by Dov Kornits
“Right from the start, I wanted to be a director,” says Jenny Hicks. “Never had the self-confidence. Then I tried and failed. Then I had even less self-confidence. Then I got old and depressed and realised if I don’t do what I am meant to be doing – Film Directing – I might as well chuck my whole film career away and go and live in the scrub, off-grid, grow my own food and go mad. Be that crazy old woman at her front gate with a pack of ferocious dogs and a shotgun, ‘get offa my land!’ It’s a back door fantasy that sits in the back of my mind at all times.”
Thankfully, Jenny Hicks is bound to continue living the cosmopolitan Sydney life because her feature length debut, Dale Frank: Nobody’s Sweetie, is a highly assured documentary, which should lead to more work as a director, rather than back at the editing table where she spent the majority of her career up until now.
“I will always be an editor for hire,” she admits. “I love editing and I love the collaborative process and helping people making their films.
“And at the same time, I have a feature film in my head that needs to make it to the page – asap as well – so that the lure of doing a runner into scrub does not prevail.”
With credits such as Wild at Heart, The Matrix, The Thin Red Line, Moulin Rouge and Lord of the Rings in her editing kit bag, along with small screen work on the groundbreaking You Can’t Ask That, we have no doubt that Jenny Hicks will be directing her first narrative feature film soon, but in the meantime, there’s one of Australia’s most prolific and respected artists as the subject of her documentary, Dale Frank: Nobody’s Sweetie.
How did Dale Frank come into your orbit?
“I met Dale in 2020 when I was looking for a particular location for my previous [short] film [The Stranger] and a Singleton real estate agent told me that an artist lived up the road and he had a big two story ‘farm house’, which is what I was after. I went and visited Dale and yes, his house was two story but with – at the time – fuchsia-coloured walls covered with taxidermied heads. It was hardly a ‘farm house’ and so I didn’t end up using his house for my film, but did end up a couple of years later drinking tea and chatting at the kitchen table and deciding – somewhat recklessly in hindsight – on collaborating on a film together.”
Do you own any Dale Franks? What’s your personal thoughts on Dale as an artist and his art?
“Lord No! Unfortunately, I can’t afford to buy art! But I think Dale is a tremendous artist, an Artist in all that he does. His home and everything in it, his botanical garden and his collections are all manifestations of his enormous creativity. In a way, his painting and sculptures took quite a while for me to appreciate. At first, when you walk through his studio, the reaction is more like, ‘whoah’! There is an element of the anti-aesthetic that Dale engages with, not always, but at times, and those works I would definitely not hang in my home, even they fitted in my home. But upon investigation, I found his early drawings simply amazing and I love many of his 20th Century paintings, all wildly different. His more contemporary resin on perspex pouring paintings I also like very much. Mostly, not all … but I love the bold colours and colour combinations, so rich and luscious – “colour radiant with light”, as Deborah Hart says in the film. My thoughts on Dale are, you couldn’t find an Artist who was more of an Artist – anywhere on the planet.”
Is the art world, artists and the artistic process something that you are particularly intrigued about, and how does it relate to your work and interest in filmmaking?
“I have always loved art and culture in whatever shape or form. The Art World, as in fine arts, painting and sculpture, I’m a bit of a pleb [ed: technical term]. I don’t know a lot about art, I look, and I like or don’t like, it moves me, or it doesn’t. I don’t know much about art theory or criticism. I learnt a lot in the making the film, but I still feel I am more of an ‘everywoman’ punter who enjoys fine art from an uneducated perspective. But the artistic process in itself, I do know about, and there seems to me to be common themes regardless of the medium. One, you have to work bloody hard at it, two, you have to back yourself regardless of uncertainty and doubt, and three, you have to be somewhat obsessive in your dreams and drive in order for your artistic endeavour to become financially sustainable, let alone successful. Luck does have something to do with it, but without the first three points, luck can’t help you.
“Dale was a major inspiration to me as a filmmaker – don’t ever give up. Just keep going!”
Was it difficult to gain Dale’s trust and how did you go about building that?
