Tropfest
SEVEN MINUTES OF FAME
(Meeting Tropfest winners, Emma Freeman and Adam Zwar)
(c) David Astle
Quiet on the set. The rock is about to speak. The rock is Bill Hunter dressed as a boulder, and he describes his inner self. ‘Well, he’s got a broken heart. He’s in agony. No friends. But despite everything, he still carries a sense of optimism.’
‘Absolutely,’ says a guy with a ginger quiff. ‘It’s all about optimism.’
‘Well, if you don’t have optimism,’ says the rock, ‘you don’t have a film.’
‘And…….cut,’ yells a girl from the wings, delighted, sunburnt, bustling across the gravel and cooing, ‘You were great, Bill. Very rocklike.’
Bill lifts his arms. The props team hoist the boulder from his shoulders. The girl, Emma Freeman, heads for the TV sitting in the carpark to watch the scene replay on video. Meantime Nicole (alias Make-up) goes stalking the ginger boy (alias Adam) to give that quiff a burst of VO-5.
The whole set bristles with…well…optimism. Like the rock says, you gotta have it, or you don’t have a film. That and $100,000 worth of camera gear – plus bagels. Making films is big dollars and very few young film-makers have that sort of stuff. By definition, they’re rich with ideas, and skint. Tarantinos in the laundromat. Campions driving taxis.
Which is where festivals come to the rescue. A chance for auteurs to quit the darkroom and find the limelight. Every second week in Australia a film festival is screening somewhere, from Flickerfest to White Gloves, from Eclectic to Kaleidoscope, from St Kilda to Love Your Work. (There’s even Sour Grapes, a festival for those who dipped out in other festivals). But the biggest is Tropfest – the biggest short-film festival in the world, no less. Big enough to get Bill Hunter into a rock-suit, and Emma Freeman her chance to say, ‘Action!’
Tropfest was born in a coffee cup ten years ago. Actor and director John Polson grew sick of ‘people talking about their plans and not really doing much.’
‘There was a lot of people sitting around the Tropicana Café (in Kings Cross) talking about how they’d make a movie if the government came through with the funding. Tropfest was an effort to give people a deadline to aim for. Give them a reason to get off their arse.’
The maiden short was a mockumentary called Surry Hills 902 Spring Roll that Polson screened in the Tropicana Café, igniting a festival. ‘Back in the 70s, short films were springboards to features. That’s how Peter Weir and Jane Campion got started. But then it went dead in the 80s. Nobody really knew what a short film was.’
Consider the lesson learnt. In 2002 alone, 90,000 people in Sydney’s Domain, plus kindred crowds in simultaneous venues across the country, flocked to see the finalists. Flocked to a flick called Lamb, Emma Freeman’s Trop debut.
A well-told story, says Polson. Accomplished and beautifully realised. A drama too, sang the critics, the Tropfest ‘gag genre’ being broken by an elegant, Ibsen-like yarn. Lamb’s seven minutes hushed a thousand picnic rugs that warm February night. A farmer and his blind son eke a living on the dry land. The boy’s pet lamb is the pair’s only hope against starvation. The Dad knows it. The kelpie knows it. The blind son can see it. Just as a jury, including Yahoo and Keanu, could recognise fine-grade film-making.
‘I was so excited,’ says Freeman. ‘It was quite overwhelming, winning the award, standing in front of a sea of people. I never even dreamed that far ahead.’
Freeman has a habit of throwing italics around. Less histrionic than ebullient, she could out-cackle any witch in the wood. At 26, she’s a bundle of energy and self-belief. You’d almost think a director so positive doesn’t need an opportunity – she’d make her own – but that’s ignoring what she’s undergone.
‘When I walked off the stage at Tropfest, the press everywhere, I just wanted to see my Mum and Dad. For them, given my history and whatever, it was a really special night for the whole family.’
If you saw Freeman’s life on the big screen, you’d come out cursing the Hollywood formula. But Freeman, the biopic, proves the power of the human spirit.
Act 1 – Emma grows up a happy normal kid in Eltham, outer Melbourne. Mum’s a retired model. Dad makes sandpaper for a living. Act 2 – Enter chicken pox. Then a complication. Emma gets polyneuritis, and she’s paralysed from the neck down. She spends her next six years in hospital, five of those learning to walk again. She relies on love and stories to keep her strong.
‘Imagination was my way of surviving. The hours I spent thinking of stories was ridiculous. I guess I had plenty of time on my hands. (cackle) When I was in Rehab I was into theatre. My parents would take me to a play about once every six weeks – they’d wheel me in then take me back to hospital.’
Act 3 is a wasteland close to Melbourne Airport. Emma is dressed in aubergine and black; Bill Hunter is dressed in a rock.
Big things have followed Freeman since Tropfest. Great Southern Films have invited her on board to shoot commercials. ‘My first job was Jockey Y-fronts. And now I’m directing Bill Hunter in a rock-suit. What do you say? Life is full of surprises.’
Hollywood likewise came sniffing this year. ‘I’ve signed with a project called Fox Searchlab, an initiative of Fox Searchlight. I think they choose three directors a year.’
Freeman in fact is the first Australian to be offered the apprenticeship. ‘I’ll make a short film with them. I’ll have a mentor and I develop the short film so they know how I work. And they have a first book option with me.
‘It’s based in LA but I’m staying here. I need to stay here. I know I’d be miserable in America. If I want to do good work it’s from Carlisle St, East St Kilda, not Hollywood.’ So it was that the Fox surrendered to the Lamb.
