Picture Partnership CO-PRODUCTIONS AND THE AUSTRALIAN SCREEN INDUSTRIES
Australia didn’t enter into any international co-productions until 1986, when we signed a memorandum of understanding with France; this makes our film industry a very late bloomer compared to others across the world. As our burgeoning industry started to catch the world’s gaze during our golden era in the 1970s and 1980s, creatives overseas displayed a keen interest in working with Australians. Equally, when Australian filmmakers – such as Jan Chapman, Peter Weir, Jane Campion, Bruce Beresford and Phillip Noyce – became successful, they started to look for opportunities further afield. While some went to Hollywood, others sought to continue telling Australian stories – albeit with bigger budgets and greater access to foreign markets.
Yet co-productions haven’t always caught fire in this country. For every success like UK–Australian–US title Lion (Garth Davis, 2016) – which, as of March 2017, had taken an astonishing A$127.3 million outside Australia and A$27 million domestically – there have been many others that didn’t take off, like Christopher Smith’s Melissa George vehicle Triangle (2009), a co-production with the UK that cost US$12 million to make but returned only US$1.6 million worldwide.
Nonetheless, Screen Australia head of producer offset and co-production Tim Phillips is complimentary about such partnerships: ‘International co-productions give Australian filmmakers a shot at two markets, which they wouldn’t normally get domestically.’ Indeed, co-productions offer many advantages: a larger audience pool that the film can reap profits from, more
