With their new documentary, The Giants, filmmakers Laurence Billiet and Rachael Antony have created an affectionate portrait of one of Australia’s most recognisable identities – former leader of The Greens Party, staunch environmental activist, folk hero and gay icon, Bob Brown.

A follow up to their television hit, Freeman, Laurence and Rachael inject The Giants with their trademark visual flair, including stunning animation, jaw-dropping drone footage, and epic camera rigging to interweave Bob’s story with the life cycle of the ancient trees that he has spent his life fighting to protect.

Laurence Billiet

Writer, Producer, Director

Laurence (she/her) is a co-founder of Melbourne-based creative studio General Strike. 

In 2001, Laurence founded Lonely Planet Television and executive produced dozens of TV shows for domestic and international broadcasters. Hit TV series included Lonely Planet Six Degrees for Discovery and Going Bush, featuring Cathy Freeman and Deborah Mailman travelling across Aboriginal Australia, for SBS. 

She was the first producer ever to secure original commissions from US digital platform Hulu and Al Gore’s Current TV. Laurence also executive produced hundreds of on line videos for Vice, i-D, Hulu, Babelgum, Facebook Live and Youtube. 

After several years overseas, Laurence moved back to Melbourne to establish General Strike and pivoted to directing the films she produces. The first full-length film she directed, Freeman, which premiered on the ABC TV, was the most watched documentary of 2020 on Australian TV. 

Laurence is the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Betty Roland Award for Scriptwriting at the NSW Premier Literary Awards and the 2021 Australian Directors Guild Award for Best Direction in a Documentary one-hour. 

Rachael Antony

Writer, Producer, Director

Rachael (she/her) is a co-founder of General Strike and the studio’s head writer.

Rachael has over 20 years’ experience as a writer and journalist, having written for television, online and print. She has worked as a writer/researcher for television series, such as Lonely Planet Six Degrees (SBS, Discovery) and Family Footsteps (ABC). She has scripted and produced around 100 short form videos including the Webby award-winning series Freewheelers.

Rachael spent several years in Paris where she oversaw editorial and community for Silicon Valley news app Flipboard in France and curated news coverage of events such as the Paris terrorist attacks, the World Cup and COP 21. Most recently she acted as Script Editor for Freeman (ABC TV).

“We really want to make joyful films that really spark curiosity and joy and wonder, and try to counter some of that negativity that we all experience in the real world.”

Interview by Matthew Eeles

You two co-founded the Melbourne-based creative studio, General Strike. How did you two meet?

Rachael We met a long time ago. We’re actually partners in real life. We lived overseas together for quite a few years in London and Paris. Then we came back to Australia and we didn’t want to work for other people, so we decided to start our own thing. We really wanted to make joyful films and events that really spark curiosity and joy and wonder, and try to counter some of that negativity that we all experience in the real world, particularly in the context of political polarity, the climate crisis, and all those bad news stories. Initially we were really keen on people getting off their screens and getting out into the world and connecting with each other physically. Our previous joint project was Freeman for the ABC, which was primarily Laurence’s project. Initially Freeman was conceived as an outdoor event as an opportunity to get people to come together. That didn’t quite work out due to Covid, and it turned into a television documentary. In a way, that was an unexpected silver lining because people were at home, and they were able to watch and relive Cathy Freeman’s race at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 together as families, or in group houses or whatever, as they would have done at the time.

Laurence Prior to General Strike, we were both working in media. Rachel is a journalist by trade, and she’s a writer. I was also involved in setting up Lonely Planet Television making a lot of documentary and travel television. More recently I worked in more visual commercial space in Paris, France. We were interested in bringing those two words together; documentary storytelling, the beauty of storytelling, but with a very strong visual and creative aesthetic to it. We thought there’d be a lot of space to do that because I think people’s visual language has really become a lot more sophisticated over the last few years with Instagram, Netflix and so on. People expect to see things that blow their mind. We both thought that would be really interesting to explore both words. An example of that is our work with Stephen Page from Bangarra Dance Theatre who brought contemporary dance to Freeman, and we worked with cinematographer Bonnie Elliot who created some stuff which really looked great. By bringing these different creatives together, we merged sport documentary with high-end dance choreography. It worked really well and people really loved it. It was a mainstream success, so it really proves that you can do something a little bit edgy and people will respond to it.

