This is an edited transcript of the interview with Peter Rix

ASE:  Peter, first up could you tell us what you actually did for APEC.

PR:  We were the Executive Producers of the Leaders Week activities that took place in Sydney in September 2007.  We were responsible for each of the events that involved the 22 Leaders of the member countries of the APEC.  So there were business meetings, there were dinners, a large concert in the Opera House, meetings at Government House; photographs of people in funny jackets. I think we had 14 events that we ran over the five days, Thursday to Sunday.

ASE:  So you weren’t actually involved in any of the lead up events that took place around the country?

PR:  No we weren’t involved in any of the other APEC Ministerial meetings that took place, nor were we involved in security or protocol for the event at all.  We liaised with everybody for obvious reasons, but our client was the APEC 2007 Task Force and the tender was very specific.

ASE:  Could you take us through the process of how the tender was distributed, how you tendered and then what the process was from there to actually get the gig.

PR:  It was advertised in national media in June of 2006.  We presented our credentials initially.  We were then invited back to present an opening presentation of why we thought we’d be good for the job, there were a number of the major event companies in Australia who were invited back to that briefing session followed by the first round of the tenders.  Out of that three finalists were selected, we were one of them and we then prepared a very detailed document that defined our vision for what we would do.  So the look and feel as well as the production and producing of each of the events; and we were appointed in November of 2006 to the job.

So there wasn’t that much time between invitation and conclusion.

ASE:  From the time that you were appointed until the actual APEC event, can you just take us through the steps that you took.

PR:  We provided them with a full budget of what our dream of what we would do. 

We were appointed, and at the date of appointment they advised us the budget was one fifth of our dream.  Therefore we then were tasked with providing virtually every element of what we had in our dream, but instead of marble we were going to use laminex.  So we then had to find the compromises.  We had final sign off on the majority of the work in June of 2007.

ASE:  The core team that you were working with at that time were?

PR:  Eamon D'Arcy was the head designer and was there from day one.  Ro Tynan was the Senior Producer out of George P Johnson and there from day one.  David Comer was the Senior Production Manager from Staging Rentals from day one.

I gave each job inside that APEC environment to senior producers in this company.  So I then had a very flat line where each of those producers then built their own resource team under that, with the exception of a terrific Production Director called Jacqui Knife who freelanced.  The balance of the production staff came internally from GPJ.

PR:  .  George Gorga was the Audio Director for the concert hall cultural performance.  Tony Moffett was the Audio Director for the other events, the business meetings which were held in the Opera Theatre at the Sydney SOH.  Ziggy Zeigler was the LD for the peripheral events, Gavin Swift was the LD for the concert hall. 

TDC provided most of the audio visual, Jands the audio and Chameleon the lighting.  We did it in conjunction with the Opera House.  So the Opera House provided a significant amount of their own internal equipment and they provided us with their labour and some of their technical staff.  The marriage was a good one.

ASE:  And your particular role?

PR:  They called me the Executive Producer.

ASE:  So you were then the conduit to the APEC Task Force?

PR:  I was the principal source of relationship, but really Ro Tynan ran the day to day and she had a very close relationship with the majority of the logistic staff of APEC and it was a very important role to play.  We had to fit into a much larger plan that just the work we were doing.

ASE:  So you were reporting to the Task Force which was comprised of whom, broadly?

PR:  Well the Head of Task Force was a bloke called Alan Henderson from out of DFAT.  APEC appointed Kathryn Flanagan who was our primary liaison and then above her was Stuart Paige.  Then you had a series of other senior APEC executives…

They were all inside DFAT, they were all Government appointees, bureaucrats and they were primarily from the Prime Minister’s Office or the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

ASE:  Within that expertise that was there, you mentioned that most of them are career public servants essentially, what degree of understanding was there within that organisation of event management?

PR:  Flanagan had a very good idea, but I think we did take the balance of the organisation on a journey that fortunately exceeded their expectations but there was certainly a lack of experience in understanding how putting these sorts of events together is run.

ASE:  And had any of them come from any comparable sort of events such as Comm Games or anything like that?

PR:  A few of them had worked on the Olympics. We had Anthony Bastic as our, if you like internal Head of Protocol and also talent development or talent bookings.

