The movie adaptation of The Turning was set in train and overseen by producer-director Robert Connolly, and it opens in cinemas this month. Connolly, who loved Winton's work and its atmosphere of "cryptic originality", had the idea of acting as a curator for a project "in which each chapter was interpreted by a creative person, in their own voice".

Making it happen was a complex logistical exercise that involved scores of people. Connolly and producer Maggie Miles oversaw the whole; Connolly (The Bank, Balibo) directed one segment himself. Justin Kurzel (Snowtown) and Warwick Thornton (Samson & Delilah) were among more-experienced filmmakers on the project. Among the newcomers, actor Mia Wasikowska wrote and directed her first film. So did David Wenham. Oscar-nominated animator Anthony Lucas took on his first live-action work. Visual artist Shaun Gladwell worked with narrative for the first time. Bangarra Dance Theatre artistic director Stephen Page made his directorial debut. At one point, Cate Blanchett was due to direct, but decided instead to take a role in her story, and theatre director Simon Stone stepped in.

Winton's book consists of 17 interlinked stories set in a small coastal community in Western Australia. Characters recur, most of all Vic Lang, who turns up in eight stories, as a child, a teenager, an older man. Incidents reappear in different contexts and experiences echo and play off each other.

Wasikowska – a rising star who's played Jane Eyre and Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and whose new film, Tracks, just premiered in Venice – was one of the first on board. Directing, she says, was something she had always wanted to do, and she was quick to take the opportunity.

She found her story, and wrote a first draft almost immediately. Then, when the finance was in place and it was time to lock in arrangements, she decided to do something completely different, less complicated, different in tone. The second time around, she homed in on the image of the boy at the centre of her story, Long, Clear View.

It features the recurring figure of Vic Lang, here a youngster on the cusp of adolescence who has a close relationship with a rifle.

Vic's world, Wasikowska says, is claustrophobic and he's caught up in "that weird time growing up when your parents decide what they will tell you about certain things – what they think you can handle. And because information is withheld, you then imagine things so much worse, or differently. But it's also this vivid time when you understand a lot more than you are given credit for."

She's found ways of conveying all this in an assured yet unpredictable fashion, with moments of dark humour and a distinctive visual style. She is quietly articulate about her creative decisions, from the images in mirrors that frame the tale to the use of a female voice – film critic Julie Rigg – for the narration.

It was a liberating experience, Wasikowska says, to be told she could make whatever she wanted. "I would love to do more. It's a privilege to be able to direct."

For Wenham, another actor making his debut behind the camera, the adaptation had to be faithful. His story, Commission, is the tale of the adult Vic (Josh McConville) going on a journey to visit his father, Bob (Hugo Weaving), whom he has not seen for years.

An inspiration was a scene between two actors in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show that was, he says, "so affecting and beautiful and moving and thought-provoking in its simplicity. Everything that was extraneous was stripped away. And that's what I tried to do with my little film."

He immediately saw Weaving as Bob. They had worked together 20 years earlier, in a stage adaptation of Winton's That Eye the Sky and Weaving embodied exactly the qualities Wenham needed. "If he had said no, I don't know what I would have done." Weaving has become a stronger actor, if that's possible, Wenham says.

"You can see the stories on his face. And he has a dignity to him – and certainly Bob has that. Bob is a man with a history who has found himself."

Being behind a camera was perfectly familiar to video artist Gladwell: what was new for him in The Turning was narrative. He doesn't tell stories, he says, he works with ideas, with simple images that can be open to multiple interpretation. "A single figure in a landscape, dancing. So taking on psychological, emotional and social complexities was a challenge, for sure."

His story, Family, concerns a pair of brothers and the history between them: he was tempted to tell it in a more abstract way, "but I fell in love with the text too much". He chose indigenous actors. As Frank, the footballer who walks away at a key moment of his career, he cast theatre actor Meyne Wyatt (who reminds him of the Swans' Lewis Jetta); Frank's brother, Max, is played by Wayne Blair (actor and director of The Sapphires).

The freedom other directors spoke of did not have the same significance for Gladwell. Instead, he embraced constraints that as a video artist he would never deal with. Otherwise there would have been no point, he says: he would have been wasting the opportunity he had been given.

Three indigenous directors are taking part in The Turning, and several indigenous actors play roles that weren't specifically written for indigenous characters. This indicated a sense of openness that Warwick Thornton spoke of as a strength of the project.

Stephen Page's Sand, which screens earlier in the sequence, also concerns Gladwell's characters, Frank and Max – much younger this time, but with a gulf already between them. And it, too, takes place at the beach.

Page decided he wanted a pair of brothers to play the two boys. He ended up using Jakory and Jarli-Russell Blanco, cousins of one of Bangarra's senior dancers, Waangenga Blanco, who plays their father in the story. The beach scenes, the images of the outside world, Page shot at Cronulla; the scenes that convey the boys' consciousness were created in a rehearsal studio at Bangarra's Sydney headquarters.

Page worked with John Harvey, producer at Connolly's company, ArenaFilm, and scriptwriter Justin Mongo, who Page says "was great to bounce off. We were able to shape the creative world they lived in, a place without dialogue, a space where the drama could unfold. More like a playground than anything else, really. I was looking for sparseness, and the image to tell the story."

There was constant collaboration and communication with cinematographer Bonnie Elliott, Page says, "talking about texture and tone and music and feeling. Most of all, I realised I had to be really clear about storytelling."

Animator Anthony Lucas is an experienced filmmaker but his contribution to The Turning is his drama debut. He made Damaged Goods, the fourth film in the sequence. It's a tale of present and past, in which Vic's wife, Gail (Libby Tanner), delves into her husband's life through his memorabilia and photographs, brooding over his adolescent obsession with a girl at his school.