Freeman was excellent. And you’re exactly right, I watched it on TV with my family in the lounge room as a shared experience. That’s rare nowadays, because we usually have our heads buried in our own devices. 

Laurence What was really great about it was that it was like one of those old school 80s TV events that we just don’t have anymore. We were so lucky because that really was the intention of that film, to create an experience so that people could really connect with each other like we did in 2000.

Rachael What was interesting about Freeman, and similar with The Giants, is that there was a cross-generational appeal. Obviously people who watched that original race have a very strong memory of it, and those people were able to share it with their children who were not born at the time. With Bob Brown, we felt that he’s someone who also has cross-generational appeal, because obviously he’s a baby boomer. So people know him either from his days at the Franklin, or as an activist, or they know him as a politician in Canberra. There’s a younger generation, I guess, who are perhaps more aware of him just as an activist, or they may not understand why they’re aware of him at all, which we’ve also found. [Laughs]. When we look at a big challenge like the climate crisis, it’s often pitted in a generational perspective where one generation has taken everything, and they’re not helping the next generation, and there’ll be this intergenerational inequality. We felt with Bob Brown, despite being in his 78th year, he still is extremely contemporary in his philosophies, and in his principles, and in his actions. We felt that he’s someone who can transcend generations. We felt like he was such a great medium in that sense to tell this story. Bob’s life story really really is a history of environmentalism in Australia, all the way up to the present day. But at the same time, Bob Brown is quite an unusual and spiritual person. It felt like a straight documentary just wasn’t going to do his story justice. We’d had this experience with dance in Freeman in that dance does reflect some aspects of Cathy Freeman. The act of running is a very physical one. It is poetic. And it’s a spiritual connection as well. And for Bob, he spent his life working for the forest, so we wanted to do something that could be more poetic like intertwining the life of Bob Brown with the story of trees. We had been doing quite a lot of reading, like The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, the German Forester.

Laurence Tree: A Life Story by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady, The Overstory by Richard Powers, Finding the Mother Treeby Susan Sima.

Rachael What we found was that all these books show similarities between human life and tree life that we were really unaware of, perhaps shamefully. So we thought this is a really great narrative device, because not only does it tell the story of Bob but it teaches us more about trees and helps us to understand where Bob is coming from and why trees are so crucial to us as human beings.

Why did you feel that now was right time to make a documentary about Bob Brown? 

Laurence In a way, The Giants is a response to the 2020 bush fires. We were extremely traumatised by those events. We really felt at the time that we couldn’t just carry on doing what we were doing. We just had to do something. We sat down and we thought, “Well, what can we do?” We were making films already, and after Freeman the door was open for us to do something else, so we decided to do something about trees and our forests. The size of the forests that we have in Australia, on a world scale, is just so extraordinary. And then we began the creative process, and when you think about Forests in Australia, you naturally think of Bob Brown. One thing led to another, and like Rachel said, we were interested in having that dialogue between Bob’s life and a forest’s life.

Bob Brown could almost add film star to his resume, because I can think of at least two films Bob has featured in over the last two or three years including Franklin and Wild Things. Have you seen either of those films?

Rachael We were aware of them, but we hadn’t actually seen them.

Laurence We didn’t watch Franklin until very recently. We’d spoken with the producers, and they’re lovely people, and we were in complete awe of Franklin, but we just didn’t want to see it because we didn’t want it to confuse us creatively. So we just carried on doing our thing to see where we would land. The films are very different, and that’s what’s great about filmmaking. You bring your own sensibility to your story and you can end up with films that are quite different, but similar a topic. Although Franklin obviously spoke much more on the Franklin River campaign and Bob’s involvement in that, that’s only a small part of our film. Our film is more about the forest more broadly, and activism.

