…maybe

Since relocating to London in mid-2011, I’ve covered film junkets for various Australian online and print outlets. Below are links to some of my most recent interviews and junket write-ups.

Simon Pegg: http://www.thebrag.com/2011/12/19/film-interview-ghost-protocol/

Jamie Bell: http://www.thevine.com.au/entertainment/interviews/jamie-bell-_-interview20111212.aspx

Robert Downey Jr and Guy Richie: http://www.thebrag.com/2012/01/16/film-interview-a-game-of-shadows/

George Clooney: http://www.thebrag.com/2011/11/28/film-interview-the-ides-of-march/

Michael Fassbender and Steve McQueen: http://www.thevine.com.au/entertainment/interviews/steve-mcqueen-michael-fassbender-and-abi-morgan-shame-_-interview20120206.aspx

The final Harry Potter film in the seven-part saga may have come and gone, but you can still read my interview with the franchise’s most loveable cast-member Rupert Grint, click here.

I interviewed X-Men cast James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender as well as producer Bryan Singer for Australian publications The Brag, Beat Magazine and Rave Magazine.  To read my story, click here: X-Men

With Lamb, producer Barlow and vocalist Lou Rhodes took the world by storm throughout the mid ‘90s and early ‘00s with their unique “heart-based electronic music” that lusciously fused trip-hop, jazz and drum and bass. They achieved critical acclaim and commercial success, and won over the hearts of thousands, if not millions, with hit singles Gorecki and Gabriel.

But on the cusp of the duo achieving international superstardom, Barlow and Rhodes made the heavy decision to put the band on hold. “It’s such a precious, beautiful kind of creature that was Lamb and it kind of got to the point where, bored would be the wrong word and it didn’t feel like it had come to the end of its journey but, I think Lou and I needed to take some space from each other,” explains Barlow on the indefinite split.

“Lou really wanted to explore the acoustic side of her song-writing… I could feel this frustration of her wanting to rekindle her folk singer roots and that wasn’t really what I wanted,” he says. “And, I think I needed to have a bit of a normal life. Lamb started when I was 18 and went on for ten years and, you know, I knew what I was doing everyday for 18 months in advance for ten years. It kind of felt like we needed to do it because we loved it and not because that’s what we’d been programmed to do.”

So due to creative differences and a yearning for normality, Barlow and Rhodes went their separate ways. Rhodes started her own record label, Infinite Bloom, and released her stunning debut solo album Beloved One in 2006, which was swiftly shortlisted for a Mercury Music Prize, while Barlow packed his bags and went travelling for a few years before later working as a producer. “The first two years of Lamb splitting up was really, really devastating actually,” Barlow offers poignantly.

“A lot of my identity was as Andy from Lamb,” he says, adding that post-Lamb his “social skills were atrocious because I didn’t need to use them at all”. He explains, “I was always touring and if I was single and wanted to have a night of fun with a girl it would just be easy, it was just on tap; if I wanted to go out I could just get a guest list. It was all so easy and then it all finished and it wasn’t easy.

“The best thing I did was I went travelling. I spent six months in Nepal, I went to Thailand, I went to India for six months, I just kind of did what most people do in their late teens or early twenties that I never got a chance to do because I was always doing this band thing.”

But even while on other sides of the world embarking on a character building pilgrimage of sorts, Barlow could never truly shake-off his Lamb roots.

“I was on top of this hill in Nepal in a tea shack with like three other people,” he recalls, “and Cotton Wool came on someone’s speakers or radio or something, and it was like I couldn’t be further from civilisation and here’s a Lamb song playing.

“It’s a really weird thing,” he continues, “no matter how genuine I thought [the break] was, I think I never really was over Lamb. It got to a point where I was like okay Lamb, we haven’t done anything for five years, I really don’t think we’re going to do anything, I’ve really got to let it go.”

Following the motto “when you let go of something the next door opens”, Barlow began 2009 adamant he’d finally let Lamb go. “On the Monday at the beginning of the year, I woke up one morning [and went] ‘oh my god, that’s it, it’s over, I’m free of it,” he remembers. “I had this huge weight lifted off me and I said to Gordon our manager on the Tuesday ‘you know what Gordon, I’m totally happy just producing and doing my own stuff because I’ve let go of Lamb’ and he was like ‘oh okay well I guess that’s good, you sound happy about it’.

