by Dov Kornits
With her latest short film The Dog selected to screen at the opening of Flickerfest, the emerging Sydney filmmaker will finally get the chance to watch it with an audience.
“We started the festival circuit in June at Bentonville, which is the Geena Davis’ film festival,” says Danielle Baynes today about her film’s world premiere at the actress’ diversity-championing film festival. “And then we played HollyShorts over in LA, and Newport Beach Film Festival. We’ve done a few in the US and Europe, and now Flickerfest is very excitingly the Australian premiere.”
Baynes was pregnant when The Dog commenced its festival journey, but giving birth only a few weeks ago, she will now be first in line at Bondi Beach for Flickerfest in January. With most of her previous short films screening at the highly respected film festival, this is bound to be an emotional homecoming, not just for Baynes, but also for audiences, who are bound to be hooked by the beautiful film.
“The initial seed of the idea, from a writing perspective, was thinking about grief and loss and our first exposure to that, which for a lot of people is through the loss of a pet; where you begin to understand the permanence of death.”
Don’t fret though, the film is much more esoteric in its exploration of grief, primarily focusing on a moment in time of a veterinarian played by US import Kate Walsh.
“She was in the show 13 Reasons Why, which was about mental health,” says Baynes about nabbing Walsh, best known for Grey’s Anatomy, for the lead role. “I was impressed with her dramatic work and her ability to tap into something quite heavy and a different side to her. I knew that she was in Western Australian and then we ended up having a mutual connection, and I just was like, ‘I’m just going to try and contact that person and see if she’ll accept an email with the script’. And it really hit home for her. She connected with the material. She’s a huge animal lover. I think that she just recently lost her longtime pet, so she’d been in the position of the pet parent very, very recently. And it just happened really naturally, and she was incredible to work with, and came over to Sydney, and made time.”
Although she doesn’t explain it, that mutual connection could have been forged when Baynes was studying at WAAPA. “I studied acting, and my pathway into writing and directing was waiting for things to happen as an actor and then writing things for yourself. I wrote theater plays for myself to act in. And then I just started to really love that aspect of it. I started to love the writing and the directing and went into filmmaking. I think being an actor as a director is a huge asset. Knowing how to talk to actors and collaborate with them and knowing different approaches that actors have to techniques or to rehearsal and all of that, I think that’s been just a massive benefit.”
That’s all fine and well, but how about directing animals? “There are 4 in a 12-minute film, which is quite a lot. And, with the hero dog (voiced by Nicholas Hope), it’s a chunky, meaty scene that Kate had to just act opposite this dog. And we had brilliant trainers and professional animals to work with. It was tricky at times, because it’s a long day and sometimes things shift around and you think you’re going to shoot with the dog at the start of the day, but you end up at the end of the day, and they’re tired and not doing things on command… But we got there in the end.
“You’ve just got to roll with it,” says Baynes. “You can’t get angry or disappointed at an animal. And often, and I think this is something I’ve learned just making short films, is that things that go wrong will often be a great strength or an unexpected surprise once you get into the edit. So look, yeah, it was a bit stressful when you’re really up against the clock. But that’s when having someone like Kate, who is so experienced, she could just drop in. She could be super flexible, and her performance was always on. So, when we had to swap the dog out because it needed a rest, and she had to just act opposite a voice in the distance, she was able to do it and it was no problem.”
The Dog is screening at the Opening Night and Best of Australian Shorts 5 at Flickerfest, 17 – 26 January 2025. Click here for more information.
