The Authorial Producer: An Interview with Antony I. Ginnane
No film producer has done more for putting Australian genre filmmaking on the international stage than Antony I. Ginnane. At a time when the general focus of local filmmaking was on retrospective turn of the century historical pieces with the likes of Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975), The Getting of Wisdom (1978) and My Brilliant Career (1979), Ginnane followed a different path in the late seventies and into the eighties which was to make the films he actually wanted to see, and the result was a series of genre films that, while exportable and profitable to overseas markets, drew him no shortage of criticism locally. He took full advantage of the 10BA tax concessions during the 1980s and was criticized for the quantity, as well as the supposed quality of his output, by people who conveniently forgot the purpose of the concession was to stimulate the Australian film making industry.
After participating in a thriving film society during his university days, he went on to write, produce and direct his first film, Sympathy In Summer (1971), over a period of multiple years during the Carlton Ripple period. Despite some critical success and a brief international theatrical run, the film failed to recoup its modest investment and has been kept from public viewing by Ginnane since its release. He still guards it closely. When the subject is brought up there is a definite and tangible air of reluctance from him to discuss it, but he continues affably regardless. In the Hawksian sense that a man is defined by his ability to do his job, there seems to be some personal hurt at recalling the experience. Few, however, can equal the success of Ginnane in his subsequent career as a producer. He followed it up with the sexploitation feature Fantasm (1976) and its sequel Fantasm Comes Again (1977), before a run of classic thrillers including Patrick (1978), Snapshot (1979), Thirst (1979), Harlequin (1980), The Survivor (1981), Dead Kids (1981) and Race for the Yankee Zephyr (1981), all of which found substantial profit internationally and count no less than Quentin Tarantino as a fan.
The main purpose of our discussion was to talk about the idea of the auteurist producer, but it became immediately apparent that he isn’t comfortable with the term and refuses to use it, even with prompting and precedent from a hundred years of film history. Instead he appropriates the title of ‘the authorial producer’ as a more accurate description of how he sees his role in the film-making process, not out of any false modesty – as he clarifies – but as a reflection of the contribution of his cast and crew, and the practical realties of film producing.
This is an edited transcript of the interview I conducted with Ginnane.
Chris Smith: In reference to the series of genre films you made in the late seventies and early eighties you’ve said “I saw these films as my movies. I definitely saw myself as the authorial figure…”. The idea of the film producer as auteur is well established from Irving Thalberg, David O. Selznick, and Roger Corman and so on. What does it mean to you to be an auteurist producer?
Antony I. Ginnane: I don’t know if there’s a simple answer to that you can generalize [across] the body of work. I think the concept of being the authorial producer significantly differs from film to film. There’s always a high-wire balancing act between the writer, the director and the producer on any picture. Part of that can be a function of the respective experience of the parties; the respective market place clout of the parties; the respective perception that each of those parties has within the distribution world, funding world, etc. Given that particularly in those seventies and early eighties genre pictures, I was frequently – if not exclusively – working with first time directors, by the time one got to the sixth or seventh pictures, and I did quite in a lot comparatively in that short period of time, I suppose I would have bought to the table that collected process; a level of experience that perhaps the other contributors didn’t necessarily have.
I think going back further than that, fundamentally, and it probably hasn’t changed in the films I’m working on today, what the authorial producer does is search out a piece of material that somehow there’s some nexus between yourself and that piece of material that encourages you to take that first step, but then subsequent steps, to bring it from an idea to the finished film on the screen. So in the case of some of those early films, they varied. Patrick was a script that existed before I got involved with that project, although I was very aware of it because I’d worked twice previously with Richard Franklin so I was aware of what he was up to. On the other hand with Snapshot, I had such a great time working with Everett [De Roche] the writer on Patrick that once I got involved I wanted to do another picture with him, so the driver there was to come up with another idea that seemed to be in the thriller genre. And that idea morphed from a centerfold killers idea into the fashion-model pursued-by-the-psycho that it ultimately turned out to be.
