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AUSTRALIA
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AS HEALTH RESTRICTIONS CONTINUE TO BE LIFTED AROUND THE WORLD, A GROWING NUMBER OF HIGH-PROFILE PRODUCTIONS ARE CHOOSING AUSTRALIA AS A LOCATION — AND NOT NECESSARILY FOR STORIES THAT ARE SET IN THAT COUNTRY. SANDY GEORGE REPORTS
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Austin Butler as Elvis in Warner Bros. Pictures’ drama Elvis. Photo: Trent Mitchell. © 2021 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
THE 2022 CANNES Film Festival has welcomed Baz Luhrman movie Elvis (2022) to the world’s biggest annual gathering of movie people, for its world premiere. The Warner Bros. Pictures’ movie, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, explores the life and music of Elvis Presley (Butler), and particularly his complicated 20-year relationship with manipulative manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Hanks). The fi lm spans Presley’s rise to fame and unprecedented stardom, against the backdrop of America’s evolving cultural landscape.
And this quintessentially America story has been shot almost entirely on Australia’s Gold Coast. Luhrman has moved his Bazmark production company to the Queensland coastal city, having declared that he and his colleagues have “really fallen in love” with the place, its people and its “creative energy”. The production has employed some 900 Queenslanders in roles behind the camera and is expected to have spent more than $70m in the area.
And there has been more good news for Queensland as the romcom Ticket to Paradise (2022), starring more A-listers — George Clooney and Julia Roberts — also chose to shoot there. In the movie the two stars play a one-time husband and wife who take action to stop their daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) doing the same stupid thing they once did. The story starts in Chicago, then moves to Bali and from the outset, the creative team favoured Australia as the principal location for fi lming.
“I recced Queensland for something else many years ago,” producer and Working Title Films co-chair, Tim Bevan, says. “[This time] we were looking at infrastructure and tax credits, and somewhere comfortable for two movie stars.”
Producer Deborah Balderstone, based in Sydney, did the early leg work, including scouting — communicating with Bevan and director Ol Parker remotely. If the pandemic hadn’t hit so hard worldwide, Bali would have been an option, but the creative team probably wouldn’t have wavered from tropical Queensland, Bevan says. He said that for a big movie where the main cast is coming from LA, it’s no diff erent for them, whether they go to the UK or Australia.
Bevan and Parker, producer Sarah Harvey, cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland and six actors in all, came from elsewhere and entered two weeks of mandatory quarantine in Australia.
“The fi rst seven weeks of shooting were glorious,” Bevan says. “I can’t fault anything, infrastructure-wise. I’d never shot at Village Roadshow Studios before and it’s a good facility. I’d certainly go back there. The unit around the camera was as good as any in the world. You need the A-team. It was a great can-do, friendly lot of people.”
He said it was “fantastic” to see a 50:50 gender diverse crew, and women as camera operators, grips and electricians. “Racially it was not so good, but that’s a job at hand for the world.”
Quite a lot of crew came from New South Wales, the state to the south of Queensland. He laughed when he said that Australians love their trucks and vans, just as Americans do — in London crews have to be more nimble.
“On a stage (in Australia), you wouldn’t know whether you were in Australia, America or Pinewood, except for the Australian accents and shorts and T-shirts,” he says. Film sets have become more democratic in the way they operate, he added, but on a big US movie it remains "hierarchical and imperialist".
A problem arose, however, when Australia opened most of its internal borders, and COVID cases soared — for a while it had tried for an elimination strategy. Wrap was scheduled for January 19, 2022, but the set shut down two weeks prior. With strict COVID practices in place, they were up again three weeks later.
“Given the stresses and strains, the material we got was fantastic. Everyone had had a Christmas break. I joked with Eric [business partner Eric Fellner] that we should build a hiatus into every fi lm.”
To get the most out of Australia’s fi nancial attraction incentives, which are in part based on the level of local expenditure, considerable post was done in the country, including VFX at Cutting Edge.
