MONDO STUMPO

Adventures with the Human Centipede #1: Tom Six interview 2010

2011-11-29T03:30:00.000-08:00

HUMAN CENTIPEDE DIRECTOR TOM SIX interviewed by Andrew Leavold 2010

[Never before published phone interview 22/08/10]

====================================

Andrew: I understand you're shooting a sequel at the moment?

Tom: I'm actually now in London to shoot the sequel, in the middle of the shooting.

What can you tell me about the next "sequence"?

It's going to be a Human Centipede of twelve people, and the tagline will be "100% Medically INaccurate"! I had so many ideas when I wrote Part One, I thought I'd first want the audience to get used to this sick idea, and now that people are, I can go full force now in Part Two - anything I didn't show in Part One, I'll show in Part Two! (laughs)

Apart from the twelve-part centipede, is there anything else you can reveal this early?

It's a very original thing, I think people won't expect what will happen, and I can't tell yet what happens to the middle girl or if Dieter [Laser] is coming back.

Speaking of the creative process, when you're writing the film, what or who sparks your inspiration? Where do you get your juice from?

For Part One, it was really [from] stories I read about the Second World War and all the notorious Nazi doctors. When I wrote the script I kept thinking about those surgeons, because they were so crazy. So for me the most dark and scary things that could happen to human beings - intelligent surgeons cutting you open - they are really disturbing people. So that was really the basic idea for the Dr Heiter character. Each time, when I write a script, I have something in mind with what's lingering in the back of my head.

The Dr Heiter character in First Sequence doesn't reveal his motivations other than one line: "I don't like human beings."

I did it on purpose. Most of the time the less you know about a villain the more scary he is. Like the guy in No Country For Old Men. The guy with the strange haircut, you know nothing about the character, that makes him so crazy and so creepy.

Working on the character of Dr Heiter, you obviously had an image in mind, but Dieter really brings the character to life. How much of the creation is Dieter's?

When I wrote down the entire character, Dieter is a very methodical actor, so he said, "I will bring my own wardrobe." So he got that beautiful white coat, he brought it from an old Nazi store in Germany, he brought the suits, a bathrobe and stuff. When he was on set he didn't want to talk to the crew or cast, he would just sit in his room alone, and he had a special Dr Heiter diet, all this strange green stuff that he ate. And he was in character all the time. So you can imagine, pretty crazy. Off set he's the sweetest man in the world. But on set is was pretty scary as well. So fifty percent of the character he brought in.

The other character I really liked was the house. You do become very familiar with each room and each exit or entrance…

It was quite a search, that house, because I wanted to shoot it all in one location to get the claustrophobia. So we had to look for a house that had a swimming pool, had the basement, and there wasn't a forest, so that took a lot of time to find it. Luckily this house was for sale so we could rent it for a period. It was in a villa area, which was very funny, so there other houses around it. So with some tricks we had to get all the other houses out of the shots so it looked like it was really in a forest. Neighbouring houses, people were hanging out of their windows watching what we were doing there!

The internationalist approach to the production, with a Japanese actor, German actors etc - I can only imagine the money is coming from various countries?

No, that wasn't even the thing. I used American girls because I saw so many horror films from the Eighties, where you see those naïve American girls getting into trouble, so I knew it had to be these stereotyped American girls in the film. And I wanted the head of the Human Centipede not to be able to communicate with the doctor, so it had to be a language that was very far, far away from anything understandable, and I love Japanese horror films, so I said that must be a Japanese character sitting there. So that's how I had connection with those three countries.

I wondered to what degree the Japanese character was included for economic reasons or for narrative reasons.

Purely narrative reasons. It had to be a love for Japanese horror films and those characters, they're strong and powerful, beautiful faces usually, the actresses. You want that contrast between Dr Heiter and this strong Japanese face. And the fact that he can only yell in Japanese, I love that. He's speechless, just like the girls who are attached to his ass! They're almost in the same position.

Then of course he gets to perform the ultimate act of self-immolation at the end of the film!

Yes. And it's something Japanese people do, hari kiri, and the special phrases, like Akihiro [Kitamura] did in the film, it's very cool.

Dr Heiter himself becomes like a centipede, so you get that excruciating chase at ultra-slow speed up the flight of stairs! It's a film that's being talked about, and it's hard to find a film that shocks these days. Why do you think people are talking about The Human Centipede?

I think the idea of mouth-to-ass gets some kind of reaction, everyone can imagine how horrible that must be, and somehow that sick, strange idea, that spread like a virus. The basic idea is the only thing, I think. And it's something original. Because they say it's daring to make a film like that, in the first place - people think about porn or something disgusting, but to use it in a film like that, that has never been done before like this.

It is such a graphic hook, that's true - in exploitation filmmaking you need that hook to see your film rather than someone else's.

Absolutely. And so many films that are made are copies from other films, and it's very hard for us to come up with something original. But that's the trick I think for every filmmaker who starts, to create something really original.

Of course, the ability to reduce the hook down to just three words - ass-to-mouth - automatically you get a mental image that's impossible to shake! The most perceptive review I've found, in my opinion, said the characters seem to exist in a limbo between living and dead, where death would be the most preferable option. I haven't seen a scenario as bleak as this since Salo.

That's true, that's one of my biggest influences. A lot of horror films have a fear of death, but in this film they're better off dead, I think. The idea of suffering for so long in this position in this claustrophobic house with this crazy doctor who could do everything to you, it's the ultimate nightmare, because you can't escape as well.

And if your only means of salvation dies, hope dies with them…

That's right (laughs).

What's been the most interesting reaction to the film you've heard so far?

In Holland at the test screening, a couple of girls left the theatre and they were afraid to talk or even look at me! They thought I was such a disturbing man. I said it's all make-believe, the psycho killer. But the reaction is so strong. And on Facebook, the fan page they made of me, people want to sterilize me, shoot me, send terrorists after me - some people are so incredibly angry at the film.

And they can't separate the art from the artist?

Absolutely.

In that case, it sounds like "mission accomplished"?

Yeah! (laughs)

When you started writing the first Human Centipede, did you ever imagine a franchise?

I was not really thinking about a franchise. When I was writing the script I had so many ideas, I thought at first keep the basics, and eventually wanted to make another film about it, to use all the other ideas. And I have even thoughts about the third one, because three films would make kind of a centipede itself (laughs). I'll do that in a couple of years. But I never want to make like Saw 8. I only want to make something if it's original and not copy the same thing I did before.

Why London?

London has two reasons. First, I wanted to make a completely English language film. And because I used all the main players from the Second World War, a lot of people wrote me in England - they were also the main players in the Second World War. I thought OK, let's do it in the UK.

If you weren't going to make the third film in the sequence, what would you imagine as your follow-up?

I'm already working on a script, I want to shoot a film in LA, and again I think I have a very original idea for a horror film, a psychological drama. It's going to be very controversial and I think a lot of people will talk about it. I can't say what it's about yet, but it has nothing to do with centipedes (laughs). But that's really my thing, I love to shock people or be controversial. For me that's where all the fun is.

What other genres could you do that in, a musical?

Yeah! I made two black comedies in Holland, and a children's film, but my main core is really with these kinds of films.

Jon Hewitt interview 2011

2011-11-19T17:09:00.000-08:00

JON HEWITT INTERVIEW by Andrew Leavold 16/11/11

A mutual friend, Jack Sargeant, regularly quotes Japanese photographer Araki: "Cities need zones of obscenity to make things interesting."

The same can be said for filmmaking. Danger, violent conflict, the extremes of human experience and behaviour, these are the mainstays of drama, not to mention the voyeuristic urge to witness the forbidden. Few Australian filmmakers dare to go to those dark places, and yet director Jon Hewitt has lived amongst the shadows for his entire career. From helming the low to no-budget genre productions Bloodlust (1992) and Redball (1999), Hewitt graduated above-ground with Acolytes (2008), a $4 million horror thriller pitting three high school fuckups against devious backpacker murderer Joel Edgerton.

With X (2011), Hewitt has fashioned a dark love letter to his home town, a veritable "zone of obscenity" in any culture. Set over one night, X is the tale of two prostitutes chased through Sydney's Kings Cross by corrupt cops, knife-wielding pimps, drug dealers and other creatures of the night. The second in Hewitt's 'Kings Cross Trilogy' after the guerrilla romance Darklovestory (2006) and made on a quarter of Acolyte's budget, X is a remarkable achievement: equal parts art film and exploitation as well as style and substance, with rapid-fire, split-screen editing and stunning photography. It's a mythic descent into a Hades-like world of perpetual darkness, and Hewitt's cameras capture its sense of time and location to perfection.

Andrew: I heard a mutual friend of ours, Jack Sargeant, talk about this on the weekend: "The Japanese photographer Araki once said cities needed zones of obscenity to make things interesting."

Jon: You mean like red light districts and shit like that where anything goes? Hopefully every decent city's got one, and certainly the Cross is the most resonant of those sorts of districts in Australia anyhow.

Andrew: You and Belinda now live near King's Cross - what does a place like this represent to you?

Jon: We've lived here since 2000. We live in Kings Cross - I'm in the lounge room of my apartment, I'm just walking over to the window. Just to tell you where we are - we're on the fifth floor of an apartment building right on the strip. McDonalds is next door, and we're in between Porkys and Showgirls, just across the road from Strippers. I'm looking out the window right now at two hookers plying their trade. So this is where we live (laughs). We've lived here since 2000 and seriously you can't really live here 24/7 without it becoming part of your fucking psyche. So pretty much everything Belinda and I have done since we've lived here has been influenced by what we see on the street. We've written a couple of scripts that have actually been made, like Darklovestory (2006) and X (2011), set absolutely in Kings Cross. We've written a couple of scripts for Hollywood, there's one set in New York subways, but a lot of that resonates with Kings Cross as well. It's almost impossible to escape some of the shit you see!

Andrew: How would you describe the mythos of the Cross to someone who's never experienced the place?

Jon: The one constant thing that the Cross offers - I'm a bit of a tin-pot historian since I've been living here - and I've spoken to people who have lived here for sixty years and six years and everything in between, and the one thing they always say is the Cross is constantly changing, it's never the same, and certainly in the twelve years we've lived here, it's gone through about three different transformations in that now on a Saturday night at 3 o'clock in the morning there'll be thousands of trashed young people here, well-off, well-dressed, beautiful young girls and guys, because 24 hour liquor trading has made it a club central. Whereas ten years ago at the same time it would have been full of bogan guys from the suburbs looking to get laid, and sailors, people who were staying in all the hotels here. But there are hardly any hotels in the Cross now, they are all apartment buildings. So there's been a degree of gentrification. But the strip where we live, we live on the last of the old Kings Cross, which is about 150 metres of Darlinghurst Road that's still got junkies and hookers and strip clubs, but there's also really groovy bars where they wouldn't even fucking let you in! The Cross is a fascinating place because it's this incredible 24 hour a day melting pot where you can pretty much see everything. I guess I get used to girls saying, "Do you wanna fuck?" when you're walking out your front door and stuff like that, but it can be intimidating to some people. I guess there are already a few things, people are going "Oh, you make these stories, and they're so dark, why are you so interested…?" One of my standard answers is that in 2009, within 150 metres of our front door, of the place where we live, there were five separate gun shot incidents. Including the famous "Chk Chk Boom" girl, she was an internet sensation for half a minute? Well that happened literally directly across the road from our house! I could look out the front window and see that going on. So when people from the suburbs go, "Why are you interested in dark shit?", I guess I have to say because of THAT. Apart from I'm naturally drawn to those sorts of stories. I've got this Youtube channel that I've had for about seven years called Stations Of The X, and it's full of interviews and anything to do with Kings Cross. There's about 220 separate videos there now. The myth of the Cross, what really interests me - it's one of the few places in the world that actually has a body of pulp fiction written about it. In the Sixties and Seventies Horwitz Press published 75 or 80 pulp novels - Bad Boy Kings Cross, Stuck Up The Cross, Kings Cross Junkie…

Andrew: Melbourne had that with St Kilda to a point, but that doesn't exist in the same way.

Jon: Not any more. I used to have an office in Green St in St Kilda, which is just off Gray St, in the 80s. But St Kilda was never out there like Kings Cross. Sure there are still hookers on the streets down there, but down here it was always so flamboyant and so fucking in your face. It's a little less in your face now, but some nights it can still be pretty incredible. Kings Cross is our Montmartre or our Reeperbahn or Times Square. And the interesting thing about it is, it works on a sort of mythological level or a metaphysical level in that it literally doesn't exist as a post code. It's the confluence of those five suburbs - Darlinghurst, Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay, Woolloomooloo, East Sydney. The train station is called Kings Cross, and everybody knows the place is Kings Cross, but you can't have an address that says "Kings Cross". It's just this interesting place that has those resonances, that's another reason why we set films here. They feel universal. You feel somehow stories for the whole world instead of just stories about Australia.

Andrew: You've said X is the second in a proposed "King's Cross trilogy" after Darklovestory - where do you go from X?

Jon: Darklovestory was the first film, which was like a dialectical fairy tale about storytelling wrapped in a crime thriller - an edgy, experimental, underground film that was sort of like a romance drama about a black guy and a white woman, played by Aaron Pedersen and Belinda McClory, and just trying to be in love while the world around them is trying to tear them apart. So it was sorta edgy and wacked out, it was like a modern Grimm's fairy tale. Whereas X is the middle one of the trilogy, which is a much more straight-ahead, mainstreamy type thriller about a couple of gorgeous women who go through the night from Hell. But the third one would be the edgiest of the lot, it's called Five Hits and it's about five junkies going to score. It's told in real time, so that there are five separate stories, and they all end up in this terrace house at the same time and the shit hits the fan. So there are five separate stories, all told in real time, and then there's a bookend, a top and a tail. My idea is that I do the top and the tail, and then the five stories would be directed by five different people - interesting young filmmakers, or friends, or anybody - and I have these strict rules where they have to shoot their ten or fifteen minute story in a take, or an afternoon. So it's got this whole real time vibe going on. Maybe that'll happen. But the idea was to have three radically different films narratively, production value, in every sense, but somehow happen at the same time, that told very similar stories. 'Cause it's my whole dialectical thing where there are many ways to tell the same story and you get all information on the same page. That was the idea.

Andrew: That kind of filmmaking doesn't happen enough in Australia.

Jon: You just have to force it into being, making three films about the same sort of thing… Obviously Darklovestory was made completely in the underground, and that's how that film even got made, and it's still not properly finished - I haven't been able to raise the money to deliver it, pay off the cast and crew and make it a releasable film. That's why it's not out on DVD. It's only screened at selected film festivals. It's a pretty cool film, I'm really happy with it, but I need to raise about $400,000 to properly deliver it. Which I can still do, because it hasn't really dated. X is the "legitimate" film of the Cross, and maybe on the back of X I might be able to get Five Hits financed, but as a lower budgeted and very freewheeling thing, and give some opportunities to some other interesting filmmakers.

Andrew: So it's still a struggle after twenty years to get the financing?

Jon: Oh yeah, I think no matter who you are it's always a bit of a struggle. Certainly for me, I mean X is my fifth feature film, but it's only the second one I got paid to make. I made Acolytes in 2008, I was 48 years old when I directed that film, and I'd already made three previous features, but that was the first film where I actually got a fee to make it. I've never even considered myself as having had a career in the film industry (laughs), but I've been lucky enough certainly in the last five years to have made two feature films, and you can have a living doing that. And I've written a few scripts for other people here and there. So I think I'm incredibly lucky, but it's obviously going to be just as hard for me to get my next film financed. I guess my films are always a little out there. If I'm going to make the film myself, then I may as well do something worthwhile, and try to do some sort of edgy story that nobody else is telling. Don't get me wrong, I'd be absolutely thrilled for somebody to say, "Do you wanna direct Alien 7?" Just show me where to go!

Andrew: It seems like for twenty years you've shifted comfortably between low-budget genre pictures, and no-budget guerrilla projects. Where is the ideal place for you to be as a filmmaker?

Jon: I know how to do both, and I reckon I'd be pretty adept at directing the $100 million film as well. But I certainly know how to do it the hard way, and it's not a great way to make films, I've got to say. X was a terrific experience - it cost a million bucks which is a shitload of dough, but for the film that it is, it's still not a massive amount of money. You can just DO things when you've got a little bit of money that you can't do when you've got no money. You can at least go, "I can force this through to the end and I can give it a grade and I can actually deliver the fucker and it's going to be great." Whereas when you roll the dice on a movie like Redball (1999) or Darklovestory, obviously I was able to really deliver Redball to raise some money, but Darklovestory I still haven't, so I've got a cut of the film that's ungraded and no sound mix and all that sort of stuff, but it still hangs together pretty well.

Andrew: It's MUFF friendly but not necessarily MIFF friendly?

Jon: Absolutely, that's a great way of putting it. Maybe in ten years time, if I've made a few more films, people will go, "Oh, what's this lost gem? Why didn't we think this was any good ten years ago?" (laughs) Because it's a cool film. Jack played it. People who "know" can see that these sorts of films are cool, and legitimate. But it's much nicer making a film with money in the bank until you turn over.

Andrew: I guess with a million bucks you can make a film like X look really amazing - we should mention Mark Pugh's stunning cinematography and the rapid-fire, split-screen editing of Cindi Clarkson.

Jon: Mark's a genius, and it's the third film we've made together. I don't know, we've just got this shorthand way of working where we can work really quickly. I mean we had to, it was only a twenty day shoot, and as you know, X isn't two people in a room talking for half the time, it's very location driven and there's eighteen different cast, it's all at night… So it was pretty brutal, we had to really go like the fucking clappers shooting that film. With Mark, it's a happy confluence of technology finally being there, we could actually get out on the streets of Kings Cross with no light, or shoot in available light, in Cinemascope, and get an awesome-looking picture. You couldn't do that five years ago, but you can do that now with camera and lens technology, it's just fucking great. And it's cheap! We shot on the Red, and it's an incredible camera, but the camera we shot on is already ancient history. Mark's already got the new version, the Epic, which is half the price and twice as good! Incredible. It's still hard to make a good movie, but I just love the way technology is continuing to advance.

Andrew: If you're shooting on HD, what are your ideal working conditions on a set?

Jon: I've experienced more cast than crew, I've also experienced fifty crew all looking at me going "what are we doing?" with trucks for miles and all that sort of shit… I like smaller crews that are respectful of the process. Films are still made in the way that they were made forty years ago when you literally did need ten HMIs, it needed five guys each to run, and generators and stuff, just to get an image on celluloid. Whereas you don't need that shit anymore, but people are still doing it, there are still these massive fucking gaffer and grip trucks, and then the whole shit becomes about the trucks and travel time and all that sort of stuff. I don't like that. For me it's what happens between the actor and the lens, that's the most important thing, and anything that gets in the way of that, I'm not into. So I like working with small crews, and being really mobile. Obviously I've had to as well - I think there's a way of working where you don't need thirty or forty people on set, even if you're making a huge film, you can still have only ten or fifteen.

Andrew: It would be liberating, not having all that dead weight hanging off you when you're trying to get your shot.

Jon: Yeah. And basically, it's like a self-perpetuating monster, like you end up having extra crew to look after the crew, you know what I mean? So you have a third and a fourth AD just to make sure that the massive crew is somehow working properly. Certainly a film like X, we couldn't have it but we didn't really need it, and we couldn't have made it with a logistic like that anyhow. When we were shooting in the Cross in 2010, they were shooting Sleeping Beauty around here as well, and I can remember them locking down streets and there's like ten trucks, whereas we had our production office in the Cross and ten of us walked down the block to our set - that's the way to do it, it was fucking great.

