By Travis Johnson
The Bachelor and Spinster Ball is one of those iconic institutions of Australian rural life that is completely alien to anyone who hasn’t directly experienced it: a dusk-til-dawn, C&W-soundtracked, beer’n’Bundy-fueled party where formally-attired bush boys and babes drink their body weight and try to get lucky in love. It’s a thing of weird contrasts, and that’s what drove comedian, writer and filmmaker, Tim Ferguson, to make that milieu the subject of his directorial debut (with co-director, Marc Gracie), the knockabout rom-com, Spin Out.
“The original idea came from when I saw a book of photographs of a B&S ball,” Ferguson tells us, “and I recalled the B&S balls of my youth. I thought, nobody’s told a story. There’s an entire bandwidth of Australian party culture that’s not being covered.”
Ferguson teamed up with co-writer Edwina Exton to put meat on the idea’s skeleton, and it was she who brought the film’s other key cultural element to the table – after all, the only thing more country than a B&S Ball is a ute muster. “She said, ‘don’t forget the cars, don’t forget the utes.’ Once we started talking about that we thought, well, people dancing, cars dancing, people at a ute muster, it seems romantic and we took it from there. We wrote three drafts and then threw it all out and started again.”
What eventually resulted is a story centered on champion ute team Billy (Xavier Samuel) and Lucy (Morgan Griffin), who might just have a future together if they can figure out they’re in love before the cock crows over the disheveled remnants of the annual Ball. Around this thread are woven a whole heap of parallel narratives and colourful characters, all dealing with love and life while the booze flows and the music is cranked.
“We realised we were writing a party movie with a lot of narratives,” Ferguson continues. “So we had to throw out everything we’d done just so we could start structuring it, so you don’t lose track of each story as it goes along. It turned out to be the hardest thing, making it simple when there are six three act stories working in conjunction. It should be easy to watch and making something easy to watch is not easy. From there we just kept doing drafts, started banging on doors and pushing our weight around saying ‘we’re gonna make a movie about a B&S ball, nobody else is allowed to’.”
Still, it seemed everyone had a story to tell about their B&S experiences. “Some of the stories were immediately unfilmable, you could not film it and be within the law at the same time. From my own experiences – and Edwina’s been to a lot of them – we just thought it’s a way Australians party like no one else does. We all turn up in ball gowns and tuxedos to a shed in the middle of nowhere. Everybody parties, has a mud fight. It’s the irreverence that Australia has as a country to some things. In Australia, we like taking institutions and conventions and treating them badly.”
Casting the film took a particularly long time, with 14 main characters and a total of 32 speaking roles needing to be filled. For this, the production turned to casting director Thea McLeod. “She does the casting for Neighbours, so she knows every young actor in the country and they know her, so they come to her. It took about three months of dragging actors back and forth, once Xavier had said he was in, then we could start patching and matching from there. Morgan was an easy choice, because we’d watched a lot of actresses and we just gave her one note which said have a fight with this guy but be happy. The idea was to get her used to fighting this guy and she did it. We just fell in love and said ‘Xavier, Morgan you’re gonna get romantic’.”
At its heart, Spin Out is a celebration of the culture it depicts, not a condemnation, which is something of a surprise coming from Ferguson who, being a founding member of the Doug Anthony All Stars, is part of the darkest and most savagely satirical comedy group ever to come out of Australia. Yet he assures us that it was always his intent to praise rather than bury.
“I always wanted to make it a film that inspired people to go to a bush party because it’s so much more fun,” he declares. “There’s less security, you can have a good time. Also it’s comic, not satirical. We always wanted it to be a celebration, a kind of adjustment and splash in the face of people in the inner city who think they know something. Of course they do know things and they’ve gone to university and grown up in very hard, middle class conditions. People in the bush work from childhood. They’re just not told it’s work. So I thought it was important to remind people that they just can’t go casting aspersions on people just because they don’t go to artistic events. That said, people in the city will really like this movie because we’re not asking them to do anything apart from have fun – poor things. It’s hard being middle class and being protected by your parents’ money, it’s hard getting through university.”
And as for the future, we can definitely expect another film from Ferguson down the track. “There’s nothing like sitting on a movie set with an orchestra of moving parts and the first moment when I say action, you start driving, a drone ascends into the sky and people start finding extras and it’s just like, ‘oh shit it all happens’. Then we say cut and the whole orchestra gathers again and we go one more time. There’s nothing like hearing all the noises in preparation for what’s about to occur. So I’ve got a couple of ideas which I will pester you about for the next movie.”
Spin Out hits Australian cinemas on September 15. You can read our review here.
