Creating other worlds

What I discovered about the architects of film-making magic while watching my book, ‘Fake’, jump from page to screen.

On the set of Fake, Melbourne, 2023: my niece Marni and I as extras (in a scene that met the cutting-room floor) … David Wenham as Joe. (Photograph: Sarah Enticknap.)

About this time last year I was in Melbourne, in a discombobulating, emotional other world, on the set of Fake, observing elements and versions of my life spun in other people’s hands, taking notes and doing interviews for a feature article I would later write for Good Weekend magazine about the behind-the-scenes experience of my book being turned into a television series for a streaming giant.

As is ever the case when I’m writing big feature articles, I gathered way too much material. Then, as is ever the case, at the writing stage, I had to make wrenching decisions about what to include and what to cut, slaying babies and darlings all over the place. (Print magazine pages of course are not elastic.) I cut from the story great insights into the film-making process, particularly about how clever and creative production and costume designers, location scouts and graphic designers coax life from one-dimensional words on pages to build the intricate and brilliant other worlds of screen and stage.

A couple of things I spotted recently have reminded me that I wanted to share with you some of that cut material – and have reinforced the fact that extraordinary film, television and theatre productions are the result of creative, brilliant, behind-the-scenes collaborations.

First, I saw this interesting short interview (above) with Charles Davis, the costume and set designer for Opera Australia’s new feminist-skewed production of Verdi’s La Traviata. Davis offers an insight into the process and thinking behind the development of the costume and set decisions for La Traviata: “The original period is incredibly oppressive for women; they were wearing corsets on a daily basis, layers and layers of petticoats, and everything was really about sculpting the female form into the shape that was desirable for the male gaze. We really wanted to use that as … a starting point to symbolise the entrapment that Violetta was experiencing within her life.” (OA’s La Traviata runs from January 23 to March 27, 2025 at the Sydney Opera House. It’s a wonderful opera … you may recall that it had Julia Roberts’ Pretty Woman character, Vivian, in tears … this is a wonderful aria from it.)

Then, articles started to pop up about the making of the new historical war drama, Blitz, which depicts the story of the separation of a single mother (Saoirse Ronan) and her bi-racial son during German bombings of London during World War II. In a great photo essay, The New York Times describes the film’s “meticulous” production design, how it was shot on location in other British towns including Hull as well as a sound stage. In one scene, the boy is taken to a bomb shelter. The article notes: “Though a real bomb shelter still exists as part of the London Transport Museum, the production didn’t end up using it, [production designer Adam] Stockhausen said, because it was from 1944, and so would not have been accurate to the film’s 1940 setting.”

So to Fake and the magic-making and creativity behind it …

If you’ve seen the series, I think you’ll agree – it is a beautiful production visually, the result of dozens of clever creative people collaborating, a fine-grained layering of aesthetic decisions. (If you haven’t seen it, the trailer above will give you some inkling.) I spoke to four of those clever people – location manager Nicci Dillon, production designer Josephine Wagstaff, costume designer Erin Roche, and co-producer Emelyne Palmer.

Locations

The Olinda pub is perfection, a wry facsimile of the country pub the real Joe claimed to frequent when he was down on his putative (in fact, non-existent) farm, a pub I visited after our break-up as I tried to ­establish the truth of his identity … rock posters, beer ads, ­vintage ephemera, a mounted stag’s head, dart board and a bunch of extras, some palming beers, some ­playing pool. If anything will crack me open today, it’s the scene that’s about to be shot here. That late winter afternoon all those years ago, driving on my own through unfamiliar countryside, opening the door to the pub, going in … I was terrified. Some part of me believed he could be lurking somewhere. (Excerpt from my Good Weekend story)

Location manager Nicci Dillon spent months scouting for locations in Melbourne and regional Victoria. Among those she needed to find: that country pub (where Asher Keddie’s Birdie, the magazine journalist character that is ostensibly me, goes in search of information about Joe, her/my mendacious ex who claimed to be a sheep farmer); a grand country mansion (to stand-in for an estate in the NSW Southern Highlands which my real ex claimed to be buying); a quirky stylish apartment (for Birdie); a glam restaurant (for Joe and Birdie’s first date); a house on the Yarra River with a jetty (where Birdie and her family/friends wait in vain for Joe to arrive in his boat and pick them up); and an antique shop (where Joe sells his mother’s willow pattern crockery).

