Australian cinema has a genre problem, though perhaps not the one you might assume.
It’s not that horror movies aren’t being made in this country – it’s that audiences aren’t rushing out to see them in big enough numbers. The Babadook made more in the first weekend of its English run than it did for the entirety of the time it screened in Australia, and Wolf Creek had to earn the blessing of Quentin Tarantino before it began gathering steam at home.
It’s a problem Tim Pocock understands all too well. The star of the upcoming Aussie action-horror flick Red Billabong has experienced the industry’s genre bias first-hand. “In every creative outlet there is a risk involved,” says the relentlessly chipper 30-year-old. “But because our film industry is so much smaller, it’s very difficult to make films that cost money, or that push the envelope a little bit outside of what we know to be tried and true.
“Dramas do so well for Australians,” he continues. “You look at something like Animal Kingdom, which put so many Australian actors and creatives on the map. [So] that’s the thing that film bodies and investors feel confident in making. Whereas the bigger budget films – the action films, the special effects films, the ones which cost more money to make – they are a bigger gamble, and they don’t necessarily pay off. So a lot of filmmakers are scared of making that gamble.”
Certainly Red Billabong is, if nothing else, a gamble. Centred on a pair of brothers (Pocock and Home And Away’s Dan Ewing) who come face-to-face with a mysterious, outback-dwelling monster, the film slots neatly into the Aussie creature feature subgenre. And though that particular pigeonhole has its success stories – 1984’s noiry Razorback is a cult classic – it’s also a road littered with countless corpses, most notably Howling III, AKA that film about killer thylacines.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Red Billabong’s own creature caused the production a fair share of difficulties, not least of all for Pocock and his fellow thespians, who largely had to act opposite thin air. “Everything was done completely in post, except we had a couple of puppet pieces in there for the arms of the monster that were sometimes on set, and we had some concept art that we were able to look at before we shot,” says Pocock. “But otherwise you have to get on set, do your best, and hope that it works.”
Red Billabong’s lengthy post-production period also means Pocock is yet to see a proper edit of the film. “I saw a cut around December of last year,” he says. “It was the first assembled cut of everything put together – so it was longer than the cut we have now, and it didn’t have any of the special effects in it. It hadn’t been graded, and had no soundtrack. It was kind of a bit of a tease, ’cause you … get a feel of the structure and the pacing, but it’s a creature feature, and without having the actual monster there to see, and without the proper soundtrack, it just didn’t quite work for me. Then I saw a previs version a few months later, and that had some pre-vis shots of the monster in there, so that worked really well.”
And yet despite the ample attention on his monstrous co-star, Pocock says he was drawn to the project for very different reasons. “I looked at the concept of the film, and read the script, and the main thing I thought was, ‘Why hasn’t this been done before?’ It’s a film that has a lot of Aboriginal mythology in it … and if you look at the way we show Aboriginal culture in film and TV, we don’t really glorify it enough, I don’t think. We don’t make enough of a fuss about what a rich tapestry of indigenous history we have in this country.
“You watch movies like The Mummy, for example, [a film] that comes from Egyptian mythology, and they’re really celebrating their own story and ancient history. And we have so much of that in this country, but we don’t focus enough on it. There’s so much there to focus on. Every actor and every creative person wants to be at the cusp of something new. They want to be involved in new cinema, in that new wave, and I thought this project had that potential. That’s what really drew me in.”
Of course, only time will tell whether Red Billabong will usher in a new era of Aussie B-movie goodness – though no matter what kind of audience it draws, it will always have a fan in Pocock. Even if he does sometimes need to be reminded what the movie is about.
“Not so long ago we did an appearance at… it might have been Gold Coast Supanova?” Pocock says, already beginning to giggle. “I’d just done another film up in Queensland, and we were doing a Q&A and Luke [Sparke], our director, said, ‘Well Tim, why don’t you introduce yourself and the character you play?’ And I was like, ‘Hi, I’m Tim and I play… wait, what was the name of the person I play in this film?’”
He laughs loudly. “I had just done another film with the same crew and the same area and my brain just got a little bit discombobulated. But I’m so excited for this film to come out that I now definitely remember everything about it.”
Red Billabong (dir. Luke Sparke) is in cinemas Thursday August 25.
