Phillip Noyce, the ace Australian director behind “The Quiet American” “Salt and “Rabbit Proof Fence,” is no ordinary storyteller. His genial, almost bumbling, demeanor belies a quick brain and an avid user of technology.
Both were on display in Goa at the International Film Festival of India where he is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award, and where Monday he delivered a memorable masterclass.
His method of explaining how to succeed (“survive” would be a better term, he says) in the new Hollywood, passes through a description of the dire state of film pre-sales through to on-stage trust games and extracts from an unsuccessful pilot.
Noyce’s analysis of the U.S. film industry’s crisis is that production was ramped up during COVID and then scaled back; that theatrical box office is waning and causing the prices of bankable actors and pre-sales values of unmade films to decline; and that during the writers and actors’ strikes of 2023 the studios used the time to reassess their future.
The solution, according to Noyce, is to make things cheaper. Or, referencing the Christian parable in which Jesus reportedly used five loaves and two fishes to feed thousands, to make limited resources go further.
Ways to achieve that, Noyce proposes, range from liberal use of drones, which are cheaper than helicopters or planes, especially those drones which can be returned to the shop after use. And to increase cast and crew creativity.
He suggested mentoring young people who have different minds to the generation of established directors and are learning new filming tricks from social media. Or finding the right crew and ways to inspire them. “You can exponentially increase creativity, but it only works on trust,” he said.
At that point, Noyce asked for volunteers to join him in a trust game that involved blindfolds and pairs of audience members exploring the Kala Academy auditorium. Among them were Noyce’s daughter and top cinematographer John Seale, who had given a talk earlier during the festival. “Make it fun and safe,” he explained to the sighted partners.
Noyce explained that he is in the habit of using such group bonding tactics ahead of the production of all his pictures, that they can last for up to four hours, and that participants have ranged from top stars such as Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie through to heads of department.
Another way of getting everyone on board, he suggested, is to make each movie three or four times over, by making teasers, trailers and short versions. “We make the trailer well before we shoot the actual movie,” he said. The idea is to eliminate surprises for financiers, actors and distributors. “And for me to try things out. Each time you make it, you’ll learn more about it.”
In a similar vein, Noyce said that he is an avid user of story boards and animatronics, especially for action scenes. “Action is expensive and dangerous. Animatronics allow me to shoot fewer takes and fewer scenes myself. Sometimes we can do it with the second unit instead,” he said and explained that the bravura action scene in “Salt” with Angelina Jolie jumping from a succession of moving vehicles was largely done with a second unit crew. “I only shot the scenes with the male actors,” he said, adding, “For me technology, is fishes and loaves, the way to do a scene like that for a quarter of the price and a tenth of the danger.” He further suggested that the same bridge and vehicle action scene could today be shot for a fraction of the original price, by use of virtual production or a volumetric stage.
Noyce’s preference for planning, understanding the details of technology and film finance gave a lie to his self-deprecating assertion that, “All I do is yell ‘action’ and ‘cut’.” But he retains a wide-eyed enjoyment of the job of being a film director. He says it first emerged after being impressed as a teenager by a circus ringmaster.
In Sydney at college, he followed his curiosity and responded to a poster advertising underground, short movies. “They were all made for low budgets. They were personal, art, non-linear films,” Noyce enthused. “Anyone could make a movie. I went home, grew a beard and called myself a film director. I made a film about the sex fantasies of teenagers and auctioned off acting parts.”
He was there for the beginnings of the modern Australian film industry. “Those movies were the first time we’d heard an Australian accent on screen. Australians were then blessed by having a prime minister who would support cinema,” Noyce explained. “There is no economic rationale for the Australian film industry. The Americans and the Brits could have supplied all the films we needed. But there was a cultural imperative. And we were profitable, because Australians enjoyed seeing themselves, like a baby looking in the mirror.”
While fretting about the cost of production, the changes to be wrought by AI, and further tectonic shifts in the Hollywood studio system, Noyce’s underlying messages seemed to be that filmmaking will become cheaper and more accessible and that storytelling (and showmanship) will continue to be crucial.
He suggested that one lesson from making “Rabbit Proof Fence” is that promotion may be more important than production budget. And that “Making a movie is about everything other than shooting the movie. It is about pre-production.”
Staying fresh and open to new ideas was another tip for a film director hoping for career longevity. He called himself “restless” and saif that he has attended below-the-radar digital film festivals in order to learn. “You can write, edit and monetize with your 4k phone. Anyone can do it,” he said. It wasn’t strictly true when he started out and had to scratch around for film stock, but it is now.
An example of that, he recalled, was accepting a phone call from a stranger at 2.30am and allowing himself to be pestered into reading their script. “It was a film about me, how I needed to escape from the re-education center called Hollywood that I was in.”
