Jane Manning on being a director and writer for television and film

Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Rachel: I don’t know about you, Lynne, but I watch a heck of a lot of TV, which I think comes from having a little kid and not going out much. We know when a show or documentary captures us, but I don’t think we think too much about what goes on behind the scenes, do we? 

Lynne: No, I know what you mean. How did that show make it on air? What was the process? What was the behind the scenes? Particularly, I think as writers we’re always interested in things like the script writing and how it is to write for TV and maybe even be in a writer’s room. Because that writing is such a different form of writing to what you and I are used to.

Rachel: Totally is. So, it is great to have director and writer Jane Manning with us today. To unpack all this for us and share her super interesting career journey. 

Lynne: I’m happy to introduce her! 

Jane is a multi-award-winning director and writer of drama and documentary. For her first short film, The One that Got Away, Jane took home the award for best director at Flicker Fest. Love that and her drama film Delivery Day won numerous awards and was long listed for the 74th Academy Award nominations. Jane has also worked as lead creative on the eight-part doco Back to Nature, and she directed the documentary Ka-Ching! Pokie Nation for the ABC. She’s worked as a writer director on multiple episodes of the SBS show, Who Do You Think You Are, Foxtel’s Coast Australia. I’ve written about that, beautiful show and Two of Us – also SBS. 

Jane was also lead director on the flagship Channel Nine war history series In Their Footsteps. She recently co-founded Lantern Pictures with writer showrunner Sarah Lambert and media executive Andrew Lambert to create bold premium international TV drama series.

Welcome Jane!

Jane Manning: Thank you. It’s lovely to be here with you both. 

Rachel: Welcome, Jane, it is so great to have you! Many wouldn’t know that you and I have known each other for years through my lovely friend Jackie Manning, who happens to be your sister. So, hi Jack, if you’re listening! 

Well, something we didn’t put in your bio, but that is a fun fact for fans of Home and Away is that you were one of the first female directors on that show. Is that right? What was that like? 

Jane: I think so. I think I was about the third. It’d been going for about twenty to twenty-five years and, they used to have very regular people that worked on that show for a very long time. So, there were few openings, I suppose for new directors, but there was one year where a lot of the people that worked on that went to work on another show and it kind of opened up. And actually, I think there had been one of those longstanding directors had been a woman, but mostly the vast majority were men over the twenty years, and I think in that year that it opened up. Actually, a good friend of mine did the block before me and I think she was the second female director and then there was me, the third, but I think for our block I also had a female first AD and that was the first time in Home and Away’s twenty-year history at that point that there was a female director and a female first AD. 

For those that don’t know, the first assistant director is the one doing all the bossing around on set when you see movie sets and there’s someone going, come on, hurry up, blah, blah. That’s the first AD. They keep the set running to schedule and keep it all organised. So, it was a bit of a novelty. It was really great, actually. 

Lynne: Fantastic. Home and Away is pivotal and quite a few of the people that we’ve interviewed, particularly anyone working in film or TV, a series like that must have employed so many Australians at the beginning of their career and set them up. Do you learn a lot in that episodic television? 

Jane: So much. Actually, that was such a good experience for me. I had to confess; I’d never watched the show before I got the role, so I had to start watching it when I knew I had that job. So, for about three months I began watching it. But those serials, like Home and Away, Neighbours have been a huge training ground for writers and directors, and they’ve been really important to our industry for building up skills. But having said that, they were also in themselves, you had to be really skilful and prepared to do those jobs because they’re shot very fast. 

Lynne: Demanding schedules.

Jane: Yes, and to actually keep to schedule was a big challenge and it’s really important. Plus, you’re trying to get quality performances and so on. So, you had to take that quite seriously. I remember really preparing for that show. I’d only done short films before that. I’d never worked with a really big crew. So, I really wanted to show up prepared, which meant a good week or two of homework and shot listing beforehand. That really paid off because it went really smoothly. In fact, it went really well. And it was great fun and gave me a lot of confidence actually.

Lynne: Oh, that’s great. So, tell us a little about your career journey and how it’s evolved over the years. Where did you start out? 

