Bruce Beresford - Theres a Fax from Bruce: Edited Correspondence Between Bruce Beresford & Sue Milliken 1989-1996

I devoured this correspondence between Sue and Bruce. It has all the humour and metaphors you could wish for in an intimate exchange about the angst of ever getting a film made, anywhere, any time. Also embedded in the text is the importance of maintaining our screen archive. This funny, informative exchange is a lesson in high-wire acts for any would-be filmmaker.
Margaret Pomeranz

In touch with each other by fax while they flew all over the world, two brilliant Australians left a sparkling record of how they lived and worked as the film business turned into the international country we know today. Milliken emerges as the ideally wise and funny producer, while Beresfords wide-ranging curiosity makes you wonder how much more famous he would now be as a director if he had only put A Film by Bruce Beresford on the front of pictures like Black Robe. But he was too modest for that, or perhaps just insufficiently insane.
Clive James

Loved this. Like a Stop, Detour or Danger sign for any unsuspecting filmmaker. Succour to know even Bruce Beresford has this many obstacles to surmount getting a film green lit. But how blessed he was to have Sue fighting like a tiger in his corner, supporting his vision, defeating the obstacles and reporting back on the local scene with such perception and wit. Read it like a survival manual for a career in filmmaking. Or die.
Rachel Ward

Two of Australias most successful practitioners react with wry resignation, indomitable fortitude, and high-speed improvisation to get cameras rolling, as deals collapse at the eleventh hour and stars go feral. Required reading if you have any illusions about the glamour of filmmaking.
David Williamson

Often funny, always revealing, a compelling journey into the bi-polar world of filmmaking, its capricious uncertainties vividly chronicled in the correspondence between two collaborators navigating their way through the labyrinth. It is also the story of the enduring friendship which helped them do so.
Al Clark

For Greg Coote &
Richard Zanuck

FOREWORD
ANTHONY BUCKLEY

Receiving a fax from Bruce Beresford first thing in the morning generally guarantees a good start to the day. No matter how serious the subject, or the enquiry, one can be sure it will be liberally laced with laconic or sardonic wit and humour for the addressees eyes only. Sue Millikens responses are equally pithy and wryly observant. This exchange of faxes guarantees a great read.

Most people have an idea of what movie making is about. The director tells the actors what to do, the make-up artist applies the make-up to their faces, the costume designer dresses them, while the sound man records what they have to say. But what on earth does the producer do?

Well for a start, none of these people would have a job without a producer.

Kenneth Macgowan, in his 1965 publication Behind the Screen The History and Techniques of the Motion Picture, only devotes one page of his volume to what a producer does, and sums it up rather pithily. A producer used to be

a man [no women in 1965!] who asks a studio employee a question, gives him the answer, and tells him he is wrong At his worst, the producer may be a frightened fellow who keeps his eye on the past and tries to turn out the sort of films that made money last year. [Hollywood is still doing this!] At his best, the producer has real creative power. He can recognise a good story that doesnt follow a cyclic pattern or any current formula. He can see how such a story must be handled to make an effective contribution to the progress of the screen and the profits of the business. He can bring to it the writer and the director who will be sympathetic to the material, and capable of getting the most out of it.

Mr Macgowans words are sage advice indeed, as herein lies the secret of producing bringing together the people who will make a success of making it happen.

I dont believe anyone sets out to make a bad picture, but they do happen because movie making invites people whose ambition far outweighs their abilities. I think the prerogative of casting the picture is very much the directors, but I see the producers role as making sure the director is surrounded by the very best people to facilitate his or her wishes, and I surround myself with people who know far more than I do. In my career I regret to say I have seen too many of my peers fail because they have surrounded themselves with people lesser than themselves.

This treasure lode of faxes reveals an aspect of the picture making business that I have not come across before. You can read all the textbooks in the world but they wont teach you the realities that these faxes reveal, of the importance of the relationship between the director and producer. Each is dependent on the other if the producer is doing their job properly. If the director has made a request, the director is entitled to the decision from the producer, then and there, it cannot wait till tomorrow. Sue Milliken sets a fine example of making decisions then and there. However, raising the money for a picture is fraught with frustration and occasionally despair and it never gets any easier.

At a crowded assembly at the Film School at North Ryde some years ago, I heard Peter Weir describe the director as the captain of the ship. Ah, I muttered, but the producer is the commodore of the line.

Enjoy the read and, yes, you will wonder why we do it.

Anthony Buckley A.M.
Sydney, January 2016

BACKGROUND
SUE MILLIKEN

In the 1980s, Bruce Beresford and I were in mid-career in a world which welcomed movie makers. The Australian film industry had reinvented itself in the 1970s, and Beresford had been one of the earliest talents to emerge from that renaissance. He made seven Australian feature films including The Getting of Wisdom and Breaker Morant before beginning a career in the US that made him internationally famous, with a string of successful films including Tender Mercies and the Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy.

Meanwhile, I had been building my own, more parochial, career in Australian films, firstly in production as a continuity girl and production manager, and with my then husband Tom Jeffrey as a producer. Among the films we produced was the Vietnam movie, The Odd Angry Shot.

In 1980 I was asked to set up the Australian operation of the international completion bond company Film Finances. From then on I managed the business in Australia and New Zealand and, with the tacit agreement of the head of Film Finances, Richard Soames, I continued to produce my own films.

In 1985 Bruce returned home to make a film of Nene Gares novel The Fringe Dwellers, about Aboriginal people striving for a better life. He had found distribution interest in the UK but he needed an Australian producer to complete the financing and to oversee the production. Prior to this I knew him only slightly, but now we met and he invited me to produce the film for him. Serendipitously this brought me together with a director whose work I greatly admired and a subject I believed was of groundbreaking and timely importance. The film won a number of awards and went on to be Australias entry in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986.