Interview – 100 Bloody Acres
The Cairnes brothers are doing the Australian film industry proud with their debut horror-comedy 100 Bloody Acres. The movie has been doing pretty strongly, both home and overseas, getting audiences to laugh and squirm in equal measure. Heckler tracked them down, and promised to let them go if they’d answer a few questions…
It’s the end of the junket today, is that right?
Cameron Not quite, we’ve still got a few bits and pieces of press to do over the next few days.
How sick are you of the interview questions?
Colin Ah, quite. No that’s not true. It’s our first feature, so it’s all a bit exciting for us to get up there and talk up the film. But I couldn’t imagine doing it much longer. It’s been a long, fun week. Every screening you’re scared that it’s the best screening of your life, but then the next one is just as good.
You had these characters sitting on these cinema seats in the movie, kind of watching the action. One of the seats is empty, one of the characters walks out half-way through, only one person stays to the end. Is that what you were anticipating the audience response would be?
Cameron You hope. You shock someone enough that they walk off, indignant, and then tell their friends not to go. Which in a way is saying: go.
Colin I think you’re giving it way too much thought. The first draft, which was a more straight horror take on it, they filmed their what they did they were more sort of straight torturers they just real sadists. So I think the cinema seats were just to tie in their love of film.
You filmed in the Adelaide Hills. How did that come about?
Colin Really through our association with Julie Ryan, the producer, who’s Adelaide-based. And some of the funding came through the SAFC and so a requirement of getting that money and having Julie on board was to shoot it here and she knows the crews really well and they all love working for Julie. And plus the locations were right, once we started going for drives up in the hills we knew instantly that this was going to be our location.
Early on, we had plan to shoot in country Victoria – we’re from Melbourne, and we’d go for these drives up in the country and visit these little towns like Yandoit and Guildford and a lot of those places found their way into the story. So when it came to shooting the film we thought, well, obviously we’ll just go out in the bush in Victoria, we know exactly where to go. It didn’t work out that way, but it worked out for the best.
Cameron Looking at the film now it is very reminiscent of the locations we were looking at back in Victoria. The Adelaide Hills are much like parts of central Victoria where it’s not that densely wooded and there’s the old creek beds and old ruins of miner’s cottages and all that stuff. It’s like someone from Yandoit would watch this film and think it was shot down the road. But the hills are great, the hills have eyes. [laughs]
Colin The hills really are a character in the film. If we’re not inside the shed, we’re out in the paddocks. You’re always seeing that undulating landscape and that lovely big blue Adelaide sky.
Cameron And we shot right in the middle of summer so it was dry as a bone and it just lends a certain atmosphere.
Did you try and shoot wide to capture that especially?
Colin I think we tried, we made a conscious decision to shoot it in a more classical, widescreen way to make the most of the landscape. I know there’s a trend in horror films to tighten the shot, or shoot the shit out of something and then leave it to the edit to figure out how you’re going to approach the scene.
Storyboarding?
Colin Yeah, we storyboarded a fair bit. For most of the action-ey stuff. If it’s a two hander, like Reg and Sophie in the truck, you don’t storyboard that, that’s just three shots and you know what you’re doing.
Cameron You try and design that stuff as much as possible and of course you collaborate with your DOP (cinematographer) on those shots and on a tight schedule with not a lot of money, not a lot of access to tracks and cranes and things, you gotta make that stuff count. So it comes down to the initial design.
Colin It’s not like we had a Steadicam lying around for the whole twenty five days. You gotta be really clear and specific. You can only get a Steadicam for a few days and we only have four or five Steadicam shots that are quite key and used for storytelling purposes so you gotta try to schedule everything to get bang for your buck when you’ve got that gear.
I’m from the hills so I was curious if you remember what townships you shot around.
Cameron The main property was out past Mt. Torrens, but not quite, between Mt. Torrens and Lobethal. The idea was to suggest that there is a township somewhere over the hills. And Harrogate was where we shot the John Jarrat scene.
I’m from Harrogate.
Cameron Fair dinkum? So you’d know that dirt road that just goes on?
It was getting a bit familiar when I saw the opening of the cemetery.
Cameron We literally stumbled over that location, we were looking for the perfect cemetery and we’d earmarked a couple but they weren’t quite right for the staging of the action. Then our location scout Jessie was driving us to Harrogate road because there’s that big scene in the truck with Reg and Sophie as they bond and we needed a long stretch of road.
Colin A long quiet stretch so we wouldn’t hold up traffic.
I probably used to ride up that road on my BMX.
Colin I bet.
Cameron But on the way to that road, somebody out of the corner of their eye caught this cemetery as we were driving past and we slammed on the brakes.
Colin I love it out there, maybe we should do a drive out and go say hi to the guys at Providore. That was our coffee stop before the shoot.
My mum’s taken me there, it’s nice. How much say did you have in casting the film, did you have people in mind?
Colin Look, no. There are always name-actors you have in your head as you’re writing, but really we hadn’t written roles specifically for anyone. So it all came about through the casting process which happened a month or two out from shooting the actual film. And that was a huge, eye-opening experience. We saw just about every actor in Australia, probably, and got sent a lot of tapes from overseas, too. There’s obviously a lot of Aussie actors trying to forge their careers over there.
