“SONGWRITER TURNED SCREENWRITER is not unheard of. Yes [Nick Cave], Donald Glover did it too”.
Megan Washington, multiple ARIA Award-winning singer/songwriter, maker and performer of very fine pop songs – which she’ll be touring from this weekend with symphony orchestras – and a star of both TV and TEDx, is talking about her new side hustle. If making your first feature film, as co-writer and co-producer could be classified as a side hustle.
It’s based on and named after Paul Kelly’s Christmas song staple, How To Make Gravy, it’s out now, and as Washington explained in part one of this interview, it took on a life of its own for this newcomer to screenwriting.
“For me, the invisible beats of songwriting are the same as invisible beats of screenwriting, and for me also growing up with a stutter has tuned me into the frequency of speech in a way that I did not realise until I began writing dialogue,” she says. “I also had the great fortune to be working with Nick Waterman who has been writing films for 20 years.”
Waterman getting a shout-out should not be a surprise. He’s not just the director and co-producer, with Washington, he wrote the script with her. And he’s her husband and father of their child.
“I loved working with Nick and I learned so much writing with him. To me How To Make Gravy feels like a long song – the film I mean, not the song” she laughs. “It’s been a really interesting process creatively too because I have spent most of my time being the performer, being the product – when I’m writing a song it’s always for me to sing – and I found in general that having more opportunities to write for characters that I don’t play, male characters, whatever, has helped me to define, by relief, what areas I enjoy inhabiting. The spaces that feel really cool for me.
“So it’s been pretty healthy, it’s been very fun. I feel like I’m learning and I felt like I’ve been learning this whole time.”
They have other musical works and a limited TV series they are working on, and Bluey – yes, that’s her as Calypso – sails on. And maybe a new way to approach her music, which will see a new album in 2025.
Washington reveals that she and Waterman spent six months with a psychiatrist at the beginning of the film project, breaking down the lyrics, subtext and “Jungian symbology” in the song, and then keeping that psychiatrist as a consultant throughout the making of the film to help with “our head spaces, during the creative process, but also the head spaces of the characters”.
She likens it to the role Joseph Campbell played for George Lucas with the first Star Wars films. So does she see the psychological and filmmaking experience being helpful in songwriting?
“Absolutely. I think the more – what do they say, when you are inside the jar you can’t read the label? – understanding that I gain about the creative process, the happier I am in my process, and the better the outcome,” Washington says. “Music is a much more spiritual act for me now that I have this other practice. My music has become a very sacred space that I have heavily ritualised.”
That sounds a bit woowoo doesn’t it?
“I used to use my songwriting as a more therapeutic process, but now I feel really at ease with creativity in general and things tend to just flow in such a way that for me really to be able to sit down at the piano and sing for myself, and write for myself – I’m not writing because I want radio hits; I’m just writing because I’m existing – it feels good to me when I sing,” she says.
“Singing is an act of embodying the present moment, because the song demands your attention and it’s poor form to break it, and I get real permission to depart into the music when it begins. I just love to be there.”
Is there spirituality, is there elevation and separation from herself, in screenwriting? Or is that more process-driven?
“I mentioned before that the film has a choir in it, the prison has a choir, and something that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately is the fact that there is almost nowhere in our society at the moment where people can regularly sing together. I think capitalism has reframed a lot of art and expression as money-making enterprises or not moneymaking enterprises, and the idea that singing might just be everybody’s birthright, especially singing together and the feeling of communing with other humans at the same time, that is something that has been lost to us,” she explains.
“The older I get the more I see any other creation at all is a beautiful spiritual act of defiance. There is a line in one of the songs that the choir sings, ‘I am the reason that I sing’, which I guess sums up what I’m trying to say. All of that, that’s the river that I’m floating down at the moment.”
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How To Make Gravy is in cinemas now and will be on Binge/Foxtel from December 1
Megan Washington plays
J Noosa, Noosa Heads, November 23
Sydney Opera House, November 27
Trinity Sessions, Adelaide, November 29-30
Princess Theatre, Brisbane, December 12
Events Centre, Caloundra, December 14
Altar Bar, Hobart, December 18
Frankston Arts Centre, December 20
Forum, Melbourne, December 21
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