Flume ft. May-A, Say Nothing directed by Michael Hili / creative director Jonathan Zawada

You’ve had a fascinating and varied career so far; you were born into a family of mechanics, studied science, became an arborist, studied set and costume design at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts, became a production designer working across theatre and film and are now forging a successful career as a filmmaker. Looking back, are there any red threads linking the various elements of your journey?

I think I’ve been blessed with an insatiable curiosity and a conveniently short memory for the struggles of starting anew. It’s a combination that has allowed me to run at things with a sense of naivety, unburdened by past failures. In a way, my superpower has been a kind of foolishness.

Beyond that, in some respects, all my interests have required seeing beyond looking. Both trees and films operate on simple mechanics that yield profoundly complex results. Trees, like stories, grow in unexpected directions and demand a deep respect for their natural rhythms.

Flume ft. Oklou, Highest Building

You’ve previously said you try to produce work that ignites the part of the brain that is childlike; that is reserved for imagination and wonder. Which films, stories or artworks most inspired you as a child?

I have a four-year-old child whose mind effortlessly oscillates between reality and imagination, doing so with complete ease and conviction. He finds inspiration in objects and situations that offer ample room for interpretation. For instance, he can see a cardboard box and transform it into a mermaid with a steering wheel and a shop counter. I think it’s this sort of wonder and imagination that I’m trying to harness, rather than attempting to render out complete worlds in strict naturalism – sometimes the best feedback I receive is that something looks a little bit fake. Room for interpretation is important. Now, of course it’s tricky to make a film about a cardboard box and hope that an audience will do the rest of the work for you, but I do think certain filmmakers throughout history who have painted with more impressionistic brush have ignited this sense of childlike wonder – Carol Zeman, Gondry, Spike Jonze, Peter Greenaway, Leos Carax, Agnes Varda, Powell and Pressburger. These filmmakers are absolute giants for me.

As a kid, although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was always captivated by tactile forms of expression – animations like the whimsical “Ning Nang Nong” that played on a children’s show in Australia, puppets from one of the greatest and most twisted Australian TV shows, “The Ferals”, the picture books of Jeannie Baker and Shaun Tan all left indelible marks on me.

Looking back on these creations, I think I saw an opportunity. I thought maybe I could make something like that someday. That is a very powerful notion.

Flume, Say Nothing

You’ve developed a very distinctive filmic language and set-driven approach to directing, which reflects your theatre training. How easy have you found it to move between these two mediums with their different constraints and opportunities?

Although my primary focus was on design in theatre school, what truly resonated with me was the essence of storytelling. The pillars of great performance, meticulous blocking, compelling text, emotional authenticity, and brave interpretations—these are universal teachings that transcend mediums. These principles demand attention whether you’re on a stage or behind a camera. So, the transition from theatre to film, and from designer to director, has been more exhilarating than daunting.

I often felt restricted in the theatre, filmmaking just gave me more tools. For instance, the option of a close-up to express detail is simply not available in theatre. It sounds ridiculous, but basics like that have made filmmaking very exciting for me. I don’t take any of those tools for granted.

Flume, Say Nothing

You collaborated with creative director Jonathan Zawanda for your music video Say Nothing for Flume. Tell us a bit about the creative inspiration behind the film, and how that collaboration worked in practice?

I’ll start by pointing out that Jonathan is a genius and one of Australia’s finest artists working across many mediums.

Initially, I received a one-sheet treatment adorned with a few captivating images and enigmatic sentences, accompanied by a note asking if I would be interested in collaborating. Once we began our discussions, it became evident that Jonathan had crafted a very exciting concept and was seeking a live-action director to bring the music video components to life.

Our collaboration was primarily conceptual. We spent a lot of time on the phone, wasting hours talking about the laws of our creative universe, discussing ideas that ultimately wouldn’t make it into the final outcomes.

When it came time to shoot, I went off and did just that while Jonathan worked hard on his end to create the incredible 3D renders you see in the videos. We had no traditional pre-viz process; rather, we both went out to create images that were exciting to us based on the conceptual discussions we’d had.

