Tasmanian film in the wings for acclaimed writer and director

Damien Power’s films have been shown at Sundance and in Venice, but the writer and director has always wanted to make a film in Tasmania, the island where he was born.

That dream is getting closer to reality with development funding from Screen Tasmania for Lyell, a crime thriller based in Queenstown on the State’s West Coast.

So why Tasmania? “It still feels like a big part of me. And there’s something about the atmosphere,” he said.

“The past is alive in the present.”

Power (BA-LLB ’94) has been interested in film since he was a boy growing up in Launceston, where he and his grandfather were members of the film society. The University of Tasmania Arts-Law alumnus went on to complete his Masters in Directing at the Australian Film, Television & Radio School in Sydney, and has since enjoyed significant success.

His film Killing Ground (producers Joe Weatherstone, Lisa Shaunessy) made its international debut in the Midnight Section at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 and went on to play at over 20 international festivals. Currently streaming on Stan, Killing Ground was released in Australia in 2017 by Mushroom Pictures. It was also released theatrically in the US and UK.

Power also directed the feature film No Exit (2022) (producer Scott Frank). A 20th Century Studios / Disney production, the film premiered on Hulu in the US and Disney+ internationally in 2022. No Exit was listed as one of Vulture’s 20 Best Horror Movies on Hulu Right Now (September 2022) and one of the New York Times’ Five Horror Movies to Stream Now (September 2022).

In addition to features, Power has a string of award-winning short films to his name including Hitchhiker (2015, writer and director), which premiered at the 2017 New York Film Festival; Bat Eyes (2012, director), which showed at the Venice Film Festival and was a finalist in the YouTube Your Film Festival; Boot (2012, co-writer/director) and Peekaboo (2011, writer/director).

When not writing and/or directing thrillers, he works in film classification for organisations including SBS and Foxtel, where he was Classification Manager until 2017. He is a member of the Commonwealth’s Classification Review Board.

Power has written award-winning educational films on topics from cyberbullying to e-safety. Tagged, an 18-minute educational drama about being cybersmart, addressed issues associated with online behaviour of secondary students, including digital reputation management, sexting and cyberbullying. Awards for Tagged include being the Winner, Gold Award at the WorldMediaFestival, Hamburg, Germany, in 2012.

He is now working on the crime thriller, Lyell, with Queenstown, Tasmania, as a dramatic backdrop.

Below he shares his thoughts on the path that led him to making films, the scoop on the new film in development, and his advice to new graduates in the creative space.

“I always encourage people in whatever field to make the thing that they would want to read, or to see, or to hear,” he said.

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Where did your interest in film come from?

I was always interested in film. I grew up in Launceston and was a member of the Film Society with my grandfather ... This was the late eighties, so we would go and see films by Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch and classics by Bergman or Fellini. I think it was then that I discovered that I was interested in films and filmmakers who I thought had a point of view. I was a member of film societies in Hobart too, and always stayed interested in film.

Growing up, I wanted to write, and probably wrote my share of bad teenage poetry ... There's a quote, it’s from Ira Glass who talks about people that want to create often experiencing a stumbling block: their own taste. They look at the works of the writers they love and think, well I could never write a sentence as good as Raymond Carver, or whoever, but you just have to do it. You just have to get beyond that.

Why did you transition from law to film?

I decided that I didn't want to practice law, and, immediately out of uni, I applied for two jobs. One was in the graduate program in the public service in what was then the Department of Transport and Communications in Canberra. And I got that job. The other job I applied for was on the Classification Board. I had studied some censorship law as part of my degree, and obviously was interested in films, but never thought that I would get that job. Then, on my first day on the job in Canberra, I had a call saying that I had an interview for the classification job. So I ended up spending, I think, nine months in Canberra before joining the Classification Board in Sydney.

It was there that I was watching films every day. I did a couple of short courses in filmmaking and, to be honest, I found that the structure of a screenplay – action, dialogue, action, dialogue – was liberating for me as a writer. I didn't have to write a perfect sentence, although I tried, because it wasn't the final thing, it was a blueprint.

As for directing, I could always see the thing in my mind's eye, so I felt that I knew what I wanted to see, where to put the camera. But I had no experience with actors, so that was a big part of my motivation for studying directing – the chance to work with actors.

So even though I never practiced law, I think that the law degree certainly helped me land that interview with the Classification Board. And when I've not been working in film, I've pretty much worked in classification at different places as my day job. So, it's a windy path.

So the law degree was relevant in ways you didn’t realise at the time?

Even if you don't want to necessarily practice, it's a great generalist degree that gives you perspective on many different aspects of life and society.

What was your biggest career highlight?

I think probably the biggest highlight was Killing Ground getting into Sundance. That was a career-defining moment for me. The film had its world premiere in Melbourne. And then we had applied to Sundance, and found out very early on that we had got in, so we had to keep that secret for almost 6 months. It was a hard secret to keep.

You can get a film into a festival like Sundance, and you can go, and you can still have a terrible time. But we were lucky, we had a great time.

What opportunities did that festival open up to you?

You're always waiting for the reviews to come in; we hadn't sold the film at that point. And so we had a small Aussie contingent of some of the cast and crew that were in town for Sundance. After the screening, which was great, we went back to someone's room and everyone was having a drink and I'm a little bit ashamed to admit that I looked at my phone and saw on Facebook that an Australian filmmaker had sent me a message and said, “Oh, congrats on the reviews”, and I didn't know that the reviews were out. I thought they'd been embargoed until the next day. So then I just opened up the reviews from Variety and Hollywood Reporter, and passed the phone around to the actors to read them out to the room. So we all heard them at the same time ... They were good reviews. And then, after that, we just had a dream festival. We sold out all our sessions and they added an extra screening. We sold the film to a US distributor, and I got US representation – agents and manager. I came home and quit the day job at Foxtel. Took the plunge.

Why did you decide on Tasmania for Lyell, the script you’re developing now with funding from Screen Tasmania?

I've always wanted to make something in Tasmania. It's an incredibly cinematic place; even the light is different. And I've always wanted to make something in Queenstown, on the West Coast. After film school, I went and stayed for a week, in the motel there, just to write. The script I wrote back then is in a bottom drawer somewhere ... but I never gave up on the idea of the location.

When I was growing up in Launceston, filmmaking didn't seem possible. Films were made by other people somewhere else. But I really think that's changed now. I think the economics of production have changed so that it is more possible. I think you could count on one hand the number of films and shows that had been made in Tasmania when I was growing up. But now there's a real industry. There's a real energy. We're seeing Tasmania on screen. Which is fantastic.

One theme I keep coming back to is this idea of the return of the past. I remember many, many years ago, going on a ghost tour of Port Arthur. The guide was a fantastic storyteller, and one of the people on the tour asked him, “Have you ever seen a ghost?” And he said, “Look, I haven't seen a ghost myself. But I feel that there's something about this place, that the past is very alive in the present here.” And that always stuck with me. I have that feeling every time I come back to Tasmania. Sometimes it feels like it's a haunted place. There is something about the atmosphere.

What interests you about thrillers like Killing Ground?

I'm interested in how people react under pressure. I think there's one style of story that is about characters going on an adventure and growing and changing. And then there's another style of story – closer to a thriller – where character is revealed under pressure. And that's the kind of film and story that I gravitate towards.

Lots of people have made films about people that go into the woods, and bad things happen. So there were two things that I wanted to bring to Killing Ground that I thought would make it feel fresh. ... One was to treat it with a sense of realism. So that the antagonists in the film are not some kind of cartoonish caricatures. They're guys that you could meet in a pub somewhere and not know the truth of them. And the protagonists are not perfect; they make bad decisions.

The other thing was the non-linear narrative. Usually these kind of stories are relentlessly linear. But I hoped that a non-linear structure would hook the audience into the mystery. And that’s the way it worked.