Spotlight On Producer Trish Lake

WORDS: Caroline Russo hushhushbiz.com PHOTOGRAPHY Supplied

Introducing a leading Australian producer of feature films and documentaries and a former ABC TV journalist.  Trish Lake is CEO of Freshwater Pictures based in Brisbane, which she founded in 2001. Among her works are Gettin’ Square, Alick and Albert, Frackman and the new movie, Spit, set on the Gold Coast.


Your career spans from journalism at ABC TV to producing award-winning films and documentaries. What drew you to film production? 

Our family told stories, talked politics and loved singing and all sorts of music. I also spent a lot of my childhood on North Stradbroke Island, running wild, fishing, swimming and enthralled with nature. Journalism allowed me to figure out a lot of things by asking questions, closely observing human behaviour and honing my research and writing skills. I learned the craft of filmmaking at the ABC in the 70s well before the digital era. In the 90s I began a media production company, Freshwater Productions, to make documentaries for television, and develop manuscripts with authors as a literary agency.

All the while I was refining my taste by consuming lots of films and I started by learning as much as I could about distribution and marketing. I realised the only way to get anything actually financed and produced, was to be a producer. So I went to industry gatherings like AWG and SPA conferences, and using my journalism skills, tried to prise open what had always seemed like tightly-closed film industry doors.

By the time one of the authors I represented as a literary agent, Chris Nyst, showed me an outline of a screenplay, I knew I had found a project with which I could launch my producing career. That screenplay was Gettin’ Square, the original film which also launched the character, Johnny “Spit” Spitieri.


Spit comes 22 years after the cult Indie classic, Gettin’ Square, for which you won a SPA award as Producer of the Year. How long did it take to get Spit into production? 

Most of my work is spent developing new projects, as well as marketing upcoming and past films. Production is a small part. It is exciting, demanding, scary and gruelling, especially narrative features with a substantial budget like Spit, involving sometimes many hundreds of people on set, and with a core crew every day of around 100 technical crew and key cast. Chris Nyst and I have been collaborating on this and other film and book projects ever since we first worked together in the late 90s. Chris first showed me the outline of what was to become Spit in 2014. During that decade we had numerous false-starts with different producers and distributors. Ten years of on-and-off development is not unusual. There’s always a lot of rejection and false-starts, but if anything is really worthwhile, and you have the creative team to back it, then dreams can come true!

Meanwhile, since 2001, Freshwater Pictures has made many films for cinema, all with amazing directors, and the business of financing and marketing them has taken me all over the world to film festivals and markets such as Cannes.


Films such as Frackman and The Burning Season, have tackled powerful environmental and social issues. How do you approach storytelling in these impactful documentaries?

My journalism training and experience helps but it’s because I work with strong and intelligent storytellers. I look for different ways to tell stories to attract audiences from diverse political and cultural points of view, to create meaningful debate on a topic. I like to try to break through our media silos that are becoming increasingly isolating. I begin by taking the creative team through a series of story and impact workshops. Cinema is about emotion. You have to grab people’s hearts and minds in 90 minutes.


What are the distribution and financing challenges facing Australian cinema?

Cinema has been around for a century, and storytelling – well for as long as humans have existed. But there is no doubt that traditional distribution and financing methods are falling away, and we are not sure what will replace them. I am all for disruption if it means change is for the better, but right now, I am not so sure. I think it begins with Australians wanting to see their own stories on their own screens. Imagine a world where the only stories we see are from overseas, and on screens owned by foreign media empires.

We could only make Spit because more than half of our finance came from private investors in Queensland who believe in Australian stories. We need to ensure that our government policies defend independent cinema and Australian content.


How do you choose projects, and what stories are you most passionate about telling?

Stories about everyday people up against adversity, stories about our natural world, political stories affecting the future, and stories that showcase our Australian artists and musicians.

Currently I am consulting with creative teams on the feature documentaries Swindle: Australia, East Timor and the Art of the Steal with filmmaker Gil Scrine; Chasing Chaos about the politics of international disaster relief, with Darwin-based filmmaker, Andrew Hyde; and a film about Lethal Autonomous Weapons – LAWS, with producer Bobbi-Lea Dionysius and director Heather Faulkner.

Are there many projects on your table now, and is there a dream film or doco you would love to produce? 

There are a lot of stories out there still to be told, but I am Grandma to three toddlers now.

Right now I will be happy to consult on other people’s films, and continue with my workshops where I can facilitate and empower filmmakers to make their stories stronger and more appealing to audiences.

If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice at the start of your career, what would that be? 

It gets better!