Sue Maslin a celluloid legend championing change both on and off screen

Sue Maslin is a legend of the Australian film industry. As a producer, she has been at the forefront of feature film and documentary making for over three decades with an incredible track record of putting incredible stories on screen. Her 2015 smash hit The Dressmaker starred Kate Winslet, grossed more than $20 million at the box office and received an unprecedented number of nominations at the 2015 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards, ultimately winning five. Her most recent documentary The Show Must Go On is an urgent call-to-arms that explores the issue of mental health in the arts and creative industries. Sue has also been a passionate advocate for improving gender equality in the film industry, blazing a trail for women off camera, and supporting the stories that feature terrific female leads on screen. As we meet at Sue’s office in Melbourne’s grungy Fitzroy, I’m fascinated to fascinated to hear how she got her start in the industry and how she’s sustained a creative career in an industry that is notoriously challenging and competitive.  

Interview by Maria O’Dwyer Photography Mia Mala McDonald

MARIA O’DWYER Before you stumbled into a career in filmmaking you were destined to be a scientist. They’re very different industries yet both are founded in curiosity. What was it about film that ultimately drew you away from the lab?

SUE MASLIN I think curiosity is absolutely the common link and that’s never left me. They’re very compatible endeavours, as they’re both about understanding the world in which we live. But, for me it was understanding that if you wanted to have a career in science then you did need to make distinct choices very, very early in your career about which particular research pathways you wanted to go down. And I could see that, for me, that represented a telescoping of opportunity to discover more about the world. And I actually wanted to do the complete opposite and find out about people and stories. I had no idea what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I didn’t want to go down the path of specialisation. Then I literally stumbled on the media studies course! Having finished my degree at ANU, I went to the Canberra CAE (now Canberra University) and the first building I walked into in my search for, ‘what am I going to do next with the rest of my life’ happened to be the media studies building. And I never looked back! I thought, ‘this looks pretty cool, film screenings, photography classes’… and I thought maybe I could apply for that. And to this day I really don’t know how I got into that selective process; I had no media experience other than working in community radio at the time. And they selected me. They must have just thought – she’s coming from a non-arts slightly different background, maybe we’ll take a punt. And it was life changing, literally.

You’ve had an extraordinary career in an extremely competitive industry. Do you think that sense of curiosity, of openness, has played a part in your success? 

I think that’s a big part of it. I think that survival in the film industry takes a lot of other skills which are more to do with trying to work out how you can sustain a creative life. And that requires an enormous amount of persistence and tenacity and desire to just keep on going when you’re confronted with rejection after rejection, obstacle after obstacle. But for me, if the idea is powerful enough and if the people in the collaborative team are right – I’m there, 110%. It doesn’t matter how many rejections come, I’m there to just keep pushing that project forward. My job is to be a champion for the filmmaker that I’m working with and for the idea. That said, I only really come on board very few projects. I’m not a producer who has a big slate of a whole bunch of things in development and who works on the basis of, ‘let’s just see which one sticks’. It takes a lot for me to go, ‘yeah’, ok, I’m in on this’. So most of the time I’m the one doing the rejecting. A good idea is not enough. It has to be a really fantastic idea and it has to be a really, really great team. And then I’m in. And I’m in for the long haul. And typically for a feature film like The Dressmaker it’s around a seven-year journey. I’ve never managed to do a feature film in under seven years. And for documentaries you’re looking at 2-3 year journeys. So when I say ‘the long haul’ I’m talking about many, many years of commitment, much of it unpaid. Because unless I can successfully raise the budget, I don’t know whether I’m ever going to get paid for my work or not. Again, something like The Dressmaker was four years in development before I got paid a producer’s fee.

It must require a huge degree of mental toughness and resilience to just keep pushing that barrow…

It requires belief – absolute belief. And faith. And strategy. I used to think that it was like being immersed in an ocean with all these other filmmakers, all of us trying to get our projects made. And you’re just being hit by wave after wave of rejection and being tossed around in that broiling ocean. And I used to think that what we were waiting for was that big wave that we could ride in. That would be it, that’s how you have a career, you just pick that moment and ride in on that wave that makes your career. And then a very wise person said, ‘Sue, you’ve got it all wrong. All you have to do is just keep your head above water and stay afloat.’ And that’s been such great advice. Because, in the long haul, it’s really just those of us who can keep our heads above water [who survive in the screen industry].

