by Dov Kornits
“I moved about 10 years ago,” writer/director Clare Hoey tells us from London. “It took a couple of years to find my feet. I felt like I was on some weird extended holiday. I’d gone to Uni in Australia, all my friends were there, they were making inroads. It just took forever to break in. Putting on a play changed everything. I had agents come to that. You just have to take the plunge and show your work.”
Unlike so many Australian creatives who head to Hollywood, Hoey wound back the clock and followed the 1960s tradition of going to London, which is where she partnered up with Australian actress Sophie Lowe.
“Sophie and I had the same agent over here, and I knew of her from Australia. One of my really close friends actually worked with her mum at Screenwise,” Hoey says of the Northern Rivers screen organisation. “I messaged my agent and just asked if they could arrange a coffee with her because I thought she’d be nice, and I really wanted to meet another Australian in the same industry over here.”
Becoming friends led to a collaboration on Sophie Lowe’s video clip for the song ‘From the Inside’, which Hoey directed.
“And then we were talking and we just both wanted to make a film,” says Hoey. “We’ve both had so many different projects in development, it just takes so long for funding. So, we were like, ‘what can we do? We could literally just do it now if we wanted to…’ And then that’s how the format of just doing an audition tape came up.”
Made for $266, Showpony was born.
“I love watching audition tapes,” admits Hoey. “Actors are in such a vulnerable state in that moment. I’ve been in those rooms and it’s just a horribly charged situation. But then I was like, ‘what’s worse is when you’re self-taping and you have a partner there.’
“In a weird way, you’re even more vulnerable. If the person who’s making you feel bad is the person who should be making you feel good … I thought that’s really interesting. And Sophie has had that experience with a couple of partners who have self-taped her and may have been jealous that she’s got a role, and they haven’t… Or this one guy in particular who every time she had a role that had a sex scene or any kind of intimacy, they would try and sabotage it…”
Hoey wrote a script, then Sophie edited it, “… just phrases that she remembered the guy saying that were stuck in her head,” says Hoey.
Starring as ‘the other’ is Michael Socha (This is England), an acting friend of Lowe’s (and not her boyfriend!), who she met on TV’s Once Upon a Time in Wonderland.
Clare Hoey and Sophie Lowe hope to come to Sydney for Showpony’s screening at Flickerfest, but in the meantime, they’re hard at work on another short film together. “I’ll be shooting London in winter for Queensland, I don’t know why I’ve done that to myself, but it’ll be quite fun,” says Hoey.
She’s also written a novel and a feature film script, both set in Australia. “I keep writing about Australia and I think it’s because I’ve been away for a while now, and you see it more clearly from a distance.
“I keep telling stories about women who need to grow up,” Hoey admits when we ask her about the running themes in her work. “I keep talking about women who are stunted emotionally and stuck and who have been driven to that place by something in their need to grow up. People, women, who haven’t done the work and need to move on.”
Showpony screens as part of the LoveBites program at Flickerfest on Friday 26 January 2024. More information here.
