Shining ... from left, Chris O'Dowd, Deborah Mailman, Shari Sebbens, Jessica Mauboy and Miranda Tapsell on the Sydney set of The Sapphires.
Article by Garry Maddox, the Sydney Morning Herald
After a slow time for the film industry, Sydney is enjoying star billing, writes Garry Maddox.
When Sydney was named a UNESCO City of Film last year, it was hard to know what to make of it. The only other city with the honour was - no, not Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, London or Mumbai - but 'oomble Bradford in northern England.
Almost a year later, Sydney seems to be living up to the title. Consider these developments:
In the biggest movie to shoot in the city in three years, Baz Luhrmann is filming The Great Gatsby in 3D with Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan. Instead of the tumbleweeds that have blown through Fox Studios since Australia and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, there are hundreds of crew, cast and extras, with word from the set suggesting the movie will look spectacular and show the creative potential of 3D.
The Sapphires, the film version of Tony Briggs's successful stage musical about the Aboriginal equivalent of The Supremes in the 1960s, has just finished the Sydney leg of its shoot. The director, Wayne Blair, is in Vietnam with his cast, led by Jessica Mauboy and Deborah Mailman, to shoot scenes set during the war. After the success of Bran Nue Dae, there will be high hopes for the film next year.
George Miller is down to the last few weeks of work on Happy Feet Two, having turned an old railway shed at CarriageWorks into a thriving animation studio with more than 600 crew. The sequel to the Oscar-winning penguin tale will be released in the US next month and here on Boxing Day.
While the falling dollar will need to hit US85¢ to regularly attract Hollywood production again, two other big movies are also in the early stages: Alex Proyas's Paradise Lost, based on Milton's epic poem and reportedly due to star Casey Affleck as the angel Gabriel and Bradley Cooper as Lucifer; and Walking With Dinosaurs 3D, adapted from the famous BBC documentary series.
These films come amid a promising time for Australian cinema.
When Red Dog was released, the feel-good drama about a dog that united the Pilbara mining community in the 1970s looked likely to take $5 million. It has cracked $19 million, which makes it the eighth-highest grossing Australian film in domestic box office history, and has sold strongly around the world.
On limited release, The Eye of the Storm has taken $1 million in three weeks. While the director Fred Schepisi's lavish adaptation of a Patrick White novel won't be a money spinner in cinemas, the blue-chip cast headed by Geoffrey Rush, Judy Davis and Charlotte Rampling will give it a long life on DVD, video-on-demand and television.
After selling widely at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Hunter opened in cinemas this week, with Willem Dafoe playing a mercenary tracking down the last Tasmanian tiger. Next week comes The Cup, which tells the story of jockey Damien Oliver's stirring win in the 2002 Melbourne Cup shortly after his brother's death in a race fall.
Outside Australian film, the final Harry Potter movie took $52 million and showed that when a film is good, audiences seem prepared to pay for 3D.
The city is also back on the radar for film events, with the state government underpinning the Sydney Film Festival's viability for the next three years and the Australian Film Institute bringing the new Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards to the Opera House in January. The City of Sydney council is also financing a feasibility study for a new film centre for screenings, exhibitions and courses.
The only blip in all this encouraging activity is the state government's scrapping of the $5 million Production Investment Fund that lured film and television projects to NSW. ''The impact is more likely to be in television than in film but there will be an impact in film,'' the executive director of the Screen Producers Association, Geoff Brown, says.
''It doesn't impact at the top level with Happy Feet and Gatsby-type productions, but the smaller-budget Australian films will be looking elsewhere.''
No comments:
Post a Comment