by Abhi Parasher
Western Australian filmmaker, Callan Durlik has always had an interest in romantic comedies. However, now that cinema is saturated with mega-budget blockbusters, he has struggled to find a home for that passion.
“The last really good rom-com, the one that was really successful and everyone enjoyed, was Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” Durlik says as we chat to him prior to the release of his film, It Only Takes a Night. “On face value, it’s not your typical rom-com and there is a lot more to it. But at its heart, it was as simple as boy meets girl.”
Forgetting Sarah Marshall was released on the tail end of what could be considered the golden era of romantic comedies.
“There was a golden era of rom-coms that I loved, like the Matthew McConaughey and Hugh Grant films. I was a huge fan of Notting Hill and Love Actually. All those kinds of movies seemed to hold a really special place in people’s hearts. They’re not those ‘blow you out of the water’ incredibly cinematic films where people are like ‘Did you see the cinematography?’ They were just these beautiful human stories that everyone could relate to. I just wanted to make a film like that.”
It Only Takes a Night follows a group of four friends. After one of them experiences a brutal breakup, the four decide to go on a wild night out. Meant to be a distraction, the night turns into a life-altering series of events none of them will ever forget.
Speaking about the inspiration behind the film, Durlik says “I watched an interview with Jerry Seinfeld once, and he talks about doing a stand-up set on some late show back in the day. After that set, he got a call and he said that all it took was that one phone call to change his life. I’ve always sort of been obsessed with that idea. You can go through life with all this gradual change and things can take a while to move forward, but every now and then, your life changes in an instant. That’s where the seed for the idea came from; it only takes a night to change everything for you.”
The four friends in the film consist of Eliza Taylor (The 100), Arielle Carver-O’Neill (Ticket to Paradise), Sana’a Shaik (Class of ’07) and ‘Ana Ika (Bump). According to Durlik, it was their real-life friendship that allowed the film to deliver the charm.
“To really make a great rom-com, you need everyone to feel as comfortable as possible with each other, so the reason there was so much charm in the film is that everyone was just such good friends,” explains Durlik. “They all came up to me at the beginning, asking if they could change this or change that, and I said ‘honestly, as long as it has the same vibe as the written line, I don’t really care’. I think it makes for a much more natural performance because they can speak the way they want to speak. For example, there is a scene in the film where the girls are in the middle of their night out at a burger joint. The final two minutes of that scene was all the girls. I just told them to try and make each other laugh, because that is exactly what the characters are doing as friends. They just went to town with it.”
Aside from his work as a filmmaker, Durlik also has a background in stand-up comedy which he drew on for one of It Only Takes a Night’s most iconic characters, Sven (Charles Grounds).
“The character of Sven is a character I used to do in stand-up. I had this voice I used to do for years, which was based on the idea that if you could choose the voice for your computer, it would be this character, who has attitude but is also really smart, like Einstein,” Durlik shares. “We had been doing auditions for ages and no one was right. They were playing it straight and no one did a voice. Out of nowhere, we got this tape from Charles, and that was all I needed. Talking about brave performances, you never know how something like that is going to turn out, but I recently got to sit in a packed cinema and just watched everyone sit up in their chair every time Sven came on.”
For Durlik, the audience reception speaks to what cinemagoers are yearning for. “A fresh new story, or a new take on an old story, that’s what we are down for. It doesn’t have to be this world-changing narrative, it just has to be a good story with human characters that we can relate to.”
