Movies & Magic Tricks
FilmInk speaks to Melbourne filmmaker Glenn Triggs who tackles the slippery notion of time travel in his directorial feature debut.
Melbourne filmmaker Glenn Triggs has just completed his third feature film, 41, a time travel drama where a hole in the floor leads to yesterday. Likening filmmaking to a "perfect magic trick", for Triggs film is about feelings and going somewhere else with someone else that is not in your normal life.
A child magician and circus performer from a young age, Triggs found something in filmmaking that he always wanted from performing, the art of perfecting your craft. "With a performance you have to practice many times and hope it goes right on the night," he says. "Whereas with a film you could spend as much time as needed to perfect and then deliver that project without doubt of failure."
Beginning as a collaboration of ideas from different film scripts that eventually became the one film, 41 mixes lost love, death, time travel and the idea of having one chance. "The basic idea was always that this guy finds a hole in the floor that leads to yesterday and he could go back in time, one day at a time," Triggs says. "The interesting part was how he discovers the hole and the decisions he makes with this secret time portal."
While 41 is his third feature, Triggs estimates that he's made about fifty short films all up. All self-funded, Triggs cites the biggest challenges among young filmmakers today as financing issues. "If you haven't made anything before it's almost impossible unless you are recognised overseas first, which can be hard," he stresses. "But if you can afford a good camera and sift through the incredible talent in Australia, you can really make anything happen, and that's what we did!"
Written around a period of a year-and-a-half, the script went through many different stages. "I would always get so far with the script and be happy with it, then move into an area that seemed too clichéd or didn't feel right, so I would have to go back five or six pages and start again," Triggs recounts.
Set all over the world, including Vietnam and New York, the central location of the film is the Heathscape Motel, comprised of five different motels around Victoria.
There is certainly no doubt that Triggs lives and breathes film. "There is nothing on earth that comes close to the feeling of screening your film to a packed cinema; something you made from your mind materialised on screen."
Accepted into a number of international film festivals, such as the Las Vegas Film Festival, and a semi-finalist for the Maverick Movie Awards in New York, Triggs is taking his film worldwide. Heading to Los Angeles to help promote and seek distribution for 41, Triggs has high hopes.
Find out more about the film here.
