For our October Screen Presence session, we sat down at the Chinese Museum with writer, director, producer, and editor Dale Crawford to unpack the making of his multi-award-winning psychological thriller, Lilith.
Dale opened the evening by tracing his unconventional path into filmmaking. Starting out as an actor in front of the television camera, he gradually gravitated toward screenwriting—a shift that led him to launch his own production banner, Moon Room Films, and build Lilith from the ground up. Rather than developing a massive, high-cost project and trying to scale it down, Dale worked the other way around, deliberately putting his lowest-budget, most achievable concept first.
Through candid behind-the-scenes stories and an inquisitive audience Q&A, Dale mapped out the reality of getting a self-funded independent feature across the finish line.
Finding the Film
Inspired by real-life cases of folie à famille—a rare, contagious psychosis shared by an entire family—Lilith follows a psychology professor who locks his family inside a high-rise apartment after his daughter's murder, only to realise no one inside can be trusted. For Dale, the development process meant rewriting the script relentlessly until it took on a life of its own.
The room was eager to know how much clinical research went into portraying such an intricate psychological condition. Dale leaned into emotional truth—an approach that worked so well that industry peers and clinical psychologists alike now praise the film's portrayal as remarkably authentic.
That instinct also shaped his approach to genre. While every independent film needs a recognisable genre framework, simply replicating familiar tropes is a dead end. To cut through the noise, filmmakers have to subvert expectations and over-deliver on what the genre promises.
Pre-Production and Production
When it came to financing, Dale didn't sugarcoat the barriers facing independent creators. Refusing to wait for institutional permission, he self-funded the production entirely through his acting work.
Working alongside cinematographer Rudi Siira and producer Robert Chuter, his philosophy bridges the gap between creative ambition and on-set survival: push every boundary as far as you can conceive during pre-production, then strip things back on set so the day-to-day execution stays clear, simple, and achievable—always ready to adapt when plans change.
The Post-Production Grind
If production was a sprint, post-production was a test of sheer survival. Wearing nearly every hat on the project—including editing the feature himself—meant taking an intensely hands-on approach.
He described the solo post-production marathon with refreshing honesty: at times, it is uniquely miserable and painful, and the real reward is less about grand euphoria and more about the subliminal relief when the pain stops and a scene finally clicks into place. His advice for surviving the edit suite is to embrace your circumstances, learn every technical craft you possibly can, and hold onto those small satisfactions along the way.
Distribution
Landing a finished cut is only half the battle. Without a local distributor attached at the outset, Dale took matters into his own hands and organised the film's Melbourne premiere at ACMI himself. Building that live momentum allowed him to navigate sales agents and re-evaluate distribution strategies on his own terms.
As Dale reminded the room in his parting challenge: create the media today that the industry will chase and emulate tomorrow.
A massive thank you to Dale Crawford, our inquisitive audience, and our sponsors—the Museum of Chinese Australian History and Black Sheep Films—for making this invaluable session possible.