Back to the rock, the shoot is part of Freeman’s Tropfest booty. As well as dough and profile, Emma gets the chance to shoot the promo for Intel Tropfest 2003. A two-day taste of being director with a big D. Today she’s filming Hunter the boulder. (‘More passion, Bill. Rev it up, like before a footy match.’) Tonight, she’s in charge of Lantana star Rachael Blake lying in a bed. ‘Mum,’ said Emma on the mobile that first morning. ‘Just ringing to say life’s good.’
Irene Freeman had acted miffed. Normally she did the filmset catering, helping her daughter make movies through Victorian College of the Arts. Emma’s success was Irene’s relegation. Not to worry. A small price. In fact, as budgets go, ony the bagels and Bill’s foam rock were the shoot’s real expenses. All other gear and cinematic legends came pro bono.
A semitrailer interrupts Act 1, Scene 2, Take 3, calling for the big reflector to be hauled offroad by the gaffers. (Big reflector?! I ask Freeman for the object’s correct filmographic name, and she shrugs. ‘Big reflector sounds good.’)
Once the truck has gone, and the big reflector (or BR) is replaced, Act 1, Scene 2, Take 3 can resume. Freeman stoops to share the camera’s eyeline. Her mouth is moving in sync with the actors’ lines, emotionally part of the story, regardless of the story entailing a fop in a ginger quiff and an optimisitic boulder.
This year, Rock is the Tropfest theme. What the organisers call the TSI, or Tropfest Signature Item. (Past festivals had Chopsticks, Pickle and Horn as signatures.) The TSI is a means of ‘watermarking’ each year’s batch of entries with a subtle reference point. Last year the TSI was Match, explaining why the farmer and his blind son had matching socks. In other films, like Wilfred for example, a man in a dog-suit struck a match to light up a bong.
Wilfred was last year’s other big winner, taking out Best Actor (Jason Gann), Best Comedy and the clap-o-meter cup, or People’s Choice Award. The story was hilarious, an exploration of boy-meets-girl-meets-girl’s-jealous-dog.
‘It was based on a true story,’ says Adam Zwar, the guy with the ginger quiff, the other actor on Freeman’s Rock shoot. ‘I once went home with a girl and her dog kept looking at me suspiciously. ‘What are you gonna do with my missus…’ I took the story to Tony Rogers who directed it. And now it’s been selected for Sundance (Film Festival).’
Zwar rhymes with bizarre for good reason. If you saw Adam’s biopic at the local cineplex you’d come out sneering. Too zany by half. Zwar grew up in Leo McKern’s house in Cairns. His Dad, Bernard Zwar, was Rudolf Hess’ ghost-writer, among other job descriptions, who stashed the Nazi’s prison diaries in Rumpole’s old cellar until two CIA agents, disguised as pool pebblers, attempted to filch it. Such was Adam’s childhood.
Zwar, Act 2, sees the gingery teen going to school with the members of Powderfinger. At uni in Toowoomba he leads a double life. ‘I did journalism and acting at the same time which was actually illegal. I managed to get away with it. There was a period there where I was going to these media lectures with my tights in my backpack, and off I went to do some Shakespeare.’
Act 3 is a series of crim roles on Stingers and Blue Heelers. The weird break was an ad for HBA. Zwar plays the nerd in buckteeth who tries to pronounce ‘Three for Free’. A breakthrough role as Adam met his Tropfest collaborator, Tony Rogers, the ad’s director, and soon Wilfred the dog was whelped. The clap-o-meter approved. Part of the prize was the chance to co-script the Tropfest promo with Freeman.
Serena Paull, skulking on set, calls the process match-making. Introducing talented strangers to each other. Whether Freeman and Zwar go on to make beautiful pictures together is up to them. At least the festival has played cupid.
Not that Wilfred was Zwar’s first flick. His first, a turkey called My Night With Ava, was based on Ava Gardener filming On The Beach in 1959. (‘The guy playing Frank Sinatra actually grew a beard mid-shoot.’) Each shitty film, he laughs, teachs you what’s good and what’s bad. And you move on.
Film trivia time: Back in 1959, which well-known Australian actor got his first big break as a stunt double in the movie, On the Beach?
Answer: Bill Hunter. Bill was 18 at the time, pre-dating the era of short-film festivals and numerous other opportunities. Bill’s Dad was in charge of security on set. Stanley Kramer, the director, was looking for a stuntman. ‘A maniac,’ Hunter told director Phil Noyce in Third Take: Australian Film-Makers Talk. ‘It was all balls and guts. Fred Astaire, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Tony Perkins came to see me swim one night.’ From a swimmer to a boulder, with twenty monumental films in between.
Bill sucks a Dunhill waiting for a cloudbank to pass. ‘This is the highlight of my life,’ he whispers to me, coarsely, and delivers that trademark wink. The sun appears. This time Zwar, playing the part of Rock Thomas, a Tropfest tragic in cravat, wants the boulder to exhibit more vulnerability.
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We finish in a St Kilda bed. The bed belongs to Emma Freeman. She shares her flat with a kelpie cross called Hudson, plus Laverne and Dolores, two ragdoll cats. (Three more reasons why she ain’t moving to Hollywood) A friend is minding the whole menagerie while a film-crew seizes her bedroom. As you’d expect, the maker of Lamb understands sacrifices.
Rachael Blake is dressed in blue pyjamas. She slips beneath the doona. A valentine portrait of John Polson on the bedside table is a Tropfest gag for the trailer. Yet out of shot, a framed poster of Bette Davis in Dark Victory is most likely not.
Already Blake is a paid-up Freeman fan. ‘Emma has great sensitivity and a beautiful eye. Most directors can see what’s wrong with a scene, but Emma can see what’s not there – and should be there. She sees what’s missing.’
Not that too much is absent right now. ‘I only do what I love,’ says Freeman. ‘I wouldn’t do this unless I loved it entirely. I’m not just working to make money. I’m in this industry because I love it..’ (Italics hers.)