Andrew: What's your reaction to the recent wave of glamorous junkie romances?

Jon: Like Candy (2006)? I dunno…I just judge each film on its merits, pretty much. I've seen some awesome films that have been about tragic junkies and romance, and I'd love to make one one day.

Andrew: The junkie scene is the complete antithesis of other cliched junkie romances - what I found most interesting is watching Billie Rose Prichard's face and seeing the seething maelstrom of emotions churning away on her character's face. To me that said so much more about the reality of heroin.

Jon: Obviously as a filmmaker I'm more drawn to junky films like Pure Shit (1975) than Candy. Pure Shit is the film for me, whereas Candy is just another movie about people. And obviously the junky scene was hugely influenced by the Bert Deling film. That was our Pure Shit gesture. Everything's so pussy-assed now - you can't show sex, you can't show naked people or people hitting up, it all gets fucking weeded out of the scripts. I haven't got an idea now, but do you actually ever see a needle going into flesh in Candy? Everything is homogenized or it happens off-screen, people have sex and then get out of bed with their underwear on. You just don't buy it. One of the reasons I wanted to do certain things - and people have gone, look at the old perve, it's totally exploitive and prurient - women standing there with shaved pussies completely naked, and guys with their dicks hanging out, and people pushing needles into their skin. I just wanted to shoot it because nobody fucking does it anymore, apart from anything else. I was saying to someone the other day, could you make Last Tango In Paris (1972) in 2012? I don't think anybody would let you. At least in the Seventies and Eighties, people used to go there, whereas most of the time, except for a very small number of films, people just don't even go there anymore.

Andrew: Films now thrive on the idea of danger rather than the danger itself.

Jon: There's a lot of stuff withheld. Cinema is about seeing stuff, for me, it's about looking and seeing. Whereas now you get really smart and influential people saying words like "voyeurism" and it's a pejorative term, it's a criticism! For me it's an adjective - yeah, films are voyeuristic, of course they fucking are! We're looking at something - what are you talking about?

Andrew: Films in the Seventies celebrated the act of voyeurism.

Jon: All the films I like walk the razor edge of ideas or ideology. So people are maybe sometimes confused about where you're coming from - is this an exploitation film or is this an art film? Certainly on X there's been a bit of confusion, like in the international festival circuit where I was a little disappointed that we didn't score a huge festival berth outside of Australia, and it was always the same thing, it's too arty for the genre festivals but a bit too genre for the arty festivals, so you're stuck in between. Whereas I'm going, "Fuck that, I don't want to be either or, I want to make a crazy-assed thing that's somehow in the middle!" It's marrying strong genre tropes with something a bit more ambitious. I think that's what makes my films maybe different from most things. But that's my ambition. I love horror and sexploitation and violence, I just love watching movies like that. They're the sort of films I want to make, but I also want to give it something else. That's my schtick as a filmmaker. The people I love are probably obvious - I love von Trier and Gaspar Noe, Abel Ferrara. Nobody would accuse Lars von Trier of being a genre filmmaker, but Antichrist (2009) is a horror film and Melancholia (2011) is like an apocalypse film! It's his Armageddon!

Andrew: And all three names you just mentioned are all first class troublemakers…

Jon: You end up being that way because people go, "Jesus, you can't have people having sex, and what are you, some kind of perve, or are you trying to offend people?" There are certainly those elements to whatever you do. If you turn a camera on a naked person, you can't say that the thrill of looking at naked flesh isn't part of what's going on?

Andrew: Speaking of other troublemakers, you mentioned Bert Deling, and I guess another nod to Pure Shit is that X is set almost entirely over one night, and both films have that mythic journey in and out of a subterranean world of darkness. It's very Greek, if you want to be overly academic about it…

Jon: Absolutely. It's great to be overly academic, because that's exactly what's going on. Pure Shit is incredibly rich subtextually, and I'd like to think X is as well, but on the surface it's still this full-on, exciting movie that you'd want to watch as a filmgoer. But it can be more than that if you want it to be. Pure Shit is a huge influence, like the way it captured the inner suburbs of Melbourne in the mid Seventies, I wanted to capture Kings Cross now, before it all disappears. The sense of place was really important to me.

Andrew: The Pure Shit connection probably explains why you wanted Phil Motherwell in Bloodlust (1992) playing the demented preacher.

Jon: Phil was also in Redball, he was the crazy-assed bookseller. He was actually playing Richard Wolstencroft - that scene in Redball is a verbatim scene of what happened to Richard when he was running the Hellfire Emporium! The Vice Squad cops came in and read him the riot act… Phil's an awesome actor as well, I'd cast him in everything if I could.

Andrew: Out of interest, where is he at the moment?

Jon: He'd be in Melbourne somewhere - he's got to be in his late fifties, early sixties now. I'm sure he's still alive (laughs) and I would have heard if something had've happened to him. He's a writer, he writes a lot of plays and stories and stuff like that. He's an incredible writer - maybe he's doing that sort thing, writing his autobiography, 'cause he's definitely got some stories to tell. Fuckin' hell, he's had an incredible life!

Andrew: Central to X is that almost mother-daughter bonding between Holly and Shay, both of whom have lost their mothers, both are self-described survivors, and to a certain extent they do.

Jon: One thing that Belinda and I tried to do all the way through the development of the script, we had a lot of pressure NOT to do this, was to rely on resonance across characters and across experience. If I could explain that a bit better: at script stage there was always people going, "Well we know who Shay is, we know her back story, but we don't really know who Holly is, and where does she come from, can we have a flashback," and we were always going, "If you want to know where Holly comes from, and who she is and what her experience was as a young woman, she's Shay." Shay's experience is what she went through ten years ago, and she was saved by that Katherine woman, the older woman. That continuity of experience, and that's how you figure out the richness of the character, it's just not explained to you. You know, it's the sort of shit you go through when you develop a script.

Andrew: It wouldn't be the same film without that relationship.

Jon: Oh no. Belinda and I wanted the film to have real emotional weight, and that was found in those sorts of primal relationships between people, mother-daughter… I think people can really emotionally respond to that sort of shit, even when they don't know that they're doing it. And that's the other reason why Holly - that's a spoiler, obviously - dies at the end. We used to have a happy ending to the film where Holly gets on the plane with a bag full of diamonds, Shay's got the other half. But that was more driven by my fantasy of making X2, and starting with Holly getting off the plane at Charles de Gaulle Airport, and we go from there. We decided that we wanted to do something in the final minute of the film that would really emotionally affect the audience hopefully, and that still made sense and didn't betray the characters. For me, X is ultimately about changing your life, the most common human experience. People call it mid-life crises, you quit a job or you leave a city, you get out of a relationship or whatever, that urge to change your life and do something better is so common, and that's sorta what X is about. It's not really about prostitutes and hooking, that's just the fabric of the story. Belinda and I wanted to show how liberating it can be, that effort to change your life, but also how potentially annihilating it can be as well. I think it's the hardest thing that people ever do, is really taking the plunge, to break free of whatever.

Andrew: Then of course, one character's annihilation is another's redemption.

Jon: There's all that sort of primal resonances and Greek tragedy going on (laughs).

Andrew: The backdrop is still hookers and vice, and there are definitely shades of Redball in the corrupt cops and seedy underbelly of a city - as an outside observer, what are the differences between Melbourne's underworld and Sydney's?

Jon: Sydney's underworld is possibly a little bit like Sydney itself - it's more surface, it's more into the glamour. Melbourne has the potential to be a much darker, much more deeply nasty place. In the Seventies, Roger Rogerson swaggering around the Cross fucking killing people in broad daylight, he was a rock star! Whereas in Melbourne, that shit was going on but nobody knew about it. I think that's the difference - Sydney celebrates its criminal culture. Melbourne does as well, but not as much. In Sydney everybody's Chopper Reid, whereas in Melbourne only Chopper is Chopper Reid. The real crooks in Melbourne, nobody's ever heard of; they've never been inside a police station.

Andrew: And they never will! You were talking about categories before, and Acolytes very definitely sits in the horror category, and was a hit on the international circuit - what kind of signal does that send to Australian funding bodies and private investors?

Jon: I think maybe now it's a little easier to make a broader range of film or tell a broader range of stories in Australia than it was ten years ago. People would look at you across the table and go, "That's a genre script," and that meant NO, fuck off, we don't do genre. Whereas now, nobody would say that. And in fact there's this idea that perhaps genre is a smart way to go, as legitimate a way to go as a deeply-felt personal story.

Andrew: The "genre" tag may make a film more exportable?

Jon: Definitely more exportable and more marketable internationally. I think it's just as hard as it's ever been to make films that connect with an audience. There's no real recipe. I can only speak for myself, and what I want to do is continue to tell interesting stories that have a very strong genre backbone, that enable me to find a worldwide audience for the film, but at the same time be ambitious in what the film is about or how it resonates subtextually or whatever, cinematically. And made for a sensible budget, where there's maybe a chance that the end product justified itself just in pure economic terms. The sad fact is that the world doesn't want Australian films. Not really. And if you approached making movies in Australia as a cold, hard economic business, nobody would ever make anything. You'd just leave it to Hollywood. Obviously we're not going to do that, there are all these other things going on, so we're always going to need some sort of subsidy and some sort of value judgment. I'm not saying we shouldn't be making films here! But my path is to try and be a little more sensible in pure movies-as-product terms. I can't help not thinking like that, I come from exhibition and distribution, I always had the posters for my films before the scripts… I'm always thinking about how to find an audience. Films only exist when somebody's watching them. It may be even harder now to find an audience.

Andrew: There's so much stuff out there I guess…

Jon: So much stuff, but it's a whole other world now, just getting a respectful theatrical release of any film I getting harder and harder - any film that's not a tentpole arthouse film or a tentpole Hollywood film. It's just harder. That's the realities of theatrical. But luckily theatrical is only one tiny part of the life of what you do. Even though, certainly in Australia, everybody's so fucking obsessed with the theatrical life of what you do. Unfortunately, 95% of everything that we do will not be that successful theatrically in Australia. Hollywood won the war fifty years ago, but they've really shut the gate in the last decade. And that's cool. But there are other platforms, other avenues. X has already been substantially successful internationally - that was our other strategy. We only delivered the film in February. Some people seem to think the film's been around for ever! What Lizzette [Atkins, co-producer] and I wanted to do was to give the film an international profile before we released it in Australia. Mainly because we knew that we'd never have the P&A to make a big deal of it, so we had to do it in that free way which is get it released in America and other countries, so that if you do a Google search the first fifty pages are all about the movie and there are other reviews… you get that international imprint, and that was all part of the strategy.

Andrew: I guess it takes imagination and inspiration to try to think of new ways to rattle the tin and be in exploitation in the 21st Century?

Jon: That sounds like a smart comment to me! (laughs)

"ASWANG! Filipino New Blood" program at FAFF 2011

2011-11-03T18:49:00.000-07:00

TRASH VIDEO PROGRAMS “ASWANG! FILIPINO NEW BLOOD” at the FANTASTIC ASIA FILM FESTIVAL…A celebration of Asian genre cinema!

Finally Australia has a film festival dedicated to genre film-making from the most exciting cinematic continent on the planet – Asia.

At a time where many Hollywood genre films are marred by predictability, lack of inspiration and play it ‘safe’ mentality, Asian genre films glow like electric beacons in the murky waters of mediocrity, reminding lovers of cinema that creativity and inspiration are not dead – not even close to it!

So, what is ‘genre’ you may wonder? Well we are looking at films in the classic Hollywood genre tradition – horror, sci-fi, fantasy and action as well as some that are unique to the region. In particular this year there will be a spotlight on contemporary Pinku Eiga (Japans famed erotic genre that has been going strong since the 1960′s).

Over four days in mid-November at Melbourne’s prolific Nova Cinema complex, Melbourne will buzz with some of the finest genre films from the Asia-Pacific region. Films from Japan, South Korea, China. Hong Kong and the Philippines will kick things off for 2011 and as the festival grows, we will reach out to other Asian territories, lighting up Australian screens with more Asian genre greatness.

Some of the worlds finest and most exciting cinematic talent will be showcased at the inaugural Fantastic Asia Film Festival – already confirmed are bold new titles from Korean maestro Na Hong-Jin, Japan’s L’enfant terrible Sion Sono as well as the mind twisting extremities of Japan’s Sushi Typhoon label and the best and bizarre of Yoshihiro Nishimura and Noburo Iguchi.

There will be guests, there will be events, there will be pure unadulterated Asian cinematic madness.

You are going to love the Fantastic Asia Film Festival! Click www.faff.com.au for the full program .

“ASWANG! FILIPINO NEW BLOOD” Curated and introduced by Trash Video’s Andrew Leavold

Nova Cinema, 11.30am Sunday 13th November

Two new sensational horrors from the heart of the Filipino darkness!

For many Filipinos, the provinces are a place of innocence and dread, where “civilization” ends and the pre-Christian terrors begin: shape-shifting creatures, vengeful ghosts, and evil spirits or Aswangs, all living in the cracks between the light.

It’s no surprise that the Philippines has had such a wealthy tradition of horror cinema, and Rico Maria Ilarde and Richard Somes are its most dangerous talents. FAFF is proud to introduce to Australian audiences two genre specialists with an unwavering command of the genre’s conventions, but with such inimitable filmmaking styles, and bodies of work that are brutal, uncompromising, independent of spirit, and unshakably Filipino.

ALTAR

“Altar, [Ilarde's] latest masterpiece, is an ultra-compact exploration of pinoy spirituality done in the most concise horror film terms possible” Olaf Moller, Senses Of Cinema

A failed boxer takes a job renovating a house deep in the countryside. There’s no electricity, a chapel upstairs, and what looks like a religious altar in the cellar – but just under its painted exterior is something infinitely more sinister. Director Ilarde plays havoc with Catholic iconography in a taut, pared-back thriller of pagan rituals, defrocked priests, and the phantom of a young girl doomed to witness Altar’s unspeakable horrors.

RUNNING TIME 90 mins / 2007 / Philippines / Horror / Aspect TBA

Director: Rico Maria Ilarde (Z-Man, Dugo Ng Birhen: El Kapitan, Ang Babaeng Putik, Shake Rattle & Roll 2K5 [“Aquarium” segment], Beneath The Cogon, Villa Estrella)

Cast: Zanjoe Marudo, Nor Domingo, Dimples Romana, Dido De La Paz

DIRECTOR BIO: No other Filipino filmmaker has embraced the horror genre with such passion and talent as US-educated Rico Maria Ilarde. His early predilection for sex-and-blood shockers such as Dugo Ng Birhen: El Kapitan (“Blood Of The Virgin: The Captain”, 1999) and Ang Babaeng Putik (“Woman Of Mud, 2000) has evolved into an impressive body of work revealing an innate understanding of tension and trauma. Ilarde is currently in pre-production on his first international production.

YANGGAW/“AFFLICTION”

“…an achievement, mixing traditional elements of horror and family melodrama, creating a picture that is so bizarre, it will be stuck to your mind months after seeing it.” Francis Cruz, Lessons From The School Of Inattention

Amor returns to her village with a mystery illness; a faith healer claims she is possessed by an evil spirit, and her family inadvertently aid her transformation into a bloodsucking, baby-eating aswang. The blackness of the provinces’ nights, and the sanctity of a Filipino family ripped asunder, provide the heady backdrops for Somes’ feature debut, a grimly realistic take on Filipino folklore that’s as gore-streaked as it is genuinely unsettling.

RUNNING TIME 98 mins / 2008 / Philippines / Horror / Aspect TBA

Director: Richard Somes (Shake Rattle & Roll 2K5 [“Ang Lihim Ng San Joaquin” segment], Ishmael)

Cast: Ronnie Lazaro, Tetchie Agbayani, Joel Torre, Aleera Montalla, Erik Matti

DIRECTOR BIO: Cavite-born Somes learnt his craft as production designer for fantasy and horror specialist Erik Matti (Pa-Siyam, Gagamboy) before graduating to the director’s chair. His critically acclaimed aswang segment for Regal Films’ horror anthology Shake Rattle And Roll 2K5 was followed by three features for Star Cinema’s independent wing, including Pinoy action tribute Ishmael (2010) and possession tale Corazon (currently in post-production).

Pinoy thrillers in Melbourne: Filipino filmmakers make it in Asian horror fest in Australia

by Bayani San Diego Jr, Philippine Daily Inquirer November 3, 2011

Pinoy thrillers are making their mark in Asian horror.

Two Filipino films have been included in the lineup of the Fantastic Asia Film Festival, to be held in Melbourne, Australia, from Nov. 10 to 13.

Film critic and scholar Andrew Leavold handpicked Rico Maria Ilarde’s “Altar” and Richard Somes’ “Yanggaw” to be part of the fest, alongside films from China, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong.

Leavold, who has been writing extensively about Philippine cinema, considers Ilarde and Somes as “two of the most fascinating talents working in genre films at present.”

He pointed out that the two filmmakers are “two radically different personalities, representing divergent filmmaking styles.”

Rico, said Leavold, “is steeped in pop culture and has that formal film-school-training style.” Somes, on the other hand, “approaches film in a more intuitive fashion.”

Leavold regards “Altar” and “Yanggaw” as “arguably their best films to date… possessing a deep understanding of the genre, while remaining unmistakably Filipino.”

He described “Altar,” which top-bills Zanjoe Marudo and Dimples Romana, as a “slow-burner… allowing the intricately plotted script to build tension. It says so much about the chasm between city and countryside, civilization and the dark unknown.”

He chose “Yanggaw,” which features Ronnie Lazaro and Tetchie Agbayani, because “it’s a jarring modern take on the aswang legend, equating demonic possession with a kind of addiction.”

Leavold has always been drawn to horror flicks. “Dark fantasy is an important cathartic process in working out our inner demons. Experiencing those fears safely and vicariously via horror films is like jumping out of a plane with a parachute.”

He related that the horror festival is a brainchild of Monster Pictures, a distribution and production company based in Melbourne.

“The fest is the first of its kind in Australia,” he noted. “Hopefully, it’ll be the first of many that will showcase the DVD label’s Asian acquisitions.”

The fest aims to introduce Australian audiences to “new films, new industries, even new countries, they may not have had the opportunity to experience” previously.

In a bizarre twist, Leavold discovered Philippine cinema because of a pint-sized Pinoy James Bond.

“When I was younger, I saw Weng Weng in ‘For Your Height Only,’” he recalled. “I instantly fell in love with him. From that moment on, I wanted to know all I could about the cinema and culture from where Weng Weng had sprung.”

He conceded: “Obsession is a strange creature. Now, I get to teach film in the Philippines and consider Manila my second home. All thanks to Weng Weng.”

Leavold hopes to release his book on Filipino genre filmmaking, “Bamboo Gods and Bionic Boys,” next year.

Southern News interview 2003

2011-10-09T00:20:00.000-07:00

[From Southern News 13/02/03, p.15]

FILM PROGRAMS: Mondo Bizarro (2001) and Mondo Trasho (2002)

2011-10-08T23:20:00.000-07:00

Jack Sargeant's Cinema Of Transgression tour 2001

2011-10-08T21:52:00.000-07:00

Trash Video's 10th Birthday Party 2005

2011-10-08T21:33:00.000-07:00

Escape From The Planet Of The Tapes (2003)

2011-10-08T21:27:00.000-07:00

Courier Mail interview 2006

2011-10-08T21:24:00.002-07:00

[From the Courier Mail's Q Weekly magazine 16/09/06, p.11]

Courier Mail Q Weekly interview 2006

2011-10-08T21:24:00.001-07:00

Lesbo-A-Go-Go (2003) reviews

2011-09-25T06:01:00.000-07:00

Boris Lugosi’s review from the Girls, Guns and Ghouls website:

Do you like watching bad girls go to Hell? Do you like the rough-and-ready sleaze of maverick exploitation film-maker, Doris Wishman? Do you like to wallow in a mire of decadence and violence so deep that you may never crawl out with your soul intact? Do you like rock and roll, go-go dancers and the sixties aesthetic? Well then, you followers of exploitation in the modern age - Director Andrew Leavold of Trash Video has crafted a new Wishman-esque opus that may be right up your dark and grimy alley. I saw this one's world premiere at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival - and I tell you what, there was more entertainment value in its miniscule budget than a hundred Matrix Reloadeds ... now don't get me started on that one! Would you like to know more?

