THIS PROBABLY REQUIRES A TRIGGER WARNING, so sensitive souls may need to look away briefly.
Do you remember the worst ARIA Awards night ever? November 2010, not long before the anniversary of the only other November event that could rival it for ugliness imposed on Australia – when, as Midnight Oil put it “Gough was tough 'til he hit the rough/Hey, Uncle Sam and John were quite enough”.
Well this was pretty rough: a disaster of policy, programming, planning and execution set in and around the Sydney Opera House. It was full of missed cues, confused hosts and even more confused winners, dodgy sound and a general feel of a music awards night that didn’t trust in its awards and winners to be the centrepiece of the show.
Anyway, one of the few highlights of the night was a performance by Megan Washington and a troupe of dancers that emulated the golden age of Hollywood musicals she grew up watching, and knew back to front. It was fun, cheesy and blessed relief, done with commitment as much as flair, and unlike most of what passed for show that night, worked marvellously.
Leap forward 14 years, during which she co-wrote a radio play in 2020, pops up as the voice of Calypso in a little kids’ show you might have heard of called Bluey, composed the songs for Rebel Wilson’s somewhat troubled directorial debut The Deb, and made her own music.
Today, as Washington watches her first feature film – co-written and produced with the director, her husband, Nick Waterman – have its cinema run before landing on pay TV next month, I suggest that I would not have been the only person who figured that rather than an expansive, dramatic take on Paul Kelly’s modern Australian Christmas classic, How To Make Gravy, her first movie would be a musical, with singing, dancing – especially tap dancing! – and a ridiculous plot.
“You might enjoy The Deb if you are looking for songs and dances,” she smiles. “Though How To Make Gravy does have quite a lot of diegetic [occurring naturally within the scenes] music in the film. There is a choir in the prison, that performs.”
To be fair, in the tale of Joe and Dan and Rita and family lunch and Christmas in jail and love going awry and how much tomato sauce to use, music does lie at the heart of the film given its origins. In some strange ways too.
“Because with How To Make Gravy we are inside the song, we wanted the world to feel like an Australian music culture fever dream,” says Washington who contributed some songs, including the single, The Hook, as well as being soundtrack’s executive producer. “So there are a lot of surprise cameos from musicians, and there’s a lot of surprise music.”
An Australian music fever dream should feature a shot with someone waking up screaming, sweat pouring off them, saying ‘omigod, Richard Wilkins and Molly Meldrum are in the next cell’. Though that probably wasn’t in their script. Sadly. But we do get Hugo Weaving, Daniel Henshell, Kate Mulvany, Damon Herriman and definitely-not-Australian-but-she-probably-knows-the-lyrics-now, Agathe Rouselle.
Speaking of the script, many people wish they could write a film, most never get close, and of those who have tried, the vast bulk of them have drawers full of failed attempts or rejected offers. Does she have that drawer? Because this looks appallingly like someone’s first attempt being an outright success.
“We did use an extensive drafting process,” she says in her defence, as if defence were needed.
Yeah, sure, but there are screenwriters around the world who would chew off their left leg to get one of their 50-drafts script made. Who would kill to do it this well.
“Well, we had a lot of luck with this movie because there seemed to be a certain kind of person who only had to hear the concept for what we were trying to do, and they immediately got the picture,” Washington says. “If you are a fan of Paul Kelly, you know that song you love that song, and if that song makes you feel the way that song can for some people it really popped into life.”
Even so, for Waterman and Washington (“I do like to say I live on the back of Nick’s head, like Voldemort.” So she is the evil side of the one brain? “Just the other side; I don’t know about the evil side.”) there were some hurdles to clear. Four main ones in fact. One was the song’s now deeply held place as a Christmas tale whose detail fans would want to see represented.
“For that reason we decided to treat the song like Shakespeare and to extract and extrapolate all of the detail from the spine, the core, of the song. We tried to invent as little as possible, and to return to the song for everything: character names, plot, the whole film. That was one truth,” she says. “We also knew that the movie was hopefully going to be seen by people who don’t know the song, so for that reason the screenplay really wanted to work like a reversible jacket, is how I describe it. It had to work for the people who know the song and for all the people who don’t.
“The other things that the film had to be, was a prison film and a Christmas film, and those two genres tend to cancel each other out. And then running through the heart of this organism was this core of music, which was the heartbeat of the whole thing. So that is how we set up the area we were trying to encompass.”
When we first speak it is after a round of screenings for the local film industry awards (AACTAs) members, three cities in three days, and she is feeling the pinch physically, but happy.
“It was awesome. We are in a really cool spot with the film where we just love it. We love the movie that we wrote and we love the movie that we shot, and we love the movie that we made, we love everybody who’s in the movie, and what everybody did. So now it is feels like waiting for the fateful day. But it’s been a great experience because I hadn’t seen the film with an audience until Monday and sitting and experiencing people reacting to it was just priceless.”
On Friday, in part two of this interview, Megan Washington explains the psychology of screenwriting, the philosophy of songwriting and how the twain have met.
How To Make Gravy is in cinemas now and will be on Binge/Foxtel from December 1
READ MORE
Psych Pop: How A Film Kept Megan Washington's Music Forever Jung part two of this interview
Comments