"The Dish" is the second feature film from Working Dog, the acclaimed collective of unique and passionate filmmakers who crafted 'The Castle," which earned 10 million at the box office within its first twenty weeks of release in 1997 and went on to become one of the most successful films in Australian history.
Conceived, developed, written and produced by Working Dog's creative team of Santao Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy and Rob Sitch, "The Dish" tells the story of one of the greatest feats in scientific history as seen from the point of view of Australian scientists who made a crucial contribution to the groundbreaking NASA mission.
"The Dish" is the story of people basically thrown into the deep end," explains director Rob Stitch. "These three scientists who spend their lives doing fairly routine, humdrum work out of an astronomical installation in the middle of New South Wales suddenly have the opportunity of greatness thrust upon them, a chance to be responsible for broadcasting pictures of the greatest television event of the 20th century.
As Tom Gleisner notes, the Working Dog team found its inspiration for "The Dish" rooted in the facts. "600 million people watched the televised images of Neil Armstrong's moonwalk, perhaps the most-watched event of the 20th century," says Gleisner. "For the first time, the whole world had united around their television sets in a way that certainly had never happened before and possibly never has happened since. It really was a pure extraordinary television experience, and provided us with the genesis for 'The Dish.'"
While researching and writing the screenplay, the filmmakers discovered the sheer magnitude of the Parkes radio telescope and the challenges filming on it would present. "You climb up 200 or 300 feet onto the dish and suddenly what you thought you could do on paper disappears," explains director Rob Sitch. "I remember being pretty intimidated. How were we going to maneuver this massive telescope to suit our production needs?"
"Seeing the dish for the first time was a rush," recalls Santo Cilauro, who also served as the film's second-unit director. "Firstly, it's so bloody big. And secondly, I couldn't help but wonder how we were going to convey that 'bigness' on the screen."
Simply put, Gleisner says, "You just don't expect to see something that large sitting in the middle of a sheep paddock."
Even more daunting than the size of the dish itself was the idea of approaching the staffers of the imposing radio telescope. "We realized early on that we had to get the permission of the operators of the dish, or we could never have made the film," Gleisner says. "For awhile we considered posing as a group of Canadian astronomers. We would have gotten away with it, but we couldn't handle the accents. We had to come clean and reveal that equipment in a pivotal moment in Australian history...and we're doing it as a comedy-drama.
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