Australian cinema. The key to this genre is silence. Well used. Think Candy or any other movie that's about slow decay/drugs in Sydney/fucked up family relations. They all utilise silence. Wake up. Make cup of tea in flat in Cronulla that has no bed just a mattress. No sound. Kettle boils. Silence. Look across at note on fridge "I'm leaving. Caserole in fridge". Silence. "Fuck!". Get smack out from top drawer and shoot up. Look at ceiling. Silence. And that my friends is a good, honest, piece of filmus Australiana or as I like to call it 'movie about smack in Sydney'.
I have the perfect idea for a Filmus Australiana. I have a mate called Perky. He's sitting in a pub (make that an RSL) in Sydney drinking a beer in a rugby top, stubbies and some thongs. He's smoking a durrie and he looks a bit red around the eyes.
I walk in. Perky says "Fucking took ya time".
I order a beer and pull up a seat next to him. I am wearing a business suit and my hair is greasy. I probably have a stie on my left eye because this will convey to the viewers that I am stressed/disheveled.
Silence.
"Karren's left me" I say.
Silence.
"Left? " Perky says and sucks back a builders mouthful of beer.
"Fucking half ya luck. Have a fucking cry." Good movies say fuck a lot. i've known this for a long time. I mean a long fucking time. Good songs also have swearing as well. Turn them up when the swearing comes on.
"Lets go up the coast ya poof". Cue footage of us driving up to northern NSW in a grey rusted Falcon.
Later Perky will rape a girl, I'll shoot smack; ring my girlfriend's mum from pay phone who won't let me talk to my girlfriend who has our kid. I will say "Fuck!" and bang phone against the glass in carpark at night. We will have a car crash and the movie will end.
Critics will say "Can we only make one type of movie" when reviewing 'Grey Lines' and I will know that I have succeeded in making a good solid thinking man's piece of sub-successful yet earnest Australian film which each video shop will stock two new release DVD copies of.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
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4 comments:
★½
These days, there is a conventionalised formula for the achievement of realism in film: lots of rough-and-ready handheld camerawork, a largely unprofessional cast drawn from the same street-level milieu in which the story is set, and improvised dialogue that builds around a vague scenario that only later in the editing suite assumes real shape.
Radically different, however, is the path to cinematic vérité that the Director has taken in Grey Lines, his First directorial feature. Working from a screenplay that had been finely honed through almost a decade of development, taking on a cast of the best known C-list actors from the Antipodes, encouraging extensive character research, and working through each scene in an unprecedentedly lengthy rehearsal period, He manufactured a film in which absolutely nothing has been left to chance - and yet the final product has all the appearance of fresh spontaneity. The silence is beautiful and it's a miracle of constructed naturalism, making the great, if ultimately inconspicuous, effort which has gone into creating it seem both heroic and not a little mad.
Don't forget the rape scene! That was the best to shoot!
Whatever film you make the Sunday Times will give it two stars and say it needed Bruce Willis
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