Matthew Saville is the writer/director of Roy Hollsdotter Live, one of the more successful of the recent batch of 50-minute short features funded by the Australian Film Commission, SBS Independent and Film Victoria. Starring standup comic Darren Casey and comedy titan John Clarke, it’s shot around Fitzroy and North Melbourne. It’s a darkly humorous tale of a comedian, Roy Hollsdotter, who stalks his ex-girlfriend with a long-lensed camera, ostensibly for new material, but really because the pain he feels at their separation is all-consuming. His best friend Simmo attempts to explain to Roy that his behaviour is “on a scale of One to Fucked-in-the-Head, a strong Seven”.
The film has been doing the festival circuit to appreciative crowds and recently screened on SBS Television. It has also garnered quite a bit of critical success, as well as a slew of awards. That’s not surprising: Hollsdotter boasts a dynamic script, imaginative direction and a genuine flair for authentic characterisation and dialogue. In some ways, it’s an Australian Withnail and I – spliced with a touch of Proof. It’s about testing the boundaries of friendship, love gone wrong and the redemptive power of having a laugh.
Saville is a busy man, with a lot of projects on the go. But for now he’s happy to have put Roy to rest, purging this highly personal project that has been kicking around for 10 years.
Originally published at Sleepy Brain, 5 November 2003.
You wrote the first draft of Roy Hollsdotter Live in 1994. Was it always tailored to 50 minutes?
No. We were chasing bureaucratic tails, I think. In 1998/99 we were being mooted as a possibility for one of the AFC’s “million dollar movies”. But five of those got funded before we did (including Mall Boy). And then that money ran out and suddenly the AFC weren’t doing low-budget features any more. We had to take stock, and what emerged from the AFC after that was that they were doing 50-minute films. So we had to rewrite.
Luke Elliot and Darren Casey in Roy Hollsdotter Live
How did the cast fall into place?
From the start, I wrote the script with Luke Elliott [who plays Simmo] in mind. And [producer] Trevor Blainey read the script in 1997 and said, “I know Roy” – and that was Darren. From that point on, for about five years, the only member of the cast that actually auditioned was Asher Keddie [who plays Kate, Roy’s ex-girlfriend]. You don’t audition for John Clarke’s role [as Roy’s boss]. You just get John Clarke – if you can. I said it would be great to get someone like him and Trevor said, “Well, why not John Clarke?” And he went and spent two months pursuing that.
The acting is uniformly superb.
Yeah. I’m not actually a great performance director, but I’m very good at casting.
What was John Clarke like to work with?
Like riding a thoroughbred. You just hang on, basically. You get onto the bit that looks like a saddle, punch him in the guts, and hang on like hell. I didn’t do very much directing with him – I don’t know how you would direct John Clarke. I don’t know why you’d bother. You just say, “Well John, here are the lines from the script, please say something similar to what I’ve written down, and I’ll be over there if you need me.” Interestingly enough, he’s just directed a telemovie. I’d beg him to let me on a set to watch him direct, because he lives and thinks at a million miles an hour.
Saville is an interesting man to interview. He’s sharp and witty but his answers tend to meander through many possible outcomes, stopping and starting before arriving upon a definitive version. At one point, he apologises and promises to “try and finish a sentence”.
But I also learnt pretty quickly that it doesn’t pay to ask him obvious, cliched questions, like “who’s your favourite director” or “what do you like most about Melbourne”? He’ll either dismiss them (albeit charmingly) with a vague answer or stonewall you with one equally as silly as the question (see below). Above all, Saville challenges you to engage him.
What do you like most about Melbourne?
The weather.
When Victorian writers scooped the pool at this year’s AWGIE awards [including Saville for Roy: Best Original Screenplay for Television], did it signify to you a renaissance in filmmaking in this state? Is there a stronger film community here than elsewhere?
Five years ago, everyone was moving up north and now everyone is staying down here. One thing I’ve done – and it’s just sheer laziness – is stand still. But I’ll tell you something: it seems that Sydney is becoming increasingly more difficult to shoot in. And I think it’s because of the Fox studios there and the amount of American productions. I worked on a sketch comedy that originated in Sydney, but they chose to come down to Melbourne in the end. But I sense the same thing in the inner suburbs of Melbourne: the differences between shooting in Port Melbourne, South Yarra and Narre Warren are tangible.
You seem to like shooting around Fitzroy and Collingwood.
I actually like shooting around Narre Warren! Roy is set in St Kilda, but it’s the St Kilda of the mid-90s – which doesn’t exist anymore.
The film was partly funded by SBS with a view to screening it on their network. During the shoot, did you keep that in mind and tailor your aesthetic to television?