Jane: I started out, I did a mass communications degree, majoring in film and back then it’s so different to imagine, but there was no internet. So, films were a bit of a mystery and what the director or producer, writer did, it was all a bit of a mystery. You couldn’t really go online and research. I’d always been completely captured by films and particularly when I was, I don’t know, from the ages of seven onwards, I was one of those kids that just loved movies, and I wanted to work out how. I remember once my cousins were staying with us and they talked about an actor being in a movie, and I was like, oh, and they’d been in that movie, and they’d been in that movie, and it was this idea that these actors could be in. I just thought of them as characters. And so, I began really looking carefully so I could be grown up and talk about the actors in the movie and I remember when I was about ten, watching this film called Strangers on a Train directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and I wasn’t meant to be watching it. It was that classic thing where I was hiding behind the couch and my mum was working night shifts at a hospital. She was a nurse, and my dad was a bit more lax about letting me hide behind the couch and watch stuff, but it was way too scary for a ten-year-old to be watching.

There’s a scene where you just saw these footsteps on the ground, as you know, I think one of the men was going to go and murder someone and you just saw these footsteps walk along a footpath and it was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. There was a part of my brain afterwards that’s going, how did I get so scared just watching feet on a footpath and began getting very interested in film language. So sorry, that was a bit of a glimpse into childhood. 

I was always one of those kids that loved movies. But to say that you wanted to work in film to me was a bit like saying you wanted to be an astronaut or president of the world. It was like, I had no idea how you got there and what you did. So, I did a mass communications degree, majoring in film and loved it and left that, and I did really well in the course and in those days, you’d get the yellow pages and write to film companies and send off your resume and no one responded. And it was a time where all my friends were travelling and so I couldn’t get work for a year. I didn’t know anyone in the industry. I decided to go travelling with my friends and I ended up living in Italy for a year, and when I got back to Australia there was an Italian film festival showing, and at that stage I spoke Italian. I just rocked up and said, is there any work here? And that’s how I got my first job was working for the company that was one bringing this festival and two, they were also producing films and so on. So that was my first job. 

Lynne: Wow. It’s so interesting, isn’t it? The cinematography and the Hitchcock movies, it’s just amazing. I feel sad if young people have never seen a Hitchcock, because you might think that they’re, I mean, that’s black and white Strangers on a Train, isn’t it? And it’s amazing what you can do with those limitations. It’s amazing. 

Jane: It’s incredible and just on that, sorry, it is interesting to your listeners, but, because it’s not so much about writing, but it is about film language. But in my twenties, there’s a great book called Hitchcock by Truffaut, where Francois Truffaut, the director, interviews Hitchcock. I think he interviewed him over about eight or nine or ten days and that book became my education into film language. If anyone’s interested in film, it’s one of the best books I think that you can read about film language and Hitchcock was a great believer in the visual storytelling. And so, it was funny that years later I went to that, and I remember writing copious notes from that book, which I’ve still got, and they still ring true because he was all about telling the subtext in the visual just below the audience’s level of consciousness and how that can be more powerful. 

Lynne: So interesting. 

Rachel: How incredible. Well, I know from our chats that we’ve had, that you’ve done a lot of writing in your work, particularly on shows that you wouldn’t think would require scripts like Who Do You Think You Are? Which is considered unscripted, but it’s not really, is it?

Jane: There’s this really funny thing – the shorthand in our industry for documentary is unscripted and as opposed to scripted for drama. But the very first documentaries I’ve worked on and all since have involved a lot of writing. My very first job in documentary was these four half hours, Two of Us and what writing means in documentary is that, and that was based on the Good Weekend column about friendships and where, so these half hours for SBS about friendships, but when you go to shoot a documentary, you need to make a plan for what you’re filming and what story you’re telling because there’s an infinite, even with say, a friendship with ten two people, there’s an infinite number of ways you could tell that story. 

I’ve always found you need one idea in a documentary, one unifying idea and I remember the first time I had this producer who said, you need to write a script for this Two of Us episode and it was about these two homeless men called John and Carl, and they had lived on the streets for years together around Surry Hills. Carl was about twenty years older than John, and Carl was this small wiry, Aussie battler guy, such a character and John was from Scotland, and I think Carl was about seventy and John was about fifty. John was from Scotland, and he was quite poetic, and he had this beautiful facility with language, and they had basically been best friends on the street for about ten years. But Carl had been moved into a nursing home and he hated it. He stood at the gates every day with these bars going, let me out of here, let me out, I want to get back on the streets? And we were to film this half hour documentary, and it was like Carl was going to come out for the day and have one more day on the street with John before going because they’ve really missed each other. They hadn’t seen each other for two years. I kind of remember in the preparation for that, I can tell that story, but what’s the drive of this? And I couldn’t get it. I remember doing this plan and there was nothing like that was really exciting me. But then this idea dropped into my head. It’s like, oh my God, it’s Romeo and Juliet. You know, it’s like they love each other, but they can’t be together anymore. 

