Amy from Film in Revolt spoke with Jane Castle about her documentary When The Camera Stopped Rolling. Eight years in the making, Jane Castle’s poignant documentary about her filmmaker mother is an intimate mother-daughter story and eye-opening chronicle of women’s roles in the film industry.
Amy Leydman: First I’d like to ask you if you could explain or discuss your work with the Total Environment Centre and Greenpeace and your role within these organisations, as well as the core motivation behind your activism work at large, and I was wondering if this was influenced by your mother’s political drive?
Jane Castle: Yeah wow, great question, and that covers a big chunk of time in my life. I basically got into environmental campaigning after about 15 years as a cinematographer in the film industry and just really getting sick of looking at the world through a lens and the kind of disconnection. I wanted to be more involved and engaged and empowered and to feel like I was actually making a difference in the world, so I threw in cinematography and started again and I’d heard about this place called the Total Environment Centre and I’d seen quotes from Jeff Angel, the director, and I was really impressed with his thinking and his approach to environmental issues. I just started to volunteer there and at the same time I was studying at university, [completing] a Masters of Environmental Management, because I want[ed] to stick my hands into life and the environment is where I want to do it, so I started volunteering there; and a few months after a job came up, I applied for it and I got it so I was in at the deep end. I had no idea what I was getting myself into actually, but you know, I was pretty young and had a lot of energy and I just threw myself at it, and I was working in the waste/recycling sector, and then in the energy efficiency, climate change, demand management, and electricity sector.
I was there for about eight years and I became a senior campaigner. It’s a very small group so my work in that organisation really ranged from research and writing reports to doing media releases, to lobbying politicians to writing speeches for them to doing actions. Just the whole gamut. The point of Total Environment Centre was really about taking the opportunity when the window is open to jump through that window so we’re really good with developing policy and when the time was right and the politics kind of opened up for it of having that policy ready and encouraging the politicians to actually adopt these policies. It was really gratifying actually. One of my big achievements was (it took seven years), to get the federal government to bring in a national recycling scheme for computers and TVs with the responsibility placed on the producers. So rather than the consumers or the taxpayers or the government paying for recycling. Producers actually had to fund this recycling system, which meant that they would eventually (hopefully the message goes up the chain) design better products.
That was a great achievement and then I kind of burnt out of course, as one does in the not- for-profit sector. I took some time off and I was working with a careers counsellor and was trying to figure out what to do and I thought I wanted to get into counselling actually; but this person I was working with suggested that I just take some time off and you know for around six months and if something else emerges in that time, well that’ll be interesting, and of course, what emerged was this film. So, this creative impulse, I want to say reared its ugly head, but that’s a bit negative, but they do that, they rear up and then they grab you by the throat and then they don’t let you go until you have expressed yourself, so that came up and kind of during that time to support my creative work, I also worked at Greenpeace, a job came up as a videographer/ still photographer.
As a part time job, it was perfect because I could work on the film and work for Greenpeace and that was a whole different way of campaigning, actually. It was much more kind of boots on the ground, actions focused, grassroots, and we filmed a lot of actions and just got out there a lot more, and of course it was a big organisation so it had a lot of resources. You know social media and mainstream media and policy and the whole actions team and a warehouse where you go and practice these kinds of actions. So that was kind of exciting actually, being in the thick of that and I got arrested in that time up at the Falls Creek coal mine, which I’m sure you’ve heard about anyway. It was really, really gratifying, and then of course, the film took over and so I needed to dedicate intensive time to the film, so I left the Greenpeace job and then spent the next few years making this film, When The Camera Stopped Rolling (2020).
A: Well, it’s an incredible trajectory and I love how that creative impulse eventually emerged through that work.
J: Yes, sometimes you just can’t stop it. I think everyone has this creative potential and it’s really about whether you’ve got the space and also the confidence or drive as I have, there’s a lot of tenacity in our family and determination.
A: In considering our discussion of creativity, does your art practice, which is traced a little bit in the film; aside from your filmmaking and activism work, continue to play a significant role in your life?
J: Oh, it absolutely does but not necessarily in a structured way. My personal belief is that life itself is a creative act and including, self actualization, also in relationships with others, in helping the environment, in your emotional development, in your spiritual life, so of course, that’s all going on in me. I’m also part of a performance group. I have been for about 10 years and it’s called Reject Theatre and we just come together every year. We have an intensive period of [working] from nothing, just creating a new work and then we usually perform it once and then never again, and that’s a fabulous place to practise my creativity because our expectations [are low], we know we’re going to bugger it up. I mean, we rehearse the shit out of it, but you know the first rehearsal, basically, is our performance.
