Storm Boy producer Matt Carroll oral history excerpt

Producer Matt Carroll talking in an oral history interview. This is an edited excerpt:

What you're trying to do is to make a film for a very broad audience group. In other words, from five to 100. Rather than for the usual cinema audience which is your 18 to 28 year-old.

And so the film has to be very simple in concept, and yet very complex in its subtleties, so that it works for an adult audience. And when Storm Boy came to us --- Storm Boy came to us just through the usual reading of things and someone threw it on my desk and I read it and I just thought - terrific. That would make a really good children's feature.

When we first got the thing we knew that the picture had been prescribed reading in primary schools in a number of states. We also knew that a) that it was a difficult picture to market, even before we'd made it. So we knew that we had to come up with some new way of promoting the picture.



And so we developed this idea of promoting the thing through the schools, using the education system to mobilise the people to get to the theatres. Because we knew there was a desire for people to go and see these films, because you've got all the pressure groups coming out saying 'Why can't we see family films?' and 'clean wholesome' films, and all this sort of thing. So we just devised a campaign to use the education system to mobilise these people into the cinema. And we did it on a trial basis in Adelaide, and out of it, of course, it just mushroomed. Because what we found was that there was not only a desire, but a desire by the education department to involve, not only their classrooms just in the process of going to see a very interesting film, but in a whole range of educational activities. And so we just motivated all that, in doing pic-a-paks, and video tape records of interviews, and the book that Rigby brought out.

Now that was, first of all, done on a state basis. And then of course the results were enormous. And then we knew --- We also saw how the other children's films, or equivalent films, performed against Storm Boy. So we knew we had to do the same thing in the other states. So a massive mailing campaign, and a careful approach to the education departments to use their resources to mobilise, was used again. And of course the resources that we produced in conjunction with the South Australian education department were eagerly snapped up by New South Wales and Victoria.



And in fact there's an educational pic-a-pak, which is a classroom study kit, sort of based around the curriculum. I mean I've been told, I think, it sold 10,000 copies. It's just crazy, I mean they just - the Educational Technology Centre in South Australia has been completely flabbergasted by that. The book will probably sell 400,000 copies eventually.