We’ve all seen biopics of legendary musicians, where we get the backstory, interviews interspersed with songs, tales from the road, live performance or rehearsal clips. Recorder Queen is different. When Genevieve and I conceived of this film, we wanted to make something we hadn’t seen before, something that took audiences deep inside a musician’s experience, communicating what it feels like to inhabit the strange realm of the creative mind and artist’s journey in all its phases.
It needed to be intimate, so Genevieve’s own singular story became our vehicle. Hers is, after all, an inspiring story, and defies the almost universally uncharitable response to the recorder!
The script of the film had a curious emergence. Many of the plot points we landed on related to my journey as an artist. I could speak to my own experience through Genevieve’s story, while Genevieve could speak her own truth though the cinematic language we developed together. Supporting our collaboration was a shared (and rather wilful) inclination to defy convention.
The first device we employed was Genevieve’s narration, inviting the audience on this not-so-ordinary journey she’s undertaken with her recorder. Live action reconstructions and semi-animated flashbacks illuminate Genevieve’s earliest musical memories — formative moments, when she discovered her artistic power to physically embody sound. Hand drawn and strange, they emulate the way we construct our present day narratives from the past. CG effects are employed to visualise the music.
We developed several poetic motifs and metaphors to dramatise her creative journey: going in and out of tunnels and spaces, memories and mental states, interspersed with this feeling of being constantly on the move, intensifying the creative drive. Shoes are symbolic of the path she is walking. Animated birds help guide her way: the rainbow lorikeet speaks for Australia and a sense of home, and the nightingale shows Genevieve the landscape in which her instrument and its sound were born. Animation also takes audiences inside the music she plays, and metaphorically to the high wire and the giddy pace of the concert stage.
In the film’s third act, the renowned concert artist Genevieve Lacey returns to her origins – to the landscape she sprang from, where her sensibilities were born. In a series of live music performances, she displays her creative awakening, her redefinition of what it means to be from Australia.
Visual references and inspiration include Alice in Wonderland’s magical portholes, Run Lola Run, Michel Gondry, Wim Wenders’ Pina, the short, animated documentary Ryan, and director Sarah Watts‘ films, which vividly use animation to enter a character’s state of mind.
Music is a dynamic force in the film. Elena Kats-Chernin, Paul Kelly, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Ntaria Ladies Choir, Flinders Quartet, Karin Schaupp all become part of the story, part of the soundtrack. Music crisscrossing ten centuries and a huge variety of styles and genres, music to conjure up landscapes, states of mind, ways of being.
Ultimately, Genevieve’s story provides the framework for a bigger story about creativity and the creative artist — the commitment, courage, compromise, fear, vulnerability, and moments of absolute bliss.
It’s a poetic interpretation of an artist, created by another artist, showing you that for a musician, a sound is not just a sound, it’s a world, a landscape, a place that you choose to live.
It’s about intense experiences in life that make you who you are. It’s about stepping beyond what you think other people need you to be and finding your own way.
It’s irreverent and wryly funny too. After all, she does play the recorder…