A sweet couple stroll around the park and contemplate their wonderful life together. We've got a lot of padding here, just as Doris would have loved it. We hear the character's dialogue from behind their heads - just as Doris would have loved it. We quickly realize that all is not straightforward with the man of the couple - as soon as "Sugar" (Caryn Withercy) is taking a bath, he's got her underwear on and is stuffing oranges into her bra. Soon enough though, an underworld associate has grabbed him and taken him out the back. A bullet to the brain later and Sugar is a widow of sorts, though during a bizarre funeral scene she's suddenly raped by the same hood attending - she's seemingly revealed as a former doe-eyed virgin after we see blood from "down there". Abducted by the hood and with nowhere to go, Sugar is forced to become a dancer in a cheap, smoky club. Is there any other sort? We see what the "couple's" home life is like. Sugar's face is plunged into a plate of baked beans and she's given the beating of her life with the villian's belt.

With a running time of sixty minutes, this shot-on-video film can't stay too long here, and soon Sugar's thrown out from the club as soiled goods - to be picked up by "Kitten", a sultry lesbian number with dangerously long fingernails. A touch of the Tura Satanas by my estimation folks, but I'll leave it up to you. There's trouble-a-brewin' when a former lover of Kitten's turns up, but worse happens as Sugar becomes hooked on pills, and the black-and-white film becomes color briefly as we experience a color, drug-induced "descent into Hell". Poor old Sugar, what did she do to deserve this? Nothing, that's the whole point. It's just a plunge into purgatory with no way back.

The situation is going to take a turn for the worse, viewers. After going with Kitten to a rocking Go-Go act, Kitten falls for the lead singer and Sugar's soon thrown out on the street - again. Bloodlust director Richard Wolstencroft stars as Doctor Geese - you guessed it, a sleazy semi-backyard abortionist. Did I mention Sugar was pregnant? After being raped - again - during the abortion, the washed-out, zombiefied Sugar stumbles through the back streets - and encounters Kitten's snubbed ex-lover. She's got the fight of her life on her hands and only one will survive ...

While there's not in fact much on-screen flesh or ultraviolence, there's enough implied mayhem for any exploitation fan to get their teeth into. Don't watch it if you've a weak stomach for watching a character suffer pain and indignation with very little relief. If you can "get" what Andrew is trying to do with this piece, you should be able to appreciate the relentless spiral into the pit. It's also peppered with scenes of pro-wrestling (always a plus), a savage bashing in a bar and the Hell/Dream sequence has an Ed-Wood-in-a-Gimp-Mask intensity that lingers in the mind long after! Couple this with crisp black and white photography and a fantastic soundtrack by local Aussie bands the Gammarays, The Hekawis and The Aampirellas - gotta love that last band name - and you really can't go wrong.

Now, I just want to see the seventies biker-chick film Mr. Trash has in the works. I will of course, reserve a place for it in GGG, once viewed!

Reviews at the Internet Movie Database

From Bill McGuire: Showcasing the talents of -- among others -- director of photography Jarret Gahan, "Lesbo-A-Go-Go" is a 1960s period piece which must be seen to be believed. It could be described as "Less Than Zero" without the 80s panache, and with a measurable degree of Australian wit... though it possesses an intriguing undercurrent of macabre cynicism.

All in all, solid viewing. I look forward to the future projects of the creative team behind Lesbo.

From Shane Burridge: Inspired by, but not necessarily modelled on, the 1960s films of NY indie Doris Wishman, LESBO A GO GO sets itself up with the kind of loophole that can be brought into play upon any criticism of whether it is 'good' or 'bad'; that is, it is 'bad' on purpose. Whether it's bad-bad or good-bad depends on how much you know beforehand of the poverty row exploitation film it emulates, or how much you can ascertain of the film-makers' agenda; otherwise casual viewers may be stumped about why exactly they are watching an archetypal good girl named Sugar (who would bear the name-and-exploitation-title Sugar Hill, if her fiancé wasn't bumped off early on) suffer one horror after another for the film's duration. It starts off quirkily, reminding us that Wishman's efforts were often unintentionally funny, but after a LSD interlude shot in color (likely a nod to ALICE IN ACIDLAND), it keeps spiralling down into depths from which we rightly figure Sugar will not be able to escape. After 50 minutes, the dizzy, snarling musical score gives the entire film the effect of being one long trip in itself. The music is right for the circumstances of the film but is at odds with the faux-60s setting that is given vent only through the décor – it would have been more consistent to either stick with a retro soundtrack or push Sugar's World-of-Hell into a grungier era, but this kind of incongruity may be what writer-director Andrew Leavold had intended all along; it does, at least, help push the story well beyond the fringes of realism. If you ever wanted to make a fake exploitation film yourself, but never got around to it, then LESBO is your catharsis. It's also bound to offend those unfamiliar with the kind of stuff that Leavold is spoofing (the appellation 'Andrew' is far less suitable for this arena of film-making than the informal contraction, 'Andy', suggesting that a name change is in order for future opuses. It seemed to work for Sidaris and Milligan).

MUFF Premiere review by Tim Chmielewski

The main feature for the night was the premiere of Andrew Leavold's film Lesbo-A-Go-Go. It was made for $700 over eight months.

It also stars many people from the Brisbane music scene and has ten Australian bands on the soundtrack. Special mention must go to Gazoonga Attack who were great as the girl gang.

Other notable roles are Fred Negro as the "vision of hell", the "Fuck You Man" as the devil and Richard Wolstencroft (festival director) who really seemed to enjoy his role as the backyard abortionist.

The story is probably not that important, but it is meant to be a tribute to 60's porn and exploitation films. Although it was only a "festival edit" and is still being worked on it still looks and sounds really good at this stage.

Probably the only thing I could compare it to is Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine in Daekaroh, except I thought that his film had better music, actual dialog and more character development.

I would also be looking out for Caryn Withercy who played the leading role and also the next production from this director which is going to be a film based on a series of Australian lesbian biker novels - depending on funding of course.

Lesbo-A-Go-Go interviews 2003

2011-09-24T21:21:00.000-07:00

"MUFF REVEALED"

InPress Magazine (Melbourne, Australia), 02/07/03, p. 60

Cameron Grace presents a walk-through of highlights from this year’s Melbourne Underground Film Festival. Andrew Leavold, MUFF programmer and Brisbane film archivist, follows him every step of the way.

The MUFF commander-in-chief Richard Wolstencroft is back in top form, cocksure and energized, armed with a skip load of ‘fuck you attitude’, a skull-scraping smorgasbord of features and events and as always, an obsession with the word ‘cabal’. Ever since Wolstencroft crash landed MUFF in 2000, the local film establishment has afforded him the sort of respect you’d give an unexploded landmine. The festival’s short history has proved to be both patchy and problematic - though a cursory glance at this year’s program suggests an organisation which is now just about right on the money.

The 2003 festival has an expanded political agenda, including a selection of new and never before seen feature length films from home and abroad (to be judged by a panel headed by Mark ‘Chopper’ Read) - as well as new shorts, animation, guerrilla film, documentaries and experimental films covering paranoia, conspiracy, globalisation erotica and predatory lesbians. Wilma Smith’s Scottish film Black Coffee is an unusually fruitful grapple with the legacy of Ken Loach. Local features include Bill Mousoulis’s stark, unsettling Lovesick, Scott Ryan’s diary of a Melbourne hit man The Magician, and the much-anticipated world premiere of Lesbo-A-Go-Go, the first feature from Brisbane film archivist, Andrew Leavold. Leavold’s cult video store Trash Video was the subject of a documentary Escape From The Planet Of The Tapes, which screened on SBS recently. His lifelong obsession with '60s cult, B-grade, biker, blaxploitation, sexploitation and dwarfsploitation cinema has crystallised in Lesbo-A-Go-Go - his very personal tribute to '60s trash queen, Doris Wishman.

“Lesbo was something I’d tried to get off the drawing board for about five years,” explains Leavold. “It ended up costing us 700 bucks to make a 60 minute film. Recreating a ‘60s exploitation film seemed to be the cheapest option available to us. In some ways, it’s almost like a ‘Brisbane retro rock’n’roll film’ - we got all the bands we knew that sounded vaguely retro to contribute to the soundtrack. Story wise it’s pure exploitation - a young girl starts off living an ideal life until her fiance gets killed as a result of unpaid gambling debts by a crime boss who rapes her at her fiance’s funeral. He takes her maidenhood and then forces her to work as a stripper in his club. She ends up being regarded as damaged goods so he throws her out in the trash where she is rescued by a predatory lesbian called Kitten. It all goes downhill from there.”

At last year’s MUFF, Leavold unveiled The ABC Of Filth And Smut Australia Style and during a recent visit to Melbourne, he heroically managed to out-obscure Paul Harris on RRR’s Film Buffs Forecast. Chap! This year’s festival also features Leavold’s attempt to put the fun back into fundamentalism by hosting That’s Godsploitation - Christian Paranoia And Apocalypse Cinema 1972-2002.

“That’s Godsploitation includes the choicest moments from around 30 bizarre Christian paranoia films,” says Leavold. “The sort of exploitation films that Christians make to scare people to the pulpit. If The Footmen Tire You, What Will The Horses Do? is a film that tries to scare people into joining the bible revival for fear of America being overrun by godless communists. It's the prime example of Christian paranoia cinema. The film’s creators, Ron and Tim Ormond used to make sleazy exploitation films like The Monster And The Stripper - really cheesy, almost swampsploitation. They became born again Christians during the late ‘60s and then suddenly decided to continue making the same kind of trash they did before, only with a Baptist angle - you can just imagine how insane these films are."

For those cineastes that enjoy wanking off litres of spunk in the name of smut, MUFF 2003 provides plenty to gorge on. Laurence Gartel’s The Art Of Fetish is a candid pervefest that examines the hardcore US fetish scene (Gartel will appear at a post-screening fetish party). From the golden age of American heterosexuality comes Insatiable, the film which shot Marilyn Chambers to stardom - it also stars John Holmes on whom Boogie Nights’ Dirk Diggler was based. Billed as the ‘Citizen Kane of Erotica’, John Stagliano’s squelchtastic Fashionistas features the kind of deviant sexual misadventures even Michael Hutchence would warn you against - if he were alive.

Englishman Jack Sargeant is a renowned author and expert on transgressive cinema. This year he presents the Mondo Cane series and discusses their impact an the exploitation industry. “Jack and I are big fans of each other,” says Leavold. “I personally love the Mondo Cane stuff purely because the Italians didn’t tend to labour the point. They always tried to inject as much irony into the production as they could and it doesn’t always transfer well into English. These films were just tame enough to get past the censors during the ‘60s, but it just makes you wonder what constituted big screen entertainment in those days.”

Trash Video is part of a fellowship along the east coast with Sydney’s Mu-Mesons and Melbourne’s Isosceles collective, both of which contribute to MUFF 2003. The Mu-Mesons are screening a program of 16mm and video The Foundations Of Control which looks at manipulation of the media, from the birth of television right through to the war in Iraq. Isosceles presents Fun With Nazis And Farmyard Animals, which includes Hitler Lives (anti-Nazi propaganda from Dr Seuss) a World War II propeganda cartoon, Daffy The Commando, and Pasolini’s parody of French new wave cinema, Pigpen.

“MUFF happens once a year, but you’ve still got places like Splodge and Isosceles who week-in week-out are unearthing stuff people have never heard of - only the most adventurous people tend to support these things,” says Leavold. “MUFF is purely an underground concern because they are playing films which have almost no commercial or critical appeal. I use the words ‘critical appeal’ as a term of abuse because the films critics fawn over have no appeal whatsoever. I like the idea of no-budget guerrilla filmmaking where you can create something out of virtually nothing and make it more entertaining than something like The Tango Lesson - that kind of miserable fucking self-indulgent vanity cinema which tends to pass as arthouse these days. MUFF is really important to the overall scheme of things because at least the media will find a focus on this form of invisible filmmaking and it will become known as a result. It’s also a kind of forum for like-minded idiots, who can come together, watch each other’s work and think they’re important.”

"Lesbo-A-Go-Go"

Interview in Q News (Brisbane, Australia), 08/08/03, p.15

Lesbo-A-Go-Go pays homage to Doris Wishman, director extraordinaire of the 1960s exploitation movie genre. Lesbo focuses on the sad story of Sugar who, after the death of her cross dressing boyfriend, falls victim to a series of unfortunate events that lead her on a path of sex, drugs and underground clubs (the Furry Oyster scene is a classic). Sugar is quickly befriended by Kitten, a poisonous, predatory, lesbian pimp, but her life spirals deeper into despair and debauchery. Lesbo-A-Go-Go is kitsch, it’s camp and it was made from the heart by Andrew Leavold, owner/operator of Trash Video.

Andrew has crafted this this tribute on the cheap with production costs for this rough and ready sleaze-fest coming in at under $700 ($698 to be exact!). Its debut screening was this year’s Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF). Lesbo-A-Go-Go blew the other self-professed guerilla filmmakers’ budgets out of the water. A proud Andrew boasts “every cent is up there on the screen.” As word got around, Lesbo quickly grew to be the underdog at this year’s MUFF.

Pulling off a period film for $700 with cast and crew not only took a lot of “arsy-ness” as Andrew puts it but also an inherent passion for the subject. While lazing away many teenage days watching 60s porn, Andrew noticed common themes. “When you watch 60s porn there always has to be this ‘punishment of the strayed’ theme, that’s all the wway through this (Lesbo-A-Go-Go) movie. By having this overly moralistic streak running through; it’s a moral lesson to those who go astray from the path of righteousness.” Andrew’s passion for all things exploitative began at aan early age. “As soon as video came out, I went nuts,” Andrew adds. “As soon as I was nine, video came out when I was living in the Middle East. It wasn’t like in Australia where you had the same 20 Betamax tapes to choose from, instead there was all this stuff they were taping off late night TV in England and sending out to video shops. Literally hundreds and hundreds of these cheap ‘schlocky’ films I just consumed at a rate of knots.” Opening its doors in Fortitude Valley back in 1995, Trash Video (now situated in West End) is home to over 10,000 rare and obscure videos. The monumental task of sourcing out these rarest of the rare B grade shonky films fit for Trash Video shelves is no easy feat. “You’ve probably gotta go through 20 movies to find that one gem where you go ‘Ugh! What were they thinking?’”

Andrew’s collection has come from video stores, warehouses and other private collections. “Then in the back of my mind I always wanted to make my own movie.” Having never made a film in his life Andrew revealed a cathartic experience in making Lesbo. “When I started Lesbo I thought OK, if I was doing a tribute to Doris Wishman, who is one of my favourite 60s exploitation filmmakers, (technically) we have to do this and we have to do that. Then I just thought hang on, fuck it, I’m going to shoot it the way I want to.” While Trash Video is Andrew’s love child, his true calling is filmmaking. “It kind of hit me that this is what I’m meant to be doing, an experience I want to do over and over again.”

Andrew’s next film project will be about a lesbian biker gang who run a town in the outback, Heehaw! As for the lesbian theme, “60s exploitation genre is riddled with lesbianism, it (the third sex) was shocking and taboo for them,” Andrew explains. “Even if they were just groping each other that was tantamount to on-screen cunnilingus. All of these shocking things - graveside rape, savage beatings and a young innocent getting hooked on tranquililizers by a predatory lesbian - oh how shocking! It’s simply 60s idealist sleaze.” It’s kitsch, it’s fun, it’s Lesbo-A-Go-Go and Andrew Leavold has made the world of cinema a more beautiful place. Don’t miss the Queensland premiere of this instant cult classic.

“Trash Takes A Turn”

Interview with Lawrence English in Timeoff Magazine (Brisbane, Australia) 13/08/03, p.40

For Andrew Leavold, the screening of Lesbo-A-Go-Go (his directorial debut) this weekend is the realisation of a dream that began over half a decade ago.

Anyone who happened to ask Leavold (Stumpy, to his friends) about his filmmaking aspirations in recent years would’ve been pummelled by his passion for what was (up until earlier this year) just a fictional concept with its roots in classic sexploitation.

Seven hundred dollars, many hours of shooting and editing, even more volunteers and some life changing experiences later, Leavold is the proud father of what could well be one of the most unusual films to spray forth from this fine city.

“It’s my attempt to make a fake 60s porno for $700!” Andrew exclaims when asked to summarise the film’s intent. “Shot on DV in black and white, it chronicles the downhill slide of young innocent Sugar (Cari Withercy) into drugs, degradation, delirium and ultimately damnation.

“Every possible bad thing that can happen does happen to the poor girl – she’s raped at her fiancé’s funeral, hooked on tranquillisers by a predatory lesbian (Eileen Surepuss)… of course, being a fake 60s exploitation feature, you can’t actually show any flesh on screen, so you have to make the story as sordid as possible to convince the audience it’s witnessed a lot more than it has. It’s an exercise in audience manipulation – now that’s exploitation!”

In the age of million-dollar budgets, the notion of creating a $700 film seems literally impossible. Considering most independent films are funded with a minimum of $50,000, the successful completion of Lesbo-A-Go-Go is no small feat.

“Lesbo clocked in at $700,” Leavold says proudly. “I never want to go through the nightmare of making a film on the smell of an oily rag again. There are low-budget films and then there’s Lesbo…, which is a no-budget movie! I want at least a couple of thousand to make the next one.”

So which inspirational filmmaker impacted on Leavold so much to see him create such a film? Who do we have to blame for this feast of exploitative goodness?

“Cheapo 60s female porn director Doris Wishman (Bad Girls Go To Hell, Nude On The Moon), that’s who. I wrote the script as a tribute to her, inspired by her predatory 1966 masterpiece Another Day, Another Man. She died the week we started rolling, but her presence is in every frame – her pointless cutaways, the moral downward spiral of the characters, and the way she shot the backs of actors’ heads so she didn’t have to sync the dialogue in post production! Genius.”

"Cheap Peek At Lesbian Porn"

Interview with Alison Mason, Courier Mail (Brisbane, Australia) 14/08/03, p.20

It’s either the tackiest film ever made or the most infantile piece of cheap-trash cinema you could come across. Lesbo-A-Go-Go also is one of the funniest low-budget films to come out of Brisbane, and creator and director Andrew Leavold, appropriately the owner of cult video shop Trash Video, says that was the intention in making it.

The film is a tribute to '60s exploitation porn queen Doris Wishman, and premieres at the Dendy Cinema tomorrow night.

Leavold says its timely lesbian angle was unintentional - the chick-on-chick flick was pure imitation of 60s porn film plot devices. “It’s a kitsch plot device rather than a ride on the lesbian wave. Luckily gay people get the joke,” he says.

In the film, Sugar (Cari Withercy) is a naive and pretty young woman who idolises her boyfriend, a wrestler who unbeknown to her has a sleazy past. He is paid to throw a fight but fails to, and the heavies murder him after dressing him in women's underwear. At the funeral Sugar is raped by the murderers on a fresh grave, losing her virginity and sending her on a path to destruction from which she is resued and cast out again by sundry lesbians.

