TOM Magazine is giving away 10 double passes to tomorrow night’s Brisbane International Film Festival screening of Patrick at Event Cinemas Myer Centre, 9pm. To enter please email with ‘Patrick’ in the subject line and your contact details in the message.
TOM Magazine had a chat with Patrick’s director Mark Hartley about Aussie horror, remakes and how it all came together.
TOM: The Australian film label sometimes carries questionable connotations – did this affect how your vision for the remake of Patrick?
Mark: We certainly never wanted people to think that they were watching an Australian film when watching Patrick. We kind of realized that it’s hard to get Australian’s to watch genre films in the theatres, so we always knew if we wanted to have success with this film that we had to play it internationally. So hopefully it seems more like a European film.
TOM: Apart from some of the cast keeping their Australian accents I never really felt I was watching an ‘Australian’ film.
Mark: I could be wrong about this but I feel like a lot of Australian films aren’t shot on sets as well. I think that helped, that we could build our own environment, and so we weren’t just shooting in a fish and chip shop.
TOM: The production built all its own sets, and shot at the Docklands in Melbourne – did you do any research into the look of old medical facilities?
Mark: Not really – I’m happy to say this film isn’t a documentary. We could do whatever we wanted to do. We just wanted it to be spooky. Robbie who production designed it, we basically want this film to look like it is set in the middle of nowhere, that this place is a derelict convent, and just go for it. Gary the cinematographer and I were big fans of the recent Spanish horror film The Orphanage, so we used that as a bit of a template for the atmosphere and the style – the style in The Orphanage is pretty spooky as well.
TOM: So the concept of the comatose hospital…
Mark: Justin the writer did do research into people in comas and at the very start of the film, Roget quizzes Kathy about medical stuff, all of that is all real so there are bits and pieces in there that are real. But it’s hard to research telekinesis and stuff like that.
TOM: Had you seen the original?
Mark: Oh yeah, I’d seen the original when I was a kid. I found out that the director Richard Franklin had gone to my high school, and they’d invited him back to speak. So I knew him since I was 14, 15. He wasn’t really a mentor but certainly an inspiration knowing that he had gone to my school and ended up in Hollywood directing Psycho 2 and films like that. So it was quite wonderful that I got the opportunity to remake Patrick.
TOM: Were there things that you saw were missing or could have been done better in the original? Is that why you took on the remake?
Mark: I think people are remaking anything basically, and I think there should be rules for remakes. Such as only remake something dated, that’s very much rooted in its own period, and that you can bring something new to. Patrick is certainly rooted in 1978. But it has such a great central premise, and that’s what we kept. The idea that he’s a guy with unlimited powers, but very limited ambitions. All he wants to do is make this nurse fall in love with him. In a way we went even more old fashioned than the original by making it more gothic. The original is all set in a hospital in the city in broad daylight, and we wanted to add a lot of spook and atmosphere to the film so we probably made one that’s more old fashioned than the original.
TOM: When I was watching it there were certainly a lot of old school elements used – one of which was definitely the score.
Mark: We got a composer called Pino Donaggio, who did the original Carrie, who did Dressed to Kill by Brian De Palma, and The Howling. He was like my favourite composer and he said yes, which is quite miraculous. I wanted from the very first frame for people to know what they were in for. It’s not going to be a modern day horror film where people are just nasty to each other, it’s going to be a film that’s full of cheap scares and an old school sensibility. Pino’s score is very Hitchcockian, full of strings, and it really announces the film’s sensibility from the very start.
TOM: It certainly has a different tone to many other horror films out there.
Mark: People are either going to like this film or not. They’re either going to get this film or they don’t. I like the fact that it is different to most horror films. I think that the fact it is such a throwback separates it.
TOM: Sharni Vinson plays the lead in this film – she seems to be emerging as a great horror actress having just been seen in You’re Next. What is it about Sharni that makes her such a great leading lady?
