INTERVIEW BY ADRIAN SMITH

Although born in the UK, film director Brian Trenchard-Smith will forever be associated with the Australian cult film genre Ozploitation thanks to a number of films he made there in the 1970s and 1980s, including such favourites as The Man From Hong Kong (1975), Turkey Shoot (1982), BMX Bandits (1983, a childhood favourite of mine) and Dead End Drive-In (1986), the latter now available in UHD and Blu-ray from Umbrella Entertainment in its original Australian release cut and the later American edit featuring an exciting array of bonus features. To celebrate the release, I was able to speak to Brian about the film and the fact that global audiences will now be able to see the film as he originally intended:

BTS - I certainly want the full Australian version to be seen by a wider public. It never has been outside of Australia in 1986. Australian audiences did not respond to the movie, which was badly marketed as a summer holiday youth market romp with garish costumes and punkish costumes. You know, older people designing a marketing campaign aimed younger people and getting it wrong. They didn’t like the film, which was clear to me from meetings. They opened it in a Sydney theatre which was still under construction from remodelling and some people told me they had trouble finding which of the three theatres it was playing in. It was damned with faint praise by Australian cinema critics who were becoming jaundiced with the wave of Australian movies that were hitting the screen and they felt we’re not living up to Hollywood standards, so they were sharpening their ‘snark’. Luckily the VHS cut version that was ultimately seen by people all over the world developed a cult following, which has led to this rediscovery.

CR - It’s a shame that the full Australian cut didn’t make it to the UK because back in the 1980s we loved everything Australian here, especially the daily soaps Neighbours and Home and Away. It could have worked here.

BTS - Yes, they said Australia was Britain with better weather, which is completely wrong. I grew up in a part of Hampshire that seemed to be particularly temperate except December, but Australia can have tremendous rainfall and of course tremendous heat. I think the film would have appealed to post-Thatcher British sensibility because Turkey Shoot did, even in its savagely cut form. The British film censors hated the film but you know even with stinking reviews on its opening day it had a queue around the block at the Warner West End at the beginnings of a blizzard! So, there was something about Turkey Shoot that resonated with the British public which I tried to elicit for audience to a degree for both films.

CR - I thought it was interesting that you shot Dead End Drive-In at the same drive-in that you’d gone to when you were younger with your father.

BTS - The first drive-in I ever went to was the Matraville Drive-In in Sydney. I took my father to see Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965), which looked great. The way fate has it, I’m shooting in 1985 and was at that Matraville Drive-In doing Dead End Drive-In for that three-month window before the drive-in closed for economic reasons and became a block of flats. So, it was really kind of great to see the film again in a drive-in recently in Portland. I had never done that before because its release in Australia was so short, and I think there were over 60 cars and there were some flatbed trucks with kids on with blankets and cushions on the back, and every time there was a big stunt in there was a huge cheer you could hear from across the drive-in.

CR – I’d like to talk about some of the publicity materials. Can we start with the girl in the horned bra? It’s a very striking image.

BTS - I did not know her personally! I’ve been thinking about who she was, and I don’t think that’s one of the stunt team. We had a lot of people who wanted to be extras and they could have been models who were invited to bring costume suggestions. Of course, our art department had lots of good ideas like that.

CR - I look I kept looking all the way through the film but I couldn’t see her. She’s very prominent in the marketing which makes sense.

BTS - Yes, well I think there was a still photographer that day. I don’t know why I hadn’t signalled her out for a close-up come to mention it, but maybe it was a day in which the shooting schedule didn’t call for it, and she was not called. I don’t know. It’s interesting the things you learn 40 years later. That’s the interesting thing about the marketing; obviously it’s not the director who’s in control of what the marketing people are using.

CR – It’s the same with this chap on some of the posters, which is now on the cover of the new Blu-ray.

BTS - Oh yes, that’s appalling! The whole story of the release of the film in America, as I detailed in my director’s commentary for the deleted scenes from the American version; when they bought the film they didn’t reveal their entire purpose which was to turn it into a summer release for the youth market as if it was set in America, and dub it into American just as Mad Max (1979) had been dubbed. That appalled the actors of Mad Max and Actors Equity. When we heard about that plan, which we didn’t realize included cutting out scenes in which there was too much Australian slang in the dialogue - I mean what is a game of Two-up you might wonder? - the American intellect will be baffled by that in the drive-in circuit of America. That was their thinking, and we didn’t know there were cut scenes because the sales agent who did the deal was kind of in the bag with them as opposed to being dedicated to our best interests. He was dedicated to commission! And making good with his pals. We said you can’t dub the actors. We told whole Mad Max story, and they said, ‘Well we have the right to do anything we want under a clause of the contract,’ so we quoted Actors Equity and that the deal with our actors is that if we ever did replace their voices with other voices they still have the right to make one last attempt to get what the buyer wanted. That meant they would have to pay for them to re-record their voices in American, and then you can do what you like but at least they will not have had their voices taken away from them, which is a terrible thing to do to an actor. The distributors didn’t like the cost of that so they said, ‘Oh, what the hell!’ and basically halved the amount of the release and sort of threw it away because they knew they could get their guarantee back on the VHS sales, which I’m sure they did. We just got the advance.

