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Ben Jenkins: creating and co-writing The Killings at Parrish Station
75 Plays6 days ago
Joining the podcast is Ben Jenkins, the creator and one of the writers of the new six-part Stan Original series The Killings at Parrish Station, a cosmic horror drama that releases on the streamer on June 24. Set across two time periods – 1987 and present day – it begins when a gruesome massacre at a remote research station plunges a detective (played in the past by Mia Wasikowska and in the present by Heather Mitchell) into an inexplicable, decades-long mystery.
Throughout the episode Ben talks about his career journey from stand-up comedy to working on The Chaser, and as writer, producer and presenter on The Checkout before his time on The Feed – and how his years in sketch comedy have informed him as a writer. He talks about tackling a drama set across different time periods, how he collaborated with writers Tim Pye, Catherine Smyth-McMullen and Yolanda Ramke to draft episodes, how to maintain the core idea of a story over years of development, and much more.
Watch all episodes of The Killings at Parrish Station from June 24
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Transcript
Introduction by Karis Buzaka
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Breaking Screen, a podcast about the Australian screen industry and the creative people within it. I'm your host, Caris Bizzaca I'm recording this podcast from the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, where I'm very grateful to be a visitor and be able to work on these lands. Always was, always will be.
Ben Jenkins on 'The Killings at Parrish Station'
00:00:21
Speaker
Today's episode features Ben Jenkins, the creator and one of the writers of the new six-part Stan original series The Killings at Parrish Station, a cosmic horror drama that releases on the streamer on June 24. Set across two time periods, 1987 and present day, the series begins when a gruesome massacre at a remote research station plunges a detective, played in the past by Mia Wasikowska and in the present by Heather Mitchell, into an inexplicable decades-long mystery.
00:00:50
Speaker
The other writers on the series include Tim Pye, Catherine Smythe-McMullen, and Yolanda Ramke. All episodes were directed by Daniel Netheim, and it was executive produced by Helium's Mark Fennessy.
Ben's Comedy Career Journey
00:01:03
Speaker
Throughout the episode, Ben talks about his career starting out in comedy, working at the ABC with The Chaser, and then as writer, producer, and presenter on The Checkout, before his time as a senior producer and writer on The Feed, and how his years in sketch comedy have informed him as a writer.
00:01:19
Speaker
He talks through tackling a crime drama set across different time periods, how he collaborated with other writers to draft episodes, how to maintain the core idea of a story over years of development and much more. Here's that chat.
00:01:36
Speaker
I always start the pod the same way where we talk in screenwriting a lot about inciting incidents. And so I'm wondering what is the inciting incident of your career?
00:01:48
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:01:52
Speaker
That's a really good question because I've done a bunch of stuff, you know Like I didn't realise that what I wanted to do was writing until like quite late.
00:02:04
Speaker
Like I'd been performing and I'd been doing stand-up and sketch and obviously both of those things have a writing element to them but the idea of putting something on the page without...
00:02:17
Speaker
me then executing it was really foreign to me. Or not foreign, just something i hadn't really considered. And then would have been about 22, 23, and a friend of mine, Zoe Norton Lodge, who I'd end up going on to to make a lot of live stuff with,
00:02:37
Speaker
was down as like the technical person at this festival called the National Young Writers Festival, which is up in Newy. That's Newcastle for anyone outside of... Sorry, yes. In Newy. She was like, do you want to go up to Newcastle and do this job for me? It's a writers festival and you're just setting up projectors and making sure microphones work and stuff.
00:02:59
Speaker
And I was like in a pretty bad way. So I was like, yeah, sure, anything to get out of bed basically. And I went up there and I met all these writers and one night they were doing like an open mic reading and the host kind of knew that the tech guy, me, was a kind of comedy guy who'd done some writing and stuff and they got me up to to read something that I'd written.
00:03:23
Speaker
And don't know, it's so cheesy. It's almost like I'd have a movie, but like it landed really, really well. And I sort of realized in that moment that like... that was an option for me, if that makes sense. yes You know what I mean? um That this thing that I had thought was for other people was was something that I could do. And all of
Transition to Writing
00:03:44
Speaker
a sudden when you go like, oh, I'm not just this, I'm not just a stand-up or I'm not just a sketch comic or I'm not just whatever, all of a sudden like the world becomes so much bigger. You know what I mean? So then I started writing like essays and short stories and getting them published here and there.
