Podcast – Unjoo Moon: Directing I Am Woman
Director Unjoo Moon on the shift from documentary to drama and collaborating with music icon Helen Reddy to create the biopic I Am Woman.
Tilda Cobham-Hervey and Unjoo Moon on the set of I Am Woman (Photo credit: Lisa Tomasetti)
Find this episode of the Screen Australia Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Pocket Casts
After making the feature documentary The Zen of Bennett about music icon Tony Bennett, director Unjoo Moon was determined to try something really different and not make another music-based film.
“And then I met Helen Reddy.”
Moon recalls this on the latest episode of the Screen Australia podcast, as she talks through the various learnings she took from The Zen of Bennett and applied to her fictional feature directorial debut with I Am Woman – the Helen Reddy biopic that premiered at Toronto International Film Festival in 2019 and is now streaming on Stan.
“I think the thing I learnt the most [from The Zen of Bennett] is about working with a real-life icon, somebody who is still alive and who has a legacy and family around them… you’re not just making a film in isolation as a filmmaker,” she says.
Moon also talks about how I Am Woman started out as a feature documentary; how, after convincing Helen this could be a biopic, she, producer Rosemary Blight of Goalpost Pictures and screenwriter Emma Jensen brought her story to life; and working with her partner and cinematographer Dion Beebe (as well as the rest of the crew) to believably transform modern-day Sydney into 1960s and 70s New York and Los Angeles.
For feedback about this episode, please email [email protected]
I Am Woman is available to watch on Stan
Go behind the scenes of I Am Woman with Unjoo Moon and Tilda Cobham-Hervey here
Subscribe to Screen Australia Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Pocket Casts
Audio Transcript
Caris Bizzaca [00:00:05] Welcome to the Screen Australia podcast. I'm Caris Bizzaca, a journalist with Screen Australia's online publication Screen News. On this episode of the podcast, we're joined by Unjoo Moon, the director of new Helen Reddy biopic I Am Woman, which stars Tilda Cobham-Hervey as the Australian music icon and is available to watch in Australia on Stan. Throughout the podcast, Unjoo discusses topics including how her work directing the Tony Bennett documentary The Zen of Bennett helped in shifting to her drama feature debut with I Am Woman, collaborating with Helen Reddy, bringing the story to life with producer Rosemary Blight of Goalpost Pictures and screenwriter Emma Jensen, and working with her partner and cinematographer Dion Beebe, as well as the rest of the crew, to believably transform modern day Sydney into 1960s and 70s New York and Los Angeles. To get all of our latest episodes, subscribe to the Screen Australia podcast through Stitcher, Spotify and iTunes, where you can also leave a rating and review, and for all the latest funding announcements, opportunities and Screen News videos and articles, remember to subscribe to the fortnightly Screen Australia newsletter. For feedback about this episode please email [email protected]. Now here's the chat with I Am Woman director, Unjoo Moon. First of all, could you tell me a little bit about your background in the industry and some of the projects that you've worked on?
Unjoo Moon [00:01:35] I'm a graduate of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and I was really blessed and lucky to have gone to the film school at a time when an enormous amount of resources and support were available for film students. After leaving the Australian Film Television Radio School where I studied producing and I was also given the opportunity to do a lot of the directing stream, I actually went on to have a career directing television commercials and documentaries, corporate videos. I did short dramas and I spent several years doing that before I moved to America. My partner, who I met at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Dion Beebe, who is a cinematographer, and I decided that we would really stretch our wings and come to Hollywood and reach for the kind of movies and projects and have the kind of career that we had dreamed of having. When we came here, I actually decided to do my master's degree in film directing, which I did at the American Film Institute, an incredible way to come and move to Los Angeles and learn how to live and work in the industry here. When I left the American Film Institute, I won the directing award, the Franklin J. Schaffner Award. I had such an incredible introduction to the industry in Hollywood through not only the film school, but the film that I'd made. People reached out to me for development deals and we discussed different projects. I continued all the time that I was doing this in directing short form projects, namely commercials and music videos. I have a real love for that short form and I know the power that a very short piece of material can have in reaching a lot of people. I've also been really lucky, I've done other really wonderful projects that have screened on television, that have screened at film festivals. I've done documentaries. Before I did this film, I did a feature length documentary called The Zen of Bennett, which is a documentary about the extraordinary music legend Tony Bennett and the making of his Duets II album, and in that album, I made, I think, 60 music videos for him and a documentary based around the experience of Tony as an artist at the age of 85 and making this album. We had a lot of fun in that project because we got to work with some extraordinary artists who were recording with Tony, everybody from the late and great Aretha Franklin, we did the last recording that Amy Winehouse did, and we did the first duet, a music video that Tony Bennett did with Lady Gaga.
