Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Across the board, Australian films need to have a lot more money spent on selling them.
It's hard to pinpoint why all of a sudden a group of Australian films will be doing well and why they perhaps are better made than some from the past.
In Australia, they set up a special fund to kick films off. It was quite an enlightened sort of move. You could go to this government bureau with scripts and and get finance for films.
The thing that runs through the British film industry even today is a lot of unsung movies are financially the bigger ones. Even though they weren't always the greatest of movies, something in them was very potent which people loved.
In 1975 Australia was producing things like Picnic at Hanging Rock, in other words films that I would consider still some of the finest products to come out of Australia. I think that our quality now is less than it was then.
Mid-range to low-budget movies have to have a name in the lead to get financing for it.
I don't go on set with an army of people because the most expensive elements of a movie production are the plane tickets, the hotel rooms, food and gasoline. If you're willing to discover new colleagues in the place that you are, you can save a ton of money.
I will always come back to do Australian films. I think it matters. I think we can make films that people go and see. And I don't think it's too much to ask that films in this country make a profit and that we embrace them.
Now both my films have been number one at the Australian box office and it took about two years just to get the finance for this film, so if it's hard for me then God help everyone else.
Every film is hard to fund.