Jill Bilcock in a scene from Dancing the Invisible. Her standard line about the film's kaleidoscope of imagery was that she and Luhrmann share a short attention span; it should only take a few frames to pick something up, then move on. "Some directors think that if something is happening in a big shot you have to wait for a long time, three seconds, where nothing else happens," she says now. "There is no way I can stand still for that long." She had a rapid reversal of style, however, when she went from the mercurial Luhrmann to British director Sam Mendes to cut the measured drama Road to Perdition. At the time, she rejoiced in the change of pace. Both were very different from Rob Sitch's The Dish, which I tell her l loved. "It's fabulous isn't it? But you see that is working with people who are true comedians and understand timing." On Kriv Stenders' Red Dog, she pulled together snippets of doggy behaviour – "it is adorable, but it's different when you're trying to select dog footage" – while Koko the star sat in the editing room. It's true, she agrees. Every film is different. And she is different on every film.

Jill Billcock in her Fitzroy editing studio in 2002. Bilcock was born in Horsham where, many years later, she would return with The Dressmaker, another film she helped bring to life. When she was three, the family moved to Melbourne. Nothing about her childhood fitted the '50s conventions. Her father left when she was four; their subsequent contact was limited but memorable. On one occasion, he tried to steal the family car. "My mother got us all out in our pyjamas and said 'quick, he's rolling the car down the hill' – and so we all ran out and got in the front and pushed it back up while he was in there." Then there was the time he jumped through Jill's closed bedroom window, cut himself badly and had to be taken to hospital. Unfortunately, he picked the night of her first sleepover. ''It is adorable, but it’s different when you’re trying to select dog footage,'' Jill Bilcock says of her work on Red Dog. Credit:Theresa Ambrose Meanwhile her mother, who had given up her university studies when she met her father, was working full-time as a teacher in the technical school system by day and going to Melbourne University every night to finish her commerce degree. "Which she hated, but she had started it and wanted to finish it."

There were two boys, the oldest only three years older than Jill. "We used to just look after ourselves; we never had babysitters. We cooked. She used to go to the Victoria Market once a week on a Saturday at 10 to 12 as the prices went down, fill the car with half a sheep, a whole lot of fruit and then just leave that with us. We'd have to work it out. Forequarter today, you know." Bilcock convinced PJ Hogan to keep the "You're terrible, Muriel'' line in Muriel's Wedding. Credit:Robert McFarlane There is no way I can stand still for that long. You would never get away with that now, she agrees, but they certainly learned self-reliance. "But you see it all over the world, don't you? Children can do anything if they want to." The stories keep coming. At 15 she left school and went to what was then Swinburne Institute of Technology to study art. There wasn't much to the course – they spent a lot of time doing life drawing and copying costumes – but she did manage to go on an organised student trip to China, which was then in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and closed to all other tourists, during the summer holidays.

Jill Bilcock attributes the kaleidoscopic imagery of Moulin Rouge to a short attention span. "There were no actual hotels at that stage," she remembers. "I had to go and sleep in a commune with a family who put me to work in the fields and sat on the edge, watching. Like watching the capitalist pig! It was fun though; they were kind." Arguably the biggest adventure, however, came in her final year at Swinburne when third-year teacher Brian Robinson cast around to see if anyone would be interested in doing a course in film. She jumped at it. Fred Schepisi was one of the examiners and, on the strength of a little film she had made on human rights, offered her $30 a week to work at his new film factory in an old church building in Fitzroy. There was no Australian film industry then, but all television advertisements had to be made in Australia; that was what they did. Jill Bilcock out with her camera in the 1960s.

"We had a ball there. I have to say I drank so much, I remember kneeing a barman in the face when he wouldn't give us another drink. Schepisi let us run wild, because we were all very young and he was young. It was a great place to work; he would let us do anything. 'Go on Jill, why don't you direct? Just direct! Why don't you do camera?' Fred was an inspiration in those days. He was so experimental with so many things." She specialised in editing; her assistant was another Swinburne graduate, Richard Lowenstein. Her first feature film job was Lowenstein's Strikebound in 1984. And now, one of her long-distance jobs is as supervising editor on Mystify, the documentary Lowenstein is making about Michael Hutchence. So many stories. About going into a flurried rescue operation with director PJ Hogan to make Muriel likeable after watching the first cut of Muriel's Wedding and realising she really wasn't. Persuading Hogan not to drop the line "You're terrible Muriel" on the day it started annoying him. About cutting Anthony LaPaglia as Al Capone out of Road to Perdition and Mendes having to explain it to him. About the unknown person who secretly left vegetable boxes on her veranda when they were struggling to finish Strictly Ballroom on no money. And, of course, about Harvey Weinstein. It isn't that sort of Weinstein story. Harvey Weinstein was producing a film by new British director Lawrence Dunmore with Johnny Depp called The Libertine. Bilcock lis genuinely excited to hear that I have seen and loved it because, she says, hardly anyone has. When it was shot, Weinstein wanted big changes, including substantial reshoots. Dunmore said no; Depp, who gives a career-best performance as the raddled reprobate Earl of Rochester, backed his director. "So Harvey didn't put it out into proper release, the screeners didn't turn up and Laurence was pretty well blacklisted as a director," Bilcock says. "He's still trying to get something made. It's so sad, a horrible thing. But that was a wonderful film to work on, the sort of thing where you've got a director with a really strong vision – that this is going to be rats and slush and mud and real – and the 17th-century theatre was so beautiful, exquisite, with those dildos. I love a scene with dildos."

Yes. She said that. Actually, I don't find it half so disturbing as the fact that her literary mother used to take the three children to watch car racing. Car racing, at Albert Park Lake! And that she is still a huge fan, a total petrol head – but that's another story. Jill Bilcock: Dancing the Invisible is at Melbourne's Cinema Nova from July 5, Sydney's Golden Age Cinema from July 6, and Dendy Newtown from July 19. Bilcock will attend a special Q&A screening at Cinema Nova on July 5.