Oscar Award winner and The Daughter star Geoffrey Rush is looking for more women to join the male-dominated filmmaking industry. Speaking on the Sydney film festival red carpet, he said “I’d love to see a hell of a lot more to bring it up to an equal balance”
Simon Stone’s feature-debut The Daughter, which is currently starring Rush, has two female producers, Jan Chapman (producer of The Piano, Lantana and Somersault), and emerging talent Nicole O’Donohue (producer of Griff The Invisible and The Last Impresario).
“It’s an ancient statistic that men have always pushed themselves rather annoyingly to the front of the queue”, said Rush, the president of Aacta (the Australian Academy of Cinematic and Television Arts), “but when I think of working with female directors of photography, female directors, [there is] a very interesting quality that is not a male mind that goes into the creative process”.
Rush is one of Australia’s most established theatre actors and when asked about the recent trend for plays to be adapted into movies, he said he had no “zeitgeist theories” about the current trend of ‘play-turned-film’, but does believe it “reflects something about the fertility of what’s around”. Rush went onto add: “It takes a very seasoned producer like Jan Chapman to look at Simon Stone’s growing body of theatrical work and for them to have a meeting and [say]: ‘I think this could go further’”.
Director Neil Armfield has cast Rush as King Lear in an upcoming Sydney Theatre Company production in November. Rush also looks forward to working under writer and director of Final Portrait, Stanley Tucci. However, the actor said filming was currently in “a state of flux” due to cast and crew availability. Despite this, he said that “Stanley Tucci’s screenplay is really a gem”, adding that “as an actor, it’s a role that I connected with the moment I read it”.
Source: The Guardian
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