ScreenWize

Angels come in all shapes and sizes. There’s the invisible type that perhaps sits on our shoulder, watching over us, making us look twice before crossing that busy road. Then there’s the practical type, the wealthy kind who provide capital for that entrepreneurial dream that’s going to change the world, the dream that we’ve been working on passionately for years. The new Australian film Hunt Angels, is about a man with such a passion, a man who would not let anything – even the absence of practical, money bearing angels – stop him in his pursuit of making the great Australian film.

Hunt Angels was one of the pseudonyms used by Rupert Kathner, an often impractical, sometimes dishonest, but always somehow likeable filmmaker from the 1930’s and 1940’s, and his story has been brought to the screen in a highly innovative new film written and directed by Alec Morgan and produced by Sue Maslin. The pair of filmmakers were in Canberra in October to open the film at the Canberra International Film Festival, and to pay a visit to Kathner Street, a quiet suburban road named – by a strange twist of bureaucracy - after a man who was anything but quiet and suburban.

The film, which has just taken out the Film Critics Circle of Australia Award
for Best Feature Documentary in 2006, breaks new ground in visual design with the way that actors playing characters from the story are inserted into a story-world that is entirely made up of old photographs and film footage from the period. Alec Morgan revealed how, after six years of research with the aim of making a more conventional drama, he had to change the way the story would come to life on the screen: “I realised that there was going to be a number of problems. Firstly, there is nothing of Sydney left from the 1930s, and so recreating that look as a series of sets was going to be very expensive. Secondly, people who read the story about Kathner and his partner Alma Brooks, didn’t believe it was true. They thought it was a kind of Australian copy of Bonny & Clyde, so I was going to have to insert a lot of back-story to explain the context. Then, when I discovered that the State Library had 350,000 digital images available, I started to see another way to tell the story. I began to see the historical characters walking through a virtual film noir city that was Sydney as it really existed.”

Morgan took another six months to re-write the script around the old photographs and other footage from the period, and then he and Producer Sue Maslin found a crew who were sympathetic and technically aware enough to go through the highly complex production and post-production process. “It was a very technical shoot and we had incredibly detailed storyboards and intricate planning for every shot in order to match the lighting and the overall style of the images we were using,” said Maslin. “As well, we had to invent the entire post-production pathway because this hadn’t been done before. There were something like twenty-two steps that had to be locked carefully in place in order to create the final digital world of Sydney in the 1930’s.”

The film stars Ben Mendelsohn as the maverick filmmaker Rupert Kathner, the man who took on Hollywood at it’s most powerful, and a character that Director Alec Morgan describes as “a charming rogue who was even liked by the people he ripped off.” His partner in adventure, crime and bed was Alma Brooks, played by Victoria Hill. “She’s also a mysterious woman” says Morgan, “an ex-barmaid with a shady past, who’s ultimately more practical than the visionary dreamer Kathner. She’s the one who gets things done in this story. It’s a great yarn, and so many hilarious things happened around Kathner that I couldn’t get them all in the film.”

How a street in Chapman came to be named after Kathner is just another mad anecdote that typifies the spirit of the man himself. Andrew Pike, owner of Electric Shadows, where Hunt Angels will be screening from the end of this month, appears in the film as a historian. Pike wrote a seminal text on Australian Film, and researched Kathner and his movies back in the 1970’s. He was then working as a graduate clerk in the wonderfully bureaucratically named ‘Street Nomenclature Unit’ of the Department of the Interior. “It was a fairly Dickensian unit with great big ledgers and biographies of the street names that are, of course, all national memorials” said Pike. “I was given the job of proposing names for Chapman, and I had to make sure, firstly, that the people the streets were to be named after had actually died, and then justify all the names to the National Memorial Committee. I proposed naming the streets of Chapman after film and theatre pioneers of Australia, and the idea was accepted.” Pike then had to propose a series of individual names and was very concerned that Kathner wouldn’t get through. “I must admit that I knew he was a bit of a rogue, and the whole ethos of the unit was that everything had to be squeaky clean. As a result, the little biography I wrote about Kathner was a bit romanticized. And no-one asked any questions and it got through.”

If Rupert Kathner never found the angel who was going to give him enough money to make the epic Australian blockbuster, perhaps he found an invisible one in the corridors of the administration, ensuing that he’ll live on forever, not far from that other, rather less radical Australian film pioneer who’s name is given to Chauvel Circuit.

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon