Bill Bennett (director)
Bill Bennett | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1953 (age 71–72) London, England |
| Occupation(s) | Film director Film producer Screenwriter |
| Years active | 1983–present |
Bill Bennett (born 1953) is an Australian film director, producer and screenwriter.
Career
Bennett was born in London to Australian parents and brought up in Brisbane. He studied journalism and got a cadetship with the ABC in 1972, where he was given the nickname "milkfingers" as a result of an on-air mishap.[1] He spent two years working in Adelaide on This Day Tonight then went to work for Mike Willesee in Sydney. He then worked on The Big Country and The Australians before moving into feature filmmaking with A Street to Die (1985).[2]
He dropped out of Medicine at the University of Queensland in 1972 and joined the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as a journalist. During a ten-year career as a journalist he won Australia's top TV award, the Logie Awards (Australia's Emmy) for Television Reporter of the Year, and then later for Most Outstanding Documentary. This led him to feature films.
Bennett has directed 17 feature films since 1983. His first film, A Street to Die, won the Crystal Globe for Best Film at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. His second film Backlash was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival.[3] Three years later his film Malpractice would be screened in the same section at the 1989 festival.[4] His Outback film noir Kiss or Kill won 5 Australian Film Institute Awards, including two for Bill - Best Picture and Best Director. Bill has had three international film retrospectives, in the US, Germany and India.
His two theatrical feature documentaries, PGS - Intuition is your Personal Guidance System and Facing Fear are the first two films in a proposed series called the My Journey series. Later films proposed are on Hope, Purpose, Love and Death.
In mid 2024, distributors Maslow Entertainment will be releasing Bill's latest film, The Way, My Way, based on his best selling Camino memoir of the same title.
Bill Bennett is also an author, with Penguin Random House recently publishing his YA supernatural thriller trilogy, Palace of Fires.
Selected filmography
Documentary film
| Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1983 | The Cattle King | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1984 | Shipwrecked | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1991 | The Banjo & The Bard | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1992 | Last Man Hanged | No | No | Yes |
| 2018 | PGS - Intuition is your Personal Guidance System | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 2022 | Facing Fear | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Feature film
| Year | Title | Director | Writer | Producer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 | A Street to Die | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1986 | Backlash | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1987 | Dear Cardholder | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1988 | Jilted | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1989 | Malpractice | Yes | Yes | No |
| 1990 | Mortgage | Yes | Yes | No |
| 1994 | Spider and Rose | Yes | Yes | No |
| 1995 | Two if by Sea | Yes | No | No |
| 1996 | Kiss or Kill | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1999 | In a Savage Land | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 2000 | Tempted | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cut | No | Uncredited | Yes | |
| 2002 | The Nugget | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 2005 | Deck Dogz | No | No | Yes |
| 2010 | Uninhabited | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 2024 | The Way, My Way | Yes | Yes | Yes |
References
- ^ "People struggle to open milk cartons in 1976 | RetroFocus". YouTube. 8 August 2019.
- ^ David Stratton, The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry, Pan MacMillan, 1990 p54
- ^ "Festival de Cannes: Backlash". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 12 July 2009.
- ^ "Festival de Cannes: Malpractice". festival-cannes.com. Archived from the original on 3 October 2012. Retrieved 2 August 2009.