Australia: Hannah Hilliard; Renaissance Woman

Hannah Hilliard was a child-directing prodigy.  She may not have realised it at the time but she seemed to set the wheels of her future career in motion at the age of seven, when she would direct her brother in a version of a famous Australian commercial.

It was, she explains, a fairly standard butter ad but the Hilliard children would play at taking turns to direct each other, creating different versions of the spot. Hilliard took to the game like a fish to water.  But directing wasn’t something that initially presented itself as a career possibility. In fact, it was being in front of the camera that first piqued Hilliard’s interest. “I joined a talent school when I was 11,” explains Hilliard, “much to my mother’s dismay. I think she would rather have had me in the ballet, or playing cello.” But Hilliard excelled at acting and was soon in various theatrical productions and even an ad. Directing wasn’t something that really interested her until she, along with a university friend, decided to make a short film for Tropfest, one of Australia’s most prestigious short film festivals. “My friend and I decided to make a short film which I was going to be in and which we would produce together,” says Hilliard. “We had got someone else to direct it but when we were sitting in the edit suite I was just going, ‘no, no, no, no...’. Total closet director,” she laughs.

Glittering prizes

But those closet directorial tendencies were well founded. After completing the Tropfest film she then shot her first short film as a director, and it was an auspicious start. Blame was written, produced and directed by Hilliard with acclaimed stills photographer Michael Corridore as the DP and it went on to win $11,000 worth of film-based prizes at the Kaleidoscope Festival. “After that,” she says, “I was in the local paper and the quote read ‘filmmaker Hannah Hilliard’, and I sort of thought, ‘I guess I must be a filmmaker now’.”  Those prizes, plus financial help from the New South Wales funding body, helped her to then make her next short, Search. After touring festivals with that film, Hilliard was accepted to study at the prestigious Australian Film Television and Radio school (AFTRS), a school that is extremely hard to gain entry to. While there she made two more shorts, Eve and Mockingbird, which also picked up awards and gained Hilliard further kudos.

A talent for talent-spotting

Her most recognised short film is one made in 2009, after she left AFTRS, and is called Franswa Sharl. This fantastic film, based on the true story of one of her gay friends entering a beauty competition while on holiday as a young boy, picked up the Crystal Bear for Best Short Film at the Berlin Film Festival in 2010. If she wasn’t there already, the win put her firmly on the directorial map and saw her sign to @radical.media in mid-2011 for commercial representation. Hilliard’s first, and so far only, foray into the commercial arena was a project for Intel that saw her shoot two mini documentaries in Indonesia. One follows a hip-hop artist and the other a batik designer and both reveal how the use of technology impacts on their professions. Part Indonesian herself, Hilliard relished the opportunity to work on the campaign. “I could immediately see what the project was,” she says. “I wrote a 5,000 word story explaining how I would make the films, and the agency really liked the treatment and I got the job. It was very exciting. Since then I’ve been pitching on various projects including one for BMW as well as a global adidas campaign, so we’ll see.”  As a former actress herself, she enjoys working with actors and interpreting scenes with them, and she knows how to spot talent – two of her former short film cast include Mia Wasikowska, who starred in Eve, and Callan McAuliffe, from Franswa Sharl, both of whom have since made their own successful forays into Hollywood.

Creative chaos

Hilliard puts her success, in part, down to her upbringing. She was brought up by her mother in what she describes as a ‘semi-hippie lifestyle’ where the kids weren’t allowed to play with toy guns and the onus was put on handcrafted toys and using your imagination. “You see kids these days and they’re all obsessed with iPhones and iPads and I feel kind of sorry for them,” rues Hilliard. “I was born into a certain amount of chaos and my parents broke up not long after I was born. It was quite a dramatic time and so I think I have always relished fantasy. I was always inventing things and maybe sometimes I took it a bit too far, but I think it’s something that comes naturally to me. I just like telling stories.”  And those stories seem to come out best in film, where Hilliard is able to corral her various interests into one complete piece of work. “I love music and I love painting, writing and performing,” she concludes, “and this is a way of using all those things at once.”