The Chaser Report - License to Gillard | Tosca Looby

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

In this Afternoon Edition Zander and Gabbi chat with director Tosca Looby about her new film "Strong Female Lead" which focuses on Julia Gillard's time in power. Tosca gives details on the filmmaking process as well as some insight into how the media treated Australia's first female Prime Minister. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chase of Report. Welcome back to another afternoon edition of The Chase Report. My name's Zanda, and today Gabby and I are joined by Toska Luby, the director of the brand new film Strong Female Lead, which explores Julie Gillard's time as Prime Minister through the eyes of the media. It's a completely archival film and cuts up everything from Alan Jones interviews to press conferences to piece together how the media treated and portrayed Julie Gillard in her three years as Prime Minister.

It's a shocking look at some of the toxic views that still permeate our politics today, and it's available this Saturday at the Sydney Film Festival, or right now on SBS on demand. We talk to Toska after the break. Welcome back to another afternoon edition of The Chase Report, where we're lucky to be joined by Toska Luby, the director of the latest documentary about Julie Gillard's time in power, strong female lead. Thank you for joining us, Tosker. Pleasure.

So how did this project come about? This project is a passion project that I've wanted to do for a long time. And I was working in the same company as editor Rachel Grierson-Johns. And we kept passing each other in hallways and saying, God, I'd love to do an archive film. I'd love to do a film about women and power. I'd love to do a film about Julia Gillard. It kept kind of getting bigger and bigger. And then the final quarter came out, which is the film about Adam Goods and his three

years as an AFL player and the racism that came at him in that time. And it seemed like the perfect template for us to say to broadcasters, look, we could do the same thing with Julia Gillard, the sexism that came at her in the same period, three years that she was prime minister. And then when the first lockdown happened here, we pitched it because we were working on another series called See What You Made Me Do for SBS about domestic abuse and we couldn't keep filming. So we said, how about keep us employed and we'll go on to this archive project. And that's what we did. And so we did it all in lockdown. We had a hard drive that would pass between us once a week delivering massive amounts of archive. And we worked until lockdown opened up again.

And then we did our other job by day and kept doing strong female lead by night. So it was a passion project from beginning to end. How do you even start to find footage for this film? Because it's all told through archival footage. Is there anything new shot for it? We didn't shoot anything for this. So it's 100% archive. And that's a very good question.

How do you, where do you start? And to be honest, a woman who was in the news, radio, print, social media, newspapers, television for three years has a massive amount of media. So we plotted out where we thought the story points were. So looked at the kind of, I spoke to a lot of people, a lot of her colleagues, a lot of people who'd worked with her at the time about things that they could remember so that I kind of knew what I was looking for.

And also, I guess all of us remember kind of key things like the carbon tax rallies where Tony Abbott stood under the signs Bob Brown's bitch. And they were kind of those really iconic moments that actually people, would identify, but there was a huge amount that happened in addition to that. And we ended up with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of archive. And unlike the usual project where you're going out and creating your storyline, we were doing the opposite. We were bringing it down all the time. We were kind of getting closer and closer to a coherent narrative by always tempering down and down and down.

So it was a very long and difficult process, probably the hardest project I've worked on and I've worked on some pretty hard ones. Through the editing process, did you find there were parts that you really wanted to keep in that you had to obviously cut for time? Was there anything that sort of stuck out that you were like, oh, I'm really sad we got rid of that?

There was a lot, actually, yeah, because even though it appears to be just a chronological story, there were a lot of moments that you couldn't put in there because they weren't part of a broader narrative that you were building into this timeline. So for example, there was an incident that happened one Australia day and Julie Gillard and Tony Abbott were at a restaurant across the road from Parliament and it was the day that the tent embassy was taken down from outside Parliament and there was a big protest that

started kind of really getting quite threatening to the group who were in the, the restaurant. And so there were cameras inside that caught Gillard, you know, working out how to get out of there. And then the AFP detail getting them out. And as she came out, she lost a shoe, the Cinderella moment. And what was amazing about that was you could see everything that happened in that course of events. But the way it was then reported was, oh, damsel in distress and Gillard lost a shoe and can she handle the job and how fragile she is when actually she'd been so capable, not a moment of panic. And so that seemed like such an important piece to put in there, but it never found a home like so many other scenes that we cut.

We had a three-hour cut at one point. How did you balance the structure? Because the film feels like it's kind of building towards Julie Gillard's sexism and misogyny speech, which it plays in full. How did you decide on where to put things and what impactful moments go where? Well, again, that was kind of difficult because there was so much that we built, for example, into a trailer that was a one-liner that then didn't make it into the film itself. But it did, it does follow chronologically, even though if you were to build a drama narrative, for example, you would get to the misogyny speech and you would say, there we are, there's our moment, this is the end of the film.