“Then on the Wednesday he called me back and said ‘strange that you said that about Lamb because we’ve just been offered some really good concerts all around Europe over the summer’ and in a way it was like I expected that when I shut the door on Lamb for another door to open, but actually I really needed to put it down before it could be reborn.

“The one stipulation, when I got the phone call that said ‘would you do the summer of shows’, was I said ‘I don’t want to do it how it was’. I didn’t want it to be like ‘oh Lamb trying to make a bit of money, or rehashing the same ideas’ so I kind of said to Lou ‘if we’re going to do it we should do it artistically. We should change the band (from a six-piece to a three-piece), I want to remix all of the songs, make everything up-to-date, and just kind of spring-clean the arrangements’,” he explains, adding that Lamb currently have no plans to record new material.

On the band’s performances at European summer festivals this year, Barlow says the response has been overwhelmingly positive, much to his surprise.

“The usual fear of being a musician is that once you stop touring and putting out records no-one cares anymore, like if a band wants to come back after they haven’t done anything for five years it’s tough luck basically, you’re starting from the beginning.”

But ironically, he states, “it’s just been absolutely the opposite: when we came back we were on a higher level than when we left off, it’s really bizarre.” Lamb’s live shows “always use to be pretty powerful,” he continues, “but it’s just kind of hit this new level of intensity of emotions.”

When asked why this may be, Barlow replies, “I think in the early ‘90s when we came out we were trailblazing to the extent that it felt like a particular crowd of people weren’t really ready for it, it was kind of a bit ahead of its time. Whereas now it just seems like the timing is perfect. Like everyone really resonates with it.

“And I think in the early ‘90s there was a whole glut of amazing music that kind of came out and recently, you know in the last few years, there really hasn’t been. I think people are really hungry for it, like really, really hungry for it [now].”

“We still have a lot of people who love our songs and can’t stand us at the same time,” muses one of The Herd’s three MCs, Urthboy. “We sometimes have messages where people have said: ‘I love (the new single) The King Is Dead, you guys are the best hip hop act, but what’s up with that 77% song? That’s treason! You guys should just fuck off away from Australia.’

“I think people feel a bit at odds with themselves sometimes for liking us,” he adds.

Yet, despite such intense “bipolar” responses and the occasional backlash, The Herd still tread the fine line of merging politics with music. “Escapism is so much apart of most pop culture, most music, which is great, but time and place, and for us we don’t sort of see the separation between the things that affect us in life and our music,” relays Urthboy.

Their fourth album Summerland, dropped in May this year, shows no signs of the band relenting or pandering to a conservative or mainstream audience. Great beats and production work aside, if anything, the new album is more lyrically barbed with The Herd pointing their missiles firmly at Howard (“fucking pirate – history will damn him”), detention centres (“the torture they do, well it‘s killing me“), Indigenous and non-Indigenous inequality (“there’s still two systems of justice to this day“) and the environmental crisis (“justify, consume and breed, be blinded by our own gluttony“), to name a few.

While the list of subjects explored reads like an ‘issues in the news summary for 2007”, Urthboy thwarts the idea that the band deliberately write songs that reflect the hot topics of the day. “We don’t sort of see a news incident and then go ‘oh, we’d better write a song about that and craft it like music journalism; that’s not our thing at all.

“When we write our music,” he elaborates, “it’s not a calculated ploy. It isn’t dictated by fulfilling a kind of set criteria for an album i.e. ‘the party song’, ‘the introspective song’, ‘the love song’…There’s no kind of ‘well we’ve already written five political songs, we better not write another’, we just go, ‘well this is some issue that we want to write about’.”

When asked whether there’s a danger in penning “topical” songs in that they risk loosing their currency, he challenges: “you know what? People are so obsessed with writing songs that are universal… that it just disappears into a black hole of words…Other than every now and again where something truly original is written; it’s just an excuse to write the same old shit… [People] just write the same regurgitated bullshit that has been written week in week out by probably far better writers.

“[When you write about] stuff that you were actually there for…you were there when they were talking about The Tampa, you were there when that news happened and you were there when you heard all those different opinions…you are more authentic; authenticity can only be achieved by actually experiencing the events that you’re talking about.

“It’s like,” he continues, about to ruffle some feathers no doubt, “when you have lame fucken, pissy white dudes from regional towns talking about hip hop concepts that suggest that their lifestyle is something it’s not, well that’s fine, we all like escapism, but if you don’t actually have the legitimacy of experiencing those things that you’re talking about well you kind of look like a dickhead.”