00:04:02
Speaker
And that was really big for me because, you know, and it's something that I come back to a lot, like I was finding a tone and I was finding a voice and I was figuring out how to love the act of writing.
00:04:16
Speaker
really crucially, like not the act of having written, like the act of writing, like the joy that you have of like sitting down and getting something out of your head and onto a page and onto a screen. And I did that for years and years while doing other jobs. I worked in bars for a long time. And then I got a job with The Chaser, which is an Australian comedy group, basically as a researcher for them for a couple of years.
00:04:38
Speaker
And then I moved on to writing and some other stuff and all the rest of it. So like, I mean, like my break in television was that with them, which got me into the building essentially. But I think National Young Writers Festival, like years before that was where I was kind of like, oh, I i understand that there's this world open to me.
00:04:58
Speaker
Yeah, wow. but And, like, so what can we, can I get a sense of, like, what year we're talking? like At the time of Young Riders I would have been, like, I couldn't have been older than mid-20s, maybe even, like, 23.
00:05:11
Speaker
i got my first job in television a couple of years later. And I don't think anything that I wrote ended up on screen with The Chaser at the ABC until I was like 27, 28. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Maybe. I'm like 39.
00:05:29
Speaker
So like, and I'm very bad with maths. So I'm sort of trying to sort of take back bearings. Yeah. And then, of course, like working with those guys and they were like such wonderful mentors, you know, Chas Licciardello and Craig Reucassel especially, just really took the time to like help me figure out stuff.
00:05:54
Speaker
But yeah, and then and then, you know, I did that for a while and started to move to on-screen stuff, which is kind of what I thought I wanted to do. And I did that for a little while. And then it was funny because like we did the show called The Checkout, which was like this like comedy consumer affairs show, like this incredibly narrow brief, right? Like you are you are making like little infotainment sketches about consumer affairs. And like it was one of the greatest jobs I ever had. Like it was so much fun because I was working with like some of my best friends and these like guys who just knew how to make TV and
00:06:30
Speaker
at this network that I loved. and I did that for like four or five years.
Post-'Checkout' Career Development
00:06:34
Speaker
and then we got cancelled. And the only jobs I could find was writing. You know, I started to write for like Tonightly with Tom Ballard and then I moved to SBS and did some stuff for them. in the meantime, I was like, you know, we were having our first kid and like I was taking any job I could. Like I was writing like host links for like dating shows, yeah um which was like fascinating, right?
00:06:59
Speaker
And that whole time, like it just slowly dawned on me, kind of like it did at the Writers' Festival. you know because I'd done this on screen stuff and it slowly started to dawn on me that like the writing aspect of television was the stuff that I was enjoying the most.
00:07:15
Speaker
And I think it was around about then that I was like, oh, this is what is going to give me the most joy in life, being able to. Because when I was at SBS and this was, to I'm now like, you know, at this point I'm now like 35. We've just like, I've just had, oh no, no, 33. Yeah.
00:07:33
Speaker
We just had our first kid and at SBS working with Alex Lee, Michael Hing, Vic Zerbst, Jenna Owen, and we're doing this, like, incredibly fast turnaround television where, like...
00:07:46
Speaker
We'll pitch a sketch to the executive producer in the morning. Then we'll go away and write it and we'll write it in its entirety. And then we will shoot that sketch around lunchtime and then we will edit it in the afternoon and then it'll be on air that night. And that's what I did for like two years, three years. Yeah.
00:08:04
Speaker
And eventually it kind of broke my brain. Yeah, people think Saturday night live is hard. But like try working on the feed doing sketches. Yeah. I mean, it was, but it was also great because like we had so, we had so little time and also so little money and we had this incredible shooter editor,
00:08:21
Speaker
called Bodhi, who just worked so well and so fast and got it. But like, within all of us, including Bodhi, we just had to develop this shorthand for like, okay, we're doing this sort of thing. And then like, how do we riff on that? And how do we find the joy in that? And working like that, i mean, this is something that i've been thinking about a lot as I've been like, kind of doing a bit of press for for the killings, which is like, you know, a question that keeps coming up is like, you know, you did sketch comedy for so long, and then you did this like, totally different thing. And like, how does that transition work?
