The Big Dog is playing at a cinema near you! Tickets available here https://www.2cpictures.com/films/thebigdog Dane McCusker is a director in Sydney, whose debut feature The Big Dog is about to start its theatrical release after sold-out sessions at Sydney Film Festival. The Big Dog is a dramedy about a married stockbroker with a penchant for the e…

Garth Davis is a director from Melbourne whose credits include the 6-time Oscar nominated Lion (2016), Mary Magdalene (2018), episodes of Jane Campion's show Top Of The Lake, and most recently Foe (2023). This episode we chatted about his beginnings in directing commercials, his first documentary feature in 2000 (one of Greig Fraser's first project…

Thomas M. Wright is an Australian director in Melbourne. He started as an actor and has since directed 2 features, the most recent being The Stranger, a Netflix original crime thriller starring Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris which premiered at Cannes 2022. He's incredibly intelligent and articulate. In this interview we chatted about everything from…

Hlynur Pálmason is an Icelandic filmmaker and artist. films include Godland, A White White Day, and Winter Brothers. He's won awards at Cannes, Toronto, Locarno and more. I saw Godland at Sydney Film Festival last year and had an absurd out of body experience, he's very quickly become one of my favourite directors.…

Happy awards season! Todays episode is with Frank Kruse and Lars Ginzel, sound supervisor and re-recording mixer of the new Netflix war film All Quiet on the Western Front, which recently won the BAFTA for Best Sound and is nominated for an Academy Award. Frank and Lars chat about their history in the German film industry, the extensive crowd recor…

Maya Newell is a documentary filmmaker in Sydney whose body of work is a beautiful testament to the power of documentary to engender empathy. Her first feature documentary, Gayby Baby, followed the experiences of children of same-sex parents, and her second, In My Blood It Runs, is a cinematic portrait of a young Indigenous boy in central Australia…

WARNING: In this episode, I repeatedly mispronounce Leo Grande. Sophie was really nice so she never corrected me and I didn’t realise till I uploaded. It’s not easy being this dumb but somehow I stumble through life. Sophie Hyde is a super talented Australian director from Adelaide whose first fiction feature, 52 Tuesdays, won directing awards at b…

In this episode I chat to sound supervisor Wayne Pashley and composer/music producer Elliott Wheeler about their work on the new Elvis biopic directed by Baz Luhrmann. I joined Wayne at his studio Big Bang Sound Design, and Elliott Skyped in from the US. We chatted about their history working with Baz Luhrmann, the intense collaboration between sou…

Lauren Hadaway is a director based in Los Angeles and Paris whose debut feature, The Novice, premiered this year at Tribecca to great reviews and several awards; it's since been released theatrically and has been nominated for 5 Independent Spirit Awards. However even before this phenomenal film, she was achieving remarkable success in post-product…

In this episode I had a great interview with supervising sound editor Robert Mackenzie and sound designer Dave Whitehead about their work on Jane Campions psychological thriller Western, Power of the Dog. We chatted about their collaboration with Jane, finding the right sound of spurs, working with Johnny Greenwood's score, how Jane personally dire…

Ben Lawrence is an Australian director whose credits include Hearts and Bones, Ghosthunter, and most recently Ithaka, a feature documentary following John Shipton, Jullian Assanges father, in his fight for Julian’s freedom. It’s premiering at Sydney Film Festival this Sunday 7th November, with music by Brian Eno. In my first face-to-face podcast in…

Eddie Martin is an Australian documentary director who shot to cult fame with his visceral 2005 documentary, Jisoe, about a Melbourne graffiti artist; some of his films since have included All This Mayhem, Have You Seen The Listers? and The Kids. The Kids revisits the cast of Larry Clarks cult 1995 film Kids, and is playing at Sydney Film Festival …

David France is a documentary filmmaker, writer and journalist in New York, whose directing credits include Oscar-Nominated How To Survive a Plague, The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson, and last year's Welcome to Chechnya, the horrific story of the genocide of queer people in the Russian state of Chechnya. In this Skype interview we discussed hi…