Cameron You know what you don’t want, and that’s when through the casting you see what you’re after. That’s what happened with Damon Herriman, who plays Reg, he just nailed it. He just got that character and knew how to play him. And we were always going to fight for the people we wanted, and fortunately we got what we wanted – it wasn’t a big battle.
Colin I think investors were aware there wasn’t a lot of money, and I think they acknowledged that this wasn’t the type of big budget film that could attract names so it was all about getting the right actors.
Cameron But I think we’ve got a cast that in maybe five years you’ll look back and say, “Wow you managed to get these great actors together in one film.” It’ll seem like a bit of a coup but we’re lucky we got these guys while they’re still emerging before they become massive names. You know I think Anna McGahan‘s gonna be huge; this is our first feature, I think it’s her first feature, we’re all just learning the ropes together which made it all fun.
Michael Phillips from the Chicago Tribune had a lot to say about her…
Cameron I think every one seems to have their favourites some people pick Angus and think what a revelation, others obviously Damon because he’s so good, and Anna of course. And even the other guys Jamie and Oliver have their fans. They’re all getting good notices because they embrace those characters with all their flaws and make them dramatically interesting, but also funny as well.
Would you say the success of Aussie horror films, post Wolf Creek, has been influencing it’s comedy? Is it an easier sell, to sell an Aussie comedy if you cover it in blood?
Colin Maybe. We’re a bit surprised that we got a lot of interest once people read the script. They do know we have a bit of a track record for horror, as well as comedy in the past. But people latched onto that combination. I don’t know where our film will stand in history, but I think there’s an appetite that will go on. The next twelve months there’s a bunch of genre films coming out, Patrick, Wolf Creek 2. Hopefully we’re gonna enter another purple patch.
Do you want to tell us a bit about your next project?
Colin Yeah so we’ve got another script, “They Shoot Hostages Don’t They?” Which has certainly got lots of designer violence and laughs and a real ensemble sort of feel to it but it’s not so much in the horror domain it’s more sort of a crime caper and, look, we’d like to think we could get that one up in the six months or so and maybe be shooting early next year.
It’s an intriguing title.
Cameron Yeah, well, it gets a laugh, whether it’s for the intended reasons or not and it started out as a short film ten years ago and that has the same title so perhaps we’re just a little bit attached to that title. And it makes sense when you know the story so there’s a logic to it. Because the short did really well, it won some prizes and played at London film festivals, so we just felt in seven minutes we’d created some really interesting characters and an interesting premise. We kind of just took that first seven minutes and kept writing to see what would happen and we managed to have a bit of fun with it.
Would you say, getting back to Acres, maybe a specific film maybe influenced the script or at least the pitch?
Colin Originally a film like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes, I think they were sort of the film inspiration and it was and in its earlier incarnation was going to be more of a straight serious horror film. But yeah obviously that all changes as we got into the writing of it and it was probably more informed by films like American Werewolf and The Howling and The Reanimator and Return of the Living Dead.
Cameron But also non-horror stuff as well like think back to the eighties and seeing the early work of the Coen brother and stuff like Tarantino – all the great American filmmakers. All that stuff finds its way in whether you shoot a scene or sense of character and the humour in it. But then the pitch is quite difficult – what do you liken it to? And we’ve had people on our behalf say it’s a bit Fargo or a bit Shaun of the Dead and you know, it’s its own creature. But yeah when you’re trying to sell a film, trying to market it, and trying to get interest from sales agents and distributors you do need to say it’s a bit like this and bit like that.
Colin But then if you’re referring to films from thirty years ago it just means nothing to nobody so yeah you kind of have to narrow your frame of reference a little bit and look at more recent fare. And there’s not a lot to compare it to, I guess there is Shaun of the Dead and maybe Tucker Dale Versus Evil, but you don’t want to say it’s exactly like those films because then you build an expectation that it’s going to have the same sense of humour when the tone is its own thing. It’s a very hard thing to navigate to be honest.
The humour of the guy hanging upside down covered in blood but more worried about his love-life reminded me of Battle Royale with the teenagers still trying to root each other but they’re also trying to kill each other. The soap opera thing going on in horror is hilarious…
Cameron Yeah the idea for that was drawn from personal experience…
Colin [Laughs] Traumatic experience…
Cameron Perhaps I wasn’t hanging over a grinder but…
Colin It felt like you were
Cameron Yeah. You know, I don’t know if you guys or your readers have ever had to go through a break-up, and learn all the horrible details about an affair, but it’s like everything else you just block it out and I think that was kind of the inspiration for that idea what if this breakup was happening
Colin But at the most inopportune time
Cameron Yeah all this other horror happening around you, that sort of becomes incidental…
Colin But rather than the horror distracting from the problem it sort of magnifies the problem. Now we’ve only got minutes to live, let’s get closure here, “How many fucking times did you cheat?”
Any advice you’d give to aspiring filmmakers or just people who aspire to get into Australian film?
Colin Just, it’s going to be a long road, it was for us.
Cameron However long you think it’s going to take, double it, and add five years. That’s all I can say.
Should you be trying to draft grant applications every day or shoot something every day?
Cameron Shoot.
Colin Both.
Cameron Shoot first, write submissions later…