00:08:52
Speaker
And like the thing that i wish I had known when I was younger was it
Influence of Sketch Comedy on Drama Writing
00:08:57
Speaker
all goes in Like it all matters. I don't mean in terms of like cynical career stuff. I mean like in terms of learning how to be a good writer, any writing you do goes in.
00:09:11
Speaker
And the stuff that I learnt on the feed especially about moving fast, about setting things up efficiently on the page, about finding, like, the game and the joy of any given scene and latching onto that is basically how I wrote The Killings. Mm-hmm.
00:09:30
Speaker
Applying that kind of sketch comedy philosophy to drama or comedy drama, certainly long form drama, was something that i never thought i was consciously doing until we were doing rooms, until we were doing sort of even read throughs. When I started to realise that this thing had a tone that I was really, that I really liked and seemed to resonate with people And that's where it was coming from.
00:09:56
Speaker
o Yeah, totally. And I'm wondering, like, because, you know, it is a, it is a, ah from the outside, I feel like it's a, people go, oh, you know, the chaser and the checkout and then the killings at Parish Station, which we will get into in a second. Yeah.
00:10:13
Speaker
I'm wondering for you ah as a viewer, are you someone who will typically turn on the TV and go to a satirical comedy or are you going to the dramas? like or do you like both? And that's kind of the point.
00:10:27
Speaker
I kind of like, I think I kind of have like a slight allergy to satire having worked in it for so long. Yeah. Is it also work when you watch satire? Are you like, oh, they've constructed it this way. It's work when it's incredibly good. Like when I watch like anything by like Armando Iannucci
00:10:47
Speaker
Oh, yeah. It feels like work because I'm constantly going, how did they do that? yeah You know what I mean? Like, i don't mean I don't mean from like a production point of view. I just mean like, how is that how is that moment so funny or so perfect? Like, Iannucci you know, Lucy Preble, Jesse Armstrong, anything by those people, I kind of end up having to like turn my brain off because I can't enjoy it because I'm constantly going...
00:11:10
Speaker
but it's But it's interesting because like, i well, I remember like something that really felt like like growing up was like when I was writing Killings and it hadn't been bought by anybody yet. Like it had been they've been picked up by Helium.
00:11:24
Speaker
Mark Fennessy had bought it and like had had developed it with me, like had had given me money to go away and develop it. But no buyer had touched it. and And in fact, a few had rejected it.
00:11:36
Speaker
And i remember we'd had our second child and Arlo was not sleeping. And so like the only way to get him to sleep was basically for me or my wife to just sit up and him lie on us.
00:11:48
Speaker
And that's how he'd sleep through the night. And you can't sleep when that is happening because it's quite unsafe. So like you have to stay up. And I remember turning on the TV and putting headphones in and being like, I'm just going to watch something. And I had never seen Chernobyl.
00:12:03
Speaker
Oh yeah. And I was like, I've been meaning to watch this. So I remember I watched like pretty, it's five episodes. and I think I watched the whole thing in in a night. And that's a ahead I was just, yes it is heavy night with a baby on you. yeah um I was just shell shocked, not because the story is so grim, but because it was so, can I swear on this podcast? Go for it. Yeah. Yeah. It was so fucking good. it was so fucking good.
00:12:29
Speaker
And i was in such a funk about it because I'd just gotten this opportunity to to do this thing. And then I'd watched, I watched something and you know how the brain works. You're just like, well, I could never make anything that good.
00:12:42
Speaker
And I just kept muttering to myself, like, how did they do that? Like, how did they do that? I mean, probably not allowed. um I wasn't that insane at that at that point. But like, just thinking over and over. And I remember like having this moment where it really felt like growing up where I was like, no way.
