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INTERVIEW: John Edwards, executive producer of The Secret Life of Us

John Edwards is a 40-something television producer - a doyen of Australian TV, producing such shows as Police Rescue and Big Sky, as well as the worldwide hit The Secret Life of Us. Our intrepid Secret Life obsessive Marty Friedel recently caught up with him to ask about the show, the new DVD releases and more…

Secret Life drew new lines for Australian television drama, this time running away screaming from the “cops, dogs and lawyers or country town scenario” which can be seen on each and every free-to-air Australian television station – you know, things like SeaChange, Blue Heelers, Water Rats and White Collar Blue just to name a few. You see, that’s how easy it is to pick out dramas with this same old theme. As John says, all of these shows were “domestic hits, they were not financial successes. In order to make a cheaper show, we became convinced that you couldn’t just go on following the Australian pattern... where you’ve got the good folk and along comes evil every week and we beat it up and on we go again.” In order to make a cheaper show, yet something innovative and intelligent, they knew they would have to focus on the more “morally complex universe... and focus on moral ambiguity.” One of the problems that the producers were faced with was knowing when you “are most morally ambiguous – in your twenties of course! We didn’t set out to make a 20-something show that was going to skew young or anything like that because actually that’s not the television viewing audience, even though the advertisers want to get it. That’s where Australian dramas traditionally skew very old,” Edwards comments. “For example, with Blue Heelers, about a third of its audience is over the age of 65, and obviously with Secret Life, none of its audience is over 65. So we set out to break the mould a bit, but not knowing whether we were actually going to get a mass audience or not. Well we ended up doing so and we were very lucky. On that basis, we believe that the exploitation of the shows on DVD were a sensible idea.”

The production of this series has brought together some of Australia’s finest talent in both the writing and directing fields. Edwards and his co-producer Amanda Higgs have had a policy since day one, which “is “new-blood” and “old-blood” side-by-side. For Higgs it’s her first producing gig, and “I’ve been around since... you know... a long time”, Edwards laughs. This sort of policy was also applied to the writing team, including Christopher Lee alongside new comer Judi McCrossin. It was this team of four that started the show, and initially decided to “subvert the conventions of Australian drama... We deliberately poked a nose at the conventions, but we did all of those things except we did them sideways.” Not only were the conventions poked at “sideways” but also the writing staff. For example, Tony MacNamara is best known as a playwright, but had worked with Edwards previously and you know the rest... its all about the people you know. Others such as Elizabeth Coleman and Jacqueline Perske added to the writing combination and still applied the principal of old-head/young- head. The screenplays were written primarily on an individual basis, yet all the storylines were controlled. At the beginning of the series, the writers and producers gather over a six-week period to discuss the story and where they want the characters to go. Then from this point at a small meeting each week Edwards and Higgs meet along with the writer of the upcoming episode, and the writer of the episode behind to ensure continuity between the two. Where other series’ have script editors who alter work severely, the Secret Life producers have left it up to the writers to fix their own work. “If it takes them fifteen drafts, then they are on for fifteen drafts”, comments Edwards.

The directors follow the same policy as the writers, mixing the older faces with the fresh new faces. Because directing is very demanding logistically, experienced directors are either side of the new director throughout production to help them through, and so there isn’t too much strain on the cast. Says Edwards, “In this series, Claudia is going to be directing a few episodes. We do experiment and Cate Shortland, one of our directors, hadn’t actually directed any commercial work at all, but she’d done four extraordinary short films that were all very different from each other and showed great promise. We basically took her on and supported her in that way, and there have been a number of other “first timers” who we’ve given a similar kind of break to, such as Sheree Nolan who is another very good director who had done feature films but had never actually done any longer-form television” Directors and writers are picked from here or there, without any form of formal qualifications being required. Yet Edwards admits, “there’s a weird kind of tendency in that all the women on the show tend to be Catholics.” Yet the crew must be emotionally ‘there’, as “the extent to which The Secret Life of Us works is that it tries to be aggressively honest... This requires a fair amount of emotional honesty from the writers, the cast and the directors all.”

