MAGIC BEACH

Robert Connolly has long certified himself as a filmmaker of impressive range, having worked in the realms of murder mystery to children's whimsy. But his latest film, 'Magic Beach', an adaption of Alison Lester's seminal storybook, marks a new summit in his creative ambitions. For it, he teamed up with ten animators who all possess their own distinctive style and skill set to create a series of phantasmagorical vignettes. Using the beach, a troupe of young performers, and the book itself to guide us to the depths of the sea, it is undeniably his most experimental project and a welcome one, too. It is a film that can best be described as a vibrant rarity for the Australian screen landscape.

The day after its world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival, Connolly and I spoke about whether his reputation has boosted his ability to finance his films, making Lester's book a literal part of the screenplay, and his recent escapade with Nicolas Cage in Cannes. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

CONNOR DALTON: Nice to be speaking with you again, sir. How are you?

ROBERT CONNOLLY: We just had the most crazy world premiere of 'Magic Beach' yesterday at MIFF [Melbourne International Film Festival]. It was bonkers. There were a lot of little kids, and for some, it was the first time they'd seen a film. It was packed, and they gave everyone a cupcake and an Alison Lester 'Magic Beach' sticker. There were also seagull performers wandering around. I did 'Paper Planes' for the Family Gala as well, which was pretty good, but this was just beyond. It was madness. They had big marimba players down the front. It was a lot of fun.

DALTON: When I watched the film yesterday, it felt like it was made by someone who palpably reveres the source material. Does your relationship with the text predate your adaptation of it?

CONNOLLY: Yeah, I knew the book really well because I've got a 22 and 20-year-old. And about 11 years ago, the filmmaker Sarah Watt, who had done 'My Year Without Sex' and 'Look Both Ways' but sadly is not with us anymore, introduced me to Alison. I went down to the beach with my then-11-year-old. We stayed in the house, and we went off wandering around the magic beach with Alison. We got stuck in that cave from 'The Smugglers', and the waves were coming in, and the little dog who's in the film was jumping around. My 11-year-old loved it. It was just one of those great adventures. Then that night, Alison, her husband, [my wife] Kitty, and I had dinner, and I just fell in love with it all. I thought, "I've got to make this film." I had known the book for a long time, but that's where the film began for me.

DALTON: You chose a unique direction for this project. It begins in live-action before the characters become involved in an anthology of fables, all told through alternate types of animation. What made you decide to take that route?

CONNOLLY: I talked to Sarah Watt a lot about this idea of an animation/live-action hybrid. And this idea of collaboration came out of a film I was involved in called 'The Turning'. Liz Kearney, who produced it with me and just produced 'Memoir of a Snail', said to me many years ago, "What if we invite 10 animators to respond to a different page of the book and see what they come up with?" And the animations were sublime. We were looking at them, going, "These are extraordinary. They're diverse and bold and crazy." Then, earlier this year, one of the other producers, Kate Laurie, and I were like, "How do we create a structure to see them together?" And that's when we researched a lot of early childhood stuff.

We learned that young kids love watching themselves and other kids. They like documentary footage and seeing inside real lives. So that's when we came up with the idea of the little vignettes about the kids who wake up and are magically on the beach and then fall into these animations. I'd love to say to you, "We began 10 years ago with a plan," but we didn't really. We began 10 years ago with a passionate love of this book, and it's been a journey that has taken us down lots of different rabbit holes and approaches to make it. This is the one that we finally landed on.

DALTON: Considering how you wanted to present it, was it a difficult vision to pitch?

CONNOLLY: It was tricky to convince people, but we found great supporters along the way. The Melbourne International Film Festival, the Victorian Government through VicScreen, and the Minderoo Foundation, who helped me with Blueback, just wanted to help us. And I think across my career, I have found that you just have to be committed to what you're doing and then take it to the world. It's not about everyone wanting to do it; it's about finding the people who will help you champion it and stay true to your approach and philosophy.

I had exactly the same issues trying to fund 'Paper Planes' all those years ago. People were like, "No one will see an Australian kids' film at the cinema!" And, of course, the film was a huge success, but I found a few champions. Film financing is a delicate thing, as is finding the people that you know you can collaborate with. But I do find that with children's content - having done 'Paper Planes' for primary school, 'Blueback' for high school, and now 'Magic Beach' for pre-school - you find very passionate people. For a lot of people, I think telling stories for our children is a really important motivator.

