This month's Creative Conversation guest was the multi-hyphenate, very busy and very lovely Tony Ayres! Tony is a writer/director/producer for film and television.  His 2007 feature film The Home Song Stories, premiered at Berlin and won 23 Australian and international awards including 8 AFI Awards.  His first feature Walking on Water won the Teddy Award at Berlin in 2002 and 5 AFI awards.  In 2008, Tony directed the television movie, Saved, for which Claudia Karvan won the Logie for Best Actress.  In recent times he has become a producer of television, producing the comedy series Bogan Pride and the arts doco series Anatomy (the latter now going into series 4).  Tony was the showrunner and one of the directors of The Slap, the 8 x 1 hour TV adaption of Christos Tsoilkas’ novel.  The Slap won 5 awards including Best Miniseries or TV Movie at the inaugural AACTA awards. He is currently working on the upcoming ABC series Nowhere Boys.     

During the interview we talked about Asian Australian diversity on television screens, how to get your start as a filmmaker and the success of Matchbox Pictures/NBCU. One of my favourite quotes from Tony is about what he thinks you need to develop a career in the film and television industry:

The most important thing is actually having something to say – having a vision of the world, and having the skills to communicate it. And if you have those two things then I think they’re very useful and people will recognize it.

Of course, please let me know of your suggestions for future guests. I can be found in the comments on this blog, the Facebook page, or on Twitter.

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Download The Creative Conversation #3 - Tony Ayres

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Click on the image for the podcast interview with Hannie RaysonOn the success of Hotel Sorrento

The lesson I think for other people about this [...] is that Hotel Sorrento took me about five years to write, and I had a baby in that time, and lots of things happened to me. It was such a voyage of the soul, it was a such a creation of just passion and commitment and love, that play, and I suppose it’s over twenty years ago that I wrote it, but it’s still being performed, and those royalties just drop down out of the sky. So sometimes I think it’s my version of having written ‘Happy Birthday.’ 

On her love for playwriting

I love [the theatre] and the fact that the words can also be beautiful on the page. That’s a bit different to the current aesthetic where the words are...to be literary is somehow sort of to be old-fashioned in some ways, for some people. But I actually think that the meaning and the power of the work comes from the words and that you want it to be theatrical and wonderfully realized in the space. I’m big on the actual words.

On the fiscal realities of being a writer

I’ve had this sort of notion about myself as a writer that the money doesn’t relate to what I do. There has been a downpipe that has come into my house and that’s been money that’s come down that, not a huge amount, but enough has come down that - but it’s had no bearing whatsoever to the actual work I do at the word processor. So it doesn’t matter if the person is commissioning for a lot or a little, the job is the job and that’s what has to be done, and then if there’s not enough money there then you have to do something else to sort of supplement it.

On her daily routine

I walk every morning early, I walk in with my husband to the ABC where he works, every day. And then I walk home and then I start, really. Routine wise it’s better for me not to do emails, and all the other stuff, cos it is running a small business and there’s a lot to do. [...] And it depends what stage I’m at with the work, with the plays, or anything else I’m doing, writing articles or writing speeches, I do a lot of public speaking now, and they all have to be prepared. But you know, the great thing is to spend as much time as you can immersed in the world of the play because it takes a while to get in there, and the minute you’re out for a couple of days you’re really out, and then you have to take two, three days to get back. So I try and be very immersed in it.

On creating characters

Obviously I’m basing it someone I vaguely know or I’ve met, and you make amalgams of characters and all of that. So I’m dreaming myself into the character, I’m creating very elaborate backstories and elaborate biographies which I write down. So even I’ll know what kind of brand of cigarettes the man smokes, or whatever. I know the music that the woman listens to. I just try and know everything I can so that they are totally and utterly real. So that the exciting thing for me is that I get up in the morning and I feel that those people live inside my word processor. And it is actually a weird process of having imaginary friends, which is peculiar. 

On first drafts

I really do believe that the first draft is the draft which is the anarchic draft where you just sick ‘em onto each other and see what happens, cos they will be surprising. [...] It really takes ages to get [a first draft] out of me.

On the drafting process

Really what I’ve learnt as time’s gone on as a writer is that I would get sick of it after having finally finished the first one, and I have to keep bash myself up to keep drafting and redrafting, and not writing a new play each time. And I feel my latest play, Extinction, which I’ve written for the Manhattan Theatre Club, that really taught me about the discipline of draft after draft after draft, and what that can, and how that yields a better, better, finer polish. 

On writing and adventures

Even when I was in my twenties, there was a great friend of mine, and she had a business card and it said ‘Wendy Harmer: Adventuress.’ And I thought, I really want that business card. And I think part of being a writer is, you know, if you’re a writer who is committed to this, is to have that as your business card. Because it does give you a licence to be an ‘adventuress.’

