This extraordinary story over the weekend about Canadian customs seizing three films destined for Inside Out in Ottawa is quite staggering, especially considering one of the films, the charming and innocuous “Patrik 1.5”, was rated PG – see trailer above.
Hopefully Inside Out will take this up with a higher authority to find out why they’re being singled out for punishment in a country that has such a gay-friendly reputation.
I continue to be amazed at the mild panic which seems to occur in officialdom whenever something gay enters the picture. There’s an odd streak of conservatism in New Zealand when it comes to ratings – “Teddy” managed to achieve an M for mature audiences with a note warning about “adult themes”, and my previous film “Quiet Night In” managed an R16.
It’s enough to make me want to resurrect the baby massacre sequence from the cutting room floor.
Hollywood has a grand tradition of de-gaying novels it translates to the big screen, and it sadly seems that New Zealand has begun to follow suit with “The Vintner’s Luck”, the latest film by “Whale Rider” director Niki Caro.
The film hasn’t been critically well-received, but reports that the book’s author Elizabeth Knox “cried for days” when she saw that a central gay relationship had been totally removed from the film version has fuelled the drubbing. GayNZ.com reports that the gay plotline was filmed but then removed from the final version, which is even more disappointing, and smacks of censorship from a jittery distributor…or someone else.
Whether GLBT people are being reduced to stereotypes or merely erased from existence altogether, it seems clear that we will need to continue telling our own stories on screen for a long time yet.
The New Zealand premiere of “Teddy” at the Out Takes festival in May was pretty special. We sold out the Auckland screening, and headed up to cast member Alan Granville’s URGE Bar for an after-party – a rather interesting experience for heterosexual family members, and the beginning of a very long night of celebrating.
An audience containing a substantial number of people who knew Alan guaranteed a laugh that has happened nowhere else in the world: apparently his friends and acquaintances found it amusing when it was revealed that his character Phil’s day job is a lumberjack. A little unfair for a man who’s taken part in charity boxing matches, but there you go…
The following week we headed down to Wellington for the screening there, but we sadly couldn’t make it to the Christchurch screening. We were very honoured to receive the Audience Award for Best Short; there were a lot of great films in our programme and throughout the festival so thank you to everyone who voted.
“Fighting Shadows” is a project I worked on for Mental Health Awareness Week this year. It’s the first record I’ve produced since 2004, so I was honoured to be asked by Johnny Matteson, the writer and performer, to step in. You can download the song for free here. The clip above is a mini-doco about the making of the record.
The song was inspired by a Mental Health Foundation research project of the same name which looked at “self-stigma” – how we can be held back in life by the way we feel about ourselves. For people with experience of mental illness, these attitudes are fuelled by the stigma surrounding mental illness in wider society.
We were privileged to have some well-known New Zealand talent working on this song, including Betty-Anne Monga from Ardijah, Gordon Joll from Herbs, and engineer Nigel Foster, who has worked with Exponents and Strawpeople. Craig Warne did a fantastic string arrangement for us, which was played by a quartet from the Auckland Philharmonia.
Had a great day on Saturday auditioning for my new film, “Communication”. We started at 10am and went through till just after 5pm, somehow managing to slot in a lunch break.
We’re working with a casting director this time, Amanda Rees, who has been fantastic. She lined up a great array of talent on Saturday for our two main roles, all of whom worked really hard through some emotionally demanding material.
Our deadlines on this film are pretty tight – we’re shooting on the first weekend in December, so we’re in full mode of assembling crew, finalising the cast and panicking over little things like haircuts, shooting permits and making sure I’ve got a system that’s capable of editing HD footage without exploding.
I’ll talk more about the film in the coming weeks. We’re excited about the story, which some people may find a little confrontational. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, here’s the best audition scene ever:
Who would have thought that a children’s TV host could become one of the most chilling characters in the history of low-budget horror?
Yes, it’s Friday the 13th today, and horror fans the world over should commemorate the fantastic performance of Betsy Palmer in the original – and best – “Friday the 13th”. As soon as that woman steps out of the jeep, you know the nightmare is just beginning:
Those who criticise “Friday the 13th” as a derivative and cheap knock-off of “Halloween” miss the point of why it works. Firstly, it works because it’s cheap: the lurid colours, available light shooting, basic documentary-style camerawork (including bone-chilling point-of-view perspectives) and a general lack of polish that lessened as soon as the series was picked up by Paramount and had increasing amounts of money thrown at it for the sequels – the 2009 reboot included.
Here’s the original trailer, voiced by the irreplaceable Don Lafontaine:
While Frameline was pretty full-on, we thankfully also got time to see some films. “An Englishman In New York” was a great opener for the festival, neatly bookending the life of the legendary Quentin Crisp. A bittersweet and moving tale, the film deftly portrayed how Crisp finally found a place where he felt he belonged, only to find the stoicism which ensured his survival in a brutal London puts him severely out of touch with a modern, liberated gay population living with the onslaught of AIDS.
The beautifully layered performance of John Hurt showed once again that cinema’s most powerful moments lie in what gets left unsaid. This is true whether the subjects are fictional, dramatisations of a real-life character, or in documentary.
The extraordinary concert film “Ferron: Girl On A Road” lets the music of the iconic Canadian folk artist do most of the talking, with interview segments and between-song monologues only hinting at the pain which underlies decades worth of song. The atmosphere at the screening was amazing, buoyed by intimate film-making which made you feel as you were at a live event. Ferron herself was in attendance with director Gerry Rogers, and both deservedly got a rapturous response.
Both films are now available on DVD, and are well worth checking out.
Our trip to Frameline earlier this year was a busy one. The world’s largest and oldest gay film festival, it boasts around 80,000 attendees over its ten-day run. Most of the screenings take place at the magnificent Castro Theatre, including the screening for “Teddy” which formed part of the popular international shorts programme “Worldly Affairs”.
Over 1,000 people were in attendance for our screening, which was followed by a Q&A. The picture above of producer Andy Jalfon and I was taken just before the screening, in the filmmaker’s area upstairs where we enjoyed a few quick drinks to calm the nerves before the lights went down. We’re wearing our URGE Bar branded t-shirts from home, “Teddy” actor Alan Granville is co-owner of Auckland’s finest gay establishment.
On the media front, Kevin Thomas wrote a lovely piece about “Teddy” for Examiner.com while we were in town, but the highlight would have to be our invite to appear on KALW’s programme “The Power Of Film Music”, where I got to talk about “Teddy” and choose some favourite film themes (“Vertigo” and “James Bond”, in case you were wondering).
The interview is online, you can listen to it below:
We also took the opportunity while we were in San Francisco to record the last instalment in our “Teddy” video diaries, which you can see if you buy a copy of our DVD!
“Teddy” looks set to pass into the trainspotter’s history book with the announcement today that a passenger service to the rural Helensville station where the film was shot is to be cancelled, after only a year in operation.
According to Radio New Zealand, the service attracted an average of only 14 passengers per journey. The bus is apparently preferable because it runs more frequently.
The sparse service – literally only two trains a day, one at 6am and one at 7pm – had a huge impact on our shooting schedule for the film. The one evening train spent around ten minutes on the platform, during which we successfully managed to shoot our entire opening and closing sequence.
To devise an inconvenient schedule and then cancel a service because the schedule isn’t convenient seems like inane logic to me. Prior to the service beginning last year, no passenger trains had stopped at Helensville since 1980. Sadly, it seems like the immaculately-kept and historic Helensville station looks set to become a ghost town once more.
While in Toronto, I was interviewed by Xtra.ca as part of their video blog on the festival. My accent sticks out like a sore thumb:
“Victim Of Love”, the programme in which “Teddy” played at this year’s Inside Out festival in Toronto promised “steamy sex, unhealthy obsession, requited longing and bitter break-ups as hearts get battered and bruised but keep on beating in their search for love.”
Not quite sure where “Teddy” fitted in that scale – I’d like to think obsessions with teddy bears aren’t unhealthy, but I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
As a final chapter in the spate of technical jinxes which plagued us on the “Teddy” shoot, this screening came very close to not happening at all – turns out the dupe house in New Zealand had dubbed the tape in the wrong format and it was purely by chance that the projectionist managed to figure out the mistake otherwise my trip to Toronto could have been rather anti-climactic.
Other film highlights of Inside Out for me included “Make The Yuletide Gay”, a heart-warming crowd favourite which has gone on to be a huge festival hit this year, and “Clapham Junction”, a searing “Crash”-style narrative exploring the darker side of modern gay life in London.
