[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979]
Judith M. Kass interviewed Phillip Noyce, the director of Newsfront, and David Rowe, the production and marketing consultant for the New South Wales Film Corporation, when they were in New York City in September 1978 for the film’s showing at the Lincoln Center Film Festival. Newsfront uses Australian newsreel footage and integrates it—and the historical events portrayed therein—with the fictional story of Cinetone, an Australian newsreel company trying to survive in the 1940s and 1950s, until the advent of television in 1956.
Whose idea was the film?
Phillip Noyce: It was actually the idea of the producer, David Elfick. He conceived the idea, he says, in conjunction with some discussions he had with other filmmakers. Bob Ellis wrote the original script and I adapted it to produce the final shooting script.
Where did the funding come from?
PN: The funding came from the New South Wales Film Corporation, which is the majority investor in the film, but the budget was also met by private investors, one of the more significant being an Australian distributor called Marshak. For instance, the New South Wales Film Corporation is heavily involved in devising methods with consultant merchant bankers to fund and solicit investment from other sources, so some of the authorities are very much involved in production in an entrepreneurial way. Each bank would be termed, for want of a better description, as executive producers.
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