I think all I had in mind was that I was doing a longer narrative. I wasn’t even aware that we were shooting on video. You think of other things and other agendas, other problems that you have to solve, like dealing with actors and heads of department. But it was a great disappointment in pre-production when we did the figures and realised we were going to have to shoot on video. If you’ve been working with a script for seven years and you realise it’s actually going to be on video, and not film…well, nobody actually writes a video. People write films. So after that it was consolidation, and because of the talents of a lot of people they made it look good.
Many people wouldn’t be familiar with Darren’s work as a comedian. How would you describe his stand-up routines?
Darren’s style is observational and intimate: you need to spend 15 minutes with him to “get it”. A case in point: he did an appearance onRove where he had three minutes and didn’t get a laugh for the first two. But then he got 10 laughs in the last minute. I was actually surprised he got any laughs at all, because all of his really good stuff takes 10 minutes to get through. You have to get to know Darren first. It’s kind of like settling down on the couch and finding out a little bit about him and his world view, and then what he thinks is funny.
Darren Casey in Roy Höllsdotter Live (2003; dir. Matthew Saville).
There’s a fantastic scene where Roy is performing a routine about Batman. It’s all about why a crime fighter would choose to dress like a bat, and what would happen – in Roy’s alternate universe – if cops dressed in “bad-fitting blue underpants”.
The routine indeed unfolds at a very relaxed pace, with the humour in the detail – like the description of a traffic cop suffering from a wedgie in his bat-tights.
How much of Darren’s experience as a standup is in the character of Roy?
Every day when we were filming at the Esplanade Hotel [where Roy performs his gigs in the film], Darren would say, “That wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t get introduced that way”. And the “Batman” routine is his. I didn’t write a word of that.
That explains why he’s credited as “script consultant”.
Yes. If Roy was a cop show he’d be the “technical advisor”.
There was an article in The Age about the high incidence of suicide among Australian males, apparently a result of the lack of support networks men have among themselves. Roy Höllsdotter Live addresses similar issues: men vs. women; what happens when male friendships break down; how men cope with emotions and feelings of loss.
Men and women are different – there are no two ways about it. But to victimise one or the other is silly. Yeah, there are glass ceilings and so on, but men suffer their own problems as well. The character of Kate is sketched out and that’s a failing of the film, partly due to the fact that it’s written and directed by a man who wrote about something he understood – which is how little he understands women. I’m happily married and I love my wife, but I won’t pretend to understand the first damn thing about her except that I love her. I think the film largely functions along those lines – it’s a distant fascination.
Most blokes, if they’re honest, could relate to Roy.
In the last couple of decades men have had to lie and subvert the basic truth, by fudging and pretending that we know everything there is to know. My next film, Tinnitus, is about damaged guys as well, likeSweetheart – it’s kind of the same story but told on a different canvas. It’s about people scratching their heads and wondering where they fit in the world.
Sweetheart is the short film Saville made after Roy Höllsdotter Live. It’s about a guy, Gavin, who’s pissed off – with life, his place in it, and the void where he thinks a woman should be. Gavin misses his mother and likes talking to strangers on the phone, but like all of Saville’s work, there is a strong seam of wry humour in the film to ease the way forward.
Sweetheart‘s a bleak little number.
Is it bleak? I was at the first public screening of the film, along with everyone involved in it. Our constant catchcry – our mantra – was, “Oh god, is this depressing? Is this a dirge?” And at the opening people pissed themselves laughing. And we were all sitting next to each other wondering what were we worried about.
But it does have an underlying melancholy.
Yeah. Well, it’s had two public screenings and no one’s got anywhere near the melancholy yet. Roy and Gavin are both torturing themselves in order to reach out to something that they imagine is how people could relate to each other. And they’re dealing with regret, this vague, innate, sort of fibrous understanding that they had something wonderful in a relationship with a woman. They’re physicalising this ritual, not necessarily to solve it but to cope with it in some way.
In Sweetheart, you’ve got all that social comment in there – about how there’s no community, how we work until we die, and how it’s hard to form relationships as a result.
Well, I’m not against bleak. I think bleak’s a really nice place to start, but if you can end with some little morsel of hope, then you’ve got a story to tell.
Darren Casey in Roy Höllsdotter Live (2003; dir. Matthew Saville).
I saw Roy Höllsdotter Live at the Melbourne Film Festival’s Russell St screening. It got a raucous audience reaction.
Yeah, but the other session at ACMI was weird. They were all sitting on their hands, being all analytical about the duality of man and trying to work out if I was Werner Herzog. Everyone involved with the film was trying to astral project a collective thought: “Just try and enjoy, people. This isn’t art”. But at the Russell St screening – I think because the carpet’s filthier there – they settled in, put their feet up on the seats and just enjoyed it. It’s a funny old film because…well, for starters it’s not a film, it’s a video. And it opens with a raucous three minutes of jokes but hopefully it goes somewhere else, so that by the end of the film there are no jokes. You’re just stuck with these two guys dealing with this difficult period in their lives.
