News

Here I Am’s Beck Cole, Kath Shelper and Warwick Thorton are here to stay

The Hollywood machine loves selling audiences ‘the new project from the creators of…’ a certain box office hit or a critically acclaimed film. It looks great on the posters, but most times it doesn’t guarantee anything.

There are times, however, when such a reference is not just an empty marketing tool, but a real promise of the aesthetic and creative capabilities of a close-knit group of collaborators.

Here I Am, from the creators of Samson & Delilah, is one of those cases. Married couple Beck Cole and Warwick Thornton have created a powerful creative partnership with producer Kath Shelper. They call themselves the ‘Trinity’ and together they’ve made critically acclaimed short films and documentaries, as well as Australia’s 2009 Camera d’Or winner at Cannes.

“Warwick, Bec and I have been working as a team for the last seven years,” explained Shelper.

“We work together on all of our projects and that’s really nourishing; we are very different in our own ways but we share a very similar aesthetic. Filmmaking is hard work so you need to be making films with people you want to have a glass of wine with at the end of the day. That’s what gets you through.”

This time, it’s Cole’s turn to shine and make her feature film directorial debut with Here I Am; a powerful drama about a young Indigenous woman (Shai Pittman) just out of prison, living at a shelter and trying to deal with her own demons while fixing her relationship with her mother (the anthropologist and activist Marcia Langton) and daughter (Quinaiha Scott). By her side are a group of Indigenous women also trying to rebuild their broken lives.

A Door Opener
Shelper produced Cole’s short film Plains Empty, which premiered at Sundance in 2005. Together, they decided to work on a project for the Long Black Indigenous Feature Development Program.

Cole started writing the script soon after she had her first child, which got her thinking about her new role as a mother, and her relationship with her daughter. She also wanted to write interesting roles for women to play on the big screen – Indigenous women in particular.

“I was also interested in the disproportionate number of Aboriginal women in jail, so I brought all of these elements together,” she said. “That was about six years ago, and the story hasn’t changed much since; it’s always been this woman’s journey, from her release of prison through to a place of hope and happiness, of having a future.”

According to Shelper, Cole is a sharp observer of human nature and what makes people tick – a skill that is present in Here I Am.

“She has a great knack of bringing that personal observation into a dramatic fictional situation, and she’s able to marry her concerns about the world and her own interests with a keenly observed sense of humanity,” explained Shelper.

The project was originally called The Place Between, but the 2010 Toronto premiere of a French film called The Place In Between forced Shelper and Cole to rethink the title during production.

“I never really liked The Place Between,” revealed the director. “I struggled with it and tried very hard to come up with something better… Here I Am is a much stronger statement.”

The success of Samson & Delilah – and the making-of documentary directed by Cole – took place while Shelper and Cole continued to develop this project, which was one of the last recipients of the AFC’s IndiVision funding. It also had the support of the Adelaide Film Festival Fund, the South Australian Film Corporation, Screen NSW and the ABC.

Samson & Delilah was definitely a door opener; it’s much easier to approach people and being able to say ‘We made Samson & Delilah and now we’re doing this other film’,” said Shelper. “We were trying to shoot in prison and dealing with certain social issues, but that gave us an instant credibility with the community; they knew we had integrity and we were not going to portray the place in the wrong way.

“At the same time, there are a lot of expectations because of that previous success, but the reality is that Bec is a completely different filmmaker to Warwick and the film is chalk and cheese compared to Samson & Delilah. We had to protect ourselves from that expectation, try not to worry too much about what other people are thinking and to just follow our hearts in relation to this story.”

Rusty yet beautiful

The film’s opening scene was shot on the very first day of the six-week shoot, at the Adelaide Women’s Prison (“A really extraordinary experience,” said Cole). The rest of the shoot took place in Port Adelaide and the surrounding suburbs, where the story is set.

The team took over a vacant building that production designer Sam Wilde transformed into the film’s main location – Temple House, the grubby yet homey women’s shelter.

“We basically moved in and it became the production office as well as the set. Everything took place in that house,” said Cole.

There was only one problem with the location: its creaky floor boards. “The sound guys weren’t very happy with us because the sound recordings from location were very noisy,” admitted Shelper.

Here I Am was shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Warwick Thornton.

“No one said we couldn’t, so we did. We’re filmmakers; if we can shoot a film on film, we’re going to do so,” explained the director.

“The way we work is very economical and if I can make the budget work for us to be able to shoot on 35mm, then that’s what we’ll do,” added Shelper. “Warwick likes to use natural light, so it’s much easier to shoot on film than it is to shoot digitally; you’re not messing around with having to make digital look good and, for me, the price difference between shooting on HD or 35mm isn’t that great.”

The palette of orange, brown and blue was inspired by the colours of Port Adelaide.  According to Cole, she wanted the film to look as the way Port Adelaide is, “rusty, very old and rundown, but also quite beautiful”.

Thornton said his brief was to achieve a naturalistic field. “Port Adelaide is a dynamic but dysfunctional kind of suburb; it doesn’t have a clear-cut kind of look. It’s all over the place, and it was hard to pull back the cinematography to give it that naturalistic feel. It paid off in the end; I’ve been told the best cinematography is the one you don’t see when you’re watching the film, and I’m really proud of this film cinematically.”

The film was edited by Roland Gallois and, according to Shelper, it changed “quite a lot” in the edit.

“It wasn’t pace or tone,” explained Cole. “It was just that we realised really quickly that less was more, so we worked hard on letting the images tell the story. It did come easily but it took a while for us to let things go.”

Here I Am first screened at last February’s Adelaide Film Festival, followed by a Sydney premiere at Message Sticks. The team that handled Samson & Delilah, Footprint Films and Transmission/Paramount, will release it nationwide on June 2.

According to Shelper, the Samson & Delilah experience will inform the distribution strategy for Here I Am: “We did a very effective campaign of running a small, hand-crafted, real grassroots campaign to get people’s interest in lots of different ways. We’ll certainly try and do the same thing on this film, but it’s an art house film with a niche audience, so we’ll work really hard at accessing and concentrating on that audience.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Get the latest media and marketing industry news (and views) direct to your inbox.

Sign up to the free Mumbrella newsletter now.

 

SUBSCRIBE

Sign up to our free daily update to get the latest in media and marketing.