It’s lovely to have unstructured creativity and I also find [that] gardening is creative. Often little poems just bubble up out of me and I just jot them down. It’s just an ongoing process and It’s lovely, because some people have trouble tapping into it and for years, actually, there was this dry, fallow period where I really tried to squeeze it out, but nothing kind of happened and it felt very forced, and then who knows why? But I guess with the making of this film it just all came alive again. Even at the Total Environment Centre I would make videos, and so it was kind of bubbling along but not when I tried to force it for some reason.
A: That’s really interesting, and I was wondering if there was actually a particular film of your mother’s that has most significantly influenced you and your work or creative process?
J: Yeah, well, I guess there’s two actually. Her first film, which we call The Beach (1957). I don’t even know if it really has a title, but she always used to call it ‘beach film’ and she made it in 1957. She had just learned how to use a movie camera and she was up in Queensland and she went off to Stradbroke Island and Moreton Bay every day, and would camp out with her camera and a tripod and she just filmed this beautiful black and white cinematography and then edited it together. Then she somehow, put it into the ABC and they loved it and it was in the period they used to have before the news where they would screen little, I guess you’d call them interstitials now, but they’re just little three to five minute pieces where everyone can just chill out and watch the images. They don’t really do it these days because everything is so goal oriented. They screened it for months and months, and the other part of that story that’s interesting was that she wanted to be a cinematographer.
She went to the Commonwealth Film Unit with that film that was screening nightly on the ABC and said I want a job as a cinematographer and they laughed her out of the room they just said, you wouldn’t be strong enough to carry the cameras how are you going to climb up Ayers Rock with a camera and she just shot her own movie! Anyway, I love that film for its simplicity and its innocence and her obvious love of image and black and white. She loved the beach too and so her love of cinematography and the beach came together in that.
The other one, and actually, both of these films have influenced me, but the second film I love is called, This is Their Land (1970) and we believe is Australia’s first ever Land Rights film. She was asked by Aboriginal activist Faith Bandler to film this walk from Australia Square to La Perouse for Aboriginal education. She did more than just that. She made it into a Land Rights film, and she wrote a whole song with lyrics and Mum and Dad paid for it out of their own pockets and it was a real landmark film, and again, not by any planning on her behalf. She just went with it. She was really passionate about Land Rights and it’s an activist film and so now when you mention that, you know often I just don’t connect the dots but my first film was a lot like her first film and mine was also in black and white. It was called Land of Shadows (1981) and it was just this, studies in black and white around the city and very much like her first film. Then of course her activist filmmaking. Absolutely. I mean, my Mum was pretty left wing, pretty activist and that has obviously had an influence. I’ve gotten more involved in the environment, she was more involved in Land Rights, so yeah, I know as much as I’ve always tried to not follow in my parent’s footsteps, but I feel like I’ve just done exactly that.
A: Yeah, that’s incredible and those two films, seeing [excerpts of] them in your film is fantastic and her Land Rights film is just so ahead of its time. So innovative. And of course the shots of the beach are absolutely breathtaking. It makes sense that they’re so influential.
J: Yeah, they’re great works actually. They were amidst her main body of work, [which primarily consisted of] industrial documentaries or corporates, they’re called today and a lot of them were for mining films, but there are these two jewels that absolutely stand out, which is lovely.
A: I was wondering, in retrospect, how do you recall working as cinematographer on a Women of the Iron Frontier (1988)?
J: Ah yes, that was a little tense. My Mum directed this film called Women of the Iron Frontier and in a way it was her kind of return to the mining towns from her earlier industrial documentaries to kind of reframe her experience of those towns and it was her first really personal film. She’d made beach film, which was very visual and observational, and then she made the Land Rights film, but this one was really much more about her and her coming to terms with her history of making mining films for these big horrible mining companies. She asked me to be her cinematographer and I had just left film school and I was in my late 20s and I was a little bit arrogant. You know, I just thought, oh I know about how to make the coolest movies and I saw her as stuck in the kind of old style of making films where you have this didactic voice over that, you know, is telling the audience what to think. That’s how she started it, and so we were really at odds. Working with family is difficult at the best of times and of course, our family had a trauma history as well. We fought a bit and I feel like I could have been a lot more supportive of her, but you know, it’s tricky. We had a difficult relationship, when I was a child and in that phase, so I think a lot of those issues were playing out. Not in that, but we got through the shoot and it looks really great and she actually did transform her style in the making of it became a bit more personal. I think she was pretty much convinced by a lot of people to [acknowledge that she couldn’t] make this film like the old ones. You’ve got to put yourself in it, so she did. She began to reflect on her presence in the film and why she was making the film, so it did transform and it turned out really well and I’m actually really proud of it. I did try extra super hard because I really wanted to help Mum, you know, get her vision up on screen.
