latest features
Hard Knocks
With recent reports that life for the residents of Toomelah has reached crisis point, Ivan Sen’s feature about the troubled Aboriginal community hits home even harder.
From A Faraway Land
The inaugural Indian Film Festival of Melbourne will attempt to show audiences that there’s more to their thriving cinema scene than song and dance… though there’s that too.
Last Dance
Director Martha Goddard gives us the back story on shooting her experiential short film ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ which is vying for a Dendy Award at Sydney Film Festival.
Trolls and Tribulations
Having raised the funds via crowd-funding, Snowgum Films are bravely attempting to bring Terry Pratchett’s short epic, ‘Troll Bridge’, to screen.
search the site
newsletter
Enter your email address below to receive the weekly Filmink newsletter
Esoteric Interests
Working within a low budget is hard. Working within the constraints of a genre is hard. Sam Barrett, director and co-writer of Australian neo-noir ‘Esoterica’, did both...
Esoterica, a low budget noir pastiche produced entirely in far-flung Perth, Western Australia, very nearly didn't exist. At the least, not in the form it currently takes. According to director Sam Barrett, who also called the shots on the thriller No Through Road, initially his genre ambitions lay in another direction entirely.
"Initially I sat down with the co-writer [Robbie Studsor] and we wanted to do a Western, of all things," he tells us. "We developed that, and we actually got pretty far on that project, but eventually I had one of these epiphanies, as you do, and I realised I didn't want to make it. So then he called, and I said ‘I really want to do a noir, a neo-noir film'. You know, it comes out of what you're watching at the time. So I guess the flavour, getting the genre, was the first thing, and once we had that we started bringing more personal ideas to it. Our co-writer came up with quite an ingenious MacGuffin - which I won't give away - but that informs the underpinnings of the story, and from there it was pretty organic, really."
The result is an ambitious film that belies its budgetary constraints, but Barrett concedes that the production's shallow pockets sometimes led to difficulties that needed to be solved creatively, rather than relying on the money hose.
"Well, they say the rules are that you've gotta shoot a low-budget film during the day," he says. "And not have any period settings, and we kind of went against that completely. We shot it almost exclusively at night, and that obviously caused a lot of problems. And also, I think the locations are an interesting one; one of the compliments we get about the film is that people don't recognise where it was shot. I don't have a beef with my home town - I love my home town - but we certainly were trying to create a kind of parallel Perth, a parallel universe. Kind of a noir world that isn't just rooted in this place as some of the other films that tend to come out of here. So it was really just a practical consideration in terms of choosing the locations wisely. And also, within that, choosing interesting locations; I think that drove a lot of the decisions. It wasn't just a case of, ‘Oh, let's just shoot at our mate's house.' We were going for an analogue feel for the film, so we wanted it to have an older sort of feel, so that did affect where we shot. We were looking for anything interesting, but nothing that was too decidedly modern, because noir never feels particularly modern."
But Barrett prefers not to dwell on work that is already behind him. Instead he's already forged ahead, with a new project under the aegis of his production company, Nakatomi Pictures, nearing completion, and another in the planning stages. "Currently we're in post-production on our next film," he says with a touch of pride. "Which is a giallo-inspired thriller called Sororal. We shot that earlier this year, and we're just doing sound and music and effects on that, and hopefully that'll be finished sometime next year. It's just weird how things work out; we've got this film coming out, but we've already moved onto something else, and we're writing the next one. It's kind of a revolving door, really."
Esoterica is available on DVD from January 19. For more on Nakatomi Pictures, head here.