So, you get this one unifying idea, and it was just having that animated half hour. Similarly, with Who Do You Think You Are? You know, if your viewers know that show? It’s very heavily researched and particularly we were making, I worked on the first seven series, which were made out of Perth and an unusually large part of the budget went to the research on those episodes which was very unusual and lovely and what would happen was the researchers would work for months.

Firstly, you’d find a potential celebrity who might have an interesting background then you’d research all their ancestors and there were often ten really interesting ones and then you’d have to focus on four or so on, and then you’d come on as the writer/director and go and do what we call a recce, which is like you’d visit the locations where you’re going to film and you’d work out how the mystery would unfold, how you would keep it from, how they would go on a journey and you’d plot that journey. They were very heavily scripted. You would write these thirty to forty, fifty-page scripts with all the bits of archive that you were going to use, the locations, the characters, the bits of information that you’d want to find out and what you were really after was the emotional journey that they would go through and how that would affect them. You would want to build to a crescendo, I suppose, of revelation and they were heavily scripted, and it was really important, you didn’t know always how they’d react. You would guess, but often the beauty of making those shows is they’d often react in slightly different ways than you would anticipate. So, you wanted to always have variations, like they might get really upset finding out their ancestor was, I’m going to make it up a murder or something. Or they might be some terrible character. Or they might find that really exciting if it was long away, you never quite knew how that was going to happen and so, you’d anticipate that within the program too. So, there was a real process of writing those and carefully plotting their journey throughout those episodes.

Rachel: So, would you have to script in case they had one reaction compared to another reaction like almost how you would go in? 

Jane: We totally worked off a shooting script with that. You would script quite carefully, and in each scene, you would put down the points that you needed to hit in terms of the information you were giving or what you wanted to elicit in terms of their reflection on what was happening and usually on the day that’s your safety blanket, I suppose. You know you’ve got a good episode if you’ve hit those points and then usually on the day other things would be happening that you could also reflect on. And it was such a beautiful show to work on. I directed seven episodes and the first two I also researched as well and spent many months on those two episodes, which were Cathy Freeman and Christine Anu.

But every single episode was so special to work on because one, you are going through this extraordinary history that often isn’t that well known and through those families, you’re just encountering this incredible history, but you’re also witnessing the impact on the person and that you’d get amazing reactions and, I think, that was one of the really special things about that show. You couldn’t predict these quite big emotional reactions that you’d get. It would shift people and change them.

Lynne: That’s so interesting. I see a lot of parallels with the writing we do where you’re doing big feature stories and you’re working on an interview and you might have a brief and you’re trying to go where the editor wants, but it can go anywhere. That personal touch, that’s the thing, that’s where you connect with people, isn’t it? That whole people element. And if it was pretty obvious, it wouldn’t be as compelling to watch, would it? 

Rachel: I was thinking the same when you were talking about that. You know, you kind of have one shot, I suppose, of getting it, and in an interview, sometimes you’ve only got one shot to get what you need in an interview as a writer. So, you have to be really skilled to get it. You kind of know what you need going in, and you have to be quite skilled to navigate that conversation to get what you need for the story. So, there is some parallels for sure.  

Jane: There is and yet, and that’s so true in documentary, you really do only get one shot. That is part of the job of the storytelling. I’ll tell one story I did Shaun Micallef’s episode where he went back, which is a beautiful episode. And part of that his dad is Maltese and his mum is Australian born of Irish extraction and we told a little bit of his mum’s story, but it was building to going back to Malta. And Shaun, his dad is the loveliest man, but he and Shaun had never really, they’d never spoken about much stuff. His mum is larger than life and hilarious. His dad’s quite quiet and he knew that his dad had been in Malta in the war and when you learn the history of World War II, I think Malta was the most bombed places on earth in World War II. He said his dad used to give him warplanes as presents and so on. So, he had this sense that it was weird, but he never, ever spoke about his experience in Malta as a child. 

We took Shaun back to Malta and back to his dad’s childhood home and we were filming that story over a couple of days, and on the afternoon of one day, we went back to his dad’s childhood home, and you suddenly saw that Shaun was understanding that his dad as a five-year-old would have so much trauma from that street being bombed. You could almost feel as we were filming that afternoon, this massive emotion was going to be arising in Shaun. You can just sense, you could just feel like the tectonic plates under him were shifting. 

