Writer/Director/Magician

Aye, it’s been too long. Months ago I saw Mister Robert Connolly who brought you the stellar Balibo, which if you haven’t seen you should see it now or we’ll have a situation similar to this.

Not only did I manage to scab entry into a charity screening of the drama, my school AFTRS, had him come down for Friday On My Mind. After this talk I have made a small change to my list of idols which now includes Connolly.

Connolly is also now on board with my dear friends Screen Australia, where he hopes to rattle the cage. Connolly says that we can no longer afford to create the sort of films we have become used to, there needs to be more ‘bold and innovative’ cinema. Cinema that pushes the limits and not your idea of a sexually ailed housewife or a drug addict exiled by society.

Not naming names...

Connolly says that there are independent films and there are Hollywood films and then there are Australian films, the most expensive arthouse films ever. Believing that $4 million for such suburban productions is way too much, especially considering the return they garner. Connolly does realise the small hypocrisy in his words, looking at Balibo’s $5 million budget, but he hopes that people will understand and see that it’s different. Really different.

Yet at the time of writing Balibo has only garnered a little over half a million at the box office (citation). It’s dissapointing that something so different is underperforming, also considering Beautiful Kate aswell. This is where another argument comes into play: advertising. What is it that’s really sinking a film locally? Just advertising? It’s naive to believe that. It’s a combination of all elements and if some arthouse film about a lesbian drug addict who is forced to look after their crippled immigrant grandmother whilst coming to terms with her sexuality in Melbourne’s northern subrubs is a bomb, and the director, producer and backer go “oh it was our advertising that let us down” then that’s stupid. Also the film has to be good, and this country has no sense of nationalistic pride for it’s own art product unless it’s music so don’t expect that to be an allure. Shit, you should’ve learnt that by now.

People love cinema, it’s only your fault if you can’t remind them of that.

To reiterate what I’ve been spouting for the last few months: What Connolly has done is something amazing, it will hopefully be a reminder and a change for what will happen now. With performance this bad, we can only go up.

I have failed to mention that i’ve had the pleasure of seeing three great Australian films as of late, for free.

The first being Accidents Happen, a suburban drama set in an American community and starring the lovely Geena Davis. Another drama? Yes, but this one may have something going for it. Director Andrew Lancaster, speaking at AFTRS for Friday On My Mind, had planned to make the film in the USA however the funding fell through and Lancaster’s producer suggested that he make an American film here in Australia. He did, shot on Sydney’s North Shore with a mostly Australian class speaking American the film has shaped up nicely.

Will the very inclusion of American accents affect the outcome of this film? Yes. But not just that, Accidents Happen is a beautifully crafted and shot film with none of the “pacings” of an average drama, moving the emotionally journey along with a great use of soundtrack and a brilliant screenplay.  More on Lancaster and his directorial debut later.

Another was Kriv Strender’s latest: Lucky Country. A period drama/thriller set in the South Australian woodlands. A tense experience, catalysed by the arrival of three ex soliders on a barren family farm. Unfortunately Lucky Country has not performed well, can I take a shot as to why? Lack of coverage for the film, some people overestimate the internet and assume they will go instantly viral upon launch not so. And upon review of the trailer there could be some misgivings as to how much of the film we have seen and the monotony of Australian outback drama.

The third was Balibo. Director Robert Connolly took a fourteen man crew to East Timor and shot his $5 million dollar war biopic, him and his producer John Maynard feeding off Connolly’s  white paper as template to how the film would be shot. Depicting the story of Roger East and the Bailbo Five, a quintet of Australian journalists murdered by the illegally invading Indonesians, Balibo has been cited as looking like a $15 million dollar film. It looks like a much bigger film, and moves at a cracking pace and the climate would of been some of the most gripping cinema I have ever seen. Literally on-the-edge-of-your-seat kind of shit. How will Balibo do? Unknown, it has some prescense overseas and it has been shown that Australians love true stories. Look at Kokoda or the supposedly true Wolf Creek. It is not a film bound by its budget, but resolved by the aforementioned paper.

These three films you must go see, when you have the oppurtunity and feel free to shove my ill-formed opinions down my throat but they deserve a viewing. As they have taken the stigma of what can be done and kicked it right in the balls.

That’s not Nash Edgerton, it’s his actor brother Joel. A while ago they hit Australia with a long time collaboration: The Square. The film is amazing, comparable to the works of the Coen Borthers but without an old sherriff dissing out a monologue at the end to leave the film ending on sub text.

Unfortunately The Square didn’t make the take at box offices, why was this? The advertising campaign? Whilst I do remember catching a TV spot some night that was as extensive as it got. Otherwise there was this trailer. I think I was rabidly foaming at the mouth when I saw it, because it’s the most amazing example of how not to advertise a gritty thriller involving sex, bribery and murder. It comes off as  some sort of Sarah Blasko video, no offense to the lovely Miss Blasko.

