In late February 2010 Nett and I packed up our car and caravan headed westwards towards Broken Hill. We carried not just personal possessions but also props and supplies that would be needed for the movie production that we would be involved in for the next month..
The movie, to be called “Thirst”, was the brainchild of Nett’s brother Robert. He had written the script and would direct the film on location. He had sold his home in Sydney to fully finance the project himself so he obviously had a big stake in its success. Nett and I, along with Nett’s brother Brian and his wife Fran, were to be unpaid helpers in this venture. Naturally we did this willingly and enthusiastically as this looked like being a big and exciting adventure.
We duly arrived in Broken Hill and settled in to our basic hotel accommodation. The next morning, together with the advance crew, I took the caravan out to the desert location while Nett and Fran did their best to make something out of a very poor kitchen.
The next four weeks that followed were to give us far more of an adventure than we ever bargained for! The forces of nature were about to conspire to make the whole production unbelievably stressful and difficult. Nett sent three emails to friends and family during this time, and I can do no better than to reproduce here what she so graphically wrote from the front line!
First email: 7 March 2010
Hello Everyone,
Here is the latest from our Broken Hill filming adventure. Unfortunately we have a tale of woe and disaster to unfold! We arrived 10 days ago after two days on the road to our accommodation – an old rambling colonial home called the Cale – short for Caledonian. Our rooms are quite comfortable, however, the area where we were to cook and feed 27 people was a complete disaster – the kitchen is the size of a pantry with barely functioning equipment and the outside eating area was crammed to the overhead ceiling with rubbish and junk. Fortunately, the owners and everyone pitched in and it is now functioning in a picturesque, Broken Hill kind of way (which we are discovering is a little weird).
These problems pale into insignificance compared to those of Robert and the film crew. The next day Chris, Rob and the advance crew took our caravan out to the desert hut location to find that the hut was in a worse condition than when seen last – requiring major structural repairs including re-roofing.
The heat and flies that day were incredible so they returned to BH to find builders, leaving our caravan on location. Then gale force winds arrived and blew and blew – we had to cook in our outside kitchen and eat in the Cale’s dining room. However, the crew decided to go out to the location only to find the winds had blown up the red dust to such an extent they couldn’t even find the hut or our van and of course the builders they’d found couldn’t work in those conditions. The winds eased after a couple of days and the builders (who were marvellous workers) repaired the hut. However, the wind was still gusting and so when Chris tried to open our van up a sudden gust of wind damaged the van’s roof and it wouldn’t open up completely – the result is inches of red dust everywhere in the van.
Then the rains came – and it rained and rained!! BH’s 20 year drought was broken – they don’t have drains (not usually needed) so we were shopping and working at the Cale in water up to our ankles. The airport was closed and the road to Sydney cut. The road to the location was washed away.
The rain finally stopped but today, Sunday, we are still unable to get out to the hut and may not be able to get there till Tuesday at the earliest. Rob had to make hard decisions but decided to carry on. Cast and crew started to arrive (they are all delightful and keen to make things work) and we expect the final few tomorrow. They are hoping to now shoot 10 hours a day for 6 days with Sundays off but there are still many unknowns such as whether the big camera trucks will make it to the location.
We’ve received front page local newspaper, local radio and TV coverage so we get a great reception everywhere we go. My sister-in-law Fran and I do two trolleys worth of shopping every day and everyone seems happy with the food we are providing – however it is a constant struggle with such limited food preparation and storage facilities.
We are up at 6 am and rarely finish before 9.30 pm but we try to have a short break each afternoon and the two producers are cooking today to give us a break (to do our washing and some advance cooking for next week!!).
Chris has been a great support for everyone – helping in the kitchen and doing lots of the computer work and now transporting everyone in an ancient 12-seater bus.
Sorry for the joint email – we miss you all and would love to hear from you as the outside world has disappeared for us!
Much love,
Chris and Nett
Second Email: 17 March 2010
Hi Everyone,
The film is being made – and it’s looking good!
The RTA (under considerable political pressure) worked miracles and built a temporary detour around the washed out road, and filming started at the hut location in the desert last Thursday. This is a 45 minute drive beyond Silverton, much of it on a bad dirt road, made worse by the recent weather.
Catering is still a complete madhouse for us and we are exhausted beyond imagining, however everyone is being fed and the only complaints about the food are that we run out of salad or side dishes!
We are in the middle of a week of night shoots, which are a nightmare in themselves. We have to prepare lunch in BH for everyone by 11.30 – 12 noon, then clean up and pack for dinner on location where we cook a hot meal for 27 – out in the open on a barbecue or 3-burner gas stove. The flies before sundown are unbelievable – they swarm over everything. We all wear heavy fly veils – except the cast, of course, when they are actually filming.
The flies leave us after sundown, to be replaced by large blue beetles, moths and stink bugs, all attracted by the film lights. They carpet the ground and fly madly at the lights, and we just crunch over them and pick them off the food and each other. I suggested at one stage that we should change to a horror movie! Rob says that he is waiting for the biblical rivers of blood and the frogs plague as we have had everything else!
