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Antonia Barnard has been involved in the Australian film and television industry for over twenty years. She has worked as a producer, line producer, production manager and completion guarantor. Her credits include ‘ The Quiet American’, ‘Mad Max 3’, ‘Young Einstein’, ‘Welcome to Woop Woop’, ‘Day of the Roses’, ‘Two Bob Mermaid’ and ‘Clowning Around’. She has also worked extensively overseas, in countries such as Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, India and Thailand. AUSUS Magazine spoke to Antonia about the challenges of working in foreign countries, her involvement with the aboriginal filmmaking community, and the distinctions between the different ‘types’ of producer.  

Q: How did you get involved, Antonia, in the entertainment industry?

When I first arrived in Australia from England I worked at the Sydney Film Festival as a secretary for seven years when David Stratton was the director. I’d come out here for a holiday and I was looking for a job just for the short term and I thought the festival would be a seasonal thing. But I loved it and never left! At the festival I was David’s secretary, then director of the Travelling Film Festival. After this I moved to production managing and then on to line producing and producing. I still cut the spectrum between these latter two.  

Q: What is the difference between the different ‘types’ of producer?

Well, it’s a little different overseas, but let’s talk about Australia. Working backwards from producer, he or she is usually the person who generates the project, finds the writer and director, and is responsible for financing and all aspects creatively. The line producer is often brought in on a project where the producer doesn’t have the budgetary skills, a less experienced producer. Sometimes the producer will be the person who found the book and got the rights, but doesn’t know how to move any further with it, so the line producer comes in and does all the nuts and bolts, the paperwork, submitting applications and so on. That’s not to say, of course, that one role involves more work than another. Often the producer will have two or three projects going at the same time. The production manager works closely with the line producer and does the day to day running of the film. Sending out the call sheets, getting actors in and out, booking equipment, hiring staff and so on. It’d either be an experienced production manager and a producer, or a less experienced production manager, line producer, producer. It depends on the complexity and the requirements of the film. If it is really complex you could have both a production manager and a line producer. Not because of the lack of experience, but because of the volume of work. A two hander in a pub would be simple, whereas animals and children in the desert could be considered complicated!  

Q: What about the co – producer?  

A co – producer is really a producer but a shared role. It is a credit that is sometimes given away for a certain skill. Sometimes a writer will want a producer credit.

Q: You worked as a line producer on ‘The Quiet American’?

Yes. Bill Horberg, the American producer, came and went and left it to me to run it on a daily basis. We had a great relationship. He is amazing. He can grasp a story and a cut of a film and talk about it really easily. It just comes second nature to him and I really admire that quality. It was a very complicated film to work on but it was one of the better experiences that I had. I was surrounded by good people.  

Q: What was the process involved in bringing an American film with an Australian crew to Vietnam?

Well, I made seven trips to Vietnam! To shoot there you have to have a government partner and there’s only two studios that they would allow us to use and so Bill and I started those negotiations and then I carried them through. All of these trips were for ten days except the last one, which lasted six weeks. We did surveys, we did negotiations, we met crew. We were in Ho Chi Minh City, Nimbin, Hoi An and Hanoi . We moved a lot. It was Phillip (Noyce), always seeking the perfect place to film. In the end we shot old Saigon in Hoi An. The scene where Brendan comes over the bridge and Michael’s in the restaurant. The market and so on. The only thing we shot in Ho Chi Minh City was the square. In front of the Hotel Continental. We were presuming we’d shoot the Continental as it is. There’s three sides to the square in front of it. The opera house, the Continental and another hotel, The Caravelle. We were trying to work out how to make it work because the reverse out from the terrace was always going to be to The Caravelle. In the end Phillip decided that the trick was to shoot in the building that was giving us trouble and we’d look out to the old building. This is how we shot it and in fact the Continental is on the other side of the square from how it’s portrayed in the film!  

Q: How long did it take you to give the scene the ‘look’ of that period?

It took two or three months. And then what we did was we built the set underneath the caravalle, on the pavement. We put a blue screen above the café and then we replaced from above the terrace to the top of the hotel with a photograph of the original Continental. That was computer generated. We also had to go to every single shop and measure it and make it look exactly as it would have in the period. This was a very difficult part. Getting all those permissions and finding an amount of money that was suitable but that was within our budget.  

Q: You ran into more difficulties just as you were about to rehearse?

Yes. We were going to do a rehearsal on the Thursday and shoot on the Friday and the Saturday. We had to close off the square for this. But at the last minute they told us we couldn’t close the square, so Bill and I had to go to the Australian embassy. They got us a meeting with the chairman of the peoples committee of Ho Chi Minh City, who eventually gave us permission to shoot for twelve hours. However, the next morning when we arrived there at six o’clock they came with a letter that said we couldn’t start till eleven! Everything was just so complicated. It put a lot of pressure on Phillip, but he is an amazing director and he just became more inventive. This is the sort of thing that happens all the time. It just happened to me in China. It’s very difficult because you can get weighed down by middle management and you’re always relying on a translator to tell you what’s going on. The thing about ‘The Quiet American’ was that it was a very big budget for a film shooting in Vietnam, and we were moving around the country, which is quite rare and you would know how difficult it is to drive around there, especially with delicate equipment. However, because the script (and the book) showed an anti-American bias it did help us to get the government assistance we did. Not like the previous film, which changed the ending and made it pro-American.  

