Wish you were here

What does a caterpillar wish for? To be a butterfly of course; and the process of metamorphosing from the embryonic to the fully fledged is a journey that director Sandra Sciberras can relate to. From a single image to a full feature film, Sciberras has run the gamut to bring her vision to the silver screen.

“The very, very start of it was an old friend of mine”, Sciberras explains. “She was taking a photograph of something; and this image just stuck in my mind and I wrote it down. Then a few years later, I had this dream about a police car cruising past a high school, and this glimpse of schoolgirls' outfits. So when it came time to write a draft, I just kind of merged these two images that I had and started from that. At that stage, I didn’t really know where it was going to lead. But then I started thinking about it as a film about identity and trust and love”.

While her film dealt with some big themes, it was deliberately set in a very small community. The town of Robe on South Australia’s rugged south-eastern coastline provides the setting for Sciberras’ tale. But there were some very practical reasons for choosing that particular location.

“The main reason we set the film in Robe was because the South Australian Film Commission funded the film, and we had a commitment to them to shoot it in South Australia” Sciberras said frankly. The other reason is that we would always have gone for a place that not many people knew about. You don’t want the landscape to be too identifiable; you want it to be fairly universal.”

“When I started writing the film, I thought ‘I could make this in the mountains’ but as things progressed, I decided it should be in a coastal town. So I drove around a lot of coastal towns, scouting locations. But in the end, the film is very close to my original vision for it.”

Her star, Victoria Thaine, took her own journey to become involved with the film. “At the time when I read the script, there were a number of things that drew me to it. I thought the character of Emily was a very different teenager to stories of teenagers that I’d read before. I liked the way she was so smart, and precocious in the good sense of the word.”

“I also really loved the relationship with the mother; there was this kind of role reversal with Emily almost taking on the parental role. There was a lot of complexity in that relationship, which was something I hadn’t seen in other projects.”

“I liked the way the film had this real contrast. I mean, it’s set in this small community that’s kind of claustrophobic, and where everyone knows everyone; but they’re all alone in the world. They might have friends or family around; but there’s this deep knowledge that they have these obstacles
they have to overcome.”

The cast and crew however had to contend with more practical obstacles, notably the decision to shoot during a South Australian winter. “It was freezing” Thaine says, “especially at 6 in the morning!”

But the season played an integral part in the production. “There’s nothing like winter for mood,” says Sciberras, “and if you put in a really ‘sunny’ image in the middle of winter, there’s just something magical about it. It’s wintry and cold on one level; but on another it’s warm and lovely”.

The Caterpillar Wish is now showing nationally.

David Edwards

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Sandra Sciberras and Victoria Thaine talk about The Caterpillar Wish