Anthony had worked for the State Government and for the Opera House and had worked on the Commonwealth Games.  So he was of significant assistance.  But he was a GPJ appointee.

ASE:  What were your biggest challenges?

PR:  Money was the number one and our ambitions compared to our budgets; and I would have thought gaining final approval for our plans took them far longer than it should have which therefore gave us the heartache of attempting, of having ambitious ideas but the approval process giving us only a very short lead time into the event.  They were the biggest issues.

ASE:  And I understand that a lot of that final signoff had to actually go to Mr & Mrs PM?

PR:  I thought the Prime Minister had a very, very strong idea of what he wanted and I appreciated it.  He gave a better brief on what he wanted than most corporations and remember, he’d been to these APEC’s as a participant, so he saw that what.

It had been in Vietnam , it had been in Korea ; it had been in South America .  So they were very long and arduous events to attend even for the leaders.  So what he wanted to do was to be punchy and quick and whereas the previous cultural performance had gone for three and a half hours, he gave me 40 minutes and that was, I think the exact words were, “Mr Rix, 40 to 45 is your limit” whereas I had this vision of an hour and a half at a concert and standing ovations and whatever else.

ASE:  What did you finish up with?

PR:  Forty five minutes, well actually we ran 43 minutes.  But what he did, which was very smart, was he made the initial part in the Concert Hall and then they went to dinner and I’ve been running events where we do that forever for corporations but I’d never quite put it in the same context.  Therefore he was interested.  Therefore before we would be able to move on, yes he wanted to know what we were doing, but his interest was no different to the CEO of a major corporation.

Now they’ve got staff who are pretty much saying, “Yes this is right, this isn’t but by the way we’d better tell the boss what we’re doing”.  So yeah, you know we accepted that in some point in time we could easily have had some of our elements changed if the boss had said, “No, don’t like it”.  But we had the brief, we knew what he wanted, and really our role was to interpret that to make it work but try and make it better than what they all thought they were going to get.

ASE:  On the challenges, security issues were the most prominent in the media at the time.  How did it affect what you were doing?

PR:  Not at all, other than access in and out of the Opera House which was a major challenge for the production team, for Comer and company but we knew that from the day we started.  The reality of the barricades and the wire was I think it’s a shame that it became the focus for Sydney and of the event.  But that was much more about security than anything else.

So once you were in the Opera House or Government House or SCEC, we weren’t in SCEC but certainly APEC was.  So once you were inside the Opera House and Government House which is just a walk away, life went on as you would run a normal show.  Just that when you could bring the trucks in and out, wasn’t 24 hours a day.

But those blokes, they were good.  I mean they knew what they were doing.  or it all.

ASE:  Okay could you step us through then the major events.

PR:  There were two substantial meetings called Leaders Retreat One and Two.  The first one was held in the Sydney Opera House in The Studio.

And that involved us, Eamon designing and then us building to instructions an oval table that took the 21 leaders.  It was a room that had no public in there, there were no staff once they got in and the doors got closed, it was just them.  But there had to be cabling, significant cabling for interpreters who were outside the room and obviously there were video cameras and there was, Mr Howard was the Chairman, so he had a role to play as to which person would speak next.  So this was a Gavin Swift / Eamon D’Arcy extravaganza and it looked fantastic.  And the table was made of all Australian materials, it was manufactured in Australia , it was a tribute to a whole bunch of very skilled people.

ASE:  And I understand it’s now in Canberra .

PR:  I think it is.  I found it safer not to ask where some of these things went.

The second one was held in Government House on the Sunday morning.  Again a much more casual affair but we were asked, obviously out of respect for the architecture and the fittings and the heritage of the Government House building to be somewhat respectful and to try and design in harmony with what was already there.  So we had to build a false floor in the ballroom so that the cabling could be run underneath for both microphones and interpreters.  Then we laid a complimentary carpet over the top of that and we had to work with the Government House people and the Heritage Council to ensure that we maintained a non-damage policy. And we had a week.  We could load it in on the Monday and the event was on the Sunday.

