By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
George Miller on narrative: You want nourishing, filling, fulfilling food
While he’s near-silent on the cinema scene, George Miller wants to preserve Aussie television drama, speaking as “The Kennedy Miller Collection” is released on DVD: “George Miller, whose company Kennedy Miller has produced some of Australia’s most successful TV dramas [says]”If the quality is there, and it’s compelling, audiences will commit. Not only will they commit, they will also buy the DVD and watch it over and over again. And that’s the trick, how to make it compelling. If it speaks to the audience, we will listen.” …His relatively brief affair with TV, in partnership with the late Byron Kennedy, was extraordinarily successful. Between 1983 and 1989 Kennedy Miller produced The Dismissal, Bodyline, The Cowra Breakout, Vietnam, The Dirtwater Dynasty and Bangkok Hilton. Those landmark titles have just been released on DVD, a timely and perhaps uncomfortable reminder of the local TV industry’s capability. All were “pivotal stories in the Australian narrative”, Miller says. “And obviously there is something elemental about the stories, and if that is the case, they speak across time to us today.” … Australian drama accounted for just 575 hours of TV air time during the past financial year, figures published by the Australian Film Commission last month show, down from 722 hours in the late ’90s… Narrative, he says, is like good food. “You want nourishing, filling, fulfilling food. We seem to want it, and we’re able to invest the time, providing the story is good enough, so the question becomes how do you get something interesting out of all the noise out there?” … The real problem, Miller says, is much deeper and worrying, it’s the erosion of our Australian identity. “Our culture has been so watered down, that we are basically ersatz Americans as much as anything else, and the horse has bolted on that one… In the current ecology, it is almost impossible for Australian writers, actors, directors, producers to do good-quality material. It’s much more than just the fees they work with. It’s to do with even the understanding, at every level, that our culture shrivels up and dies unless you actively try to tell its stories.” [Photo: Steve Baccon for the Age]