You know, our hero has got to the top of the mountain, but actually, of course, that wasn't the ending. It all, you know, went horribly wrong after that. And so we were caught in this situation where we couldn't rely on any narrative structure that is generally going to work in a documentary form for an audience following a storyline. We had to bring them down again to her being ousted. So, yeah, that's really hard. And it's about kind of crafting a storyline that people are going to stick with,

even though it's politics, which people aren't necessarily very appealing in politics. And it's not following the story arc that you would naturally build. I'm sure a lot of this was done in collaboration with Julia. I mean, you were saying before you've spoken to Julia's colleagues and a lot of people in her life, but has she watched the film and reached out to you personally? Like, has she sort of given her two cents on the whole film? Look, it's been a hard one for her

because it sits kind of anathema to who she is. She doesn't want to be a victim. Even the misogyny speech, she kind of resented that that's what she was remembered for, not now, but initially. And so this film is taking her back to all the bad stuff that happened. And, you know, it's someone likened it to the worst breakup you've ever had. And then someone makes a film about it.

So, you know, she really struggled with it and didn't want to watch it. But has kind of embraced it in her way and certainly encouraged other people to watch it. and has, was very supportive through the making of it in the sense that she gave me permission to speak to everybody and that there was no, she didn't put any impediments in our way to making it, she just, and can totally see the value of it, but was always worried that it would put women off going into politics and that is the opposite to what she is working towards now. So we were always trying to reassure her team that that's not what we were planning either.

We're pursuing the same goal. You know, we also want to see more women go into politics. We want to see, you know, gender equality within our parliament. And I hope that the film does do that and that women feel galvanized by it, not, you know, further kind of disheartened. I think one of the interesting things I found about this film outside its overarching narrative about how horrible the media was to Julie Gillard was also that it's looking at this time in history where you start seeing the internet

become more involved in politics. Twitter starts to become a major play throughout the film and then YouTube is obviously a dominant factor and there's a scene where they're sitting on insiders and I think it's Barry Cassidy and is it Nikki Salva and they're arguing about the sexism and misogyny speech is obviously in context it's about in response to what was happening with Peter Slipper

and then they're talking about, you know, can this speech live on outside its context? And it's fascinating how it cuts from that to then the views just shooting up on YouTube and then they say on the program, well, looks like it is living on outside its context. Yeah, I haven't spoken to Nikki Sabra about that, but I suspect she would say now that, yeah,

she was wrong, that people, a lot of people at the time, and it's an explanation, one explanation among a few, as to why within Australia, the misogyny speech virtually went unnoticed and unremarked. And one argument is that it was about the context, that it was this grubby story of Slipper. But as David Marr says in that scene, this is bigger than that story, the misogyny speech grew out of something much bigger than what was happening with Peter Slipper and of course that is now how it's remembered but at the time it was so completely remarkable and certainly when we went back through the archive to see how the Australian media responded including female journalists who just said it's grandstanding you know

yeah it's been pretty interesting now to catch up with a lot of female journalists as I have after the film who've said who who I think have all grappled themselves with why they responded or didn't respond, including women saying, I just didn't want to believe it was as bad as it was, you know, I just couldn't quite accept that that's what was happening and that I didn't want to give her any kind of special treatment because she was a woman. But now, I think when you look back, you know, I think we all have to say it wasn't about giving her special treatment. It was about giving her equal treatment, which she wasn't getting. Do you think after doing such a massive job with this archival footage like the the amount of work gone in as we were saying

the things that were cut and you said three hours at one point cut from the from the movie are you would you consider doing like another like is there somebody else whose subject matter interests you to do this kind of film again like have you already got sort of something in the works like this for another kind of topic yes we do we've got another archive film planned it's not about an individual, but it's about politics again. So, you know, watch this space. Nice. I think, like, one of the most interesting things of the archive was, like, you wouldn't expect an archive film to have a villain in it. And then throughout this film, as much as, you know, you could expect the main villain to be Tony Abbott, and he's certainly in the film, but it kind of

becomes Alan Jones. And just the horrible way he spoke and he acted throughout this period was Is it hard to work out what you show and what you don't show in terms of trying to accurately portray a villain in this circumstance? There was a lot of Alan Jones that didn't make it, you know. Oh, no. Yeah, totally. And it wasn't necessarily because we only put the worst stuff in. It's just that that's what fitted in the storyline.

