‘Whiteley’ The Edit

When director James Bogle and I sat down to start editing 'Whiteley', not a frame of new footage had been shot for the film. No new interviews, no artwork, no contemporary images of the places Brett had lived and worked or the scenes he’d painted, nix, niente, nada. Fortunately James and co-writer Victor Gentile had spent the previous year trawling every scrap of archival material concerning the Whiteley story. They’d constructed a 65 pages script from newspaper articles and reviews, snippets of old interviews, news bulletins and current affairs stories, exhibition catalogues and most importantly from Brett’s personal letters and notebooks that he filled with eclectic musings, jottings, proclamations and confessions...