In Olinda, Nicci found two locations, the pub and the antique shop, which, for budgetary and logistics reasons, was an excellent outcome. A payment is almost always made for a location but at the pub, there were considerations other than just the licensee: locals were booted out of the popular back bar for the duration of filming. Nicci put $500 on the front bar to keep them happy.

“My weird stalking of Langi Willi,” is how she describes what was involved in securing a 1903 federation-style mansion an hour west of Ballarat with beautiful gardens which would be called “Eldorado” in the series. It had never before been seen on screen. “That’s a big thing for me – I really like [to find new places] not just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.” Nicci could find little online about Langi Willi or who its owners were but after some detective work, she finally identified and reached out to them through LinkedIn. They agreed to let the Fake cast and crew use it for three days, handed it over and then went on holidays.

Birdie and her mother, Margeaux (Heather Mitchell) in Birdie’s apartment (above; photograph Sarah Enticknap); a real estate video for Langi Willi (top) – it’s quite something!

To find a house with a jetty on the Yarra River, Nicci letterboxed houses in the Melbourne riverside suburb of Hawthorn. “The hit rate wasn’t that great but it was good compared to what we thought it might be. And you get to see these amazing houses.” (The Hawthorn house Nicci found was being renovated and its backyard pool had been emptied … in the series, to reach the jetty, Birdie and her family/friends pass the emptied and derelict swimming pool which adds big eerie vibes.)

Birdie’s apartment, an East St Kilda art deco dream which is actually the home of a film-maker, has been used as a location before, including in the recent horror film, Late Night With The Devil, but matched the production’s requirements exactly. “It’s one of the few places that you can find that actually has the old art deco as is, but has the space to shoot in.” Production designer Josephine Wagstaff did some “re-dressing” and reconfiguring of the apartment but the bones were there. “They had so many beautiful things,” says Nicci … Etched glass door panes, granite fireplace, art and antiques, books, treasures, a green colour palette.

Nicci, who made a mid-career shift to film and television after working in varied roles, from government to international currency dealing, says she revels in “the thrill of the chase” involved in identifying and securing locations. But, above all, “the places have to make sense, they have to help tell the story.” Birdie’s apartment, I think, I like to think, tells the story of an independent well-travelled, well-read woman who has a strong life of her own and a strong sense of self until she is utterly destabilised by Joe’s arrival in her life.

Production design

While we wait to be called for our scene in the lobby of the building, production designer Josephine Wagstaff takes us up to see Birdie’s office at The Weekend ­magazine. As she points out the details on Birdie’s desk – a half-dead maidenhair fern, an award for feature ­writing, a bottle of Rescue Remedy – I feel as though I’m falling into some meta vortex (no sign of the rose-petal-infused misting hydrator spray I had on my desk when I was still on staff at Good Weekend). Framed ­covers of the faux magazine line the office walls. “Don’t look too closely at the spelling,” Wagstaff says. (Excerpt from my Good Weekend story)

Production designer Josephine Wagstaff started her working life as an engineer, before doing a masters in architecture. While doing her post-grad, she started designing student films and fell in love with the work.

Leading me through the office suite she designed for “The Weekend” magazine where Birdie works, Josephine tells me that she oversees a department of about 20 people including an art director, an art coordinator, a set direction team, set dressers, a graphic design team and a prop master (in charge of anything that the lead actors touch). “If Asher picks up a pen, the prop master will know exactly what pen,” Josephine says. “It travels with the set crew, it can never get lost. Because she has to hold the same pen in the scenes that might be months apart so there’s a continuity issue.” Each day of filming, the prop master hands over whatever prop is required to a member of the crew. Everything is meticulously documented.