The last word reverberates down the phone line and after a pause, he adds, “Who is to say that political songs written fifty years ago don’t have potency now? It’s like old movies where they address a very specific issue and you go ‘wholly molly’ those issues of censorship are still around.” He makes a good point, and the proof really is in the pudding so to speak: The Herd’s 2005 hip hop cover of Redgum’s 1983 anti-war classic I Was Only Nineteen became one of the most requested songs at the time on Triple J and was voted number 18 in the 2005 Hottest 100. Where the original song references the Vietnam Veterans, The Herd’s version seemingly struck a chord with those Australians audiences fervently against the War in Iraq.

The Herd’s no-holes-barred approach to song writing (Urthboy almost winces at the word: “I think 99 per cent of the industry doesn’t believe that hip hop has actual song writing in it”), is due largely to the band being self-managed. “We don’t sort of have a monkey whipping us and telling us ‘no that’s too much (politics).’’

In fact the band aren’t only self-managed, but the core members – solo musicians from various backgrounds – also run record label Elefant Traks, which was started several years before the members decided to combine their talents and form The Herd in 2001.

“We’ve always been self-managed. We certainly don’t have that external influence that guides and directs us,” says Urthboy, who doubles as the label’s manager. “We also do all the A & R managing for the rest of the acts on the label.”

Without a head honcho or running the show, Urthboy says the band operates in a very “egalitarian” system. “There’s no lead person, no person that’s always up the front of the press shots, no front man that is the superstar or the ego, no alpha male – or female. I manage the label and I do most of the communications and the directing of things, I kind of put most of the stuff together and there’s so many times when I tear my hair out going ‘somebody, anybody, just say yes!’

“We go to the airport and we check in and we’ve got so much luggage, we’ve got guitars and bass and road cases and if everyone is tired and no one takes the alpha male role then the poor bloody attendant tries to check us in but we’re counting bags then miscounting them, then someone has a tantrum and walks off and another person is sitting there on the phone to their mum (you know, because we call our mums every hour of the day), and sometimes you just need that person to direct you, but we’ve managed without them; it can be done.”

In terms of working together creatively, he says, “It can be a bit harder [for us to all] be on the same musical page because we have so many members from so many walks of life. One person pushes and another person pulls. People are dancing way off in their imagination in the way they put beats together while other people are just trying to get that phat groove. It’s like a tug-o-war.”

At the same time though, this creative tug-of-war is exactly what makes The Herd such a productive and successful band. “It is kind of the thing that makes everything work”, he says, and it “gives us such a great group feeling and great group dynamic.”

“When we do all our label stuff we are all socially good friends, so we all hang around outside of the band in different formations. We do business and create stuff and do all those things that would take its toll on friendships, but we really managed to balance those things quite miraculously well; it’s a really weird thing.”

“You could do a text book on it and still you’d just go around in circles trying to come up with a formula that makes the group dynamic work. It’s just one of those rare things,” he finishes.

‘Life’s a beach’ was coined by the effervescent Melbourne photographer, writer, surfer, world traveller and party animal Rennie Ellis in the early ‘80s. The phrase not only sums up the classically Australian footloose way of life, but it also captures Ellis’ zest for fun, frivolity and freedom that was so prevalent in his life and work.

“He always photographed at the beach,” explains Susan Van Wyk, from the National Gallery of Victoria, who has spent the past three years putting together the first major retrospective of Ellis’ work. “Personally, he was a really keen swimmer and surfer…but he continued throughout his career to photograph people at the beach for the same reason that he loved photographing people at strip clubs and parties; there’s something about the beach that when we shed our clothes, we interact and behave completely different,” says Van Wyk. Ellis loved to explore people’s behaviour, he called it the ‘theatre of behaviour’, and he loved to capture the spirit and liveliness and people having a really good time.

Van Wyk says the NGV had long wanted to purchase and exhibit Ellis work, but being the free-spirited man that he was (Ellis is often described as someone who would rather spend five grand on a trip to Europe than on fixing his car), “he could never quite get it together to actually get us to sign,” explains Van Wyk. “So sadly it wasn’t until after he died [in August 2003] that we made a major acquisition of his work.”