00:12:56
Speaker
How did they do that? you know what I mean? Like, turning that kind of like... that attitude into one of curiosity and being like, there's no formula to crack. Like, it's not like I'm going to see the strings, but I can think about the choices that like Craig Mason and his team made in pulling off something this beautiful and, and this thrilling and all that. And like, if I just drill down and think about their choices, maybe I can think about my choices creatively and blah, blah, blah, blah. blah blah blah So like that whole thing of approaching something you love with like,
00:13:28
Speaker
an openness and a curiosity, knowing that there is like some ineffable part of it, right, that you are never going to be able to understand. Like that's just creativity. But approaching like a moment, a scene, a sequence and being like, what choices were made there that are really great choices?
00:13:45
Speaker
I find a really wonderful way of watching stuff that I love. But sometimes you do have to turn your brain off and just go, I just want to enjoy this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And so it does, ah you know, i've there's many points I want to touch on because Chernobyl has this kind of feeling of dread that I also think you have successfully achieved in the killings at Parrish Saging Heads. This is a show that, you know, It has this kind of like foreboding dread that you kind of get in that first, um straight from the first episode. And so, but for anyone that's listening who hasn't heard of the series yet, can you just give me a bit of a like top level, like what is the killings at Parrish Station about? Sure.
00:14:22
Speaker
There is a massacre out in the Gibson Desert, or I think actually we ended up not naming the desert, but there's a scoop for you. It's the Gibson in my head. ah um Where a bunch of scientists in 1987 found, murdered and mutilated at ah at a radio telescope, a really a remote radio telescope.
00:14:41
Speaker
And this cop, Georgia Cook, is like part of the group that's investigating it and she kind of gets drawn into the story. And it ends up, and this isn't spoiling anything because you'll understand in a sec why, she ends up kind of end ending up institutionalised as a result of that. And the reason we know that from episode one is that it's it's a dual timeline show. So we tell the story in 1987, the whole investigation over those four or five days, and at the same time we're telling the story in the present day where like... her former kind of mentee comes to see her in the institution that she's in and and she basically says, look, I think this is happening again and can you help me with this case? And so you're
Challenges of Dual Timelines in Writing
00:15:18
Speaker
you're telling these two stories with with characters in that are in both timelines.
00:15:23
Speaker
I suppose that's a top-level pitch. Like, you would think i I would have gotten better at explaining the show, it's you know, by this point, but I still... Yeah, it's a it's a crime crime drama playing out on two timelines. Like, yeah, that's why I, like honestly, I was being lazy. It's why I asked you to um explain it. So was like, man, i'm I'm going to go on to a long rant.
00:15:45
Speaker
I think one of the greatest things, one of the greatest assets you have as a person making your first television show is your naivety.
00:15:56
Speaker
Like you have no fucking idea how hard what you're about to attempt to do on the page is going to be. I remember because I'd written the pilot and the second episode by the time that Stan picked it up. Yeah. And then we got like,
00:16:10
Speaker
a bunch of really great people on board, really experienced people, like Tim Pyre, Yolanda Ramke, Catherine Smythe McMullen, and they all said to me in various registers, you understand how hard this is going to be in terms of doing two timelines. Like you understand that that is going to be a really difficult thing. yeah And I was like, i don't really see how. Like I've done it in two episodes. Like you just switchy backy forthy. Like it's whatever.
00:16:34
Speaker
And it was only until like we started scripting more that I was like, what have I done? Like... Yeah. Yeah. It's really hard, man. It's really hard to tell two stories at once. Yeah. And like what I, what I think is really interesting about the show. So there are two timelines, but it's not like you have half the episode play out in one and then you switch the other, or it's not like you're in present day and you're just getting flashbacks, like informing the present day. They're kind of in yeah conversation with one another. was was that always the way from the beginning? Yeah, I mean, ah i again, this kind of comes down naivety in a good way, I think, because, like, I don't doubt that there is probably a structural way to do this that...