Brisbane lesbian cabaret performer Eileen Surepuss, who co-wrote the script with Leavold, plays her first saviour, Kitten.

The first and last parts of the movie are shot in black and white, its only pretence to arthouse cinema, then it turns to colour as Sugar hallucinates a vision of hell after being drugged by lesbians.

Also appearing in the film are various Brisbane bands: Brisbane chick band Gazoonga Attack play a delinquent girl gang; Geoff, the singer from Sixfthick, the gangster who rapes Sugar; Rollo from Blowhard, a Mexican wrestler, and The Aampirellas play themselves miming to a Gammarays song.

The rape scene was filmed on a fresh grave at Toowong Cemetary, Sugar’s subsequent backyard abortion at Wooloowin and the lesbian strip club at West End’s The Winery - familiar locations with tantalizingly shocking content - but the film is shot in the naive style of a 60s porno. “They couldn't show much flesh so they had to make the storyline as sleazy as possible to make the audience think they were seeing something really provocative,” Leavold says. "In the '60s there was nothing more shocking than lesbianism."

Leavold says Wishman died two weeks before shooting started, but the cast and crew of Lesbo-A-Go-Go felt she was looking over their shoulders in spirit. "There were so many freaky coincidences. We were filming the rape scene in the old part of the Toowong Cemetery and. brought along a bag of potting mix to dummy up a fresh grave," he says.

"What are the chances of finding a fresh grave in that old part of the cemetery? But there was one - which we used. The whole cast and crew were really freaked out."

From start to finish the film, shot on digital video and edited on producer Kimberley Colwell's home computer, took six months and $700 to make. It premiered at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, at which Leavold was the opening and closing MC. “We offered it to BIFF (Brisbane International Film Festival) but they said it too cheap and nasty. It was too late to be entered into the MUFF prizes," he says.

"Chopper Read was the president of the film jury and he introduced Lesbo and harrangued the audience as a bunch of art fags, basically saying ‘None of you made a decent movie’,” Leavold says.

"I gave it an award myself for the most judicious use of the word ‘lesbo' in a film title.

"It was also the cheapest film ever screened at MUFF, which is basically a playground for low-budget filmmaking and where I was congratulated on a feat of atrocious arsiness which was an audacious act to actually screen.”

And how did he get it past the censors? “I rang the film censor and said, ‘Look, I’ve got a fake 60s porno I want to show at the Dendy.’ He said, ‘Oh God. All right, it’s unrated is it? All right, we’ll pretend it’s a filmmaking seminar and we’ll let you play it as long as you don’t play Ken Park,’” he says.

There will be a seminar on low-budget filmmaking after the screening, with a Q&A session with the cast and crew. Following the Dendy, it will tour the country.

Next Leavold moves on a decade. He plans to shoot a 70s girl biker movie Birds Of Destruction, in Pittsworth which “looks like it’s stuck in the 50s” with independent funding.

“The fact that we’re playing a $700 fake porno at the Dendy is all part of my ongoing campaign of cultural terrorism.”

"LESBO-A-GO-GO!"

Interview with Katrina Fox in SX News #134 (Sydney, Australia) 21/08/03, p.22

This is the title of a new movie by director Andrew Leavold, which has its Sydney premiere next week. But you won’t see it in the usual venues and it's on for one night only. Oh, and it cost just $700 to make! Leavold says Lesbo-A-Go-Go is about "a young girl's unwitting descent into drug addiction, delirium, depravity and damnation.” Set in the l960s and filmed in Brisbane, the movie centres around poor innocent Sugar who is beaten by gangsters and attacked in a graveyard before kidnapped by a gorgeous but predatory older woman called Kitten (think Joan Collins on acid) who plies her with pills and takes her out on the scene.

The film is Leavold's tribute to Doris Wishman, who he describes as the queen of 60s exploitation (movies that are one step removed from porn). "Once you get a female film-maker who’s making exploitation for a male crowd it changes the rules a bit," he explains. "So the focus is not exactly on tits and vulva, you've got all these other weird things coming into place. It's more about the morality of the situation or the emotions of the characters."

This was the spirit that Lesbo-A-Go-Go was made in. "We have this constant figure of a priest who appears in a funeral scene and looks at the main female character disapprovingly at the end of the film. He paints an upside down cross on her forehead while quoting a line from the Old Testament about the death of Jezebel and how she was nothing but dung in the fields after being confined in the insides of dogs." Not the sort of thing you'll see at your local Hoyts then...

Leavold, who owns and manages Trash Video, a store specialising in cult movies in Brisbane, admits that Wishman used lesbianism as a plot device to try and get around the lack of flesh being shown. "She wasn't a lesbian but she kind of exploited lesbianism as a plot tactic to titillate the raincoat brigade, which is why her films are beyond feminism because they don't play by the rules. She was definitely out there on her own."

Lesbo-A-Go-Go is already the centre of controversy interstate, generating complaints of offensiveness to women. Leavold's response? "It's more of a parody of outmoded sexual politics but it's done with a very straight face. If you take it on the surface, of course it's a very negative portrayal of women - doe-eyed innocents who are just playthings at the hands of predatory lesbians and vicious gangsters, but I certainly don't think of women in those terms, I'm more making fun of outmoded gender portrayals. I guess it depends on your sense of humour." Mine's obviously twisted. Forget Chutney Popcorn, girls and go for Lesbo-A-Go-Go!

"Lesbo-A-Go-Go"

Interview from Over Easy Magazine (Melbourne, Australia), August 2003

What inspired you to open a Trash Video store in Bris-Vegas?

A mixture of blind optimism and the need to find a home for the growing mountains of ex-rental videos in my lounge room! Brisbane’s not the cultural backwater you big city ser-fisticates think. It’s just big enough, and for that matter just small enough, for a place like Trash to work.

What defines “trashy” videos?

The “get fucked” factor. If you can find the right balance of insanity and goofy storytelling, and you feel compelled to scream “Get fucked!” at the TV set, then THAT’s the trashy gem that makes the journey worthwhile.

Is there a typical type of person that comes to Trash Video?

Not at all. We used to get Valley bums, speed freaks and street urchins - since we moved to West End three years ago we get FAMILIES! And bums and film nerds and Trekkies and...

Do you have a favourite trashy video and what makes you love it so much?

That’s easy - For Your Height Only, the Filipino James Bond ripoff starring a three foot Weng Weng as Agent Double O. A beautiful hybrid of midget jokes, lame Bond pastiche, loopy kung fu capers, and the worst dubbing you have EVER heard (all the bad guys have Peter Lorre voices)! Plus you get to see a midget battle a dwarf in the final reel - I would have paid money for a plane ticket to Manila to find out the winner of THAT contest. I just recently found out Weng Weng died in the 80s - for the last 10 years my life mission was to track him down and pat him on his little head.

What top five movies would you recommend for a first time trash video viewer?

Evil Dead, Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, Pink Flamingos, Bad Taste and Meet The Feebles. That’s only five out of a VERY long list of Trash essentials!!! My current favourites: 1) If The Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971) A Baptist gore fright film with a vision of America under Godless communism; 2) Love Me Deadly (1972) An American necrophile shocker about a woman obsessed with funerals, shot like a TV movie!!! 3) Mystics In Bali (1984) Indonesian horror with a fetus-eating flying head! 4) Any Jeff Krulik, Andy Kaufman, Ron Ormond or George Carlin stuff; and 5) The Impossible Kid Of Kung Fu (1982) The triumphant return of Weng Weng in the long lost For Your Height Only sequel! Only ever in French so I paid someone free rentals to translate it, and now we redub the film live on stage!

Who are you favourite Australian directors?

Richard Franklin, Jon Hewitt, John Lamond (Felicity, Pacific Banana), Brian Trenchard-Smith (Turkey Shoot, Man From Hong Kong), John Hillcoat, Richard Wolstencroft, Tim Burstall, early Bruce Beresford, Sandy Harbutt (Stone), George Miller for the first Mad Max, Phillipe Mora (Mad Dog Morgan), Wayne Groom (Maslin Beach), and a horde of other Aussie cinematic underdogs.

Why do you think you where invited to Melbourne underground film festival?

I’m cheap and forgiving! No, seriously, the MUFF crew and I share a similar philosophy - they are unmitigated cultural terrorists intent on putting a boot in the face of mediocre cinema culture and the arts nazis that populate it. They look for kindred souls (Mu Mesons from Sydney, Jim Knox in Melbourne, UK author Jack Sargeant) to realize their vision of a truly “underground” event, and despite the constant harpings from certain disgruntled folk, I believe the elements came together beautifully this year.

Could you tell us a little about you latest movie Lesbo-A-Go-Go?

It’s my attempt to make a fake 60s porno for $700! Shot on DV in black and white, it chronicles the downhill slide of young innocent Sugar (Cari Withercy) into drugs, degradation, delerium and ultimately damnation. Every possible bad thing that can happen DOES happen to the poor girl - she’s raped at her fiancee’s funeral, hooked on tranquilizers by a predatory lesbian (Eileen Surepuss)... Of course, being a fake 60s exploitation feature, you can’t actually SHOW any flesh on screen, so you have to make the story as sordid as possible to convince the audience it’s witnessed a lot more than it has. It’s an exercise in audience manipulation - now THAT’s exploitation!

Are you worried about shocking anyone with your films?

No, I welcome it! But if someone finds the film offensive, I want a reasoned response and not some ill-informed knee-jerk reaction. And if it’s a particularly witty rebuff, I’m gonna put it on the poster!

Could you tell us any funny stories that happened on set?

The Toowong Cemetary shoot was the strangest one. We were in the oldest part of the cemetary to film Sugar’s fiancee’s funeral, and we thought we’d have to tip a bag of potting mix on an old grave to freshen it up - amazingly, we found a NEW grave without a headstone, just a mound of dirt with a little wooden cross in the top. Jarret the cameraman said, “Andrew, we can’t shoot it from the front, you can see the name.” I said, “No problem”, plucked the cross out of the dirt and turned it around. The rest of the crew were mortified - they thought we’d just committed an act of desecration! We filmed the rape sequence straight afterwards: Sugar is grabbed by her fiancee’s killer and dragged through the graveyard until he throws her against a huge stone cross and violates her. The cross looked sturdy enough, but when we shouted “Action” it started rocking and looked like it would collapse on Cari and Geoff, crushing both of them to death! Of course we kept the cameras rolling.

What is the budget like for your movies?

Lesbo clocked in at $700. I never want to go through the nightmare of making a film on the smell of an oily rag again. There’s low-budget films, then there’s Lesbo which is a NO-budget movie! I want at least a couple of thousand to make the next one.

As a filmmaker what is your motivation, what possesses you?

The madness of the shoot, and the cast parties afterwards! That and the intense adolescent glee of shocking the shit of people on a constant basis.

Has anyone in the production team had any formal training?

Just about everyone behind the camera had film school experience - except me that is! It sounds like a Tarantino-inspired cliche these days, but I seriously sat behind the counter at Trash and soaked in B-grade movies until I figured I could make one. The effects guy Steve Boyle worked on Undead and Star Wars Episode Two, but he still made us a pair of devil horns for free!

Who would you credit as being your greatest artistic influence?

On Lesbo? Cheapo 60s female porn director Doris Wishman (Bad Girls Go To Hell, Nude On The Moon etc). I wrote the script as a tribute to her, inspired by her predatory 1966 masterpiece Another Day, Another Man. She died the week we started rolling, but her presence is in every frame - her pointless cutaways, the moral downward spiral of the characters, and the way she shot the backs of actors’ heads so she didn’t have to sync the dialogue in post production! Genius.

Is it hard finding the right people to work in your films?

No, there’s a willing stream of hopefuls filing past the counter every day! The lure of “fake porn” is incredible - I’ve already got the cast and most of the crew together for our next project, a five minute trailer for an all-girl biker film set in outback Queensland in the 70s, called “Birds Of Destruction”. I’m pitching the film to producers as “Faster Pussycat meets Prisoner Cell Block H”. Most of the “Lesbo” gang are back and they’re badder than ever.

We notice you use a lot of musicians in you films, what sort of people to you prefer to work on and in your films and how do you approach them?

I think half of the Brisbane band fraternity is in Lesbo, and for a good reason - they’re all great performers in their own way, and if you can find a character that suits their personality, they’re going to deliver the goods like a seasoned professional. Geoff Corbett from Sixfthick is a stage actor so we knew he’d look like Cape Fear-era Robert Mitchum on screen, but we took a punt on some of the others - the Gazoonga Attack girls are fucking awesome as a gang of juvenile delinquents, Trixie from the Aampirellas is outstanding as the drug ravaged guttersnipe Candy Mountains... I’ve watched Eileen (Kitten) for years doing her Abigails cabaret shows so her lesbian drag act was in the bag, and most of the crew were friends who did it for kicks. The real surprise was Cari Withercy in the lead role of Sugar. She was a shop regular who volunteered to be on the crew. I asked her if she wanted the lead, and she almost fell over! We seriously put her through hell on the shoot. She had her face pushed into a plate of baked beans before getting flogged with a belt, she was “raped” in a cemetary, forced to lie on the road covered in chocolate sauce, and still she gave her all. For an untrained actress she’s truly amazing on screen.

What is your connection to the Melbourne music scene?

I’ve been going to Melbourne gigs for over ten years, I LOVE Melbourne punk, scuzz, rock etc, love the people involved on and off stage. It’s like the tight-knit band community in Brisbane, only the bands aren’t as shithouse. Our abominable cowpunk caberet act They Might Be Vaginas has toured Melbourne a few times with Fred Negro’s band The Twits, and we’re Fred’s backing band in Brisbane (the dubiously titled “They Might Be Negroes”!!!). Trash also toured the Gammarays, The Fuck Fucks and The Twits through Brisbane.

So what were you thinking at the time when you decided to use Fred Negro as your vision from hell?

I’ve been listening to Fred’s music since high school (the I Spit On Your Gravy days!). He’s one of the most inspirational artists I’ve ever come across - the fact he isn’t more widely known is a fucking disgrace. He also has the sort of face that screams out to be used in a drug hallucination sequence. We shot that scene at the Greyhound Hotel in St Kilda with Fred Sounds director Rohan Pugh, using a gimp mask fashioned from a leather jacket, an upturned bar stool, a pool lamp and a red tablecloth which caught fire mid-shot on the light bulb!

What are the after affects of working on one of your films?

To tell you the truth, during the six months shoot I went on a two month bender, had a nervous breakdown and walked out on my 13 year relationship. I suspect it was the film’s doing - the brain-fried madness is all there on the screen, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who can pick it!

Is there any hidden messages in you films?

“Spill the blood of the innocent”. But you have to rewind the video to hear it.

How would you describe your sense of humour?

An unholy mixture of absurdist gallows humour and poo poo jokes. Like Bazza McKenzie at a car wreck.

“NINE THINGS I DISCOVERED MAKING FAKE SIXTIES PORN”

Originally published in Damian Kringas (ed), Tales Of The Cinematic Experience (Independence Jones Guerilla Press Division, Sydney, 2004)

- Try not to be a one-trick pony, and if you’re making low-budget genre or exploitation, for fuck’s sake deliver the goods. Sure, our first feature Lesbo-A-Go-Go was “an experiment in audience manipulation and generic convention” but there was NO flesh whatsoever, even for 1966 standards. Our next film Birds Of Destruction, a Baptist biker gore film, is all about (you guessed it) tits and blood.

- Don’t tell how much your movie cost. No-one will work with a cheap bastard who won’t even shell out for beer and pizza at the film shoots. Plus no one wants to see your shitty $700 home movie no matter how much lower than El Mariachi the budget was. Rodriguez had $100 grand to clean up his mess and wipe out any original copies from existence. You don’t. Rodriguez hangs out with Salma Hayak and Cheech Marin. You don’t. Rodriguez has three mega-successful Spy Kids features under his poncho. You don’t.

- Permits are for people who follow rules. You are a guerrilla filmmaker, not an AFC buttboy. Sign nothing and don’t EVER show them even a page of the script - they may want to dig deeper and ask questions about insurance, award wages, even the morality of the whole film. Tell the Brisbane City Council you shot in Sydney, tell Sydney it was Adelaide and so forth.

- Rakish behaviour is encouraged or at worst tolerating during the production, but please remember you’re making FAKE porn. In the quest to cherchez la femme, keep your dick in your director’s pants and above all, fermez votre bouche.

- Don’t give away editorial control your actors, particularly if they are concerned how ugly they may look face down in a plate of baked beans. Rule the set with an iron fist inside a steel glove and have them quaking in fright at the prospect of upsetting you. If you work in a slaughterhouse, you don’t hand over the boltgun to any old pair of sad brown eyes. Human cattle are the same.

- Don’t promise free copies of the movie to your cast. Extras comprise around 60% of your audience. Fill your screen De Mille style with hundreds - no, thousands - of extras, and watch those Dendy seats fill up on opening night.

- Make your debut feature a period piece. By putting the “art” back into “heart attack”, your film will have a ludicrous penny opera feel, and in the middle of your breakdown you can fool yourself into the belief you are making an important social document that will live forever.

- Whore yourself to whoever will listen: community radio, Quest newspapers, even the lowest midden of all media bottomfeeders, the student press. Do NOT, however, get drunk on red wine and call the Courier Mail in a shambolic attempt to whip up fake outrage. Words tend to lose their ironic inflection through a thick crust of tannin and cheese crackers, and the OFLC is not renowned for its sense of humour. Also watch how fast “simulated rape scene in Toowong Cemetery” becomes “gang bang on open graves”.

- Lie, cheat, steal, do ANYTHING to get your feature finished. “Exploitation” is the name of the game - exploit your cast, crew, friends, media acquaintances, and tell them whatever it takes to get the word out you need slave labour and free shit. Then give a tearful Oscar-winning speech thanking them at the premiere and they will not only forgive you, but pledge their undying support for your next project. Rinse, and repeat.

Wordy Mofo interview August 2010

2011-09-24T20:43:00.000-07:00

Farewell To Trash

Andrew Leavold interview with Lachlan Huddy August 2010, published in Wordy Mofo online magazine Issue One

It was almost “Titfuck!”—exclamation mark mandatory. “Schlockbuster” was another title jockeying for the prize. “Blackbastard Video”, “I Spit On Your Video” and “Video Sleazy” were all in contention, too. In the end, though, simplicity carried the day, and Brisbane’s first, finest and filthiest alternative video store was baptised Trash Video.

“It’s a good filter,” says owner-manager Andrew Leavold of the evocative moniker. “That kind of passive, mindless consumption that categorises most movie-watchers. It’s a good filter to scare them off.”

Since 1995, Trash has been the proud purveyor of everything beyond the flow of cinema’s mainstream. Shock, schlock, art, grunge, indie, cult, foreign, rare, grotesque or sublime—if it exists outside the realm of casual moviegoing, Trash is the place to find it. Burning to take in Microwave Massacre, the self-declared worst horror movie ever made? It’s in the Trash stash. Can’t track down Leni Reifenstahl’s 1930s Nazi propaganda Triumph of the Will for that modern history essay? Pick it out of the Trash. And while you’re there, why not indulge some nostalgia and plump for the Twin Peaks Season Three double-VHS pack? Yes indeed, Trash is everything the modern video shop isn’t: cluttered with obscurity, disorganised, and bursting with character.

But to speak of Trash is to speak of Leavold, its indefatigable founder; the store is but an extension of the man himself, for whom the creation and consumption of culture—popular and otherwise—is more than a business or pleasure: it is a way of life. And has been for a long, long while.