CR - We should also talk about your short information film Hospitals Don’t Burn Down! (1978), which has also been restored and is now available on this Blu-ray. I know from a UK perspective that there were many of these kinds of 1970s education and public information films that traumatised that generation.

BTS - That was my mission! It was just a great experience. We felt we were doing something good, and we were getting paid something for it. The film is beautifully remastered. I guess they must have gone back to the 16mm negative. The density of those original negatives were really quite good.

CR - In the article in the book which comes with the Dead End Drive-In release there’s an original ad for Eastman Colour where you wrote about the fact that it was the Eastman colour film that really helped you with making the film in those lighting conditions.

BTS - If Hammer had ever hired me to make an industrial fire safety short, this is what I would do. I would make it into an industrial horror film. The idea was for it to be a kind of docudrama which would faithfully reproduce life in the hospital and then somehow integrate this fire disaster into it. That’s what I tried to do and give it an overall consistency. We blended three separate hospitals together, all run by the Veteran Affairs Department that had been having problems with fires in the hospitals and commissioned this film for about $85,000 AUD. We shot for 18 nights in three six-day weeks. I wrote the shooting script, so it edited together easily, and it seemed to turn out well because it became shown on a compulsory basis to every new staff member when they joined the Veteran Affairs Hospitals. I think that spread to all the hospitals across Australia. I am told a hospital on the north coast of New South Wales, a four-story hospital, that had its ICU on the fourth floor, realized that non-ambulatory patients need to be as close to the ground as possible so they moved it to the ground floor and several months later the fourth floor caught fire and was gutted. So that could be an example that the film saved lives. It is probably the only film I’ve made that has! It’s one of the many reasons I’m proud of the film and I think everyone who worked on it is proud of it.

CR- There are some amazing fire stunts too.

BTS – That was Grant Page and his team. They were top pyrotechnics people. This film needed to be a great marriage between the stunt department, the fire department, the safety department and the crew, particularly when you’re working with children, and it all went very smoothly. It was a great experience.

A - I would like to just talk a little bit about Grant Page as he sadly passed away earlier this year. He had such a huge impact on your career right from the start.

BTS - I’d always been fascinated by stunt men, the unsung heroes of the movie industry who do extraordinary things that make the star look good, or shock you and make you gasp in some way ‘God, how did you do that? Who are these guys? Gee, I’d like to be one!’ though I sensibly only dabbled at the edges. I found a stunt man called Bob Woodham who had just come back from working in the UK on The Guns of Navarone (1961) and You Only Live Twice (1967) and he also did British television work. He had come to Australia at the dawn of the Australian film industry in the beginning of 1970 so was just getting to do stunt work in the very few Australian police procedurals. I got to know him and decided to make a film (The Stuntmen, 1973) with him in the lead and it won a prize at the Sydney Film Festival. I was planning to go on to make a series but after the premier Bob unfortunately died of a heart attack. I thought ‘Right well I’ll find the other really outstanding stunt man that I had worked with’, who came up from Adelaide to do the rope slides on The Stuntmen. This was Grant Page, and he had charisma in his interview. He was the perfect person to build a series around, exploring the whole world of stunts, maybe over four or five episodes, and that’s how Dangerfreaks (1975) was born. I signed Grant to a five-year contract of management and managed his career for five years and sold him to other movies for stunts including Mad Max. We worked together on six things. I created vehicles for him like Stunt Rock (1978). Going over to America and making Stunt Rock there allowed me to introduce him to a producer who then took him on to be the stunt coordinator for Death Ship (1980) and City on Fire (1979). It was Grant’s fire stunts as exhibited in Hospitals Don’t Burn Down! that I showed that producer and he was sold, and then they hired him to set his hair on fire as a demented pirate in The Island (1980). Grant was a great man and I miss him. I sent a somewhat tearful greeting to the funeral and I expressed my view that Grant and I were pretty useful to each other at a critical period in our respective careers. He was the perfect person to put the kind of ideas I had on the screen and to make them work and make them practical. He was a great guy, and he expanded my horizons and made me challenge boundaries. He forced you to face some of your own fears. I think Grant was right - that you know your life better if you do actually face your own fears and try to expand your boundaries.