Caris Bizzaca [00:04:32] Is that The Lady is a Tramp?
Unjoo Moon [00:04:34] Yes, that's right.
Caris Bizzaca [00:04:36] You said you studied at AFTRS and initially, you started producing. What prompted the shift into the directing side of things?
Unjoo Moon [00:04:47] I was always a storyteller from when I was a young girl, and I was always looking for different ways to express myself as a storyteller. I went to a high school in Australia that didn't really have performing arts, but I pursued debating and public speaking and I was always looking for different ways to be able to tell the kind of stories I was interested in. When I went to university, I studied law and I went to the University of New South Wales because they had such a great theatre programme that I could do at the same time. Even though I was exposed to more elements of storytelling in terms of theatre, I didn't really grow up with a lot of people who look like me, being a Korean-Australian girl, that I didn't have a lot of role models to really understand that directing was a path that I could take. I think that when I got my first job in the film and television industry, I actually got a job on ABC TV, I was working as a reporter on a show called Edge of the Wedge. When I got that first job, because it was in television and the way that television worked, the incredible producers that I work with were essentially also the directors of the stories that I was filing as a journalist, but I came to learn very quickly that the people who were crafting the story and were really creating the foundations of the work that was happening was really the producer, who was also the director at the ABC, but I knew that to be the producer. When I realised that really my role was not going to be in front of the camera, that what I really wanted to do was to be the storyteller, and that was to be behind the camera. When I initially applied to AFTRS, I applied as a producing student because I think that's what I understood directing to be in some ways. I knew what producers did, I knew that they put projects together, I knew they finance, I worked as a producer's assistant in London for a while as well. But I think that my experience at the ABC really didn't clarify to me what the role of the director [was] that I was probably best suited to. I started off as a producing student at AFTRS, which I loved. I had an amazing head of producing at the time, Gilda Biracchi, who was incredibly supportive and really very creative and really pushed me to really explore different aspects of myself as a creative and as a storyteller. At that time, the Australian Film Television School had a very unique programme, in my year they only took 12 students and even though we had to come in specialising in a certain area, we were all allowed to make our own films. I directed a second-year film, which is the first project I worked on together with Dion. He was also a student at the film school and it was the start of a great collaboration for us. When I finished that project, all the graduate students were allowed to screen a film to the great Peter Weir, who really is one of my all-time idols and inspirations as a storyteller. Peter Weir watched all the graduating films. Of course, mine wasn't the graduating film, it was the second-year film which we managed to slip in there, but after he watched the films, he actually came back to Brian, who was the head of directing at the time, and really encouraged him to take me on as a directing student. Based on that recommendation in my last year, Brian very generously allowed me to do all the directing components of the third year, which really helped solidify and really helped me understand what my future path was going to be.
Caris Bizzaca [00:08:52] And that short was Azzadine, was it?
Unjoo Moon [00:08:56] Yes.
Caris Bizzaca [00:08:58] Your feature documentary was The Zen of Bennett, which was about Tony Bennett. Do you think that it's a coincidence then that your first drama feature with I Am Woman centers around someone with such musical significance as Helen Reddy?
