Episode Details

It always fascinates me when people with other artistic backgrounds settle on making films. They end up creating an art form that is noticeably different than their peers. My guest, Australian director Peter Skinner, spent five years as a sculptor, and then with the precision that art form requires, turned his focus into making astonishing films like his most recent, TWO UGLY PEOPLE (2025).

It's a hard film to describe but a beautiful one to watch. The impetus for the story of TWO UGLY PEOPLE came in the form of a question: " how do I tell a story about two people who want be together, but the only way they can be together is by being strangers?" and Peter actualized that here, in a work worthy of a sculptor.

In this episode, Peter and I talk about:

• the Letterboxd comment of " Peter Skinner is one of Australia's most exciting emerging filmmaking talents";
• how he got involved in filmmaking and the path of his classmates;
• sculpture's role in telling stories, directing, and cinematography;
• what he learned from making four shorts before his feature;
• how he describes TWO UGLY PEOPLE;
• the title!;
• the role of feedback for a film that is pushing boundaries of what people normally see on screen;
• the cinematography and production design of the film;
• how they found a space six hours away from Sydney;
• the festival and release strategy for the film -- and the crazy "pre-selection" process for Venice (is this common?!);
• the distribution process for the film;
• what's next for him.

Peter's Indie Film Highlight: BABYTEETH (2019) dir. by Shannon Murphy

Memorable Quotes:

"I made figurative sculptures and that were based on myths and obviously very, narrative-based. But a sculpture is a, a physical object that sits in a space that if it's a static object, doesn't do anything other than sit there. So you have to tell a story as economically as possible, but also as much as you can in the static frame. So then when you look at filmmaking, filmmaking is just that 24 times a second over an hour and a half of a film." 

" Imagine you're a painter and you have to buy all the materials and you have to paint all the thing, and you've never painted a big painting before, but it's gonna cost you a million dollars, and then people have to really like it. It's almost a fool's errand."

"I wanted to make a film I've never seen before."

" It's like these places that hold every room is its own story, and I'm just telling you the story of these two people in these two rooms."

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