Kate Simko is a composer in London who's worked across a wide variety of docos and fiction films as well as having had a long career as an EDM DJ. Her most recent work is on the documentary Underplayed, which explores the issue of the lack of female-identifying DJs and the history of women in electronic music. We chatted about the influence of her …

Aunty Donna are a 6-piece comedy group from Melbourne, Australia, who have worked across video, stage performance, and music. They are very, very, very funny people.In this episode I chatted to two of the members; filmmaker Max Miller and composer/sound designer Tom Armstrong, about their new Netflix original series, Aunty Donna's Big Ol' House of …

Glendyn Ivin is an Australian director of features such as Last Ride and Penguin Bloom, which just premiered at TIFF, as well as amazing TV shows such as The Cry, The Beautiful Lie, and Puberty Blues. I managed to have a Skype interview with him while he was stuck in a two week quarantine in a hotel in Sydney, and we had a really amazing chat about…

In this episode I chat with Natalie Erika James and Robert Mackenzie, the director and sound designer of the hit Australian horror film Relic. In this Skype interview, we talked about the collaborative process of having a sound team working in 3 different cities, creating an extensive sample library before the edit, and how they created a sense of …

Ron Bartlett is a re-recording mixer working at the Formosa Group in LA, with over 170 credits to his name, including Bladerunner 2049, Reservoir Dogs, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Us, and the upcoming Dune film by Denis Villeneuve.In this Skype interview we chatted about his intro to sound through drumming, the exper…

Jed Kurzel is an Australian composer living in England. He is the brother of Australian director Justin Kurzel, and in addition to having scored all of his films (Snowtown, Assassins Creed and The True History of the Kelly Gang) he's composed for films such as Alien: Covenant, The Babadook and The Nightingale. In this Skype interview me and Jed tal…

Karen Baker Landers is a two-time Oscar-winning sound editor in LA, working for the Formosa Group. Her credits include The Bourne franchise, Skyfall, Spectre and Black Hawk Down.In this Skype interview we talked about her fascination with sound in storytelling since a young age, working with an audiences expectations of "movie" sound, and keeping t…

Justin Kurzel is an Australian director working in London; his films include Snowtown, The True History of the Kelly Gang, Macbeth and Assassins Creed. In this Skype interview we talked about his origins in theatre design, his collaboration with his brother and regular composer Jed Kurzel, creating a social-realistic sound in Snowtown and the influ…

For my first interview with a picture editor I was lucky enough to talk to the Oscar-nominee Douglas Crise! Douglas's credits have included Birdman, Babel, Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum. After seeing The Beach Bum I was absolutely compelled to chat to the person behind the edit. In this Facetime call we talked about how Doug likes to work with …

For this episode I did a cheeky little pod swap with the amazing sound design podcast Tonebenders. The Tonebenders hosts are incredibly talented with heaps of industry experience and they've been making awesome content for years so it was an absolute pleasure to hear from them and collaborate on this. In this ep you'll hear their interview with Bra…

Happy International Womens Day! As a late celebration here's a new episode with one of my favourite female directors, Mirrah Foulkes. Her first feature, Judy and Punch, is a violent, feminist retelling of the traditional Punch and Judy story. It premiered at Sundance in 2019, and she came on the podcast to chat about her journey from acting to dire…

Listen to the entire interview with Wayne Pashley, Derryn Pasquill and Andrew Miller from Big Bang Sound Design from episode 1 talk about their work on Mad Max, working with George Miller, their time on the Great Gatsby as well as a deep dive by Andrew Miller into sound effects editing for gunshots and action sequences.…

David White was the Oscar-winning sound designer on Episode 1 of the podcast, one of the several people I talked to about the soundtrack of Mad Max: Fury Road. In this complete interview with him he discusses his acting background, what it was like working with George Miller, what the Australian film industry could do better, and how story should t…