The project had a lot of contributing factors that influenced the way it turned out. Jonathan, Flume, and the record label were very trusting, which meant I had complete freedom in both the production and the edit. When the videos were made, I had just moved back to Australia from America and I lived in a very rural town with a little workshop, which meant I could hand-build all the props myself with a small team. I also wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about EDM as a genre, so I was really just trying to respond to the collection of sounds in a satisfying way rather than performing within a genre.

It was one of the most rewarding things I have ever worked on, so much so that Jonathan and I continue to work on it. We have recently been reconsidering the creative world as a long-form series, developing new characters and strengthening the logic that connects it all.

Michael and Lachlan’s mother Amy on set, The Public Diagnosis for The Brain Cancer Centre

We really loved your spot The Public Diagnosis for The Brain Cancer Centre, which intercuts immersive storytelling and evocative set design with real personal footage. The use of water, reflections and the flooded set in particular is absolutely stunning. Can you talk us through the production challenges and how you achieved your creative vision?

I’ve spent the bulk of my career chasing around kids with bleached hair making music videos. When I was brought onto the Brain Cancer project, I was struck by the weight of responsibility tethered to our task – to honour Lachlan’s life, to go gentle with Amy [his mother] and her generosity in sharing her story, and to represent the many others who had been in a similar situation. This weight influenced every decision, both conceptually and practically. It was FINCH founder and EP Rob Galluzzo who pushed me to reconsider alternative ways to tell Lachlan’s story. From there, I worked with Amy, whose strength and determination as a mother were like nothing I’ve ever witnessed. Over many hours, we discussed who her son Lachlan was and what the experience of learning he would die from his new diagnosis felt like. The confusion, the waiting, the tears, the bravery of Lachlan, the many memories they had created slowly abstracting like a quickly fading tape.

I had an extremely generous and dedicated team behind me. Unfortunately, brain cancer is something that has touched a lot of people’s lives, and many of the crew gave up their time for nothing to make a considerable piece of work. We were working with archival material from Lachlan’s life—not classic milestone images, but images and videos that were important in Amy’s memory of Lachlan. I felt like my job was to understand the emotional truth of the images and design sets and performances that supported that truth. Practically, this meant creating a series of vignettes on small square mega deck stages. One of my greatest interests in production design is the details you erase, creating focus by taking things away. Using texture, colour, and negative space to get to the guts of what’s important in a shot.

Water was woven into the project from its inception, but the challenge was to take it beyond its literal expression to something more poetic – Amy made clear that the truth of these situations is that the tears come often and interspersed. At big moments like learning of the diagnosis, but also during small moments – an idle Wednesday afternoon sitting at the kitchen table.

DP Sean Ryan has incredible focus and big dedication to testing – leading up to the shoot, we used the basement of the production company to test flooding, small trays of water, sunken mirrors, and projection reflected through water. The results of these tests were broken into shooting modes; each scene was shot traditionally and then covered out by these various wet modes.

Australian Brandenburg Orchestra 

With projects like this or the Brandenburg Orchestra, how do you create something that’s more than just a play (or performance) being filmed?

The camera as a storyteller.

The camera can take what we experience and transform it into a poetic reality. It’s not just about documenting but about interpreting the essence of the human experience. It’s the camera’s ability to interpret and shape reality, making it both a witness and a storyteller that gives you a film capable of reaching an audience on an emotional level.

What does the pre-viz process look like for you?

It changes based on the project’s needs. For something like the Brandenburg Orchestra project, I was heavily involved with the set build. So the pre-viz was born from understanding the angles and surfaces that would look best. This is fairly common for me, in a way it’s a form of rehearsing the set, like you would actors or camera moves.

Something like the Flume videos, where collaboration with another artist was important, we didn’t follow any traditional pre-viz rather Jonathan and I communicated through a complex Miro board of sticky notes and reference images that was a living document, constant evolving even throughout production.

At the other end of the spectrum, I just finished on a commercial which was more or less a musical. It demanded a more focused, traditional approach where I moved from storyboards, to an animatic, to a filmed rehearsal – on set we had shot timings down to the frame. The edit was simple choosing the best performance takes.

Whatever services the idea the best. Saying that I almost always start with some sketches, I have notebooks full of sketches – all the ideas usually begin there.

Michael Hili on set

With your ability to access and interplay multiple filmmaking techniques from stop motion to painted backdrops to CGI, where do you want to take your talents next?