Josephine points out that every item in Birdie’s office is branded with “Weekend Magazine” – right down to the coffee mugs. Shelves hold back editions of the fictional magazine or folders of planning documents and image proof sheets. The level of detail, the visual minutiae of an office space, is insane; elements which might not get even a half-second on screen are conceptualised, designed, created: a tech department’s sticker on a monitor … “user password” and a number; notices on a pinboard – “please be advised that first aid kits are located on every floor in the kitchen area” (I could have helped with that sentence construction); spectacles sitting on top of a notebook; a Post-it note stuck to an employee’s monitor – “Meet Susan @ 9am Tues” and another, “Dentist appointment, 12/3, 11am”.

Josephine tells me something that I had not noticed when I watched the series … there is a shift in colour and tone as it goes on, as Birdie starts to realise that Joe is not who he seems. “It starts off and you get swept up in this story, [in a sort of] hypercolour kind of whirlwind of dreams and ideals and fantasies and wonder.” And then, she says, “it almost drains of colour”. She talks about how colour has been used generally in the series: “We’ve used green a lot in this show … it’s got that beautiful natural freshness but can also turn when you change its colour tone to a really ill, sickening feeling.”

A desk in the offices of ‘The Weekend’ magazine (above); production design details in the country pub Birdie visits to seek out information about Joe (top).

Costume design

[Costume designer Erin] Roche had long conversations with Keddie to develop Birdie’s look and the walls of her office in production HQ were covered with images. “You were up there for a while,” Roche says. (She pulled images of me from Google – how disconcerting.) “We kept coming back to words like ‘safe’. Birdie’s not super-edgy in a fashion sense. She knows what works and sticks with it.” (Excerpt from my Good Weekend story)

If you’ve ever come upon a film being shot on location, past the countless trailers that are part of “unit base”, you might have wondered what was going on in them. At least one is likely to be a costume trailer. On location for Fake in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, costume designer Erin Roche gives me the guided tour. There’s a laundry area (washing machine, dryer, steam iron, ironing board), racks of clothing in labelled sections for each character, including extras (eg, “train passenger 1442”), drawers of stock items (“women’s thermal bottoms”, “men’s singlets”, “women modesty cup fillets/nude slips”), and a change area behind a curtain. (Erin has, she says, “a pretty intimate relationship” with cast at times, right down to their underwear. “If it was a period show, you’d want to make sure people have the right-shaped bra to give the right line.”)

Erin tells me that she was “pretty focused” from a young age on becoming a costume designer; she has a doctorate in creative industries and, in 2016, travelled for a Churchill Fellowship during which she developed “a philosophy for the practice of costume design based on the triangulation of embodiment of character, voice of the designer and collaboration”.

She says that her process always starts with questions. With Fake, for example, she delved into Birdie’s character, asking whether she was “every woman” and could the experience happen to anyone? “One of the appealing things about reading the script was going, ‘oh yeah, there are bits of it that are reminiscent of stuff that’s happened to me’, there’s a really relatable thing about the whole story, so it was trying to work out how we could make Birdie relatable.”

Erin worked closely with Asher Keddie to develop Birdie’s costumes – 68 in all. “We really wanted to carve out a new look for her that didn’t already exist [in previous characters].” Paisley, for example, was off the list for Birdie because it was a favourite of Keddie’s Offspring character, Nina Proudman. Additionally, one of the key thoughts behind costume choices was that they should have a tactile quality – “we wanted people to want to give Birdie a hug”.

The costumes used for Fake came from a variety of sources: some were from Erin’s personal collection of vintage items; some were purchased (the Hoss dress Birdie wore during the first-date-with-Joe scene sold out soon after a publicity still of Birdie wearing it was released); some items were “Frankensteined” … adjusted or added to by a tailor.

Pivots were needed along the way. Melbourne’s weather sometimes threw up challenges: for example, on the day of the Yarra River shoot, Asher was to wear “a gorgeous spring dress”. The day turned out to be cold and windy. “We had to pivot on the spot and find something that worked for the story we’re trying to tell, but also the practicality of not freezing.”