00:17:17
Speaker
is a little more rigorous. But the way i ended up deciding when we were going to go back and forth, at least on the page, was vibes. You know what I mean? And and when you're deciding on vibes, when you don't have a strict rule, and you're like, you get to the end of an 87 scene, and you're like, nah, I want to stay here a little longer. And so you stay in 87. And then, you know, you go, nah, I want to go to present day. What that ends up doing is making, as you say, the scenes have a conversation with each other. Because you always have kind of a reason to to go there rather than, a you know, you have a story reason to go there rather than a structural one. So like from the very, very start, I was sort of saying to the room, like, I don't want this to be flashbacks, but I also don't want us to be too slavish with like equal weighting. So if we end up with an episode that is predominantly 87, I don't care.
00:18:11
Speaker
If we end up with one that's very much present day with only a little thing tacked on the end, if that feels like where the story wants to go, let's just do that. By the time we were getting into pre-production and we were doing big reads of it, you realise that sometimes, okay, well, on a completely structural level, we do need to kind of remind the audience that certain people exist. So let's just whack something in there. But...
00:18:32
Speaker
In terms of like the big work, like the big kind of story work that you do, i kind of wanted everybody just to follow the story that they wanted to tell. And also it was really fun because sometimes sometimes you'd say to a writer like, this scene that you've written in 87, is there any way we can set it in present day just in terms of the information that we get?
00:18:53
Speaker
That was a nice little trick that we could use where like if we... if we needed to cut away... mean, you obviously can't do that in reverse, but, like, we could transpose certain 87 stuff into present day if it was just purely plot.
00:19:10
Speaker
And you never want to seem to be purely plot. And that's why... that's kind of why you could transpose it because you could be like, i want to I want to see a scene where like Heather and Doris just argue about something. That's a fun scene for me. Like, let's do that and then put all the information that was going to be in the 87 sequence with Mia and Xavier and Rob Carlton, move that into an argument with Heather and Doris and let's just see if that works.
00:19:33
Speaker
And having the freedom to do that was fantastic. Like, that was just great. And it also made you realize as a first-time TV creator, like, oh, man, like there are so many different ways to convey information to an audience.
00:19:44
Speaker
Often your first instinct is potentially wrong in terms of what a scene needs to do or or how it needs to happen. And something I also wanted to ask about was tone because, um or like, you know, the genre that it sits in. There is um still some, I feel like you can sense that you and the writing team have some um comedy chops because like there's still some moments of um comedy. ah On that note, I appreciated the podcast dig. on That podcast is a one rung below cruise magicians, was it? Oh, man.
00:20:20
Speaker
No, it was great. i Loved it. Can I just on that? Yeah. On that. So I love these scripts and I love the ones that I wrote. i love the ones that I didn't write. I'm very proud of this.
00:20:34
Speaker
That line, i am one rung, podcast basically one rung below a charisma tradition, is an improvised line by Cam James. oh And it has come up.
00:20:46
Speaker
It has come up in no fewer than four interviews Yeah. All the podcasters are like, oof. I'm apoplectic with rage right now. ah You're like, damn, Cam. Yes, because there is, of course, you know, for people listening, there's crime element. There is some podcast references, of course. Yeah.
00:21:06
Speaker
um i so So to go to your your your question on tone, I mean, like, so the way I wrote this, the way I started it, who was i had this image in my head of a woman waking up in a hospital bed, huh having survived something terrible that she doesn't quite understand.
00:21:25
Speaker
And she's like in this hospital and there's like a two-way mirror. And these like detectives are like behind the mirror because they don't want to be in the same room as her because they don't know if she's contaminated in some way.
00:21:36
Speaker
And they're trying to interview her and the tech's fucking up and the lights are coming on and off. And it's like slightly farcical, but also there's some of that dread there. And that was my image that like kicked the whole thing off. i was and And as you'll know, that appears nowhere in the show.
00:21:49
Speaker
But like those characters, which which were at the time and remained, Kate Reynolds, Georgia Cook and Mick Thorne were were there from the start. And when i when I get an idea, i'm not very good at like conceptualising it unless I write it down as a scene. And then I kind of start to understand it better. So remember, I had that idea and I started to to write it out.
00:22:10
Speaker
And I got to like 10 pages of this interview And i realized that I was really enjoying doing this. And I was like, why am I really enjoying doing this? This is interesting. Like, what about this story is interesting? And then I was like, oh what's interesting about this is that I'm creating an urban legend.
