The Australian Financial Review.
You don't have to be an asshole to be successful.
You can be a nice guy.
Yeah, you don't have to be anything more than who you are to do well.
Who you are is different from your job or the product that you're making, the story
that you're telling.
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review, and welcome
to 15 Minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything in between.
And along the way, we're hoping to get some great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Tony Ayers, screenwriter, director and executive producer.
Hi, Tony, lovely to see you.
Thank you for coming into the Melbourne studio.
Hi, Sally, lovely to meet you.
Now, Tony, as I said, you're a screenwriter, director and producer.
In 2008, you established Matchbox Pictures, developing and producing feature films and
Your credits include Netflix miniseries Clickbait, the contemporary reimagining of The Devil's
Prey Ground, Underground, The Julian Assange Story, Safe Harbor, Stateless, The Slap and
its US remake, not to mention winning BAFTAs and Emmys and too many actor and AFI awards
My goodness, you've had a busy life.
Well, there's a lot more to come.
Do you spend your whole life working?
I do have problems switching off, but then I have a really great job, which is basically
responding to the world.
So if I probably do it, if even if I wasn't doing it for a living.
Lovely to hear that.
On that note, we only have 15 minutes.
I'm going to start the clock right now.
So Tony, my first question is about your morning routine.
What time do you get up?
Do you have a really regular routine or are you a more sort of ad hoc person?
I wake up about 5.30, 6 a.m., but I tend to listen to the radio for half an hour, three
quarters of an hour and then get out of bed.
I try to on a good day do Sam Harris's waking up, which is a 10 minute meditation every
My partner and I do that together.
Then we have breakfast.
I read various articles and the best of journalism that I can find for half an hour, three quarters
And then I start my emails.
And the meditation practice that you do, is that a particular type of meditation?
I don't know Sam Harris.
Sam Harris is a podcaster and it's just basically trying to get you to reflect upon what the
nature of consciousness is, which is a useful thing to remember when you're in highly stressed
situations that, you know, you can sort of step away from the stress, observe it.
And he gives you techniques for doing that.
Oh, so what are the techniques?
It gives you certain steps to separating yourself from the gripping feeling of either
anger or anxiety or fear that you might be experiencing in a particular situation.
It makes you aware that these are just feelings and thoughts and they all belong in this state
called consciousness and that they don't actually need to define who you are.
And just being able to see those things as feeling states or thought states or even bodily
states like breathing faster or feeling your heartbeat, being able to be conscious of those
things somehow gives you a separation from them and being able to separate yourself can
sever the power of those feelings.
So the three steps are understanding that you've got the feeling, understanding where
it resides in you, how it's playing out and then severing yourself from it.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I take from that podcast.
And do you do breakfast, coffee?
Coffee is my productivity hack.
There's a great coffee shop around the corner, which is kind of my de facto office.
So is that where you do your emails?
No, it's where I do my meetings.
So if I have a breakfast meeting, I'll do it at the coffee shop around the corner just
to get out of the house.
So that's kind of my routine, except for when I'm in production.
And of course, production determines basically what you do because, you know, it's so resource
heavy and so expensive and you basically have to tailor your day for that.
So you have to get up early.
You have to be there or you have to sort of stay up late and be at the beck and call of
Yeah, I can imagine.
So my next question is, tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that shaped you as a
leader or somehow changed what you were doing.
In 2006, I made an autobiographical movie called The Home Song Stories about my mother
and my sister and I.
I was so proud of that movie.
I gave it my all.
It did very well in terms of film festivals and awards, but no one saw it.
And I sort of realized, well, maybe I need to pivot to television.
Soon after that, I did pivot to television.
I made the slap soon after that for the ABC and every episode had about a million people
And this was the day before streaming services or iview or catch up opportunity.
So it had a big commercial audience.
It won every award under the sun.
It got nominated for an Emmy, got nominated for a BAFTA and my career took off from there.
In terms of connecting with audiences, that was the pivotal moment for me.
So if you look back at the time when you made that decision to move into television,
do you think that was a stroke of luck or do you think it was, I guess you had to make
the decision yourself though to move into TV?
Yeah, I'd always kind of flirted with TV early on in my career.