DALTON: That said, you are undeniably one of the country's most consistent and versatile filmmakers. You have proven that both critically and financially, time and time again. Does that reputation give you somewhat of a blank check to produce a film as particular as 'Magic Beach'?

CONNOLLY: Look, I think it's always a miracle when any film gets made. I think cinema is a real gift. Every time I make a film, I don't take it for granted. There's a reputation you build, but there's always a challenge. For me, it is often about making sure that I don't just rinse and repeat, I look for innovative ways to make films for audiences, and that I don't get bored with my own work, really. I have to be willing to shake the tree a little bit, and 'Magic Beach' was an opportunity to make films for little kids, so I can't use any of the tricks and tropes of any of my other works.

I remember when I funded 'Paper Planes', it was so hard. And someone said to me, "Do you know why it's hard? It's because 'Paper Planes' is a family film from the director of 'Balibo'." (laughs) It never made sense to people. But I was so inspired by Peter Weir when I was younger and how he worked in different genres, so I like the challenge of not getting fixed and not getting lazy. And there was no way I was going to get lazy on the set of 'Magic Beach' with nine kids between the ages of four and nine on a remote beach, improvising the live-action sequences. I was definitely on my toes in the most delightful way.

DALTON: Has financing become more accessible for you in the wake of titles like 'Paper Planes' and 'The Dry'?

CONNOLLY: Yeah, I definitely think opportunity has come with the box office success of those films, but I would say it's still really tricky. One of the things I love, though, is the support from exhibition from cinemas. My great passion is making films that people see collectively in a cinema, and I love the people who run the cinemas that we depend on. Exhibition, generally speaking, really supports Australian cinema, and I've felt increasingly supported by exhibition in the programming of my films, which is wonderful. Without that, we're just retreating to making films for the small screen, which I've got no interest in.

DALTON: I imagine the making of this would have been a different experience for you as a director. How was it combining with your ten animators to engineer each distinct piece?

CONNOLLY: Oh, it was amazing. They're so talented. They're a creative, diverse bunch of people, and I felt challenged by them every step of the way. There are moments in the animation that I think are sublime. I was talking after the screening yesterday with Marieka Walsh about her sequence where the llama goes through the watermelon forest - she did that whole stop-motion animation with real watermelons. I look at her and I can't even work out how she did it. I think all the animators have an extraordinary talent in their art form, so I have to pinch myself at how lucky I am to collaborate with them. There was no conflict ever. There was no difference of opinions. There was a great creative freedom. Every now and then, we did Zooms with all 10 animators to chat about the ideas, although the world premiere yesterday was the first time all of them had seen each other's work. And a lot of them hadn't met the kids that played their animations. There are beautiful photos that MIFF got of all the kids with the animators; that was really amazing.

Jake Duczynski, the Indigenous animator, does the last animation with Flynn [Wandin], the young Indigenous boy, but they hadn't met. It was so beautiful seeing them chatting about this artwork - and know, too, that the live-action responded to the animation. The animations came first, and then we got the children to match the animations. Jake's begins with those embers coming out of a fire, so I cast Flynn, we went to the beach, then we built a campfire, had all the kids around it, and constructed a story. It was interesting; we retrofitted. You might think it would be done the other way, but I took my lead from the animators' amazing work.

DALTON: Was Alison Lester involved in the production?

CONNOLLY: Yeah, she's part of it. She's a producer. We had dinner every night after the shoot in the house, which is featured in the book. She was also on set. Bigsy the dog is her real dog, who is featured in his own book. Alison was around, and the kids loved it. Every morning, we'd all meet at her house - it was a very small crew - and the kids would all get ready in their costumes to go down to the beach with Alison. We'd all have breakfast together; it's a very handcrafted film in that regard. And it was so funny; she turned up for the premiere in a massive Hummer limousine with all her grandkids for fun. She turned up, opened the door, and got out with all the cameras on her, followed by all these kids that kept coming out of the Hummer (laughs). She's an exceptional person, and her contribution to our national storytelling for children is extraordinary. She's done a lot of work with the Children's Hospital and a lot of work in the Tiwi Islands, a remote Indigenous community.