Over the last couple of years, the issue of gender has been at the forefront of many industries, including film and TV. Are you starting to see a difference in the industry?

Look, I’ve been in the industry for 35 years and I’ve seen initiatives come and go over that time with a specific focus on achieving gender equity. When I started my career I was certainly the beneficiary of affirmative action programs in the late 70s and early 80s. The Women’s Program at the Australian Film Commission actually gave me my very first grant to start a documentary film. When I first moved to Melbourne, I didn’t know anyone and remember thinking, ‘wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a Women in Film and Television here,’ and there wasn’t at that time. So I got together with a group of other women and we got that off the ground. And that really was the beginning of my commitment to gender equality in the industry, and the work that goes into not only recognising the persistent problem of underrepresentation of women behind the camera, but also the really appalling underrepresentation of women in key protagonist roles driving stories on the screen. So, really I’ve been obsessed with gender diversity for a long, long time.

In recent years it’s come and gone in terms of focus, but there hasn’t really been a real shift until about three years ago. The Dressmaker (released in 2015) was a film I was told was never going to work, it was not going to be commercial being so female focused. The fact that it blew all of that thinking out of the water through its box office success, together with what was happening internationally, paved a new awareness of, ‘oh women are going to the movies, they are a consumer force, and they want to see these kind of movies’. So it means now that here in Australia there’s a whole raft of films in development driven by female leading characters.

Around that time was also the beginning of Screen Australia’s ‘Gender Matters’ initiative where they had 5 million dollars to essentially ‘pump prime’ the industry by just pushing more and more female-driven projects into the development pipeline. The theory being that, if you had more at the beginning of development, more would gradually move through to completion. In theory, that’s fine until you get to the gatekeepers. So you start to look at who is at the table deciding what gets greenlit into production and financed and, once a film is made, who is at the table deciding what gets greenlit onto screens. And in both cases it’s overwhelmingly male dominated. Which is why, in addition to getting more and more women driving and creating new work, you have to change the leadership structures. This is where the Natalie Miller Fellowship comes in. Around 10 years ago I was involved as a founding member in setting that up, and it has a specific focus on recognising, nurturing and inspiring the next generation of women leaders. So we’re starting to see change there (in industry leadership) as well.

One thing that has struck me is that you are incredibly generous with your time, willingness to advocate for others, and advice. How important is it to you to act as a mentor, to be both a leader and a teacher?

For me, it’s just been part of my makeup from the beginning. I get an enormous amount out of it and I have always said this many times on the record: it’s far more empowering to share information than to withhold it. It’s been my mantra my whole working life and it’s always served me well. It gives me enormous encouragement as well – just to be involved in helping young filmmakers both men and women but, in particular, women, find the opportunity not only to find their voice and to make that first work, but to find out how they can keep going, how it’s possible to have a more sustainable approach to their creative life. It’s a very unforgiving industry and highly competitive and people do leave it and get burnt out, often ending up with significant challenges to their mental wellbeing as a result. So I figure, if a little bit of encouragement or a bit of information or just some well-targeted advice can help someone get through that next obstacle, then maybe they’ll just keep going. And it’s really rewarding, when I see the careers of people I’ve helped along the way develop, it makes me feel really good!

It seems to me that you are a real community builder, which is a lovely kind of person to be.

I’m a groupie! In fact, my partner keeps saying, ‘how many more groups do you need to be involved in?!” I just can’t help it, and it’s not just work groups and advocacy – I’m in a book group, and an ocean swimming group, a walking group, a ‘ladies who lunch’ group and a skiing group. I do love being in groups. Possibly because I was the only girl for miles around when I was growing up. I was mostly alone as a kid, out on my own with my horse because I grew up in quite an isolated place with no other kids to play with except my awful younger brothers (who I love dearly!). The other thing of course is that when you work in groups, particularly in really close creative collaborations, you get things done – and it’s deeply, deeply rewarding to be on a shared journey. Working together towards that vision of what it is that you might just be able to do. Nothing beats it; it’s terribly exciting.

The Dressmaker was a huge hit. How much of this do you think can be attributed to the fact that it was a ‘women’s story’ that really showed how women collectively – seeing the film in groups, with their friends – could become a box office force?