00:22:27
Speaker
Like, what is happening? Because i I'd already said it in the 80s just because that felt right. I was like, oh, I'm creating something that like in this world people would still talk about in present day. And once I realized that, I was like, oh, I got to see how it's talked about in present day. So I just like stopped that scene and started a new one with these podcasters. Mm-hmm.
00:22:48
Speaker
And I wrote the podcasters thing and obviously really enjoyed doing that because that's the world that I have occupied for so long. And I could i could write these guys fairly easily.
00:23:00
Speaker
And then I went to bed and I was like, that's interesting because I have two timelines now. And I bet people from the first timeline are still alive in the second. And how does that work? And, like, could you tell that that story, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And I tell that long story of its inception to point out that, like, that tone was kind of baked in from the start because the first two things that I wrote were, like, a kind of dread-filled interrogation scene and these two dipshits. And for me for me, it was, like, can they exist in a world together? Can they exist in a show together without undercutting one another? Mm-hmm.
00:23:37
Speaker
And one of the things that i realized, and I think like, I think this is good advice, but i ah you i don't know, take it or leave it, listener. But like, when you are developing a show, you will develop it for so long,
00:23:52
Speaker
And there will be so many versions of it. And you will throw out so many things and add so many things. And you will feel like you are losing it a little bit, like losing the show.
00:24:03
Speaker
And that's like a real fear that will... Like all real fears is like... you can't confirm or deny it to yourself, which is
Maintaining Creative Vision
00:24:09
Speaker
what makes it so scary. You feel like it's getting away from you. And that's nobody's fault. Nobody's taking it away from you. Just like, how can I keep, how can how can this thing still be the thing that I got excited about in the first place when I've worked on it for so long?
00:24:23
Speaker
And what I found was at the start of pre-production, i sat down with Tim Pie, the script producer, and I was like, I have a couple of North Stars, right?
00:24:34
Speaker
that to me are the show. And first of all, like I'm planting a flag in the sand that we cannot lose them. But also like i'm so I'm telling you this and I told Daniel, the director, because I think this is what the show is. And whatever we do, it needs to be a show where this can exist. And one of those things was Kayla and Damien, the podcasters. I was like...
00:24:56
Speaker
And there wasn't any resistance to them, really. Like, it's not like I was defending them against being cut, but it was really important to me because, like, I'd be writing another scene or we'd have another scene come in.
00:25:06
Speaker
And even though it had nothing to do with the podcasters, I'd be looking at it and going, is this a show that Kayla and Damien can exist in? And if so, great. If not, no.
00:25:17
Speaker
And I think having those little North stars, even if they seem like really small things to an outsider, are really good at keeping your show on track and keeping that tone preserved. Because i think, and again, this is like nobody's fault. Like nobody sets out to do this.
00:25:37
Speaker
But I have a theory that like all old creative stuff wants to cool to room temperature. Like it's entropy, right? Like the the the longer something sits in development, the longer something even sits in production, it wants to cool to room temperature.
00:25:55
Speaker
And unless you have people around you and unless you are doing this yourself that are constantly firing it up and not letting it do that, it will just cool. and as long as you're aware of that, I think it's like a very easy thing to overcome.
00:26:11
Speaker
But I think if you're not aware of that, it can really sneak up on you. Yeah, definitely. And I also, you know, because the development of something does take a long time, like I think I read that this idea first came to you during like COVID lockdowns. like Yeah. when When I wrote those scenes, we were in lockdown. Yeah, yeah. And so then you obviously go into like writers rooms and, um, and like you said, you worked with these great writers. Um, so you were the writer on F1 and then you collaborated with writers like Catherine Smyth McMullen, Yolanda Ramke, Tim Pai on different episodes. Like, how do you then approach writing a ah draft or writing the script, like with collaborators? Like, how does that, how does that work?
00:26:58
Speaker
Oh, it totally depends on the writer. And it depends on the writer and it depends on the episode. Like some of those co-writes are like literal, you do first draft, I'll do second. yeah Some of those co-writes are, we're on the phone a lot talking about various moments. yeah It totally depends on the needs of that ep. And also it's so hard in Australia because...
