesses and I can say that a lot of these people are where they are today because of fantastic people that support them too. (And I know they’d say the same). It’s great to celebrate some achievements throughout the industry like this.