The next day we were going to be filming the archives, and I knew it listed all the people who had died in that street during the bombing, and a couple of them were next door neighbours, the same age as Shaun’s dad and just by sheer luck, Shaun’s dad’s family went and stayed with an auntie in a different street that didn’t get bombed that night and so they kept safe. I think that morning, it was planned that a photographer was going to be coming to the archives to take the stills for the thing and this photographer was quite a loud personality. I just remember thinking, we’ve got to shut everything down, we’ve got to keep this really focused and quiet because I think something big is going to happen here, you know? And it did. It was one of the most emotional scenes I’ve ever filmed, and it was almost a lifetime of Shaun realising that his dad had carried this, his whole life. Shaun got to see, really understand his dad on a really deep level and in the writing, you had a certain amount planned, but then things happen on set that you’re like, we’ve got to adjust everything, this is actually going to be the big moment.

Lynne: Talk to us about Ka-Ching! Because that’s another big project and it was about Australia’s poker machine addiction. It’s such a huge problem. What drew you to that and how did it go? 

Jane: Well, I was really lucky that was the baby, and the passion project of a man called Neil Lawrence, who was a very big name in advertising and yet he was a childhood friend of Tim Costello. I don’t know if you know Tim Costello. He has been one of the people at the forefront of really trying to get public awareness about the damage that poker machines have caused. And simply from that childhood friend, I think he had contacted Neil at some point and said, could you do a campaign around this?

It took Neil some time to realise that what really needed to happen was a documentary and he’d spent years putting. He knew all the research and all the people, but he needed a director for that episode. So, he reached out to me for that. There was a couple of really big things to do in that documentary.

I remember my neighbour saying to me when I said I was working on this, that she said something like, I just don’t understand poker machine addiction. I understand drug addicts and alcoholics and so on, but why would you even do it? And I thought, that’s what we’ve got to answer. At that point when we made that film, it was still kind of seen, I think generally people saw poker machine addicts as it didn’t make sense – why you would put money into this machine and lose all your money, and yet the research showed that it actually activates within your body exactly the same thing as cocaine and other what it does to your dopamine. It’s not about ingesting something, it’s about how your body’s reacting to this event. So that was a key idea, and the other key idea was how do we take or the audience through a one-hour story so that they really understand what’s going on.

One of the ideas was to begin with the graphics and then the sound, and then have the machine works. It’s almost like you’re going from the surface to this deep part of your animal body. What it is, is you are reacting to the unpredictability and human beings, like all animals are pattern recognisers and it’s tapping into this part of you, this pattern recogniser as well as obviously telling the story of an industry unfortunately, in conclusion with governments exploiting that in the human being and telling that side of the story as well. Even in the writing of that it’s often good again, to have themes that you’re working with, and we really focused on the human being as an animal. We are an animal. We have these biological, so you’d make all these choices. 

For example, the poker machine, we used to show how they write the formulas to get you keep playing. We made sure it was an animal poker machine. So that thing isn’t obvious in the audience’s head, but it starts building, it keeps building throughout the episode that we’re this animal responding to this fiction machine, and it’s almost beyond our control. We had all the footage of Pavlov’s experiments, and you know the animals in those experiments. We kept going to that as a theme. Now, as a viewer, you’re not necessarily conscious of that, but these ideas work powerfully on an unconscious level too. 

Lynne: It unites it and tells the common story.

Jane: That’s the thing where in a documentary you are telling truth and facts, but you’re still looking for the best ways to tell those stories and to do it in a way that’s going to work powerfully on the audiences conscious and unconscious, I suppose and that’s what we try and do in documentary film making. 

Rachel: Do you think you need an instinct for that or is it something you feel like you really learned as you went along and people taught you, and you thought, oh, I hadn’t thought to approach it that way or something. Or is it the instinct is strong in how to tell a story in that way?

Jane: I think it’s actually both, Rachel. I’ve always kind of loved telling stories and in fact, I know you through my sister Jackie, and I was her older sister, and I can remember there was this one year where we shared a room and I would literally stay up telling her all these stories, always try and make her go, oh my God! And so, you know, you learn that. There is that natural instinct, but you do learn a lot along the way, and you often learn from people going, that’s not enough, what else is there? Okay, I’ve got to bring something really special to this. The people that you’re working with, you’ve got to make that clearer. You’ve got to really, it’s often, you know the great story, but you’ve got to really articulate it well and make it really clear to the audience and break it down in a way. So, there’s skills as well as a natural propensity I would say.

Lynne: With something like a Ka-Ching! I guess some of the problems are, is what you leave out? It’s a fairly confronting subject and in some ways people would’ve lost a lot, destroyed families. What ethical challenges do you face when you’re telling these real stories? 

Jane: That’s a really good question, particularly in relation to that particular documentary.