Featuring over 200 pieces of Ellis work, this exhibition focuses on Ellis’ main areas of interest in the 70s and 80s. “The 70s was an amazing time in Australia,” Wyk begins, “it was a time when people changed their behaviours in all sorts of ways; there was that whole hippie counter culture thing happening and in the late ’70s that whole punk movement grew and really flourished.
“[Back then] people had different attitudes towards sex and sexuality and nudity and people dressed up. I can’t imagine there would be many nightclubs in Melbourne today where someone would arrive in pink crutch-less knickers as their outfit” – as is seen in one of Ellis’ fabulous nightlife images. “maybe under their dress,” adds Van Wky, “but not as their dress!
“That kind of behaviour is so particular to that time – you know some of these pictures with people lounging around at the beach and half of them are completely naked, but no-one batts an eyelid.”

Ellis also worked as a commercial photographer with the successful Aussie bands of the day. When he wasn’t jet-setting around the world on his own adventures, he could be found on the road with ACDC, the Bee Gees, Billy Thorpe and Mark Holden. “So he was just over their [in Hollywood] travelling around with them, photographing them backstage, at their performances, the parties. The photographs are wonderful, absolutely wonderful,” Van Wyk exclaims.

Not only was Ellis an extraordinary photographer with a penchant for capturing people’s ‘theatre of behaviour’, but he was also incredible influential within the art world. “He ran galleries, he was a commercial photographer, he was a mentor to many young photographers, he gave people their first show, he wrote extensively about photography, he was a very important figure as well as a really interesting photographer and he had this great capacity to engage with people.” No doubt it was his charismatic demeanour and high spirit that drew people towards him, who then allowed him to photograph them in the candid shot. “I think that’s the key isn’t it,” agrees Van Wyk, “he was really open to people and he was quite non-judgmental in the way he engaged with people. He would treat someone from the marijuana [political] party, the Governor General, a stripper in Kings Cross and a homeless person all the same way and would approach them in the same way.

“He really wanted to know about people and their lives. He was interested in how we behave, what we do, how we dress, how we engage with one another. He was endless curious about people and that openness and that real want without that sense of being prejudice or being better than them or judging them means, I think, that people warmed to him and opened up to him. There’s that real engagement, which is why in some of these photographs you have that sense that he really knew them even though he may have only known them very briefly.”

The rather apt title of this major retrospective ‘No Standing, Only Dancing’ comes from one of Ellis’ photographs, which you’ll see in the exhibition, that captures ‘No Standing’ written across a wall and underneath that, someone has graffitied ‘Only Dancing‘. “It seems to me to be the perfect title for a show on Rennie because he did dance his way through life, he did have fun all the time and he did really understand and love the kind of spirit to not just take anything on board.

“It’s perfect for this show because so much of it is about people celebrating life and living life to the full and having a good time and just refusing to be canned in.”

Diving headfirst into Australia’s ‘real’ underbelly, David Michod’s gritty debut feature film Animal Kingdom boasting a mightily impressive cast of Guy Pearce, Joel Edgerton, Ben Mendelsohn, Jacki Weaver, Luke Ford, Sullivan Stapleton and James Frencheville. Writer/director Michod and world renowned actor Pearce speak with X-Press about the film that’s making headlines around the world.

DM: When I first moved to Melbourne from Sydney, you know this big sprawling city was really new to me and it felt like an exploration and while that was going on I was reading these books, on Melbourne true crime writing…

That are just so popular…

DM: And that there’s just so much of. My favourite ones were these ones by a guy named Tom Noble, who was the Chief Police Reporter at The Age back in the ’80s and he’s written a few, one’s called Untold Violence and another one about the Walsh Street killings, and another one about Neddy Smith that Blue Murder was based on. He also ghost wrote the Mick Gaddot autobiography that came out recently. His writing is just so detailed and kind of serious in a way. These books were just kind of fleshing out, just giving me stories, filling these new streets with stories and as soon as I started reading these books, I just started building what I hoped would be a big Melbourne crime story in my head and then it just kind of evolved over years and years.

When you move to a new city or even just visit one and you know the history of the place, you really can just let your imagination run wild with stories from the past and also untold stories of the present.

DM: Yeah it helps contextualise new neighbourhoods. I remember when I first moved to Melbourne it felt… it kind of doesn’t feel that different to Sydney to me anymore because I’m so familiar to both places now, but when I first moved here it felt very different. It had a kind of raw texture, you know, Sydney is beautiful and it’s all built around hills and water and stuff like that. Melbourne felt like a much more grittier kind of little Chicago or something. It was great to have these stories to flesh out these new streets and neighbourhoods.

I love the scene in the National Gallery Of Victoria, where several of the criminals are scheming on a course of action. It makes you realise that these meetings could really be taking place anywhere and that criminal activity is probably happening everyday, just lurking underneath the surface.

