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Liam Hemsworth and Kate Winslet in The Dressmaker (Credit: Ben King)
In a mostly stellar career Kate Winslet has had her fair share of commercial and critical misfires, including Labor Day, A Little Chaos and, currently, Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs.
But the Oscar-winning actress looks set to bounce back in The Dressmaker, Jocelyn Moorhouse’s high-spirited, wickedly subversive Australian comedy-thriller-mystery-horror-revenge saga.
The 1950s-set film based on a Rosalie Ham novel opened at No. 1 in Australia last weekend after being pre-sold by UK-based Embankment Films to multiple territories including the UK, Canada, Spain, Germany, Italy and China.
A U.S. sale had proved elusive but producer Sue Maslin says a deal is being contracted (CAA reps the film with Embankment in the U.S.) and could be announced later this week. A significant theatrical release is guaranteed and a second quarter 2016 launch is likely.
“The U.S. distributors knew the film plays well after the responses at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival, where it won the audience award,” says Maslin, who spent seven years developing the film. “But the refrain we kept hearing from buyers is ‘How do we sell the film in 15 seconds?’ I think the performances and the story finally secured the U.S. deal.”
Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Universal Pictures International, The Dressmaker raked in $A3.16 million (US$2.2 million) in its first four days at 284 locations plus $A416, 000 in previews and festival screenings. That beat the $A2.76 million debut of Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner last December.
The release- Moorhouse’s first film as director since A Thousand Acres in 1997- coincides with a concerted campaign to redress the under-representation of female directors, producers and writers in the Australian screen industry.
The Australian Directors Guild has called for a quota of 50% of the feature films and TV dramas funded by federal agency Screen Australia to be directed by women.
Winslet was the filmmakers’ first choice to play Australian-born Tilly Dunnage, who decides to return to her dusty, middle-of-nowhere home town after many years working as a dressmaker in exclusive Parisian fashion houses.
Her mission: To right the wrongs of the past stemming from the mysterious death decades earlier of a classmate. Despite the presence of Winslet plus frequent Woody Allen collaborator Judy Davis as Tilly’s irascible mother and rising star Sarah Snook, Maslin says the film initially was considered too high risk by international buyers.
“In a film about a woman dressmaker targeted primarily to a female audience, the exclusively male sales agents and buyers needed A-list male actors to secure the sales estimates,” she says.
Maslin and Moorhouse, who co-wrote the screenplay with her husband P.J. Hogan, addressed that problem by casting Aussie Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games franchise, Roland Emmerich’s upcoming Independence Day: Resurgence) as a local football hero who is Tilly’s love interest, and Hugo Weaving as the cross-dressing local cop. Weaving and Russell Crowe starred in Moorhouse's debut film Proof in 1991. Embankment Films was then able to negotiate numerous deals with buyers in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Maslin laboured long and hard to raise the $A17 million production budget. The UK’s Ingenious Senior Film Fund put up 35% of the budget against pre-sales and Sydney-based Fulcrum Media Finance cash-flowed the Australian producer tax offset, which worked out at 33%.
Investment from agencies Screen Australia and Film Victoria covered 12%. In addition to the minimum guarantee from Universal there were small contributions from facilities houses Soundfirm and Motion Picture Lightning. The last 10%-15% - a gap which the producer describes as a "dead zone" for many Oz projects - came from private investor White Hot Productions and Maslin.
Entertainment Film Distributors will launch The Dressmaker in the UK on November 20. Among the other major buyers are eOne in Canada, Ascot Elite in Germany/Switzerland, Eagle Pictures in Italy and Vértice 360º in Spain.
The campaign for gender equality for women follows a study by Screen Australia which showed that, on average over the past five years, just 15% of agency-funded features were directed by women. The participation rates were better for writers (23%) and producers (32%), but only 28% had female protagonists.
Director Gilliam Armstrong says, “It is pretty obvious that the current system is not about merit. There is not a level playing field. Equally talented young women filmmakers are graduating from film schools in the same numbers as men, and winning short film awards, but they are not getting the breaks as film directors.
“It doesn’t even make commercial sense, given that women are more than 50% of the audience. The same pattern is seen around the world. It is time to take action about this obvious gender inequality.”
Maslin welcomed Armstrong’s call but is not in favor of quotas, arguing that would alienate the male-dominated ranks of distributors and sales agents. Maslin argues the case on business grounds, reasoning, "It makes commercial sense to include more women in positions of creative and business leadership in order to cater for the obvious audience demand. "
Moorhouse says, “Any kind of commitment to hire more women would be great.”
Screen Australia deputy chair Deanne Weir, who is also chair of production company Hoodlum (a producer of the U.S. ABC network drama series Secrets and Lies) is a strong advocate of gender equality. Speaking at a recent Women in Television conference in London, Weir said, "My personal view is that we should just get on with it and put in place some meaningful and workable quotas: really, what is the worst that could happen?”
Screen Australia executives are investigating options to improve the representation of women for a policy paper to be presented to the board later this month.
The agency’s chief operating officer Fiona Cameron says, “Analysis has shown that Screen Australia’s support for projects with women in key creative roles has been allocated in very close correlation to the number of projects coming in with women in these positions.
"We see strong female representation at the early career stages of feature films, with a drop off in higher end, signalling the challenge of moving from shorts to features, or from first features into a more sustained career. This trend is seen across writers and producers as well as directors.
“Within our own sector there needs to be a range of responses to help shift the needle. I don’t think there are any quick fixes."
Meanwhile Moorhouse is continuing her collaboration with Maslin, scripting a 19th Century drama based on the real-life romantic triangle between German composer Robert Schumann, his composer-pianist wife Clara and the young Johannes Brahms.
After a suicide attempt Schumann died in an asylum for the insane in 1856, aged 46. “Robert was a mentor to Brahms, who eclipsed him,” the director says. “It’s a quite tragic and beautiful story.”
Moorhouse will undertake more historical research on the project when she visits Germany later this month to mentor aspiring writers at the eQuinoxe Europe international screenwriter workshop.
