by Dov Kornits
Picking up the Audience Award at SXSW Sydney, writer/director/producer Sam Hayes’ debut Pools is the cinematic equivalent of taking a refreshing dip on a sweltering summer day.
And meeting Hayes [pictured front, right] and the film’s other lead producer Jack Heston [pictured front, left] on a sparkly day at Bondi Beach to discuss the film and its immediate festival success is equally refreshing in a sea of hustlers and wannabes that make up the film industry.
“The timing just worked out perfectly,” says Heston when we ask why they chose a new festival such as SXSW Sydney for the Pools world premiere. “They really understood what we were trying to achieve with the film, and we can’t imagine a more epic location than coming down to Australia and taking off our festival run with such a great group of people and such an awesome audience.”
Locking the film off only one month before the premiere, and screening alongside studio films such as Smile 2, Saturday Night and Nightbitch among others, the film was voted most popular by the Sydney audience.
“People really vibed with the film, people laughed, people cried in the theatre,” says Sam Hayes.
Pools follows Kennedy (Odessa A’zion) during a particularly hot summer in suburban Chicago, where she is avoiding going to her university class, no matter what. After failing to win over the air conditioning guy (Michael Vlamis), Kennedy convinces her fellow students Shane (Francesca Noel), Delaney (Ariel Winter), Reed (Mason Gooding) and Blake (Tyler Alvarez) to go pool hopping in the palatial homes that surround the university.
One of the first things that you notice in Pools is the distinctive visual style employed by Hayes and cinematographer Ben Hardwicke, including the unfairly maligned zoom!
“Zooms are meant to create comedy with a camera,” comments Hayes, also informing us that it was mostly used in the beginning and end of the film. “The camera is a character and the camera’s goofy, wacky and wild when the characters and the story is goofy, wacky and wild. When we get into the heart of the story, we’re starting to understand who these characters are and what they want. Then we’re moving into more handheld, intimate stuff and we’re not being so crazy with the camera because it’d be distracting at that point. And then once Kennedy gets to the end of her journey and kind of figures out what she wants out of life, we can relax and can have a little more fun with the camera and come back to some of these big smash zooms.
“My favourite director visually is Edgar Wright,” Hayes continues. “He’s just the master of camera movement and visual storytelling. The Graduate also has a lot of camera movement, a lot of big zooms. When I came into the movie, getting the right zoom lens was my biggest priority camera-wise. We chose the camera body based on what would work best for the zoom lenses. Ben Hardwicke found that a red would actually work better than the Alexa for the vintage zoom lenses. We had 60 vintage zoom lenses, one of them was like 25 to 300, another was a 50 to 1500. So, absolutely massive.”
Casting was another crucial piece of the puzzle on the indie. “I had this idea of this character in my head,” he says about Kennedy. “I didn’t know who was going to play it. And then I saw Odessa in Nina Dobrev’s Instagram story one day, and I was just like, ‘oh my God, that’s the girl’. She hadn’t done very much stuff at that point, but it was just perfect and I had a way to meet her. I got a coffee with her and took her through the story. We definitely clicked. And from that point on, I wrote the role for her. And then she wrote a couple of songs for the film.”
Which certainly helped, with music an essential ingredient of this distinctive film.
Something else that will help the film’s trajectory is that Odessa A’zion is about to ‘blow up’. “Right now, she couldn’t be here because she’s on set filming a movie for Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme,” Hayes says. “She’s starring alongside Timothee Chalamet and a bunch of other big names. She’s also in the cast of Rachel Sennott’s comedy show for HBO. And then she’s got a big movie based on video game Until Dawn.”
So, this is all just the beginning for Sam Hayes, Jack Heston and Pools.
“I love going to the theater, whether it’s a big movie or small movie,” says Heston when we ask him what would happen if the film was scooped up by a streamer. “I think it would be cool to have a cinema release. Also, the movie is very much a summer movie, so we’re hoping to release the film over the course of next [US] summer from theaters to streaming.”
“I have all kinds of different stuff,” Hayes says when we ask whether he has other projects in the pipeline. “I’ve got a Halloween comedy. I’ve got a follow up to Pools. I’m producing Matt Johnson’s [Blackberry] next feature…
“My first love was really writing, creative writing and writing fiction. I fell in love with The Great Gatsby and how powerful a single sentence or paragraph can be. I wrote a novel that came out on in 2017, The Weather Man. I’m going to be adapting it into a TV show and calling it Man in the Cloud.”