DM: I think that’s one of the things that was fascinating for me generally about Melbourne crime. And one of the things that kind of differentiated it from Sydney crime in a way is that sense you get here that the criminal fabric stretches right across the whole city. When things explode, things of a gangland nature explode, they very often explode in very public places, in places you might have been or streets you may have walked down yesterday. I knew that I wanted to make a crime film that felt like it was happening in just regular places.

While the Animal Kingdom story is loosely based on the Walsh Street police shootings, the characters are fictional. Why did you decide to not base it on anyone in particular?

DM: The reason I didn’t base it on anyone in particular is because I knew that there was a certain kind of structural framework that I wanted to use, but I wanted to fill it with my own characters, I wanted to be free to build my own world of people, build my own Cody family. I knew from very, very early on that I didn’t want to make a true crime story. I wanted to build my own big world of people and places.

You’ve got such a big cast of incredibly talented actors. How did you get everyone involved? Did you write characters with specific actors in mind?

DM: I’d been writing for Jacki [Weaver] for quite a long time. I wrote the Pope character for Ben [Mendelsohn] as well for quite a few years and I wrote the Baz character for Joel [Edgerton]. I had known Ben and Joel for a few years anyway, just socially.

Even though Joel and Ben are mates of yours, I’m sure they wouldn’t have signed up if they didn’t believe in the film, or if they thought it may embarrass them.

DM: Joel was somebody who not only said yes, but was one of those first really passionate champions of the script and who demonstrated from a very early stage that he wanted to do whatever he could to help me get the movie made. So we did a short together, which was actually logistically difficult for him to do. He really wanted to do it so he had to juggle and shift other things so he could do it because he knew it would help me get Animal Kingdom made.
But yeah, you’re right… especially when actors are very experienced. When they’re your friends if they don’t want to do something they’ll find a way of not doing it. But you know, Guy [Pearce] was our first choice for Leckie and that felt kind of easy, he became attached to the project about a year before we started shooting and it never felt like we were going to lose him. He read the script and he watched the shorts and he met me and he just wanted to do it and that was very confidence inspiring.

Guy (Pearce), why were you attracted to the film? Why did you sign up?

GP: Really it was David and his vision… meeting David and really feeling so sort of moved by his honesty and his creative outlook and his perspective on things as well as then seeing Crossbow, his short film that he’d made, I just went ‘oh wow’ this guy knows how to create a world. So yeah, pretty straight-forward really as far as feeling the urge to go and join in.
I was obviously aware, I mean I know the film is not a direct re-examination of the Walsh Street killings, but obviously there is the basis there and you know that story, I was fascinated by it when it occurred after I moved to Melbourne. I’m always interested in crime and crime stories, so you know there were a number of things that sort of pulled me in to doing the story. Primarily, I think it was David and his viewpoint.

Can you tell us about your character, senior cop Nathan Leckie?

GP: Well, funnily enough it’s something I’m actually really terrible at. I’m much better at playing a character and I think part of why I’m an actor is because it’s much easier for me to express a character through playing it than describing them. But one of the things David talked about, that he wanted to make sure we got right was, and this is not just this character but it’s potentially the police in general, the sort of very mundane sort of quality of their work.
You know, we get blinded by police on TV shows because they’re kind of hard hitting and they’re slick and they’re opinionated and they run an interview in a particular way, and they’re slamming their fists on the table and shouting in the suspect’s face. But if you listen to police tapes, the majority of them are very pedestrian. They go on forever and ever and they go ‘you know, it’s really just a chat’ and there’s something incredibly ominous about them even without trying to prompt the suspect into saying something. If the suspect has something to hide, or they’re trying to hide something, it’ll just come out and it’s so much more effective when the police have just been really mundane, you know, just asking the questions just getting on with it, just writing down the facts. There was something in the way that David expressed that, that I found really appealing about the character and obviously with the way he looks and stuff, David was quite specific about that, so it was great to really be able to honour what he wanted.

One of David’s aesthetic specifications was that you grow a moustache for the role.

GP: Yeah that was his idea; I was really happy to do it, but it was his. And David is so softly spoken and so polite and so lovely – ‘there’ll be a moustache, yeah okay great’ and he talked about what that might mean as far as not necessarily consciously hiding behind, but from an outsider’s point of view, there’s a little bit of mystery if you can’t see someone’s mouth properly. So, it helps I think [in creating] Leckie. It’s a bit of a uniform I think for some of those police, so, it was fine with me.

