Third Take: Australian Film-makers Talk

Third Take is a valuable historical resource and an insight into contemporary filmmaking both in Australia and overseas. This is the second instalment in Raffaele Caputo and Geoff Burton's series of Australian film-makers "talking", based on the model of John Boorman's Projections series. In their first volume, Second Take, Caputo and Burton presented a series of essays, interviews and previously-published articles that profiled, or gave voice to, a dozen Australian directors, including Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion. One of the improvements of Third Take is its diversification of the label "film-makers" to include contributions from three cinematographers (John Seale, Don McAlpine, Vince Monton), one actor (Bill Hunter), one producer (David Elfick), and one scriptwriter (Bob Ellis), as well as six directors (Phillip Noyce, Peter Weir, Rolf de Heer, Andrew Dominik, Curtis Levy and Dennis O'Rourke, who is interviewed by Martha Ansara) plus a reprint from Ken G. Hall's Australian Film: The Inside Story. The need for dialogue and insight into the film-making craft, identified by the editors in their introduction to Second Take (6), is answered in Third Take by this inclusion of craftsmen [they are all men] other than the director, an important corrective to the auteurist preoccupations of academic criticism.