The plan had been for Birdie to wear a lot of green but after the decision was made to use the green-hued art deco apartment as Birdie’s home, Erin had to drop the colour from her costumes. “What seemed like a problem actually pushed us in a really new direction and a new colour palette for Asher, which was pretty exciting,” she says. “It brought out these kind of dusty, romantic pinks and some earthy tones.”

She remembers the moment that the Birdie character clicked in a costume sense: Asher tried on a dress with a high turtle-necked jumper. “That was the first time we went, ‘oh, there she is’. It gave us our base silhouette. It’s hard to say what it is, it’s just about this perfect moment. I’ve heard other people talk about it – Meryl Streep has worked with the same costume designer, Ann Roth, for a very long time, and she talks about it as like a little orgasm that happens in the room where you both go ‘oh, there she is!’.”

Birdie (Asher Keddie) on her first date with Joe (David Wenham) wearing a Hoss dress (above); one of a number of boxes with wardrobe stock items in the costume trailer (top).

Opening titles

Opening titles or sequences – the still and moving images, animation, music and graphics which appear on screen before a film or television series starts – are designed to establish the tone and style of a show.

But I was so off-kilter when I first watched Fake that I barely noticed the sequences with their animated flowers and shadow movement (see video below) nor the individual episode/chapter titles. Only later did I start to think about them when friends commented on them; one said she wondered if they were designed to suggest a “poison garden”, a concept that emerged from 16th and 17th century herbalist or apothecary gardens. Other people noted their “fairytale” border (it completely escaped my notice).

“We were really drawn to the idea of the princess myth and that fairytale thematic – the ornate border and the old-style font, things that you would see in a storybook. [If you didn’t know] anything about the show, you see that image, and you think, romance or fairytale, love story,” Fake co-producer Emelyne Palmer tells me in a phone call some time after I’ve returned from Melbourne. A nod, she says, to the fact that women are told so many stories about romance/men/love. “But we wanted it to have a bit of a disturbing overlay, [for people to think] something feels a bit off.”

Working with the creative design studio Barlow Agency, the Fake producers settled on the acidic green of the title because it “felt contemporary but also disturbing – it’s quite an aggressive colour – and similarly we incorporated those acid tones into the flowers that are overlaid in the border”.

There was similarly detailed thinking behind the chapter titles (eg, “Lanolin”, “Stitches”, “Eldorado”, “Love Kitten”). “We wanted the chapter images to speak to the theme of the episode, but also to reflect a kind of innocent fairytale,” Emelyne says. Episode One, “Lanolin”, features illustrations of little sheep, for example, while “Love Kitten” shows two kittens playing. (FYI: I have a feeling the video below will only play if you click through the Substack site … that it won’t play in your inbox … sorry!)

Being on the Fake set in Melbourne and talking to some of the creative people behind the production has forever changed how I look at film and television … the illusions created, the smoke and mirrors, the meanings embedded in physical objects, the incremental and layered building of tone, style and story. And I never thought I’d say it, but I think I’m ready to watch Fake all over again so I can re-examine it for things I missed.

PS: Last week, Fake director Emma Freeman won Best Direction of a Drama Series Episode in the ADG awards (the Australian Directors Guild awards) for episode 5, “Love Kitten” … you might recall it, the Uber scene, in which Birdie tries to secure a loan for Joe.

🎵Mood

Laura Marling’s new album, Patterns in Repeat, dreamy, calm, wistful, an ode to motherhood. Says The Guardian: “Patterns in Repeat considers weighty topics – heritage, lineage and what we pass down – and strips them down to small understandings and wisdoms. It’s an extraordinarily tender accomplishment.” (I’m especially loving The Shadows; one review raves about Child of Mine which starts with a baby’s gurgle.)

