Gracie Otto, the human sparkplug
Producer, director, actor, screenwriter… is there anything the youngest Otto can’t do?
Nine o’clock at night and the human sparkplug that is Gracie Otto shows no sign of slowing. Having nailed pick-up shots for her first feature film, Seriously Red, and interviewed mum Sue for a documentary on famous dad Barry, she’s just spent a long day-into-evening warming up the director’s chair for a yet-to-be-announced TV show, driven home to her pocket-sized Sydney apartment, scoffed down some takeaway, texted the co-director of her new doco, Under the Volcano, about the red-carpet premiere underway on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, and shared, via Zoom, an anecdote about interviewing Yoko Ono in New York.
It’s a lot. Work is taxing, frenetic, all-consuming. Otto loves it. “I’m always kind of hiding how many jobs I’m doing,” she says, scraping her hair into a messy top-knot, as if it could somehow impede the mile-a-minute patter she’s about to unleash. “My theory is if I come home and work for six hours and then work all weekend, that’s on me. If I feel I can do all the jobs, if I give everyone what they employ me to do and more, then it’s on me if I want to not have a kid and do another job at night, you know? Or not be in a relationship and go out to dinner and [instead] do another job at night.”
Otto, 34, works across time zones and disciplines. She writes, edits, produces and directs: TV shows, fashion films, commercials, shorts and features. She is one-fifth of Dollhouse Pictures, the all-female creative collective behind Seriously Red. She’s an occasional actress and model, fashion muse, girl about town. She’s done stand-up comedy in LA. For her 2013 documentary The Last Impresario, Otto recorded her own sound and vision, lugging the equipment, backpacker- style, on planes, trains and buses across three continents. “She’s a one-man band,” says acclaimed director Gillian Armstrong, a mentor who sometimes has to remind her mentee “to eat properly and have a break”.
“I decided a few years ago to say yes to everything I was offered,” Otto says. “I think I’ve worked non-stop with maybe a week off for, like, three years now. Which is good, you know. I just love working so much.”
Of course you believe her. She’s a millennial. She belongs to a generation credited with inventing “hustle culture”, the go-getter mindset that extols the virtues of 16-hour work days. And the hustle is clearly an animating force. But Gracie’s also an Otto, the youngest member of a family deemed Australian show business royalty. Father Barry is an acting legend and sister Miranda is a Hollywood star. Of course she’s got something to prove.
The human sparkplug grew up in a grand but decaying Victorian mansion in Sydney’s inner west, so steeped in family history and eccentric charm it could have played stand-in for The Royal Tenenbaums’ whimsical abode. Huge rooms, high ceilings, chandeliers. Hundreds of paintings and thousands of books jostling for space with antiques and esoteric keepsakes such as a Don Bradman custard jug used to serve gravy.
It was, and still is, Gracie’s mother Sue Hill – feminist “supermum” and a founder of Belvoir St Theatre – who brought order to the chaos. Her dad? Well, he just brings the chaos. “Having an actor as a father is… interesting.” Gracie smiles to herself, full of affection for the wayward paterfamilias, a mainstay of the 1970s theatre scene and star of films such as Bliss, Strictly Ballroom and The Great Gatsby. “Good but crazy. I mean, I don’t know any better but he’s just… eccentric. Dad’s never really known how to use a credit card or a bank account or a mobile phone or TV or any of those things. He’s not, like, living in the real world sometimes. My mum was able to create that environment for someone like him to be who he wanted to be.”
The documentary Otto on Otto is an unscheduled passion project she’s been working on between jobs since 2018. Segments featuring her 80-year-old dad are filmed in the Petersham house: it’s Barry being Barry, wandering about the house, picking flowers in the garden, dressing up Gracie’s beloved pet cats in ties and sunglasses. Gracie lived in the sprawling old house until she moved to Los Angeles in her mid-20s. She remembers Sundays being particularly social. Family friends included Gillian Armstrong, Jan Chapman, George Miller, Judy Davis, Peter Carey, Noni Hazlehurst and Hugo Weaving; to Gracie they were merely the parents of the kids who came to visit. “I’m still good friends with Gussie, who’s George Miller’s daughter, and Gillian’s daughter Billie and Heather Chapman – we’re all now working in the industry,” she says. “We were always as kids being dragged along to the theatre – ‘Aw, not another opening night’. Now we’re like, ‘Are we still on the list?’”