It comes up with every documentary, but that one was in particular, interestingly, a couple of things. Neil, who had, that was his passion project over years. He had seen that there were other documentaries that almost focused entirely on people who’d been victimised, and he had seen that hadn’t changed government policy or things. So, he said and originally, he had the idea of doing, no victims or people who victimised by poker machines in the documentary. And I said, look, you’re going to need some because you read these stories, and they tear your heart up. He had this great analogy, he said, okay, but let’s make it like a great wine. There’s not too much alcohol, but there’s some, you know? And that was our approach in that documentary too, is that now, in terms of, I’ve done lots of documentaries on difficult subjects, and you know, you reach out to find people who are willing to be public about it. That documentary was the hardest of all because it would’ve been easier to find heroin addicts or sex workers or anyone who has to come on screen than poker machine addicts, partly because they are stigmatised as these, as being individually really, you know, heavily stigmatised.

So that was actually a big challenge with that. But once we actually got onto a network of someone who had started a poker machine, anonymous group. And once we got onto that network and gained their trust, there were a few people that were really willing to come on board. 

Lynne: Do you think that storytelling, I mean, it sounds like you do storytelling with documentaries. Do you think that changes? Is it different from scripted drama or is there something that unites them all? 

Jane: I think good storytelling on screen always connects with people’s emotions and you know, it’s that, make ’em laugh, make ’em cry. Shakespeare had that. It is famously when you study Shakespeare at school, you have a tragic scene followed by comic light relief, and it’s about something deeper. Honestly, I think that is just human storytelling. That’s what we do. You know? And that’s what you do on screen, whether it’s documentary or drama, it’s what we do in books. So, there are differences, of course, but even in drama, I personally love dramas that are very alive on screen and the challenge in documentary is corralling life into a story. I suppose the challenge in drama is. 

Lynne: Corralling a story into life?

Jane: That’s right. Thank you. That’s really interesting. You find life between the lines, but of course you have beautiful writers in drama that create a lot of that for you. But again, as a director, you then want to really feed life into those lines. 

Rachel: Well, the other big series you worked on and that you wrote as well was Back to Nature, which told stories from the land. What were the challenges in that show? 

Jane: Back to Nature is an eight by half hour series, which was on the ABC. I think it went to air in 2021 or was it 22? Might have been 22. But anyway, it was an unusual show. I hadn’t really seen anything like it before. It came from a Finnish series. It was based on a Finnish series, but really had to be reimagined in the Australian context. It was hosted by Aaron Pederson and Holly Ringland, and we really wanted it to be that this immersion almost, not quite slow TV, but we wanted the audience to really sink into the beauty of places that aren’t too far from us. It was about reimagining and honouring our relationship with the land and with nature and Country as First Nations people beautifully describe it. 

The challenges with that is that it wasn’t obvious stories like when you go and tell a history show about war or something like it. The story is so there, whereas in Back to Nature, it was more tenuous and subtle. So, the challenge was, it wasn’t as reliant on hard and fast story and facts. It was just this more subtle way there might be a five-minute story about walking up to a grove of trees. So, it was capturing that relationship with those ancient trees. There was something beautiful to doing that though because there was this slightly mythic element that the land is alive. That again, when we talk about these big. I’ll go back because when we were developing that series, we had this real sense of the kind of stories we wanted to tell and there were stories about geology or this particular or how we often. I noticed that in so many, like over the last, however many years of television, there’s been how many decades, a lot of nature documentaries are about everything’s at war with each other and trying to kill each other and so on and when you actually look at things, it’s like entire system of nature pretty much works together. It’s extraordinary, you know, this ant will help these fungi, which will help this animal, which will, and yes, animals have to eat, but they don’t do it wantingly. Human beings are really the only animals that do destruction, really wantingly.

Often there’s this thing, it’s called symbiosis where things are helping. So, we wanted to tell stories about that and of course there’s a very strong First Nations element in the series and it was like, what unites them all? I couldn’t get that, for, I don’t know, about a year as we were researching it. I didn’t know what was that unifying theme. And we actually had beautiful writer Bruce Pasco, who’s a First Nation’s man and was something of an advisor and mentor in the beginning. And I remember I rang him up and I said, if this series could tell the audience one thing, what would that be? He was just lovely and silent, and he went, the land is alive. And he meant that as like, it’s a being, you know, it’s not dead matter or it’s not un-sentient, it’s a being and that became kind of this, that’s what unified every part of it. So again, I suppose that was a challenge, finding the unifying story and that unifying story became in every single thing we did, that the land is alive, and we are in relationship with the land as a being.

