By Jeremy Nigro
In 2012, Aussie filmmakers, Jesse O’Brien, Samuel Baulch and Christian D’Alessi, headed into the desert to create the sci-fi short film, Arrowhead: Signal. Written and directed by O’Brien, it was picked up by TV1 and turned into the feature film, Arrowhead. The guys are now back with the new proof of concept short, Return Flight. The short is described as a coming of age adventure story with a sci-fi fantasy twist, set during a bygone era in Australian history. This time, D’Alessi is the writer/director, with O’Brien producing, and Baulch bringing his fantastic cinematography to the project.
D’Alessi recalls the inspiration behind the story: “Return Flight came from a time in my youth when I was fascinated with both the spiritual and the supernatural. Daydreaming during one of my art classes back in 2001, I first had this idea, and I would sketch the same final image of a man with wings over and over. I began writing a story surrounding this imagery with the intent for it to be a comic book first, and a dream that it would later be adapted into a film.”
The short is set in Australia in 1952, in the midst of the Korean War, with the country gripped by fears of a foreign invasion. Thomas Parker, single father of Sarah and Andy, is recruited into a top secret branch of the government as a test pilot and later mysteriously disappears during a flight. One year later, during a storm, the children spot someone falling out of the sky. It’s Thomas, but he has significant memory loss and now has bizarre, fleshy wings. The family must escape the shady military forces who hunt them, whilst also uncovering the mystery of what happened to their father.
The short is being likened to the hugely successful Netflix series, Stranger Things, and not just because it hopes to become a mini-series on a streaming platform. It draws on the adventure fantasy and nostalgic vibes of Stranger Things, but instead of the American suburbs of the 1980s, Return Flight is set in a rural Australian town in the ’50s.
D’Alessi had this to say about the similarities between the two projects: “We were in post-production when Stranger Things dropped. It’s a great show, and it confirmed to us that we are right on the pulse. Just like Stranger Things and Super 8, Return Flight embraces nostalgia and pays homage to many key influences of pop culture from my childhood. One of its strengths is its Australian setting, as it has the ability to cut through the tropes and clichés often seen in American films and television set in the ’50s, while also striking a balance by embracing them.”
It’s clear that the team’s passions lie in genre works, with Return Flight just one of the projects that the team is working on. A couple of years ago, we spoke with producer, Jessie O’Brien, on the set whilst he was directing Arrowhead, and he had this to say on the subject: “I had already written this script, but when I saw Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, it just gave me the faith that you could go out and shoot something and do the effects and it’ll find an audience… I just wanted to make a movie that I wanted to watch. I wanted to watch an Australian movie like this, and they just simply don’t exist. There are a lot of genre movies here, but a lot of them don’t fully embrace their genre. I have two scripts written, which are both in the hands of different producers, and I hope to be shooting one at the end of the year. One is a sci-fi and the other a creature feature. I want to keep pushing the boundaries for what we do here in Australia, and just keep doing bold genre work because I think people want to see it.”
And you can see Return Flight right here!!!
