Amelia (15) from Film in Revolt spoke with Axel Grigor, director of Jill Bilcock: Dancing the Invisible, about the art of film editing and his latest documentary.
“I was fortunate enough to have a chat with Axel Grigor, about the art of film editing and his latest documentary. I loved the documentary and learning more about the amazing editor Jill Bilcock, so I was especially excited to speak to the driving force behind the film. Axel was very generous with his time and his inspiring advice about film editing is something I will definitely take away from this interview.” – Amelia
You’re not originally from Australia, but you have studied and lived here. So, are there elements of Australian culture and cinema that are different from other countries and influence your work?
I was around 20 years old when I moved from Sweden to Australia. At the time, in the mid-90s, so many wonderful Australian films were appearing in Swedish cinemas. Priscilla Queen of the Desert by Stephan Elliott, Shine by Scott Hicks, Muriel’s Wedding by P.J. Hogan and of course Strictly Ballroom by Baz Luhrmann. I was also really taken by Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby. I thought ‘oh my god, you can make films this way?’. It just seemed there was something in the water in Australia. Aussie filmmakers and stories seemed able to connect with a diverse audience in a way that I wasn’t used to seeing in Sweden.
It looks like you have worked on quite a few documentaries. Is there something about documentaries that you enjoy creating?
I enjoy the challenges and close-knit camaraderie of docomaking. Making documentaries is difficult because you don’t really know what’s going to unfold. You try to capture real life as it is happening all around you. People surprise you and things happen that you couldn’t imagine or write. Your ‘story radar’ has to be on all the time.
As an editor of documentaries, I love working closely with the director. It’s always a very intense, long-term relationship. When working with my colleague Faramarz K-Rahber, he’d shoot things and then we’d look and discuss all the material, then I’d start cutting sequences and we’d shoot some more and the cycle would repeat. It’s a very intense story lab and you are very much a co-writer of the story. You have a big say in what’s worth filming and how characters are presented. Making long-form documentaries also takes a lot of time and you often don’t have much money. But it’s so rewarding to have a little group of people working hard to reveal a hidden world for the audience. A small multi-skilled team with a unique vision and subject really can achieve a tremendous lot.
What was it you wanted to achieve when beginning Dancing the Invisible?
When I met Jill in 2012 I was quite busy teaching at my alma mater Griffith Film School. As a teacher and as an editor it frustrated me that people didn’t really know much about what a film editor does. The contribution of the editor seemed to always be the part of filmmaking that got left out of the discussions about how a great film had been made. How can you have an intelligent and informed discussion about filmmaking if the most essential part is constantly overlooked? I also asked myself where all the films were that highlighted the incredible contributions legendary film editors have gifted to cinema? Everything seemed to focus on auteur directors, film producers, cinematographers and writers.
As I got to know Jill I began to sense an incredible opportunity to reveal something that deserved to be seen and appreciated. Jill’s has made such an incredible impact on our industry. Her skill and her choices are evident in many of the greatest films made in Australia over the past 30 years. It frustrated me that not more people outside of the film industry knew about her and what she had achieved together with Baz, P.J., Shekhar, Jocelyn and all the other great directors she’s worked with. It only seemed right to try to make something that gave some well-deserved kudos to Jill and a profession that I dearly love.
Was there anything about Jill that you discovered during the process of making a documentary that you found interesting or that you weren’t expecting?
In 2012 I invited Jill to Griffith Film School for an international symposium on film editing. I found her incredibly open, fun to be with and she seemed full of colourful life stories. Some of the stuff she told me about her life felt like it rivalled the plot of some of the films she had cut! She’d grown up in countryside Victoria and Melbourne, starred in Bollywood movies, visited China before it opened up to the West and she was part of the first intake at Australia’s first film school. Everything was just like “oh my goodness, how many lives have you lived!?”. I thought she’d be a fantastic subject for a documentary, someone audiences would be interested in regardless of what they knew about filmmaking. I also found it fascinating that she was part of that brave new wave of young filmmakers that revitalised Australian cinema in the 60s and 70s.
Do you have a favourite film that Jill’s worked on?
Jill has worked on so many diverse and great films. But it’s very hard for me to go past Romeo + Juliet. It meant a lot to me when I was younger. It still does. Somehow Baz, Jill and all the others managed to take Shakespeare’s language, put it in the mouths of these exciting young actors and totally transport you to an utterly relatable, modern setting. The colours, the energy and the way the music and images flowed together completely mesmerised me. Shakespeare came alive in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Also, the fabulous opening of Romeo+Juliet is one of the greatest film beginnings of all time. It triggered a curiosity in me about what the editor brings to a film.
What was the most challenging element of creating this documentary?
So much about this project felt like breaking new ground. No one had made a documentary about a film editor like this before, especially not at feature length. Despite Jill’s impressive credits and many achievements it was tricky convincing potential financing parties that we could get an audience to really care about the life and craft of an ‘invisible artist’.
To really highlight Jill’s artistry we also needed to show many key sections from the films she had cut. You can’t just get a freeze frame of Leonardo DiCaprio from Romeo+Juliet and say, ‘okay, so this was really well-cut’ or show a film’s trailer. No, to really grasp her genius you’d need to give viewers the chance to dive into them. For example, If I couldn’t show how Jill used sound in the Paul Newman’s final scene in Road to Perdition, if I couldn’t show DiCaprio and Claire Danes meeting through the aquarium in Romeo + Juliet, then you lose the true impact and the emotion that Jill brought to these stories. Problem is that licensing such valuable archive material is usually very very expensive. It took many years of negotiating and kind support from studios, filmmakers and producers in order to include what you see in the film.
I also needed someone to help me gain access to Jill’s creative space, her editing room. Thankfully producer Sue Maslin, who came on board as our executive producer, was about to go into production with The Dressmaker. Sue organised clearance for us to film Jill working on that film. That really was key for this documentary. Suddenly we could catch Jill in action, filming her while she was editing and could capture her wonderful banter with her assistant and so on. It was such a big relief.
The film was made on a very low budget. Having Griffith Film School assist us was particularly helpful in that we were able to get access to equipment and soundstages. I’m also incredibly grateful for the strong support we got from Film Art Media, the film’s distributor. They believed in the film from the get-go and put in a big effort to find a cinema audience for this film.
So since Jill began her career as an editor, obviously a lot has changed in the cutting room, but do you think there are any lessons that you have learned from Jill or you think other young aspiring editors could bring into their own work?
Yeah, I think it’s interesting that Jill didn’t go into filmmaking with the specific aim of becoming a film editor. She started out doing odd-jobs at a busy commercial house in Melbourne. Before she even got close to cutting fiction she’d learned how to handle a camera, how to deal with people on set and help out where help was needed. She honed her editing craft by cutting hundreds of commercials, music films and documentaries. All of this has given her an incredibly broad understanding of what it takes to make a good film and how editing can make the whole much more exciting than all the parts.
Jill’s a master at solving problems in the edit. She is unafraid of trying new things and not following the script if a better approach presents itself. That takes a lot of determination, a strong belief in the story, a deep respect for the audience’s intelligence and a love of collaboration. She has an incredible ability to connect with the director’s vision and then make sure the film goes beyond that, to really take the material as far as it can go. I think that’s a great lesson to all new editors out there: never be afraid to take risks and don’t forget why you are making the film in the first place. And try to have a lot of fun while doing it.