“We will come back. A big movie or a 10-episode series makes sense for Australia. And we’ve got a great, great partner there in Deb … Australia always feels further away than it is."
Universal Pictures releases Ticket to Paradise in the UK in September, and in the US in October, 2022.
Two big US projects are sharing Village Roadshow Studios’ nine stages throughout 2022. The 10-part live-action series Nautilus for Disney+ is the origin story of Captain Nemo and his submarine, as depicted in Jules Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The water tanks helped win Nautilus. The other project is an untitled movie in Legendary Entertainment’s MonsterVerse franchise. Producer is Eric McLeod, who was on the ground for Kong: Skull Island in 2016, and Godzilla vs Kong in 2019, both of which were fi lmed in Queensland.
“In the 35 years I’ve been here at the studios, I’ve never seen it so busy as it’s been for the last two years,” studio president Lynne Benzie says.
With the shortage of studios around the world, she said she would be delighted to expand but it would only be possible if a “visionary” client folded the cost of construction into a big production.
The studios are busy because of the Federal Government incentives. Ticket to Paradise received A$6m, the new Legendary fi lm $16m and Nautilus A$23.3m via the Federal Government’s Location Incentive, a discretionary grant. All are expected to claim a further 16.5% Location Off set, a tax rebate. This will equate to a saving of 30% of Australian expenditure. Federal Arts Minister Paul Fletcher said the projects would be spending A$47m, A$119m and A$172m respectively in the country.
Any production must spend at least A$15m to claim the Location Off set. Applications and payments are made upon completion. A 30% Post, Digital and Visual Eff ects (PDV) Off set also exists for TV series and fi lms, irrespective of where they were fi lmed. Expenditure must be A$500,000. Some states also have PDV money.
In fi nancial year 2020/21, 45 international projects received an estimated $101m via the PDV and Location Off sets — the department will not divide the fi gures because taxation matters are confi dential — and $99.6m for 13 productions under the Location Incentive.
The three productions mentioned also got money from the Queensland Government, via its agency Screen Queensland’s Production Attraction Incentive. Actual amounts were not available.
The big recent news in terms of Australian studio infrastructure is the opening of a A$46m 3,700 sq m (40,000 sq ft) super-stage at Docklands Studios Melbourne (DSM), which increased the controlled shooting space by more than 60%.
“The global appetite for content, combined with DSM’s reputation for quality and service, has increased inquiries,” Docklands CEO Antony Tulloch says. “Stage 6 will help us facilitate these projects. DSM has traditionally punched above its weight. Stage 6, with its practical layout and systems, will enable us to attract more business whilst facilitating domestic projects.”
Being government owned, DSM has always left room for Australian projects, which are growing in budget and ambition. This year Stage 6 will also see director Mark Gracey (The Greatest Showman/2017) make a biopic about musician Robbie Williams. And DSM is also hosting Garth Davis’s feature Foe. Tulloch was operations boss at Iskandar Malaysia Studios, and recently took over from Rod Allan, who had been in the job for 13 years.
In April cameras rolled on season two of La Brea (2021), the fi rst international production to visit Stage 6; fi lming is scheduled through to November. The original series was principally fi lmed in 2021 on location and using warehouse
space, over winter, in the state of Victoria — Melbourne is Victoria’s capital. With 14 episodes in the new series, Fletcher says A$118m will be spent in Australia compared to A$98m last time.
“Changeable weather is part of the Melbourne scene and our show is outside a lot as it depicts Los Angeles 10,000 years BC,” senior vice-president, production, at Universal Television Richard Ross says. “The studio will give us a larger footprint to create that world on a stage — and weather cover.”
He said returning to Victoria was “a slam dunk”. He moved the frst season to Australia in part because of the pandemic, but also because the level of production activity in Canada undermined his confdence about getting enough crew expertise. He asked Melbourne-based Matchbox Pictures, owned by Universal International Studios, whether the country could handle a big show with big elements. Matchbox said it could; then he had the job of convincing the key creatives that it could be produced in Australia at a high quality. It was a hit with NBC’s audiences and a new season was ordered before the frst played out.