And then there were people like Andrew Bolt, you know, who didn't make it but should have. And, you know, there were plenty of villains. That's the sad part of this story, I think. There were just so many characters who you thought, I just cannot believe that you keep behaving like that. It wasn't just one line. It wasn't just a bad day. It was repetitive and targeted.

And the whole shame thing, for example, the way people, there was a lot of that with different words, generally, Lady Macbeth, you know, even the real Julia. So it was like there were these, words that were used and they became weapons and they were used over and over again by people and they'd be picked up by the next person and used again and I think the other thing about you know the idea of a villain in this film was her own party were were part of that kind of undermining yeah and it is interesting because you know you see Kevin

Rudd speaking out against the media so much now and looking at the way he his relationship with the press has changed. And then you look at this film where, like, 10 years ago, he's very much contributing to this media spin narrative with his actions. And it's interesting to see how much the landscape shifted, but also that, you know, people like Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt are still very much part of the scene. Yeah, I mean, and then there's the Howard Sattler scene, you know,

in Perth where he asks her about whether Tim is gay, whether she's in a heterosexual relationship. I mean, that people had generally forgotten about. A lot of people have seen the film and just said, oh, my God, I couldn't believe that that happened. And yet it was still at the time just part of what happened. You know, it wasn't as though we were shocked by it. And that in itself is shocking.

Yeah. And like for me, I was in Canberra on like my year six excursion on the day that Gillard was rolled. And I remember walking through Parliament House and Tony had to be giving high-fives to all the kids in our group because he knew what was going to happen that night. And then we got back to the rooms and then I think I wanted to watch the spill on TV but everyone wanted to watch the state of origin.

And so like it's really weird to like watch this now and then going back to my childhood and seeing all these collections of events from random points in my life that I didn't give much waiting to then because I was 12 years old. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting too. You know, I've spoken to a lot of young women who were same age as you at the time and said, how did you feel about there being a female prime minister? And so many have said, well, I thought she, her voice was funny and that she wore strange clothes and that she was a bit hopeless. And I think, wow, how sad is that? That, you know, that's what was sold to every. regeneration, really. I remember in high school, that was 100% what everyone thought. I didn't though, because my mum was quite a big fan of Julia's policies. And I remember once I got in an argument with a teacher who decided to bring up how stupid a pantsuit looked one day. And this was

in like a PDHPE class. And I was like, are we not supposed to be learning about like, you know, not like creating equilibrium between the genders and like I just don't understand why everyone's talking about Julie Gillard's pantsuit when you know I never talk about what Kevin Rudd's suit looks like or like we've never discussed this before it's not

no one talks about what people are wearing in politics until a woman's in the seat of power and then all of a sudden it becomes fair game it's just yeah I remember that being a huge huge um opinion at the time amongst yeah like young women who just thought it was cool to

hop on the bandwagon, really? Well, especially when they see someone like Germain Greer take a shot as well. Yeah. That was, you know, that's why I think people were so disappointed about her getting on board with all of that because it's like, well, if Jermaine Greer can do it, then we might as well all do it.

Yeah. That's the feminist thing to do. I mean, we could see in the archive to a real evolution in Julia Gillard herself when you see in the film to begin with a journalist says, oh, I notice you've got the same earrings that you had on yesterday. And she goes, oh, you know, I didn't even think about it. And you can see that at that point, she's just thinking, are you really going to comment on my earrings?

But okay. And then by the time you're getting close to the end of the three years, she just doesn't have it. It's like, I'm not here to talk about me earrings. You know, she really hardens up about it. But by then the damage is done. Well, thank you so much for your time, Toska. It's been fascinating talking to you.

I've loved the film. And it's on, it's Sydney Film Festival On Demand. I don't think it's on SBS on demand anymore. Yeah, it's on the City Film Festival this Saturday. And I think it might still be on SPS on demand. Check it out. It's worth watching. It's a fascinating look into Australian politics.

And I think it's almost a must watch for this year. It is on, it is on SPS on demand until September next year. Oh, there you go. Still got a while. No excuses. Everybody needs to watch. Everyone has the year. That's right.

Thank you so much for listening to this afternoon edition of The Chaser Report. Tosker's incredible film is available online right now at Sydney Film Festival On Demand or SBS on demand, and if you want to see it in cinemas, it's this Saturday at the Sydney Film Festival. Thank you so much for tuning in. We're part of the Acast Creator Network, and our gear is provided by road microphones. We'll see you tomorrow morning.