Q&A WITH GLENN JOHNSON
Benny: Tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to be working with greens in Film and Tv.
Glenn: Originally from Sydney, my wife, Beth and I moved to Melbourne in 2002 after I finished my trade as a Golf Course Greenkeeper. I got work at a nursery and picked up skills in nursery work and garden maintenance. In 2006 a good friend was working as a Set Decorator and gave me a few numbers of people working on Where The Wild Things Are. I was employed as an Assistant Greensman and my main job was collecting materials for the construction of sets. I was hooked at this point and this is the work I wanted to do. I was then asked to join the Greens crew on the film Australia as a Greensman and have been doing Greens for film, Tv and Tvc’s since. To help with the Greens work I do, we have a rental nursery keeping plants on hand mostly plant stock that does not look like it has just been bought from a retail nursery. Old over grow, weedy, leggy, shitty looking stuff.
BC: Tell us a bit about your set.
GJ: My set is a bit of a homage to the first film I worked on. I have tried to make it feel as if I am in a deep dark forest that is melding into the indoors, represented by the book shelf, carpet and potted plants.
BC: What was your process and how did you prepare?
GJ: I started by marking out the floor dimensions on the shed floor.
I then placed the trees and the book shelf. After selecting the live plants from the nursery I did a rough placement of them. To give the ground shape I built up the levels with mulch bags. replaced the live plants then added the moss. I loaded up the book shelf, added the branches to the trees and fallen leaves to the ground then took a few reference photos. The day before the shoot I pulled the whole thing apart and loaded the trailer. Once at the studio I rebuilt the set and tweaked anything I felt still did not work.
BC: Where did you get those Birch trees from and how do you accumulate all these pieces?
GJ: The Birch tree came from a Japanese Tv commercial for fruit milk. They were used to make location look more scandonavinan. They now live in my steel rack out of the weather and I pull them out when needed. As for the rest of my stuff I have been collecting plants and pots ever since I started at fitzroy nursery. I would collect anything clients or the nursery did not want, this has been how I have been able to accumulate so many things of character.
Since starting the Greens work I have also developed an eye for things that I can offer up to be used on sets.
BC: What personal items have you included in your set and what do they mean to you?
GJ: There are many things in the set that are my collected things. I like collecting skulls and have quite a few in personal collections at home and I've gotten a few into the set there are possum and wallaby on the book shelf, as well as the cow skull in the foreground. This one came from a river bed up in the Hunter Valley in NSW where I was working on a film about 10 years ago. There are also fossils I found over in Coober pedy and a fisherman's float I picked up from a beach on the Coorong SA. There are a couple of toy dinosaurs in there and these guys I have had since I was a child ! in fact I got when I was only a few days old. I've included pots of cactus which I propagated close to twenty years ago. I like hanging on to things, especially interesting things, and often they end up dotted through the house and our garden.
BC: What are you working on now?
GJ: I'm currently up in Sydney doing my quarantine getting ready to start a big job on a blockbuster film. I will be up here for about 9 months, and am hoping that the borders open up between Vic and NSW soon, so I can pop back for weekends with the family.