On her advice to young writers

I think being curious is the most important asset anyone’s got, and once that’s gone you can roll over and die. So it’s really important to keep grilling and asking yourself and other people about life and meaning and power and all those important questions about how the world’s organized and how human beings function in it. That and everything else. And tenacity. Really, truly, being an artist in any media is about the last man standing. Everyone falls over along the way cos they want to do other things and we can all start out with great expectations, but you know, it’s tenacity and self belief and great doubt that makes you, as well as great faith of course. But on a practical level [...] people who are likable get work. And people who are pains in the arse don’t. No matter how good they are. Especially in the theatre because it’s such a social medium. It’s such a collaborative workplace. And you know if you are difficult and a pain in the arse, it’s harder to get work. The other thing that’s good too is to the ability to talk about what you do, because that’s the package now. Everybody wants people who can spruik.

Click on the image to download audio for interview with John Collee On writing

As I see it, you start off with a global idea of what the story is, this is how it will start, this is how it will become complicated, this is how it will finally conclude. And then, as you think about it and research it and talk about it, you gradually build it out from the middle outwards, so that all of these areas become more and more complex, and so you finally build up to a detailed synopsis of the film or the novel. 

As you know I’m a big believer in using real life experience. When people talk about writer’s block they’re often talking about just having running out of things to say, things they know, things they care about, things they have research. And so you’ve got to do two things simultaneously as a novelist or a screenwriter: one is to be planning your story, and the other is to be loading up your mind with all the elements that would go into that story. There are often parallels in your own life and your own experience and other times you’ve just got to go off on your own and research, and so you’ve got to be doing both of these things at once.

On the differences between types of writing

Unlike a novel, which is completely immersive for a long period - you know, you become, when you’re writing a novel, a little bit like a heroin addict, in that you’ve got your real life going on in parallel to this fantasy life that you’re sort of, living in, thinking about the book almost continuously, cos you really do have to create this whole fictional world. And with a screenplay, because it’s shorter, and because screenwriting is basically more collaborative, it’s more of a social kind of writing job. And so, having tried journalism, which is very short term and you know, constant voracious appetite of the newspaper and magazine to get the next article, and having tried novel writing which is very long term, where as I say, you can disappear into your own fantasy world, screenwriting is a kind of nice mix between the two: you’re working with other people, you’re constantly discussing the story, refining it.

On his screenwriting process

My own system is just to, first of all write everything on a card, and you sort of stick up all the cards on a cork board and then tell each other the story, backwards and forwards through all these events in the story until finally we get a plot that we like. Then I’d write out more detail about each of these component sequences. I always think that films are made up of three-minute blocks that you can sort of tell as little short stories, events in the film. So from the cards I go and write out each of these sort of blocks as a sequence, and then I’d read it to Peter and we’d discuss each sequence. Then I went off and wrote these pages of sequences into the final script. And then Peter would rework the stuff that I’d written, and backwards and forwards.

The other thing that’s bizarre in writing is that you can spend a month or two month with a script and not make it better, and you can completely turn it around in a couple of days. So that’s a very bizarre thing, you know, you’ve got to get, I mean, changing from medicine to writing you’ve got to get rid of the Calvinist notion that the number of hours you spend on the job is somehow the worth of your work, cos it doesn’t work like that. 

On the profession of screenwriting

And the truth is, you can usually find something of virtue in almost anything that you do. Weird projects come up and you think I’ll never be able to relate to this, but then you do a little bit of reading around it and think, oh yes, I can connect to that. 

When they sign you up, you say, how long it’ll take to write the draft and I’ll say three months, and out of that, at least six weeks to work out the storyline and do a lot of the research, and then – really you can write a draft in two or three weeks, and then to sort of distill it down, work out where the problems are, rebuild it again, so yeah. To get a readable first draft, it usually takes about three months.

On choosing a project to work on

So when you have a story which is both a thriller and a meditation on something that’s important to you, I think those are the kind of projects which you should ideally always work on. And if you don’t know the story, you need to work hard on that, and if you don’t know the meaning of the story then you need to work especially hard on that, because it’s only when you find meaning or theme to the story that obsesses you, and is important to you, that anything really good will come out. 

 On giving advice to new writers

I would say do something that is not just writing, so get some experience of life, I would say. I would also say, understand that part of the job of being a writer is being a kind of a teacher of philosophy, I think that’s what the job really is. We write stories for a reason, and the reason we write stories is to express a kind of a philosophical or political theme that’s important to us and important to the world. Unless you’re doing that you’re just basically manufacturing entertainment, and there’s no real point of that, there’s so much entertainment out there already. So if you’re going to write something meaningful, if you’re going to be a writer, then write something meaningful. And if you want to write something meaningful, you probably want to have a meaningful life first.

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For his ninth book, humorist David Sedaris has pooled together stories as diverse and obscure as the collection’s title: Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls.