Armstrong (My Brilliant Career, Little Women) recalls the young Otto as a tomboy obsessed with sport. “She wanted to be like her older brother Eddie,” she says. “I never saw her out of baggy shorts and a baseball cap her entire childhood.” Her dad once said of Gracie that she “looks like Grace Kelly and walks like John Wayne”, thus nailing her essence in one unlikely but vivid mash-up.
At school, she represented Australia in indoor soccer and softball but by Year 12 the film bug had bitten. Kill Blondes, a short film made for HSC credit at Burwood Girls High, was awarded a perfect score, “which bumped my [overall grade] up ’cause I didn’t do well in French”. Then it was off to Sydney Film School to begin a career spent on the other side of the camera from the famous Ottos.
“The thing about Gracie,” says Armstrong, “is that a lot of people think she got where she did because of her family name and all. But she has always worked so hard.” Yes, Armstrong came in at the last minute to help her cut down her HSC film to length. Yes, she perhaps owed her entrée into the cut-throat, male-dominated advertising world to her star turns on the red carpet with her dad. And yes, she could call on professionals such as Barry (“He’s free!” she quips), Miranda (Lord of the Rings, War of the Worlds, Homeland) and brother-in-law Peter O’Brien (Neighbours, Underbelly, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) for her early short films.
But Gracie opened a lot of doors for herself. “I wouldn’t say [having a famous surname] worked for or against me,” she says. “Obviously, people will read this and go, ‘Well, of course it was an advantage, it got you in the door for things’ and while that’s true, you’ve always got to back it up. Those people have not been there with me on a Saturday night, doing all the editing and mixing myself, working four jobs at the same time and not sleeping. I know how hard I’m working.”
There’s certainly never been any “spare mummy and daddy money”, Armstrong points out. Otto laughs at the idea of a “privileged” upbringing. She laughs as she sits in the 39 square metre apartment she’s just bought with money saved during a pandemic that extinguished overseas travel. Laughs from the orange couch she’s borrowed from a friend. Whirling her laptop camera through 360 degrees, she gives a (very short) tour of her new home. Lamp. Plant. Thermomix. “I did all these jobs and didn’t travel and cooked at home and I was able to buy this!” she says proudly.
“People always think…” She trails off. “But our family’s never had money. They live in that big house but it’s run-down and dad was a theatre actor and mum works for the Department of Education so it’s never been a rich family or anything like that. So you get to an age when you realise you’ve got to get your shit together.”
One gift Otto’s brought along from her star-studded youth is a cavalier attitude to the head-turning glamour of celebrity. The child who showed Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton how to play Chinese Whispers and was taught by Toni Collette to “give the finger” to paparazzi was never going to get star struck. “Nothing’s ever been a big deal for me in that way,” she says. “Some of those people don’t get treated like normal people. People just lose their shit around famous people; imagine that happening every second that you lived.”
Friends describe Otto as eccentric, energetic and hilarious, with a natural, unstudied charm that is key to her ability to convince bold-faced names the world over to appear in her films. “Gracie is always herself and I think that is both disarming and also charming,” says her Dollhouse Pictures partner Jessica Carrera. “I think it’s this quality that has always given her real and honest access to her interview subjects. Plus, she’s [obsessive] about research and would never go unprepared.”
Otto’s debut documentary, The Last Impresario, chronicled the career of prolific British theatre and film producer Michael White, whose little black book was full to bursting with household names. She interviewed more than 60 friends and colleagues of the late impresario and managed to wrangle sit-downs with John Cleese, Kate Moss, Anna Wintour, Naomi Watts, Lorne Michaels – and Yoko Ono.
