Flat Hill

Director's Statement

Flat Hill began as a POC short film for a TV series that I have been working on about an anthology of stories based on events that took place while I was growing up in the outback mining town of Mount Isa. My reason for telling this particular story was to critique the male behaviour and point out that not only was the violence wrong but it was motivated by their own fragile male egos. However, the film grew to become something much bigger. After Flat Hill was selected to be the first short film to be produced by the Winton Film Institute, it became clear that I would be working in a new process. Having made several short films in Winton already I was used to our quick and dirty outback shooting style however, this became a much more collaborative and improvised process than I had ever worked in before. We opened the script up to the entire cast and crew to help rewrite during our 4 days of pre-production in Winton, in order to ensure that the female perspective was being authentically represented (especially given the sensitive subject matter). What we ended up with was a highly detailed beat sheet which the actors then improvised their dialogue to. We shot the film in 2 days with all locations, and many props and costumes sourced while in Winton. And while we started off with a script for a film based on a world I grew up in with people I knew we ended up with a very authentic, personal, and visceral character drama that came from the entire group.