Feature
This is her
by Diana Wichtel
From Shortland Street to short-film directing, Katie Wolfe has always attracted attention.
Melbourne, New York, San Tropez, Prague, Pt Chev … Katie Wolfe’s life over the past six months reads like a joke T-shirt. She’s been doing a sort of belated, compressed OE – “I went from school to varsity to drama school and straight to work” – while touting her short film, This Is Her, around some of the world’s more glamorous film festivals. The top she’s wearing the day I visit her inner-city home reads, evocatively, “Telluride”.
Wolfe, 40-ish, is best known for playing difficult women, often called Amanda, on everything from Marlin Bay to Cover Story and Mercy Peak. You recall a wired intensity that always made her one to watch.
Her first outing as a film director has not gone unnoticed, either. This Is Her is a bleakly comic take on marriage and related disasters. “This is me. This is my husband. And this is the bitch who will one day steal him and ruin my life,” begins the narrator, Evie. Or, as Wolfe observes, “She’s f---ed off.” “Me” is enduring a sort of birth scene that, while not graphic, has your teenage daughter going, “Whoa. I am never doing that.” “Her” is the angelic six-year-old who will grow up to be the other woman. The film’s cheery tagline: “There is no fairytale ending.”
The film has won a clutch of awards: a Qantas for cinematographer Ginny Loane; the Audience Award at the Prague Short Film Festival; Best Short Film at the St Tropez Antipodes Film Festival. Last month, Wolfe took it to the Sundance Film Festival.
The way Wolfe tells it, it was a bit of a dream run from the start. The script arrived fully formed, written in an evening by Shortland Street colleague Kate McDermott. You have to wonder whether part of the film’s success was that it escaped the endless reworking that so often happens. “That’s a huge problem -– too many cooks and too many arbiters of taste out there. I think there are a lot of scripts that were really good, once.”
Really good script in hand, everything else fell into place. “We just brought together a team to apply for money. It was really that simple. We all wish that happened more.”
Sundance. “Man, I really felt for the first time in my life how isolated we are here … You’ve been travelling for 24 hours and others had a quick three-hour flight from Chicago.” But distance looks both ways. Other filmmakers admired Wolfe’s No 8 wire naivety. “They were intrigued by the fact I haven’t been to film school. I don’t have a developed film language. One of them said, ‘Oh my God, you broke all the rules!’ And I’m like, ‘What rules?’”
So, did she meet famous people? “Not really.” She sat next to actor Woody Harrelson at a bar. “He had the beanie pulled down over his face.” Wolfe has been on Shortland Street. She knows a bit about the art of avoiding eye contact. “You just leave him alone.”
There were some mad moments. “You’ll like this. I was having breakfast one morning, a meeting, and I was witness to the big, controversial Sundance moment.” That would be when a reviewer for Variety punched out producer Jeff Dowd, the inspiration behind “the Dude” in the cult hit The Big Lebowski. “He’s a real character around Sundance. He was having a go at this reviewer. This morning at breakfast, he started giving him another go and the reviewer just lost it and threw a punch.”
Everyone’s a critic. Happily, Wolfe and I have never come to blows. Though a few years ago she rang me about a less-than-rapturous television review. “Did I?” she wails, appalled. “What did I say?” Actually, she was very reasonable. Just asking, possibly through slightly gritted teeth, for more feedback. “I’m embarrassed now, because I was a bit stroppy in my younger age. Which is all right.”
You get the sense that, even after years of surviving in an unforgiving industry, Wolfe has never developed a terribly thick skin. “Bad reviews hurt so much. Good reviews you can walk around on air for about a month.” These days, she wouldn’t phone. “You go up there,” she says philosophically, “you gotta go down.”
She has had to take some frank feedback about the film as she’s gone around the traps. “I heard through the grapevine that some people think the film is mean. Mean!” Someone else described it as manipulative. “I know there has been this reaction that it’s anti-male. I don’t understand that, really. If anything, the women are so horrible to each other. How nasty women are to each other comes across.”
There was the Israeli director of photography (DOP) at Sundance. “She was saying to me it looks like a commercial – which is completely intentional. That was my instruction: it needs to look like a nappy ad.”
A strong reaction is better than none. Some reactions were so strong as to be bizarre. There was the German DOP. “He goes, ‘Ach, your film makes me so angry!’” It turned out his wife was about to have a baby. “He went, ‘It does not have to be like that!’ They were doing this hypnobirth thing.” First child, obviously. “Yep.” She wished him luck with the hypnobirthing.
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