“Basically this was an idea that I had when I was ten,” Leavold says. It’s a July afternoon and we’re talking over the counter of Trash’s current store in Brisbane’s West End. To the left sit neat piles of rental DVDs stacked thirty and forty high; to the right the store computer is near-buried under posters and VHS and other bric-a-brac your local Civic would’ve sold off by now. There’s a touch of gloom in the air, but we’ll get to that later—for now there’s only Leavold in a Coney Island T-shirt, with his errant blonde hair framing a wild-eyed face, telling Trash’s tale. It is, he says, “a story of childhood obsession taken to ludicrous extremes.”

The son of a civil engineer, Leavold spent his early years globetrotting with a father who tended to accept “filthy overseas jobs” throughout the Middle East. Starved of pop culture care of the slim pickings on Arabic television, Leavold took his first step along the road to Trashy treasure with the advent of Betamax (a videotape format, for all you post-Gen X-ers). Late-night gems like “old fucking Vincent Price films” and “the most grotesque horror films that were just coming out as part of the Italian New Wave” infiltrated the Middle East through pirate video networks, the “betamax grapevine”—and found a spellbound audience in ten-year-old Leavold.

“The Indian guys who used to run the local video store used to wait for me to come in,” he recalls fondly. “I’d pedal up on my bicycle and they’d go, ‘Ah! We have a new zombie film for you. But don’t tell your mother!’ And they would feed me fucking vile garbage… It got to the point where my mother had written to every one of the video shops I was a member of saying, ‘Do not give my son any more horror films’.”

But it was too late for little Andrew: an idea had taken root. “All the time, I kept dreaming about having a video shop that had all these movies that I loved in it. This kind of anal obsession as a ten-year-old to control culture.”

It was an obsession anal enough to persist throughout high school and into his first job, during which he was “blowing every fucking paycheck on a pile of VHS.” When his trove hit critical mass—at somewhere around 2000 tapes—Leavold went public and Trash Video was born, its first home a little walk-up over indie music club The Zoo in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. It was a fine neighbourhood to raise an alternative video store: grungy, unpretentious and not quite suitable for the under-twelve set. But time waits for no cult film fan, and after five years, when Trash’s stock had more than tripled, the Valley had mutated.

Scott Anderson and I outside Trash Video Mark I, 1996

“Trendy fuckheads on bad drugs,” Leavold laments. “When all of a sudden you find yourself surrounded by stores that sell $80 fucking can openers, it’s time to go. The lease was up; we thought it was either sink or swim time. We either try to do this somewhere else on a larger scale or give up. And luckily one of our readers on our email said, ‘Why don’t we try West End?’ That was ten years ago.”

And what a decade it’s been. Trash’s stock has swollen to a horde of more than 16,000; a silent partner has come onboard as co-owner; a 2003 documentary—Escape From the Planet of the Tapes—has been made about the store and about Leavold; and a loyal, close-knit community of renters has entered Trash’s orbit. In the few hours I’m here, Leavold greets every walk-in with a smile, easy conversation or a few flicks reserved just for them: “Have I got something for you?” is a regular refrain. No clinical efficiency here; just a shared love of the movies, a gentle reminder of how unifying a force cinema can be.

Still, this is retail. It can’t all have been sugar and spice and everything nice. Can it?

“I’ve seen you rip up someone’s membership,” a friend and regular customer says to Leavold, smirking, before quoting, “‘Just get out! No! No, I don’t care what you say! Just get out!’”

Leavold is reflective. “Yeah. There have been a number of those public meltdowns...I hate a lot of people for years. I carry grudges. Anyone who transgresses the rules of politeness here.”

And what are those, I wonder?

“It’s based on ever-changing brain chemistry,” Leavold grins, with a good-natured twitch of the nostril.

There’s one particular memory, of course, that stands at the top of the Trash heap. “Worst customer experience,” says Leavold, “was probably having an elderly gentleman ask for rape-themed videos, specifically rape between a father and a daughter.” I guess we’ve all been there.

Outside Trash’s hallowed aisles, meanwhile, the past decade saw Leavold cement both himself and his store as cult cinema icons with Film Club, weekly screening nights across Brisbane that ran until 2006 showcasing the best, worst and weirdest of Trash’s back catalogue. He also launched Schlock Treatment, his weekly cult film TV show on Brisbane’s Channel 31—and added his own cult curios to the world of cinema.

2003’s Lesbo-A-Go-Go, Leavold’s no-budget homage to 60s sexploitation icon Doris Wishman (a woman oft-referred to as the female Ed Wood) is “porn without porn”, a cheap, tawdry faux-morality play that propels hapless heroine Sugar from one hideous travail—cemetery rape, drug addiction, rape-during-abortion—to the next before having her stabbed with a syringe and condemned by a priest as she’s dying on the footpath. Shot in grainy black and white and featuring no sync sound, Lesbo is as trashy in its delivery as it is vile in its content, and leaves you in need of a shower and a good stiff drink—right on the money, in other words. It’s elevated by a soundtrack just this side of kick-ass and a frankly awesome psychadelic colour sequence, and is a tremendously fun, sustained in-joke for Wishman fans.

Like any cult film worth its salt, Lesbo offended audience sensibilities and ignited a riot of ire amongst the moral majority—particularly when a drunken interview that Leavold gave to Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail left the mistaken impression that there’d been more than just simulated sex going on during a shoot at Toowong Cemetery.

“The article basically said we were filming gangbangs on open graves,” Leavold deadpans. “And immediately there was a shitstorm.” Quite sensational for a film which, Leavold thinks, could have scraped in with a PG-rating. “None of what you see on the screen is explicit. There’s no profanity whatsoever. There’s no onscreen salaciousness. It’s all implied.”

After three years the shitstorm had slackened enough to allow Leavold back behind the camera for 2006’s Bluebirds of Peace and Destruction, a fictionalisation of the lesbian vampire killing in Brisbane’s Orleigh Park in 1989. With $2000 from a generous Trash customer, Leavold set about crafting the tale of three damaged women who abduct a family man and murder him to drink of his blood.

“I thought, right, the only way to do this is to totally improvise it,” Leavold says. “Get two genuine…” He pauses, selecting his words.

“Crack whores?” offers the teenage work experience girl, familiar with the story.

“I wouldn’t say crack whores,” Leavold replies. “No, I would say two girls who are no strangers to the sex industry.” He cackles infectiously.

The girls may be no strangers to the sex industry, but they’re no strangers to credible emotion, either; Bluebirds’s documentary aesthetic is complimented by engaging naturalistic performances from its lead actresses—friends of Leavold’s then and still—and a fantastically foreboding score. Assembled with taut editing, it’s a snappy, authentic and brutally effective ride into Brisbane’s seamy underworld.

Then there’s the upcoming The Search For Weng Weng. If there’s a magnum opus in Leavold’s life so far, this is it: a guerilla doco about Weng Weng, star of For Y’ur Height Only, a Filipino spy thriller about a kung fu-kicking midget James Bond.

“Weng Weng was, I think, was one of those catalytic moments where cinema changes forever,” Leavold says. “Literally a bolt from the sky. I’d never come across a film that was so inadvertantly a masterpiece… Somehow that absurd image of a kung fu-kicking midget had a weird kind of humanity about it and I wanted to know where he came from, what his real name was, I wondered if there were other Weng Weng films.”

Filmed over four years and as many trips to the Philippines, Search is now in post-production, Leavold struggling to, “get across the surreal nature of the Philippines and the bizarre way that things just literally fell out of the sky during the search for Weng Weng in order to piece that story together… that layer of weirdness and serendipity that covers everything.”

In the meantime, his work on Search gave birth to Machete Maidens Unleashed!, the new documentary from Not Quite Hollywood’s Mark Hartley, which had its premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival on July 24.

“I signed [Search] over to a producer here,” Leavold explains. “She approached ABC. ABC went, ‘We’d rather have a more conventional, essay-based documentary on B-filmmaking in the Philippines, like Not Quite Hollywood, so why don’t we get that nice chap who made Not Quite Hollywood to make it?’ And I went, [sighs] ‘Fine’, graciously stepped aside, and Mark came onboard.”

Leavold’s time in the Philippines also seeded the idea for a fittingly spun-out feature film, which is now at second draft stage and has secured partial funding. “It’s about an Australian who goes to the Phillipines to try and make a dwarf kung fu remake of The Harder They Come, the Jamaican Spaghetti Western. Ends up losing his fucking shit, you know, Francis Ford Coppolla-style.”

And is there any better way to lose one’s shit?

Amid it all, his exhaustive research into Weng Weng caught the eye of Brisbane academia, and landed him a place in—of all things—a doctorate. “Griffith University said, ‘Why don’t you just turn it into a thesis? You’ve done all your research. Now just write the damn thing.’” So the directorial credit for The Search for Weng Weng just might read Dr Andrew Leavold…

With so many balls to juggle, it’s a miracle that Leavold can keep them all in the air and still have time for the store that started it all. But can he?

“You know,” he says, gesturing around the shop, “you spend seven to ten hours here, you have very little enthusiasm for anything else.”

Ah. Remember the touch of gloom in the air we were speaking about earlier? Here it is. According to Andrew Leavold, digital’s killed the video shop. After fifteen years as Brisbane’s—and Australia’s—largest cult video store, Trash Video is closing its doors against the harsh light of a changing media landscape, in which the likes of Foxtel IQ, Netflix and Bigpond Movies are rendering quaint local video stores, with their physical constraints and limited stock, all but obsolete.

“The idea of an old-fashioned video shop has well and truly had its day,” Leavold says, and it isn’t the voice of bitterness, nor defeat, but the voice of a man content to move on. “The onus now is on ownership. It just means that we’re consuming culture in a different way now. Much more immediate. And, I think, with the switchover of technology, that’s our cue to exit as gracefully as we can.”

With the day winding down, I finally take my leave from Trash. I’ve stayed far longer than I’d planned, but it’s an easy place to get lost in. I pause, peering down the aisles at the rows and rows of VHS and DVD, thinking of the films inside each, the weird, the enchanting, the scandalous. Somewhere here is the mutant fish baby from Corman’s Humanoids from the Deep; the mad, murderous, Buddhist Jew-burner from the nutso Czechoslovakian horror The Cremator; the prehistoric stop-motion wonders from dino-western The Valley Of Gwangi. Soon they’ll need to find new shelves from which to ply their strange nightmares and stranger dreams—and perhaps no-one will take them in. It’s a mournful thought, and I almost feel that words should be said, some goodbye prayer.

“Titfuck!” Leavold chirps to me in parting.

Says it all, really, doesn’t it?

Your Story podcast interview March 2009

2011-09-24T19:40:00.001-07:00

Your Story Ep 32: Andrew Leavold, Trash Video, Film Making and Filipino Search for Weng Weng

CLICK HERE for the Podcast interview with Ian Kath, March 2009

Today we talk with Andrew Leavold who has an alternative video store with nearly 20,000 tapes and DVD’s supplying all the odd, eccentric Andrew and Trash Video and obscure videos that have ever existed in all the genres imaginable.

Trash Video is the video version of the dusty old High Street Bookstore full of the old weird curios of the odd and eccentric that only the most passionate of owners can organise and know each of the individual items in the store. The vast majority of which aren’t available through the standard video stores.

The advantage Andrew feels he has over the internet downloads is due to the fact that most of what is available in Trash Video isn’t available on the internet and so he feels that he is insulated in ways that the major video stores are not.

Andrew takes us through the journey of his childhood in Oman watching bootleg videos and creating fake satanic rituals as a six year old to the development of an alternative view on film from other children. He then moves us to Australia where his now restricted access to videos caused him to start collecting the substance of his interests for himself that eventually evolves into Trash Video.

Trash Video is now an important part of the support for Andrews’ other passion into discovering more about the Filipino film industry particularly in the worlds shortest leading man “Weng Weng”.

Weng Weng was a black belt in Karate who was discovered and played in Filipino James Bond spoof films. The bizarre thing with Weng Weng is that he is 2′9″ (84cm)tall and for a time was incredibly popular in the Philippines including within the Marcos family. Andrews’ story of searching for Weng Weng is not only a story of a flash in the pan novelty Weng Weng but also a story of his own obsession for the discovery of this person and the amazing coincidences and famous people that he has meet because of this journey.

Now Andrew has funding for the completion of the documentary film that has been started and can look forward to returning to the Philippines to tie all the story line together for release for all of us to see. Hopefully sometime in 2010.

This is a story of someone having a dream with no comprehension of how to do it and being able to manage to pull it off.

Spectrum interview September 2011

2011-09-22T22:30:00.000-07:00

Courier Mail article 21/09/11

2011-09-22T22:28:00.000-07:00

"From Trash To Treasure": QUT buys the Trash Video collection

2011-07-30T00:01:00.001-07:00

From Trash to Treasure

QUT PRESS RELEASE 28/07/11

When the home of Brisbane's biggest cult film collection shut down last year, many were left wondering "how do I get my hands on the latest underground zombie offerings now?"

This is a question QUT film and television lecturer and resident horror expert Dr Mark Ryan also pondered but thanks to the formation of a partnership between himself and Trash Video's owner, Andrew Leavold, and Alice Steiner, a QUT Creative Industries librarian, B-grade film lovers and movie boffins need go no further than the University's library.

The QUT Library's collection of Trash Videos will give access not only to students, but the community at large, to one of the country's biggest collections of Ozploitation and art house films that had been lovingly acquired by Trash Video during its 15-year lifespan.

Dr Ryan said though the collection was not usual fodder for a university library, the QUT Trash Video collection was priceless in terms of education for his film students.

"From a researcher's point of view it's awesome to be able to have a collection like this - when I did my research I almost primarily used the Trash Video collection, so it's important not to lose that,'' he said.

"The National Archive didn't necessarily keep a lot of the obscure titles and main chain stores certainly didn't stock them either.

"In the past there was definitely a tendency to write out genre and B-grade films from Australian film history and university level teachings often focused more on the likes of Picnic at Hanging Rock and Crocodile Dundee. But in recent years there has been a rediscovery of our genre heritage and a renaissance in genre movies such as Tomorrow When the War Began, Wolf Creek and Daybreakers. As a result, film courses are increasingly teaching Aussie genre and cult-titles."

Ms Steiner said the QUT Trash Video Collection, which includes titles such as 1906 silent movie The Story Of The Kelly Gang, The Last Of The Knucklemen (1979), The Peter Weir Short Film Collection, released in 2005, and Ozploitation classics such as The Adventures Of Barry McKenzie (1972), Mad Dog Morgan (1976), The Naked Bunyip (1970) and Dead End Drive-In (1986), would "hand a life-line" to obscure titles.

"It's definitely a niche market. We aren't aware of any other university to have a collection as extensive as this one," she said.

"It's all about having the cutting edge resources and being able to break the divide between high and low culture. We don't turn our nose up at any material because at the end of the day our students are learning about the entertainment industry and this is certainly entertainment."

Mr Leavold, whose collection has even attracted the likes of legendary Australian actor, the late Charles "Bud" Tingwell, said genre films were slowly being recognised as a genuine art form in their own right.

"Ten years ago 'genre' was a dirty word at the university level. Now we're at a stage where we are pioneering into forgotten film territories," he said.

"The kick for me is keeping the old, obscure, neglected, classic and forgotten titles in circulation."

QUT Staff and students can borrow the titles from the QUT Kelvin Grove Library and community members can watch them for free in the library's new media rooms or borrow them by becoming associate library members for an annual fee.

Cult Treasures Rescued From Trash

Story by Katherine Feeney, July 30, 2011 - 12:45AM [Syndicated via The Age, Brisbane Times and Sydney Morning Herald]

Good news local film fans, West End's much loved alternative movie store Trash Video is back.

Sort of.

The Queensland University of Technology has acquired a hefty range of classic cult films from Andrew Leavold, the colourful cinema guru and filmmaker behind the now-closed movie library.

Over 500 zombie flicks and Ozploitation reels like Alvin Purple, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Mad Dog Morgan are now firmly ensconced in the university's archives at Kelvin Grove.

Mark Ryan, QUTs horror movie expert, said that the swag was a boon for students and the public who will be able to rent titles or watch for free on campus at the library's new media rooms.

Dr Ryan said many of the movies collected by Mr Leavold over his shop's 15 year history were no longer in general circulation.

"The National Archive doesn't necessarily keep a lot of the obscure titles and main chain stores certainly don't stock them either,” he said.

“From a researcher's point of view it's awesome to be able to have a collection like this.”

Mr Leavold, director of the Filipino B-film industry documentary The Search for Weng-Weng, said the acquisition was a sign academia had come to appreciate the merit of genre cinema.

"Ten years ago 'genre' was a dirty word at the university level,” he said.

“Now we're at a stage where we are pioneering into forgotten film territories.

"The kick for me is keeping the old, obscure, neglected, classic and forgotten titles in circulation."

Dr Ryan said film historians had a tendency to write off genre and B-grade films from Australian film history.

He said university level teachings often focused more on the likes of Picnic at Hanging Rock and Crocodile Dundee, though recent years witnessed a renaissance in genre movies such as Tomorrow When the War Began, Wolf Creek and Daybreakers.

“As a result, film courses are increasingly teaching Aussie genre and cult-titles," Dr Ryan said.

“When I did my research I almost primarily used the Trash Video collection, so it's important not to lose that.”

Chad Ferrin interview 2011

2011-06-01T21:42:00.000-07:00

Monster talks to horror maestro Chad Ferrin

Interview & intro by Andrew Leavold, originally published on the Monster Pictures’ website 26th May 2011

“I’m gonna fuck you til you die!”

Without doubt one of the most visceral, cinematic and violently, dangerously original talents to metamorphise in the digital underground, Chad Ferrin’s work is finally dragged kicking and screaming above ground in Monster Pictures’ recent releases, the no-budget psycho giallo Easter Bunny Kill! Kill! (2006) and the beyond-psychedelic Someone’s Knocking At The Door (2009).

It’s been a long and arduous road for Minnesota-born Chad, working as a production assistant on Halloween and Hellraiser sequels in the 90s, and mortgaging his home to finance his first feature via Troma Films, the no-taboos-spared minimalist nasty Unspeakable (2000). Despite never having received a single cheque from Uncle Lloyd, he hooked up with Troma regular Trent Haaga for a second film, The Ghouls (2003), a double-edged title referring to cannibal mutants living under downtown Los Angeles, and the drug-fried gonzo “stringers” who film them. Audiences took notice of Ferrin’s assured direction and the bone-raw performance from lead stringer Timothy Muskatell, also in Unspeakable as both scat-obsessed therapist and mohawked, de Niro-like pimp. Once the dust settled, however, Ferrin, Muskatell and producer/actor Haaga found themselves stranded once again in the no-budget ghetto with a slasher script and only five grand to translate it to the screen.

You know what they say about Necessity being the toothless, ragged mother of Invention. With Easter Bunny…, Ferrin and co pulled a rabbit out of the hat: a bizarre, maddening, unpredictable, perverse rabbit-masked riff on the “holiday stalker” sub-genre. The ever-valiant Muskatell snorts cocaine off hookers’ tits, charms his way into a single mom’s home for the weekend, then grants his crippled pedophile sidekick unlimited access to her palsied sixteen year old son. And that’s just the wallpaper. This ain’t no sad, self-reflexive, pre-branded, by-the-numbers exercise in an overtrodden genre pandering to the “so bad it’s good” brigade. Instead you’re served a film that’s so far out on its own, at turns grimly humorous and plain grim, and always with a savage cinematic eye and an intuitive grasp of what makes an audience of true believers howl for more.

