Glendyn Ivin (Photo credit: Stephen MaCallum).
While Glendyn Ivin was directing a TVC in Melbourne over four days last week he felt the mood shift among the crew as the coronavirus deepened.
“I could feel the energy drop and the doubt set in. Jobs were being cancelled and schedules emptying by the minute,” the director of The Cry, Safe Harbour and Gallipoli tells IF.
“Perhaps like most people working in the film and television industry as I come towards the end of a production I always start to wonder if it will be my last. Maybe my luck is up and my phone will never ring again.
“I doubt any of us have found ourselves in this industry with job security as a priority. We live from job to job and it’s overall a wonderful thing.
“But this feels different. This is a random, enforced time of doubt and insecurity that far outweighs our usual lack of confidence and regular creative insecurities. And it’s not just our industry, it’s nearly every industry.”
Ivin is in the process of locking the edit on Penguin Bloom, the adaptation of Bradley Trevor Greive and Cameron Bloom’s novel scripted by Shaun Grant and Harry Cripps.
He assumes post will continue on the drama produced by Naomi Watts, Emma Cooper and Made Up Stories’ Bruna Papandrea, Jodi Matterson and Steve Hutensky, based on the true story of a young Sydney family’s struggle to come to terms with a near-fatal accident that left their mother paralyzed.
Roadshow has dated the film starring Watts, The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln, Jacki Weaver and newcomers Griffin Murray-Johnston, Felix Cameron and Abe Clifford-Barr for New Year’s Day, by which time the pandemic hopefully will have abated.
He hopes the federal and state screen agencies will divert funding that would have been allocated to productions into development, observing: “We are always saying we need more time and energy spent in developing our projects.”
Concluding on a positive note, he says: “I’m interested to see what all this isolation does creatively. We are a creative industry, we constantly find our way through restrictions and limitations. I’m sure some amazing things will come out of this in some form or another.”