By Mitchell Earnshaw
Shot in California with an Australian creative team, The Florist is based on an award winning short of the same name. Rebecca Murphy, star and producer of both the short film and the feature says The Florist “…follows a girl as she sources and sells edible hypnotic flowers, and focuses on the millennial thirst for instant success”.
Murphy describes the inspiration behind the film, “Aesthetically, the ‘70s and the Americana girl vibe was a huge influence. Also, spirituality is a big deal in LA – I feel as though so many people here use it as a coping mechanism to deal with the frustrations of LA and the industry. So, we incorporated that into the story.”
Despite the daunting nature of expanding a short film into a feature, there is a plethora of great films which originated as shorts, including Boogie Nights, Saw, and Whiplash. Murphy describes what inspired the team behind The Florist to make the jump. “The script for The Florist was picked as a finalist for the Sundance Sloane Prize in 2016, so that kind of propelled the team to making the project happen. The short had a fun pace to it, which played well with festival audiences, so we had to do our best to carry that through 90 minutes of story. A lot of films in this genre just concentrate on putting together as many jokes as possible, but we always wanted to have a plot and for it to feel cinematic.”
Entirely fictional, the short film was shot in a cinema verite style which Murphy says often got it confused for a legitimate documentary. “It’s funny because when it screened at Tribeca Film Festival, Richard Kind (Spin City, Mad About You) was a judge on the panel, and he thought my character was a real person. A festival also screened it as a documentary accidentally once.”
The Florist is screening on Thursday, November 10 at Event George St Cinemas
Can’t wait to see the film as I enjoyed the short version of the Florist in Sydney a couple of yrs back.