Bill Bennett (born 1953) is an Australian film director, producer and screenwriter.
Bill Bennett | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1953 (age 70–71) London, England |
| Occupation(s) | Film director Film producer Screenwriter |
| Years active | 1983–present |
Career
editBennett 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
edit- The Cattle King (drama documentary 1983): writer/producer/director
- Shipwrecked (drama documentary 1984): writer/producer/director
- A Street to Die (1985) (feature film): writer/producer/director
- Backlash (1986): writer/producer/director
- Dear Cardholder 1987 (feature film): writer/producer/director
- Jilted (feature film 1988): writer/producer/director
- Malpractice (1989): writer/director
- Mortgage (feature film 1990): writer/director
- The Banjo & The Bard (drama documentary 1991): writer/producer/director
- Last Man Hanged (drama documentary 1992) producer
- Spider and Rose (feature film 1994): writer/director
- Two if by Sea (feature film 1995): director
- Kiss or Kill (feature film 1996): writer/producer/director
- In a Savage Land (feature film 1999): writer/producer/director
- Tempted (feature film 2000): writer/producer/director
- Cut (feature film 2000): writer (uncredited)/producer
- The Nugget (2002): writer/producer/director
- Deck Dogz (feature film 2005): producer
- Uninhabited (2010): writer/producer/director
- PGS - Intuition is your Personal Guidance System (feature documentary 2018) theatrical feature documentary: presenter/writer/producer/director
- Facing Fear (feature documentary 2022) theatrical feature documentary: presenter/writer/producer/director
- The Way, My Way (feature film 2024) writer/producer/director
References
edit- ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKDR1Q19BzU
- ^ 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.