Look, I have a great belief in the power of female audiences. And that’s the thing that does sustain me when I embark upon a journey that I know is going to be long – in the case of The Dressmaker it was actually 15 years as I tried to get the book when it first came out but had to wait five years before I was successfully able to option it. It’s what really sustained me when the male distributors were saying, ‘it’s female skewed Sue, it’s not commercial’ – I like films that bring women together as a community.

I also keep going back to the question of, ‘what is it in this day and age that is going to encourage audiences to go into the cinema and spend two hours of their time?’ What is it about that cinema experience that is different to what they can get at home on streaming devices and on television. And to me, what cinema does is create a communal space, a place of coming together with your tribe in a way that you wouldn’t normally, of complete immersion in both the spectacle and the emotion of what films can deliver, which is quite different to what you get on your device. And I think about that as an experience – when I set out to make a movie I’m not just thinking, ‘oh, I’m just going to put this story up on the screen’. What I’m thinking is, ‘ok, The Dressmaker – I can see it in my mind’s eye and it is going to be amazing – but what is the experience that sits around it? And it goes like this; Grab your girlfriends, dress up, have a drink, come and have fun!’ It’s a pure celebration of female pleasure – pleasure in character, story, those gorgeous vintage frocks, pleasure in the notion of revenge – that’s the experience. You can laugh, you can cry and you’re going to be immersed in a sense of pleasure – spectacle and emotion.

You recently launched the documentary The Show Must Go On about mental health issues in the entertainment industry. It was launched during Mental Health Week in 2019 and is being a supported with a national, year-long Wellness Roadshow. It’s more than a documentary – it’s really about starting and continuing a conversation. How important is it to you that we’re talking about mental health and its relationship to the arts and entertainment industries?

It’s very important to me, partly because I had a very visceral experience when the filmmaker Ben Steel came into my office and started showing me some of the interviews that he had been doing with people from right across the spectrum: from performers to DJs to roadies to writers, all talking in a very real and vulnerable way about anxiety, about depression, about suicide ideation. And it was literally one of those moments in your life where you’re just kind of like, ‘nothing else matters, we have to tell this story.’ Because people were voicing the kinds of things that I know and the kinds of conversations that I’ve had with my colleagues, and my partner, and my family over the years but we never talk about publicly as an industry.

In the entertainment business the silence and stigma is such that it’s not discussed publicly for fear of being blacklisted, or being considered difficult, or just not getting the gigs. And it’s all very real. So here was Ben, prepared to go and tell us his own journey with mental health, which is incredibly powerful, and then open the way for others to open up to him. So I pushed everything aside and thought, ‘we’ve got to do this’. And it’s so much more than just making a film that screened on ABC TV.  We set out to change the culture. And that’s where the impact strategy comes in. So it’s the desire to use film – and all my films have been like this, right from the very first one – to change something about the culture in which it sits through questioning, through the opening up of genuine discussion and debate. With The Show Must Go On we really want to save lives. At the moment the suicide rate in the entertainment industry is double the national average. It’s shocking.

It’s a very powerful thing you’re doing.

Well, it keeps it interesting. That’s why I’m still making films after all these years! There’s a purpose to it.

What’s next for you?

At the end of The Dressmaker I asked director Jocelyn Moorhouse: ‘was there a film that she had always really wanted to make that she hadn’t got around to making yet?’ And she said, ‘well, actually Sue, there is!’ And she told me the story of Clara Schumann, the virtuoso 19th century pianist – now not as well-known now as her husband [the composer Robert Schumann] – but who was in those days one of the most celebrated pianists anywhere in Europe. Against all the odds, including her father who tried to stop the marriage, she married Robert, the love of her life. She supported him financially while having eight children, and as he gradually went mad and ended his life in an asylum. However, not long before that a young, brilliant composer Johannes Brahms came into their lives wanting to be mentored by Robert. They adored him, they recognised his genius when no-one else did, and he fell hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with Clara. Forbidden to see Robert for the last two years of his life, Johannes then became indispensable to Clara as the couple’s go-between. So it’s an intense portrait of these three brilliant musicians, and their extraordinary intimacy that’s played out through the music, through their creativity and madness. But above all it’s a love story.

And the title?

The Variations. We hope to be filming in Austria and Germany in 2021.