“Good incentives are only as good as the infrastructure and labour … I couldn’t be happier with the experiences I’ve had down there, with our partners and with the people at Matchbox, who know the country. We take the lead from them — if I have a show that’s right creatively, they’re my frst call.”
When asked if Australia had weaknesses, he drew attention to how Australians and Americans drive on opposite sides of the road: “In a police drama with a lot of action on the roads it’s going to be, not a weakness, but a disadvantage. You have to fnd cars with left-hand drive and change road signs.”
Asked the same question, Brian O’Leary, senior vicepresident, tax counsel, NBC Universal, talked of the measures Australia is putting in place to deepen and broaden the crew base, including building on what he calls “a natural synergy with Australia’s existing VFX and gaming skill set”. The worldwide streamer-induced production boom is putting a squeeze on personnel in Australia, just as it is in many territories.
But big foreign companies like O’Leary’s are helping with that: no-one can successfully apply for the Location Incentive unless they add to Australia’s skills base. This time around, Matchbox Pictures and NBCUniversal are spending A$350,000 to fund training in virtual production, in partnership with the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
The states compete vigorously for interstate and international production. The local screen agencies need to be the frst port of call for those seeking the Location Incentive because the Federal Government looks to them to make a judgement about whether a state has capacity. Without that approval, projects are not eligible.
Joe Brinkmann, manager of production attraction and support at VicScreen, and his colleagues, expect Stage 6 signifcantly to boost Victoria’s production levels. He talks of ofering an end-to-end service to ensure visitors have a great experience, so that they become ambassadors. Ensuring an orderly pipeline of local and international activity is one aim — although, with so many moving parts to productions, it’s never easy. He’s helping to entice people from other industry sectors with compatible skills to learn the ways of flm, as it’s seen as a quicker way to grow skilled crew numbers compared to fasttracking entry-level people.
In his experience US productions want 50:50 studio space and locations. Australia has great diversity of landscapes and looks and Victoria is no exception: in recent years, it has doubled for Africa and India, as well as period Shanghai, Edinburgh and New York.
A CGI profle of the water pit in Stage 6, Docklands Studios Melbourne. Image: Grimshaw Architects
Brinkmann says VicScreen is invited to pitch for 80-90 projects a year, a marked increase from three years ago when it was more like 40 projects.
“We are back, post the height of the pandemic, in an environment that’s hugely competitive and are still seeing the benefts of strong incentives,” Ausflm chief executive ofcer, Kate Marks, says. The organisation that markets Australia’s locations, services and people to the world, felded enquiries for A$1.4bn worth of production in the six months to early March 2022.
Marks advocates for a diversity of foreign production but is enjoying seeing returning US series — and also increasing levels of Australian involvement at a high creative level. Young Rock (2021-), The Wilds (2020-) and La Brea, for example, all had Australian directors in the credits.
Australia’s third world-class studio, which is also on the east coast, is Fox Studios Australia, in the heart of Sydney. Now owned by the Walt Disney Company, the last big production there was Thor: Love and Thunder (2022). It has been having a quiet period and at the time of writing there was no information on future bookings. That is likely to have changed by now, however.
Fox has a few dozen tenants, including full-service postproduction company Spectrum Films, which recently took over and acoustically rebuilt the Dolby Atmos theatre at the site. Soundfrm, another renowned full-service company, also created a Dolby Atmos theatre in a nearby suburb — it has another in Melbourne. Post Lounge and Arc Film have both opened new post facilities in Sydney — one of Arc’s founder owners, Peter Sciberras, was the editor on The Power of the Dog (2021). As mentioned, A$500,000 spent with any of these companies — or with one of the many VFX companies — delivers a 30% rebate.
