One Class Act

Emma-Kate Croghan is hung over, not from drink but from promoting her first feature film, “Love and Other Catastrophes.” She’s just flown to New York from London. Previously, she was home in Australia. Before that she was in Japan, Australia again and Sundance.

Basically she’s been junketing ever since the film’s celebrated debut at Cannes last year. She’s lost weight, which scarcely seems possible, given that she’s waif-like to begin with. Of course, a lot of independent directors would love to have her problems, and she knows it.

“ ‘What are your three favorite movies and the reasons why?’ ” Croghan says, seated at a midtown Manhattan hotel coffee shop and citing the questions often asked by journalists. “That’s the one I hated the most. ‘Why did you become a filmmaker?’ And usually questions about the way we made the film, because the story is kind of Cinderella.” Another one she gets: Which character are you?

“To me that seems odd,” Croghan says. She orders poached eggs with hash browns, a side order each of mushrooms and spinach, a double espresso and a yogurt drink. Where does it all go?

“On the one hand I can sit on my high horse and say it’s so obviously such a classically structured narrative,” she continues. “But on the other I can understand why people get confused, because the people who made the film are the same age as the characters. We talk pretty much the same, we wear the same kind of clothes and we’re part of the same subculture. We’ve all graduated from university in the last three or four years. People make a first film that’s usually very personal and cathartic. It’s not like that. We were actually trying to make a screwball comedy.”

“Love and Other Catastrophes,” which opens Friday at selected theaters, follows a hectic day in the life of five students at the University of Melbourne. Two of them, Mia (Frances O’Connor) and Alice (Alice Garner), have moved into a loft and need a roommate. Mia’s lover, Danni (Rhada Mitchell), is a prime candidate, but Mia has a fear of commitment and a crush on one of her lecturers. (A subplot has her fighting university bureaucracy in order to transfer into one of his classes.) There are also two males on the scene: Ari (Matthew Dyktynski), a part-time gigolo and full-time existentialist, and Michael (Matt Day), a nerdy medical student who has his eye on Alice, who in turn is interested in Ari.

The movie was made with a 12-member crew for $37,000. Script development and pre-production took six weeks, and the actual shoot lasted 17 days. Scenes were rewritten at the last minute. Lines from one were often transposed to another. According to Croghan, there was a method to this madness.

“One purpose was to have a deadline because it’s easier to get money from people,” she says. “But the other thing was I’d become obsessed with the energy in screwball comedies. So I was trying to find as much information as I could about the way in which Cukor and Hawks and Lubitsch and those people worked.

“From what I could tell, they created chaos on the set. Because we were making a low-budget film, we had no choice but to work in this kind of chaos, so we made a film that would benefit from that. We were running around in the way that the people were in the film.”

So which character was she? Better not to ask. It’s clear that while Croghan shares some of her characters’ youthful idealism (she’s 25 now, 23 when she made the film), she’s also tough-minded and not at all shy about speaking her mind.

She’s a quick study too, having figured out over the past year what all the journalists and agents and studio execs want from her. It may not be what they get. “Someone said, ‘You look so like a girl.’ ” She gives herself the once-over. “Yeah? They’re marketing the youth thing. I have seen photos of myself where it’s very woman-child.”

Croghan actually did some modeling in Japan to put herself through college, although it’s a subject she’d rather not dwell on. She describes herself as a product of the ‘70s. She was raised as an only child, though with a complicated extended family (the film is dedicated to her mother, Kate, who also appears as a by-the-book university bureaucrat).

She attended a “hippie school.” “I went to school with Jasmine and Sunflower and Jesus, who changed her name to Naomi,” she says. “And Ultraviolet Purple, who changed her name to Debbie. Why did she do that?”

Croghan went on to attend the Victoria College of Art, make two award-winning shorts (“Sexy Girls, Sexy Appliances” and “Desire”), and co-direct a documentary (“Come as You Are”). “Love and Other Catastrophes” grew out of a desire simply to work.

And then it became much more than that. First the Australian Film Commission kicked in about $400,000 to finish the film. A print was flown to Paris for a pre-Cannes screening for North American distributors. After the screening, a feeding frenzy ensued, with Fox Searchlight the winner, shelling out $800,000. (Croghan will see some points on the back end, but the film is owned by the Australian Film Commission.)

At first, she didn’t know what to make of this hysteria, and her initial response was both very Australian and very naive.

“The last film Fox had bought was ‘Crocodile Dundee,’ ” she said. “Don’t they know this is a small film? And then I was convinced--all this stuff goes through your head--that maybe they have another film and they want to bury this one. That’s the Australian attitude toward Americans, that America violates everyone. America is this huge symbol of capitalism. Your culture is so dominant, and we love it. It’s a love-hate relationship.

“In my case, at that stage, I was a 23-year-old girl sitting in Melbourne thinking, ‘I made this film with my friends. How did this happen?’ Trying to rationalize it. I got used to it pretty fast.”

From being on the dole in Australia, Croghan was whisked to Cannes, where she was besieged by agents (she eventually settled on ICM indie specialist Robert Newman), hobnobbing with stars and trailed by the media everywhere she went. Looking back on it, she says, “It was kind of fun to be a part of this big thing. People kept saying, ‘Welcome to the ride.’ It really was like that.”

Despite Croghan’s road weariness, her subsequent tour has had an upside, aside from promoting the movie. It’s taught her a few things about other cultures--none more than America’s. In no other place, she says, were the issues of the characters’ sexuality so hotly debated. Reporters were confused because Mia is interested in a man even though she has a lesbian relationship with Danni. They also didn’t know what to make of the homoerotic overtones of Ari and Michael’s encounter in a men’s room.

“There were quite a few times during the junket where I would have to explain why some of the sexuality is fluid,” Croghan says. “That seemed bizarre to me, that people would want to put characters in boxes. We were shocked how puritanical and how hung up about this they were, because the thing is there’s so much violence. Everyone has said this stuff a million times before: Over in America, you can show people getting killed but just don’t show them kissing.”

Croghan does concede that these characters are specific to a certain subculture, the urban Australian university campus, where a new multiracial generation of men and women are more relaxed and open about sex. It doesn’t represent the whole of Australia any more than Greenwich Village represents America.

Needless to say, Croghan is eager to put such discussions behind her. She wants to start making movies again. She has a script in the works that she hopes to put into production this spring. It will be a comedy again and feature some of the same cast and crew, but it will not be a remake of her first film. Why would she want to do that?

And it will be made in Australia. Not only does geography keep her away from the temptations of Hollywood, her fellow Aussies do too.

“The thing is, we don’t celebrate success in the same way,” she says. “In fact, we do the opposite. There’s a syndrome called the tall poppy syndrome. If a poppy grows too tall, you cut it down so it’s the same size as all the others.”

So instead of ticker-tape parades, she says, her countrymen simply saluted her with a “Good on ya.” Which, after all the hype, was probably a relief.