Lynne: You’ve worked on so many interesting projects. Are you at that stage of your career where work comes to you or are you still out there pitching and hustling? How does it work? 

Jane: Still out there pitching and hustling because I mean, certain work comes to you, but you also want to keep expanding and doing. I keep want to do wildly different things that haven’t been done before and that’s always hard to get people over the line on those things. You’re still out there pitching and hustling, and I’ve really transitioned in the last year I’ve been working with my dear friend Sarah and her brother Andrew, on a company that’s focused on drama and having been mainly in documentary for the last twenty years.

That’s a return. I mean, it’s kind of a return in some ways, but it’s also new again. So, it’s like, what can we do in drama? How can we push the envelope? What kind of stories can we tell? And I’m also learning a lot about that TV drama process right from the beginning and the writing and conception. I just think it’s in your nature that you’re always  

Lynne: Always hustling.

Rachel: I’m always really interested in the process of how things go from a concept right to the end. So, if you are directing something, does that influence how you write scenes and, and what kind of comes first is the script writing right towards the end where you pull it all together.

Jane: I’ll break down just in documentary that what you will do before you go on a shoot, you will absorb all the research, and you will write down a bunch of ideas and potential scenes and you’ll try and find that unifying story throughout it so that it’s compelling to an audience. So, you do that before you go on a shoot, and you make plans, and for me, I like to break down the scenes and I’m asking this, this, this, and we are showing this and we’re going here. So that’s all, all there as your plan. Then you get to set, and you’ve got the blueprint but things will change the weather, everything changes and you respond to that, but you’ve got your blueprint to go back to and you are trying to get life and almost invariably on documentary, and this is what I love about it, some weird stuff happens and it goes in this slightly different but interesting direction.

So, you trust your instinct. On the day if someone says something interesting that you haven’t thought of before, you want to push and get into that. And I think of the director’s role on a documentary set is like creating this very safe, quiet, focused place that allows magic to emerge and allows, it’s very important that the people on camera allowed to be themselves. That they’re not trying to like to be good or follow some, they’re allowed to be real and then you get that in footage and then ideally of although there’s this awful thing happening in documentary where directors are less and less in post-production, but in the old days, the director and in a really good model, directors go all the way through to the very end and writers write a director role and you get all the footage and you have transcripts and you do your paper cut and so your paper cut is going through transcripts and moulding the story that way before the edit. Then the editor gets your paper cut and they start building the documentary.

Usually if it’s an hour-long documentary, the first thing that the edit assembles – it’s called an assembly edit. That might be three hours and it’s all the rough shape of what you’re doing. Then I like what’s called ground up editing. You are actually listening to the heartbeat of the footage and pulling out the best bits rather than trying to impose some idea that you’ve got on top. It’s really important to me and even as a viewer, when I go and see documentaries that have done that, they’ve listened to the heartbeat of the film. I love it. As a viewer, I can tell when it’s kind of been imposed from above. It’s never as interesting. And so, that’s what you do in the edit. You try and draw that out and then sometimes if you have a documentary that has narration, you then have to write the narration. Again, narration writing is a real skill. You want to do it in a way that it’s usually to help clarify the story, but you don’t want to tell people what they’re seeing. You want to enhance what they’re seeing. You don’t want to say, so and so is now going here. You’re trying to get underneath what’s happening in the narration so that you’re enhancing what’s on screen, not just pointing out what’s on screen. And that’s where a real discipline with language comes in. I know in terms of being, that’s where, in documentary, that’s where your real discipline with language is. Every word has to earn its place, and you won’t put in any adjective or adverb or anything that doesn’t really belong there. It’s a process of peeling down every word to be essential.

Rachel: That’s so fascinating, isn’t it? So good. 

Lynne: Our listeners are mostly writers. But they’re talented in many areas, and I’m thinking that a few of them might want to go into turn their hand to writing for TV or transferring their skills to documentary. Where do they start? 

Jane: It’s the question that’s mainly asked, and yet it’s the hardest one to answer because unfortunately there’s no, there’s very little pathway like there used to be. I started by being a researcher and I loved research, and I still would enjoy research. I worked on both documentaries and drama as a researcher where people are looking for good researchers and that can be finding people to appear in a documentary, finding archive, finding the background story and you need a good writer and story brain to be a good researcher as well. So, you need to have that good story instinct. You need to trust, oh, that’s really interesting, all that huge pile of thing, but that huge pile might. That was the way that I came into doing what I’m doing. I suppose I would recommend that potentially. And it is really an interesting thing, and if you’ve researched your own essay or article or you know how to research.