Bob has achieved some incredible things throughout his life, but he’s best known as the leader of The Greens Party from 2005 until 2012. Did you follow Bob’s career during that time and were you a supporter of what The Greens stood for then?

Rachael Look, I think it’s true that obviously we were aware, and we were supporters. Having said that, I wouldn’t say that we were signed up members of The Greens Party, or anything else. I guess, by nature, we were interested in environmental candidates and candidates who were going to take on the challenges we face in relation to climate change. I’m speaking for myself here, but I don’t mind who does that job as long as they get on with it. But yes, we were aware of Bob, and we had a certain fondness for him and a sense of what he would be like. It was interesting because when we met him, he really was like you would imagine him to be. [Laughs]. Sometime you meet people in real life and they can be quite different. Going back to your previous question of why now, Bob has been approached previously to make films about his life because he’s such a folk hero amongst certain people. What we did was we contact his campaign manager, Jenny Weber, and we put it to her. She had seen Freeman, and she really enjoyed that film. Jenny then introduced us to Bob and I think that she personally encouraged him to do it because she was thinking about this idea of Bob’s legacy and showcasing that legacy on screen. I think, to a point, we take Bob Brown for granted, perhaps a little bit like the way we take our environment for granted. It’s interesting to remind people that things change across the course of a lifetime. And the decisions that you make can be really important, not only for you and yourself, but for future generations. We really wanted to point out the contribution that Bob has made to this country. Lots of people are aware of him, but we were also surprised that when we started on this project that there’d never been an Australian story dedicated to Bob Brown. We thought that was unusual given that he’s been such a central character for so long.

Tell us about meeting Bob for the first time?

Laurence We first met Bob on Zoom while he was at his home. He was outdoors and there were chickens clucking in the background. [Laughs]. He was lying against a tree trunk wearing a woolly jumper with holes in it. It was the whole Bob Brown look that you would expect. [Laughs]. He was lovely and engaged.

Rachael The whole production was impacted by Covid and border closures, so we weren’t able to meet him in person for quite a while. Initially we had planned to do all our interviews in-person. Finally the borders reopened and then we all bought tickets to Tasmania and we went down to Liffey and shot with him at his old farmhouse in the Liffey Valley.

Laurence Bob is exactly as you’d imagine him to be. He’s really genuine and very youthful in his approach. He’s funny, and he’s a very genuine person. It was fantastic for us to be able to collaborate with him. You always learn so much from people like Bob. It’s been very interesting on a personal level and very gratifying. 

Rachael When we asked him to do it, he said he’d do it for the trees. So that was his motivation as always.

How easy was it for you to access Bob’s personal photos and home videos?

Rachael That was interesting because Bob is actually a bit of a millennial in a way in that he’s got this massive collection of photos and materials. There’s also massive amounts of ABC archives about various political happenings, or environmental happenings. He’s got a big collection at the National Library of Australia, and he has his own personal collection. So basically, it was great because we had so much material, and on the other hand it was really challenging because we had too much material. So a lot of it was just trying to isolate the bits that we could actually use, and reducing it to these broad brushstroke moments.

Laurence Bob is someone who understands, and has always understood, the power of story and storytelling. And so from the word go, he has documented, or let others document, what he was doing. Some of the Franklin footage, for example, when he is rafting in 1975, 76, this is all in the very early beginning of the campaign. He always understood that if you want people to get motivated to save something, they have to see it. They have to experience it. So if you can’t go rafting down the Franklin, the next best thing you can do is watch a film about it. And that’s why he filmed himself. He went down that river several times and was filmed. When you see the film, you can imagine how tedious that would be, because some of those shots are beautiful. It would take a lot of time to set up, then raft, then go on the water and do it again. And I think that was part of our motivation for this film as well. As urban people, we can get disconnected from those forests. They’re quite isolated sometimes and we wanted people to experience those forests firsthand so that they would become motivated to save them. Bob has documented a lot of what he has done. So for us, that was really great to see some of those early actions.

Would you say you’re both environmentalists?