I went down to Big Bang Studios in Rosebery to chat with director Mike Green, sound designer Peter Climpson and mixer Wayne Pashley, who I'd previously talked to in my episode about Mad Max. We chatted about Mike's debut feature, Outback, a psychological thriller set in the Australian desert, how Mike and Peter developed a style in the films soundt…

In this episode I talk with a big name in Australian sound design, Annie Breslin. Annie has worked for decades in Australian post-production sound as well as film preservation and archiving, with directors such as Gillian Armstrong, Samantha Lang and Rachel Perkins, as well as in theatre and installation. She talked about the "old days" of Australi…

Peter Strickland is the British auteur director of underground cult hits such as The Duke of Burgundy, Berberian Sound Studio and In Fabric, which this year premiered at Toronto International Film Festival. I got the pleasure of interviewing him while he was in Sydney for a Q&A at AFTRS.In this interview he talked about the struggles of post-produc…

Yulia Akerholt is an Australian soundie who has worn all the hats in post-production sound over her career, specialising mostly in dialogue editing. She's worked on countless great Australian films such as Tracks, Samson and Delilah, and Little Fish.We had a great chat about the often under-appreciated art of dialogue editing, designing the desert …

For my coverage of Sydney Film Festival I interviewed Rob Braslin, one of five directors of Dark Place, an anthology of five short horror films by Indigenous directors; also joining us was actress Sara Pensalfini, who starred in Rob's short Vale Light. We talked about what it was like to work with a sound designer for the first time, the influence …

I had the pleasure of interviewing Samuel Van Grinsven and Stuart Melvey, director and re-recording mixer of the indie feature film Sequin in a Blue Room, which is premiering at Sydney Film Festival this month. They talked about making a thriller about contemporary queer culture, the struggles of indie filmmaking and creating a sense of claustropho…

I was fortunate enough to sit down with the 6-time Academy Award nominated Australian filmmaker Peter Weir, director, writer and producer of films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dead Poets Society and Master and Commander.Peter is an incredibly interesting person, and talked about everything from the influence of Jung's writings during the making …

Whilst on holiday in England, I hopped on the train to Twickenham Studios, just outside London, to have a chat with James Mather, who was sound supervisor of the last four Harry Potter films as well as having worked on Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Clash of the Titans and countless others. James has been working in the British industry for deca…

I interviewed Oscar-Winning director, writer and producer George Miller, amongst many other talented people, for Episode 1 of the podcast, "Fury Road: From Storyboard to Soundtrack." With so much great content I was unable to fit into an hour, I'm releasing them all individually.Here you can listen to George talk not only about Fury Road but also t…

Ben Osmo is an Oscar-winning Australian sound recordist whose extensive list of credits include Strictly Ballroom, Alien: Covenant and many of George Miller's films. We talked about his working relationship with George Miller, how he uses his role to help facilitate the film-making process, the technical challenges he encountered on Mad Max and Bab…

In this episode I chatted to musicians and sound designers CORIN, Becky Sui Zhen and Casey Hartnett about the music they composed for the Masters of Modern Art exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. I chatted with them about their collaboration, what it's like creating music for interactive audio-visual guides and how their music-making process is d…

Andy Wright is a sound supervisor, ADR recordist, and all round interesting person who works at Soundfirm in Sydney, and in recent years won an Oscar for his work as sound supervisor on Hacksaw Ridge. In this interview we talk about how he approaches working with actors in ADR, mixing a war scene, Mel Gibson's as a director and the Chinese film ind…

I had the pleasure of interviewing Dean Hurley, David Lynch's regular sound supervisor for over a decade, while he was here in Sydney working on the upcoming Sydney Festival event Masters of Modern Sound, where him and other sound practitioners are composing and performing works in response to the Art Gallery of NSW's current exhibition, Masters of…

In this special episode I talked to the Oscar-winning director of the Mad Max franchise, George Miller, as well as many of the people behind the soundtrack of this visceral action film, including David White, Wayne Pashley, Derryn Pasquill, Mark Wasiutak and Andrew Miller. In this comprehensive look at a franchise, I discuss with them how George ap…