A: Yeah, it seems like a really important experience, and one that was maybe full of learning and growth in I guess so many different ways.
J: Yeah definitely, very very challenging, but rewarding and of course, if you’ve seen When The Camera Stopped Rolling, there’s that film of us. Filming beside the train tracks and I’m behind the camera and she’s there directing and that film was taken by the sound recorders on Women of the Iron Frontier. Now of course, it becomes really pivotal in my film.
A: Absolutely. As a final question, I was wondering what is the most important piece of advice that you’ve received, or that you go by in regard to filmmaking?
J: Yeah, that’s a great question, because you know, there’s always a lot of advice out there. I think that I can whittle it down to one piece of advice and it’s something that I did in the making of my film. I’m really proud of the fact I could do this because it’s really difficult to do, but it’s to let go of your own little ego’s concept of what you think the film should be and instead listen to the film and also to the feedback you’re getting, which can often be quite tough.
Really listen to what the film is asking of you to make it a better film to make it more compelling, to make it more honest, to make it more relevant because over my career and especially at film school, I saw films with great potential, be kind of really [hindered] by the director’s fixation on what they wanted it to be. Once you start a creative process, it’s kind of out of your hands and I see these films as beings in themselves and it’s a bit ‘woo-woo’, but they feel like they are these entities and they have their own DNA which they’re just trying to get you to help them express. They kind of know what they want to be. Sometimes po;I saw directors just getting in the way of that and the films would just not reach their potential, so it requires a lot of internal flexibility and surrender and also determination because it’s a difficult process.
You’ve got to stick with it, and you’ve got conflicting feedback coming from all sorts of directions. If you listen to it and you know in terms of my film like I wanted to make a completely different film, I actually wanted to make a documentary about death. I made a whole trailer, did all this research. I interviewed Nuns and Monks and people who were dying and people who had died and come back and kids, and near-death experiences and we took it to the funding bodies and they weren’t interested in it. There was this little bit in that trailer about my Mum’s death, and they’re like I don’t know about all those Vox pops, but we really like this thing about your Mum, and I’m like ok, pivot time and we did pivot and and I didn’t want to be in the film and now I’m all through the bloody film and I narrate the whole thing. It’s a completely different film to the one I envisaged. I think it’s the most compelling film that I had in me at the time, so yeah, I’m really happy with that.
A: Right, it’s so interesting how the process shifted in a really different direction.
J: Yeah it was pretty interesting, but you know we had the time, that happened over about 10 years. We had the time for it to evolve, and if people can create that, it’s very difficult with the money aspect and time aspect of film, but if you can create that space, it’s really beneficial.
A: I definitely agree that in a creative process, any project needs a certain amount of flexibility and time for it to truly evolve to the best that it can be.
J: Totally, yeah, and one of the things that I noticed as we went along is that whenever we had a break in the editing process, for some reason like the editor wasn’t available or we’d run out of money, we had to put it down for like a few months, it was the best. It was more productive putting it down than working on the film because you come back fresh and you just see what needs to be done. If you’ve got your head kind of inside it all the time, you can’t see. So, just stop it. Not making the film is often more productive than making the film, weirdly.
A: Wow, that’s fantastic advice.
J: Our film is going to be on commercially, we’re doing a theatrical release in mid-to-late March next year. After the Sydney Film Festival, it’ll have a bit of a run so people can [see it]. It would be really great to see it on the big screen. If you can get to see it in a cinema because it’s very cinematic and also the surround sound [is fantastic]. The sound designer did a fabulous job, so it’s an immersive experience [especially] in the cinema.
A: Thank you for speaking with me. It’s been great to chat.
J: Yeah, it’s been lovely. I love talking about this stuff and about creativity. Yeah, it’s a really rich area and I wish you the best with your show.
A: Thank you and congratulations again on the film!
J: Thank you, thanks for watching it.