by Annette Basile
The Australian filmmaker (Low Life, High Life, I Met a Girl) has turned the challenges of Covid into his very own franchise, with the feature UnCancelled about to release for free to view for the public.
There was one rule that married couple Luke Eve and Maria Albiñana adhered to when writing the script for UnCancelled, a feature in which they play themselves, drawing heavily from their own lives.“We had a rule that if one character was coming across as a bit of dick or a bit harsh, then we were on the right track,” laughs Eve. “We just went, ‘This is honest, these are the things that we’ve said to each other, these are things that we’re feeling’. There are definitely times where Luke is really annoying, and other times Maria is quite harsh – but that’s life, right? That’s being in a relationship.”
UnCancelled follows Australian writer/director Eve and Spanish writer/actress Albiñana’s two hit web series, Cancelled and ReCancelled, which aren’t quite documentaries but scripted retellings of their lives. The first instalment came about when Covid hit and they were in Maria’s Spanish hometown, Valencia, about to get married…
“We had organised a big wedding and had friends flying in from all around the world. Our wedding was planned for the very weekend that basically the world turned to shit,” says Eve. The wedding was cancelled and Eve’s mother, Karen, who had flown in for the nuptials, got stuck in Spain. Instead of a “dream wedding”, Maria ended up confined to an apartment with Eve and her future mother-in-law for three months.
But it was grist for the mill for this creative couple. “We thought that was a really unique situation,” he says. “I’m a director, she’s an actress and my mum is really dry and quite funny, so I thought there was potential there to make something. So, I mentioned it to Screen Australia, and they were wonderful, they were very quick at coming back and making it happen. It was very low-budget – it was just the three of us shooting on a mobile phone.
“The series was initially released on Facebook for free during the pandemic and it just went crazy [laughs]. It just had really great numbers, and we got a lot of press … Then due to the success of that we did another series, ReCancelled, when Maria fell pregnant and that was a very intimate portrayal of her pregnancy and the birth of our little kid, Isabella.”
For the third instalment, Eve and Albiñana decided to create the full-length feature, UnCancelled, a romantic comedy-drama that mixes real relationship tension with belly laughs.
“I’ve always loved romantic comedies,” says Eve. “But with this, we wanted to do something a little bit different. Most romantic comedies finish with the wedding … We wanted to subvert that.”
With a cast of actors and non-actors, UnCancelled shows Maria frustrated with her fiancé’s obsession with documenting everything as they prepare – finally –for their big day. It also features the return of Karen, who was a big hit with their Facebook audience. It’s a polished piece of filmmaking – with a delicious meta element – and it’s already come to the attention of Channel 9, who will be screening it in 2025.
“Because it’s a film and it’s operating on a bigger canvas, we knew that we needed to raise the standard and push things a little,” says Eve. “We didn’t just want to make a straight continuation of the previous two series. I was getting so obsessed with filming our lives because that’s what happened over the past couple of years [laughs]. I’d fallen into this thing of documenting things and filming everything. I had been really nervous about my career, about being in Spain. I’m ambitious like most filmmakers, so we thought that was an amazing jumping-off point, going, ‘OK, it’s still about these two characters but now let’s talk about the fact that these two characters put their lives under the spotlight’. That, for us, was really juicy material.
“The making of Cancelled and ReCancelled were both really taxing – not to complain because they changed our lives, and they were such beautiful experiences, but they were also a really tough experience and very exposing. In some ways, it’s really idiotic to put your life online like that, but we really enjoyed the intimacy of it. There was something authentic about it, and it changed me as a filmmaker in many ways.
But how much of UnCancelled actually happened in the couple’s off-screen life? “In terms of the actual physical events themselves, not everything that happens in the film actually happened,” Eve replies. “But, I would say thematically, pretty much everything that goes on is truthful and authentic.
“Maria and I always joke that whatever we write seems to come true, so we’re always a bit careful about pushing things too much,” he adds with a laugh.
When Karen, now 71, flew back to Valencia to appear in the film, she came down with Covid and was, says Eve, “quite sick for the first couple of weeks”. While filming a scene where a concerned Eve is trying to call his mum to check on her, he was also calling her for real, in between takes, while she was in the Emergency ward.
“This is why we played on the meta element because it was just so prevalent. The layers of what was real, what was not, and what was actually happening were so muddled.”
Cancelled and ReCancelled are both available to view on Youtube. UnCancelled will be available for free on YouTube on 12 September for 2 weeks only.
