I studied vet science at university and realised it wasn’t for me, so took a job as a personal assistant at a TV station. I then landed in production at Kennedy Miller Mitchell [Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller’s production company]. That taught me to be really organised. With the financing structures available back then we also had to be really creative as there were no contingencies in our budgets.

Recently I’ve been line producer on Breath, Hotel Mumbai, Hacksaw Ridge and The Water Diviner. I like to do those Australian films with a major U.S. producer attached. What I can learn from them is fantastic. I met Tom in Denmark, Western Australia, the small town where Breath was based, four to five weeks out from the shoot. We’d communicated via email and phone but quickly developed a shorthand working together on set that was built on a circle of trust – which you need in this position.

Working in such a remote location we had a variety of challenges, from not being able to find cast vans (which we eventually hired from online auction site Gumtree), to having to hire a local as a driver. The driver had to drive the camera cards 56 kilometres to Albany every day and persuade the council to let us use their internet connection, as we didn’t have a fast enough or big enough connection on set to get the dailies to and from Sydney.

A substantial part of the film was also shot on the water. Our water unit was often heard discussing minke whales, a local euphemism for great white sharks, common in the area. We took every precaution to keep cast and crew safe from potential great whites, hiring safety jet skis from nearby Margaret River. We didn’t come across any but we were lucky as there were two incidents with them in the area not long after we left. We used a lot of people from the town and local area on the film. They loved being part of it and we were made to feel very welcome.

Initially the plan was to shoot Breath in northern NSW, where [director] Simon Baker lives, however with WA’s state incentives for screen production we were able to make the case to make the film on location there and it became this big adventure. It was fantastic.