In the case of Thirst I wanted to do a vampire movie and I went looking for a piece of material that was appealing and stumbled onto John Pinkney’s script. Both of those cases I went looking for the director too. In the case of Snapshot it was attaching Simon, it was his first picture, he came out of Crawfords [Television Studio], which was the place you looked in those days – as had Richard – as subsequently did Rod Hardy, who directed Thirst. It was Rod’s first picture; it was Simon’s first picture; it was Richard’s third picture [Patrick]. In that sense choosing – ferreting out or selecting the material – in most cases choosing the director; and in tandem with the director, attaching the other key creative elements. During the production process trying to make things run as smoothly as possible and in the post-production process coming back in quite significantly, because you’re as involved in the editing process and the selection of composer, all those other things, as the director.
By that of point of time the other leg of the triangle, the writer, has pretty much dropped out. In some cases the writer drops out by the time you option the script, but on some of the pictures I’ve done the writer has been on set, but certainly it’s unusual for the writer to be involved in post. The producer comes back into the mix in post and then the producer really stays with the project all the way through its subsequent life, during its initial theatrical exhibition release – in those early days particularly – the director and the writer and the cast would be back in the mix as part of the promotional elements but 28 years later when a 1978 movie is perhaps in its tenth iteration, coming out on Blu-ray for the first time after three or four DVD releases, four or five VHS releases before that, that’s being managed by the producer.
The authorial producer is the person who generally comes in first and leaves last. Really assembles the other elements. If you were to jump forward forty years and look at the pictures I’m making at the moment they vary across the spectrum. In the case of the Patrick remake (2013) that was a situation where I got to know Mark Hartley through the Not Quite Hollywood (2008) process and had indicated to him that I was thinking about remaking some of these seminal titles, and as one does in conversation, threw at him if he had the opportunity to get involved in remaking one, what would [he] do, and he chose Patrick, so it went from there.
On the other hand, another project I’m working on at the moment, Spontaneous Combustion, that was just an idea a writer I’d previously worked with [and I] sat down over lunch brainstorming ideas that might work for a pandemic conspiracy thriller and came up with the idea of Spontaneous Combustion, figuring it had only been used once and not particularly well in the Tobe Hooper picture…
C.S: I was wondering if it was a remake of that, but obviously not.
A.I.G: Nothing to do with it, and thank God for that, it’s not one of Tobe’s best works.
C.S: It’s not one of his worst either.
A.I.G: No, not his worst either. In any event, in the case of Turkey Shoot [2014] I wanted to work with Jon Hewitt [the co-writer/director] for a long time because I was a fan and it was the same conversation: “What would you like if you were going to get involved in a remake of one of my pictures” and he said “Turkey Shoot”. In that sense it’s a driving process, certainly with the remakes.
My part is to “which, when and with whom”, but of course that goes back further into the process, but to be able to do that you had to structure the financial deals so that you owned the rights to the pictures anyway, and that they didn’t revert back to writers or other people and you remained the controlling entity forty years later. That required a game plan at the beginning to be an owner instead of a person for hire.
Today, not so much then – in those days we possibly had a production manager and a production secretary – now on something like Turkey Shoot, we’ve got a line producer, an associate producer and a production manager. I suppose what the authorial producer doesn’t do – what I don’t do particularly, is put my hands in the dirt – and by that I mean I don’t tend to be on set in the rain at six in the morning, I mean unless the thing was fucked up the night before. But that’s part of the process: you try to choose people who you think will work well together and create some sort of cohesion through the process. You don’t want to be Henry Kissinger unless you have to be…
What are components might a producer have? A predilection for certain pictures, although I’ve done just about every genre, with the exception of the western, which I haven’t gotten around to doing yet. I’ve done comedies; I’ve done historical stuff, but my preference is definitely, thrillers; suspense sci-fi, they’re the films I’ve spent most of my time doing. Even when I’ve veered into something like serious drama, relatively recently Last Dance (2012); I saw that as Lifeboat (1944) really, a suspense thriller, a confined space, it was Rope (1948) or something like that, so for me I wasn’t really moving far away from the bean pole in doing a project like that. Some of the other pictures I’ve done that seem a little bit off the reservation, at the time, and even now, I probably still see them through a prism slightly different to the prism of the actual publicity of the picture on its one sheet.
C.S: What about Blue Fire Lady (1977), the movie you after the Fantasm films?
A.I.G: Well, I was interested in doing a family picture.
C.S: Were you trying to diversify?
