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Taking the temperature: Section 4 – Working overseas

Results from Encore Magazine‘s industry-wide survey into the mood of the sector and the EncoreLive panel discussion that followed.

Have you ever considered:
Leaving the country to look for work overseas – 34.8%

Staying in Australia, but leaving the industry to pursue another
type of work – 34.4%

None of the above, I’m happy doing this job in Australia – 28%

No response – 2.6%

Comments:

“I’d love to work overseas, but on my terms. Not because I can’t succeed here.”

“Left Australia for ten years to work in the industry in London. Now back for some years I am happy to work in Australia but constantly disheartened by apathy in this neck of the woods.”

What are the main issues affecting your sector of the industry?

Comments:
“Lack of work opportunities especially for my age group (mature aged male).”

“Lack of positions/opportunities or networks available for emerging artists and lack of resources to information for emerging artists.”

Do we have a problem with a brain drain in this country?
Peter: I don’t know if it’s necessarily a bad thing if it’s a two-way street, so long as writers, directors, actors, producers go and come back. I don’t know any Australian who has left and permanently stayed away – everyone seems to come back. People like Miller and Luhrmann bring massive productions back into the industry for specific reasons but everyone goes and comes back. I think it’s great. I think where we are suffering from a brain drain is in the skill set. We’re in serious danger of losing our skill set simply because there is not the activity to keep that momentum in training. I keep going back to grips but they seem to be the people I hang around with. These cranky old bastards who have been shooting films for 30 or 40 years and their trucks are Aladdin’s caves of these insane things that they’ve built and they know how to do. They’re not able to pass that on; both their crankiness and the ability to pull magic out of their truck and make a shot work. I think that’s happening all the way through from hair and make up to production design, art department – that’s where we’re running into trouble.

Lisa: It’s a global industry and if we don’t work on a global scale I think we’re in trouble. I think the filmmakers who are most successful are transnational. They can make films and pull money from anywhere in the world, that’s your Baz Luhrmanns, Jane Campion, writers like Laura Jones, producers like Jane Scott, Jan Chapman – they’re coming and going, moving backwards and forwards. Jane Campion might make a short film because she wants to, because it’s like poetry and that’s the form of the thing she wants to say, then she’ll make a bigger film – most are transnational now but she works here and uses creative talent like (cinematographer) Greig Fraser on Bright Star. They have that two-way relationship which feeds our industry, which is really fantastic.

Tony: One of the things that SPAA is pushing as an agenda to the Government is this fund opportunity called the Producer/Distributer Film Fund. The theory is that we’re making a substantial number of films in the $0-6 million dollar range and we’re making a number at the ultra high budget level at the $80-150 million level, whether it’s Gatsby, Mad Max Four or Happy Feet 2 but we’re not making many in the $7-40 million range. This creates an exodus of a whole range of professionals, most notably the actors and actresses, and to a lesser degree the directors and directors of photography and certainly in the visual effects and post productions sectors who are trained up at the Government and taxpayer expense, achieve some degree of success and critical acclaim before being hoovered up, mostly to the United States and elsewhere to work there. Part of the reason that happens, apart from the traditional curiosity to explore other places to work, is simply because there is a whole canvas size for working on production in Australia that is almost impossible to get financed. To get a seamless career path where someone can get into the industry in their early 20s, get married or get in a relationship, secure a mortgage, have a couple of kids, those sorts of things are pretty hard to do on $35,000.

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