by Dov Kornits

With his latest documentary, The Great White Whale, the veteran cinematographer took on his most personal project yet, bringing to light an extraordinary expedition in the 1960s that saw a group of men climb Big Ben, Australia’s highest mountain on outpost Heard Island.

How did this particular story, of the Heard Island expedition, come into your orbit?

“I was a teenager when the expedition left Sydney in 1964. I heard that they needed volunteers to help them prepare and I helped out a bit before their departure. I have since become lifelong friends with many of these ten brave men and wanted to honour them with a film.”

Was it difficult to access the amazing archival footage?

“I knew they had filmed the expedition with a hand wound Bolex 16mm camera and knew they had entrusted the footage to The National Film and Sound Archive. The Archive kindly gave me good rates to scan it up to 4K resolution and the results are outstanding thanks to that old Kodak 16mm film having such good a resolution in the first place. I too used 16mm film a lot in my career, from 1972 until digital cameras started to replace it in the 1990s. Sadly, the first 20 years of the various types of digital cameras have far less archival resolution than 16mm film.”

Michael Dillon in the wild

Have you been to Heard Island?

“Yes, I have been to Heard Island. I had a video and stills assignment for Australian Geographic. I travelled on an expedition cruise ship, all of us knowing that after a 12 day sail, conditions may not even allow us to land. But we did land twice for about four hours each time so I ran around with two still cameras and one video camera around my neck trying to do as much as I could.”

The film documents a very different time. Do you yearn for those days?

“Yes, the expedition took place 60 years ago when there were less than half as many people on earth and three times the amount of wildlife. So very few people visit Heard Island that it remains one of the few examples of what the world used to be like.”

Was it a bit of a race against time to get as many participants as possible on camera?

“It was 2013 when I realised it was now or never in terms of getting as many of them as possible to sit down and take us on that expedition by way of their armchair recollections. Seven of the 10 men sat and told their stories. Three had already died and now only three remain. It was only in 2020 after finishing another big project- Hillary – Ocean to Sky, that I got cracking on bringing their story to life. The Film is called THE GREAT WHITE WHALE because three of the men had once before attempted to climb the big snowy Great White Whale looking volcano that dominates the island. They almost died in five different ways, but they developed a Moby Dick like obsession with trying again. My film covers both the near fatal expedition and their Moby Dick second attempt.”

How do you finance your films, this one in particular?

“I have been a documentary cinematographer for 50 years and every now and again I get a Moby Dick like obsession to do a project of my own even though I know the likelihood of recovering its costs, let alone payment for my time, is negligible. This was such a case. My wife and I funded it ourselves. So far, we have received $20,000 from overseas Festival prize money but we still have about $160,000 of actual costs still to recover.”

What do you hope happens with the film after its festival run?

“It’s a cinema film with a wonderful 5.1 surround soundtrack, and fabulous music track so we want to have cinema screenings as a first step. We have organised some in Tasmania and Western Australia in August and hope to persuade Cinema Nova to run it as well. I would love a Distributor to take it on, but I think this film will join the many others that rely on the filmmakers doing it all themselves distribution-wise. The sad thing is that all cinema chains and even independent cinemas charge very high session rental costs – giving themselves far more income than they would get from their share of a normal release session – and they keep the candy bar revenue as well! The poor renter, the filmmaker has to make huge efforts to fill most seats, to cover the cinema hire.”

What else are you working on?

“Nothing else as self-distribution of any film is a huge task in its own right, and that is what I am concentrating on; trying to achieve as many sightings of the Great White Whale as I can in Australia and New Zealand and the world.”

The Great White Whale screens at Cinema Nova on 20 July 2024, as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. More info here.

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