by Simon Sellars

Originally published on Sleepy Brain, 25 November 2003.

Trevor Blainey is enjoying himself. In 2003, the former accountant’s first film as producer, Matthew Saville’s Roy Hollsdotter Live, won everything in sight, with awards for best screenplay, best short film and best cinematography. But filmmaking in Australia is notoriously tough, and while awards give off a fuzzy glow, they don’t automatically confer the green light to future projects. Blainey tries to keep a lid on it, but he can’t help betraying an incandescent pride in the achievement s of the Saville/Blainey team. He must deserve it – he’s been on a long, meandering journey to get to this point. Blainey likes to tell the story of how he produced his first film, “nearly 30 years after missing an Accounting 101 lecture to go and see Play It Again Sam“.

Trevor Blainey’s obsession with film has always got the better of him. In 1973 he enrolled in Business Studies at Swinburne, but spent the year shooting pool, watching movies – and failing. He then finished an Economics degree at La Trobe University, winding up as an accountant for Coca-Cola AMATIL. In 1986 he became Finance Manager at the Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Blainey’s “utter intent was to do that for a while and then go back to the formal business world”, but being so close to cameras and sets at the ACTF reignited his true desire. Gradually, he came to understand that his financial management skills could help to realise a career in film. In 1993, Blainey left the ACTF to try his hand as a freelance Production Accountant – and to form Retro Active Films, at that stage more an idea than anything.

As Production Accountant, Blainey worked on 30 films, including The Last of the Ryans and Crackerjack, but his most memorable experience was on the set of crime flick Chopper. “A lot of the extras were ex-crims, because it’s hard to find actors with immense body mass, covered in tattoos and with insufficient quantity of teeth and hair. A few guys had ‘been in the life’. I got a call from the second Assistant Director: ‘Trev, this guy wants to know when he’s gonna be paid.’ I told him to get the guy to put a timesheet in and we’d pay him by Friday. He said, “No, no, you don’t get it. He wants to be paid NOW”. The second AD was shitting himself, while I had to carefully explain the mechanics of filmmaking to someone who clearly wasn’t used to it.”

Blainey was steadily gathering up the skills and resources needed to produce his own films under the Retro Active banner, but in 1997 that phase of his life was still dim and distant. That year, “Matthew Saville and I met on a feature film – he was the third Assistant Director. One night, we had one of those conversations that people have when they’re depressed, and their girlfriends are back in Melbourne, and they hate what they’re doing. We moaned into our beer about him wanting to write and direct and me wanting to produce.”

The future director then handed the future producer an embryonic Roy Hollsdotter draft. Blainey loved the script from the beginning, with its dissection of “what happens when love’s over. Hollywood typically has relationships that spark at the start and then it all breaks up. But Roy was beyond that: the couple had already broken up and we were looking at the after effects”. From that moment, they resolved to get the film made.

Blainey is animated when talking about Roy Hollsdotter Live. It clearly binds together many elements of his life – like Darren Casey, the standup comic in his first acting role, as the character of Roy. “Darren and I were university mates. He now reminds me that I said, all those years ago when he used to stand in our kitchen on Sunday nights and make us laugh, ‘One day, Darren, I’m going to make a film and I’m going to put you in it’”. Trevor, with crewmembers, on the set of Roy Hollsdotter Live.

Such was the strength of Saville’s script and Blainey’s nous that Roy Hollsdotter Live was tapped as one of the Australian Film Commission’s “million-dollar movies”. But the money ran out after the first few features were made. The AFC eventually funded a series of 50-minute “short features”, and Roy finally got up under that scheme – five years after Blainey first read the script. The budget was tight, but the film looks a million dollars, helped enormously by the goodwill Blainey generated during his Production Accountancy days. “We had an absolute dream crew. We asked these very experienced people [including comedy legend John Clarke] to work for absolutely bare minimums, but they did it because they knew me and they embraced the script”.

But Blainey’s industry experience won’t guarantee more funding. It’s a hard time to get features made, and Blainey notes that the AFC and Film Victoria are in the “scarce-resource management business”. Under new guidelines, producers can’t access development funds unless they’ve produced two hours of television drama or feature film. Roy Hollsdotter Live has a swag of awards, but it’s still only 53 minutes long – making Blainey ineligible. For now.

+ Read the rest at the Sleepy Brain archives.