by Abhi Parasher
“It was very challenging, very demanding and very hectic,” says writer/director Ulysses Oliver about his debut feature Love Road, which premiered to full houses at this year’s Sydney Film Festival (SFF). “We only took two cars. It was like a dysfunctional family travelling around the countryside.”
Love Road is Oliver’s debut feature film. It is a romantic road movie tracking the breakdown of a relationship across the same terrain, but over three different time periods.
“I was sitting in a bathtub in Japan, having got away from the kids with my wife, and it was one of those moments when you can ask yourself all those philosophical questions about where you are at in your relationship. Those questions you can only really ask when you are stuck in a car, plane or a train,” says Oliver. “Most of the episodes in the story come from me having been in those situations myself.”
Made on a shoestring budget, Oliver and his team had to face up to many unforeseen challenges over a remarkable two-week shooting period.
“We got evacuated a couple of times with the bushfires in NSW,” shares Oliver. “And then on the backend with post, we had to deal with COVID restrictions.”
Oliver has had 20+ years of experience on the production side of filmmaking, producing previous SFF successes such as Lonesome and The Longest Weekend. He is currently heading up Breathless Films, which has three films on the SFF lineup this year, including Tennessine and Birdeater.
“As a producer on the film, I essentially also took on a production manager role as well, so when things would go wrong it would be entirely my fault,” he laughs. “I found it hard to give my time to every department equally, particularly the actors.”
It is an experience that every low budget filmmaker could attest to. Regardless, there is a reason the creative business has coined the term ‘the show must go on’.
“Would the film be made otherwise?” Oliver asks. “It took that creative energy, my own experience in producing and a healthy level of naivety to get it all done.”
Oliver and Breathless films are champions of this style of filmmaking, and it has proved successful in the past.
“It was a packed-out audience, great Q+A and a really engaged audience,” Oliver says about Love Road’s premiere. “We had a great response.”
Breathless Films is a hub for new-wave micro-budget filmmaking, with their website stating that “It is our aim to support, unashamedly, contemporary film auteurs who are telling bold and uncompromising Australian stories”.
“We’re going into our second slate of films with some of the same directors along with some new faces,” shares Oliver. “We’d like to finish production on at least two films a year, while we challenge ourselves to go bigger and better. We also want to stick to our dogma of making films: limitations breeding creativity.”
For more information regarding Breathless Films, please visit their website at https://breathlessfilms.com.au