Lynne: I know a lot of journalists do move into research for TV. That’s whether it’s factual television or current affairs or something. Or into something like the ABC or SBS where they might have some roles. 

Jane: In terms of other paths, there’s probably as many paths as there are people working in this industry. I mean, the other thing potentially people go to film school, or they make their own film. I think making your own film, especially now that equipment’s so accessible, you can shoot a good short doc on your iPhone really. If you find a place where something like that could be shown and you have an idea, an interesting idea, I would encourage people to just go and, if they have an idea that they’re really compelled by, go and make it yourself or find out who you can make it with and hopefully find a place you can show that. That’s also a really good way to get experience is by doing it yourself and the more conventional way, obviously is just contacting production companies and so on.

But this is an industry that really runs on word of mouth a lot and a bit of luck of timing as well. You could contact a company thirty times over three years, or you could contact them once when they need exactly what you’re offering, and you’ll get it. It’s often about a bit of luck timing.

Rachel: Interesting. Do you find your, you’ve got lots of downtime and slow patches. I know a lot of writers listening would be nodding along to this, or are you pretty much constantly working these days or starting projects or having overlapping stuff going on? 

Jane: It’s funny because even when I’ve just got so used to the rhythm of freelance life that yes, there are times when you’re not working or getting paid on something. They’re usually the times when I’m getting obsessed by some project or idea that may eventuate later on. Even Back to Nature’s a classic one. I’d begun, I was obsessed with tree sentience and stuff like that, and no one was paying me, but I was just sitting at home doing three months of research on tree sentience and so on and thinking, this is a bit out there, God, I’d love to make a documentary about this. And then the Finnish thing came across my path, and it was like, oh, I could do it. So, things come from those obsessions and interests, and I think you do obviously have to make money last throughout those periods and there are fallow periods where you’re not actually working, but they’re often where you’re building your reservoir of ideas and working out what areas you are interested in. 

Lynne: It’s interesting. Can we talk a little bit about money, because you did mention that. How do you charge? Do you get paid by the episode? Do you do a project fee or are there things like residuals? How does it all work? 

Jane: It depends a little bit job to job. So, on something like a one-off documentary, you’ll have a contract and so when I did Ka-Ching! Pokie Nation, you get a contract, and you’d get a certain amount, which is the industry amount. You just get that. If I go and work on say a series, it might often be a weekly fee. I’m actually about to work a job for the ABC at the end of the year and that’s a daily, weekly fee because it’s like I’m just turning up to do a bit of the directing. It’s not something I generated, and you just get a weekly, daily fee for that. 

When we made Back to Nature, that’s a real risk because you actually have to put a lot of work in to get a series like that up and you might never get paid for it. So those sorts of things are a risk, but when you do get them up, you get, our industry has a whole bunch of standard fees and budgets, so, you get paid a certain amount as a producer or director or a writer, and there are awards. So, you tend to get that. For people listening who are interested in writing for television it does depend, and if you’re writing drama, there’s a whole different set of standards. Again, there’s different rates for writing serial tv, like Home and Away than there is for writing what’s called a limited series, or if you’re doing a six by one, you’ll have a slightly different rate. It does vary a little bit. 

Lynne: Do you have to be quite tough at negotiating for yourself? 

Jane: I’m terrible at that. I was really terrible at that when I began. I’m better at it now. You learn that muscle. As I said, there are awards and standards, so you can’t be, especially in documentary, which doesn’t have huge, you can’t be wildly crazy with what you demand because otherwise you just won’t be able to make the program. But you do get rewarded for experience as well.

Rachel: Interesting. I know that you are recently kind of moving from documentary into drama with Lantern Pictures and there is a drama series you mentioned to me that you’re working on. Can you tell us anything about that or do you to kill us?

Jane: Basically, Sarah, my partner is one of the best writers of drama in Australia and is very sought after, and she comes up with ideas all the time and she had this great idea that the ABC loved. And so, we are developing it into a six by one hour series and with drama, you have a development period where you will flesh out the idea, write a plan for the series, and often get money to write maybe episode one and two.

So, you put together what’s called a Bible and the Bible talks about the characters, the main idea of the series, the tone of the series, the individual characters, and has a plan for each episode. You often have a Bible episode one script and episode two script, and that’s what you then take out to try and get funding for the whole series. Because as you know, TV series are expensive, so people want to see what they’re investing in. 

