By Erin Free
“As a Bunbury boy now living and working in Perth, it’s great to go back for one of Australia’s premier film festivals in my old stomping ground,” director, Hayden Fortescue, laughs when FilmInk asks about him having a home ground advantage when it comes to screening his short film, Council, at The CinefestOZ Film Festival, which kicks off in Western Australia this week. A former staffer at one of WA’s busiest broadcasters, Fortescue has also worked extensively as an assistant director, location manager, and production assistant, with credits including The Reckoning (for WA genre hero, John V. Soto), Drive Hard (directed by the legendary Brian Trenchard-Smith), Kill Me Three Times (from Red Dog helmer, Kriv Stenders) and Looking For Grace (directed by Sue Brooks). Now, after making his directorial debut with the 2012 short, Manu Marmont, Fortescue is back with Council.
The film is set at an indeterminate point in the future where overpopulation is a serious danger, and must be managed by a panel of judges who determine who lives, and dies, on an annual basis. The film’s central character, Jeremiah Kane (Liam Graham, pictured above), must go before the council to prove his worth, and finds that the values that they are looking for are not the ones that he envisaged. “I first came up with the concept in January 2015,” Fortescue says. “I was listening to some motivational tapes on a long drive when it hit me: the idea of a future where everyone must prove to a panel of judges that they deserve to continue living each year. How would this affect the way that we lived our lives? What sort of society would enforce this? The questions and possibilities were endless! I take a long time to gestate and think about things, so it was probably six months later that I finally wrote something down. I couldn’t figure out the ending, but as soon as I had that, the script poured out in just a few hours.”
While Council has a few obvious thematic sci-fi forebears (“I’m sure that people will draw parallels with 1984, Logan’s Run, Gattaca, or even Whiplash”), the main inspirational grist for Fortescue’s mill came from a far more unlikely source. “To be honest, I was more influenced by the non-fiction books of the self-development world,” the director reveals. “Titles like Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, Mastery by Robert Greene, and The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday gave me a lot of ideas about how to tackle the themes and characters.”
Usually associated with high-gloss CGI, futuristic tableaux, or alien worlds, Fortescue came at the sci-fi genre from a decidedly different angle. “Luckily, the aesthetic that I had in mind was more ‘retro futuristic’ as opposed to your typical sci-fi spaceships or aliens,” the director says. “This meant finding a balance between creating a world that is set many years from now, but that also had a feeling of history and gravitas. As always in filmmaking, there are certain compromises that you have to make in order to finish the film, but I think for the most part, we achieved what we set out to do. But working with a low budget certainly made things more interesting! The greatest challenge was probably the night shoots. I’ve always hated doing them, but due to location availability, we had no choice. It’s tough to remain an energetic leader for the crew at 3:00am after ten hours of filming. Red Bull does help though!”
It helped that Fortescue could lean on performers – in the shape of Liam Graham, Nicola Bartlett, and Adam T. Perkins – who knew exactly what they were in for. “I was lucky in the fact that I wrote my roles specifically for the actors who ended up being cast,” the director explains. “My three main characters were all written for actors that I knew of and respected in the Perth film scene. I only had to fill in the supporting players. We held open auditions for these, and we saw a lot of very talented people. All the performances are great in the film, so if we did nothing else right, we at least cast talented actors!”
With projects like Terminus, Infini, and Arrowhead pointing to an upswing in Aussie sci-fi, Hayden Fortescue’s Council is breaking through at just the right time. “Genre films have always been popular with the audience, and more financially viable in the marketplace,” he says. “Australia could be seeing an upswing in more commercial, genre based projects in general, and sci-fi might be a part of this new push. The biggest surprises with Council have come from talking to people after watching the film. It’s the type of short that leaves things open for the audience to interpret in their own ways, so I’ve had a wide range of discussions with people about what they thought afterwards. Some people get it straight away, while others take a few months to digest everything that’s happened!”
Council plays at The CinefestOZ Film Festival, which runs from August 24-28. To buy tickets to Council, head to the official site. For more on Council and Hayden Fortescue, head to VCR Media.