Drenched in blood, buggery and drug-induced psychosis, Ferrin’s follow-up feature Someone’s Knocking At The Door chronicles five college kids experimenting with a reality-altering substance locked away since the Seventies, when its guinea pigs and serial killer sweethearts John and Wilma Hopper went on a fucking-and-killing-and-fucking spree. Trippy visuals and cruelly unnerving sound design maintain the film’s “what is real?” scenario right to the bitter end, and a bona fide budget signals yet another exponential leap in filmmaking from a mutant talent that’s only begun to grow bigger and scarier.

WATCH THE 30 MINUTE SKYPE INTERVIEW WITH CHAD FERRIN HERE

Lady Terminator's Barbara Anne Constable interview 2010

2010-07-31T18:44:00.001-07:00

Trash Video’s GRINDHOUSE 101 presents

WENG WENG vs LADY TERMINATOR!

8pm Friday 6th August at Tribal Theatre, 346 George St Brisbane

LADY TERMINATOR (1988) PLUS Q&A! "First she mates...then she terminates!" Ultra-bizarre Indonesian ripoff of Arnie's original Terminator with more sleaze, buckets more gore, and some of the most eye-popping action scenes to come out of South East Asian exploitation! PLUS as a special treat, meet Lady Terminator herself, Barbara Anne Constable, as she introduces the movie and goes one-on-one with Trash Video's Andrew Leavold after the film!

PLUS... THE IMPOSSIBLE KID (1982) The return of Weng Weng (Agent OO), the two foot nine James Bond of the Philippines, in the sequel to Grindhouse 101 favourite For Y'ur Height Only! Ticket only $8.

BARBARA ANNE CONSTABLE Interview with Andrew Leavold

[originally published in Rave Magazine 03/08/10]

“First she mates…then she terminates!” the posters screamed outside New York City’s fleapit cinemas back in 1988, and for once it wasn’t just some Z film producer’s huckster hyperbole. One can only imagine the 42nd Street crowd’s reaction to bizarre Indonesian splatter-sci-fi Lady Terminator, with the plot of Arnie’s first Terminator grafted onto a supernatural horror tale of a South Seas Queen possessing an ‘American’ anthropologist.

Gorgeous, big-haired Barbara Anne Constable plays both Tania and the Queen’s unstoppable killing machine, mowing down hundreds of innocent bystanders with her AK-47, while - in an unexpected riff on the original Terminator - fornicating like a banshee. Breathtakingly surreal, hyper-sleazy and violent in equal doses, and crammed with one over-the-top action setpiece after another, the film is about as loopy as Asian exploitation gets.

London-born Barbara grew up a professional dancer in Australia whose leg injury took her to Hong Kong and into the world of modeling and fashion reporting. After a chance audition for an Indonesian film company, Barbara was offered the lead role in a local Terminator ripoff: no acting experience necessary, but physical endurance was a plus. The film’s cartoon-like Indian producer Ram Soraya “met me at the airport and held up a big wad of cash in US dollars to the customs officials when I arrived. So that set the scene.”

Without warning, Barbara was plunged into the Wild West chaos of Indonesian B-filmmaking. “Everybody were smoking joints on the set, people were off their nuts! I don’t know how they got anything done.” Barbara was expected to perform her own stunts, and as a dancer that didn’t pose a problem. Even so, her pain threshold was pushed to its limits. “I had so many near misses, like half car bodies flying and missing me by two centimetres! I nearly got killed so many times during that film…” After three grueling months of clinging onto car bonnets and being burnt by bullet squibs (“serious, second-degree burns!”), the final shot was Barbara kicking through a glass door. “The glass should have shattered into small pieces. It was a real pane of effing glass!”

Her ankle was skewered by a long shard of glass, just scraping past her Achilles tendon. Production was shut down for a month – with Barbara on full wages – while a military hospital stitched her up and she regained the ability to walk. “Then I shot that last scene, the candy glass broke the way it was supposed to, and we wrapped.

“Ram Soraya called me a couple of years later and said, ‘We want you to do a comedy.’ I said no. ‘I’ll pay you double?’ ‘No, I’m not coming back. I’ll never get out otherwise!’”

Barbara accepted her role –and her fate – as Lady Terminator, on the understanding that the film would never be screened outside Indonesia. Two years later, Ram Soraya sent Barbara a Betamax copy – and a press clipping the New York Times. “I was like, ‘You’re fucking kidding me?’ I was mortified.” Even more disturbing was the ‘possession scene’, in which a brutally primitive CGI snake slithers its way into her – ahem – bikini bottoms.

“They wanted me to fall onto a bed. I was tied up, and they wanted me to look like I was possessed. That was the scene. They didn’t say, ‘Afterwards we’re going to put this friggin’ snake thing that goes up your vagina…’!”

Is Barbara still mortified, I wanted to know. “I’ve seen it since with friends over a few drinks, and just laughed all the way through it. It’s a crack-up! People were like, ‘That’s YOU? That’s weird!’ I know!”

Barbara Anne Constable introduces Lady Terminator at Tribal Theatre on Friday 6th August, followed by a Q&A with Trash Video’s Andrew Leavold

John D. Lamond interview 2002

2010-05-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

John Lamond at his computer, in front of a slide for his infamous "Mondo" film Australia After Dark (1974)

8pm Friday 4th June 2010 – Trash Video’s Grindhouse 101 presents

AN EVENING WITH JOHN D. LAMOND

Tribal Theatre, 346 George St, Brisbane

The King of Ozploitation presents his two favourite films, the salacious Felicity (1978) and the mondo shockumentary Australia After Dark (1974), and gives a detailed expose of his career as sleazemonger supremo during a detailed Q&A with Trash Video's Andrew Leavold.

Tickets $15, both films rated R (18+).

CONFESSIONS OF A SLEAZEMONGER: JOHN D. LAMOND, "OZPLOITATION" KING!

Phone interview with Andrew Leavold, early 2002

(tape starts mid-conversation about the Australian film industry)

John: They sort of refer to sexy films as hanky panky…

Andrew: Oh my God!

Yes, I did. Voluntarily. They said, oh, I suppose you have to have that for the box office. I said, no – I want it.

“As a filmmaker, I demand it!”

They always look for some sort of subversive thing. That you’ve been made to do it by a distributor – in fact, the distributors left to try and hold me back. That’s the real incident. I love it too. You know when people say – I used to have a double answer. I did an interview with Playboy once – the Playboy girl, I mean the woman interviewer from Playboy, said, “I suppose that with all those lights and things on the set that doing nudity is not at all sexy.” And I’m saying, “Don’t you believe it!” If on the other hand they say, “Gee, it must be pretty sexy making those films,” I say, “Nah, with all those hot lights and the crew…” (laughs) You always go against it. I remember Graham Blundall once, when they were touring Australia with Alvin Purple. At about the umpteenth woman journalist saying, “You don’t have any sex with any of the people in this film, do you, really?” “Yeah, I fuck them all.” “I can’t put that in!” And he said, “Well – don’t!” Because he got so tired of them saying, did you get a fat or anything. He got devilish after a while – I did too. I used to love it.

I could imagine it would have been a bit of a subversive act, being a filmmaker that made adult films and horror films, back in the Australia of the 1970s. You would have been a bit of a pariah.

Before I did Australia After Dark, I promoted an American film called Dynamite Chicken.

With Richard Pryor?

You remember that? Well I hired the Palais Theatre in Melbourne and stuck the film in there. The ads were bad in America, so I got a beautiful Danish model in Melbourne, stuck her in a nun’s habit and bared her legs. I did a sort of rendition of that famous nun poster that they had in America, like a nun flashing herself.

Yeah, yeah!

And Don Chipp, who was Minister for Customs, got outraged and banned the ad, said I upset the Catholic Church, I upset Billy McMahon... Don Chipp got up at the Queensland Exhibitors Convention and said, “He’s a blot on the good name of film exhibition and distribution!” I though, geez, I’ll never work again. And Alan Finney, who I didn’t know at that stage, met me at a dinner. And he said, ahh, you’re the guy that’s in all the trouble. It was front page in the papers, you know. I get out of the plane in Brisbane and the newspaper headline said FILM MAN ANGERS CHIPP. And I said, “Oh, someone else” – and it was me again! And I thought Jesus, I’ll never work in this town again. And Alan Finney from Village Roadshow said, “We saw your – ah – publicity.” And I said, “Oh yeah?” Dived in. “You wouldn’t like to do the same thing for us on A Clockwork Orange would you?” (laughs) And they sent me around the country promoting Clockwork Orange. They knew I could get publicity. I used to be Wonder Boy in those days. The minute you could upset the film censors about anything – Midge Pinnington was one of the film censors. I continually upset her, with ABC Of Love And Sex ads. Australia After Dark, because they’d have women writhing in sexy underwear and all that sort of thing, in the trailer. And they’d come in balls and all. If you wanted to get any publicity, you’d put something in the ad that they’d object to, and then act like a hurt child. Ring up Truth, ring up the Mirror, the Sun, and say they’d attacked your artistic integrity! You know, when I made Pacific Banana, some woman parliamentarian in South Australia – because the South Australian Film Corporation were in it – said, “Oh, the pornographer! We’re in bed with a pornographer! Outrageous! The people who made Storm Boy are in bed with a pornographer!” So I said, “Step out of Parliament and I’ll sue ya!” Because they never do anything. But I used to thrive on that. Because you could get them every time. TV, radio, press – in the end, you’d be fending it off. But when you’re a success in your area and offend their delicate sensibilities – well, they tend to get you onto the blacklist of evil bastards. Part of some leftwing conspiracy to denigrate the country…

To corrupt the morals...

…capitalist, corrupt, an agent – you name it. I think I was on the front of Truth more times than the racehorses. Shocking, isn’t it?

Did you find yourself without work after Pacific Banana?

Ah no, not really. The thing is, in chronological order, I did Australia After Dark (1974), ABC Of Love And Sex (1978), Felicity (1979), Pacific Banana (released 1981), Nightmares (1980), Breakfast In Paris (1982), a couple of other small ones. And then I ended up doing Sky Pirates in Australia in 1983, ’84. And that wasn’t sexy at all. So they didn’t know how to handle that. Then I nipped off to Hong Kong and Thailand and made some more stuff. Did a kung fu film called The Sword Of Bushido (1989) with Richard Norton. I produced that and Adrian Carr directed it. I spoke to him, he emailed me the other day, he lives in LA now. He was the editor on Phar Lap and The Man From Snowy River and that sort of thing. But I didn’t make, I didn’t make a film in Australia after 1984.

When I spoke to Ross Dimsey the other day, he said he didn’t know that you were in Singapore. And when I told him that I thought you were making martial arts movies in the Far East, he said, “Well, I think that’s where John always wanted to be.”

I love the Far East. Have you ever been here?

Oh, as a kid. I used to go across every couple of years, spend a bit of time in Hong Kong and Singapore, Bangkok.

I love Bangkok, love Hong Kong, love Nepal… I love Japan. The Far East is exciting, and then of course there’s no unions, there’s no tax problem, you can work whenever you like. People have fun, it’s exotic. It’s hard to make St Kilda Road look exotic in Melbourne! Doesn’t lend itself to a kind of gloss, does it?

So I suppose going across to Hong Kong to make Felicity, that must have been a bit of a dream come true.

Well, it actually was in more ways than one. Because when I was fourteen – do you remember The World Of Suzie Wong? I loved that film, and I loved the work of the director, Richard Quine, who used to do a lot of old stuff in the fifties with Judy Holliday. He directed World Of Suzie Wong. And I fell in love with Nancy Kwan, who was the lead. She’s now in a – I actually ended up getting to meet Richard Quine. Subsequently, the silly bugger committed suicide about a year after I met him. Not for that reason I might add. I had lunch with him in Hollywood. I saw Nancy Kwan after that, and we kept in touch, and I said, “We’ll have to have dinner when we go over there. You look fantastic.” She’s in E.R. sometimes now, on TV. And The Joy Luck Club, films like that.

Yeah, I know she was on TV advertising a pearl skincream.

Byron Kennedy, my late friend who did Mad Max, the producer, him and I went over to Hong Kong in ’73 on a world trip, and I thought, “I’ve got to make a film here, it’s wonderful.” So I put together the money for Felicity. Went back there in ’77, I think, after I’d made the first few films. That was a joy, because we found all the locations there. We came back to Melbourne, and hired the studio where they were about to do Prisoner, in Nundawading. We brought the lead actor there, cut together a beaut little film. That was absolute fun, you know.

The thing that really strikes me about Felicity – well, there’s two things. For one thing, the film is beautifully shot. I mean, the cinematography is absolutely gorgeous. And the other thing is, you really notice that the film hasn’t dated that much, because it’s not so saturated in seventies fashion. And it’s such a classic story as well.

You are right about the cinematography. I was thinking just the other day, gee I hope we can get a print of this on DVD. Apart from the fact there are a few mistakes in Hong Kong, and she lands in a 707 rather than a Jumbo – this doesn’t matter at the time. Hong Kong’s wonderful at night. You’re right, it doesn’t actually date that much. If you went out and did the same story today, it’d probably look much the same. We’d use the trams, the can-fan, the ferry, neon signs – it’s still the same city.

You said on the phone the other day that you were trying to make a beautiful soft core film, like Emmanuelle.

Well yeah. I loved the Emmanuelle films. There are two great loves of my life, filmwise – the Orient, and France. Go to France, there’s beautiful food, lovely culture, art, paintings, and I love the music in France. I also love the fact that they’re able to do – when people were doing what were called pornographic films, the French have always been able to make their films NOT be pornographic, they’d be erotic. They were classy – the most they could ever say was ‘softcore’. And the way they did it, they made pretty images that looked like a Singapore Airlines TV commercial, they had nice fashion, good photography and nice music. And that way it dresses it up and makes it all chocolate boxy. Because they did it with The Story Of O and they did it with the first Emmanuelle, which was partially in Bangkok. The second one which was in Hong Kong. And we’d been influenced by those films. We’d seen some of the other films that were made around that time. There was a similar film called Bonenza – it was German. But it didn’t have the same classiness. I thought, if I can be influenced by the French filmmakers, like Just Jaeckin who did the Emmanuelle ones and Story Of O. And they look good. I thought okay, the way to do that on a film budget is to go somewhere exotic. Make sure the people are pretty and they don’t have pimples. Don’t be sordid in any way, have pretty music and exotic locations, nice lighting and nice fashion. So even though it was a tiny film, we came up to Hong Kong and we got all the clothes tailor made for them, so that they fitted properly. We had a little art director in Melbourne do the sets so that we had them just right, everything looked just perfect. In most sexy films, even overseas ones, essentially they’re low budget. And they’re treated badly – they get crappy art direction, they just get in a room, turn on all the lights and they do it. We thought, well no – I even drew little storyboards, where I went, when we do the massage parlour I want to do this, I want to accentuate this, and have lots of scenes. And always colour! Gary Wabshot, who’s a very good cinematographer, was interested in light sources – whether to have little fairy lights on the wall and so on. Each scene in Felicity had a source of lights, we’d play with light and colour. But it didn’t look like the sets were fake. Even one of the Film Commission women said to me one day, “It doesn’t look like this was done in a studio.” I said, “Well, that’s the idea. It’s all meant to be Hong Kong.” I mean, you can probably pick which parts were studio. But we built the massage parlours, we built hotel rooms. They’re all back in Melbourne but nobody knows. When she’s picked up in the Mercedes at the airport, goes through Hong Kong on a ride – that’s an identical Mercedes with a Hong Kong licence plate on it. All the other shots that are in Hong Kong – we just got our Mercedes, put another Chinese student in a cap, bromided the number plate in Hong Kong and brought it back to Melbourne.

Amazing!

And I found out later that’s what they do on REAL films! Keep it simple – I think we did because we had over a year to put together the money. It was a labour of love, and it was a tiny budget. At the time, we thought, tiny for everybody else, but not for us. In fact, it’s harder to make a low budget film – you’ve got to make the money thin out. But you do clever tricks. When we were filming the floating restaurant in Hong Kong, they get off the boat, get into this floating restaurant. But when they’re in there, it’s back in the studio in Melbourne. And the art director said, “Which direction do you need to look?” I had to say, this way, not that way, we need a right angle, we need this, two tables, one bowl of rice, two sets of chopsticks, two people here and an extra there. And he’d say, “Oh, that’ll only cost this much.” Whereas a lot of people, when they’re not disciplined, they’ll build the whole Chinese restaurant and then just shoot in the corner. We built what we needed. That way you can spend the money elsewhere. We went out to Hong Hong with high speed night lenses. That was the first time they were used in Hong Kong. And we went with available light. So we didn’t need a lighting truck. Consequently, we didn’t cut streets off or anything, we just wandered off, radio-mic’ed the people, gave them hand signals and filmed them in the real crowd! And if you got the odd person looking into the camera, which they even got in World Of Suzie Wong, you can rationalise it by saying, oh, they’re looking at the pretty girl! Even the big films, even now, done in New York, just in the distance, out of focus, in the background you can see about 75 onlookers all watch. But we didn’t have that problem, because we’d shoot with a small camera, hide behind rubbish bins, shoot with available light. So there you are.

So the fact that you’ve made a classy erotic film, rather than a cheap-looking porno, means that not only can you get away with more, with the censors, but you’re also able to sell the film overseas a lot more easily?

You can, and we did. For example, when we put it up for sale in the Italian market, we had to beat the people away with a stick. The sales agent first of all didn’t want to handle it. She saw the theatre full of people that I had – she said, “I’ll take it.” We had about three or four distributors in Germany vying for it, half a dozen in France, quite a few in Italy. And they treated the film right – because we gave them only the bits we needed. We had nice stills done, and we controlled the advertising, the way it was handled. So it was obvious – someone said to me once, it was kind of ‘Emmanuelle-esque’! And that way, for instance, we ran for three months in Paris with it. And when it went on cable there, it was about the eighth most popular film of the year. And that’s because – it wasn’t thought of as being porn. It wasn’t X-rated, it was R-rated, so a lot of the ‘beautiful people’ would get along to it and feel all right.

So it’s a film with sex in it, rather than a sex film.

That’s right.

And you got away with the British censors too.

Yeah.

The notoriously savage British censors!

Well, Sir James Thurman phoned me and he said {very posh accent} “Mistah Lamond, looked at your film.” And I thought, “It’s someone taking the piss.” And he says, “I’m not going to cut it.” “Very pleased to hear that.” “It’s not sleazy, like the Scandinavian things or some of the other people. Very nicely done. Now – all I need are the birth certificates of the girls to prove they’re over age.” Once I’d realised that he was genuine, I thought – gee, that’s sort of a backhanded compliment in a way! The censor ringing me up from England. Because I thought oh, it’s a friend putting on a voice. Because I didn’t think censors did that. Bit of a film buff, too, you see – and I thought, that’s good stuff. You know, he’s not just saying, “Right, sex film – cut it!” Looking at the way it was handled. I think that’s the way the French did it too. They make something that’s classy. Maybe the censors are mesmerised by the good quality and go, “We can’t cut that.” It’s a lot different to things like Deep Throat – you know, they turn on the lights and everybody screws.

Garish close-ups and things like that.

Casting the extras from McDonalds (laughs) I have to bite my tongue!

Tell me about Glory Annen. How did you get hold of her? She’s pretty much perfect for the role.

She is. And Mike picked her out. Like the casting couch story – you don’t really go there and sleep with the girl and give her the part in the film. What happened was, my wife who had done – we weren’t married then, she’d gone back to the theatre, she knew about acting. I said, “Dianne, I want somebody who can act as well as look good and will do it. We’ve got to find somebody uninhibited.” We went over to England, and I got a casting person to work for us. And we met Koo Stark – remember, Prince Andrew’s girlfriend before she was married.

Yeah. She’d done a couple of sex films around that time, too.

