From his piano in the most romantically picturesque of work spaces - a book-lined chapel in a former Catholic convent in the artist community of Binalong - one of Australia's most prolific composers tinkers out a few recognisable notes to explain his approach to composing for the big screen.
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Bruce Smeaton has been responsible for some of our better-known local film scores and soundtracks including Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, while his work for international productions includes the Ringo Starr film Iceman, the Steve Martin comedy Roxanne and the Meryl Streep film Plenty.
His work for television includes composing for the miniseries Ben Hall, A Town Like Alice and The Eureka Stockade. His work won him five AFI (now AACTA) awards, and he served 12 years on the Board of the Australian Performer's Rights Association (APRA).
His resume runs much longer - I could easily kill my 1000 word-limit listing the familiar names - and also includes more than 2500 scores and jingles for the advertising business.
Folk old enough to have gone to the movies when tobacco companies were allowed to advertise might still be able to hum Smeaton's tune that accompanied attractive Stetson-wearing horseback riders at work mustering.
"Each [jingle] was a mini-course in budgeting, scheduling, costing, producing," Smeaton says.
"One commercial had not been filmed particularly well and I was asked to try and make the [male cigarette brand character] on horseback move faster," Smeaton says, "and solving the problem of speeding up the horse and rider got me fascinated with the interface between music and moving image."
The hallways of Smeaton's expansive home include images of his passions – such as vintage French racing cars - and the original portrait of Bruce in oils painted by Felicity Marshall, as a younger man at a note-strewn piano with the seagulls of his Brighton childhood home about.
The 79-year-old grew up in post-war Brighton in what was then the far-fringes of suburban Melbourne, and preferred days of beach and cricket, but when the weather meant staying indoors, Smeaton would borrow his brother's wind-up leatherette gramophone and walk across the road where he and his friend - whose musical parents had converted their garage to a rehearsal room - would try to pick out the notes on records.
"We'd slow it down which would change the pitch but enable us to find a starting note, then try and find by trial and error the next note," he recalls.
"It's called ear-training but if I'd have known that at the time I'd have run a mile."
As he reminisces, Smeaton cites the phrase from Hartley's The Go-Between "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there".
"It's the present-tense 'do'," he explains, "The past isn't the past, it's just there in my head. It's just deciding which particular door to open."
The young Smeaton was more interested in engineering and mechanics until the day he heard a live jazz band in the beer garden of the local pub where he was selling newspapers, and realising music structures weren't dissimilar to motor-cars, became interested in how music was put together.
Smeaton would take up the baritone saxophone and eventually joined the RAAF Central Band, along the way signing out every instrument the band owned to learn first-hand what they were like.
"One day I began to realise I was not a performer but a composer although I didn't know how to go about being a composer," he says.
Smeaton developed a medical condition from the constant vibrations that playing a saxophone involves, and switched careers, working at teaching, as a mechanic, in sales, until his initial work as a composer for the advertising industry.
"Nowadays I'm told a kid with a synthesiser can get $9K to do a simple jingle," he says, "but I would be lucky to earn $100, and that was going to the meetings to get the commission, compose the music, orchestrate it, organise musicians' studio time, run the session, produce it, supervise the mix and then take the tape back to the agency."
"It's not a lot and that's why I did so many of them," he laughs, "but without all that just hands-on doing, I could never have done the film scores."
Being interviewed for the ABC TV program GTK (Get To Know which aired 1969 to 1975) brought Smeaton to the attention of the larger-than-life American producer Charlie Russell, then working for the ABC, and led to Smeaton being commissioned to score Seven Little Australians.
Russell made introductions for Smeaton in the United States where he studied - at his own expense - the arts of the film composer and film music editor, and his return to Australia coincided with the mid-1970s renaissance of the Australian film industry.
His work is instantly recognisable, at least to those my generation and older. It is experimental, working across a range of sounds and instruments, and he jokes that "When an artist switches genres - Like Picasso and his Blue period, his Cubist period - they call him versatile, but when a musician does it they call him insincere."
He is a pragmatist, frank about the role the film composer is contracted to do.
"Music can be a cheap fix, cheaper than a reshoot," he says, "like if the car isn't driving the right speed, this guy doesn't look menacing enough."
As we chat, Smeaton gets quite specific about his craft - "The piano in Monkey Grip is in 4/4, but in unequal groupings to throw the listener off, and I did the same thing for the ascension of the rock in Picnic at Hanging Rock, but that's in 17/8," but I am supremely musically illiterate and I just have to take his word for these things.
Smeaton has some dark stories about the difficult personalities and shady practices of the film industry, here and overseas - I will have to burn my voice recorder once this article is submitted - but he is also a gifted raconteur (transcribing our interview was difficult with the sound of my laughing over the top of Bruce's story-telling).
Bruce Smeaton joins Dr Jenny Gall in conversation at the National Film and Sound Archive. Friday, December 8, 6pm. There will be a discussion of the art of composing for the screen, followed by two films featuring Smeaton scores - The Cars That Ate Paris (at 7pm) and The Devil's Playground (at 9pm). The event is part of the Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits exhibition being held in conjunction with the National Portrait Gallery.
Tickets $10 available at nfsa.gov.au/events/composing-screen
Cris Kennedy is Manager of Engagement and Education at the National Film and Sound Archive.