That was again a rectangle but with no central obstruction so people were able to look across at each other; the doors were closed and again it was a private event.  They were very important occasions for APEC.  They were the real reason for why we were there.

At the same time in parallel in the Opera Theatre of the SOH there was a two day business summit which involved business leaders from all over the APEC region, serious players.  We had the Chinese PM speak, we had the Canadian Prime Minister speak, obviously Mr Bush spoke at various times during all the summits and there were business panels of experts on stage -  climate control, global warming, big subjects.

So we again designed a set.  We had significant audio visual in there.  Tony Moffett operated audio.  We had internal stage management as well as Opera House technicians there and it was pretty well a nine o’clock in the morning til four to five o’clock in the afternoon for two days of these meetings.  We had to run those virtually independently.  Graeme Lugston, who was an APEC 2007 appointee, was responsible to APEC for those.  It was his job to liaise the guests for the stage and our job to make it look good and to make it run.  That was two significant days of work.

ASE:  So that had an audience did it?

PR:  No public but an invited audience of about 450 each day.  Q & A out of the audience.  Other than that like the Chinese Prime Minister wasn’t going to take questions from the floor as much as the media would have liked.  There was a media component to all of this as well.

There were media components where we had to create media rooms, this is all part of these jobs; and plus Press conferences.  So each time a panel would finish they’d be escorted outside to a presentation, or a meeting room.  There were holding bays for the speakers beforehand for the panel, so they could meet each other and prepare for their time.  The average panel would go about 40 minutes. 

There was a dinner for the business summit delegates on the first night.  So the first event was really the business summit on the Thursday, all day; and then that night there was a dinner at the Overseas Passenger Terminal which some of the leaders attended.  Certainly Mr Howard attended.  It was a social event and we used a number of students from the Conservatorium of Music to provide the tapestry if you like, the musical tapestry in there.

Belinda Franks did the catering and did a lovely job.  Literally they came over by ferry from the Opera House because the whole Circular Quay area was a bit hard to walk around.  So they came by ferry and they were there at 6:15 and they were gone by 9:00.  Much earlier night than I thought it would be.

ASE:  They’re not party animals?

PR:  They’re not, no.  They probably are but they didn’t show it that night, cause they were all back at the Opera house again the next day by a quarter to nine. 

We had then the stage for the Prime Minister’s Declaration which was the presentation of the Sydney Convention, I think they called it, which was the new Climate Change Agreement that the 21 Leaders agreed to and that was his announcement moment. 

Then there was the stage in front of the Opera House we built for the leaders photograph in the Drizabones.

ASE:  There was just that little rostra that was put there.  Why that rather than just stand on the steps?

PR:  Because, well… bluntly Mr Bush left on Saturday night, didn’t stay for Sunday, arrived early.  So the shot which was meant to take place from Government House looking down over the Opera House had to be moved to the steps and the decision was, from the PM’s office, that in order to get the shot they wanted through the Opera House sails and to the Bridge as well, that we needed to move it further across.  The shot on the steps would have given us the sails, but it wouldn’t have given us the Harbour Bridge .

We provided a wardrobe, we provided a wardrobe mistress, we provided wardrobe staff and a separate area within the Opera House for this photo shoot, following the change, a fairly significant event for them. 

We had then the cultural performance which was held on the stage of the Sydney Opera House.  An enormous undertaking because again with the security issues, there were only invited guests, but we had the best part of 900 guests there.

There was a dinner after the cultural performance in the northern foyer facing out to the Harbour which was one.  Then downstairs there was a second event for the 300 nearest and dearest which were the various dignitaries that had travelled with the leaders, Foreign Affairs Ministers etc, and the Senior APEC Australian Trade delegations that had been a part of the proceedings.  So we ran two separate events on the same night using the Opera House caterers - Opera Point Events and Guillaume (restaurant) and Matt Moran (ARIA Restaurant) catered for both and did a beautiful job. 

We were involved in the design frame and production staff. Choosing of the very important and proper protocol of making sure of Australian flowers and table settings and plates and knives and forks and this nightmare of intrigue that surrounded clearly making sure we presented for that event at the pinnacle.

ASE:  There would also have been issues, cultural issues with food as well with some Muslim countries.

