Amazon Special Filming: Thoughts and Some Questions

Okay! I’ve had a week off - was intending to write this up earlier, but it turns out sometimes you have done so many things in a row that you need a day or two just staring at the horizon to feel human again.

I filmed Savage for Amazon Prime at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne on 10 September, and here are some of my thoughts and some answers to questions. If you have other questions, leave them below! I still have some more to answer.

Worries:

I knew when I went in that it was a gamble to take the “one hour of your comedy” that Amazon offered, and put Savage in there. In part, this was because the bigness of the opportunity felt a bit like Monopoly money. So gambling big on a show that may-or-may-not-strictly-be-comedy felt like a thing I could contemplate doing. It wasn't the safe choice, but I feel like Savage is a good primer for why I do what I do the way I do it. It's sort of an intro show. 

Also, Savage is my desert island show, I think. I feel like the shows I’ve done in the five years since have probably been increasingly punchy in terms of pure jokes. Savage is still the one I'd pick if you told me I could only keep one. It's basically the show that’s my heart on a plate, so I picked it. 

My logic was as follows:

1) The worst case scenario is it sinks without a trace.

2) The best case scenario is I get enough twitter followers that I activate some algorithms and robots tell me to kill myself.

Obviously that's a joke - the best case scenario is that it connects with people, and it does what I want it to do and people watch it at home with friends or family or alone and laugh and cry. And then send me pictures of themselves crying or laughing. 

Above and beyond that, that and people like it enough that the people who have resources offer me some resources so I can do interesting things with interesting ideas forever. 

But the reality is I’ve put something that means a lot to me out into a world that is now structured towards strong and polarised opinions. If someone likes it a lot, there will be someone who hates it *if only because* that other person likes it.

It's a weird set of things to contemplate, particularly as someone who doesn't really like reading reviews. I don't know how much criticism I can take of that show in particular, so I may have to just take some time off the internet when it comes out. 

MAKING THE SHOW BE ON FILM

That all aside, the process of making the show was super interesting. There were so many people on the production team putting the show together around me. My job was to perform my hour as closely as possible to the ways I've done it before. But there were people on lights and sound and seven (SEVEN) cameras, including one on a boom swinging over the audience like a proper television shoot. And makeup which is fun, and hair (to which I said no thanks - my hair doesn't take well to being fussed with).

I felt like a jewel in the heart of a handmade clock with complicated mechanisms made out of hugely competent people revolving around to make me and my work look beautiful. It was very strange.

I’m immensely grateful. Like, beyond. I was the only act in the group of 10 Australian comedians Amazon picked up for this series who wasn't represented by the management arm of the film production company, and that’s because Neil Gaiman liked my work enough to have put me forward directly to Amazon.

That’s a weird thing. I've always been a bit the odd one out, and even in comedy, which is made of odd ones out, I am an odd one out. It fits with my career so far, very much finding another way through the forest. 

A lot of my ability to do that comes from your support, you know.

If this absolute gamble of taking a huge opportunity and choosing this particular non-comedy comedy show to throw down on the poker table works out, you are all to thank for it. 

Thankyou so much for helping me take this quiet messy heartfelt show and back my own decisions enough to risk putting it into a whole new framework. It was surreal to have this incredibly smoothly and beautifully run production revolving around me, and I’m very glad to have had that experience.

Will be answering some of your questions in this week’s podcast and in a few posts this week.

Here are a few to start.

Question: Now that you've filmed your second comedy show Savage, do you feel you've grown as a comedienne  in the subsequent years since filming The Resistance? 

This question is good because it lets me clarify the timeline a bit. I definitely think I’m a better performer now than I was when I wrote and performed The Resistance, but I originally wrote and performed Savage in 2014/2015. My uh... filmography(?) goes:

Savage (2014/15)

The Resistance (2016)

Empire (2017)

ETHOS (2018)

The Alice Fraser Trilogy (2018, a compilation of Savage/The Resistance/Empire)

MYTHOS (2019)

This filming of Savage is a sort of history, and I didn’t change many of the jokes in it because it's very much a thing I wrote in a particular time and place (I had to wonder whether to say "last year" or "in 2014" when I was saying some of the lines), and it has a lot of stories in it that all lock together pretty tightly. 

That said, I am definitely a better performer than I was back in 2015 when I wrote it, so yes.

Question: You spent a lot of time before the show interacting with the audience. Did it interfere much with your pre-show routine?

This is true. Before the Amazon filming, I was in the lobby, talking to people. This is marginally different from my normal way of opening a show, though often I’m on stage while the audience enters, and I quite like that as a slow ramp-up into performing. I quite like the human-ness of it. The idea of big lights and fanfare as I walk on stage feels a bit artificial. 

The reason I wanted to be mingling with the audience in the lobby before the show was to flip the normal 'Stand Up Special' intro of the comedian coming out from backstage quiet into the roar of the crowd and the lights in their eyes. That would work for a more straight standup show, but I don’t think it would represent the kind of experience I have, or the kind of experience I hope the people in the room will have with Savage.

So mingling was nice, but it mixed up the order of how I normally do it, which is welcoming people into ‘my’ space (the stage).

Question: Do you have a memorable comeback to a heckle that you are immensely proud of?

Savage is not a show that invites heckles, but I’ve had my fair share of idiots in the audience who try to get attention as though they would bring glory on themselves. I once told a man in the front row who had shouted “spread your legs for us”,to eat a dry Berocca, which he did.

There’s also the story in the show The Resistance of a man in Western Australia who said “you’re like bread! Everyone touches it, nobody wants it“, which I had a comeback to in the moment, and I was proud enough of that comeback to write it into the show. As a rule, I tend not to have pre-written comebacks to heckles, and just deal with them in the room as they come.

I hope this was all coherent: my brain still feels a bit fried. 

xx

A