Director lands on her feet at high altitude

Cate Shortland's success is anything but sudden.

Sudden success can be a terrible burden. Somersault, the debut feature of Australian short-film maker Cate Shortland was the only game in town across the Tasman last October.

The film, about an alienated teenage girl looking for love in all the wrong places, is remarkable for being set in a cold Australia, on the shores of Lake Jindabyne in the snowfields. And its cool, detached, composed style is much more European than Australian.

Its box-office performance was a modest A$2 million ($2.16 million) but it obviously struck a chord in the film-making community: nominated in a record 15 categories in the Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards, it won 13.

The Australian critics oohed and aahed. The director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, Shane Danielsen, described Shortland as "the most talented film-maker to emerge from Australia in the past decade" and added that "Somersault is the work of a born film-maker".

It strikes me that being feted to such an extent must be a trifle intimidating. But Shortland, speaking from Australia, copes by trying to ignore all the fuss.

"I think it's all a lot of hype," she says, sounding very unhyped. "Most of my friends who are film-makers have had the same thing said about them: Rowan Woods [who made The Boys] and Andrew Dominic [director of Chopper]. Journalists can write things about you but you just have to try and not read too much of it and keep making your own work."

Shortland's success is anything but sudden. The director of several well-regarded short films, she was writing Somersault as a 15-minute movie until her producer and collaborator Anthony Anderson encouraged her to make it longer.

She worked at it, off and on, for seven years and gradually a feature began to emerge. Then it was selected for the Aurora script development scheme run by the NSW Film and Television Office. The scheme is similar in intention to the Sundance-style labs run by the Writers Foundation in this country, but differs significantly in format in that mentors assist over six months and the script is workshopped by actors. Shortland's mentors, who included Alison Tilson (Japanese Story), Rob Festinger (In the Bedroom) and Jane Campion, and their input was critical, she says.

Along the way the dramatis personae changed. A gay man, played by Erik Thomson, a familiar face in this country, was part of a romantic triangle in what Shortland calls "a three-way, quite dysfunctional love story". But he is a subsidiary character in the finished film which concentrates on the relationship between the runaway Heidi (Abbie Cornish) and Joe (Sam Worthington), the anguished scion of an aristocratic farming family.

The changes result in a script which bears the bruises of repeated handling - there are a few narrative dead-ends and questionable motivations. But the film is remarkable for its assured control of look and emotional tone. Shortland says that that look was to some extent dictated by Cornish.

"When I wrote her, she was a freckle-faced suburban kid," she recalls, "but when we cast Abbie, the look kind of changed. I was a bit scared about casting her because she is so beautiful. But what people take away from the film, I hope, is her spirit and emotion rather than just her physical beauty."

For all that it's an intimate personal drama, Somersault is also a film about a place. Shortland spent a period of her life driving a lot between Sydney and her hometown of Canberra. She would pass Lake George near the capital which, at 155 sq km (about a quarter the size of Taupo) is a big body of water by the standards of that sunburnt country.

"It's really big and really desolate," she says, "and the highway goes right along the side and all you can see is lake.

"But what happens every so often is that the lake disappears. It dries up and what you're left with is this amazing piece of flat dry land. When it is there, it can have fenceposts sticking up out of it and when it dries up they find light planes that have gone down that they couldn't find.

"It's just this eerie, eerie place and it's always got this mystery to it, this desolation ... I wanted to make a film there."

In the end, the story was relocated to Jindabyne, an instant town in the snowfields, on the edge of a lake. And in the high, cold air, Shortland was able to realise her visual design for the film.

"The exteriors are very blue because when Heidi is outside she's very cold and isolated. And the interiors are very amber and warm and full of wood panelling because when she's inside there's more relationship and intimacy."

The music, by Aussie band Decoder Ring, adds to the sense of eerie cool. And that title? Shortland explains that a title was elusive "and I was looking up millions of words in the dictionary and I saw that 'somersault' meant 'to fall forward and land on your feet'. And that reminded me of adolescence.

"It's a period of your life when you're continually falling over ... that title just fitted."

On screen

*Who: Cate Shortland, director
*What: Somersault
*Where & when: Opens Rialto today