Award winning writer/director Christina Andreef has seen it all – not getting into film school, working with Jane Campion’s and finally seeing her own films at Cannes and Sundance.

Cleo Mees spoke with Christina about writing for the screen and seeing her screenplays through the production process.

Tell us about not getting into film school.
Very painful.  The first big rejection in my life! I applied in the ’80s, and there was no Major in Directing those days.  You had to do a year in another craft and then graduate to Directing.  So I chose camera.  On the day of the final test they made me lace up a 35mm movie camera.  I made a stab but didn’t have a clue… I thought that’s what you went there to learn.  The clincher was being told that as a girl, and a short one at that, I would have trouble carrying the equipment.

I made up my mind to do what the successful students were doing:  Make three short films, on 35mm, over three years, and get them into international festivals. And that’s what I did.

How did you get into contact with Jane Campion?
In the meantime, I began a PhD in film at Macquarie Uni.  I was writing my thesis on Australian women filmmakers and I interviewed Jane for it.  Soon after that she got funded for her first feature, “Sweetie”.  She needed an assistant but it was extremely low budget and they couldn’t pay for one.  I had a Commonwealth Scholarship, so I just stopped going to uni and started working for her…  Didn’t take much persuading.

The Gap (Sundance, Telluride)

How did your experience on other peoples’ films shape you?

It just made me feel like anything was possible.  It was like an awakening for me, I absolutely thrived in the creative environment, and Jane was a totally generous, inspiring boss.  Everything felt like a treat – from stopping the traffic in Sydney’s suburbs to bribing the neighbour’s kids to shut up during takes or driving out to the desert for the ‘Jill-a-Roo’ scenes. It was all brilliant.

“The Piano” was really the high church of my experiences on other people’s films.  Everything … everything just filled me up. I organised and ran the rehearsal room and that was a terribly fertile learning ground.  I filled up notebooks on how to “be” with actors, what to say if things weren’t working, how to help them.

I’d been a bit afraid of actors, but had to get over it, as Jane used to make me get up and play opposite Sam Neill or Harvey Keitel if their scene partner wasn’t there!   I also learnt about the critical importance of preparation in pre-production – no stone unturned.  Things will always go wrong on the day but I really absorbed the notion that the better the prep, the richer the elements that do end up on screen.

Shooting the Breeze (Sundance, Berlin)

How does being a writer/director affect your writing?
Polish everything beautifully till it sings.   When you’re writing for yourself to direct, you should be able to pull out a lot of the descriptive embroidery.  Now I just make separate art department or character lists to remind myself.  The critical thing is that the script gets a clean, fluid read.  And the more you trust your director self, the more sparely and cleanly you can write.

How did you crew up your first shorts?
I started off with a friend producing – we were at kind of a similar level.  It helps because then you’re both hungry for the same thing.  My DP, Gary Phillips, had shot heaps of ads and focus pulled on features, but had never DP’d a 35mm drama himself. So there was something in it for him – especially when our first short together went to Cannes.

The 1st AD (Mark Turnbull) and Designer (Janet Patterson) had both just worked on ‘The Piano’.  We’d made friends and then I kind of insisted they come on my short for free!  Funny how naivety helps. It was terribly cheeky when I think of it now, as they were two of the most experienced and talented in their jobs, in the country.

It’s good to start forming a ‘team’ early on — Screen Australia likes that. It’s all about ‘teams’ these days.

Soft Fruit (winner 6 international awards, 13 nominations)

How did you go about getting funding for your first shorts?
With “Excursion…” we were turned down for production funding, so we put our glad-rags on and went out to Kodak and made a proper professional pitch to Tim Waygood.  He came to the party with the 35mm stock that I wanted for the film.  It was terrifying.  I thought “God, we’ve got the stock now, we have to make a film!”  Because we had stock, Lemac came on board with 35mm camera and equipment, and producer, Helen Bowden and I shot the whole film for nothing.