00:27:23
Speaker
You engage a writer for a certain amount of time, for a certain amount of drafts, and then the world just changes. Like network notes come in or production concerns come in. And those people are long gone on and on other projects. yeah And like you don't have the money to
TV Writing Challenges in Australia
00:27:42
Speaker
recall them.
00:27:43
Speaker
And you don't want to ask them to work for free. So, like, all of a sudden you're like, what what do we do here? And, like, that's why, like, kind of being in a showrunner role and having that kind of established from the start is good because everybody knows where they stand on that. Yeah.
00:27:59
Speaker
But, like, there were things, like, in Catherine and Yol's scripts where, like, you know, for whatever reason, certain things weren't possible that I know that they were really attached to and that I was really attached to. and like I say, they were working on the projects.
00:28:12
Speaker
The only thing you can do is call them and say, hey, listen, I'm going to have to change this and I'm going to have to like blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And like those two especially are just such pros and so wonderful. And I'm so grateful to them too, like how lucky I was to have, you know, them and Tim on my very, very first show. You know, they they understand. They go, okay, cool.
00:28:32
Speaker
That's fine. And you just kind of get on with it. you've all been in the weeds together in the room, breaking the story apart. You it so well, that kind of thing. But I do remember thinking on set, we were like in Manly Hospital, like the old Manly Hospital, and it was like we were the last people in there before they were going to knock it down. Oh, yeah. And so it was like this this horrible place. We were like literally falling apart. And I remember for some reason something had to be rewritten really quickly.
00:29:01
Speaker
and I was just in this like room with like the ceiling caved in, trying to rewrite something and just like, you know, in 20 minutes to get to Mia. And I was just thinking like, God, wouldn't his staff be nice?
00:29:17
Speaker
Like, wouldn't it be? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to just pick up the phone to like a really great writer and say, hey, listen, we got this problem. Like, let's work on it together. Yeah. um But like, that's so much money. Yeah. You what mean? And you, you know, I think that, I think that the show allocated its money really, really well. And I think that it looks really great. Yeah.
00:29:39
Speaker
And I think like for me to be like, no, I'd like like, you know, just somebody on call to make me feel better um is something that um we just can't afford in this country. Yeah, yeah. That's fair.
00:29:51
Speaker
And well, because you're saying like, you know, those North Star things and, you know, you're shepherding this story across all these years, it goes into production you ah you know You mentioned that you were on set, um but you had was it helpful knowing that you had one director, which is Daniel Netheim, shooting across those six episodes to kind of like ah god keep that tone yeah intact?
00:30:14
Speaker
And not only not only one director, but one director who had been on this with me for years. Oh, cool. like yeah daniel was Daniel was the first... person outside of Mark Fennessy to read it and go, oh, let's meet up.
00:30:30
Speaker
Like, I basically cold called him through his agent. and and just, you know, based on his previous work, I was like, if this guy's in Australia at the time, and if he wants to do it,
Collaboration with Director Daniel Netheim
00:30:40
Speaker
I think this would be perfect.
00:30:42
Speaker
And I was really blown away that he was like, look, i' mean I'm in this Australia for like a week. Let's just meet up and have a chat. And he was just so wonderful and supportive. And we had this really long coffee where, and this was like probably like a year and a half before Stan came on board. Like it was a long time.
00:30:59
Speaker
where we kind of talked about how we do it and what's sort of what sort of drew him to it and and that tonal question and all that stuff. So by the time that, you know, he and I were up in Broken Hill about to film the first frame of this thing, we talked about it for so long and we were like, there was so much trust there but but between us. And yeah, if we hadn't had somebody across all six, I don't know, I think I...
00:31:23
Speaker
I mean, I'm sure there's a way to make that work, but, like it gives me hybes thinking about it. Yeah. Because it's such a complex story and the timelines. It's complex story. it's It's a really difficult tonal needle to keep threading over and over again.
00:31:38
Speaker
But Daniel was the continuity and he was across sort of everything. He's phenomenal, man. Like, the way that he just sort of... Not only like creatively, like dealt with every department and sort of had his hands across everything and had a really strong vision, but also like the way that that guy kind of gets around in the world and behaves on a set.
