Caffeinated Clint
Director of “September” talks to Clint Morris
Peter Carstairs is spinning – so much so that he really needs to get a better grasp of that slice of toast (it’s breakfast time when we meet at Melbourne’s Park Hyatt hotel) he’s holding – and you would be too if you were suddenly living the dream.
In the space of two years, the wannabe filmmaker has gone from working as a copyright lawyer with Sydney firm, Gilbert + Tobin to a feature filmmaker with more buzz surrounding him than a hive. And like Morgan O’Neill, who went from out-of-work actor to director thanks to an Australian filmmaking competition (O’Neill’s film “Solo” was the result of the Project Greenlight competition on Movie Extra), Carstairs has the ingenuity and generosity of some film-loving body corps to thank.
“I made a short film last year, Pacific, which we entered in Tropfest”, begins Carstairs, whose first short film was the award-winning ‘’Gate’’ starring Joel Edgerton, “Just before that they’d announced the Tropfest film competition – and in a nutshell, the way that works is they invite everyone that’s been a finalist at Tropfest to submit a feature film script – if they had one – and they’d go through a selection process, and the Movie Network channels, who sponsor Tropfest, would put up a million dollars to make the film as a feature.”
The script that Carstairs submitted was called ‘’September’’, and told the story of two boys from different sides of the tracks – one a white boy, one an aboriginal boy – whose friendship is tainted by social change.
“[September] is two ideas that came together at the same time. The first thing was I really wanted to write a movie about friendship – a relationship between two boys, one from one world and one from another world, whose friendship comes undone for a bunch of different reasons”, explains Carstairs of the script he wrote just after he graduated from the Australian Film Television and Radio School in 2002. “The other idea came from reading about an event in history – before 1968, aboriginal people weren’t paid wages. They were essentially living on properties and working for farmers without wages. Their wage was being allowed to stay there. In 1968, government made a ruling that aboriginal people had to be paid the same as other people in the pastoral industries.
“Though that was a well-intentioned law, the unexpected consequence was a lot of white pastoralists and employers took the view of ‘if we have to pay an aboriginal guy the same as we’d pay a white guy – we’d rather have a white guy’. When I started reading further into this, I discovered what an important part this rule played in firstly, the displacement of the aboriginal people but also, the aboriginal employment problem – which still exists today”.
The script caught the attention of the Tropfest Film Programme’s adjudicators.
“It was really surreal – I entered Tropfest, submitted a script and then walked out with a feature film. It was great.”
It was then that Carstairs – and producer, and Tropfest founder, John Polson – realised that they couldn’t “do justice” to the “September” script for a million dollars, so they shook their cans for more.
“All up, we ended up getting 2.4 million – the film finance corporation became an investor. It was still going to be a really low-budget but I thought it was enough to make the movie”.
Coming from a short film background, Carstairs laughs that he initially actually thought he’d “have some left over” of the budget. “Of course, we don’t have a cent”.
The biggest constraint that the budget put on the production was the length of the shoot.
“We couldn’t shoot for any more than 25 days –and even that was a stretch”, explains Carstairs. “It also meant we had to have a pretty skeleton crew. And though we don’t talk about it much, we shot on 16mm – and just made it look like 35mm”.
Though the film is set in Western Australia, Carstairs ultimately decided to shoot the film in NSW, just outside of Yass.
“We looked at a lot of locations – we looked at South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia – but we couldn’t find the right place that was going to work out logistically, and also aesthetically. That was until I saw some photographs by a guy called Philip Quirk – who does a lot of landscape photographs – and so I contacted him and found out where exactly he’d shot these photographs. We went down [there] and had a look and discovered it was really close to Sydney, really close to a big town – Yass is reasonably big – and it worked aesthetically, so that’s where we went”.
When it came to casting, there was some pressure on Carstairs to try and get names on board but he always envisioned fresh faces in the lead roles.
“At first there was a bit of pressure to cast name actors – because it’d help the film get finance and help it at the box office, but ultimately everyone – including the financers – agreed that if we get names, especially in the support parts, it’d take the focus of whoever was playing the two boys – and we didn’t want that, they have to be the focus.”
In the long term, Carstairs is going to have a little “creative hiatus” now until he stumbles upon what he wants to do next, but for the meantime, he’s going to finish his toast.
SEPTEMBER commences November 29 across Australia
– CLINT MORRIS