“Dale and I connected quickly. We are both down-to-earth psycho Virgos, we share the same sense of humour, and we are both ‘True Believers’ in all things Art.
“Over and above that, Dale is a super brain and a very astute judge of character. I am a straight-shooter and I didn’t have any agenda other than making a good film that we could both be proud of. I think that he saw pretty quickly that I wasn’t a tricky type. But of course, real trust has to be earned and it came over time.
“We filmed on and off over the course of two years and during that time there was also a lot of emailing and I was also up at his house scanning a lot of archive. So, we got to know each other pretty well and Dale saw how hard I was working and that I was doing it alone. Really, it was just him and I in it together, so we had to trust each other.”
You are co-credited as an editor on the film, did you do the first cut or the final one? Was it difficult to not edit the film yourself?
“Ahhh, the editing, that is a very long and somewhat agonising story. Lindi Harrison assembled a monster timeline of the footage without interview, I think it was about 8 hours, and I assembled a monster timeline of interview of six hours – no script. That was how I started. Stupid … wouldn’t do it that way again.
“Later, Scott Walmsley and Andrea Lang also edited the film. The main problem was, I kept running out of money and having to let the editor go and then I’d have a crack at the cut and then get some more money and get another editor on.
“Every time I got my hands on it, it would get longer and the next editor would have to cut it down.
“In the end, I did the last pass.
“I could never have cut the film just by myself. Impossible. Unless it had been a mini-series….
“I really wanted intelligent objective input from an editor, which turned out to be editors, as the more creative brains on the job, the better, if you ask me, and with the mountains of material, I was very interested in what interested them.
“Filmmaking is a collaborative game, and the best results come from the best collaborations.”
The playful style of the film speaks to Dale’s approach as an artist. Was that always the plan or did it come together in the edit?
“It was always the plan. I wanted the style of the film to match Dale’s personality and his largess as a human being. That is why the film is fast, dense, complex, intense, bold, amusing and the music is big!
“The playful elements are there because Dale is a funny guy and because I enjoy teasing him and being silly myself. And also, because as I said to Dale on day one, we might be serious about our work, but with the film, we can’t take ourselves too seriously because then we will be wankers.
“The film is biographical and about an ‘important’ Australian artist, but at all costs, it couldn’t be a boring hagiography. It had to be entertaining first and foremost.”
Further to that, did you just shoot shoot shoot and then write the script? What sort of plan did you enter the project with?
“Plan? I wanted a small intimate crew, myself and James Falconer Marshall behind the camera and doing the sound, and we’d feel our way into it as Dale got used to being filmed and see what happened…
“That was the plan. We shot and shot and all I had to start with was the narrative – ‘Dale is making work for an exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 and the Exhibition opening is the climax of the film.’
“A very simple straightforward chronological storyline to hang the film on.
“I knew I wanted to do some sort of chapters telling the story of the history of his body of work over the last nearly fifty years, also chronological.
“These two steady clear chronological stories kept the film moving forward and allowed me to weave in all the other themes throughout without losing momentum and getting too bogged down.
“The other themes in the film came to the fore as we filmed, things that I found interesting about Dale, and so dug into, and things that I thought helped us get to understand the artist as a human, over and above his impressive body of work.”
Has Dale seen the film, how did he react?
“Yes, he has seen it. He has probably watched it more times than I have on his computer. He’s like that, a tad obsessive, looking for mistakes.
“I gave him ‘final cut’ – apart from half the artworks being sideways or upside down in the cut, which had to be rectified – and he asked for two minor changes and that was it.
“I think he likes it. He is not one to gush with compliments, “you did a good job” I think was his response after the Sydney Film Festival premiere. That will do me.”
Dale has an international following. Do you know if the film will be released overseas, and when/how?
“Yes, the film will be released overseas. I don’t know how or when because I am still working on trying to make that happen. Any international sales agents or distributors out there who are interested please get in touch!”
[ED: Oh, the glamour of being a filmmaker!]
Dale Frank: Nobody’s Sweetie is in cinemas 1 May 2025.