A.I.G: I think that we did the two Fantasm’s back to back; one was very successful, one just broke even. I didn’t take the view that some of the people on both those films took, that you ought to use a pseudonym or something like that, but none the less, I think I didn’t want to run the risk of getting ghettoized in the sexploitation subgenre, even though those two films, particularly the Richard Franklin one were a lot of fun – almost every episode sort of played off a different genre – we were able to squeeze in an inordinate amount of fun film moments into those two. I felt going forward and looking to use state and federal money and not just the private finance that I’d used on the Fantasm’s, and indeed did use on Blue Fire Lady largely, we’d need to build a force field around any suggestion that was one’s choice of drug. What better way to take a shower than redo National Velvet (1944)? I got to work with Ross Dimsey who was another first time director.
C.S: Who wrote the two Fantasm movies…
A.I.G: He had a similar sense of looking at this as a sort of cleansing operation, but Bob Maumill wrote it, who’s another first time writer. I’ve done a couple of family films since in the nineties when we were doing these Canada-New Zealand co-pros and then over here with Sally Marshall [Is Not an Alien (1999)], although that had a little sci-fi undertone to it. You ferret out material, you react to material you like, you tend to gravitate back to, I do, with the exceptions of the height of the late eighties tax shelter – I had the distribution company running in a large way as well, we needed multiplicity of product, at that point where I was taking EP credits. We wanted to have a Boundaries of The Heart (1988) which could blend just as well with a Grievous Bodily Harm (1988). That was looking at building a distribution slate as oppose to a production slate, during that ’86 to‘89 period. For the rest of the time, almost every project – certainly anything I’ve had my name on as producer rather than executive producer – have been projects that have broadly fitted into that. You’d got out and get the flour and eggs and then you’d bake the cake and then you’d try and get a few people to eat it.
C.S: Going back to the authorial producer for a moment, you mentioned Snapshot and Thirst, which films would you say are most reflective of your authorship?
A.I.G: If you’re going the other way, and you’re asking that question of the director, or you’re looking at somebody like Hawks, you’d be looking at components and elements that keep playing through different stories and different subjects, and I think the same thing, I mean all of those films, Harlequin, Survivor, Thirst, Yankee Zephyr, all of those films have components in there that are connected, that are similar, so I don’t really see any individual film more or less expressing that.
Certainly in that period 1976-1984 and those 20, 25 or 30 films, they were all very consistently chosen, specifically chosen, put together in a way that was meant to give me as much opportunity to impose my own ideas. You try to make the cinema you want to see. I see everything, but having said that if there are three or four films opening in a weekend and I haven’t been to a screening or something, I would go see Transcendence (2014) first and The Other Woman (2014) second, just by nature. I apply the same process to the films that I’ve made. As you keep going, the directors that you’re working with and the writers that you’re working with, take naturally enough of what you have to say. And that’s no different to if the directors a first timer or in his late fifties like David Pulbrook or a twenty-something kid, it doesn’t seem to matter. Every film is a process and the push-pull between the prime creative components on any movie is generally a healthy process and what comes out at the other end… The demonstrable would be to look at the two films Simon Wincer did with me, Snapshot and Harlequin virtually back to back, and to look at all the films he’s done since, they’re very different to those two movies and you could say the same about Rod Hardy, he’s never made another movie like Thirst – he moved mostly into television – even when he came back [to Australia] for December Boys (2007).
Choosing the material is a substantial part of the battle for the authorial component because you’re taking that script then trying to find a director who’s going to present it and film it a particular way, and you find that if they’ve directed before, you look at their style. In those days the first time feature directors had done massive amounts of series television week in and week out. They knew how to shoot a schedule; they knew to make their days. What they needed, and what a producer brought to that sort of director, was a sense of placement of the film in the overall world of cinema and a place in the marketplace as a consolation as well.
C.S: What about the visual style? They have a fairly consistent style with the exception of Patrick; all in widescreen and a lot of camera movement, perhaps more so than Australian films at the time.
A.I.G: I’m a big fan of the scope frame so we pushed heavily for that. We didn’t go scope on Patrick and we didn’t go scope on Blue Fire Lady. Certainly Snapshot, Thirst, The Survivor, Harlequin and Race for the Yankee Zephyr all of those were 2.35, that was definitely my decision to do that. In those days it added certain costs, certain implications. I forget who said, whether it was Hitchcock or Fritz Lang, that scope was only good for Snakes and something else…
C.S: Lang in Contempt.
