Sasha Hadden: Driving A Stitch in Time

by FilmInk Staff

“I was nineteen, and I found it really inspiring,” he told FilmInk. In the West, he says, stories of the aged and the aging tend to focus on struggle, grief, the tragedy of a life coming to an end.

As in the famous Oscar winner, Hadden wanted to explore something quite different with his picture. “I particularly liked what Daisy had to say about love,” he said. Once youthful beauty is eliminated, he said ‘love’ becomes a richer canvas.

A Stitch in Time is a drama (with a lot of humour) set in a very pretty looking Sydney. It focuses on a former dress maker called Liebe (Maggie Blinco) who, after years of emotional neglect and putting her own dreams on hold, hits the ‘re-start’ button at eighty+ years of age.

“I’ve always had older friends,” Hadden said, talking about the film’s plot, which has Liebe befriending a young fashion designer called Hamish (Hoa Xuande). The pair cook up a plan to get a business going in haute couture. In its own quiet way, the story is a rejoinder to the mass media’s all-pervasive ageism of the 21st century.

“I’ve always had this connection with older people in my life,” he said. “Many are still working hard and contributing and doing amazing things.”

One of them, he says, is cinematographer Don McAlpine, who shot A Stitch in Time in 2019. A veteran of the film industry since the 1960s, now in his late eighties, McAlpine’s credits include Breaker Morant (Beresford, 1980), Predator (John McTiernan, 1987), and Moulin Rouge! (2001).

While Hadden built a career in the corporate film sector, he was developing screenplays to direct, and McAlpine, a friend for years, always had his back. (McAlpine takes a credit on the film as executive producer, as does Sue Milliken (Ladies in Black), another famed Aussie industry veteran.)

“A Stitch in Time came out of a discussion, where we said, ‘if you have a camera, a mic, and an actor,’ you could make a movie… we just sort of built from that,” Hadden said.

The filmmaker completed the screenplay in just six months, writing only a few hours a day. He carefully mapped out the structure. An important theme was passion.

“It was based around the idea that someone at the end of their life might say, ‘all my life I was trying to find my audience’.

“The important thing,” he continued, “is not about making it, or not making it, it is about embracing our passions and it’s not necessary to justify our passions in any grand way.”

Liebe’s passion finds its rewards in creating something beautiful for its own sake. This throws her into conflict with a younger generation of entrepreneurs like Hamish as well as her long-term partner, the selfish Duncan (musician Glenn Shorrock), a once promising songwriter who dreams of getting his band back together. His motives, perhaps, lie in redeeming soured dreams, never forgotten betrayals, lost opportunities…

“I found Glenn was a natural method actor,” Hadden said. Shorrock fearlessly embraces the anger and rage of the role in his scenes with the late John Gregg (Bodyline) and Belinda Giblin (Home and Away), ex-friends, from his musical past. Shorrock, of course, has his own bruising episodes with the music biz, with his contentious split from the Little River Band looming large in his history. “There were aspects of his past that he could lean into.”

Hadden credits casting director, the late Susie Maizels, for suggesting Hoa Xuande and Blinco: “Susie insisted I look at Maggie,” he said. Seen in a support role thirty-five years ago in Crocodile Dundee, and lately in The Nightingale, the eighty-something actor has been working mainly in theatre and until now, had never been cast as a lead. Hadden reckons that worked to the advantage of the story, since there was no persona known to viewers. It’s a challenging part demanding a vast emotional range and Blinco nails it: “She is that character.”

As for Hoa Xuande (Top of the Lake), McAlpine turned to Hadden on the first day of shooting and told the director: “He’s a star.” (Kathryn Courtney-Prior shared casting duties with Maizels.)

The film was shot with a crew of only twenty, over eight weeks, a generous schedule on a picture of this scale. “Don said, ‘if you try and do this in five weeks you are gonna have to talk to everyone on the first day in a such that they won’t come back on the second day’,” Hadden said with a laugh.

Part of what the film is about is the building of an inter-generational community, a chance for old/young to learn and grow together. What was happening on screen was reflected in the process itself, Hadden explains.

“We operated like a group of filmmakers, learning from each other,” he said. “When you see Don McAlpine move a light or put down some plastic to black out a window, all of a sudden everyone is doing everything.”

McAlpine favours real locations (Hadden gave up his own bedroom at one point) and advised against walking onto set with too many pre-conceived ideas. “We made the story king,” Hadden said, where technique was always subordinate. The finished film is all about the emotions.

Hadden edited the film and produced it, finally completing it early this year.

“I’ve always believed in the philosophy, ‘I want to know how to do everything’,” Hadden said. “As a director you want to be able to give advice that your craftspeople can use and not just judge what they are giving you.”

He hopes the optimism and inspiration at the core of the story will reach a younger audience: “I think it will connect with twenty-somethings, in the same way Driving Miss Daisy connected with me… have them think about the journey they are undertaking… the thing I realised is that we are always starting different journeys all throughout our lives.”

A Stitch in Time opens in cinemas 17 February