Teaching and mentoring

Mike has been teaching for much of his working life. He likes to teach by strongly relating with student projects, setting interesting challenges, and then following through with intense interest till the projects are completed . This means of course always working with only a small number of students, which has been the case with all his classes to date. He has virtually never looked up at hundreds of students in some vaste lecture hall.

Mike brings his own experiences into his teaching, telling stories about his various documentary productions, the dramas and the pitfalls, encountered in the making process. Documentary is all about getting access to interesting characters and situations. How one gains and keeps that access, is the main challenge of the genre and about which Mike often teachers.

Mike has had a large library of films he admires and which he screens to illustrate various ways of solving documentary problems. . It is important to have a great store of exemplary work on hand so that students can draw on a rich repertoire of examples when they do their own creative work.

It is also very good to know what has gone before, the films done by others, the ground breaking work.. Knowing the history of documentary is an important way of giving onself permission to go forward to new methods and new subjects..

Mike’s longest teaching periods have been at The Australian Film and TV School, Sydeny Australia, AFTRS where he taught for several year in seventies,. He would come from Canada once a year to give a nine week intensive course in documentary theory and practice. Each time he came, he brought back with him to the school a large library of documentaries, mostly never seen in Australia, that he had collected from film makers around the world, especially in the US and Canada.

To these he added long VHS interviews he'd done with many of those same film makers. The doucumentaries and interviews together meant that he was able to offer a compelling and often dramatic package.

For example, he had Bill Cran's film, Chachajee, my poor Relation. The film was a protrait of a genteel old indian manservant, hanger-on, related  to a rich family in New Delhi and distant uncle to Ved Metha, a well know Indian writer. It was  Ved who decided on doing a film portrait of his poor relation for PBS, and who worked with Cran to do the documentary. But there was a falling out. Ved thought Bill had held his Uncle up to ridicule and proceeded to write a book attacking the film maker.

Mike  offered the film, an interview with Bill Cran, and Ved's books as a fascinating and very intense package to Australain students, one that raised all sorts of interesting questions on the ethics of the documentary process.

It is a pity that Mike's large library of long form interviews with people like the Mayseles brothers, Richard Leacock, Don Pennybaker, Tom Daly, Nick Bloomfield, Roger Graeff, etc have never been transcribed and now barely playable

While back in Australia for AFTRS, Mike also ran weekend retreats for local producers, intense weekends which became seminal in the direction of documentary in Australia. Robin Anderson and Bob Conally found them inspirational. And Tom Haydon went from one such weekend retreat to start the documentary fellowship program which was so important in the career of many local documentary makers. Mike's teaching has played a part in the history of documentary in Australia

As well as AFTS, Mike's major teaching stint was at Harvard in the early eighties, invited by the accomplished film personal maker and head of department, Alfred Guzetti. Mike also had a colleague , Ross McIllwee who made the famous Sherman’s March and has become a leader of the personal film genre. At both Harvard and AFTRS, Mike ran small classes that were practice based. Everyone got to make movies in his classes..

Apart from these stints, Mike has taught at numerous other universities around the world as a guest lecturer. UCLA, NYU on many occasions. Drexel, Stanford (from where he graduated) and Univ of Florida. Often he bought his own works to these sessions to run master classes at these schools.

When Mike came back to the ABC in Sydney to run the documentary department in 1996, his first act was to put on a two day seminar for staff. He brought with him an extensive library of documentary classics and ran an internal course in the belief that it would be good for busy ABC professionals to take a short break and look to where their documentary genre had come from. So memorable were these seminars, that now, over 10 years later, Mike has  being asked to run a similar course at the ABC.

He has also run workshops at the expanded film school, now The Australian Television and Radio school, AFTRS, in recent years, travelling interstate to run his one day sessions.

His most unual teaching experiences are to do with the TV show he brought to Australia, Race around the world. He was involved in setting the intensive teaching course for  successful applicants, the crash training they needed as neophyte film makers to set off aorund the world with video cameras for the ABC show.

Between the two seasons of Race around the World, Mike travelled the country lecturing a universities to those who were interted in being part of the second intake . Because the show was so popular, this gave Mike the largest audiences he had ever had. The format was a five hour lecture on how Race around the world worked with tips on how to be chosen for the next round

As well that formal teaching events, Mike does some mentoring with beginners and established professionals both, helping out when a film nears completion, when editing has to be fine tuned, commentary written, etc. Mike is experienced at writing simple and effective narration. He has recently been helping David Bradbury on two upcoming films, Blowing in the Wind and A Hard Rain.

Anyone interested in having Mike as an advisor, either in the beginning stages of a documentary, or in the finishing stages, should reach Mike through this site.

Outside of documentary, Mike hopes in the future to run classes in making improvised drama such as he trialled in Even Emus need to Dance. This he calls, Fictomentary

Last year, 2006, he took on the post of Adjunct Professor at QUT. in Brisbane, leading, along with colleagues, a small group of graduate students in a practical documentary class towards a MA. The first group will complete their projects soon. Another intake will come in at the beginning of 2008.

Students interested in being part of the next intake and working with Mike, should apply to the department of Creative Industries under Geoff Portman at QUT for consideration.

The aim of this course is to provide intense training in the documentary on a very practical basis. Mike uses , as always, his six principles. These , he developed as a contribution to the training of participants in Race round the World, the ground breaking TV show of the late 90’s, mnetioned above. Following that successful show, Mike applied the six principles to his own work with success and uses them today with each new student intake.