She was good, but I had a feeling… we had breakfast with her one day, and my wife said, “Lovely girl, but will she do it?” She’d been in several films. And we saw a few other people. And then Glory came in. She was Canadian, and I thought, oh no. She’d lived in London for years. She put on a British accent, and I thought, well, she’s got to be sort of a cultured Australian – I thought, there’s no such thing! I said, “Well, will you take your clothes off?” And she said yes, but wouldn’t do it there. I said to her, “When we do it back in Australia and in Hong Kong, there’ll be twenty people in the room. This is my wife here. If you’re not willing to take your clothes off now, you’re not going to feel comfortable in front of a crew.” But she was. So she was happy. She had a lot of proper theatrical acting training. She’d done a film before called Prey (aka Alien Prey), there was some nudity in that too.

That was a thing about alien rapists.

Something like that.

Yeah, I know the one.

I said, “Glory, we want to treat it seriously. We want to take a lot of care and attention. But I don’t want to be hassled. I don’t want you to get out there and start re-negotiating. So if you’re not willing to flash your breasts now, and show pubic hair – I know that you’re not going to do it in the studio. You cannot be coy.” I said, “My wife will be there, but she’s not going to be your guardian angel or anything. She’ll be doing continuity, and there’ll still be blokes around, we can’t keep clearing the set, because we want good lighting, good sound, good makeup. Some of the people will be male. She said, “That’s all right.” Funny thing, when she came out, she took all her clothes off straight away and said to everybody, “Okay, you’ve seen what I look like now,” put her robe back on. From time to time, she’d wander around naked, and she wouldn’t even – I mean, you’d look but you wouldn’t stop and turn because they could see it any time. And she was great, because there was somebody who (a) would do it (b) would look good, and (c) could act. One of the most disastrous things is if you get somebody who gets out there and starts going “Oh, I don’t really want to do it, I don’t want to show my pubic hair, the gaffer is looking at me.” The gaffer just wants to make money and get home, he’s had his look. Now he’s going to plug in the lights. But she was good like that. I suppose she gave me perfectly what I wanted, you know. As I said, an actress who was slim in the body, because you have to get somebody slim because they photograph pounds heavier, someone uninhibited who would do it and enjoy it, but still be a credible actress. It’s quite hard to do, because there’s plenty of good-looking actresses who won’t take their clothes off, and there are also dogs who can act who won’t take their clothes off. Many different combinations, and getting all three is hard.

Did she make any movies after that?

She did little bit parts in Superman and things like that. She still does casting over there, and she does writing and cartoon work. I talked to her last night, actually. She’s a hoot. Still looks good too, because when she made the film, I hate to talk about her age, but she was about 26.

You can sort of tell. That she’s no schoolgirl.

She sort of passed for it for a while though. She still looks so good.

That’s probably another reason why the film travels so well, because everyone in it has their own mid-Pacific accent.

Barry Humphries, in his autobiography, is quoted as saying he doesn’t know why Australian actors – he doesn’t mean this current crop, interesting now that Russell Crowe and Guy Peace and Hugh Jackman, they all perform well overseas – prior to that, when an Australian actor was in a film, they didn’t think they were Australian enough so they used to exaggerate it all. Everything’s a random upwards inflection.

That’s the Neighbours syndrome. It’s a shocker.

I mean, you hear that now in England. Some of the kids in England are developing that sort of accent because of Neighbours! They think we all live like that! ‘Struth’, shocking.

Now, John Michael Howson makes an amusing cameo in a number of your films. He’s not too bad as…

… the pervy gardener and his campy Adrian guy in the clothes and underwear scene.

What compelled you to keep putting John Michael Howson in your movies?

He’s actually a very good writer, he used to write satire for the Ray Taylor Show years ago. At the time, my wife and I were good mates with him because we worked in Roadshow Publicity and he used to be a film buff. And he’d get on and do it, we’d say we need a campish role, or a pervy gardener. And he’d just get up and do it, he’d know his lines, look good, do his showbizzy thing and then buzz off. He always was good value. People knew him in Australia and they didn’t know him overseas, but then overseas they just thought he was good, for what he did.

He was perfect in Nightmares, as the nasty savage queen film critic.

I haven’t seen John Michael for a few years. The last time, we were in LA, because he lives over there. He’s a funny guy. Whenever you put him in a film it was fantastic, because he’d get on all the TV shows and he wouldn’t shut up. A walking publicity machine! Even if he just walked on and smiled for one shot, he’d be a bloody full-boned campaign for you, the Don Lane show, the Bert Newton show, on Derryn Hinch in the morning.

I noticed another thing in Felicity, that you start to recycle some of your images, from ABC Of Love And Sex.

Yeah, that was pure Roger Corman-style economic necessity.

Sitting in the cinema watching ABC Of Love And Sex, but also almost recreating the sex in a lift scene. The bit where Felicity is having sex in an elevator, and they try to beat the 22nd floor?

That’s actually the lift in Roadshow in Melbourne. The theatre was the Tracks Cinema in Melbourne on Toorak Road, which had much better seating than the crummy old cinema in Hong Kong at the time. So they were filmed going into a cinema in Hong Kong, the interior of the theatre was in Melbourne, and they were looking at the sexy stuff done in Sweden in my other film! Miracle of budgeting. You’ve heard of a film being done on a shoestring budget? Well mine was made on a G string budget.

Let’s get back to your background., Before you started working with Tim Burstall and John Murray, what were you up to in the Sixties?

I was a film editor. I started my career in Melbourne at the old Channel O, what is now Channel Ten. In the props department. I was the cheapest person on the staff, lowest paid, youngest person. Then I left and I worked for the various other film companies in Melbourne that used to churn out TV ads. And I worked for places like Ajax Films. Up till 1971 when The Naked Bunyip came out, I always liked the idea of barnstorming around, putting on a show, because at that stage people said Australian films don’t work. And Philip Adams and John Murray hired me to put on The Naked Bunyip. And I saw there was an audience for Australian films, and if you put the right things in a film it could work. So in 1972 I had a choice, either work for Crawford Productions, or I could work freelance doing film publicity for Roadshow. And I took Roadshow because I thought it would give me an insight into the passage a film makes, from when it’s made till when it reaches an audience. So I’d go out to various drive-ins, from Broken Hill to Surfers Paradise, and I’d promote films and see the audience come in. When Alvin Purple came out, I did that for Roadshow. I mean, I didn’t create the campaign, but I’d barnstorm it, and you’d see the audience turn up and like it. I remember standing up at the back of the theatre with Tim Burstall with the first paying audience, at the Hoyts Cinema in Melbourne. Allen Finney, Tim Burstall, Graham Blundall and I stood up, unseen by the audience. And I remember Tim saying “Jesus, is this going to work?” Because people had theories but once you give the audience what it wants, they’ll embrace the local stuff.

And I suppose what I did from that day on, I worked through 1972, ‘73 with Roadshow, and I went around the world with Bryon Kennedy and looked at all the film production and distribution set-ups we could see on a world trip. And I came back busting to make my first film.

So mentally taking notes the whole time.

And for years I collected stories about weird things in Australia. Remember the old film Mondo Cane, about the weird wonderful and way-out things around the world, with a phoney baloney narration? I thought to myself, I could do an Australian one of those. So I thought of the name Australia After Dark. I unashamedly copied the style of Mondo Cane, I borrowed a 16mm print of it and ran it on a closed circuit cinema thing and stopped and started the projector and looked at it. It ran on a sort of cycle – pathos, humour, oddity, nudity. I thought okay, what I need to do is shoot about fifty sequences, cut it into something coherent and pacey, and made it on the same sort of thing. I’d have something sexy, then something odd, then something really way-out, then something light hearted. And always do it tongue in cheek, and not have any sequence in the film run longer than about two minutes. And anything sexy, I’ll make it way-out or pretty. I did that nude underwater stuff, with all the tropical fish. I shot it 16mm with a very tiny crew. And when we were shooting it, Hexagon – who were a Roadshow production company, they put up part of the money – and I shot it in 16mm with the intention of blowing it up for commercial release. When the film was finished, I didn’t like some of the sequences, so I reshot a couple. Then Graham Burke, the head of Roadshow, said a couple of things, “You don’t want to have Aboriginal rock paintings in it,” so I took them out. And then I changed a couple of scenes that had witchcraft, I put witchcraft down near the underwater scenes. Did a final edit on it, blew it up to 35mm, made twenty prints of it. And I remember Terry Jackman, from Birch Carrol and Coyle, he said to me, “Your film’s a pile of shit, but it’ll make a lot of money for us.” He didn’t really mean that, but he DID really make a lot of money from it! And we ran that, and when that worked really well, I wanted to do Felicity. We got off to a false start on that. George Miller was going to originally direct Felicity.

Really?

We went to Hong Kong and were preparing it, but it became obvious that we were thinking of going in different directions. He wanted to do Mad Max and I still wanted to do Felicity. So we parted amicably and he went off and made Mad Max! So I made ABC Of Love And Sex in the interim after Australia After Dark, and then Felicity. But all the time in the seventies that I worked at Roadshow, there was an understanding that I’d work in their publicity department. I used to write and produce all their radio and TV commercial spots, I’d make their trailers. Between those times, I’d leave for about eight weeks and go and make my film. Then I’d come back and promote my own film from within. So I had a wonderful experience - guaranteed the release of my films in Australia, retain the overseas rights to my film, and work for Roadshow for my bread and butter. But I couldn’t do that after the first three films, because filmmaking is really fulltime. And I guess I went out on my own from 1977 on. So that’s where I got to. And that was when I made Felicity, in 1977. Scary.

In Australia After Dark, there’s that great Mondo Cane tradition in there of sliding in fake footage.

(mock outrage) NO! You don’t think any of that’s FAKE do you?

Total shocker! I shouldn’t even be suggesting it! (laughs)

You mean the witchcraft sequence?

Well, that springs to mind, yeah.

There was some real witchcraft sequence in there, with a very interesting intelligent Sydney witch named Eddie Beorge.

Could you tell me more about him?

He was a very intelligent man., very interesting to interview. There was some nudity involved in that, with the girl who worked with him. But we wanted to be a bit over the top with the entertainment. We’d heard of a witch cove down in Melbourne in the forest, and we managed to find it, with the help of certain people I knew. Who put on robes. And built props (laughs). And brought in fog machines. And it all happened together, and cutting the two together it looked a bit Hammer Films-ish.

Exactly! You expect the devil to appear on a rock.

I know. Shocking, wasn’t it? I’m still conscience stricken about the whole thing.

It looks like there’s a bit of Swedish footage in there as well.

I don’t think so. You mean the blonde girl in the titles? No, we blew the film up in Sweden. When I made the film in 16mm, at that stage you couldn’t do terrific blow-ups in Australia but it became obvious that my film’s money was going to be made at the drive-in. You need really good 35mm prints. So my cinematographer recommended a studio in Stockholm that did the best blow-ups from 16mm in the world. They did stuff for Ingmar Bergman, a TV series called Scenes From A Marriage, which they cut together and made into a feature film. And it looked fantastic. So I took the 16mm negative over there and blew it up to 35mm and also made the prints. Hence the Swedish thing. And when I do ABC Of Love And Sex, I shot most of that in Australia, but went back to Sweden, used the lab again, but shot a lot of the sexy stuff in Stockholm. So that’s the connection, but there’s no Swedish footage in Australia After Dark. We just blew it up there.

Now, ‘Madame Lash’ seems to make an appearance in quite a few Australian programmes back in the seventies.

She was an intelligent woman too, she was a university graduate, highly intelligent. Just liked whipping people.

Like Germaine Greer, only with a whip!

She was actually good stuff. She put on that Madame Lash thing with the rack and I just filmed it. Since I paid to build the rack…

I’m sure it was well used afterwards, too.

Oh yes.

But I guess you might say it was faked?

Oh no, I’m not saying the Madame Lash stuff was faked. It’s just that Madame Lash seems to have been a bit of a cool celeb back in the early seventies. She’s like the first media star from the S&M scene.

Now, onto The ABC Of Love And Sex: Australia Style. You said that there was about 20 percent Swedish footage in there.

I’m not sure of the actual percentage. What we did, we went over there and filmed real sex, and stuff like this very plain looking woman…

Brigitta Almsron.

From Swedish Sex Research. And it was interesting, because I asked her about women’s orgasm problems, masturbation and that sort of thing. She seemed to delight in telling that stuff.

That’s strange, because that’s probably the most unerotic footage in the movie.

I know, Bridgit didn’t like watching it either! She said orgasms were normal, watching films. Masturbation was normal. I think they were worried about getting pressure for that.

You remember Marilyn Chambers? She and Chuck Traynor came to Australia and I went to Melbourne and Sydney with them to do a video when they were promoting the film Insatiable. I was nearly going to make a film called ‘Marilyn Chambers Makes It Down Under’, but I couldn’t get anyone to finance it.

Oh my god! Insatiable was an absolute blockbuster.

Heavily cut in Australia, I can tell you. I’ve still got an autographed video box of that, with her lips on it. I might auction it off sometime. Her and Chuck Traynor – they were non-smokers, very health conscious. They just screwed with other people. Or she did. They were nice people. One of the biggest clichés is people who make sexy films are weird. My experience is that some are, and some aren’t. Probably in equal ratio to people who don’t make sexy films. I’m one of the nice ones.

People always used to say that Chambers and Traynor had one of those weird Svengali-like relationships, that he had a Svengali type hold over her. Now, back to ABC Of Love And Sex. Did you ever actually release a hardcore version of it? Overseas?

I think it was probably cut just about everywhere at the time. Lots of it, totally cut in Australia. They get into bed and have sex? In the Australian version they’re shaking hands and saying pleased to meet ya. They’d be welded together, but they wouldn’t go up and down. Because it would have been obvious it was real. Which it was. In Sweden I got about six groups turning up in a sex club, lesbians on a bed, all that sort of thing. An it was real. You couldn’t get away with that in Australia at the time. You would have been clapped in irons.

The animated intro is quite amusing too.

That was done by a guy called Alan Osborne. He’s a film buff, a huge collector of film memorabilia. Very good at animation. It took ages to do that, all by hand, stop motion claymation, takes hours and hours. It took as long to shoot as the whole film! I remember waiting on that after the film was finished. It looks good, though, doesn’t it?

It made a great bookend to the film though. All those little blank faces, waiting to be enlightened.

I only wanted to do something different. I used to get fed up with everybody in Australia, who kept wanting to do films that had to be valid, had to be relevant, had to have integrity… And if it was entertaining, well that was all right too. But I’d rather get away and make it entertaining. Cos I didn’t want to keep justifying the content of my films, because the audience likes them, why do I have to justify them to a film critic or a journalist? If you go to Scandinavia, people don’t worry about sex, but violence, they worry about.

You were telling me there was an attitude coming from the film industry in the seventies that if you were using foreign money, and you were successfully selling your films overseas, that you were almost deliberately gearing your films towards an international market, that it was somehow selling out the Australian industry. If you didn’t make films that had a distinctly Australian feel, then you were almost letting the team down.

They did, they had this sort of patriotic thing going on. But I used to answer it like this – when you go and see Dirty Harry, Warners Brothers don’t say, “See this great American movie!” They just say it’s a great film. Obviously the American films are very ‘American’. But even now, Raiders Of The Lost Ark – American and British actors, shot in Tunisia and in an English studio, and finished off in post-production in America. What was it, American, British, what?

Star Wars is another classic example too.

And I remember when I made Felicity (a) with private money, and (b) partly overseas, I remember a clown from one of the film commission bodies saying to me at the time, when I had to get a certificate of origin for the film, “Your film’s obviously not Australian.” I said, “How do you mean?” He said, “Well, it’s Chinese, isn’t it?” It’s like saying Out Of Africa is an African film. Or Lord Of The Rings comes from some strange place that doesn’t exist. How does it get its certificate of origin? It belongs with the filmmakers, the creative people and the money. I said, “Felicity was an Australian production made in Hong Kong with an Australian crew, and a cast from around the world. Not Chinese, not Canadian, not Italian.” But that was the way it was. Especially if you had government money, they’d say the film has to be very, very Australian. Unlike if you make a film in England, they don’t demand it be very, very British. You can trot off and shoot it in Tunisia if you want to. Like The Mummy was made in Morocco with American studio money by an English studio. They haven’t had that nationalistic hang-up the way that they’ve had in Australia. They’re mad about the artistic integrity, and want the films to be very, very Australian, down to its bootstraps. As long as the money comes from local sources. If the money comes from overseas, then they go the other way – “Ah, you’re only engineering it so it works overseas.” Now, Clint Eastwood wouldn’t be accused of engineering his films to work overseas. He’d say, well I come from California, but I don’t just want my films to work in California, I want them to work in Stockholm, in Germany, Italy, France… And Australia used to be very outward looking like that. Then they went the other way, but they HALF-did it. Me, I couldn’t have cared less. Even some of my early films, I’ve always had overseas influence. I’ve done the blow-up overseas, or I’ve filmed a bit of it overseas. I’ve now filmed in Sweden, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Canada, England, Easter Island, Tahiti. I like exotic locations. And I like the film to travel across more than one national boundary. It becomes boring, staying parochial.

They also seem to have had a hang-up that if the film is somehow entertaining , that it can’t be ‘ART’.

That’s right, that’s the other thing. Art versus commerce. See, in the case of Mad Max, it was snuck overseas and sold before it was shown in Australia. And when you do that, when you get it shown overseas and somebody likes it, then they dare not rubbish it. Funny that, isn’t it? I thought most of those hang-ups had gone now. I mean, you can do the other way. With Australia After Dark, I capitalised on the Australian response to Alvin Purple and Stork. With Felicity, the story started in Australia. But it didn’t have a kangaroo, and it didn’t have slouch hats, it wasn’t overtly Australian. It wasn’t anything. Those films become easily saleable, but I didn’t stop and think things like “I won’t show things that are deliberately Australian.” Pacific Banana was very Australian. They just come out a certain way, they’re not really contrived in my case. They cost so little money, nobody ever said to me, you’ve got to do this or you’ve go to do that. I was never even conscious of it. I was only conscious of the audience. But it is a buzz when you go along the Champs Elyses in Paris and see your film running in a theatre there. “Well, somebody must have liked it, in a place other than Melbourne.” But I’d hope those hang-ups would have just about disappeared now, have they?

Which movie comes chronologically after Felicity? Is it Nightmares or Pacific Banana?

Good question. I shot them back to back. I shot Pacific Banana, and then I shot Nightmares. And I edited them virtually together.

Was the script for Pacific Banana there first? Was the script already done before you decided to do the film?

No, the idea was there and I went to the South Australian Film Corporation who unfortunately after the criticisms of me in Parliament about being a pornographer, said they would only be involved with the film if I toned it down and it was sanitised. Which was regrettable.

When I first saw it I think I was about 13 and I saw it on late night TV. I couldn’t believe that Sid James’ son from Bless This House was in an Aussie comedy.

The film was sort of like those British films, the Confessions Of A Window Cleaner or Adventures Of A Taxi Driver, things like that.

It’s almost like that film comes a couple of years too late, because that whole sex comedy cycle was pretty much over by about 1976, 1977.

That’s right, because the second Alvin Purple movie (Alvin Rides Again) was already suffering for not being a novelty.

Pacific Banana was pretty much a deliberate attempt to do another Alvin Purple.

Well, I knew Graham, he was good fun. Helen Hopkins thought of the idea, of ‘Banana Airlines’, and I said, “Let’s go to Tahiti.” And I went there and had a look and we shot some locations in Tahiti. The plane never went there, the plane was only ever in Melbourne.

That old DC-3?

