Red Hill marks Australian filmmaker Patrick Hughes feature film directorial and writing debut. Red Hill, a modern Australian Western, had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. The film’s action unfolds over one day and night in a small town in Victoria. Ryan Kwanten stars as Shane Cooper, a city cop who has just relocated to the country town of Red Hill. Cooper’s first day turns into a nightmare when convicted murderer Jimmy Conway (Tom E. Lewis) escapes from prison and returns to town seeking revenge against the lawmen who imprisoned him, including Old Bill (Steve Bisley).
Beth Wilson caught up with Hughes on the publicity trail to find out more about his transition from short films and commercials to feature films, the inspiration for the film and to talk about the dirty word ‘genre’…
Red Hill has been called a Western and a return to the heyday of Australia’s 70s and 80s genre films, how would you describe your film and its film genre?
I like to call it a neo-Western. It’s a modern take on old themes. Certainly I was inspired by the landscapes and the town we shot the film in, I found something that was really tragic about the story of a town, a boomtown that has gone bust. It is an old town that has lost its way in a modern world and it’s fighting for its survival, and it is fighting for a position and a sense of identity. You look at a town like Omeo (where Red Hill was filmed) it used to have 40,000 people, in 1890 it was Australia’s biggest gold rush town, Now there are 120 and all those industries have shut down. What happens to all those people left? How far will they go to save their town? I found that was a really interesting starting point in terms of creating a modern-day Western.
So the story started with that town?
I was fortunate enough to do some Brumby chasing when I was younger with a character that lived up in that town named Ken Connelly, and I remember riding back through the main street of Omeo, and I literally felt I was in a living breathing Western. I remember riding on horseback and you’d pass the town hall, barbershop and rickety old shopfronts and then a Toyota Landcrusier drives past and no one flinches because it is the kind of town where there still is that mix of horses and cars. It felt like you were in a lost world, felt like you were walking through a museum.
I am a huge fan of what every western is, which is a moral code. Red Hill is an exploration of revenge, redemption and sacrifice, and then you look at the history of our country. I grew up watching all these Westerns and if you look at the colonialisation of America, and the white man moving in pushing the American Indians out and the terrible atrocities that happened, the parallels to our country are striking. Exactly the same thing happened here when the white man moved in and pushed the Indigenous people off their own land. I felt like if anyone is due for a story of revenge it would be the Indigenous people of Australia.
You have had a career making commercials and highly successful shorts, how did you find the transition to your first feature film, where you had a budget that was less than you’ve had previously for commercials?
Every time I’m on set I’m learning. I think commercials are a really great training ground to learn the physicalities of how a set operates. Knowing how fast you can move, and I like to shot fast and move fast, obviously with Red Hill we had four weeks to shoot the movie; some people would go “you’re nuts, you’re crazy” but I knew in the back of my mind that we had a real chance of pulling this off. What commercials have allowed me to do is bring in an incredibly gifted crew. These guys are some of the best people in the industry, they’ve worked on some of the biggest films, you know all the Hollywood blockbusters they shoot out here.
We ended up with a situation where if we could just get a really great cast and a really great team of crew and just get them into the high country, in this one town for four weeks, we could pull off a movie, and that was kind of how I did it.
How did you go about casting?
It is tricky as an independent filmmaker because you don’t have a studio behind you or any major resources, so I’d written the script, but I had to raise the money before I could approach the actors, because you don’t want to waste their time. You want to give them a cemented date. Once I’d written the script I then raised the money privately and once we had, that first port of call was casting the three leads.
Steve Bisley was my first choice and I got the script in front of him and we immediately hit it off. Then Tom E. Lewis, I was really terrified about sending him the material, because you know the assumptions people make about who the bad guy is. You know you’ve got a disfigured Indigenous person wielding a sawn-off shotgun and sweeping through a small country town, it is pretty confronting material. So before I gave Tom E. the script I said please don’t throw this in the bin at page 50 because you won’t know the full story, don’t make any assumptions. God bless him he didn’t and he called me the next morning. And Ryan [Kwanten] of course, I was looking for an actor who had a strong physical presence but also had a vulnerability, because essentially the film is the story of a city boy who needs to become a cowboy. Once I’d cast those three leads I knew I had a real movie. I’ve got two iconic legends of Australian cinema, Steve Bisley and Tom E. Lewis, obviously Ryan Kwanten is just a raw talent, he literally walked off the second series of True Blood and onto our set.
Because it was independently funded did that mean it felt like you had more creative control?
I mean the only reason you make your first movie is so someone lets you make another one. I know that I’ll look back in 20 years and say the most fun I probably ever had making a movie was shootingRed Hill, because we literally made it outside of the system. No one even knew we were up there shooting it, it felt like we were in this little bubble. It was a really surreal experience when you are standing on set at 3 am setting fire to a house, or doing all the crazy stuff we did with the car chases and shoot outs and we felt we had the whole town behind us and there was a real kind of team spirit up there.
There has been a lot of talk in Australian film circles that Australia needs more genre films, which you have provided. But are you worried at all that Australian audiences are notoriously bad at watching Australian films?
Yeah, but I think if we consistently keep on making better films then we’ll probably win them back. I don’t know if one film is going to turn it all around, I don’t think it is that simple. It does feel like maybe we lost our way for a while, we lost our audience for a while we certainly did that. How do we win them back? I think if we start making films of all different types of genres. That is really important too, not to just keep making the same kind of films.
Everyone walks around saying genre is a dirty word. I think it is ridiculous, because I think if you look at every kitchen sink drama, they are a genre to themselves, they all hit the same marks every time. If it is the fish out of water, the story of someone who has come back to bury their father in a small country town- I’ve seen that a million times. Name me one film that isn’t a genre movie.
But it is a term that holds connotations…
I think what people apply it to is making commercial films. I made this film because it is really something I’d like to see, I hope it transpires to box office figures. I think if filmmakers keep questioning who’s the audience for this film, then slowly piece by piece we might just win that audience back. I think there is a lot of distrust out there. The marketing can push it so far but to get that real pop you need to get the word of mouth and the buzz from people on the street. More than anything I’ll respect what my friend says “hey man you’ve got to go check out this movie”, at the end of the day that is what it comes down to.
That’s what we want more Aussies watching Aussie films
And if they don’t go and see it I’ll cut loose with a sawn-off shotgun. I’m serious I’ve got my gun licence. (he’s NOT serious)
Images provided courtesy of Sony Pictures Au
First Published on Trespass 18/11/2010
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