Today was the day for the ‘Director’s Mentor Session’. What is that, I pretend to hear you ask? It’s risk mitigation. Look, it breaks down like this: Ryan is a first-time feature director. In order to make sure all parties interested in the successful completion of the film are satisfied that the inherent risks of a first-time director are mitigated, you do things like get that first-time director to sit down with someone who is experienced, and if possible, that experience is with projects that will face the same kind of challenges. For us, the big challenge is water.
Andy and Shannon organised the workshop to be with writer-director Andrew Traucki, and on paper, he was the perfect choice. The guy made Black Water, a film about three tourists stuck in a mangrove swamp and hunted by a killer crocodile, and The Reef, a film about people getting hunted by sharks. Both films are absolutely dominated by wet sets.
Ryan drove us to the airport, and we argued to mutual satisfaction on how to get there, where to park, and the best approach to making a successful pickup, so it was a good morning. Andrew’s flight came in like clockwork, and we all enjoyed a chat about life in general on the trip back to our writing office.
Once we were in the office, things changed. Ryan and I were absolutely blown away by the honesty, the clarity and the sheer amount of invaluable information Andrew gave us; knowledge hard won on what must have been incredibly difficult sets to work on. Andrew was humble about his achievements on those films, especially as a first-time director on Black Water, and that really stuck with me. It would’ve been so easy for him to strut a bit, with a captive audience of greenhorn filmmakers lapping up every word – but he didn’t. He seemed to have a genuine desire to help out some fellow movie people. He even had great notes on the screenplay from a pure story perspective. I ended up writing over three thousand words of conversation points.
Along with his awesome approach to the day, there were a few other things that stuck with me. Things that he said, like; no matter how well you control the temperature of the water, your cast are going to get cold. Water is insidious that way. And if you are heating it, you need to be aware of the possibility of lense misting and who knows what else. Test, test and test again before the shoot. He talked about the triangle approach to filmmaking of Time, Money and Quality, and how they are always influencing each other in good and bad ways. He said that we should identify as early on as possible what the hard things were to achieve that were not negotiable for the film’s success, and focus on getting solutions for that, and the rest would fall into place. He said so much more, and it was great. We broke for lunch and we all made fun of each of our suggestions for where to eat. We returned to the office, wrapped up the conversation points and then watched the making of Black Water – which was a lot of fun to do with the director in the room.
By the end of the day, it felt like we had made a new friend in Andrew. He said he was happy to be ‘on call’ for Ryan if he needed him for advice throughout the production, and would love to visit the set if we could swing it.
We drove him back out to the airport. There’s a new entry ramp to one of the departure terminals, and we were all guffawing as we circled around, trying to find the right way to go, asking directions from people who couldn’t understand what we found so funny about him potentially missing his flight. We finally found the right spot, and Andrew was out of the car and on his way with a smile and a wave of his hand above his head. We are genuinely looking forward to seeing him again when we start production. I hope we can make that work.
