School for fanatics of film rolls into town
It is a short walk to the Fox Studios soundstages where The Matrix trilogy, two Star Wars episodes and Wolverine were shot. Even closer is the production house where the animated Happy Feet came to life and where the director Baz Luhrmann chose his office while making the epic film Australia.
And right out in front are two cinema complexes and a dance school that is crowded with hyperactive youngsters in leotards after school.
The new headquarters of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School - on the site of the old Babe set at Moore Park’s Entertainment Quarter - is smack in the middle of Sydney’s film heartland.
After two decades in the grounds of Macquarie University in North Ryde, it is a big move in every way for the national film school. Instead of an awkwardly laid-out building that was remote from the industry, the new base is open, airy and feels refreshingly like it could encourage creative work, which it will need to do if the country’s filmmakers are to get rolling again.
In the early weeks at its new home, the school is being reinvented under its director, Sandra Levy, a long-time film and television producer and former executive at the ABC and Nine Network. Just about everything except the name seems to be changing, and even that was briefly considered.
“Suddenly the school is part of the business, whereas it wasn’t at North Ryde,” Levy says. “Being so far out of town, with the building laid out in an isolating manner, it was not a great environment for the sort of organisation that needs to be creatively charged and full of excitement and contradiction.” Levy says the school is taking a new attitude to training, which involves new courses and new types of students, so it can become “a major contributor to a generational shift in Australian film”.
Its biggest successes include the Oscar-winning cinematographers Andrew Lesnie, who shot the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, and Dion Beebe, who shot Chicago and Memoirs Of A Geisha. The school’s claim to have “an international reputation for excellence” is also backed by three Oscar nominations for short films in the past seven years.
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