Laura Scrivano

I grew up in a small, working-class town on the NSW south coast in Australia. It was known as the “coal coast” and the nearest city was called the “steel city” because nearly everyone’s parents worked at the BHP steel works or collieries. My dad was a coal miner and a first generation immigrant from post World War 2 Italy. My mum was an English second language teacher, and the men in her family had also worked in the mines. Growing up I had no exposure to the film industry and the expectation for my brother and I was that we would work hard at school and be the first full generation in my family to go to university and get “good jobs”. But from a very young age, I had a natural attraction to storytelling and both of my parents loved movies. I have a vivid memory of seeing my first film aged three or four – Wolfgang Peterson’s The Neverending Story – and was utterly addicted. I came home and acted out the whole thing on our front lawn, and apparently told my mother, “I want to do that”. Of course, I had no idea what that was. My brother was a huge Spielberg, Lucas and Zemekis fan and growing up we watched as many behind-the-scenes featurettes as we could find. In these docs doing that for a woman seemed to mean acting – and so I decided I wanted to be an actor. My dad had a VHS camera that my brother and I would make “shows” and “films” with. Inspired by Star Wars my brother built all these little models and we used lego figures as the actors, taking turns to do the voices. 

When I was 11, my parents finally relented to my pleading and let me attend the drama classes run by my local youth theatre. I completely fell in love with theatre and the rush of live performance. Having never really fitted in at school, it was there I found my best friends, my people. And one of our female drama teachers had recently graduated from the prestigious directing course at NIDA (think RADA). Slowly I began to realise there were other jobs that might be possible outside becoming an actress – a financially insecure ambition that terrified my father in particular. But entering any form of the arts made my parents nervous, so I agreed to their request for me to study a “normal” job and enrolled in a BA Communications, majoring in Journalism. I loved writing but I hated the formulaic style we were being taught, and was having serious doubts that this was the career for me. At the same time, I joined the university drama group, and the Australian Theatre for Young People, and aged 19 directed my first play. I LOVED IT. It somehow merged the visual, analytical and storytelling part of my brain much better than acting (and I was better at it too!). I was terrified the whole time but weirdly I loved that too. My mates in the drama group were mostly fellow communications students, but most of them were majoring in Media Arts and Production – essentially it was an introduction to filmmaking, radio and performance. I realised this is where I wanted to be, so I switched majors. I didn’t tell my parents. At this point I was working three part-time jobs to support myself so I figured it was my decision anyway. They weren’t thrilled when they found out. I was still enamoured by a career in the theatre, and frankly intimidated by the technical aspects of filmmaking, so chose to do a radio play as my major work rather than a short film.

After university I just wanted to keep directing, but I also needed a day job. So I applied for a position at Sydney Theatre Company (Australia’s largest theatre company) as publications editor. The job was to write program notes for each production, and articles for the subscriber magazine. I had two interviews and felt like an imposter the whole time. I didn’t think I was in with a shot but miraculously they offered me the job. I still remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I got that phone call. 

I worked three to four days a week at the company, directing profit-share theatre productions in my spare time. Looking back it was the most incredible training ground. I got to see loads of amazing theatre, interview the artists and spend time in the rehearsal room, with actors like Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Judy Davies and directors like Philip Seymour-Hoffman, Benedict Andrews and Steven Soderbergh. Watching them informed my theatre work, and slowly, almost without me noticing, started to push me back towards visual storytelling. 

In my late 20s I hit a wall with theatre. I desperately wanted to be a freelance director, but given the small size of the industry in Australia, the intimate and immersive nature of the work I was interested in, and my lack of a financial safety net, it seemed impossible. Then I got asked to do a new role within STC – to make trailers and behind the scenes content about the productions. The new artistic directors, Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, had seen what The National Theatre, Royal Court, etc., were making and wanted to do something similar. Suddenly I was directing actors in front of a camera, working with DPs and lighting, and adapting theatre texts to work on screen. I loved the visual intimacy of the camera, the ability to be in close-up to a compelling performance, and the physicality of image creation. Having studied physical theatre techniques, I found filmmaking an extension of that  – a magnified way to play with space and time. Doing this work made me realise filmmaking was something I wanted to pursue as a full-time career.