by Dov Kornits
“I remember I had to sit him down and tell him that it’s going to be a long time. It takes a while to break, and it’s going to be a good few years before you actually see anything of mine on a screen,” Becca Johnstone recalls a conversation she had a few years ago with her father, who has since passed away. “It’s bittersweet when you start hitting these career milestones and he’s not going to see them. Grief and loss are so impactful. I’ve noticed since his passing, I write a lot about family.”
Today, a number of Becca Johnstone’s projects are preparing to go into production. There’s feature film Most Admired Woman for Aquarius Films, based on the life of Elizabeth Kenny; dystopian sci-fi series The Subjugate, also for Aquarius; romcom feature Addition for Made Up Stories; a survival thriller for Truant Pictures; a sweeping biopic of an American dynasty for a Hollywood studio; and her passion project, a limited series adaptation of Lily Brett’s Lola Bensky.
Growing up on Sydney’s North Shore, Becca’s parents were both lawyers, so it’s surprising to discover that they were excited when she announced her desire not to pursue the family profession. “They were like, ‘thank God, not another lawyer in this family!’ My dad, in particular, he saw that my brain worked in a different way and had potential to do things that weren’t so structured. I’ve always been a bit more of a philosopher, looking for those greys and trying to understand why people do the things they do.
“I’ve always been a storyteller. Writing is something that has always come naturally to me. I loved reading as a kid and I loved being read to, but I always got more joy out of telling my parents a bedtime story, which they thought was pretty strange. I was always rambling, making up crap, just those child brain things. I remember writing plays when I was at primary school that were awful.”
Attending a private girls’ high school, Becca told her careers adviser that she wanted to be a film director because she loved movies. “I had no idea, I didn’t know what a screenwriter was, grew up completely separated from the industry. She promptly said, ‘no, not with your marks. With your marks you do journalism or law’. I was a frustrated smart girl, but not much of a rule breaker… yet. So, I went and studied media.”
Graduating with a plan to become a foreign correspondent, Becca was offered an ABC cadetship, which soon made her nervous because she realised that she did not want to be a journalist.
She applied to the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in her mid-twenties, and didn’t get in.
“I was devastated because I wasn’t used to being knocked back from things academically, typical over-achiever bullshit,” she tells us today. “I took a year out, stopped doing random work and just dedicated myself to teaching myself more about screenwriting at the behest of one of the people who knocked me back from AFTRS, a teacher there who said, ‘You’ve got a great voice and ideas, if you just spent a bit of time understanding the craft, you’d be ready’.”
Becca read Joseph Campbell, Robert McKee, Christopher Vogler, “started writing and reading more and listening to screenwriters speak and reading screenplays, really understanding the flow and getting myself prepared.
“Even though I read these guys, I realised pretty early on that this was just an interesting starting point. The things I really needed to learn wouldn’t be found in the pages of a screenwriting book. I was just holding on to that academic nature. Even though I really value my time at film school, the only way I truly learned how to be a screenwriter was by being a screenwriter. At the end of the day, I think someone has an innate sense of storytelling, or they don’t. And that sense is worth more than anything you’ll read in a screenwriting book.”
She was also doing an intensive program in screenwriting at the National Film and Television School in the UK when she conducted her interview with AFTRS the following year, this time accepted into the post graduate screenwriting program at the prestigious school.
From being knocked back only a year prior, at the AFTRS graduation, she was awarded the Foxtel Award for Exceptional New Talent. Not long after this, she won the Australian Writers’ Guild’s ‘What Happens Next’ competition. Becca has been writing full time ever since.
“I think my voice and writing style is characterised by one thing in particular: character first. I’m not one that goes to high concept, big ideas first. I’m always – who’s the character we are following, what’s the journey? I think what most of my stories are identified by, is following a character who sits on the fringe of their world, whatever that world may be. That’s the common thread in a lot of what I write, and maybe that’s super psycho-analytical, but that’s how I’ve lived my life, as someone who feels that they’re just on the edge of the world that they’re in, both on the outside looking in and on the inside trying to find a way out, or as I like to say, trying to find a way through, because there’s not always an out for every world that we’re in. It’s about finding your place in it and how to maintain your integrity and identity through a world that perhaps is different to how you imagined it.”
It has been a few years since Becca graduated from film school, but it’s only now that the credits are starting to stack up. “I made a pretty conscious decision about 2 years ago to not take everything that was offered to me,” she tells us. “The first four or five years of your career, you’re just taking everything, scrambling, trying to just get the experience and learn. You’re developing your voice and you just say yes to everything, and you’re completely overworked and overrun. Now, I feel completely overworked and overrun in a good way.”
Scoring numerous recent gigs based on pitches of adaptations and underlying properties, we wonder what pitching entails, exactly. “They’ll send some material, it might be a novel, it might be a couple of pages of coverage or notes that they might have put together on something and say, ‘what’s your take?’ I sit with the material for as long as I can, a few days, a few weeks, and then we just jump in a meeting and I say, ‘here’s what it is, here’s the character, here’s what I think the journey is’. And maybe a few big turning points. And then, maybe there’s a second conversation. Maybe, they go away and think about it, but ideally, they say, ‘yeah, we love it. Come write it’.”
A future project particularly close to Becca’s heart is the adaptation of Lily Brett’s novel Lola Bensky, so much so that she optioned the book herself.
“I was introduced to her work so serendipitously on a trip to Melbourne,” says Becca. “I remember it was raining and I went to the best Acland St café, which no longer exists, Scheherezades. I was on my phone trying to get a hold of my mother who had just taken my grandmother back to her hometown for the first time since World War II. It was this hugely epic emotional trip. I got talking to a woman in the cafe about this, and she said that I need to read this author, Lily Brett.
“That’s how I came to know about Too Many Men, which is Lily’s greatest bestseller, and currently being adapted into a feature with Lena Dunham and Mandy Patinkin. It’s about a woman who’s taking her father back to Poland, a Holocaust survivor. I fell in love with her and her writing. Once I found out more about her life, I became obsessed, she was this rock and roll journalist in the sixties and then transitioned to “serious” writing. And Lola Bensky, the novel I’ve optioned, is a semi-autobiographical telling of her life. Lily insists that she’s not Lola Bensky, but Lola moves through many different parts of the world that Lily has as well.
“It is this beautiful tale of this ‘almost famous’ life on the road for this fish out of water Jewish girl from Melbourne in the 1960s being sent by her rock music magazine to interview the biggest names in rock and roll. She goes to London, New York, LA, it’s this enormous adventure. But what it really unpacks is this relationship with her parents who are survivors and the complexity of that and what it means to grow up in a house like that. There’s literally pain creeping around every corner, it’s this character driven, very emotional, wonderful story wrapped up in a hell of a lot of fun as well.
“Sometimes you read these stories as a writer and they’re so brilliant, you’re like, ‘I’m so jealous that this person has this idea and this thing’. You get this professional envy of the way someone else’s brain works. It’s a happy jealousy, an inspiring one – not toxic in any way. The same kind of feeling a lot of us get sitting down to watch The Bear, Parasite or The White Lotus, the thing that makes you want to be better.
“But sometimes you read something that feels just so inherently you and personal. When I read Lola Bensky, I was like, ‘I need to find a way to make this somehow, I need to find out how to do it’.
“I read it at film school, I didn’t know what an option was, I didn’t know how to acquire material. I thought, ‘there’s no way it’s available, and even if it is available, it’s too cool. She’ll never let someone just take it, someone like me. But a few conversations with Lily and I’m just incredibly grateful that she’s entrusted her story with me.”
