If you’re yet to experience the hilariously honest, embarrassingly identifiable, and brilliantly cast Hot Mess, the first ever feature film by Sydney’s Lucy Coleman, you’re missing out.
Inspired by true events and starring comedian Sarah Gaul, Hot Mess tells the tale of 25-year-old Loz, an aspiring playwright who seems intent on sabotaging her own success.
Given the film and the pure Australian-ness of it all is far too recognisable to be fiction, The Brag asked Lucy Coleman to come clean on exactly what inspired Hot Mess.
Watch the Hot Mess trailer below:
“By the time I started to write my first feature film, (the very semi-autobiographical) Hot Mess, the wound was still there but it was just a little scab that was fun to pick at,” Coleman tells The Brag.
“’Dave’ – who I’d dated for a total of six weeks by the way – had broken my precious 25-year-old baby heart,” she adds. “By the time my pen had hit the page I had read Eat, Pray, Love, Wild, and all the Brene Brown books. I had moved to Byron Bay for fucks sake, that’s how cliche I was in my healing.”
Coleman says if there was a genre called “ridiculously humiliating life-crisis comedy” that would be Hot Mess.
“Spoiler warning – the climax of the film is drawn from my own experience of when I hit myself in the face with my phone to keep a guy’s attention,” she reveals. “For some fun trivia, the real life events went down at a Sticky Fingers gig at the Cambridge Hotel in Newcastle.
Love Film & TV?
Get the latest Film & TV news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
“I was a grad student overwhelmed at finally having to step into the real world and like any good feminist I wanted a guy to save me. I was a desperate m****f*****r to put it lightly. When the wound had turned scabby I knew it was time to tell the story.”
Coleman says at the heart of all her stories – including her very first short, Hot Kebab Guy – is the “humiliating hypocrisies and insecurities of modern day womanhood.”
“I ain’t got a clue what’s going on and it’s my one way I hope to connect with the world,” she says. “After our first festival screening and a girl in the bathrooms touched my shoulder with tears in her eyes and said that was literally my life, I knew it had all been worth it.”
Hot Mess is available to rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube and Fetch TV now.