Mark: I honestly don’t know. Obviously she’s got a very physical background, she’s got a dancers background so she’s drawn to physical action roles. I think she more wants to be an action hero than a scream queen. She gets to do a lot more physical stuff in Patrick, the first day we had her on set she was in a harness on set, getting thrown back into walls. I think the good thing about Sharni too, she’s like the everywoman. I don’t mean this with any disrespect to Sharni but she isn’t the blonde, glamorous type – she’s someone that ordinary people can identify with, and I think that’s a great quality to have with these films. The blonde one with the big tits is the first one to die.
TOM: You’ve also got Rachel Griffiths and Charles Dance in this film as well, can you tell me about how they got involved?
Mark: It’s very hard to make genre films in Australia, and the one thing that I thought about Australian genre films is that they never really had a famous cast, so we wanted to attract a good cast so it would have an air of prestige. Rachel was a big fan of the original when she was a kid – she saw it on TV and loved it. So I think that was part of the appeal. Charles just liked the script. Knowing that we wanted to attract a decent cast, we over wrote the script so that it seemed like a smart/dumb movie, hopefully to attract a decent cast and it worked. They really liked what was on the page.
TOM: So the character of Patrick is a bit of a tough one.
Mark: I always felt sorry for those poor agents who told their actors “you’re going in for the role of Patrick.” “What’s the film called?” “The film’s called Patrick.” “Great! I’m the lead!” And they’d sit there going through the script looking for one line of dialogue and not being able to find it.
TOM: How do you direct someone who’s in a coma?
Mark: You say “don’t blink. Jackson, don’t blink.” Jackson was great. If you want to see how good an actor he is, all that shock therapy stuff is him doing it himself. There’s no CG element to that, it’s literally him shaking his body in his bed. He’s such a lovely, funny guy. He’s lying there for hours, and then all of a sudden when Sharni or Peter would come hovering over him, he’d suddenly lean up and grab their throats and scare the living shit out of them.
TOM: Previous to Patrick you’d worked a lot in the documentary field – why did you choose now to move into a fictional film?
Mark: You don’t choose these things; the industry chooses these things for you. Prior to that I made about 150 music videos, and that’s what I always thought would be the stepping stone into feature films. In the end it turned out making documentaries was. Really, it’s just all the balls fell into place on this one. Lots of projects had been trying to get up, but we had a producer on this one who was just really tenacious. This is the one that got up.
TOM: Was it a hard sell to financiers?
Mark: All finance in Australia is triggered by having a local distributor attached. As I said, horror films – well our film is more of a thriller – haven’t done well in Australia. Not international ones, there are very few exemptions. So it’s hard to get a local distributor come on board. Thankfully I’d had a long relationship with Umbrella, so they wanted to take a chance with us.
TOM: I actually find a lot of people I know love horror films, and we always wait for them – but not many of them get released here.
Mark: You look at America’s box office, The Purge was at number one. The Purge has gone straight to DVD in Australia. Evil Dead only came out on one screen in each state and that’s only because people lobbied for it. The same with Cabin In The Woods. The big commercial films are finding it hard to get released here, so it’s very hard for a film like this, where exhibitors and distributors know that there are other films that are a lot more of a sure bet.
*Spoilers Ahead*
TOM: Were you worried about the level of violence in Patrick, particularly the scenes between him and his mother?
Mark: Yeah – it’s funny – it’s only when I saw the film with the sound mix that I thought ‘wow maybe this is a little too full on.’ When you’re on set, you know that everything’s fake, the actors are laughing as they’re doing stuff. The first two days we shot on this film were Patrick drowning his mother. As I say, I’m a first time narrative filmmaker, Justin is a first time writer, Gary who shot it – it was his first feature film, and we weren’t prepared for how nasty that really was. It was disturbing to watch because Jackson was really shoving Simone underwater, but she was such a great sport, and she made it so easy for us. I think obviously you have to somewhat give the audience what they want. The film isn’t people slicing off each other’s fingers. It isn’t as nasty as many films out there. And you do need to know why Patrick is who he is.
Patrick is screening on November 20th at Event Cinemas Myer, with a special Q&A with Mark Hartley after the film. For more information and to book, visit biff.com.au
