Graduate Diploma of Arts (Film & Television) Directing, 2000
Writer, director, producer and visual artist, Claire McCarthy was featured in Variety’s ’10 Directors to Watch’ in 2018.
Her 2022 feature film The Colour Room about celebrated ceramicist of the 1920s Clarice Cliff, was shot in Europe and the US. Claire was set-up/lead director and EP for Sky/Epix series Domina (2020) starring Isabella Rossellini and shot on location in Rome. Prior to this she was sole director and EP on The Luminaries, a screen adaptation of the Man Booker Prize winning novel, starring Eva Green and Eve Hewson, produced by Working Title, Freemantle and BBC.
Her feature film Ophelia, starring Naomi Watts, Daisy Ridley, Clive Owen and George MacKay, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2019. In 2013, Claire adapted for the screen and directed the centrepiece segment of Tim Winton’s celebrated novel The Turning, starring Rose Byrne and Miranda Otto. Her award-winning 2009 feature film, The Waiting City, starring Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Her upcoming feature, The Personal History of Rachel Dupree, which Claire has written and will direct for Amazon Studios stars Academy Award winning actress Viola Davis.
AFTRS HIGHLIGHT
Forging lifelong friends and collaborators with people of like mind, including sparking a creative collaboration with my bestie and now husband Denson Baker ACS NZCS.
CAREER HIGHLIGHT
There are so many! Scouting close to every Medieval castle in Prague for Ophelia, having the joy of working so closely with some incredible actors who I feel blessed to now call close friends, shooting next to Fellini’s studio at Cine Citta in Rome with an almost all Italian team, wading amongst water snakes in the Ganges whilst Radha Mitchell acted her socks off in The Waiting City, a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival after screening Ophelia with over 1000 teenagers all crying and cheering, figuring out how to survive making films and still being creative during the most recent pandemic, working with my son on over 4 productions and being so proud of him and him telling me he’s proud of me.