We painted ‘Banana Airlines’ on it, flew to a different airport, we did takeoffs and landings, flew over the bay, getting the sun in the background – which is a hard thing to do in Melbourne – and we integrated it with aerial footage and other footage done in Tahiti. And it worked all right. It was a bit hard to do, because when you go overseas with a low budget, people want to stay in nice places and you can see the money going out the door. Just in overheads. We should have quite frankly gone to do it in Dunk Island or somewhere like that.

But you wanted to do it in Tahiti?

It was part of getting the money, to do it in Tahiti. I said, “I think we could pull the plug on it and do it in Queensland.” They said, “If you do that we’re not going to put up the money.” So I reluctantly went off to Tahiti. On a film, when someone else is meddling, you make a lot of silly compromises. If it had been just my film, I would have said, “Okay, we’ll go to Tahiti, but just for three days. We’ll do the background stuff, and everything else we’ll fake in Queensland. A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree, you know? In Felicity, when she’s walking along the beach at the end, we were shooting that on Land Howe Island. A typhoon struck, and we had to come home to Australia. It was going to rage for five days, it would have blown our budget. So we duplicated the beach house and stuck it on a beach in Victoria and used interiors from the studio as planned. A lot of the exteriors… the woman in the Chinese hat walking past is my wife in Chinese pajamas and a cane hat! Roger Corman stuff, you know? That’s the way to do it.

I suppose by the time you’re making Pacific Banana you must be a master at producing something out of nothing. I mean, you can tell the film is very low budget, but there’s some amazing things you can do.

Because I was a film editor, you learn. Even in Felicity, when she gets out of bed, walks down the hallway and sneaks a look at the other couple making love in the bedroom. Well, chronologically I did her bedroom where she’s awake and gets up, walks out the door and then I did the hallway. That was the first day. Then they repainted her bedroom, redecorated it, and we used her room again as the second bedroom with the lovers in it. So she’s really looking into her own bedroom. And when you do that, you can say, “Right, we need that wall.” So that wall then became the wall for the massage parlour, painted another colour. If you know what you’re doing, you can do that again and again. Even in Sky Pirates, we had five jeeps, and it was the one jeep, painted with different numbers. As long as there weren’t two jeeps in the one shot it was never going to matter. When we did Sky Pirates we had a couple of DC-3s, one which was mainly in camouflage, the other one in another colour. Well, we painted plastic strip-off paint on an old DC-3 from Sydney, we painted one side with camouflage, the other side with the other colour! And the one sinking in the water is actually a six foot model sinking in my swimming pool in Melbourne. That’s the way you do it, otherwise you can go broke.

The thing I think most people remember from Pacific Banana is the song. The song is fantastic.

We did a little animated banana thing for it in the film, it was good. They sat down and wrote it together in a couple of days, and I thought this will be good, and it was, so they recorded it. They were all happy. It’s good when things like that happen.

Cos I know that the film’s got a fanatical following in Australia. I mean, that’s your definition of a cult film right there, a film people will watch over and over again. And the song is the thing that I think gets most people.

I don’t even have a copy of that anymore. Well I’ll be damned.

And the script as well. I mean, it’s pure British sex comedy, absolutely dripping with innuendo. It’s just one after another. The one line that I could not get over is when he’s talking about having sex with Lady Blandings, and he says, “It was like waving your arm in a warm room.”

Shocking! But the audience does like that. I love James Bond films, the old ones are still good. But the Pierce Brosnan one, The World Is Not Enough, has the best line. It’s when Denise Richards says “Somebody’s going to have my arse for that,” and Bond says, “First things first.”

I should have done stuff like Austin Powers years ago. I wanted to do more films with Graham Blundall, something like a Tom Jones thing but do it on Norfolk Island, among the old ruins and make a really bawdy Rum Rebellion movie. But when the second Alvin Purple didn’t work, no-one was interested in it. But I’d still like to make a Woody Allen style neurotic comedy in Australia, because in Australia they don’t make comedies about normal people. Everyday people, you know. I’d like to do a Woody Allen type film about a neurotic guy in Melbourne, working a normal job.

Blundall’s perfect for those sort of roles, too. He’s that kind of "every schmuck".

That’s right. It would be good fun. There’s still plenty of things to do, isn’t there?

Yeah, absolutely.

I used to wag school and see films on sports days. I’d see two films on a Wednesday afternoon ‘cos I hated sport. I got honours and high marks so I didn’t have to worry. And then on Saturday I used to see films at 11, 2, 5 and 8, running from one theatre to the other. I saw everything that ever came out, for years. And then when I worked at Roadshow, we used to see all the films pre-censor. Which was wonderful. You’d pick up a print of Jaws, even though Roadshow didn’t release it, everything would come in and Roadshow would see it. And I’d definitely get involved. All pre-censor, all months before release. People would say, “Oh, I wonder what A Star Is Born will be like?” and I’d say “I saw it three months ago.”

Nightmares is one of the few films in that short lived Aussie horror boom that came just after Patrick.

Nightmares should have been a lot better. We used the Steadicam camera for the first time in Australia on that. It was all right, but it didn’t have any story. The technique was all right. Brian May’s music was great.

I figured that he was taking a lot of cues from Bernhard Hermann.

I am a Bernard Hermann freak, as was Richard Franklin was. He was even more of a freak than me, even has some of the original recordings from the studio. But I love his stuff too. I played it all for Brian May, and said I want that sort of stuff. At that stage, the only people who knew about Bernard Hermann were film buffs and composers. But I loved that sort of stuff.

With Nightmares, I was a bit disappointed. It was dumped by the distributor. No-one tried, nobody did anything. But it should have been better. Because it was a real quickie. I had the chance to make a real quickie, they said if you don’t take the money we’ll give it to somebody else.

So Colin Eggleston put that one together, did he?

Well, actually I did, but he wrote it. And John Michael Howson had the original idea for setting it in the theatre, and I virtually said to myself, “You have six weeks to get a film together. And a few hundred thousand, and if we don’t do it, someone else is going to get the money.” Looking back on it, I wish I had more time and more money.

There’s a great cast – except for the lead.

The girl?

She’s AWFUL.

The girl was a last ditch stand. Because, would you believe, we picked a girl who was Mickey Rourke’s girlfriend at the time. She had a car crash on the way to the airport and had to replace her at the last minute. Pity, for the film. Gary Sweet’s in that, his first film.

Yeah, he’s pretty good in it, too., I see Briony Behets makes a small appearance in it as well.

We shot that in three different theatres in Melbourne. It was interesting. We shot it anamorphic, with the Steadicam.

Have you ever seen the print that Roadshow Video put out?

No.

Suffers badly. It’s so badly cropped. It’s one of the worst pan and scans I’ve ever seen.

They annoy me when they used to do that, because when I was in the country they could have called and said come and do it yourself. I’d often wondered about that. That’s why I want to do the DVD jobs on all my films. If you ever convert that to widescreen, it’s going to work a hell of a lot better than it does. You see half heads, you see action happening off screen… one of the worst pan and scans. And when you said it was done in anamorphic… I mean, it would have looked beautiful in the cinema.

So was it a rushed edit job?

Yeah, pretty well everything was. That was back in the old tax regime. You had to get the money, make the film, be finished by a certain time, you couldn’t take longer.

You can actually tell there are a few sequences towards the end of the film, which just don’t really go anywhere.

The kills are all right, you know when the girl falls off the catwalk. When the girl runs in the rain at the end of the film… I think more attention could have been given to the script. I think the techniques were all right, that walking around the catwalks and the creepy music would have worked had there been a proper script. Had we been more careful on that, it could have been really good. The money was there to do only certain things.

It’s a movie that’s got some great bits in it, but the overall effect is just a little less than that. There’s the whole red flashing light from the police car, that red flashing light proceeding any of the knife attacks. That’s great stuff. Then you chuck Brian May’s music on the top of it, and it really works beautifully.

Those things work better than the story though, that’s the problem. I think we had a technique in search of a story there. I like the killings, and the Steadicam was good stuff for the time.

Just going back to Pacific Banana for a moment, was the narration in the script, or was that an afterthought?

No, we had a narration in there. It wasn’t in the first draft of the script, but before we shot it we planned to have a narration. Because I like that sort of thing, it somehow makes it ‘legitimate’.

Especially when you get someone like Noel Ferrier.

He died a couple of years ago, didn’t he? I worked with him on Eliza Fraser.

Could you tell me a few stories about the experience of taking The Naked Bunyip up and down the country?

Of course, I wasn’t there when it was shot. I came along afterwards. The funny thing was, you know, the thing with Barry Humphries looking out the window of his suburban house as Edna Everage? Well, Queensland never got the joke. Because Barry Humphries loves showing Australian kitsch as bad taste, because we were showing it in northern Queensland they didn’t get the gag. It didn’t look like bad taste to them, it looked like a classy home! All the gags went over their head. At that stage it was rather unsophisticated in northern Queensland.

There were queues for it a mile long at different times, I think because there was novelty value. There’s very little nudity in it. But there’s a few snatches of it, haha. There were glimpses of nudity, not much. When you think of the full frontal nudity in Australia After Dark, nothing like that in Australia at that stage. It’s not a brilliant film, but it’s interesting. The second half ran too long. John Murray would kill me for saying so. Because he is a pioneer, he dragged Australian audiences back into a theatre for the first time in years to look at an Australian film.

It’s two hours.

About half an hour too long, because there’s an interview with a callgirl and it goes on forever. Now I’m probably being unkind, because I’ve seen the film about a hundred times because I had to screen it.

I think you probably know it almost as well as John, what’s going on in that film.

Filming The Naked Bunyip (1970): director John B. Murray (middle) and producer Phillip Adams (right)

Pretty good the way it was, for the time. But now it would not even raise an eyebrow on television. Because it comes across as being old fashioned, it’s not the fault of the film. For its time, it was outrageous, it was people discussing sex and showing things on screen.

Did you have to put a film up for a certificate at that time? I think there was something that went up on posters that said “Suitable for adults only.”

Yeah, they didn’t have the R, but it still had to be classified.

So you still had to go up in front of a censorship board?

Well, you didn’t have to turn up yourself, just give them your film. The funny thing was, when Australia After Dark came out, I found out they wanted about fourteen cuts in it. I found out you could go in front of the censorship board and argue your case. I objected to all the cuts and I won every time, they didn’t cut anything. Because they were intimidated, people didn’t usually turn up to argue, they could safely cut it.

You know they now charge you an extra thousand dollars if you wanted to dispute a certificate? It’s a thousand dollars to get a film classified, and then if you want to review their decision, it’s another thousand.

Freaks!

That’s why most distributors don’t even bother, they just go right, we’ll cut it. They’ve pretty much got all the film companies over a barrel. So what sort of places were you showing Naked Bunyip in?

Townsville, Rockhampton, we went up the Queensland coast from Surfers Paradise upwards. It took about six months to do it.

Town halls?

Usually rented cinemas. We’d go to the cinema owner, they were independent cinemas that were a bit run down. We’d say look, we want to hire your cinema for a week. And he’d say no, no, I can’t make enough money out of that, I would have made a thousand dollars anyway. And we’d say how about we do a deal where we go halves, or whatever, after costs. But I wouldn’t want to do it again. I mean, it’s all very exciting for a while, but eating a cold dinner every night, you end up saying “I’d rather give it to a distributor now and negotiate a better deal.”

I suppose at the time no-one would have touched it.

It was like an experiment. That worked. But I remember saying to John Murray at the time, and Philip Adams, “Okay, we’ve proven we can crack it, that we can put on a film made in Australia where the audience turns up. Now it’s better to do it properly, deal with a distributor.” And that’s what happened with Tim. He used the same projector we had used with Naked Bunyip, put the film on in the Palais, proved to Roadshow there was an audience, they paid for the blow-up of Stork, and it ran in the drive-ins and did very well.

And I think that’s where it really started. I don’t count films that have come in from America. Wake In Fright was an Australian film from a couple of years before that worked, but it wasn’t big. Just okay. The first thing really done for years that worked was They’re A Weird Mob. And I shared a flat with Michael Powell’s son Kevin, I think he still lives in Canberra. His father made that one, and the other one was Age Of Consent. Essentially they were British films made in Australia. Nothing wrong with that. But there really hadn’t been an Australian made and conceived film for years.

But why was that? Because there wasn’t any money there?

I think two things. I think there wasn’t any money there, and people didn’t think there’d be an audience. What happened was, there was a process – John Murray was a pioneer and proved there was an audience. Tim Burstall verified it. Not to mention The Adventures Of Barry McKenzie – I did the same thing, I went around a few states and promoted that a bit for Philip Adams while I was working for Roadshow. Those films, Stork, Alvin Purple, Naked Bunyip, Barry McKenzie – they got audiences back into films in Australia. They were ones that proved there was an audience.

And a mass audience, too, not just a cult audience.

They didn’t just do well, they did fantastically.

It must have been a very exciting time.

It was. There were a lot of things influencing it. I mean, we didn’t have colour TV at the time, so it was still a novelty to see a film in colour. Well, not a novelty. But you couldn’t see a film in colour on TV. Plus the R certificate – films like that were a novelty to the screen. With the second Alvin Purple movie they made one mistake – well, it wasn’t funny enough, but also they made it less sexy, because they didn’t want to lose any potential audience, “we want people under 18”. So the second one wasn’t rated R and it flopped, fell on its arse after the first month. The first one ran a whole year in Melbourne, and the second one started the day the first one ended. But once the word got out, straight away…

We used to find that with the drive-ins. If the film was a dog, whatever it was, it would go to the drive-in on Thursday and if it was no good, everyone would go to Hoyts on Friday. Or vice versa. You’d tell your friend, and he’d tell his mother, and that’s the way it would work.

So after Pacific Banana and Nightmares, you make a few more films in Australia, and then you decide to piss off overseas.

Yeah, I think I did A Slice Of Life (1983), which was a TV film with Robin Nedwell, and Sky Pirates. Then I did Sword Of Bushido and a couple of films overseas. It’s actually a lot of fun making a film overseas if you can get the money together. There’s no Film Commission trying to control your money, you know, if it’s made in Singapore “it has to be Singaporean”. It’s more of the real world.

So it’s a lot more exciting making films overseas now?

I think it is, but I don’t like unions, and I don’t like to not work on weekends. And I like one day off, but I don’t feel the necessity to finish at 5 or 6 at night. Two days off and have coffee breaks and all that sort of thing. When you film in Thailand there’s none of that. You have a big lunch, no coffee breaks, you have a situation where one day of the week comes along and provided you’re not religious and don’t miss the church on Sunday, that day may be Wednesday. They have Buddha’s birthday in Thailand and that’s about it.

So you really do feel like an independent filmmaker.

I guess so, because even though I came out of distribution – see, I like reading about Spike Lee and those people who do films on credit cards, because I’ve done all that. I’ve sort of done similar versions of that, I did Sword Of Bushido and stuck it all on my Diners Card. For the first three months getting it together, because it’s not going to happen otherwise. You can wait for the film commission. I can remember going once to a film commission in Melbourne after I’d made Sky Pirates. Big film, 4.2 million dollars. The first film to have a prospectus in Melbourne, everybody copied me afterwards. Michael and I put that film together with all of our money, our own dough. We were the biggest customers of Film Victoria, using its studio. And I went into Film Victoria and I asked for a deal on development. I said, “Look, give me fifty thousand, I’ll develop a couple of movies. If you like them, stay in, if you don’t I’ll give you the money back with interest.” No, it had to be the old ‘fill in the form, go to the board, we’ll give you three and a half thousand’. I leaned across the desk and said to the guy, “Lift your Venetian blind and look behind you.” He said, “What?” And I said, “See that bank ATM machine on the corner? I can go over there, punch it, eight anonymous numbers on a machine, and five grand’s going to drop out of it, and they won’t even get to read the script.” So see you later! And that’s true. That’s the trouble. I think one of the things that became bad about the Australian film industry is that producers became totally reliant on government money, to the point where they wouldn’t make the film unless the government gave them the money. I’ve never been in that position. The films I’ve made, I’ve put my own money in them – sometimes the very thing that gets a film going is the money you put up on your own first. Because you don’t want someone saying, yeah that’s a good idea, here’s the money. What if they say it’s a bad idea? Does it mean you’re so uncommitted you don’t make the film? Put it together. Did you ever meet the guy that went to all the video shops in Australia and raised the money for his film? Apparently he went up the coast and went to all the video shops and said, “Look, stick five grand in the film and I’ll give you videos back when I’m finished and a percentage of the film.” I think he raised quite a bit of money.

I’m doing it at the moment. I’m putting together, I’m trying to put together a hundred thousand US so I can prepare a film. I’m just going to do twenty investors at five thousand each, because if you do that, you get the money together, no-one interferes with you, and you can give the people back their money with a profit. If you went to the Film Commission and tried that, you’d be going through seven years of red tape. And then they’d say, “But we still have to like the script.”

We’re doing a film noir film called Dark Days. We’re going to do it in a beach resort in Patia. Sort of like The Postman Always Rings Twice. And it’s about this guy who’s infatuated with the beautiful wife of the German owner of this resort there. The film noir thing is very successful. Doing it all in this resort in Patia. And my son and I and another guy are writing it. He’s directing it, I’m producing it, the third guy’s editing it. We’re all experienced in the business world of film. It’ll be us and about ten investors. And we’ll own it. We figure if we shoot it for a price, the least we can do is double it. We’ll do a Coen Brothers, a Blood Simple, something like that.

That was made on the smell of an oily rag too.

But those are the sort of things that in a way - you know, John Carpenter’s best film is Halloween, where he did everything himself. He and his wife did the music. They hired Donald Pleasance for three days, scattered him throughout the film. They got Jamie Lee Curtis, who was a non- entity then, went to a location and put a mask on a bloke and used the Steadicam. The one we used. I got the inspiration for Nightmares by looking at it.

All you’ve got to do is have a good grasp of filmmaking and you can make something that should cost two or three million, for a hundred thousand.

You know what we’re doing? We’re putting together seven hundred thousand US dollars, and half of that’s deferrals. We’ll raise the cash through ten investors, shoot the film in Thailand, edit it in Thailand, do post-production in Thailand. We can do everything in Thailand at a dirt cheap price. I worked on Oliver Stone’s film Heaven And Earth there, I represented the completion guarantors when they were making it. In a small capacity. But I’ve worked on three films in Thailand and I’ve got a British art director who lives there, who did The Killing Fields, Good Morning Vietnam. Steve lives in Thailand, and I’ll get him, my son, a cinematographer, an editor, we’ll go and stick the whole thing together. We edit on AVID, and do the whole thing on a couple of Apple Powerbook computers. Keep a low profile, a small group in Thailand. The Thai crews are wonderful, most of them speak a bit of English and they’ve done scores of films. You can go and make a film there for about half what you could in Australia. And have more fun!

Without people peering down the back of your neck!

So if you want a grip job, give me a call! We’ve either do it just before or just after July.

Hey, the one thing I didn’t ask you about was your appearance in Alvin Purple as the projectionist. I mean, that must have been the ultimate kick in the teeth for the censors.

They asked me to do that. It sounded like a hoot to me. I said I’d be honoured to do it. Didn’t get paid for it, didn’t mind.

And the fact that you’re screening a porno film in a court room, there’s so many levels of irony there.

Well, I did a Cinema Papers interview once, they took a photo of me in a plastic raincoat coming out of an underground cinema. I don’t mind, I’ll take the piss with the best of ‘em! You know, you can get rubbished in your home territory and then still be appreciated overseas. Felicity got good reviews in Italy, France, Germany… I thought, it’s nice to know the Broadmeadows Times might like it, but it’s not worrisome if they don’t.

As long as you know there’s a cult following here in Australia.

It’s good, I appreciate it. It’s nice to know.