The first series was released on DVD by Shock, and totalled seven individually released discs, each originally retailing for $29.95. Yes, that’s a lovely price tag of nearly $210 for the entire series. Edwards comments, “Seven discs, I think… it was just too big a whack for the fans of the show to shell out that much money.” Some of us were patient and waited until they were discounted to $9.95 each and picked up the series for less than $70. “And you know what, so did we and we gave the cast those ones”, Edwards laughs. “Well, that’s a bit of a secret, but it was just too big a whack, so we tried really hard to squeeze as much as we could on the individual discs when we talked about doing it with Liberation.” The second series is now available through Liberation, released on three two- disc sets, each with a respectable price tag of $29.95. Now isn’t that a much better total price tag? Some may wonder the change in companies when Shock had done a decent job with the first series, and if the large price tag had anything to do with it. Edwards comments that the pricing of the first series discs had nothing to do with it, “Shock bid in the first place and it was before we’d actually done anything with Liberation. We had a very happy experience on the soundtrack record this time around... and they made a bid, and Shock fundamentally competed for the second series rights and frankly (Liberation) made a better offer. It was as simple as that. And we believe that because they looked after the soundtrack so well, and the coordination of the cover art with the soundtrack cover art, it just seems more coherent to have one company doing both.”

One of the constant nags from DVDnet reviewers and readers alike is about extra features, or shall we say, a lack thereof. A television series isn’t likely to have the bundles of extras that major film companies produce for the latest Hollywood blockbusters, yet Secret Life at least has a small serving. The final disc in the second series hosts the special features for the second series, and that is the television special that goes behind the scenes of The Secret Life of Us. When asked if there were any other inclusions on the drawing boards for series three such as bloopers or soundtrack bundles, he admitted that there will never be bloopers on a disc for the simple reason that “there aren’t that many... We looked at this early on and basically they’re all the same kind of thing; something silly happens and people go “fuck”, you know and they’re all a bit the same. There are a couple of screaming ones and there are also a couple that you just wouldn’t want to show anyone. Things to do with, you know, sex scenes and that sort of stuff - you actually wouldn’t want to put them out.” But then the rest of us still want to see the screaming ones!

In a series filled with richly detailed and colourful characters, inspiration had to come from somewhere. The broad range of characters tries to be inclusive of society today, with aspects of multiculturalism, homosexuality, drugs, alcohol, love, friends, family, etcetera, etcetera and so forth. It’s all about real experiences, portrayed by believable people with whom you can empathise. But where does this inspiration come from? Says Edwards, “The characters in the series are based on the central four of us a fair bit, and our friends, and they’re all amalgams of lots of them, and in the case of Chris and I, Chris is in his 50s and, you know, I’m not quite there, but I’m in my 40s, and Amanda and Judi are in their 30s, and it’s a remembrance of our 20s in lots of ways.” So, with the characters being based upon real people and events, did someone actually have an affair with their best friend’s boyfriend? “Um, yes.”, Edwards laughs. Right, OK, mental note, change of subject required at this point...

After asking friends and colleagues what they wanted to know most about Secret Life, their response was unanimous. What was it with Gab and the Belgian guy, Dominique? The show’s policy on being “brutally honest” is revealed with the in-depth answer to this popular question. Edwards laughs and states, “This goes on and on and on, I mean it’s a bizarre thing. I think the very fact that it causes so much consternation is fundamentally good, we actually went around in a number of circles and then other things were planned, but fundamentally we wanted to cast a really good actor, and Dominique being perceived as ugly is kind of a weird thing. The interesting thing about that is that he’s just a compelling actor, and in real life he does live with Catherine McClements. People actually do have relationships with people who don’t always look conventional and it’s pretty much in the spirit of everything else that we have set out to do. I mean it was a conventional wisdom when we started that ‘you couldn’t cast Deb Mailman as a lead in a show’ and we did. And you wouldn’t ordinarily cast Sam Johnson in a romantic lead – well, we did. And we’ve tended to take casting decisions where we believe that somebody was the most ‘right’ person for the role, and we went forward on that basis. And it’s one of those things that has caused a whole lot of hype and consternation, but you just don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. Ratings didn’t drop, nothing like that happened. I actually felt for Jacek because he copped a lot of shit over it. I just find him a very interesting actor. Now young women do have affairs with older men, it does happen, did they want us to be conventional? Did they want us to cast Marcus Graham? Why do they want everyone to be good looking? That was the argument, the day we get to a situation where you can only have affairs with good looking people – hmm, God forbid! And in real life, Jacek’s wife is an incredibly gorgeous beautiful person.”

Examples such as this ensure that this series stands out from any other Australian television drama, with its unconventional yet realistic approach to life for this group of St Kilda 20- somethings. The scripting, direction and acting combine to form this hybrid of television drama that thousands of Australians have let into their homes on Monday nights, and which can now be owned on DVD so you can relive those experiences over and over again, and try to gain a better understanding of the secret lives of us…

LINK : http://www.dvd.net.au/goto.cgi?news.cgi?id=2784

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