Laurence Not really. I think the film has changed us. It seems to also change some of the people who watch it. It has certainly made us want to pull up our sleeves and be more proactive when it comes to environmental issues. It’s made us do more than just vote or post on social media. You’ve got to actually go out there and do something. It doesn’t have to be radical. It can just be having some skin in the game. I think that’s what it’s about at the moment. I think that making this film has had the effect on us that it’s having on other people. It has certainly encouraged us to get involved and to connect with the people here in Melbourne who are trying to save our forests.

Rachael I’ve always been a nature lover. But we spoke to a lot of scientists throughout the making of this film and it has been a very educational process for us. I think it has really convinced us of the urgency to protect our forests. I think we went from wanting to make a film about the forests and how extraordinary they are, to getting people inspired to save them. I guess we’ve become somewhat, not precisely radicalised, but educated and more energised. I wouldn’t say we are professional environmentalists, but we care about the environment and now we care about it even more.

The Giants interwines Bob’s story with these ancient Tasmanian forests. The trees act as supporting characters here and the results are quite breathtaking. For those who haven’t been to Tasmania, can you tell us what it was like to be amongst these ancient areas?

Laurence Firstly, we were lucky because we went to Tasmania for the shoot, and we first went there to find those trees that would act as protagonist characters alongside Bob. We had Eucalyptus regnans in the Styks Valley, the Huon Pines in the southwest, and Myrtle in the Tarkine. So we had to go and find our trees and then once we found them we spent three days filming them in that exact spot, literally in 50 square meters around it. So we became quite connected to those trees. And they certainly have an incredible presence. It’s funny actually, like people, trees have different moods and different vibes. The Huon Pines particularly, which are thousands of years old, you can really feel that when you’re in their presence. They are majestic. They have such a beautiful presence. You get the sense of them having been around for such a long time. So it’s quite moving. And you feel very humbled and very small. And of course, Eucalyptus regnans are a hundred meters high. It’s unbelievable. Everyone should go see them. Standing at the foot of one of those trees, you can’t see the top of it. As you will see in the film, how they operate as an organism is quite incredible. But the scale of them is something to experience.

I know there are drone shots used throughout the film, but I noticed a few camera rigs were used as well to get a bird’s eye view of the tree canopies. Can you tell us about the technical aspects of those shoots.

Laurence Well that was quite epic because we really wanted to film those particular trees in a slightly different way. Obviously those trees are hundreds of meters tall, so we worked with some elite tree climbers who specialise in climbing those giant trees in Tasmania. We also worked with XM2 Pursuit on the Gold Coast and we designed both a vertical rig that goes all the way up the tree, which is the one you see in the opening shot, and we placed horizontal cable camera lines running across the top of the myrtles. We really wanted people to experience a viewpoint into the canopy that you wouldn’t usually see. You can’t do that with a drone because those canopies are so dense. You also get a completely different vibe using the kind of camera and the kind of optics that we used. We had a visual reference for this film which was like a Renaissance painting. We wanted to do something that was impressionistic, and atmospheric, and moody rather than something that was ultra realistic. So we decided on these particular optics and cameras to help us achieve that look.

Is there a certain danger involved in using these rigs on a film set?

Laurence Well it’s scary. When you see people climbing up those trees, it’s quite intimidating. [Laughs]. They are very tall. It’s challenging to see that. That’s not really something I enjoy watching, but when you watch the footage, I think that those rigs were worth it. Those shots are beautiful. Even flying a drone in those dense forests isn’t that simple because of the canopy, and there’s such a diversity in the height of trees.

Rachael Regarding the climbers though, the team, Steve, Jen and Greenie, they do that all the time. That’s their profession. And they make their own films too. So what seems extremely foolish to us is their every day. [Laughs]. They actually take people up those trees too as part of their job. They’re very professional.

Have either of you ever climbed a giant tree? It’s quite an experience.

Laurence I’ve never climbed one of those trees. I just couldn’t do it. It’s so high. [Laughs]. The Tree Projects actually have those climbing workshops where they take people up those trees. I feel that the more people you take into the forest, and the more people connect with those trees, the better.

There are many striking moments in the film, but something that really made me sit up and listen was being reminded of Bob heckling President George Bush in parliament. What was it like for you both to be reminded of that time?