Q: Where was post - production carried out?

We did it in Australia. Normally they’d take it back to America but Phillip was very keen to do the post here and I ended up staying on for this, which was fantastic.  

Q: How did you get involved in ‘The Quiet American’?

I’d worked with Phillip before and he was in town for ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’. I was tail ending another film, ‘Bootmen’, and we bumped into one another at one of the post -production houses. We’d worked together many years ago in Thailand, before he’d done ‘Dead Calm’, and he asked me to come aboard.  

Q: How do you choose which projects you work on?

I like always to like the script. I didn’t read the script for my current project, ‘Ultra Violet’, until I got on the plane, but I hadn’t worked for a while and it seemed to fit my schedule quite well.  I got up there in the first week of the shoot. It wasn’t as much work as if I’d had to also prepare the film. But usually I will read the script first. On ‘The Quiet American’ I’d worked with Phillip, but I knew nothing about anybody else and I remember thinking how honored I’d be if I met Sydney Pollack. That was one of the fantastic things about working on the film, getting to work with Sydney.  

Q: Have you had any mentors in this business?  

I have actually. Brian Rosen was my very first mentor. He’s now head of the Film Finance Corporation. And Tony Buckley as well. He’s been around for a long time, having been part of the renaissance of film in the early seventies. He did ‘Caddie’ and ‘The Irishman’ and just produced a film that was applauded at Toronto. He’s one of our foremost producers and has been for more than thirty years. I worked with both of these people as a secretary very early on in my career and they inspired me to move on from where I was.  

Q: What was your first producing job?

It was in the eighties. I did a lot of work with Patricia Edgar at the Children’s Television Foundation. A director who was doing one of the shows had recommended me and she had the faith in me to take me on board. I did a few projects with them and they were quite successful.

Q: Is there a purpose behind your producing work?

It’s really moment by moment. I did a short film in the mid nineties called ‘Two Bob Mermaid’. A fifteen minute film for an aboriginal director. It was part of a series of six films made as a package to get indigenous people telling their own stories, as opposed to white people doing so. I took it on because I liked the story, but also because I had never found a way to contribute to what I considered to be the aboriginal ‘situation’. It was quite confronting, but also quite fulfilling. It won the Sydney Critic’s award and the Asia Pacific Film Festival award for the best short film, was in competition in Venice and played on Channel Four. Darlene, the director, is the product of an aboriginal mother and an Irish father so she has aboriginal features but her skin is perfectly white. The film is therefore about identity. What are you, who do you belong to and can you cross all areas? It’s now used as a resource in schools in NSW to talk about identity. It has an ongoing life.  

Q: What’s your next project?

It’s going to be a film called ‘The Drowner’. It’s based on a Robert Drew book of the same name. Its not initiated by me. You could compare it to ‘The English Patient’. It’s an epic love triangle set against the backdrop of the building of the water pipeline from Perth to Coolgardie at the turn of the century. It’s about the engineer who actually pushed the pipeline through and his love affair with two women. We intend to finance through

the FFC and an English organization called the Spice Factory. It has to be an official co – production. It’s the only way you can raise that sort of money. We also have a sales agent, Gary Hamilton, at Arclight.  

Q: What do you think is the future of the Australian film industry?

I think it’s going to come out of its current slump. It will always need government support. It’s never going to survive on it’s own. The FFC was conceived to be self funding, but it hasn’t turned out that way. It’s just a bit vexed. They’re trying a new system. It will take some time to see if it works for Australia. And the American’s are coming back. There’s two films scheduled in Melbourne. ‘Charlotte’s Web’ for Paramount and ‘Ghost Rider’ for Sony Pictures. And there’s also two going to be produced in Queensland. ‘Papa’, about Ernest Hemmingway, and another project about the wrestling. In Sydney, Jocelyn Moorhouse has a new film called ‘Eucalyptus’, possibly with Russell Crowe, which Fox Searchlight will fund. So I think it’ll eventually pick up.  

Q: Are you involved with casting or working with the actors?

Not like the director is but I would always sit in on a rehearsal. ‘The Drowner’ is a project that Jeff Darling and his partner Sarah Blair have had for four years. They’re relying on me for scheduling and budgeting but because I produce I have an opinion about actors as well. Sometimes I’ll also be at the casting sessions. I was for ‘Bootmen’ and ‘Welcome to Woop Woop’.  

Q: What about writers? Do people ever approach you with scripts?

Every single day. I used to read everything that came in but I had to stop. At the moment I have five projects I’m working on so it becomes too much. And now with email I’ll get three approaches a day. Three or four page summaries. I always reply though. It’s different in America I think. They have readers to do the work and seem to work on the basis that this could be the next great script. ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,’ for example.  

Q: Looking back on your career at its conclusion what would you like to have achieved?