Accenture boss Mark Green convinced Tourism Australia CMO Susan Coghill to chip in to boost the production budget for Play it Safe – the Cannes Grand Prix-winning, Tim Minchin-fronted film created for the Sydney Opera House’s 50th birthday.
Michael Ritchie is the managing director and co-owner at Revolver, the production company behind the work. Speaking at This Way Up, the Advertising Council of Australia’s festival of creativity, Ritchie said the team knew it needed an eight day shoot for a film of its scale and ambition, but the budget wouldn’t support it. “No offence, but the budget wasn’t very big,” Ritchie said.
As it was, director Kim Gehrig had flown herself out. Revolver had invested all its fees “plus some to actually make it happen … And I’m not advocating, by the way, for production companies always doing this, because we’d be super out of business.”
He said of the shoot conundrum: “It was an eight day shoot. We thought we could probably do seven. And then, of course, we could only afford two for the budget. So we thought, ‘Okay, go to three’. And it was at that point that we kind of knew, we just didn’t think we could do it.
“Then Mark Green, to his credit, said, ‘Look, I can get you a little bit more money.’ So he went and talked to Susan Coghill at Tourism Australia, and just said, ‘Can we have a little bit of money, just to help us get across the line?’ And Susan, to her credit, which I think it’s a smart move to back something like that, because I think it’s a great thing for the country, she put in this little bit of money that just got us across the line to do a four day shoot.”
The Monkeys’ executive creative director Barbara Humphries joked that while Green was hunting for the extra cash – secured with the pitch that the film didn’t just do a brand-building job for the Opera House, but for the whole country – he was also warning her that she needed to work on a plan B.
“We just stopped going into the kitchen because if we didn’t see him, we couldn’t work on that,” Humphries quipped.
Play it Safe launched last October, and this July, Coghill awarded Tourism Australia’s creative and digital account to an Accenture village made up of Song, The Monkeys and Droga5.
But well before then, when The Monkeys first approached Revolver for Play it Safe, Ritchie said yes without thinking. “Barb was on the phone and said, ‘Look, we’ve got a project for the Sydney Opera House 50th birthday.’ And I said, ‘Yep, we’re doing it. That’s it.’ And no idea of budget, no idea of any sort of parameters on the thing at all, and that was it.”
The next step was convincing director Gehrig. Humphries “really wanted to work with her, but Michael was completely honest about it. We knew it was a long shot.”
“Kim is one of those people, by the way, that you walk down the Croissette in Cannes and people ask her for her autograph,” Ritchie explained.
“She’s one of those directors that gets 10 to 12 scripts every day from around the world. She can work every day of the year, but she only chooses to do about five projects a year. She’s just one of those special directors. And so for her to take what we felt was going to be three months out of her year to do this project was an enormous thing.”
Humphries added: “She’s a force. She just brings so much to an idea. She interrogates it, she pushes it, she pushes us. And she’s really, really gifted with music and choreography.”
As Ritchie told it, Gehrig agreed, but said she’d have to listen to Minchin’s song first. “If the song’s not up to scratch, maybe I can’t do it,” he recalled her saying. “Of course, she loved the song.”
After Minchin said yes to working on the brief, he went quiet for a nerve-wracking six weeks before sending a demo late on a Friday in May last year. Humphries thought he might “write a song and kind of help us make it, and then not really be that involved. But he got really, really involved.
“He was starting to suggest camera angles … he was a collaborator. He was all in from day one, all the way down to our final sound mixes and stuff.”
Ritchie said: “He’d do 40 takes, and just keep it going.”
The shoot was complex, and the four days finished with the shot of Minchin running down the forecourt. Thousands of people gathered to watch it being filmed, Ritchie remembered. Humphries was on such “a high after that shoot” that she was worried “we’ll never make anything that exciting again.”
The final product won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix. Jury president Tor Myhren said it was “the best film of the year and makes you proud to be in the industry.” Ritchie is especially proud of that; he said “hopefully it’s great for all of us” as a creative community. And beyond industry accolades, Minchin is now ending his shows by playing the song.
“73% of people who weren’t already Sydney Opera House visitors said they had a better opinion of the House after watching the film,” Humphries said of the results.
“And then 49% of people said that they intended or would intend to visit having seen it.”
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Top image: Ritchie and Humphries presenting at This Way Up