Like I was a TV writer to start off with after film school, but the deliberate decision to
really focus our resources on television was really an audience based decision.
Like I really wanted my work to connect with people.
And when I made the slap, it was just like, oh, it was one of those come to Jesus moments
where you can make work that you're proud of and people can watch it, you know.
Who would have thought?
Yeah, who would have thought that?
But I would kind of say that a small audience in TV is a huge audience for independent cinema.
So my next question is, what is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
You don't have to be an asshole to be successful.
You can be a nice guy.
Yeah, you don't have to be anything more than who you are to do well.
Because I remember when I was at film school, like there was this kind of unspoken sort
of idea that to be successful, you had to be like the auteur director and you had to
be ruthless and kind of narcissistic and selfish and-
And thump the table and get your way every time.
Yeah, and always get your way.
Soon after I left film school, I befriended a beautiful playwright, Nick Enright, who
sadly died of cancer decades ago now.
But he just sort of said that you can be the person that you are.
You can be a good person and try to cultivate good ethical values and still be successful.
And it allowed me to sort of find my own path through this industry, but still maintain
a sense of my personal integrity.
So are there times when people aren't really doing what you want them to do and you really
feel like being an asshole and you feel like thumping your hands on the table and you
have to restrain yourself or are you actually not that way inclined at all?
I certainly have an emotional temperature, which I try to, you know, there are a few
people I vent to and I think that's useful, but I try not to bring it into my work.
And when you say you have an emotional temperature, what does that mean?
Or I can get cranky.
And do you let people know or do you go home and sort of talk to someone about it afterwards?
I believe in the unsent email.
That's another very good piece of advice.
You know, like sometimes you need to vent.
Sometimes you need to express what you're feeling, but I think that the consequences
of acting in that way are always greater than the pleasure of venting your feeling.
I think it's better to just try to act in a rational, dispassionate way and have some
other outlet for the feelings that you're going through.
Very good advice.
Okay, Tony, stay right where you are.
We're going to take a short break.
When we come back, we're going to open this beautiful chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Tony Ayers, director, screenwriter and producer.
Now Tony, this is our section as threatened called the chatterbox.
Inside this beautiful brown box are around 20 questions all folded up on little bits
I'm going to ask you to pick a few out one by one, pass them to me and I will of course
then ask you to answer them.
So please have a forage in the box.
What speed do you listen to podcasts on assuming you do listen to podcasts?
I am such an avid fan of podcasts.
I have to hear them at normal speed.
So you say you really like podcasts.
What are you listening to at the moment?
Well, I got into podcasts, of course, because of cereal and true crime and I just kind of
consume them at a rapid rate.
I'm listening to this great thing at the moment called Chameleon.
It's all about scams and frauds and there's one about the conspiracy to kidnap a governor
and basically how it was all facilitated by the FBI.
When you're listening to them, are you trying to get ideas for scripts or for stories that
you want to tell?
Do you sort of mind them in that way?
I mean, the thing about being a storyteller is that, you know, material is all around
you all the time.
So sometimes it's for that and sometimes it's just like fascinating.
There's a podcast called Blocked and Reported, which I really love.
It's all about the crazy things that happen on the internet.
It means I don't have to join Twitter or X or anything like that.
I can just listen to that and get the latest scams.
So is there something about fraud and scams and scamsters that really fascinates you?
Well, that's one thread of interest.
I mean, you know, we're all putting on an act all the time and just even in relating
We're all putting on masks and sometimes when you exaggerate that, that becomes a story
that impacts on the world.
And so, of course, you know, like I find all things that impact on the world in a material
way, kind of interesting for a storyteller.
You know, sometimes it's good to get away from, you know, like the murder mystery sort
of version of the world, which where the stakes are very high.
And sometimes you kind of want to find stories that you want to tell that are still have
consequence, but aren't necessarily, you know, life or death.
OK, next question.
Have a forage in the box.
Ah, I like this one.
Do you like public speaking and have you always liked it?
I don't mind public speaking, but I can't say I like it.
I'm always filled with dread beforehand.
I can be either good at it or terrible at it.
Does that depend on whether you've done preparation or not preparation or is it just how you wake
up in the morning?
Sometimes I can over prepare and that is worse than under preparing.
