ScreenWize

After a day finalising the sound on his award winning film 10 Canoes, Rolf de Heer opened the fridge in his workshop looking for a cold drink to celebrate. It was then that he noticed a collection of old film stock - 20,000 feet of it - left over from more than ten years of filmmaking. “In an instant,” he says, “I knew what our next project would be. I had this light-bulb moment imagining what the film scraps would look like running through a camera. It was unspooling in front of my eyes, and I realised it would probably be as weird as one of those old silent films. So that’s what I decided to do: make a silent film.”

De Heer has fond memories of movies from the silent era. He attended a regular film programme at school in Australia in the late 1950’s. “It was before television had started in Australia,” he says, “and the films I recall most vividly from those screenings were the silent comedies. I liked slapstick, and remember policemen chasing people round and round. It was probably The Keystone Cops.” These crazy policemen, forever tripping, prat falling and smashing into each other, came from the earliest days of Hollywood, when Mack Sennett, the so called “King of Comedy”, formed The Keystone Studios in 1912. Charlie Chaplin was one of Sennett’s regulars, and helped make slapstick comedy hugely popular in those early days. “I realised that the film would have to be a comedy to have any chance of success,” says De Heer. “I knew it would sound like a radical idea in marketing terms to make a silent film in 2007, but everyone loves to laugh.”

With slapstick comedy in mind, De Heer started shaping a story. He decided early on that it would have to be a period film, to match the feel of the silent era. But then, in another light bulb moment, he imagined a device that could free the story from its period moorings: a time machine. “This would allow travel into the present-day,” says De Heer. “And my next thought was that I would need an inventor – a mad scientist.” And so Dr. Plonk was born, a mathematician and inventor from 1907, trying to make sense of his world. He creates a wooden machine that enables him to travel one hundred years forward where he finds plenty of Keystone-like cops to chase him around. (In a lovely self-referential joke, de Heer also makes Dr. Plonk travel backwards to a very 10 Canoes like time).

Once de Heer had established these basic narrative elements, he began fleshing out the story. “Dr. Plonk obviously needed an assistant, and I decided to make the assistant - Paulus - deaf and mute,” says de Heer. “This helped overcome some of the problems of a film without dialogue. Clearly Dr. Plonk cant talk Paulus, so he has to kick him in the bum a lot.” De Heer smiles at the thought. “Actually everyone kicks him in the bum a lot.” The central characters were then finished off with Dr. Plonk’s wife, Mrs Plonk, and his energetic dog, Tiberius who frequently steals the show.

De Heer cast Nigel Lunghi in the role of Dr. Plonk after regularly passing him busking in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall. “I didn’t even know his real name at that time,” he says “He was called Mr. Spin and I knew he’d be perfect with his extraordinary physical skills, energy and ability to juggle. I asked around and eventually tracked down his phone number.” For Mrs Plonk, de Heer could think of no one better than Magda Szubanski. “She has superb comic timing and a great physical presence,” says De Heer. The role of Paulus was perhaps the easiest decision of all. Paul Blackwell is one of South Australia’s best known and best loved stage actors, with a huge reputation for clowning, a key feature of the deaf mute’s role as the much maligned side-kick. Blackwell’s other contribution to the Dr. Plonk casting process was to allow his pet dog Reg to be Tiberius. The production notes for the film – written as silent movie title cards – explain how Reg, a Jack Russell terrier, got the job. “When Paul asked Reg if he wanted to be in the film, Reg asked who was directing it. Paul said “Rolf! Rolf!”, and Reg figured anyone with a name that sounds like a barking dog must be okay, so he agreed to do it.”

The technical aspect of making a film in the silent movie style from expired fragments of film stock proved a significant challenge for De Heer and his crew. De Heer wanted to use a hand-cranked camera to photograph the action, ensuring the look of the period. On the internet he found and purchased a 35mm camera made by Universal Camera Corporation in 1920. “It looked lovely,” says De Heer, “but unfortunately we discovered that we couldn’t use it. We loaded the film into the camera and it fit perfectly. Then we tried to focus it but there was no image to see. We realised that modern film stock has so much more emulsion on it compared to ninety years ago that the image couldn’t be seen on the back of the film. We sold the camera.”

Slowly all the ideas of precisely duplicating the past were consigned to the rubbish bin. De Heer ended up using newer lenses than he originally wanted, and a more modern camera was adapted to take a hand cranking mechanism. Director of Photography Judd Overton then had to find a way to crank the camera constantly at the desired speed. “In the old days,” says de Heer, “they used to sing or hum little ditties to keep the cranking in time, but no-one knows the songs anymore, so we developed a digital tachometer – rather like a metronome – so that Judd could keep the rhythm of the cranking consistent.”

But it was the post-production process that caused the biggest headaches for de Heer. “Our original intention was to process the film normally, get a black and white print, and then edit the old way, by splicing bits of film together,” he says. But this seemingly straightforward strategy was too expensive, because the film stock – although old – was far superior to that of the silent film era and had to be degraded in a highly controlled way to get the right look. As De Heer puts it: “A very simple process had to be replaced by an extremely complex one to duplicate a look previously arrived at in a very simple manner.”

However, the result is just as De Heer wanted. “So far the film appears to work for people aged from 4 to 94,” he says. And it’s also helped clean out his fridge.

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon