Yesterday we shot our second and final interview for She Drives, and let me tell you, it’s much more fun to travel to Brunswick in the afternoon than it is to get up at 4am to go to Ballarat!

After the rough cut session we decided to go ahead and scrap the Shebah driver altogether, because they were an absolute nightmare to deal with. Izzi would get someone to agree to an interview, only to have them drop out a few days or a week later, so she had to start all over again with someone else, who would also then drop out… it was pretty frustrating, but I think we’re happy enough with the material we already have that we can make it work without talking to a Shebah driver.

So our interview with Marz, a former Uber driver, suddenly became much more important. I’m friends with Marz and I know she’s an extremely articulate speaker and comfortable on camera, so I knew that the interview would be pleasant, but I had no idea what she would say about her experiences as a female driver. Thankfully she gave us plenty of great stuff, personal anecdotes, stories from other drivers she knows, historical context, all kinds of things. I think it’ll fit together nicely with what we got with Elizabeth, our taxi driver, but it’s fair to say now that our original pitch has been slightly modified for the finished product, since neither Marz nor Elizabeth had much personal experience with harassment. But the general theme and topic of our film will stay the same, the challenge now will be to craft what our subjects said into snippets that build on (or bounce off) one another.

We’re a little behind the eight ball since Marz only had a very small window in which she could give us her time, so this interview was conducted a little later than any of us would have liked, but this is the nature of the beast when you’re asking people for favours. We have a little over a week until the finished film is due, so we’re in the home stretch now.