We’re at the stage where we’ve just done development for our first series, and we are now going out to fund that, and it’ll be a six by one hour series on the ABC. It’s had a really great response, and so fingers crossed we get it funded and we would then shoot that next year, and it would go on television in 2027. And that’s actually quite quick. I know that sounds a lot, that’s actually quite quick for a TV series. I’ve got friends who’ve had to, it can take five or ten years to get a TV series from idea to being on telly. 

Lynne: Well, I’ve certainly heard, Kitty Flanagan talking about the process with Fisk and how long it took. I think it was six or seven years and it’s done incredibly well. It was rejected by so many people, and it had been many different versions of what it ended up being as it got pitched and re-pitched and finalised. 

So, tell us what a typical work week looks like for you. Is there one?

Jane: It is funny is at the moment it is not that typical because I’m doing something new, which is transitioning into TV drama and although I’m still developing documentaries, it’s been very untypical this last year. But this week, for example, we’ve been doing stuff on financing the TV series with Lantern. I’ve also been involved in a children’s feature drama, and I’ve been doing some script editing and preparation for that. So that’s three days this week on the drama, and part of that was getting up pitch decks, so looking at budgets and that sort of thing.

Now I’m attached as a director to a children’s drama film, and I’m doing some script editing on that. Next week I’m planning, I have a feature documentary idea, and I’m going to be writing up a two or three pager for a producer for that may. So, there’s a lot of development at the moment. So that’s what you call, when you’re pitching and hustling and trying to get projects up. I’m in that phase, I suppose at the moment. I’m really excited in a couple of weeks we hopefully are, or in a few weeks we’re hopefully going into development on a Lantern second drama series, just development and I’ll be one of the writers in the writer’s room on that. That might be a week of sitting in a writer’s room, which is amazing fun with these incredible writers and just throwing ideas at a wall. Again, it’s one of Sarah’s, they’re formed ideas, but you build them out. It’s a week of sitting in a room, putting ideas on the wall to build out a series. That’s really fun. That’s like being a kid playing with other kids and so on. 

Lynne: Sounds fun! 

Jane: So, it’s pretty varied at the moment.

Rachel: Well, something we do love asking all our guests about is their favourite tools of the trade. So, are there any programs or apps or software that you would be lost without?

Jane: Notes!

Lynne: Notes? 

Jane: Sorry. I’m a bit of a Luddite, so I’m not great, but Notes is what I use all the time in terms of putting ideas down. And they start, to get a bit disorganised and then I have to do a whole lot of clearing up of Notes, but basically, I’ll be out on the morning walk, listening to a podcast and some amazing idea will pop into my head about some project that I’d like to do one day, and I’ll just put it down in Notes, what that idea is and start building. Sometimes I’ve got projects or ideas that I’m interested in, and I might have a year or two little gems on Notes and by the time I get round to developing that idea, I’ll just go to the note on that project and a lot of it will be there. I’d say that is the most useful at this point.

I love as a director and putting together pitch, I’m very fond of Shot Deck, which is where you get visual ideas for things. It’s an image bank basically, that you have to subscribe to if you want to use, but it’s basically a bunch of images and that’s extraordinary as a director. When we started out in this industry, there was nothing like that and you literally had to go through thousands of photo books or go to the library and try to. 

Lynne: Or do sketches. 

Jane: That’s right! Or do stick figure drawings. But now to have Shot Deck and so many ways you can get so many visual ideas. I think that’s a really beautiful program. They’re the two that I use the most and actually kind of enjoy using and that really helped me. 

Lynne: Wow. Thank you so much, Jane. It’s been so interesting, so much. I love those stories. 

Rachel: It really has.

Lynne: A real insight into the world of documentaries in particular, and drama too. Thank you so much for coming on. Tell us where everyone can find you and connect with you. 

Jane: I do have a website that was my website for the last few years that actually needs updating now. I worked on my own as Threshold Pictures, but that kind of needs updating. But that is on there and then with Lantern, we haven’t even had time to do a website, so we’ve just got a landing page at the moment. It’s a whole big deal to do a website. Lantern Pictures just has a landing page at the moment, but we’re hoping to get all our comms and branding up to speed by the end of the year. So, fingers crossed we will have a proper website by then. They’re the best two places and I’m also on LinkedIn. 

Lynne: Fantastic.

Rachel: Oh great. We’ll pop that in the show notes, which brings us to the end of the show this week. Thank you everybody who’s listened to our lovely chat with Jane, and we will see you next week. Thank you. 

Lynne: Thanks, Jane. Bye!

Rachel: Bye!

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Credits:

Connect with Jane via her website: https://www.thresholdpics.com/ or via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-manning-98079321/

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

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