Rachael It’s really interesting because a lot of people have forgotten all about that. What was interesting was that we knew that this had happened, obviously, but I was looking at the Hansard parliamentary records, but they hadn’t written that down because there’s a lot of heckling in parliament. So I guess they just don’t usually write that kind of stuff down, like the usual day-to-day heckling. But I thought that was quite a significant moment, but they hadn’t written it down, so we didn’t really know exactly what he had said. So we had to ask him what he had said, and he said it was interesting at the time because none of the Australian media actually asked him what he said. It was only CNN in London who actually asked him what he’d said. So that was quite interesting. It felt like by the fact that media hadn’t reported the contents, and the fact that it had actually been erased from the official record, meant that that whole episode had really been brushed under the carpet. The thing I enjoyed most was looking at the video archive and watching the look on John Howard’s face.

The man of steel.

Rachael [Laughs]. One minute he’s looking so incredibly puffed up because he was receiving those kinds of compliments, and the next thing he had a look on his face like, “Kill that Bob Brown now.” [Laughs]. It’s so embarrassing. So that was funny. But the other thing that I took away from that was that of course Bob Brown did stand up and say those things, but he wasn’t alone. Kerry Nettle was there with him. And one of the things that we took away from this process was that while we always knew other people were involved in Bob’s endeavours, there’s usually some extraordinary woman working with Bob at every stage getting this stuff done.

Many of who feature in the film. 

Laurence Christine Milne, Karen Alexander, Sarah Hanson-Young. Bob is a connector who is connected to a lot of people who work in activism. Activism is an organism, and Bob’s been fantastic at connecting and working with really great people and supporting them. It’s not mentioned in the film, but apparently it was Bob who suggested to Sarah Hanson-Young, who was a student at the time, that she get involved in politics. He’s very good at identifying talent and supporting them in that sense. He’s like the great forest elder encouraging the canopy below him to grow and reach for the light.

Did your personal perspective on Bob Brown change throughout the making of The Giants?

Laurence The thing that I find perhaps the most surprising, is the defiance of Bob Brown. We’ve seen him in the context of being a senator and wearing a suit in Parliament, which is all quite a tame setting, and despite the George Bush heckling, that was a culmination of defiance. I think you see it in the context of his life, what he’s done, what he’s put himself through, and the consistency in which he’s defied power and maintained a moral compass through all of it. It’s quite wonderful. And all those around him share the same ethos as well. Christine Milne is someone that we both discovered throughout this processed, because we were both overseas when she was the leader of the Greens. We perhaps didn’t know her as much as we knew Bob. What Christine has done is extraordinary. I think a nice aspect of the film is to discover a bit more about her story as well. 

Rachael As filmmakers, we didn’t want this to be just a heroic portrait of Bob Brown. We thought it was really important to ensure that we also brought in other voices because, like many of us, Bob is never really on his own. While he’s often the public face of many of these acts, there’s always other people, many of them women, together with him. And I think it’s something really important to take away from the film. If you look at the film, it really is almost an activist handbook in the sense of showing so many different ways that you can contribute to environment change.

Laurence Something that I didn’t realise prior to making this film is the role that Bob had in promoting diversity in Parliament. And when you look at those images of Parliament, way back, it’s extraordinary. They’re just white men in suits. And this is not that long ago really. He brought in a lot of women. At the time The Greens Party was a majority of women. So he’s always been supportive of women, and he’s always been surrounded by them. I think he’s had quite an impact on the national scene and getting women on board. It’s not something that is particularly acknowledged, but it’s certainly something that we realised while making the film.

There are so many narratives within The Giants that could be explored further in followup television or film projects. 

Rachael A few months into this we realised that we should have made a mini-series [Laughs]. Every chapter has such a big backstory and there was quite a lot of frustration in terms of the editing process. So the answer to that question is yes, we could do a mini-series with in-depth coverage of almost every chapter. I don’t think we will, but somebody else can. [Laughs]. There’s plenty more to explore.

The Giants is in cinemas now. You can find a full list of cinema locations here. 

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