Hello, my name is Marc Fennell from The Feed on SBS and on Triple J radio, and I’m about
to go Back to School with Student Edge.
Hi, I’m Simon Miraudo and today I’m sitting down with Marc Fennell, host of The Feed.
Hi. I feel like I’m about to regress into childhood. This is terrifying.
We’re doing it. We’re going all the way back.
Oh God. Make it stop.
Princess Mononoke, Akira and Ghost in the Shell have all raised the profile of Anime
in the West.
What kind of student were you?
I was this weird mixture of very nervous and kind of a little bit too over-confident and precocious.
I was a kid that learnt I could talk, a lot, very early on. Of course, when you talk a
lot very early on, you get told to shut up a lot. And so I think by the time I got to
high school I was just very, very nervous.
But underneath the surface I was quite confident. Basically what I’m telling you is
I’m an ****hole. I was an ****hole from day one.
Well, did you feel a bit like, “People keep telling me to be quiet, but I’ve got such good stuff."
No, because the sense that you had good stuff was beaten out of you by the time I got
to high school.
So from primary school to high school, I went to an obnoxious, overpriced private boys school
that my parents – who weren’t rich; my parents just assumed that would give me the
best education and they worked way too long hours to afford to put me in that school.
What they didn’t realise and I didn’t realise until much later was that it’s ******* awful.
It was the worst thing in the world. Because it was one of those really blokey private schools
where if you're not a sportsperson or some kind of musical prodigy, there is no space for you.
Whilst it was awful as a culture, it did have a lot of resources. It was my first experience
with media. In fact I think in Year 9 I directed a TropFest film.
What then were the films you kind of watched growing up that made you think, “Okay, this is a
field I want to get into and start critiquing”?
It was a very defined moment. It was 1999. I’d always liked movies. I’d always liked
talking about movies and TV shows but in 1999 I made a decision that I was going to watch
all of the Oscar nominated movies.
I don’t know if you remember but 1999 was a great year for movies.
That was a good year.
It was Magnolia. It was American Beauty. It was The Insider.
Being John Malkovich. The Sixth Sense.
So many good films and so many good films in different genres. And they were big films.
They were films that were accessible.
I saw, I think it was The Insider. I was just like, “That’s it. I’m going to do something
with films. This is what I’m doing from here on in."
I’ve never really had a career plan beyond being the Film Critic for Triple J.
It's actually been really interesting because that was all I wanted to be. That was everything.
Then I got it, I was like, “I don’t really have a plan for what to do after the one film
review I do a week.”
I didn’t have a plan, career-wise, beyond that. So it’s been a bit of feeling my way through since
that job, and even though I’ve done a bunch of TV shows, Hungry Beast and The Circle and
The Feed, I’ve always maintained that one job, because that two minutes worth of radio
that I make every week for Triple J is all of my love of film kind of poured into two minutes.
People keep asking me why do you still do it, because I’m coming up on ten years.
I will quit at some point, but I still love it. I still love being able to look into a
microphone and go “Oh my God I just saw this thing and it’s amazing and we need
to talk about it.”
Because that takes me right back to being 14 years old and sitting in that cinema.
And it was an empty cinema. That was the thing. I saw The Insider at like 3 o’clock in the
afternoon on a Thursday, and I looked around and went, “We need to talk about this, right?
We need to discuss this.”
And there’s no one there.
I think that was the moment where I was like, “Actually, I need to be somebody that does this.
I need to have this conversation with people all the time.”
I do love the idea of the 14-year-old Michael Mann fanatic going, “Guys, Year 9 is great
and all, but have you seen Manhunter?"
Yeah. There’s not that many 14-year-old Michael Mann fans, and if there are, call me, we should be friends.
What you kind of alluded to is that you’ve been adaptable, right? You’ve hosted The Feed
and et cetera, and you’ve written a book, while still doing Triple J.
But when you’re doing uni course selection, it’s hard to plot out that plan. So, can you tell
me a little bit about… was there a point where you thought, “You know what, maybe
this isn’t a viable career. Media journalism and film criticism. Here are my backup plans."
Were you vision board style, devoting yourself, inspired by The Secret perhaps, to get that one gig.
So, that’s an interesting question because what happened was I got to the end of school
and I’d completely screwed up my university preferences. I’d done slightly better than
I’d expected. I went through all of high school being told I was very average, very
average, very average, and the bell curve was just super nice to me that year and suddenly
I wasn’t very average and I was like, “Oh, I did well.”
But I’d put in all these university preferences to go and study in places I didn’t really
want to go study, hadn’t really thought about it, and I completely and utterly ****** up.
I just ruined it. I didn’t know what I was doing.
So I got into some university that was halfway across the country and I was like,
“I’m not doing that. Why am I? Uh, I’ve screwed this.”
So I canned it. I canned all uni. I took a year off and I was gonna take this plan.
I'd started when I was in high school, to make money, designing websites for people.
And I came across a website for a new radio station that was launching in Sydney called FBI, and
I said to them, “Hey I can do graphic design,” and they basically taught me radio
from scratch.
It was accidental. It was entirely accidental. After a year, they taught me the basics of radio
they taught me how to constructs omething to get people’s attention really fast. It was the best education I ever got.
And after a year of that I‘m like, “Yeah, I’ll go to uni.” And I’d gone onto a course. I'd signed onto this course.
It was a media arts and production course at UTS. And then after three months
of that I got this phone call from SBS.
I chatted to this producer for three hours about everything and nothing. The next day,
David and Margaret announced they were leaving SBS and going to the ABC. I ran into this
producer again, randomly and she was like, “Oh you should totally send in an application
video,” and I was like, “For what?”
She’s like, “Oh, they’re re-casting The Movie Show.” First thought in the back
of my head was: “That is a terrible idea. No one will watch that show without David and Margaret.”
And after that I deferred uni and I never went back. And the moral of this story is
you can come up with a plan, plans are good. Know what you like. More importantly, know
what you don’t like. Because I actually find asking anybody at the age of 17, 18, 19, 20...
30, what they want to do in life is kind of pointless, most of the time.
I think what’s better is to work out absolutely what you don’t want to do. If you can start
using a process of elimination to rule out the things you don’t want to do in life,
the options for what you do want to do, what really excites you, will stand out in sharp relief.
Be flexible, because it doesn’t matter how many times you come up with a plan about what
you want your life to be, it will change six, seven, eight-thousand times, is my experience.
Whether it’s anger, love or grief, you can always feel Spike Lee’s passion for a subject
rippling throughout his films. Now sometime it verges on browbeating, but when it works,
it can be tremendously powerful.
Marc, thanks so much.
No worries. I have all kinds of terrible pearls of wisdom, I’ve just realised.
Let’s get them all out, rail them all off. Let’s do an improv run like in Parks and Rec or something.
No, I’ve run out of them.
Two’s good.
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