What sort of preparation did you do for the film?

GP: I didn’t do a lot to be honest; I mean listening to the tapes was really the majority and there was a stack to go through; a variety of people being interviewed by police for a number of crimes, within that sort of realm of serious crime, like serious aggravated burglaries or murder or whatever it happened to be. To hear voices of those people answering questions was really great. I find that sort of stuff so much more satisfying than, I mean it is great to go and talk to people about things and hear about their experiences, but it’s so much more satisfying to be a fly on the wall during something than have someone else recount their experiences because I’m recounting an experience in my performance so I don’t need to have someone else recount their experience as well. That should be already there in the script.
I’ll do a certain amount of research for things, but there comes a point pretty early on for me, where I go ‘you know what? I’ve got what it is I want to do’ and if I’ve got to do too much research then I shouldn’t be doing the film.

The film did incredibly well at Sundance this year, taking out the world cinema grand jury prize. You must have had an inkling the film would be well received, but were you surprised at just how well it did at Sundance?

GP: I don’t think I was surprised, I mean at that stage I’d only seen a rough cut of the film, I hadn’t seen the fully finished film… but even the rough cut I thought ‘wow, this is really effective’ so I wasn’t surprised. I was really excited and really pleased. I thought ‘gee, this is fantastic’. That really solidified for me what I thought about the rough cut was really true: it really was a great piece of work.

In 2004, Victorian Park Ranger Sean Willmore sold his car, remortgaged his home and set off on a 14 month journey to capture the stories of the men and women around the world who daily risk their lives to preserve our planet for our tomorrow.

Despite having no prior filming experience, let alone having never travelled overseas before, Willmore says the decision to abandon his comfortable life in Australia and sacrifice everything to make this film, was actually a no-brainer.  “For me, as long as the banks would approve it, it wasn’t a choice.  I believed in the rangers I was visiting and the story I was trying to tell”, Willmore explains.  “Sure”, he adds, “there was doubt as to whether what I wanted to do was possible, but there was no doubt within me as to whether I should go or not.  If [the project] was going to fail, it was going to fail trying”.

Willmore says his DIY documentary, The Thin Green Line, is a human story about the rangers who stand on the green line of conservation.  He elaborates, “It’s not rocket science that the world’s population is [growing dramatically] and [as a result] the world’s resources are diminishing.  These are the people standing on the line saying ‘hey we’ve got to look after these areas’”.

Yet, as Willmore depicts in his documentary, being a ranger isn’t just about cuddling cute animals and working amongst the most picturesque landscapes in the world.  It’s a hard and sometimes thankless job, where the rangers battle against corruption, ignorance, politics and greed.

The selflessness of rangers around the world is captured in Willmore’s documentary, and is best highlighted through the example of a Ugandan ranger Willmore meets, who is in charge of protecting half the world’s Mountain Gorillas.  This lovable ranger consistently works 16 hours a day, sees his family for a total of 22 days per year (including weekends), has watched rangers be killed in front of him by rebel soldiers, and without complaining, he cannot even afford to buy a bicycle.

Willmore tells me about a moment of elucidation for him when, while visiting Uganda, he picked up the English newspaper and read about Wayne Rooney signing a 44 million dollar contract to “kick a fricken ball around”.  Willmore passionately protests: “As a society, we need to question that. Part of the documentary is about saying ‘hey let’s support and value these rangers.  We don’t have to pay them 44 million, but we should look after them and at least try and protect them because they’re doing an honourable job”.

While Willmore is realistic in believing that his documentary probably won’t inspire millions to risk their own lives to save our planet, he hopes that it at least inspires people to support those that do.  Willmore pledges that all profits from the sale of his documentary will go towards supporting rangers on the frontline, including the International Rangers Dependency Fund, which supports the families of committed rangers who have lost their lives, and rangers who have been severely injured in the line of duty.
Willmore says you can also show your support by coming along to the world premiere of The Thin Green Line at The Astor on July 31.

Alongside crossovers to other premieres of the same documentary around the world, the night will also feature a spate of performances by great Australian bands such as Bomba, Symbiosis, Cousin Leonard, TOV, Paul Dillon, Josh Owen and Wityana Marika – singer in the band Yothu Yindi and head of the Dhimurru Indigenous Protected Area in North-East Arnhem Land. Willmore hopes “good people will gather for a good project” and says, “Come along and be part of one night, for one planet for all of our tomorrow”.