“That was a funny one,” she says, launching into a long, transPacific tale in which the artist was unexpectedly reached via landline in New York, Otto was told yes, she would do the interview, but Otto would have to get from Sydney to New York by Easter Sunday, then not being able to find a gallery to host the interview, something about a Blackberry with no data, then a hired camera and two microphones “because I couldn’t f..k this up”, and Ono baulking at the double-mic setup and then “just having to pray that it worked”.
It did work and The Last Impresario premiered at the London Film Festival in 2013 to glowing reviews. Upon returning to Australia from LA, Otto followed up with a successful foray into TV: she directed the second season of comedy series The Other Guy, episodes of the hit series Bump and six episodes of sketch comedy series The Moth Effect, including a finale starring Hollywood actors Vincent D’Onofrio and Bobby Cannavale. “Vince and I are good friends and I was just like, ‘Do you want to do this?’ and he and Bobby worked together years ago and Bobby really respected Vincent as an actor and it was just a fluke it came together.
“I do have a good black book,” she continues. “I’ve always been really good at meeting people. I’ve always had really good luck with being in a city for the night and meeting someone that no one has ever met before or never would meet and it just happens. Everyone is like, how did you meet that person? I’ve always had a weird vibe and energy – an orbit, people always say. And I say yes to things. If someone invites you out somewhere I always say, ‘Why not?’ ”
Otto has a three-pronged approach to wrangling famous names for her projects: “I try to get three people from different worlds to just mention the project, so you’re not asking them personally for a favour,” she says. “Like, ‘Can you ask Elton, can you put in a good word, just so it’s bubbling in his brain and when the request comes in it’s there.” Elton John became something of a white whale during filming for Under the Volcano, an engrossing and gossipy documentary about the studio paradise established by Beatles producer George Martin on Montserrat in the 1970s.
Despite befriending John’s husband David Furnish at a dinner in London and, later, his band in Sydney, Otto never quite managed to close the deal. “I felt like we were so close to getting Elton,” she says. “I felt like we got to level 59 in a Super Mario Kart adventure and then at the last moment, we missed out.”
Under the Volcano features interviews with Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, all three members of The Police, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Verdine White from Earth, Wind & Fire and Jimmy Buffet, as well as archival footage of many of the biggest recording acts of the 1980s, including The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and Lou Reed.
“Mark Knopfler said no three times,” Otto recalls. “We even went to London to interview someone else in his band so he’d put in a good word. Then we got back to the airport in Sydney and were told: ‘Mark Knopfler can do Wednesday’. We’d just travelled 24 hours in a plane but turned around and went back.” That marked the third time in three weeks she and producer Cody Greenwood had travelled to London. “We were travelling like maniacs,” she says. The last interview was in the can and Otto had just returned to Australia when Covid-19 hit. “We were incredibly lucky we got to make the film in the year we did because if it had been any later when we were not allowed to travel, it wouldn’t have been made.”
She also feels lucky to have been able to shoot her feature film debut, Seriously Red, in northern NSW late last year, in the midst of pandemic uncertainty. The musical comedy stars Schapelle actress Krew Boylan as a Dolly Parton impersonator and the supporting cast includes Rose Byrne, her partner Bobby Cannavale, Celeste Barber and Jack Thompson. It’s the first film from Dollhouse Pictures, the creative collective and independent production company founded in 2015 by Otto, Byrne, Boylan, Carrera and filmmaker Shannon Murphy (Babyteeth) with the aim of telling female-driven stories. Next up for the collective is a TV series based on Sally Piper’s psychological thriller The Geography of Friendship, with Otto directing.
Ten-thirty at night and the human sparkplug isstill sparking. We’ll leave her to it, seated on the couch borrowed from a friend, in the tiny apartment bought with her hard-earned. She may have five projects on the go, and a couple more irons in a couple more fires, but Otto’s mind is racing ahead, always looking forward to a bigger, bolder, brighter project and she makes you believe she will get there. “I’d like to direct a Marvel movie, like Birds of Prey: women superheroes, great music, cool camera tricks, all that kind of stuff,” she says. “Like, hit me up Margot Robbie!”
Under the Volcano screens at the Sydney Film Festival on Nov 6 then nationally Nov 12-21 for SFF On Demand.