Unjoo Moon [00:09:14] It's so funny because after I made The Zen of Bennett and I'd taken some time, Dion and I had had a child and I'd taken some time to really focus on being a mother, which I think was such a great decision for me, not just personally, but because I think I just learnt so much as an artist, having that experience. It was interesting because after I did The Zen of Bennett, I had pretty much been approached by a lot of people to look at music-based projects and I remember saying I am gonna do something really different and I'm going to make a feature film and it's not going to be about music and then I met Helen Reddy and I realised that that was the movie I was destined to make and it ended up being all about music, and other things, too.
Caris Bizzaca [00:10:07] But there is some music elements to it, naturally.
Unjoo Moon [00:10:10] Oh, it's very strong. Her music, the music in it is really the inspiration for why I wanted to make the movie at the beginning anyway.
Caris Bizzaca [00:10:19] Did working on the Tony Bennett documentary, did that help in any way with the shooting of, there are obviously some big musical numbers in I Am Woman, but did that help with shooting those scenes?
Unjoo Moon [00:10:32] Well, before I did that documentary, I'd already done a lot of music-based projects in short form, so I directed music videos, I directed commercials with a lot of musical leanings to them. I also have a background in dance. My job when I was at law school, I thought that I should go and get some kind of part time job because that's what everybody was doing at the time and I was a horrible, horrible waitress. I still would be a terrible, terrible person in any scenario like that, but because I had a dance background, I worked as the assistant to the Australian Olympic coach for rhythmic gymnastics at the state sports centre and my job was choreography. I have that musical background and that dance background, which I've always carried through with me in all the work that I've done. What did I learn the most in terms of, if you asked me what it is about working on the film about Tony Bennett that I was able to carry through, I think the thing I learnt the most was about working with a real-life icon, somebody who is still alive and who has a legacy and who has a family around them and a family that will carry that legacy on? When you're dealing with a subject matter like that, that's a very, very important thing to understand, because you're not just making a film in isolation as a filmmaker that you really have to work with the family.
Caris Bizzaca [00:12:08] Yeah, there's the additional layer of responsibility, I suppose?
Unjoo Moon [00:12:12] Yes, and different families want different things. The Zen of Bennett was a project that Danny Bennett, Tony Bennett's son had initiated, and he was very, very involved in every aspect of it. Helen's family had a very different approach, I think that they were happy to hand over a lot more to me as a filmmaker. They trusted me from the very beginning and had been really happy with the trust that they enfolded in me, so it really depends on how involved the family is with that legacy.
Caris Bizzaca [00:12:52] With I Am Woman, from what I understand, it was an originally going to be a documentary and then became a drama feature. Is that correct?
Unjoo Moon [00:13:01] Yeah, I mean, Helen and I had talked about it being a documentary. She was really interested in how we'd made the documentary with Tony. She knew Tony, I have a really wonderful photo of her and Tony Bennett together. She knew a lot of the people that I had worked with, and Helen had just returned to America at that stage after pretty much not performing for a long time and living in Australia on Norfolk Island. I met her just after she'd pretty much returned to America and she was about to start this comeback tour that she was doing in the late stage of her life. She was really interested in reflecting on her life, which is very much what we did in the research process of this film. But the more I spoke with Helen and the more I learnt about her story, I just realised that she had such a cinematic story to tell. Also, that the story would probably be best served as a movie in some ways because we could succinctly tell it by being more inspired by her real-life story and being able to combine certain things to make the storytelling more powerful. Also, there's so much material on Helen already online. There's an amazing YouTube channel called ReddyRockedThe70s, so if you go into that you can spend hours, which I did when I first met Helen. Everybody who watches the movie ends up Googling Helen.
Caris Bizzaca [00:14:33] Going on a deep dive.
Unjoo Moon [00:14:36] All those fantastic videos, the midnight special, The Carol Burnett Show and Helen Reddy Show, so there is already a lot of material there.
Caris Bizzaca [00:14:45] Then how did you find that process once it was decided that this would be a feature and you embarked upon it, how did you find the process of making a drama compared to a documentary, were there things that you enjoyed or things that you missed?
