Melbourne
March 29-30, 2025
Melbourne Showgrounds
Australian thriller Reaching Distance is looking to inject new life into the local industry, with producer Becca Saunders and director David Fairhurst taking fans behind the scenes at their Supanova Brisbane panel.
Cinema shake-up
David: “It’s a film that’s unique. It does stuff that you haven’t seen before, particularly from Australian films, and it does a lot of unexpected stuff and I think you can definitely tell it’s made with love, passion, blood, sweat and tears.”
Look before you leap (or don’t)
Becca: I’d never produced a feature film before – none of us had – so when David said to me, ‘I’ve got this film, do you want to produce it?’ I just went, ‘Yeah, okay.’ I mean, how hard can that be? It’s quite difficult, so don’t jump into it light-heartedly.
Breathing new life into a tired storytelling convention
David: “I wanted to do something different with the idea of photographic memory. You see it all the time, where it’s like, it makes this person a great detective or a great lawyer, and at least my perception of memory is far more emotional. The true moments of happiness in our lives are great, but they’re few and far between and because our memories aren’t perfect we tend to forget them, so I wanted to have a character whose [photographic memory] is a curse.”
Behind the scenes
Becca: “We’ve got four [behind-the-scenes] episodes…it’s all very well going to see something on the big screen, but not many people get to see how much effort goes into creating something that is seemingly so simple.”
Time is money
David: “There is a take in the film where Wade, who plays the lead, and Eddie, who is an Australian character actor who has been in everything, are talking about the movie Ghost, and in one of the takes they broke out into the entirety of Unchained Melody and sung the entire thing. It’s hilarious now, a year out of it, but we were trying to shoot a lot on that day and I was just kind of sitting there being like, ‘This is funny, but we really need to move on, guys.’”
Thinking outside the box
Becca: “LinkedIn for me was absolutely phenomenal because we had some awesome conversations with some really high up people and fantastic organisations, who would just have coffee and say, ‘The film’s not for us, but come have a chat if you need assistance.’ The way we got those meetings was because we tried those traditional routes, we were getting nowhere and I just went, ‘Bugger it, I’m going on LinkedIn and I’m talking directly to the CEO,’ who replied, ‘No one treats us like humans, so it’s great we’ve had a conversation.’ Thinking outside the box has helped us along the way.”
The longterm goal
David: “Coming out of a corporate mindset, we wanted the film to be able to make money. Sometimes Australian films can get so dependent on, ‘It’s about the art.’ Particularly because we’re so Screen Australia-reliant, it’s more about something being more culturally significant than it is commercially successful, but if we want to build an industry that is an industry and can be self-sustainable, you need to make stuff that has an audience and has a clear genre and has a way to find that audience.”
The cinema-goers of tomorrow
David: “Part of the approach to get the film made is there is this catch 22 of, ‘Young Australians don’t go to the cinema to see Australian films,’ so we stopped making films for young Australians years ago, so it’s just this self-fulfilling prophesy. So we’re adamant about having this theatrical release.”
Lead image by Ewan Ly