A.I.G: It was Lang. I disagree, I think it’s a beautiful frame, whether it’s crazy Leone close ups of eyes or you know, Lawrence coming out of the… Anyway.
C.S: Can you tell me a little about Sympathy In Summer, it was made during the Carlton Ripple?
A.I.G: The only things to say about that are when I first started out, probably I had aspirations to direct – it was that early stage of critical analysis and the directors were the rock stars, and at that period of time you either wanted to be a rock star or a film director. It was fun, you got the girls, you got this, you got it all. A number of people around that time both in Carlton and in Sydney had – again inspired by the New Wave – the ability to get out there and make a movie.
There was the capacity to do that at Melbourne because the film society had some 16mm equipment that you could access and I got left a little bit of money, so over the period of two or three years, it wasn’t exactly 52 Tuesdays (2013), but a lengthy period of time. So I wrote that, and directed it and produced it. It was a reflection of my aspiration at that particular moment, and a rather unprocessed homage to a lot of the film makers at the time. For example: Truffaut didn’t have credits on Fahrenheit 451 (1966), so we didn’t have credits on Sympathy In Summer, we had the credits read. There were probably more granules of references ion that then there ought to be.
We worked with a completely unprofessional cast – the only people in it who had any film experience were the DP and the sound [person], and a couple of other people. I wasn’t the only one doing this, probably half a dozen people at Melbourne Uni from 1960 to 1966, ‘67 and during a similar period of time in Sydney. This was just before, although in tandem with, some of the experimental film stuff. We sort of didn’t like those filmmakers; we were interested in traditional narrative. Well not traditional narrative, but narrative as oppose to experimental stuff.
What would happen then is that these films would get screened on campus, you might get them screened off campus at two or three Sunday screenings, down at Dendy Brighton or you might screen them at La Trobe; you might screen them at Melbourne campus etc, etc.. What I discovered in that process was that… [LONG PAUSE] first and foremost, trying to do what I suppose you would call an arthouse movie simplistically was a sure way to lose money. And that’s notwithstanding the fact we got some reasonable reviews. We came out a week or two after Two Thousand Weeks (1969) came out and a couple of the critics thought we were more worthy than that. I did manage to sell it to Fiji I think, where it had a couple of screenings, mainly because there were a couple – very tame by today’s standards or by even the standards of a Fantasm – sort of sex scenes at a party.
Having made that movie -it probably cost about $10,000 and probably made around $700 or something like that – I looked at myself in the mirror at the end of that 3 ½ year period and – by this stage we were getting close to the point where the Australian Film Development Corporation was about to be set up, which was 1970 but the legislation was about to go through, being written in ’69 and the push was in ‘68 – and I just came to the conclusion that everybody would continue to want to be a director and that there would be only very small number of people who would want to produce, and that was probably going to be a much easier way to make a mark at that particular point in time.
Also, I had the sense that the renaissance was going to sort of bifurcate between the historical rediscovery of what Australian history was and the commercial entertainment and sort of stuff I was interested in. As it turned out, Peter Weir went from Cars [That Ate Paris (1974)] to Picnic At Hanging Rock, and the rest is history. Sympathy in Summer was sort of an aberrant experiment that lost me some money. It’s a good thing I think to have made a film completely yourself. On a 16mm picture like that you were sitting in the cutting room and handling the film. So that was a productive component. And there were no film schools. Not only were there no video, but there were no film schools so the only way you could learn the practical mechanics of it – let alone anything aesthetic – was to actually do it. I suppose it was $10,000 for film school.
C.S: That’s cheap!
A.I.G: By today’s standards, but this was in the days when university was free, so it was expensive.
C.S: Has there been much interest in it since it was featured in Carlton+Godard=Cinema (2003)?
A.I.G.: Every couple of years someone approaches me to talk about it and every couple of years I talk about it, but to the extent that there’s been a current critical analysis or re-analysis in post-Not Quite Hollywood period, the emphasis has largely been on the ozploitation titles rather than some of the more – or would appear to be – the more obscure titles.
C.S: Have you ever thought about writing or directing again?