Unjoo Moon [00:14:59] Well, there was a long research period before Helen agreed that it would become a film. I think it was almost a year after I met Helen, [and] Helen and I had a lot of conversations, we'd go to lunch together, we'd walk along the beach together. I guess that I wanted to feel that I had enough material to know that there was enough of an ark and enough scope for a feature film. Also, she had to really reach a point where she would trust me. It's a big thing for anybody to hand over their life rights. I mean, it was a different scenario for the Tony Bennett film because the rights were owned by the family, and Danny was so involved. But in this scenario, Helen really had to trust me from the very beginning and hand over those life rights to somebody who hasn't even got a screenplay yet. She had to really believe that the story that I would tell would be something that she was comfortable with, so there was a lot a lot of research beforehand. At that stage, her son, Jordan Sommers, was her manager, and he really also believed in the film. He could see the kind of movie that I wanted to make, so he was incredibly supportive and the two of us really nurtured Helen to get to a point where she felt comfortable with this. I remember when we were at that final point of, Helen had decided that, yes, she would make this movie. I remember I said to her, Helen, this isn't going to be a documentary and I can't get everything right. I can't get every word that you said right. I won't get every sequence of events correct. I may end up combining characters to make two people, one person just for ease of storytelling. But what I will promise you, Helen, is that I will absolutely capture the spirit of who you are, what your music has meant to be people and what your life has been, and I think we did that in the movie and she was very pleased with that.
Caris Bizzaca [00:16:55] Yeah, definitely, so you had the idea that this was going to be a feature. You got the life rights from Helen. What happened next in terms of, did Goalpost come on board then? Were they already on board? Goalpost Pictures, sorry and getting Emma Jensen on board as a writer as well.
Unjoo Moon [00:17:17] After we decided that this would be a movie, I came and did a research trip in Australia and I came to Screen Australia and Martha Coleman, who was there at the time, who is somebody I went to film school with. We both had a long discussion about all the possibilities of how to make it in Australia, and one of the things that I did was I went out and I spoke to a bunch of Australian producers. It'd been a long time since I'd worked in Australia or both Dion and I had done anything in Australia, really. It was this really wonderful moment when I reconnected with Rosemary Blight because Rose and I have known each other for a really long time and we actually know each other through music. When I was at film school and Dion was directing music videos, Rose was working in the company that was producing those music videos, so we'd had a really long history and of course, she's gone on to do wonderful movies and is such an experienced producer and so we reconnected. What was really amazing about seeing her again, of course, it was wonderful to be able to talk about, she'd just completed The Sapphires, which I really loved and thought they did such a brilliant job on. But what was really the thing that I think that bonded us together is that we from the very beginning always knew the message of this movie that we wanted to tell. In the whole journey that Rose and I had been on right up to now, that's what's really been the foundation of why it's been so successful, because we've always wanted to tell the same story. In the end, we told that story. Rose has been a great partner in making this movie and of course, she brings with her all her experience of making films in Australia and marketing them out to the world. Then together, Rose and I then started to explore writers, we looked at a lot of different people and I even started some early work with different writers, but because it was pretty clear the kind of movie this needed to be, I think I was really searching for someone like Emma [Jensen] all along, and when I found her, it was really quite wonderful because I knew that you really needed a writer who was really great at research, who'd really been able to tackle real life subjects. Emma had done the movie on Mary Shelley. She had just embarked on a project that had links with Ava Gardner. She was really looking at different people in history, so she was really wonderful at the research. Also, she brought with her what something that Rose also brings with her, which is the love of music. I think to make a music movie like this, you really do have to love music as well. I met Emma through a mutual friend, Matthew Dabner and Matthew set us up with a lunch and in that lunch, it was just very clear that this was gonna be a great partnership and a great collaboration. Having talked about how much Rose, Emma and I love music, I can't tell you how many times our writing sessions would end up with the three of us just singing those Helen Reddy songs. I think the staff at Goalpost got just fed up with it after a while, because we'd just be blasting that music.