DALTON: Her illustrations open and close the film, which is a charming touch.

CONNOLLY: Yes, I felt like people needed to see these classic images before they saw how the animators responded to them.

DALTON: The book itself operates as a transporter for these children to get to the beach and partake in their animated adventures. It is a very meta idea. Where did it come from?

CONNOLLY: It came from trying to work out how to tell the story where we had the animations, but also researching how children's minds work and talking to Alison about how to tell stories for kids. She says, 'We mistakenly think little children are looking for big, sweeping narrative arcs across three acts. Whereas, you look at 'Play School', and kids love when it goes through the arches, and you see other kids.' And you're right; it's a meta idea. It's like a Christopher Nolan approach to telling a film for little kids (laughs) as they move from the real world into this dream in an abstract world and then into an animation. But it came out of us all trying to work out how to reach children with a story in the shorter form of content but with this overarching device.

It's amazing when you watch it with lots of little kids. By about the third or fourth time, kids love understanding the vocabulary of the film. They love meeting the kid and going, "Oh, my god, they're going to end up on the beach. What's their animation going to be like?" You could feel that kind of tension and energy in the crowd yesterday, which I loved. That was something we talked about. It also came from the practicality of looking at the animations and going, "What would be a way to stitch them together that didn't detract from the power of the animations?" Because they take the lead.

DALTON: I admired how the first three animations work almost like a silent picture. That isn't an avenue most directors would travel for something designed for a younger audience.

CONNOLLY: It's a really great question, and it's good to talk to you because we've only just started. You're probably my second interview I've done about this film. We spent a lot of time trying to get the order right. The order of the animations and the kids took a while. I always knew we'd begin with Luka [Sero] going under with the horses and then Summer Jeon, but we weren't sure about the third one. We did a few test screenings with little kids, and they loved that the dog had his own animation; you could feel it. So I thought, "That belongs with the first three." And you're absolutely right - there's barely any dialogue in the film, so little kids can understand it. But then as the film gets on, we wanted to challenge children with more narrative works.

And, of course, there's the piece with little Rylee [Chuck], who's profoundly deaf, which has sign language. It was amazing at the screening seeing all these little kids turn to their families, going, "That's sign language." The film does try to challenge and push because I think young audiences want to aspire for something. So we wanted to begin the film and relax everyone with very little dialogue but then add little bits of narrative and surprising things. But we spent a lot of time in the edit trying to work out the order, so it's lovely you picked up on that. We didn't get there straight away; early on, the order was different.

DALTON: My pick for the best of the bunch is 'The Smugglers'. It is incredibly atmospheric and thematically quite dark. It also shakes up your form by introducing a narrator.

CONNOLLY: That's Anthony Lucas. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his animation, 'The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello'. It's incredible, and I think what you're saying is really interesting because I felt that children could be taken to places that are a bit more playfully dark and a bit more mysterious within a G rating. They like feeling a little bit stirred in a safe place. So when Anthony pitched that he would go for a more narrative work, I trusted him because he is a sublime animator and his work is exceptional. It's the most narrative of all the work, and that's why we put it there: to disrupt.

I was worried that if they all just felt like they were quiet, you might lose people. It's like listening to an album compared to the nightmare of Spotify in which you listen to songs in isolation. If you listen to an album, as intended by the musicians, you can be hit with a rock sensibility, but then a gentle ballad will come in. You get a dynamic shape listening to the record that we were trying to achieve, so it'll be interesting to see whether the kids will find that one disruptive. I also think Anthony keeps the film engaged for more of a family audience. Even though it's a film for little kids, you know what it's like when you go to the cinema - the older sibling normally comes along. So I wanted to make sure there was something in there that could work for a slightly older audience.

DALTON: Another I want to discuss is 'Castle vs Castle'. Visually and tonally, it is such a radical shift late into the game.

CONNOLLY: I love it. Pierce has done such a great job with that. He is one of the animators on 'Memoir of a Snail'. Again, it disrupts. It disrupts right in the moment where you want a burst of colour and humour, and it's funny. We had it earlier in some of the cuts, but it just felt like, "No, if it can come here, it can hit a better point." You don't want the audience to be lulled into feeling the same because that can make something feel very long, no matter how beautiful it is. You almost want people to be feeling like, "Oh, this is what they're doing," and then bang! There's a girl with thongs and socks walking down to the water, and there she is with the robots and the castle wars.

