Glendyn Ivin’s short film Cracker Bag contains many of the elements that have since dominated his film-making career. Its protagonist is a young girl, with separated parents, who is in the grips of enormous anticipation of a big day. Marked in big, bright letters on her calendar, “CRACKER DAY”. For a short that is mere minutes long, Cracker Bag is remarkably dense. It builds an intimate relationship with this little girl, the emotional stock she puts into her fire-crackers, and the emotional devastation that results when the big day doesn’t go quite right. This emotional devastation is conveyed in one brief shot at the end of the film that doesn’t last for more than a second or two. In short films, resonance in brevity is paramount. Glendyn Ivin understands this.
The film caused quite a stir. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2003 it was awarded the Palm D’Or for best short film of the year. For the uninitiated, the Cannes Film Festival is kind of a big deal -- other Palm D'Or winners include Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction, the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink and Jane Campion's The Piano. After winning the Palm D’Or, the Australian movie industry was at Ivin’s feet. He could have chosen just about anything for his next project. Eventually, and after filming another short called The Desert (which doubled as a music video for indie rock band Magic Dirt), Ivin chose Last Ride. Based on the novel by Denise Young, Last Ride concerns the journey of an outlaw father (Hugo Weaving) and his young son, Chook (wunderkind newcomer Tom Russell). Yet another story concerning the effect of parenting on the young, and the notion that the sins of the father are easily commuted to the son. I asked Ivin why, of all the scripts he read, he chose Last Ride:
“It’s not hard to read scripts, but it’s very hard to read the right script. I think that’s one of the most difficult things about film-making. Not so much the process, but actually finding the material in the first place that you can fall in love with, live and die with, and maintain passion for an extended amount of time. Finding something you can fall in love with is hard.
“With Last Ride, I could see myself in the story. Even though it was quite a different story to my own life, there was something about Chook’s life that resonated with mine. We had a similar childhood. When I got the script I’d just become a Dad for the first time. Ollie was a year and a half old at the time. I realised that since I hadn’t had the best father growing up, there were all these issues about what sort of father I would be. There are all these issues in Last Ride… this cyclical nature of parenting. The way your parents raise you dictates the way you raise your children. That was a very strong feeling, I was living it.”
Since Last Ride was Ivin’s first feature film as director, it seemed logical to ask him what it was like working with Hugo Weaving, an actor held in high esteem in every industry he has worked in. I wondered if it was intimidating, empowering, instructive, or all three.
“Hugo’s name kept shooting up to the top of the pile of actors we wanted in the role, and he responded very quickly. He was making The Wolfman at the time, this $80 million epic, and I think he was looking for the flip-side to that, something small and intimate. He was back in Australia and I met him to have a chat and we just clicked. I think having that relationship and a connection is so important. You can cast a great actor, but that relationship and connection makes things so much easier.
“It was a little bit intimidating. But Hugo’s not that character. He’s not intimidating at all. He made it very easy, and he was very trusting and patient with me. I think he really enjoyed working with Tom, as well. He said he learned a lot about acting through watching Tom acting.
“Directing Tom (Russell) and Hugo was like a Jekyll and Hyde experience. With Hugo you talk about character and subtext, script and story. With Tom I had to work out a basic A-B way of directing him, because the moment we talked about anything like story or subtext his eyes just glazed over.”
Last Ride marks the second time that Ivin has worked with a child actor, but the fact that Last Ride was a full feature film rather than a short like Cracker Bag raises some interesting issues. How was Ivin to extract a performance from a child who is too young to truly understand the implications of the film as a whole? Is there an age at which a child changes into an ‘actor’ where previously he/she was simply ‘playing’?
“I think Tom was acting. There is a bit of Tom in the character, I wouldn’t say it’s totally not him. But then he’s very serious about what he does, and even when he did something that wasn’t quite what I wanted, he took it on board. He didn’t think “oh, I did something wrong.” He thought about what he did a lot. He was in the moment all the time. I think that‘s the beauty of child performance.
“Tom is a pretty amazing kid. He’s an amazing actor. An actor in the truest sense in that Tom is very far away from Chook. We were able to carve Chook out of Tom. He also had very cool parents. They say that when you cast children, you also cast their parents. That‘s very true.”
Last Ride was recently released on DVD, and within 24 hours of the film becoming available in shops, it had been downloaded illegally a staggering 17,000 times. I asked Ivin what he thought of the shifting paradigm of film distribution, the illegal file sharing crisis facing the industry today and how it effects the Australian industry particularly:
“I don’t know if it’s effecting the Australian industry that much. It probably is a bit, I don’t know the statistics. But it’s a really strange situation we’re in. I personally don’t mind people downloading it. I’m glad that a whole lot of people have watched it. Producers will have another opinion and studios will have a very different opinion, but for me, I don’t mind it because people are going to see the film. There’s all this talk about alternative distribution methods, how will we distribute films these days? Last Ride was released on DVD and the next day it was being downloaded all around the world. If people want to watch a movie they will, whether it’s free or not. If they can’t get into a cinema, or get their hands on a DVD, then they’ll download it. But I think if we set up a torrent ourselves, and had a tip jar, some people would still pay. But Trent Reznor of Nine inch nails did a similar experiment, and it was surprising, the amount that didn‘t pay. I think it was around 80 percent of people didn‘t pay.
“But the problem is different with films. With music people will still pay to see Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails in concert, or will pay for a t-shirt. But with a movie, once someone has watched it, they probably won’t watch it two times or three times. Most films don’t have t-shirts or extra-curricular material. It is a real quandary. The film industry has sat back and watched the music industry crumble and rebuild itself, and the movie industry is definitely in the process of crumbling. But now it’s been put back into the hands of the film-makers, much like music has been put back into the hands of the creators. It’s rather empowering in that way.”
Given Ivin’s own path to success via film festivals and the coveted Palm D’Or, I asked him what his thoughts are on the more unorthodox path of film-makers like Kevin Smith (Clerks), Oren Peli (Paranormal Activity) and (The Blair Witch Project) -- all guerilla film-makers who made feature films for next to nothing with limited resources and then found themselves the creators of break-out hits.
“I think with film these days, it really is choose your own adventure. I don’t think going out and making a film in the hopes that it will break through is the way to go. I think when those things happen, it’s when people have their head down, working away, and they realise at the end of it that they’ve done something amazing. I’m pretty sure when Kevin Smith made Clerks, he didn’t think that would be a break-out success. With the Blair Witch again, it was sort of like, ‘this is something we’re doing.’ But those stories I think are much more inspiring than successful first films that are studio-backed.”
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Glendyn Ivin's blog, which features some of his extraordinary photography and insights into his film-making philosophy.
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