In his signature conversational style, Sedaris meanders quite literally all over the place – from dentists’ rooms in France (where he lived for several years before moving to West Sussex) to Hawaii, where serendipity causes him to lose his passport and thus his UK immigration status. Several essays written for luminaries such asThe New Yorker and The Guardian are published again here, with no loss of their original appeal. Sedaris’s reflections about the relevance of family while watching a kookaburra eat in 'Laugh, Kookaburra', and his revulsion of the offal he encounters in China in ‘#2 to Go’, stir the digestive and emotional juices in all the right places.

An amusing addition is a series of short essays known as ‘Forensics’. A short note at the front of the book explains that they are short monologues, written by high school students, to be recited at competitions. The majority of these pieces, penned by Sedaris, are from the point of view of a person blinkered to their own world-view: an anti-Obama racist, a whining housewife. Dropped in and around his other essays, they jar tonally, but despite this I found them amusing, especially ‘I Break For Traditional Marriage’, from the perspective of a redneck against gay marriage.

Sedaris won’t change your life, but he will make you snigger, especially as a school girl obsessed with Jesus and ruling the world.

Talon Salon will be on again later this year at another arts festival. Will keep you posted on further sightings!

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Harmless, Julienne van Loon’s third book, is a short, tight novella that deals with humans on the fringe. It follows eight-year-old Amanda and Thai born Rattuwat as they cross the suburbs of Western Australia to visit Amanda’s father, Dave, in prison. The chapters alternate between different characters’ points of view, examining their personal journeys as well as their individual relationships with the mysterious Sua, Dave’s de facto Thai lover and Rattuwat’s daughter.

The novella is also a retelling of the Jātakas, a collection of stories concerning the previous incarnations of Buddha. However, although van Loon, a practising Buddhist, approaches the texts imaginatively, I found the overall plot strangely lacking in suspense. Van Loon never quite unpacks the psychology of her characters, propelling them on a physical journey but reserving the insight into their inner lives. They are contemplative but never fully reveal their motives, especially around a central, horrific event relating to Sua, nor do they spur into action. Dave, his daughter and father-in-law may be harmless to society at large, but with such subtle inner workings they are also at risk of being harmless to what’s inside themselves.

Regardless, Harmless is an admirable book. A portion of the royalties will be donated to the United Nations Refugee Agency, a charity that provides aid for displaced people around the world. More stories about the asylum-seeking experience are needed in this climate; I’m personally glad that van Loon’s is among them. Harmless is a love story and a road story, whose portrait of refugee life in Australia and abroad is complex and astute.

Photo of Hannie Rayson by David Connelly

So this month's guest was the lovely and wonderful Hannie Rayson who didn't mind my sniffling throughout the entire interview. Hannie Rayson is a playwright and writer of Hotel Sorrento, The Swimming Club, Life After George, The Glass Soldier and the upcoming Extinction with the Manhattan Theater Club. Her play Hotel Sorrento was turned into an award winning film, and her other awards include Sidney Myer Performing Arts awards, the NSW and Victorian premier's awards and several Helpmann awards.

During the interview we talked about the joys of travel, how playwrights make money, lying on the floor for inspiration and imaginary friends inside her word processor. One of my favourite quotes from Hannie is about writing and adventurous spirit:

"In my twenties a great friend of mine had a business card that said ‘Wendy Harmer: Adventuress’. And I thought: I really want that business card! And I think part of being a writer, you know, if you’re a writer who’s committed to this, is to have that as your business card. Because it does give you a licence to be an ‘adventuress’."

Of course, please let me know of your suggestions for future guests. I can be found in the comments on this blog, the Facebook page, or on Twitter.

And if you like the podcast please don't forget to subscribe to iTunes and/or to the RSS feed!

Download The Creative Conversation #2 - Hannie Rayson

The lovely Haiha Le and Harry Tseng at work on 'Moths'

The second exciting thing I got to attend was the National Screenwriters Conference. Over two and a half days at the Mornington Peninsula myself and two hundred other attendees got to listen to international guests such as Tom Schulman (Dead Poet's Society) and Paul Abbott (Shameless) talk about writing process and industry goings on. The vibe was super friendly and I learnt a lot, not to mention enjoying a wonderful meal at the Point Philip Estate. Clearly screenwriters know how to enjoy themselves and each other!

NSC Panel: L-R Jan Sardi, John Collee, Tom Schulman, Paul Abbott, Stephan ElliottAnd in between I managed to go on a research/holiday trip to the Solomon Islands where I had intended to research doctors in aid. However the shortness of the trip did mean that I spent most of my time snorkelling and diving instead. Research well worth spent! 

And of course another Readings review will be coming soon, as well as more interviews for The Creative Conversation. Hope you've all had an exciting start to the year so far!