Like I remember once I had to give an introduction for something at the Melbourne Film Festival
and I had over prepared and I was thanking everyone.
And then I realised halfway during it, I'm just banging on and on and on.
But I had this kind of paper in front of me that I was duty bound to kind of go all the
And at one stage, someone in the audience said, just shut up.
So that was probably one of the most humiliating moments of my life.
And you couldn't be responsive to the audience as a result.
But I knew I was losing them.
So I'm always best when I've got a few dot points and I kind of know I have to hit these
dot points and then I'll just riff.
So with the dot points, you know, there is this theory that you should make three points
and if you want to make smaller sub points and you should have three points underneath
each one, because apparently we as an audience like things in multiple...
Ah, storytelling is the same.
So it's a little bit more complicated around a certain idea of what a narrative is.
Like a sentence is beginning, middle and end.
That's a narrative.
And that's three things.
So in terms of storytelling, what is the rule of three?
Can you explain that?
The rule of three is basically you have to say something three times for it to print
to an audience so people will understand it and take it on board.
This is a particular message, for example, that you're trying to deliver.
A key plot point, for instance, or a key character point.
If you do it three times, it will somehow bore into the audience's kind of reception.
Sometimes if you just do it once, the audience can glance over it.
So if you want the audience to understand a particular plot, you've got to find three
different ways of delivering them that information, which will be through different characters
or through different methods.
It can be manifest in all kinds of different ways.
And it is a rule that is designed to be broken as well, because, you know, often you don't
It's surprising how often the rule of three works.
I must watch out for that.
Have another fish.
Tell me about a time when you failed at something.
How did you recover and what did you learn?
The last feature film I made, which was called Cut Snake, I was very proud of the movie.
It just did not find an audience at all.
And that was terribly upsetting, especially when you're directing a movie.
Do you feel particularly responsible?
So what did I learn from it?
I learnt that there are certain things that audiences will respond to.
And if you try to do something that's a little bit too esoteric, you know, because in a way
what I was trying to do with it was slightly more abstract.
I was trying to talk about the crime genre in Australian cinema and the hidden homophobia
and homoeroticism in that genre.
And I think as a kind of theme, it was a little bit too abstract for an audience.
And I guess also maybe what you're saying is that you're dealing with a sense of rejection
from audiences for something that you have put your heart and soul into.
And that can happen to lots of people on lots of different levels.
It might be failing to get a job that you've been for, like actors failing to get a role
or people in business, a deal falls over and somehow you take things personally.
Is there a secret, do you think, to dealing with that personal rejection?
Because it's kind of hard not to take things personally a lot.
I think the key is to remember that who you are is different from your job or the product
that you're making, the story that you're telling.
And I think that will help you move on and do the next thing.
I mean, I'm a great believer in jumping back on the pony.
And some stubborn part of me uses failure as an incentive to then do better the next
So, Tony, that is the end of our Chatterbox session.
I've got one final question for you, and that is if you had 12 months off unencumbered,
you could do anything you liked.
You didn't have to worry about the film production world.
What would you do?
I'd get really good at table tennis.
Just before COVID started, I got a table tennis table.
And during COVID, through a bit of a loophole a friend came over and we played table tennis
every second day.
And I sort of realised, oh, this is such a great thing.
And it stops me thinking about work.
It satisfies a certain obsessive compulsive element in my personality.
You're just seeing a tiny little ball over a net.
Is it very active?
Table tennis is great because if you play it for half an hour, you work up a sweat.
If you're wearing a step counter, it actually counts all those little steps one way or the
It's so satisfying.
I love the different markers that you have done something.
And that is our timer.
I love the piece of advice that you don't have to be an asshole to be good at your job.
I love your advice also to get back on the pony as soon as you fall off and don't take
The rule of three is really good and of course applies to storytelling, but it also applies
I really do love your attitude of separating yourself from work, which sometimes I think
But if you can do it, that is a really, really great thing for you as a person.
And who doesn't love a game of table tennis?
I'm going to learn that next.
So thank you for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
It's been an absolute pleasure.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton, and produced and edited by Lapfan.
Video and audio assistance and our music theme is by Alex Gao and our executive producer
The Australian Financial Review.