We are very impressed by the professionalism and competence of the cast and crew. They are demanding, but they work 10 to 12 hour days under these horrible conditions. Imagine what it is like for the boom microphone operator who holds a heavy pole over his head with both hands while flies crawl up his nose!
We can’t wait to get home, and we miss you all. Our mail is being forwarded – thank you Helen and John, and we hope the garden watering is not too onerous. Thanks so much for all your encouraging emails. Keep them coming as we love to hear your news – it makes feel that there is another and better world out there.
Everyone comes to breakfast with their laptops – the only free time we have. On our Sundays off we cook future meals and do the washing and cleaning, so we see very little of Broken Hill itself.
Much love,
Nett & Chris
Third Email: 27 March 2010
Hi Everybody,
At last it’s all finished!
The film is looking great. Working 10-12 hour days in unbelievably awful conditions, the cast and crew somehow got the shooting back on schedule after such a terrible start, and have come up with what is surely going to be a beautiful, moving film. Each night we see the rushes, and they are just stunning in this desert location. As Rob says, the best movies are made in adversity so, with music, editing, etc to come, this one should be an award winner! Few feature length movies have been filmed with so few paid staff: 18 plus a couple of part-timers.
Our dramas continued, though! Every day brought a new challenge. Victoria Haralabidou, one of the cast of four, was rushed to hospital last week with a possible broken toe – which fortunately was only bruised. Then the other female cast member, Hanna Mangan-Lawrence, was accidentally hit with the stock of a gun, a sickening blow to her arm, and again there was a rush to the hospital. I was cooking dinner at the time when a call came on my mobile: Hanna was waiting in Emergency and there was no ice, so we sent up a packet of frozen peas wrapped in a towel! The actors are precious, as there are no understudies, so if they can’t act there’s no film.
We also had a dispute over extra pay for working in such conditions, so Rob had to shell out more money for an extra “per diem” allowance. He didn’t need this either!
Halfway into last week a caterer was found with a fully equipped catering truck and four staff, and they have been serving hot lunches on location for cast and crew. They provided the standard RSL club-type food: filling but not very appetising, especially when the flies come to share it! Whenever the crew saw Fran or myself they asked: where are your wonderful soups and casseroles? We were grateful for this extra help, though, as even without having to prepare lunches we were still frantically busy. We stocked five houses where the cast and crew were staying with their breakfast requirements, so we rushed all over Broken Hill to find the right European muesli, yoghurt, rice milk, etc. Then we prepared morning and afternoon tea for cast and crew. These included substantial meat and salad rolls, cakes, biscuits, fruit, etc, tea, coffee, milk, water, ice, etc, etc. We also cooked an evening meal for the 7 of us based at our B&B, plus Brian & Fran, and this was any time between 7.30 and 9.30 pm, depending on the shooting timetable. Then the eskys came back from the location, full of red dust and insects, and these had to be cleaned and restocked for the next day.
If by this time we were still standing we then dragged ourselves to the sitting room to watch the rushes on a big TV screen. Some days I sat there, with no make-up, hair in a sweatband, wearing food-spattered clothes, with two of Australia’s leading male heartthrobs. Because I don’t watch TV soapies I had no idea that the two male actors were Myles Pollard from McLeod’s Daughters (whom half the female population of Australia is in love with) and Tom Green (only 18) from Home and Away. They are both lovely, unpretentious blokes. The female actors are also well known: Victoria Haralabidou starred in the Greek-based move The Brides, and Hanna Mangan-Lawrence (19 years old) was the daughter in ABC’s Bed of Roses. They are also very nice.
No-one will believe how dreadful the conditions were on location. Even the locals are stunned by the number of insects resulting from the unprecedented rains we had earlier this month, The heat and dust were bad enough, but the flies were unbelievable – millions of them, and so aggressive! Fly veils were essential! And the beetles were everywhere, even invading the supermarkets in town!
Thanks to you all for your emails – we love knowing that there is civilisation out there somewhere. We pack up today (Saturday) and leave early tomorrow. Can’t wait to see you all soon.
Love, Nett & Chris
Nett has said it all! What an experience! We took a couple of days out before we left to do some sightseeing in and around Broken Hill with Brian and Fran.
There was more drama to come yet! It turned out that we weren’t done with our insect plagues. On our way back to Sydney we had to drive through a huge swarm of locusts! Masses of them caked our car radiator, requiring a major clean-up when we finally reached home.
Rob then spent almost two years getting the editing, soundtrack, music, etc done to his satisfaction before the film had its first major screening. This was at the Chauvel Cinema in Paddington in January 2012. It was a beautiful production, as everyone involved knew it would be. Nicola’s cinematography was outstanding. There was no indication in the film of the horrors that all of us had to endure in the making of it! Nett and I enjoyed seeing our names appear in the credits (right near the bottom)!
Here’s the website for the movie when it was released: www.thirstthefilm.com For a full list of cast and crew see here.
In the meantime Nett and I now settled back to life in Sydney. We needed time to recover from the exhausting month we had been through. We were definitely getting too old for the kind of experiences we had endured! Soon, however, there was going to be much to keep us busy in the months and years ahead.
Next chapter: Seeing the World
Nett 