Problem was we couldn’t get the work-print out of the lab without paying for it, so we invited the AFC out to Atlab to see the rushes, and they loved it and gave us solid post-production funding to finish the film.  It went to over 60 festivals around the world.  On the strength of that the AFC fully funded my second short, “The Gap”.  Through my shorts going to Sundance, I met the people at Fox Searchlight in LA.  They invested in my feature “Soft Fruit” along with the FFC and FTO.  It was the first time that Fox Searchlight had backed a debut feature in Australia.

What did you learn after watching Soft Fruit as a finished film?
Jane Moran (Editor) and I changed the order of scenes from the script to the final cut quite a lot.  It should not have been possible to do that.  There should be an inevitability about every scene in your screenplay.  Each scene should be where it is because it’s totally necessary to advance the story, and won’t work anywhere else.  There wasn’t a sense of inevitability about some of the “Soft Fruit” scenes, which in the end made the film slightly episodic.

My script was quite ‘talky’ and I wished it was less so.  That I’d left more open moments for Antony Partos’ gorgeous music, or just for the audience to reflect and feel what we were showing them.

Excursion to the Bridge of Friendship (Cannes, Sundance, San Fransisco)

What tips would you give to screenwriters, from the perspective of someone who has been on the practical end of filmmaking?
Stay in there.  Simple as that.  I’ve heard it said that 90% of filmmaking is persistence and 10% is talent.  That’s obviously not to denigrate talent.  It’s just that there are many more talented people out there who would love to make a film but never will, for various reasons;   they can’t get beyond self-doubt, they can’t do without the safety of wages, they can’t abide the long long time a script takes in development.

I do every workshop and masterclass that comes to Sydney – have done for years.  I really recommend that.  Join the Directors’ and Writers’ Guilds, get involved with the filmmaking community.  Volunteer yourself as an Intern on feature sets or TV writing tables.  Write every single day.  Know the FTO and Screen Australia Guidelines, and keep applying for development funds.  Trust that good things will come.

Christina Andreef has written and directed three prize-winning short films, “Excursion To The Bridge of Friendship” (In official selection at Sundance & Cannes), “The Gap” (Sundance & Telluride) and “Shooting The Breeze” (Sundance & Berlin). She followed with her first feature film “Soft Fruit” in 2000.  “Soft Fruit” won the International Critics’ Prize in Spain and was invited to Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000.  It was also nominated for 7 AFI Awards.  Currently, she teaches Screenwriting and Direction at the Sydney Film School and Sydney College of the Arts.

Cleo Mees

Cleo Mees is a Sydney-based writer, filmmaker and dancer. With a background across several disciplines, her interest is in finding out how these different disciplines can intersect and inform each other.

Award winning writer/director Christina Andreef has seen it all – not getting into film school, working with Jane Campion and finally: seeing her own films at Cannes and Sundance.

Cleo Mees spoke with Christina about writing for the screen and seeing her screenplays through the production process.

When did you start screenwriting?
I did a little at Uni in Ireland, but I really got cooking on the set of  (Jane Campion’s) “The Piano”.  I was writing a short called “Excursion To The Bridge of Friendship”.  Jane would ask to see it in between takes of the shoot.  (I’m sure we pissed the 1st AD off )  Then she’d send me away to improve it on the far side if the set.

I shot the film on 35mm with no money, and Jane let us (me and my editor, Heidi Kennessy) edit it on a dusty old Steenbeck in her storeroom at Spectrum films.  I finished it the same time Jane finished “The Piano”, and both films were invited to Cannes – “Excursion…” in ‘Un Certain Regard’.  It was an incredibly exciting baptism.

Where do you start when you have an idea for a script?
On “Excursion..” I started with … a prop.  Someone sent me a cassette tape through the mail, and it grew from there.  On “The Gap” I started with a story in the local rag about a guy trying to jump off The Gap.  On “Shooting The Breeze” I started with an idea – domestic violence in a dense hi-rise apartment building.  On “Soft Fruit” my first feature, it was my mother’s death and the crazily emotional, destructive and beautiful way that our family came together over it. On “Shiver” I started with Nikki Gemmell’s book, and wrote my first adaptation.

