Interview: Stuart Buchanan and the Sydney Opera House

Conducted by Matthew Donlan

The Sydney Opera House has become home to more than just theatre in recent years. For a week every few months the Playhouse theatre transforms into a cinema. Ahead of the VIVID Live programme, I had the wonderful chance to pose a few questions to Stuart Buchanan, Head of Screen at the Sydney Opera House, about the programme, the space and the local film industry.

Thank you to Stuart for his time and words. You can see the full VIVID Programme here, my suggestion is 24 Hour Party People and David Byrne's True Stories.

On why we love blowing up the Sydney Opera House in films...
The architecture is a triumph of human ingenuity and creativity – even by modern construction standards, it shouldn’t really work. Yet somehow, the human spirit persevered and made the impossible possible. So, smashing that to pieces in the most dramatic way possible is a great shorthand for signalling that we’re all screwed.

I recommend the 1984 Australian film One Night Stand, which is shot almost entirely inside the Opera House just as nuclear war breaks out. It has a wonderful sensibility that permeates through so many Australian films of that era - dystopic scenarios smashed with offbeat whimsy and nonsensical narratives.

On restarting film screenings at the Opera House...
When the Opera House first opened in 1973, it screened films most nights of the week, largely curated by the (then) National Film Theatre of Australia. Over the decades, it’s hosted many seasons and festivals, such as the 14-year run of the Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival. So, in part, we wanted to pick up that baton, reboot the relationship, and understand what part we could helpfully play in the local film ecology.

We don’t yet have a permanent cinema at the House – we install a projector and screen in the Playhouse six times a year and run week-long seasons. That’s an expensive undertaking, which means we need to see solid audience numbers for each screening to make it viable. If there’s pressure, it comes from designing a balanced mix of films that can draw high attendance with those that are more surprising, more niche, more adventurous.

On the musicality of the VIVID Live programme...
The audio-visual team at the Opera House treat film screenings in the same way that they treat any other show – with an incredible attention to detail, and the aim of creating a perfect experience for audience. Hence, music films play particularly well in the Playhouse, so much so that people don’t feel too shy about dancing on some nights. During Vivid LIVE, the Studio next door to the Playhouse turns into a club space, and so I was inspired by the idea of a season of club-adjacent films – knowing that you can stumble out of the cinema and onto the dance floor at any time.

On the Shortwave commissioning series and partnering with local filmmakers...
We’ve commissioned around thirty original short films from Australian artists in recent years – noting these are performance films, or what we might call ‘art films’, rather than narrative shorts. There are very few places, certainly in the mainstream, screening regular programs of short films, ‘art films’ even less so. The Opera House cinema feels like a logical place to celebrate those.

It’s worth noting that the commissions started long before the new cinema program, but they had hitherto been ring-fenced to streaming. When we decided that the commissions needed a home on the big screen and worked out how to do that in the context of the Opera House infrastructure, the idea of extending that into a regular cinema program became evident.

There’s a short step from screening our own commissions to curating and screening films by and for the multitude of local film communities. We’ve made a great start with local festivals such as Africa Film Fest, Blacktown Shorts Film Festival, Pasifika Film Festival and others, but we could do more. The appetite is there, and the need is there – so we’re hustling to find ways to expand our programming footprint and broaden the ways in which we work with the local film community. 

On finding the balance between maintaining history and looking to the future...
I’m always reflecting on the fact that the Opera House was raised up from the ground by a bunch of people with their eyes locked on the future.  They didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer and envisaged an environment like no other, that still has no peer.

Countless iconic, innovative and often iconoclastic artists are platformed here every year, but the classicism of the Opera House casts a long shadow – its very name makes that hard to dispel. Therefore, pushing a futurist agenda is critical, if we are to counter misunderstanding and ensure that artists pushing boundaries are easily heard. Right across the House, I feel that much of what we do is extraordinary and future-facing, but such work can sometimes struggle for oxygen. So, we keep fighting the good fight, knowing – thanks to those crazy cats in the 60s – that’s what we’re here to do.

And lastly, on under-appreciated film gems...
As a Scot, it would be remiss of me not to rep the homeland. I think the first Scottish film I saw was the charmingly parochial coming-of-age comedy Gregory’s Girl, which most Scots of a certain vintage can quote at length. I had no frame of reference as a kid, but it felt as if that film was everywhere, and had conquered the world.

Laurels must also go to Scotland’s Lynne Ramsay. She might have only made five films in twenty-five years, but the one-two punch of her debut and follow-up – Ratcatcher and Morven Callar - is hard to beat.

I also admired the way the English director Jonathan Glazer faithfully represented Scotland in Under The Skin – using a guerilla handheld-vibe to convince us that Scarlett Johansson could easily prey on unsuspecting Glaswegians as a messed-up vampiric alien.