00:32:00
Speaker
It's so beautiful. And it was like genuinely the most beautiful calm shoot, which I am told is rare. I mean, like, I didn't have a lot to compare it to because when I was on The Tracer and SBS, I mean, that was very, very small stuff. And we'd always had it drilled into us at The Tracer too, that like, you cannot have an ego. Like, if you if you were ever short with the crew, you are in a world of trouble, like that sort of stuff.
00:32:28
Speaker
But the tone that Daniel set on set with all departments and with the cast and all that, like, it just made what could have been, like, a tremendously stressful shoot because we really packed it in. i think it was ten weeks.
00:32:43
Speaker
Ten weeks, yeah. Like, six episodes. into Yeah, ten weeks. Yeah. And, like, but doing it dual timeline, like, with actors' availabilities and all that, like, it was tight. But it wasn't, like, it was just a joyous place to turn up every day.
00:32:58
Speaker
Oh, great. Yeah, the dream. And so that kind of brings us to the the final segment of this podcast, which is um so it's called Pay It Forward. And it's basically where ah you'll be asked a question from the previous guest. Then if you can come up with a question after that for the next guest. What a great idea. um Our previous guest on the podcast was writer-director Tin Pang. um Tin's question was... So I was thinking about inciting incidents, but then i wanted to also add to that and ask what is one of your exciting incidents being that I know that I get this warm experience sometimes when something just works, you know, whether it's onset or when you're writing, it's something that you immediately feel and reminds you of this is why i do what I do. This is why I'm passionate about this industry or creativity. And even though there are so many shitty things that happen, you know, in creative, in this industry, and it's very easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom, what's an exciting incident where you've said, no, I'm going to continue because this is addictive. This is like, this is the reason why I love this.
00:34:10
Speaker
What a great question. First of all, I think that that, um, like the premise behind that is really true that like, it is so easy to get disillusioned and to fixate on the unfairness of certain things.
00:34:28
Speaker
And in my experience, the people who last are the people who are able to do exactly what this question says, which is hold on to the good.
00:34:41
Speaker
Signing incidents I tell you what, I am never more excited than the first day of a writer's room. Maybe the second hour of the first day.
00:34:52
Speaker
First hour, everyone's getting their feet out of the desk. We're sort of sussing out the snack situation. like everybody's kind of getting a measure of what the show is. But once a writer's room takes off and it's kind of firing and...
00:35:07
Speaker
It's that kind of brainstorm writer's room where like just this like endless possibility, right, for what this thing can be. And you're realizing that. And I think that's part of the excitement.
00:35:19
Speaker
Like, you know, if you're running the room based on your own idea, you've had this idea probably in your head for quite a while. And then somebody will say something that like to them seems so obvious, right?
00:35:29
Speaker
And it just fundamentally changes your idea. and you realise that, oh, this is so much bigger than I thought it was. You know, like there's a really common dream where like you discover there's a new room in your house. It's kind of like that. Like when you start collaborating on something that has just been trapped in your head,
00:35:49
Speaker
And people are gelling with it and people are running with it. It is like discovering your house is several times bigger. And, like, to me, that is, like, pure unadulterated joy.
00:36:01
Speaker
i love it so much. Yeah, 100%. I totally agree with that. Writers' rooms are the are the best. I mean, like, you know, like, and then and then you kind of start narrowing your idea down, which is frightening.
00:36:17
Speaker
And that's where it like stops being so fun and starts being quite daunting because you have to start taking things off the table, right? But in that moment when this thing is like just possibility, it's just so wonderful.
00:36:30
Speaker
Definitely. um Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast Thank thank you so much for having me. It was such a wonderful um chat and such thoughtful questions. wow Amazing. Thank you.
00:36:42
Speaker
That was writer creator Ben Jenkins and huge thanks to Ben for joining me on the podcast. Remember you can catch all six episodes of The Killings at Parish Station from Wednesday, June 24. This episode was produced and edited by myself with logo design by Shara Parsons and music by Seb Sebotaj-Gavrilovic. If you enjoyed listening, please hit that subscribe button and leave us a review. See you in a fortnight.