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)

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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.

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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

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