latest features
Hard Knocks
With recent reports that life for the residents of Toomelah has reached crisis point, Ivan Sen’s feature about the troubled Aboriginal community hits home even harder.
From A Faraway Land
The inaugural Indian Film Festival of Melbourne will attempt to show audiences that there’s more to their thriving cinema scene than song and dance… though there’s that too.
Last Dance
Director Martha Goddard gives us the back story on shooting her experiential short film ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ which is vying for a Dendy Award at Sydney Film Festival.
Trolls and Tribulations
Having raised the funds via crowd-funding, Snowgum Films are bravely attempting to bring Terry Pratchett’s short epic, ‘Troll Bridge’, to screen.
search the site
newsletter
Enter your email address below to receive the weekly Filmink newsletter
Top-notch Advice at Tropfest
FilmInk recently chatted to New York based screenwriter Charles Randolph (‘Love and Other Drugs’), the keynote speaker at one of Tropfest’s new side events...
The guiding aim behind Tropfest has always been to offer aspiring filmmakers a platform from which they can tap into other career opportunities and with 2012 marking Australia's biggest short film festival's 20th anniversary, they've decided to step things up. For the first time, the festival will be expanded to three days of events, one of which will be Tropfest Roughcut, a filmmaker symposium where a number of industry heavyweights will be sharing their wisdom.
Confirmed to speak is Australian film editor Jason Ballantine (currently working on The Great Gatsby and whose credits also include Wolf Creek and Rogue) as well as Kieran Darcy-Smith whose debut directorial feature, Wish You Were Here, has been selected to screen at Sundance. Delivering the keynote address is international screenwriter Charles Randolph who has penned the screenplays for such films as Love and Other Drugs, The Interpreter and The Life of David Gale. The high profile screenwriter will also serve as a judge at this year's event where he says that he's looking for shorts that "have a strong emotional connection with the audience and take risks."
A long-time friend of Tropfest director John Polson (he produced the director's feature, Tenderness), Randolph was all too happy to be lured to Australia. "There's a little bit of an Australian mafia in New York City which I've been exposed to over the last few years," Randolph recounts. "I judged Tropfest New York three years ago so when John asked me if I could come to Australia and participate in these extra things they were trying, I thought it would be a lot of fun."
So what type of advice will Randolph be offering to those in attendance? "The gist of the discussion will be ten things I wish I'd known when I started," says Randolph who came to screenwriting in his early thirties. "One of the most profound for me is that everyone will always look at your work through their own incentives and self interests and you need to try and find a place where the work is good enough to transcend varying forms of interest. It needs to be so good that people will look beyond their concerns about commerciality or that the lead isn't a traditional movie star or whatever that thing may be."
Randolph is definitely speaking from a position of experience, as his films, while often sold as relatively mainstream movies with big stars, have always had political elements at their heart. "I don't self-consciously look for those types of films but I'm sure I'm drawn to them," he muses. "I tend to like things that occupy a strong resonant cultural space. Sometimes those things get watered down a great deal in the process of becoming movies. Love and Other Drugs was far more political than the actual movie became. I never envisioned it being sold as a rom com. The Life of David Gale was probably politically a slightly different movie on screen from page."
Does one ever get used to seeing their screenplay morph into something else once passed through the hands of studios, directors and producers? "No!" he laughs. "It never gets easier to deal with. It's like you have a child, raise that child until they're five, send them off to school and don't see them again until their high school graduation. You never get used to that process. What happens is you learn that's the way it's going to be, but to write a decent script anyway, you need to be wholly invested."
Despite the ways in which he sees his scripts change, Randolph remains committed to the idea that you should write what sparks your interest. "It's a battle you fight with regard to how much you adhere to genre norms and how much you strike out on your own," he says. "But ultimately, if you find yourself worrying about making something that the studio can easily market, you're probably not doing a project that's all that interesting. I've always had great success in getting any actor I want to do my work because if you take a socio political approach and have something to say, it gets people excited. The studios have wanted to make all my films bigger and in that process, they change and mutate into something else. Whether that's good or bad, I can't judge."
But while he may not be able to pass judgment on that, something Randolph can offer is practical advice on navigating the Hollywood machine. "I'll be talking about what it is to be in Hollywood and overcoming the obstacles hopefully from a smarter place," he says. "I'm interested in things like how attitudes to our work change as we go through the process and how accessing the machinery is easier in some ways than people think. I'm fascinated by the way social media has not really fulfilled its promise in terms of development and more traditional institutions remain."
One of the most important pieces of advice he can offer aspiring writers and filmmakers is to look for ways - Tropfest being one of them - to share their work. "Something you get a lot with young writers is that they don't want to share their material with anyone because they're afraid someone will steal their idea," Randolph explains, "but the truth is that studios don't buy ideas; they buy writers. It's really important early in your career to spread your work as broadly as possible and not be precious about it. I wish someone had told me that because the people who steal your ideas won't be people in the business; they'll be your colleagues," he laughs knowingly.
Tropfest Roughcut will be held on Saturday, 18 February and traditional Tropfest festivities - the finalist screenings and awards - will be held Sunday, 19 February. For more information, head here.
Photo credit: Randolph, courtesy of Getty Images/Robert Mora.
