Cate Shortland: Writing female anti-heroes

This interview with Cate Shortland from 2000 gets to the heart of what makes her films so visceral, unsettling and refreshing all at once – she is prepared to go into terrain that others aren't.

Cate has never shied away from using violence and sex in her films and says here she isn't interested in making films about 'nice' people: 'Nice people are usually really boring. I never have a problem with people being bad.'

She was still four years from finishing her first feature here, but she has indeed made complex, compassionate portraits of flawed humans: Heidi and Joe in Somersault (2004), Thomas and Lore in Lore (2012), Andi and Clare in Berlin Syndrome (2017) and Natasha Romanoff in Black Widow (2020).

Earlier in this interview Cate says she has been influenced by European, Asian and African cinema and melodrama, loving how emotional and political those cinemas were.

Cate is interviewed by Deb Verhoeven in front of an audience at a Popcorn Taxi event in Melbourne on 12 December 2000 entitled 'Shorts by Jo Kennedy and Cate Shortland'.