A.I.G: One writes all the time in a sense because most movies you get involved in, 12, 14, and 15 drafts of screenplay and you inevitably write notes and engage with the writers, so that’s a sort of surrogate process. I still write articles from time to time about industry politics and stuff like that, speechify from time to time at one thing or another, and certainly do the occasional focus on a particular film. Ultimately, there are only so many hours in the day and my focus has always been on things that will wind up with a result rather than things that are going to sit in the desk. One would never say never, but it’s not really…
C.S: On your agenda?
A.I.G: Well, Fantasm wasn’t my first choice when we made it. I had actually written an Underbelly-styled crime picture and also a Nurses picture as well, which even at that point I was still ambiguous about whether I would have directed one of those, but basically when it became clear I could finance Fantasm with someone else directing it, it was a fairly easy choice. I wanted to be engaged in the cinema, but whether I was engaged as a director or producer became moot. But something like Spontaneous Combustion, you have an idea; you don’t really have to write it, somebody else can write it for you. Why Not?
C.S: How did you meet Richard Franklin?
A.I.G: I met Richard through a guy called Robert Ward who at that stage his family owned the then Dendy Brighton. Richard grew up in Brighton, and I had met Robert because at that stage I was writing reviews for university papers and they decided to put out a bi-monthly publication focusing on the pictures they were going play, and so I got to edit that for a couple of years; and they had a sort of a half-assed festival at Falls Creek a couple of times and in that context I got to know Richard and Robert. They had co-funded [The True Story of] Eskimo Nell (1975), and wanted someone to help sell it, and Robert and his partner Mark Joseph were experienced at buying films but not selling films, so I came onto that as a de-facto executive producer, and did a little work on that. Richard and I both were big fans of Hitchcock and we bonded over that. Eskimo Nell was a big flop so Richard was left to lick his wounds and needed a comeback picture so we talked about doing Fantasm which we were going to do here, and then couldn’t do here, so we did it in the States and that suited him, suited me. Although Richard was a big thriller director he had quite a sense of humour so he liked the idea of it. At that stage the censorship, the R certificate changes, were just coming through so there was a trailblazing part of that as well.
C.S: Was Fantasm the only movie you had censorship issues with?
A.I.G: We probably had it on the second one as well.
C.S: I was thinking more of Turkey Shoot (1982).
A.I.G: It depends. We had problems with Turkey Shoot in New Zealand, we had problems with Turkey Shoot in the Philippines, and Malaysia and a couple of territories. We actually had problems with it in the US to get an R rating from the MPAA. But in Australia, probably yes, because once the R certificate came in and we moved out of sex, none of the films I’ve done have been ultra-violent. With sex and ultra-violence out of the picture, we didn’t really… Our censors, I suppose, were our critics and the protectors of the “endangered film species”.
C.S: What about Vincent Monton, a really underappreciated cinematographer?
A.I.G: I met Vincent through Richard, he had worked with Richard. Vincent was a Crawfords guy, so he knew Simon; he knew Rod Hardy; and he knew Richard, so we used Vince on the two Fantasms, he worked with Colin Eggleston as well. Richard and Vince had a brief falling out for a while which is why we didn’t use him on Patrick. But I used him again on Snapshot, Thirst and Yankee Zephyr [and] subsequently on a couple of other pictures, and then ultimately had him direct a film for me, The Hit (2001), which we shot in Lithuania. Of course he directed previously with the Nicole Kidman thing, Windrider (1986), and had done second unit on a number of pictures. Vincent was a great guy for scope, and fast.
C.S: What about Tony Patterson the editor, had you seen his work on The Firm Man (1975), the John Duigan film?
A.I.G: [Thinks] Tony hadn’t done Mad Max (1979) at that stage because we were cutting Patrick next door to Mad Max. I’m not sure how I was introduced to Tony. I think Ross Dimsey introduced me to him, but he was… I used to call him the ‘spreader’ as well as the editor because sometimes we had to make scenes run longer as well as shorter and he was good at that.
C.S: The other two editors were Phillip Reid on Snapshot and Thirst and Adrian Carr starting with Harlequin. What does a different editor bring to a project?