I have in fact, never started with structure.  I try to go to the core of where the heat is for me, and write from there out.  It’s a process I’ve often lamented because you have to find structure eventually – nothing is surer.  And it’s a long, slow, painful way around.

Excursion to the Bridge of Friendship (Cannes, Sundance, San Fransisco)

What’s the hardest part of writing for you?
Just that. Finding structure.  I was given Flannery O’Connor’s book on writing, “Mystery and Manners”, early on, and I love the mystery bit – mining your heart and soul and unknown bits for content and character.  But the manners bit is hard.  The re-writing and re-writing and re-writing and the interminable search for action and structure that feels fresh.

What do you do when you get stuck?
I go for a walk and put it out of my head.  Spend an hour in nature. Do yoga. Then brainstorm:  take a bit of paper and just write it all out – all the nonsense, all the banality, all the half-formed untested ideas floating in your head. Spend an hour just writing everything you know about the problem down. No stopping, no punctuating, no correcting, no reading back, no censoring… Eventually you get past what you know and into what you don’t know, and therein could be the answer….or not.

The Gap (Sundance, Berlin)

Have you developed any routines or methods that help you develop your characters/ideas?
I think I’ve always been really bad at (external) routines, so no.  But I do make sure that my story develops though character – the character’s action.  Story is what character does. I would not be random or arbitrary. I ask, “what would the character do now, in this situation?”  Of course since you’re inventing the character, the answer could be anything…an even more useful question is ‘What would I do now, if I were that character”. With that question you start to imbue your character with a uniqueness, a particularity.

Where does structure come into your writing process?
A lot of ‘how to..’ books offer schemas of some sort, but I’ve only ever found them useful after the fact –  like a template to lay over the work if you’ve got problems, to see where the problems might be, and how you might shift things around to fix them.  I seem to write character, feelings, plot, visuals first.  However I would never poo poo a 3 act structure.  It’s a story archetype that goes way beyond formula.  All it means is beginning, middle and end.  Set up, journey, resolution.  What’s so scary about that?

Shooting the Breeze (Sundance, Telluride)

What is the importance of feedback from script editors, friends, etc., for you?  Who do you consult?
I think it’s important not to give your work too much oxygen too early.  Once you start taking on other people’s ideas too early, you risk getting a democratic script. That’s death.  There’s no such thing as democracy in script writing.  I don’t show it to friends.

When it’s nearly finished, I might show it to trusted writers, with track-records, who I think are good and whose taste I admire.  Most readers are only going to give your script ONE good read.  If it’s below par or you’re just looking for a pat on the back, then they’re never going to read it again with those fresh eyes.  You’ve got to save those fresh-eye reads – they’re important.

I’ve done the FTO Aurora Workshop with “Shiver” at 2nd Draft.  That meant a whole lot of  strong creative people with ideas. It was brilliant.  But you have to tune yourself to really feel which ideas are resonating with you, and leave behind the ones which aren’t.

Christina Andreef has written and directed three prize-winning short films, “Excursion To The Bridge of Friendship” (In official selection at Sundance & Cannes), “The Gap” (Sundance & Telluride) and “Shooting The Breeze” (Sundance & Berlin). She followed with her first feature film “Soft Fruit” in 2000.  “Soft Fruit” won the International Critics’ Prize in Spain and was invited to Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000.  It was also nominated for 7 AFI Awards.  Currently, she teaches Screenwriting and Direction at the Sydney Film School and Sydney College of the Arts.

Cleo Mees

Cleo Mees is a Sydney-based writer, filmmaker and dancer. With a background across several disciplines, her interest is in finding out how these different disciplines can intersect and inform each other.