Now I’m not sure if I should speak out here (so don’t), but I was recently at a screening of Balibo (which is fucking brilliant by the way) and there I met Nash Edgerton. I asked Nash about The Square and of course Mariah Carey’s personal edit of his trailer (I assume that’s who did it), whilst Nash was in the editing suite Roadshow approached him various times with a version of the trailer.

This was uh…time wise, but not creativelty safe as Nash told me that at the time he didn’t know what type of film it was yet to be and of course he was not in a position to commit a lot of time to the trailer as he was still editing. Roadshow launched the trailer and the results may speak for themselves.

Could it just be The Square is another victim of Australia’s stigma towards its own cinema product, or just another Australian film that falls behind because of the amount we can’t commit to advertising? Nash seemed surprised to its reception after receiving so many good reviews. If I remember correctly The Square was released during quite a good season for cinema as Hollywood had put out some stiff competition on the screen at the time, a bad call for Roadshow.

Is this poor return for such a good product a result of poor advertising and poor distribution? With the two million dollar injection into Screen Australia’s budget can we see an upturn? Can we see better distribution methods for Australia?

Of course this leads me to another issue I have raised upon my self. Besides the fact I’m a snobby little arsehole, I spew out the money made of a film rather than its quality like a celluloid dictator. A friend of mine asked me why it’s so important to me that a film makes money for it to be a success? Can’t it just be a good film? My answer: yes and no. Film is not a dead medium it is full of awe and meaning, and a film can have so much to say, Australian films more so. Unfortunately these films cannot relate to an audience born into Hollywood, they do not communicate or appeal to the masses on a general level and therefore they fail to recoup their budget at the box office instead of another film that might of. It’s a gamble I know, but it’s like betting on a dead horse as the race starts. Then there’s the fact that we simply can’t market a fucking thing. So when a film like Disgrace launches, putting people ten million dollars out of pocket, and only manages to coup a million within its third week it shows me we’re still battling a waning audience.

Two reasons:

ONE Disgrace is a character drama. Big suprise, a story of this man and a woman coming to grips with two separate accounts of sexual offense. You see the ad and you can imagine the film playing out of the landscape with monologues and crying and all that.

TWO Disgrace does not have the market potential, a film that could reach a bigger fanbase is first launched and premiered in Australia to be desperately sold overseas. It probably deserves more than that.

In closing, distribution and producing can no longer take a backseat to your projects where “you don’t care how much money it makes, we just make movies”. If you want to make your second film, this needs to be thought out. This can go to Screen Australia as well, who like a fatigued husband hand the money out and run. There needs to be more hands on work from the commission to help kickstart these films not just by throwing money at the marketing budget. On top of that, there should be more collaboration and rights to collaborate for Australian filmmakers when it comes to their own distribution, not by having to say yes to everything that comes at them.

I could go on, you know it.

Get your reading glasses out, Robert Connolly presents a white paper on ‘Embracing Innovation’. Robert Connolly is set to release Balibo, the $5m Australian docu-drama that looks like a $15m action flick. The low cost can be accredited to the new style of production he describes in his paper.

Check it here, meanwhile that’s the Balibo trailer above.

Read more here.

The award winning Samson and Delilah has taken back its $1.6m budget at the box office, with $2.6m at the box office. Albeit after ten weeks on the screens.

Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max however has oly taken back just over an eighth of its $8m dollar budget, which suprises me as it shows even the Australian claymation rockstar hasn’t got the name to bring it back.

A truly crushing, and almost ballbreaking statistic shows the cheesy (and deliberately so) horror Prey taking back $1,000+ from $4m. Fuck a duck.

Go through it all for yourself, it’s depressing stuff. With statistics like these, what does Screen Australia say?

Okay Screen Australia, I take some of my past erh…blessings back. So you all know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the new film Daybreakers funded by Screen Australia itself. Of course the film has the ANZAC appeal (athankyou Mr. Sam Neill) and of course the overseas bait of Willem Dafoe and Ethan Hawke and with a trailer like this you can’t say it looks like my stereotyped Australian arthouse bungle.

No, Daybreakers is a science fiction film set in 2019, where all of mankind have become vampires (as you would) from a plague. The human population is nearing extinction and so therefore the vampires themselves face starvation, thus begins vampire hematologist Edward Dalton’s (Ethan Hawke) hunt for salvation.

Of course the appeal to this film is that it does not look that Australian, but of course this lends itself to an awareness of the audience from the wizards at Screen Aus.

The project itself is headed by the boys who brought you Undead, the Spierig brothers.

So read more shit here or take it from me thay January 21, 2010 (the picture’s release date) might be a touch to far away for your liking.

If you don’t watch The Gruen Transfer, you should.

‘An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory’
Friedrich Engels

We can be lazy and we will feel worthless for being so.

It’s purgatory. Stay tuned.