A.I.G: Phillip worked with Simon at Crawfords a lot and Snapshot was arguably an under budgeted picture, and we had to watch every penny, and that meant that the post production schedule had to be tight, so we looked for an editor who was really fast. Funny enough, I used Phil again on Last Dance, many years later. I hadn’t actually seen him but he was a good friend of David Pulbrook [the director]. In the case of Adrian Carr, well Adrian… I guess on those pictures it was more of a three way dialogue going on between the prouder, the director and the editor. Probably I was particularly in the cutting room more on Harlequin and Survivor, so I think what I wanted there was an editor in Adrian who was talkative and… Some editors are instinctive and capable of verbalizing what they think and what they’re trying to achieve, and Adrian could tell you what he was trying to achieve. At that point of time we were just changing over from moviolas to flatbeds, and Adrian was fast on both. I think on Harlequin we had a flatbed but we had a moviola as well. There were technical skills that he had. All of these guys who were ex-Crawfords were very, very fast, because if you were shooting a show on Monday and it’s got to go to air Friday week, there isn’t a whole lot of time. Richard Franklin cut in the camera, Simon and Rod not so much, [they] wanted to play with different possibilities. Different people, different approaches.
C.S: Everett De Roche was the master of genre in Australian cinema, how did you come to work with him?
A.I.G: Richard introduced me to Everett via the Patrick script. I got to know Everett that way, and then when things started on Snapshot, the original idea was to do this thing about centerfold murders and that project got aborted. I said to Everett, how quickly can you write a script, and he said “how quickly do you need it?”, I knew he was fast and I said “two weeks”, so the Snapshot script was written in about two weeks, so I liked that. I think Everett’s best scripts are still Road Games (1981) and Patrick, and Harlequin and Razorback (1984). In its own way I think Harlequin is a better script then Patrick, but Patrick some would consider a better film, Harlequin has the blending of the Rasputin story, the politics, the mad duke…
And then again, he was pragmatic. When we made the decision to leave Australia when Equity wouldn’t let us bring in actors, we had to re-write the entire script: not a problem, off he went, back he came, great ideas, crash in a mountain lake instead of a tropical jungle; deer hunters from helicopters as oppose to… Some writers are director’s writers, and some writers are producer’s writers, and Everett was both but he was certainly a producer’s writer.
At that point there wasn’t really anybody else writing drama’s in Australia. I mean, Pinkney wrote Thirst but he had a day job as a columnist for newspaper and he was a mad fuckin’ UFO freak and just happened to write Thirst in his spare time, but that wasn’t what he wanted to do. In the case of Survivor that was different because that was based on a book by a guy who was an already established horror/thriller/suspense writer, James Herbert, so we got the book and went from there. But stuff generating from the ground up, which was what Yankee Zephyr was and Harlequin was, Snapshot certainly was, Everett was the go to guy.
C.S: And Brian May, who you’ve described as being one of the best symphonic composers in the world, did you have much input in his process?
A.I.G: I know a little bit about music. The thing about Bryan was just choosing. When the industry started you had Bruce Maiden who was off writing these commercial style, whistley, light – he’d come out of the advertising world. Bryan came out of the ABC show Bandstand. He had a classical background, although he was doing pop stuff for the show band, he had passion to be a film composer and he was very familiar with modernist music in terms of the way he wrote. He was certainly very familiar with Bernard Herman’s work which is the direction Richard and I both wanted to go in Patrick – Brian never met an extra violin he didn’t like. He was flexible, so when we moved to something like Turkey Shoot – a score which has never been out and a company’s putting it out later in the year so they needed some liner notes – on that move Brian went off and did this weird blend of Jerry Goldsmith, sort of Basil Poledouris and some very weird-disco, oddball stuff thrown in at the beginning of the chase as the kids a tumbled out of camp, so he was extraordinarily multi-talented in that regard. And big. The first two or three cues in Yankee Zephyr are extraordinarily large. We never worked with an orchestra of more than about forty so there was over dubbings, and over dubbings that worked extraordinarily well in the mix. I think he did 32 or 33 scores ultimately, obviously the two Mad Max’s people recall fondly, but the Survivor score won a lot of awards, and the Harlequin score won a lot of awards. Brian introduced a lot of the theory into Australian composers. Patrick was the first film we used the clip track. A whole lot of composing on devices that had been used in the States since the forties, but hadn’t been used in Australia. He was a trailblazer and died too young.