PR:  Well throughout the whole event, remember there were always lunches and break meals to deal with as well.  But you know it was an enormous mix.  That protocol within the APEC 2007, that was much more their role than ours.  We had to fulfil the delivery process once that decision had been made.

ASE:  So essentially you were the look and feel of it rather than the content?

PR:  Opera Point didn’t report to us they were contracted by APEC direct.  But if you like it was a task force.  You know we all had to sit around a table and agree on how this was going to be run.  But we certainly weren’t sitting in the room pointing to where the tables had to go or where the food had to go.

ASE:  Any other significant events?

PR:  They’re the primary ones.  Because of the complexity of where we had to fit in.  When the two most important parts of the deal were obviously the protocol issues and then secondly the security issues.  So in us being happy, knowing that we were third cab off the rank, the complexity of putting these jobs on, as a result of those issues, was a lot more than it would normally be.  Therefore in the… and not a lot of time could be spent on it and you were dealing with constant changes right up to the last minute.

ASE:  Just a little bit on the technology involved.  You mentioned that at Government House you had to put in a false floor to run the cabling, was wireless considered?  Or was there security issues with that?

PR:  No, the major issues, I mean there was so much, I started to try and explain George Bush’s security system, let alone Mr Putin’s security system, then the Japanese Prime Minister, I mean every one of these bastards is wandering around talking into either their lapel or their shirt cuff, and it was deemed way too dangerous and really APEC had their own internal technical team, particularly the recording or the translation services.  It was the same audio set up which APEC appointed for those things, not us.  Whereas we put in the audio system, we were in charge of audio systems for the larger performances.  So they needed to be multi-useful.  They were recording it for the House home broadcast, the internal House broadcasters.  We had to have it heading towards the interpreters plus it was being used for monitoring into ears if anybody needed to hear what was being said by the people.  Thus hardwiring was a better idea.

ASE:  In terms of what you were doing production wise was there any innovative technical stuff or were you playing it pretty safe with all of it?

PR:  Well for an organisation like GPJ we were not stretching the technical limitations of anything, but we were certainly using LED.  The Opera House stage set for example used a LED curtain that TDC supplied to us which had been only in the country for the best part of three months at the time.  That was as close as we got.  The rest of it, the complexity was the marriage of interpretation, privacy, reliability.  Lighting wise, very very simple.  Hardly any moving lights at all in the job.  But audio wise, very complicated.  But as much as possible, keep it simple.

ASE:  So coming to the big concert, Stuart Maunder was the Artistic Director.  Who appointed him?

PR:  We did. Stuart was the Creative Director and the central focus of what went on stage.  Anthony Bastic was primarily responsible for the appointment of the artists.  Andrew Green was the conductor.  Two stage managers that Stuart appointed from the Opera Company. 

ASE:  So apart from the people, what was the artistic thinking behind the program that you put together?

PR:  It was an evolution.  We started out and I think succeeded in wanting to make sure that we displayed Australia to that audience.  Our real audience we saw as being those 21 Leaders.  The plan was always to show this country as being in the 21^st century, to being modern, to being contemporary, to having a serious and in-depth artistic community, but that it was a celebration.  In having 40 minutes it actually was an enormous advantage because we didn’t get to feel, that we could do was pander to our own egos.

So it in many ways became our own version of a command performance.  It was a series of mini pieces that just intersected, and we were lucky enough to get Hugh Jackman to be the Master of Ceremonies.

We started with an a cappella choir version of Farnham’s “You’re the Voice”; we closed with Christine Anu and the choir and the rest of the cast singing “My Island Home”. In the middle there was the Opera Company, there was the Australian Ballet, there was Bangarra, there was Simon Tedeschi, there was this wonderful bringing together, and each of them had frankly four minutes to show their whares; and with the orchestra behind them on that stage it was a significant achievement to get that through and that idea of both celebration and of showing off the pointy end of our world and not turning it into kangaroos and koala bears, was the game and that made us, we were a very happy bunch of people after that show.

Then they walked outside, we had the fireworks on the Harbour, we had the boats.  So the Foti boys got their day in the sun and so did Sydney as a harbour destination.