Lucas found many elements of the story in which he identified, or felt in tune. "It made me think about being a teenager, so I decided to work with two friends I'd been to school with" – photographer Carl Warner and composer Cameron Patrick – "and I thought I'd do something a bit exotic with a point of view."

He uses a split-screen technique to give viewers simultaneous encounters with past and present, with photographs and the moment in which they are taken. He mentions Richard Fleischer's The Boston Strangler and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up as influences. In keeping with the themes of recollection and the power of the object, he put some of his own childhood memorabilia into the frame, as did production designer Annette Ringrose, such as concert tickets and footy trophies.

Yaron Lifschitz, artistic director of Brisbane-based contemporary circus company Circa, was moving into a new realm by directing his film, Immunity. But one thing stayed the same, he says: a ritual in which at the end of every project, "we have this moment where we shake hands, and pat each other on the back, and look earnestly into each other's eyes and say, ‘Fooled them again.' Did we carry it over in the filming?" He laughs. "We perfected it. It was a grand adventure in following your instincts and doing things you don't know how to do. And I think the moment when you stop feeling like a fraud is the time to get out."

Immunity concerns a train journey and a young girl who has a crush on Vic. Remembering that Einstein used the image of a railway carriage to discuss his theory of relativity, Lifschitz decided that Immunity was about relativity and the nature of time. The slender story is told through dance, wordlessly, often in slow motion.

There was no script, he says, something guaranteed to make people nervous. "There were concepts and documents, but no script. It was clear to me that we needed a great cinematographer, and we were very lucky that Bob Humphreys agreed to do it ... And then we went into a room and we made it up. That's what we do best." He had no idea how complex the editing process was: this was where he needed particular help to bring the work to its final stage.

Theatre director Simon Stone directs Cate Blanchett, Robin Nevin and Richard Roxburgh in Reunion, a tale about the awkward relationship between Vic's wife and his mother, and the circumstances that transform it. Winton's story, adapted by Andrew Upton, is about the intervention of fate, Stone says. "I suppose the philosophy of story is one I agree with very strongly. You can't control when fate will give you a helping hand. It's kind of like surfing - there's nothing you can do about when the wave will come, but you have to be ready to catch it."

He and cinematographer Andrew Lesnie "choreographed it on the day. I had specifically chosen the locations for their ability to achieve what I had in mind. It was a little bit like making theatre – we couldn't remake the film in the edit."

Like many of the directors, Stone is also keen to talk about other people's work. Justin Kurzel's contribution, Boner McPharlin's Moll, blew him away. Kurzel has taken a long, intricate narrative and distilled it into an evocation of a single character, and it's compelling. "That really humbled me," Stone says. "It was so advanced, such a sophisticated and integrated way of thinking about how cinema uses pre-existing material.  It's been a source of my new way of thinking about the film I'm making now."

Individual Winton stories have been adapted for the screen before, and some movies have drawn on several works of short fiction – notably Short Cuts, Robert Altman's adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories – but The Turning is different. Gladwell compares it to the exquisite corpse, a surrealist exercise like the parlour game of consequences, a collective collage of words or images, in which contributors are unaware of what precedes or follows them.

"Early on, we decided not to link the stories in overt ways," Connolly says. "We wanted to maintain the experience of reading the book, of a cryptic narrative that you unlock. We could have had the same actors playing the same roles, but to lock the casting in was something that inhibited that." The plan, he says, was to embrace differences – "we had the idea that there would be an energy between them, and that there would be a pleasure in that."

No director saw anyone else's work, although many of them were curious. More than a dozen of them attended last month's premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which was the first time they had seen the whole movie.

Winton, who was at this screening, was happy to keep his distance during the production process. "I try to practise a form of distance, partly to protect myself, to be honest, but also out of respect for those people who would like to make an adaptation. They need the freedom to find their way with the work."

He was involved in a couple of ways, however: he helped Wenham find a remote location to shoot in, and he provided a voiceover for the first story in the series, Thornton's adaptation.

Connolly matched people with a mix of experienced and emerging producers. Some directors wrote their screenplays, others collaborated with writers. There was a document of about 80 pages that explained certain aspects of the project; participants weren't even required to look at it, but it was there if they needed it.

There are, in fact, 18 individual elements: Connolly decided to ask animator Marieka Walsh to work on a segment for the epigraph to the book, lines from T.S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday. Her animations are made using sand, a process that seemed to fit perfectly with the themes of Winton's world.

They thought long and hard about how to present the final version before deciding to put the films in the same order as the book. Each film is introduced by title only, without the filmmaker's name attached. "We wanted people to think of them as chapters of a bigger work, rather than a compendium," Connolly says.

Another part of The Turning's singularity is the way it is being presented. Connolly wants to highlight the cinema experience, to make it into a special occasion. It opens for a limited season, a fortnight only, in 15 cinemas around Australia – once a day, mostly at night, but with a few matinees. It screens with an interval. With the ticket comes a glossy 36-page booklet that introduces each story and provides timelines and character guides. He thinks of it as being like a theatre production, or a band performance: a live experience. Actors and directors will be there to introduce it and take part in Q&As. Eventually, it will be on TV and DVD.

Speaking after the premiere screening, Winton described his reaction as "a kind of familial pride" in the work and the way it was produced. "People we know are great consented to be in the film. And there are people we've never heard of but know are going to be great, and they're terrific in the film." He calls it "an act of creative insurgency, of defiance of the trends".

The Turning opens in cinemas on September 26. theturningmovie.com.au