By FilmInk Staff
“As a cadet journalist at the ABC, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent,” screenwriter Brian Jones tells FilmInk of his long and winding road to his eventually chosen career profession. “So I self-financed an Arts/Economics degree at Monash Uni. But I got lured into being an opal miner at Lightning Ridge and then fell into a job as a clown in Silvers Circus travelling country NSW. I eventually became, for thirteen years, a world traveller/adventurer. I financed myself in many and varied ways, some very professional, and some a little ‘dodgy.’ I also evolved from selling my paintings door to door to enjoying serious exhibitions in LA and San Francisco. This enabled me to become a visually experimental filmmaker whose work received significant recognition at several major US film festivals.”
A literal jack-of-all-trades, Brian Jones also has a forward-thinking and entrepreneurial bent, playing a role in setting up one of Australia’s first low budget special effects and post-production facilities, and aiding in the creation of many experimental short films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Jones has also worked professionally as a cameraman, editor, director, producer, and film lecturer and instructor at RMIT and TAFE colleges around Australia.
Jones has been involved in the creation of 65 short films. “I also did a six month TV directing course at AFTRS in Sydney,” Jones says of one of those shorts. “I chose an unknown actor – then at NIDA – called Baz Luhrmann to be my male lead, and we ended up with a very intense eighteen-minute film shot on multi-cam. Baz said, ‘We must work together again’, but then Strictly Ballroom took off, and the rest is history.”
Brian Jones also has two feature films to his credit. 1984’s Coming Of Age stars renowned softcore porn actress Angela Menzies-Wills, and features cinematography from John Ruane, who would go on to direct films like Death In Brunswick and That Eye, The Sky. Jones’ other credit is the dramatised documentary For Her Eyes Only, which the screenwriter informs FilmInk will screen in the near future at Cinema Nova in Melbourne. “It’s certainly fun…a lovely time capsule to a pre-Priscilla era of innocence and heavy smoking,” says legendary Australian film critic David Stratton, who was treated to a personal screening recently.
After moving across points on the cinematic map, Jones opted to make the shift into screenwriting. “I realised that if I wanted to make a significant feature film, I needed a significant script,” Jones tells FilmInk. “I sold my studio and focused on learning the craft of screenwriting. I continued writing feature articles on film and was a film reviewer for several publications as well as a regular with Cinema Papers.” After writing over ten treatments for feature film scripts, Jones found two very impressive mentors in the late Richard Franklin (the director of cult classics like Patrick, Roadgames, Fantasm and more) and prolific screenwriter Everett De Roche (who penned many of Franklin’s films, along with titles such as Fortress, Razorback and Long Weekend).
“Film Victoria funded development of two of my screenplays,” Jones tells FilmInk. “I was to direct The Last Reunion, with Richard producing, but Richard went back to Hollywood to direct Psycho 2. Both Richard and Everett were known for genre films. Ultimately, I saw myself more as an artist. I want to create personal stories that resonate with the real person you are.” That shift in focus saw Jones form a creative alliance with late producer David Hannay (The Man From Hong Kong, Death Of A Soldier), who saw the screenwriter/director’s For Her Eyes Only, and agreed to be his producer.
With Hannay’s support, Film Victoria and Screen Australia invested in three screenplays to the third draft stage. At the time of Hannay’s death in 2014, Mongans Bridge Movies had three projects Jones had written with significant major talent committed, like legendary actor Jack Thompson and French auteur director Catherine Breillat, who was set to direct Jones’ Bridge Of Floating Dreams, a drama set in 1960s Japan. “I won a $30,000 National Screenplay Award, and a two-week writing intensive overseen by multi Pulitzer winner Edward Albee,” Jones tells FilmInk of the screenplay. “He saw Bridge Of Floating Dreams, based on my personal cultural and sexual experiences in Japan, as ‘the one in a hundred screenplays/plays that really works.’”
Now something of a free agent, Brian Jones currently has a host of projects awaiting the perusal of potential producers. His novel Skin is currently out with publishers, and is an adaptation of his small budget screenplay of the same name, which was developed with a Film Victoria investment of $60,000. Publishing consultant Robert Sessions, who spent 28 years as head of Penguin Books, Australia, has called it “a work of technical virtuosity…a dazzling tour de force.” The novel is set to be adapted back into a screenplay for a big budget film. Jones also has thirteen very different screenplays – with around $200,000 invested in development – seeking new producers. Prime amongst these is Not Alone, which was written in conjunction with voluntary assisted dying practitioner Dr. Rodney Syme, who Australian media commentator Andrew Denton proclaimed “more experienced in end-of-life and its many forms than any other person alive.” Before his recent death, Dr. Rodney Syme backed the project wholeheartedly. “This tragic but inspirational and deeply moving story with its final act of love is beautifully portrayed in a very real way,” he said.
Having experienced enough for several lives, the work of Brian Jones is infused with everything he’s been through over his long and varied filmmaking career. “It was only after significant life experience that I began to find out who I really was and what it was I wanted to say,” Jones tells FilmInk. “I always found I was more interested in original and personal creative ideas than just being a young writer recycling versions of other people’s ideas and other people’s kind of films. As the wisdom says, there are only a limited number of different kinds of stories, but characters are limitless…that’s what I have grown to understand and embrace.”
Brian Jones is looking for producers to collaborate with. Contact him on email to find out more.