Wild thing

More on the subject of creativity … In a series of legendary interviews with Bill Moyers, the late American mythologist, Joseph Campbell, talks about the importance of sacred spaces: “[It’s] an absolute necessity for anybody today … you must have a room or a certain hour a day or so where you do not know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe to anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you; but a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be – this is the place of creative incubation. … as you get older, the claims of the environment upon you are so great that you hardly know where the hell you are, what is it you intended – you’re always doing something that is required of you.” It’s worth seeking out the entire series. (From the Joseph Campbell Foundation).

Reading

HOMELESSNESS: I’d like to urge you to read an extraordinary story published in the American magazine Esquire, traditionally one of the homes of great narrative non-fiction writing.* “A firsthand account of what homelessness in America is really like,” by the writer and journalist Patrick Fealey, is both beautifully written and so important. It had me on the verge of tears the whole way through. (Much of what Fealey says is, I’m sure, applicable in Australia.) … “ ‘Do you want the other half of my meatball sub?’ she says. … ‘Thank you,’ I say. She walks for the beach. Does she know I’m homeless? Maybe she’s seen me here before. She will be the only person in six months to offer help.”

* FYI: I highly recommend “Esquire Classic”, a podcast series which explores “some of the most groundbreaking narrative journalism ever published by Esquire since its founding in 1933”.

DIVORCE: Catching up on this excellent older piece from The Atlantic … “How I demolished my life”. “I didn’t have a secret life. But I had a secret dream life – which might have been worse. I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself. Everything I experienced – relationships, reality, my understanding of my own identity and desires – were filtered through him before I could access them.”

DRECK: A bit of chatter around the place this week about a Vanity Fair story exploring the late, legendary American writer Cormac McCarthy’s 16-year-old “muse”. I haven’t read it but in the interests of keeping you informed about the articles being talked about, I’ll just leave it here … you be the judge!

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Beautiful Thing

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Wonderful, mesmerising video of Cornish photographer and print-maker Mark Lord (aka “Lino Lord”) at work. (And there’s a shop … artichoke print on canvas tote bag has my name on it!)

Food

SALAD: A print-out for a yoghurt-mint dressing found its way into a folder on my kitchen bench … no information about what publication or website it came from … apologies and thanks to its creator. It’s good: combine ½ cup yoghurt, 2 tbsp avocado/olive or macadamia oil, ½ tsp honey, 1 tbsp lemon juice, 2 tbsp finely chopped fresh mint, salt and pepper. I might have upped the honey a bit.

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PASTA: This was dinner tonight … broccoli and anchovy pasta. Super. Super easy. Super fast. Some nutritional benefit.

INDIAN: This will be dinner tomorrow night. I’ve been hanging out in my local Indian supermarket and picked up some packeted paneer. Next time will make my own as Jamie does. Will report back.

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Home and garden

FOR SALE: A Grade II-listed two-bedroom beekeeper’s cottage in Mellis Common, Suffolk. “… the older timber-framed section is of 17th-century origin and is characterised by its white-painted exposed timber, pamment floors and warming wood-burning fires … [the garden comprises] cut flower beds, an orchard, herbaceous borders and vegetable beds, as well as a happy colony of bees that supply the current owners with honey. There is also a summerhouse, a workshop, a large patchwork-tin shed and a fecund polytunnel.” (Via India Knight’s Home.)

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HYGGE: Find myself watching this Swedish scene over and over … that fireplace … the dogs, the textiles, the Hygge. Yum.

BOOK: A new book, Inside the Homes of Artists, explores the residences of luminaries including Julie Mehretu, Tracey Emin and William Kentridge. “I wanted to understand what it meant to spend one’s life surrounded by and devoted to art, from the perspective of those who create it,” author Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian tells Christie’s. Click through for a glimpse of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s extraordinary “grand reception room” and the wonderful apartment of art power couple Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher, near New Dehli.

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Fashion

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Elsewhere, it is winter; elsewhere, there is Paris (via Instagram).

Socials

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(via Threads; story here – it is very funny … “Hand sewing the linens only caused arthritis in seven of my fingers by the age of 21.”)

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Stolen words

“The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool – a faculty unheard of nowadays.”–Fyodor Dostoevsky in his short story Bobok (via Elif Shafak’s Substack, Unmapped Worlds)