Recently, we introduced to you director Alex Munt and his feature debut, LBF. As if the film weren’t unique already, Munt shared with us some interesting stories of what happened on the set.
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The film stars Toby Schmitz in the lead role of ‘Goodchild,’ with Bianca Chiminello (as ‘The Beautiful Financial Backer’) and Gracie Otto (as ‘The Dead Girl’). These off-beat character names are lifted directly from the novel. Septimus Caton (‘Cash’), April Rose Pengilly (‘Tanya’) and Iren Skaarnes (‘University’) complete the central cast.
For LBF, there was no official casting process. I’d seen Toby onstage and in other indie films, and thought he was terrific. He is mates with Sep Caton, who came on board shortly after. Gracie Otto was the first to read the screenplay, and she suggested April Rose. Iren was a friend of mine already. April and Iren had not acted before, so we built their characters around themselves in a sense. Knowing April could play drums, we did an LBF ‘drum montage’ at one point in the film!
I remember one of the first things we did for LBF is to shoot our wardrobe tests. I like these—shot with lots of colour on white walls of Blank Space Gallery. They pre-empt the ‘pop’ aesthetic of the film, with retro-appeal. In fact, I liked them so much, some ended up cut into the film, set to music or narration. People have often asked what I mean by LBF being a ‘pop-art’ film—which for me, is really about the way in which the film enfolds pop-culture into the cinematic frame primarily the music, but also fashion, photography and visual-arts. LBF trades on a ‘hyper-real’ aesthetic to create its film world.
Day #1 of Production: We shot the first scene when ‘Goodchild,’ just off the plane, is picked up by his best-friend ‘Cash,’ on the way to an afternoon motel party (cocaine and hilarity) where he connects with ‘The Beautiful Financial Backer.’ For this scene, my friend owned an Alpha (Spider), which I borrowed for the shoot. But a day or two before shooting, we learned neither cast member held a current driving license, for the opening travelling shot, which served to introduce ‘Goodchild’s’ return home, and feelings of dislocation. This demanded a quick solution, which was to tow our actors in the rolling car, elevated behind a tow-truck. Our cinematographer Gareth Tillson ‘cheated’ the camera angle to allow for the tilt, with me riding next to the tow-truck driver ahead, wired into the performance.
I guess, this story reflects my feelings about micro-budget filmmaking. You always need to keep moving forward, finding creative solutions to problems that are typically resolved by money. I think we got this scene in the bag for $180 (cost of a tow-truck driver for 1 hour), which made me think ‘yes, this is possible… we can actually make this film.’ The driving scene, which opens LBF, unfolds to the song ‘We’re All Gonna Die’ from Sydney band ‘The Model School.’ It sets up the tone for the film: pure-pop with a dark undertone. After LBF wrapped, I ended up filming the music video for this track, which you can check out on Vimeo. It’s also the track used for our Sofia Coppola-inspired trailer that uses music to introduce the story.
LBF the film (Official Trailer) from muntmedia on Vimeo.
In the novel, the story takes place between Perth and Melbourne, but for the film we set the story between Sydney and Paris. The decision to film in Paris on a micro-budget sounds an unusual one—but again, with digital filmmaking anything is possible. In Paris, we saw the story of ‘The Dead Girl,’ and chose to film in Paris since Gracie was spending a lot of time there. For these scenes, Gracie doubles as our 2nd Unit Director. Armed with a HD handy-cam and a few sketches from me about what I thought would work—she came back with some great material of a greyed-out Parisian winter. For LBF this worked well (the story of the past) compared to our images from the Australian summer (in the present).
In LBF, the character ‘Cash’ is played by Septimus Caton, who is front-man of the band ‘Kids at Risk.’ In the film, ‘Cash’ forms a relationship with ‘University’ (Iren Skaarnes). For this scene, it was the actors who came up with a really nice, effective scene that gets across the idea of their romance. ‘Cash’ sings the song ‘Sugar’ (‘Kids at Risk’) to ‘University’ as an acoustic version. Sep did it in a single-take. It’s one of those on-set moments, when the crew intuitively gets that a scene is hitting the mark.
On Oxford Street again, ‘Goodchild’ interviews pole-dancer ‘Zahra Stardust,’ as part of his work in writing ‘The Love Enterprise.’ Again, this scene isn’t scripted. At the start of the interview ‘Goodchild’ says, ‘I just have some one-word questions, it’s how I’m rolling at the moment’—which also describes LBF made off-the-cuff.
For LBF, I was also interested in making a set of creative collaborations, outside of the immediate film. Filmmaking is of course a collaborative art, but often this means just within the crew—and not beyond. For example, in one flashback scene of ‘The Dead Girl,’ we worked with Tangent fashion magazine. Here, we see the backstory of ‘The Dead Girl’ modeling in Paris. The fashion photographer in LBF is Tangent’s Emmanuel Giraud. This was interesting since both the DP and the fashion-photographer (in the scene) were using the same technology and light set-up, DSLR photography. I like films that capture a sense of ‘reality’ within the cinematic frame, when the fiction film narrative is opened up to the real world. Like in a later scene, when we see ‘Goodchild’ lonely and dejected—walking the streets of Sydney on NYE, which was shot guerilla style in the city.
I often get asked what we shot LBF on—to which the best answer is probably, ‘anything we could get our hands on.’ It was all HD, but across a range of cameras. The dSLR’s surfaced during the making of the film, which we put to good use. ‘LBF’ is a splintered story, which unfolds between ‘Goodchild’s’ past and present, and I think that our use of multiple digital formats works with that idea.
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Andrew and I went to film school together, and we’ve been friends for nearly 20 years. A nonprofessional actor who has never appeared in a film before, Andrew is known among his friends for being an incredibly witty and charming yet frustratingly elusive personality. Although the story for “Loveless” is fiction, Shauna and I based much of it on Andrew’s life, and he plays a version of himself that is very close to the real thing.
Andrew’s world, for which we sought to create a naturalistic tone, is populated by nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves. Cindy Chastain, who plays Andrew’s ex Joanna, is Andrew’s real-life ex-girlfriend. Kendra, Andrew’s office-mate, and Sabin, his boss, are both played by his close friends. One exception is that Gary Wilmes, a professional actor, plays the character of Tad. Reality and fiction come together, though, when the real-life Tad makes a cameo, as a banker who, in one scene, is seated next to the fictional Tad.
For the absurdly comic world that Andrew encounters represented by Ava’s family, we cast professional actors. Ricky is played by Scott Cohen, with whom Shauna and I have been friends for years. Ricky’s younger brother, Paul Jr., is played by Scott Cohen’s son, Liam. And Ava is played by Genevieve Hudson-Price, the daughter of the novelist and screenwriter Richard Price; we found Genevieve on an audition tape through our friend Meredith Tucker, who is a casting director. Shauna produced the film out of our apartment, all the actors wore their own clothes and all the locations were donated by friends. Our daughter, Lily, plays herself in the film. It was truly a labor of love.
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