Caris Bizzaca [00:20:38] Again? [laughs].
Unjoo Moon [00:20:40] I think also what was really wonderful about having this team of women who were in the development phase of the movie with Rose, Emma and I is that a lot of the movie is about the friendship between Helen and Lilian, and I think that that's something that Emma captured really beautifully, that friendship of two women and what that friendship created through the music and what that friendship meant to Helen's career.
Caris Bizzaca [00:21:04] Yeah, definitely. You mentioned the music and from what I understand, you rerecorded some of Helen's music specifically for the film. Can you talk through why you did that and how you went about it?
Unjoo Moon [00:21:24] We always knew that in the casting of the actor to play Helen Reddy that we may have to also look for a voice to marry with the actor, because when you're dealing with a real-life person, as I was saying before, you're always opening yourself up to the amount of research people are going to do. People are gonna jump onto the internet and listen to those Helen Reddy songs, and they want to hear a voice that sounds like Helen. You want to be able to sell the performance, but they are a little more forgiving if things don't look exactly the same, but they really want to hear that voice. Helen has such a unique and distinctive voice. When we first started working with Tilda, she went through a series of tests, she did aging tests, she also did singing tests. It was just really important that Tilda knew how to sing, even though we probably knew at that stage that we were going to marry a voice to her performance so that we could really enhance the creation of the character of Helen Reddy. I took a lot of inspiration from the way that musicals did it, during the golden years of Hollywood. If you look at Natalie Wood in West Side Story or Deborah Kerr in The King and I, they worked in a very specific way to get the voice married to the performance. We went on a huge search to look for the right voice that would be able to do that. We looked in Australia, we auditioned people in America, in Los Angeles, in Nashville and in London, and amazingly enough, we found Chelsea, Chelsea Cullen, who is from Perth, and Chelsea worked with our music producer who really worked very hard in getting the style of the way she would sing Helen right. It's not really about getting the style right, what really counts in the end is really about getting the emotion of those musical performances right. The way that the film is constructed and the way I always saw the movie is very much as a musical, so those songs are very much placed at certain points of Helen's life, even though they're her most iconic songs, and those songs helped tell the story and the emotional journey that Helen's on. We couldn't just use a Helen Reddy recording because it wouldn't speak to the emotion, and plus, Helen's voice never worked coming out of Tilda's body. Everything we did was really based around Tilda's performance, we really worked hard on getting Tilda's performance absolutely right. Tilda did such a brilliant job, but in the end, especially with the songs that we use that Chelsea is married to with the voice, we just really had to make sure that those songs hit the emotional moments of Tilda's performance. We went back after we'd shot the pitch, after we'd edited some of those sequences and we had Chelsea re-record to picture.
Caris Bizzaca [00:24:36] Oh, wow, yeah, just so it was really spot on.
Unjoo Moon [00:24:41] Some of the songs are Chelsea's and there's actually some of Helen's real songs and Helen's real voice in the movie as well.
Caris Bizzaca [00:24:49] With the film itself, it's kind of incredible to think watching it that it was made in Sydney or shot in Sydney. You've made Sydney look like New York and Los Angeles across a number of different time periods throughout the 70s and 80s and earlier, I think. Can you talk through that process and working with your heads of department to to create that?
Unjoo Moon [00:25:14] I think it really helps that Dion and I've lived in America for so long, so we had a very clear idea of the look of the film, apart from the fact that Dion is just such a brilliant, creative and has been in so many scenarios over these extraordinary movies that he's made where he's had to make different locations look like different countries. I think that coming back to Sydney, and we really wanted to make this film in Australia from the very beginning because we felt so strongly that even though the story's actually not set in Australia, it's such a quintessentially Australian movie. It's the story of the dream of an Australian artist that is still happening today for many young people.
Caris Bizzaca [00:25:57] Yeah, there's still people doing that trip.
Unjoo Moon [00:25:59] Absolutely, and we're one of them. Dion and I, we went to Los Angeles with those dreams. We wanted to make it in Australia, and we looked at various cities and we had such incredible support with Fox Studios and Screen New South Wales, who made it very easy for us to come back and shoot in Sydney. Dion and I already knew the look of the film fairly clearly before we started and it really helped me enormously to have Michael Turner, the production designer on the movie, because Michael had already worked in America. He'd lived in America, and Michael's training is as an architect and some of his favourite architects are Americans. He had done architectural tools across America, so when we're searching for locations, this film certainly didn't have the budget to build everything. We had to really find specific locations. Michael was very on board and very meticulous about finding the houses and the locations that would really sell each of those cities that we were trying to recreate.
Caris Bizzaca [00:27:03] If you look back over the process of making I Am Woman, if you could name one or two things that you learnt from that experience, what would they be?
Unjoo Moon [00:27:13] One of the really big takeaways for me was managing such a big scope of storytelling, which had very different time periods. You had to constantly be redressing sets. You couldn't just be in one location and say, well, I'm going to shoot all those sequences in that location back-to-back, because you had to really, [you] often have to stop and redress sets. Tilda [Cobham-Hervey], as Helen had, I think, sixty-three costume changes and she had more than fourteen hairstyles. Every time we were scheduling, you had to take into account all the different changes in period as well. That was a really big take away in terms of being able to be prepped enough to be able to manage those different periods, which means that they would take up more time in a day. We didn't have long shooting days at all. We didn't have the budgets suddenly to go into overtime on many days. It was just really about being efficient, balancing efficiency in production with being able to give space and breath to the actors in order to be able to really help them explore their characters and bring the most to each of those scenes that they were filming so that they could really stretch themselves, reach further, reach deeper within the time constraints. I think I was pretty lucky because I happened to be married to the cinematographer, so we were able to, we worked on this 24/7 and we came in with really solid plans and we were very, very organised. Of course, Dion brings enormous amount of experience and his talent is immeasurable, so that support I had, I was extremely, extremely lucky. But within that, I always wanted to make sure that there was enough time and space for the actors to be able to explore and be playful and to be able to shake things up and create energy if things ever felt flat. What was I surprised by? The biggest thing I was surprised by about working with Australia, I thought we were very, very well planned but I think one of the things that I wasn't planned for was just how noisy the Australian birds are and how much they would eat into my day because we had to always wait for those kookaburras and those crazy crows and the parakeets that were squeaking.
Caris Bizzaca [00:29:51] It doesn't really fit in with 1970s New York.
Unjoo Moon [00:29:56] Definitely can't be Los Angeles with that Kookaburra in the background. Evan Peters does such a great kookaburra impersonation now.
Caris Bizzaca [00:30:04] And so just lastly, what advice do you have for any Australian directors out there?
Unjoo Moon [00:30:13] I think the biggest thing I've learnt in the kind of projects that I'm interested in making is really learning how to be unique in what you say. By that I really mean that you tell the story through your eyes. Find a project or find a story that you feel that only you can tell. There are so many different and wonderful projects out there and such limited ways to be able to make them. There's limited financing in Australia, they can't choose every single project, but I think that if you can present a story that has an audience, that has broad appeal, but that as a director, whether you're a first-time director or whether you've made 10 feature films, I think that you have to be uniquely able to tell that story. It has to just come from you as a storyteller.
Caris Bizzaca [00:31:11] Fantastic, well, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast and talking to us about I Am Woman.
Unjoo Moon [00:31:18] Oh, such a pleasure, it was such a wonderful experience to be in Australia to make this film and to be able to bring it to Australian audiences now.
Caris Bizzaca [00:31:29] That was Unjoo Moon, the director of I Am Woman, which is available to watch in Australia on the streaming service, Stan. For all the latest updates from the local screen industry, remember to subscribe to the fortnightly Screen Australia newsletter and thanks for listening.