I think you're picking up on something. You'd be surprised by how much time we spent trying to get that order right. There'd be another way you could probably structure it, but we took a lot of time trying to almost plot how people were feeling and to balance the comedy. Some of them are really funny, and some of them are more dramatic or emotional, but we made sure we kept kids engaged with enough comedy, which is something I found on 'Paper Planes' was really important, so I'm glad you liked those.

DALTON: It sounds like it was a massive undertaking, and now you and your troupe have begun the process of handing it off to audiences, starting with yesterday's world premiere at MIFF.

CONNOLLY: I think it's going to have a long journey now and play in cinemas at some school holiday period. We're working that out at the moment. There's a whole campaign we're looking at around famous people talking about what the first film they ever saw was - "Make 'Magic Beach' your child's first film." It's about getting people to the cinema, which continues my great love of cinema's collective experience. And The Astor [which is where we had our premiere] is such a great cinema. The lights came up, and there were a thousand kids. We got all the kids up on stage with the animators, and Alison Lester gave them all a watermelon hat as a gift. Then, as they left, all the kids were given stickers and things to colour in. MIFF did a great job of launching it because it felt like a celebration of how going to the cinema is an event.

My childhood of going to the cinema in the mid-70s was turning up for 'Star Wars' in 1977 as a little 11-year-old. These experiences are significant. I try to make sure people connect with going to the cinema at a very young age so that they'll carry that through their lives. And that's not just about going and seeing some big studio film. How you transcend that is the challenge for filmmakers because people talk a lot about streaming and the death of cinema, but I feel that throws the challenge back on us to make films that are more than that.

'Paper Planes' came out of an anxiety I had that my kids at that age had only ever seen films where the heroes were American. They'd never seen a film where the kids spoke in an Australian accent. I had Australian kids audition for 'Paper Planes', and in their audition, they talked in an American accent; I had to ask them to stop. They thought that acting in front of the screen was done with an American accent. That's heartbreaking, so I think disrupting that attitude is fun. And look, part of the joy of my career has been my love of cinema. If I can bring lots of little kids into the cinema to watch this film, that would be a triumph I'd be proud of.

DALTON: You and I spoke earlier this year for 'Force of Nature: The Dry 2'. On that press day, a lot of people asked you if Eric Bana and yourself planned to adapt the final Aaron Falk novel, 'Exiles'. Now that the dust has settled, I want to ask you that myself!

CONNOLLY: Yeah, there's a lot of interest, particularly international because Force of Nature has just gone through the roof in the U.S. on all the other platforms and in the UK. So we're getting almost commercial pressure where people are going, "Are you going to do another Jane Harper book?" So it's just looking at what to do next. I'm trying to adapt a film based on Nikki Gemmell's book 'Shiver', which is set in the Antarctic, which is really exciting. I'd film in the Antarctic. But I think you can be pretty assured that at some point, I'll be very keen to return to Jane Harper's work, whether it's the next one in the trilogy or another one. I'm not sure, but her stories are so compelling, and the genre elements and location elements are so powerful. And I thank you for not asking me that question on the day because everyone else did (laughs).

DALTON: Finally, my favourite actor of all time is Nicolas Cage. I am so excited to see his new film, 'The Surfer', which was shot in Western Australia and produced by your company, ArenaMedia. Can you tell me anything about it?

CONNOLLY: That was a wonderful adventure making that film. It has a wonderful cast of Australians. Lorcan [Finnegan] is a gifted director, and Nic was amazing to work with. We'll be releasing the film in Australia theatrically, and we will set a date. Otherwise, all I can say is that one of the most extraordinary experiences in my life was the midnight screening in Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival with 3,000 people in attendance and Nicolas Cage at three in the morning on the microphone doing stand-up comedy with the crowd. It was electric. I didn't sleep for 24 hours after that. It was so much fun, and it brought that invigorated sense that this is a movie, this is cinema, and he is a movie star. I look forward to showing you when we do the press tour for that one.

'Magic Beach' is currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival.