Dov Kornits
“I always imagined my first film would be an Australian film, so I’m still adjusting,” says filmmaker Daniel DiMarco, who grew up in Sydney’s Western Suburbs, made a bunch of award winning short films here, but who’s ended up making his feature directorial debut many years later in Canada. “I ended up in Canada when my short film Spoonman played the Seattle Film Festival. An Aussie at the festival invited us to Canada and the weather and scenery really suited the tone of the film I was developing at the time.”
DiMarco spent three years developing a project, The Apologist, but it “died in the eleventh hour.”
Frustrated and angry, he quickly wrote a script called Wrecking Ball, “until Miley Cyrus ruined that title,” DiMarco laughs. Retitled Juggernaut, the all-Canadian production is about to hit the festival circuit.
“I always wanted to make a film about brothers,” says DiMarco. “The darker side of sibling rivalry. What started off as a modern version of Cain and Abel got remarkably more complex. It became a story about a broken family that didn’t know how to fix itself. So it became Juggernaut because it’s about an immovable force of a human being that is obsessed with a crime that may not have happened. Hud staring Paul Newman was a huge influence. I’ve always been obsessed with protagonists that can’t quite find their bearings.”
Originally blessed with a cast that included Dominic Cooper, Freida Pinto, and Sam Elliott and a higher budget to suit, scheduling complications started rearing their ugly head, which rang alarm bells for the filmmaker. “My last project failed due to a bunch of postponements, so I made a decision to just take whatever money I had raised from the funding bodies and pull the trigger.
“You can wait for so many things to line up… but your first feature is a hump you need to get past… what the failure of the first one taught me was don’t mess around… just get it done.
“My lead, Jack Kesy [pictured with Daniel DiMarco], is a rising star. He blew me away in an audition, and since my film he starred in the Death Wish remake with Bruce Willis and as we speak starring in Horse Soldiers with Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon. I also got to work with a fave actor, Peter McRobbie who was in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and Lincoln and (my favourite director) Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. And it was a treat working with Amanda Crew from HBO’s Silicon Valley. In fact, I loved working with the entire cast. Dave Cubbitt is also great local actor. I got lucky.”
Now that the anxiety of getting a first feature in the can is behind him, DiMarco is well on the way to following up, this time, naturally, with a Canadian Australian co-production. “I always imagined my first film would be an Australian film, so I’m still adjusting,” he reflects. “I’m definitely in a good position to take advantage of an Australian/Canadian treaty now that I have passports in both countries. I had some great success with Australian shorts so the next logical step was an Aussie film. I am writing a film called The Bigamist at the moment. It’s a psychological drama in the vein of something like Black Swan. It’s a deceptive title. On the surface it’s about a woman married to two men, but what it’s actually about is a woman’s descent into madness due to a repressed memory. Juggernaut was about brothers and very male oriented. I’ve been wanting to write a complex female character with plenty of flaws for a while… something like Gena Rowlands in Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. This genre is uncharted territory for me.”
Receiving development funding from Canada’s Screen Australia equivalent, Telefilm, for the nascent project is a good sign that we may just see Daniel DiMarco back in Australia making films before too long.
“It always feels like a minor miracle when a project gets up,” says DiMarco reflectively.
Juggernaut will be out in 2017.