ASE:  There was criticism in the media at the time in terms of acknowledgement of Indigenous Australia and in particular Rob Welsh, the Chairman of the Metropolitan Land Council who told the Sydney Morning Herald that the Indigenous people had not been asked to perform a single welcome to country or cultural performance.  Were you aware of that criticism at the time?

PR:  Well we did.  The opening of the show was a welcome to country.  I didn’t even know it had been quoted.

So I had an audience from four o’clock in the afternoon.  Even though the leaders didn’t arrive until seven.  We had a whole raft of preliminary activities that took place prior to the Leaders arriving because we had an audience.  We had to layer in.

So we had the first layer arrive by boat, 400 of them, then there was a break of 30 or 40 minutes in which we had performance on stage, then we had another group of 350 that would arrive.  So during that time yes we had Welcome to Country

And we not only had Welcome to Country we had Kim Walker, who’s the choreographer of the Flying Fruit Flys; we had a major component of those things that were in there.

ASE:  I think the criticism tended to be that the local Indigenous people weren’t represented as they saw they should be.  Indeed the group who performed at the Maritime Museum , I don’t know if that was your event, but they’d come from Arnhem Land and that there wasn’t… that criticism, there wasn’t something that was certainly reported as a Welcome to Country.

PR:  He’s too sensitive.  I’m in show business.  I dealt with it in a manner that we thought was appropriate and I feel that his criticism is both a little subjective in light of what took place on the night and the extent to which the Indigenous people of this country were represented on that stage, and he needed to make the call prior to the event not afterward.

ASE:  Fair enough.  There was also criticism in the use of “My Island Home”.

PR:  Oh was there?

ASE:  Well because essentially the song was written about Elcho Island .

PR:  Originally that’s right.  But Neil Murray is an old mate of mine and we had a long conversation about it beforehand.  I got his approval and his delight at the idea of being played.  I think we all know, we all knew that there was a lot of this…

ASE:  Sniping?

PR:  No, no, no.  The critique’s okay, I mean I think that’s not a problem at all.  But no, in order to move into doing this sort of public performance of good work the concept here was to put on a show and if the song worked and provided we’d made sure that we’d dealt properly with the respect of, okay we’ve got this song, now before we go marching in here let’s make sure we deal with the ramifications.  That was my job.  The songwriter, who’s a white boy by the way and Christine, who’s Torres Strait Islander, it was on the table beforehand, Mr Maunder was very good at all this and so we moved forward and I’m sure outsiders would go, “Oh my goodness gracious me, why is this?”  But it was properly dealt with.

ASE:  The most satisfying element of it all personally?

PR:  Look I’m the cranky old man of all of this.  I think the most satisfying thing for me was that this is a… GPJ is a business that has 70 odd staff, full time staff working here.  Somehow we managed to utilise most of the people that work here in APEC whether they’d be designers, creative or the production staff, and yet we still managed to keep the business going at the same time.  So the pleasure was in knowing personally, like I think in our game you’ve got to know yourself whether you’ve done a good job.  We knew we’d done a good job.  We knew that we’d created an event to be proud of.  We also knew it was a private event.  We weren’t going to be publicly acknowledged through any of it, nor that our work was there really for the public.

So on one hand you knew you’d done a good job, on the other hand you knew that the business hadn’t gone into a deep hole because we still have longstanding good clients, IBM, Toyota , etc who we had to continue working for.  So we survived, we prospered, we did a good job and now we move on and that was last year’s, that’s the fish and chip paper.  Haven’t we done a lovely job, now what’s next.  That’s me.

ASE:  But you did get a personal phone call of thanks.

PR:  Well the Chief Executive rang.  Mr Howard rang me on the Sunday morning at home and I was both flattered and very pleased for the guys that worked on the show; and he was effusive.  He was very pleased with how, as I did say earlier in the chat, that we were able to exceed what his expectations of, particularly of the cultural performance were going to be and that was the nub of our work.  That was the showpiece I suppose.  But yeah, he was very nice. 

He’s not here anymore though. 

You’re only as good as you’re last show.

ASE:  On that note, Peter Rix, thank you very much for your time.

PR:  Pleasure Trevor.