(2 of 2)
But some Sydneysiders wonder if, in selling itself as celluloid paradise, the city has sold its filmmaking soul. Marian Macgowan, producer of last year's award-winning Two Hands, says that filming in the city center has become too expensive. "The bottom line is that for someone like me making a $2-3 million film, I'm just going to move to another town." Ausfilm's Trisha Rothkrans is unapologetic about the benefits a movie like The Matrix can bring to the local economy: "$50-60 million. Then they leave with the rolls of film. It's brilliant."
PREPRODUCTION
It's three days before Star Wars: Episode II begins shooting, and producer McCallum is buzzing. For 10 weeks, Lucasfilm will hold hostage Fox Studios Australia's six soundstages, where 60 sets are being constructed and a team of 500, many of them Australians, is being assembled. With the radical decision to use high-definition digital cameras to shoot the budding romance between Anakin Skywalker (Canadian newcomer Hayden Christensen) and Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman), McCallum says, "we're going to a place that nobody's ever gone before."
But getting there won't cost as much as it might have. Because of the soft Australian dollar, McCallum estimates Episode II will save 25% of its budget, bringing the final pricetag to around $115 million—what it cost to film The Phantom Menace three years ago. He believes the savings "take the risk out of making the movie," still two years from release. Just look at The Matrix, he says: "They got much more freedom and much more movie for their money."
PRODUCTION
At Kiama, a couple of hours' drive south of Sydney, the low-budget Mullet, billed as a film about fish, football and family, is into its fourth and final week of shooting. This is the underside of Sydney filmmaking, on whose talent base many of the offshore productions are being built. But at what cost? Writer-director Caesar is looking weary. With Star Wars in town, and Lord of the Rings and the remake of South Pacific currently shooting in New Zealand and Queensland, "a lot of the crew you'd normally have access to go, 'Why would I work on a film like that when I can get four times as much money on an American film?'" That soggy Australian dollar, while a boon for offshore producers, bumps up the cost of American film stock and technical equipment. Still, Caesar isn't complaining too much. "I don't think people will believe that we made this film for only a million bucks," he says, as a picture-postcard dusk breaks over the local fish markets. "A lot of that value is in the locations, and what it's going to look like is because of the locations."
POSTPRODUCTION
Directing the Nicole Kidman vehicle Moulin Rouge, Baz Luhrmann really has his work cut out. With Fox backers and much of the local industry watching over his shoulder, the Sydney wunderkind is expected to deliver another hit by Christmas. "Nobody in the world wanted to make a film about Shakespeare or ballroom dancing—it was a great battle," says the director of Romeo + Juliet and Strictly Ballroom. "Same with Moulin Rouge. No musical has worked in the last 20 years."
A musical, set in French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's Montmartre of 1899, and all shot within the walls of Sydney's Fox studios—it's a huge leap of faith, and one that attempts to bridge local and global filmmaking. With a Sydney creative team and imports such as British actor Ewan McGregor and America's John Leguizamo, "that's the reality of filmmaking now," says Fox's Williams, "that you want the best and most appropriate people to be working on any one film in order to give it the maximum opportunity of realizing its potential."
The pressure's also on for the visual effects house Animal Logic, which has the task of digitally creating 19th-century Paris from models at its Sydney shop. Defying geography and history is no big deal for the company, which previously weaved its magic on The Matrix, Holy Smoke and Babe: Pig in the City. For the World War II opus The Thin Red Line, shot in Queensland and Samoa, U.S. director Terrence Malick didn't set foot in Sydney, where Animal Logic created the digital effects. "Our work would finish at 8 p.m., it would be downloaded into The Thin Red Line editorial-office site during our night, and by the time they'd resolved those issues, we would be just rolling up at work," recalls managing director Zareh Nalbandian. "Whether we're two blocks away at Venice Beach or 12,000 km away at Bondi Beach, it doesn't really matter."
Luhrmann, for one, knows where he'd prefer to be. "We live in a country where you have the luxury of being so disconnected from some of the complexity of the world that we have the time to imagine and think," he says. "I can think and imagine more in Sydney, just because I have a different headspace."
Which leads us back to The Matrix. At the end of the film, as Keanu Reeves steps out of the phone booth and into Sydney's Pitt Street rush hour, the narrator says: "I'm going to show you a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders and boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you." He could have been addressing the city's filmmakers. So will they take the blue pill, and stick to what they know or, like Reeves in The Matrix, take the red pill, and plunge further into the rabbit hole of global filmmaking? Perhaps, to be safe, they'll take both.