What was the reaction like at the interstate festivals?
It went down well in Adelaide because I’m from there. Sydney was good and Brisbane I loved, because the audience was little old grannies and lots of people in cableknit cardigans.
You made television ads once upon a time. Tell me about the transition from that to studying at the VCA.
Well, I don’t think anyone actually “makes” ads. They’re a byproduct: you make ads the same way you make faeces. I was 29 when I went to the VCA. And that’s very old to be at the VCA. I was a mature-age student, and you’ve got ballet students there. And so I’d stand in the queue at the canteen with 13-year-olds. Breasts were sort of like a rarity. Actually, I think I was the only person at the VCA with breasts, but they were man-boobs.
Saville directs sketches for Channel Ten’s comedy series,Skithouse, as well as designing titles for film and television.
This keeps his eye in and, as he says, gives him “flying time” – experience in producing miniature films. But what about the relatively little-known discipline of titles design?
Do you enjoy your work as a title designer?
Well, you follow a brief, and there have been times when I’ve done stuff I’ve been really proud of. But I recently did a job that was shit. I totally fucked up, partly because it was a bad brief, but I can’t blame that because I’ve done good jobs from bad briefs (and I’ve done the inverse of that). The thing about titles design is that it’s an exercise in pure aesthetics. It’s 30 seconds of meaningless: colour, movement and somebody’s name. But there’s something meaningful in emptiness, I think.
Tell me about your influences as a film director.
Again, form follows function. I’m influenced by everything.
Are you influenced by specific directors?
OK, well I’m gonna be John Cassavetes here and say I admire any director who completes a film.
Maude Davey and Darren Casey in Roy Höllsdotter Live (2003; dir. Matthew Saville).
Can you see yourself directing someone else’s script or writing for other directors?
No. People have given me scripts that I’ve really enjoyed, but I’ve had trouble imagining myself as the director of those. I’ve also had a script directed by someone else and it didn’t work out. It should have – there was no reason why it couldn’t – except that there are vagaries. I’d have to spend six months with a writer and drill them about what they wanted but having said that, I direct 20 scripts a week in sketch comedy that are written by someone else, although they’re only a minute long. But the wonderful thing about sketch comedy is you never deal with subtext. It’s all just plot: how funny is that joke? How loud is that fart?
Do you have any interest in making documentaries?
No, because I’m just in awe of good ones. I don’t know how people manage to make films in controlled environments, so I’ve never understood how you’d pull together a doco.
I ask that because to me Roy has a strong realist aspect, an immediacy, in the standup scenes especially.
I’m thrilled to hear that. That’s a wonderful compliment, because probably the films I most enjoy watching are documentaries, but I never purport to understand anything of how they’re put together. That really is thrilling because I often think the paraphernalia around a film shoot kills the spontaneity, so its great that you think it’s still there.
It’s clear that sound design is an important element in Saville’s work. In Höllsdotter, Roy walks away from the scene of his misery, although we are unsure if he’s learnt any lessons or not. As he does, the sounds of the street continue over the end credits: traffic noise; the click of the pedestrian lights.
This brilliant stroke – the work of sound designer Emma Bortignon – adds immeasurably to the ambiguity of the film’s ending, suggesting there is more to the story beyond the final frame. When I ask Saville about the importance of sound in Roy, he urges me to stop talking and listen to the ambient noise of the cafe we’re in – for a good two minutes.
What do you see as the function of good sound design?
I think a lot of DOPs get awards for good sound design. A lot of people walk away from films saying, “Gee, it looked beautiful”, when actually what they mean is it sounded beautiful. Sound works on a subconscious level and changes the way you look at things.
You’re obviously fond of Melbourne. In Roy Höllsdotter Live andSweetheart, it’s in the way you frame it – Melbourne clearly inspires you.
Yeah, it does. But the way it’s framed – you’re talking as much about Laszlo Baranyai’s cinematography. Laszlo is like me, a bit of an outsider: he’s not from here, but he’s come to Melbourne and he loves the place.
Darren Casey in Roy Höllsdotter Live (2003; dir. Matthew Saville).
How closely did you work with him?
It was entirely symbiotic and very fortunate. I knew on some level he would understand the film because he’s Hungarian and he has a “glass half empty” way of looking at things which is pretty Roy-like. I’d schlepped about on VCA films that Laszlo had photographed and I always liked the cut of his jib. I liked the way he lit shots and I liked his process, the rhythm of the way he works. DOPs – more than anyone on set – imbibe the rhythm of a shoot and he just had a very clean, low-maintenance way of achieving good results. I like a DOP who says, “Well, I’m going to light the scene this way” and works around not what the director is doing but what the actors are doing.
Saville’s feature-film script, Tinnitus, is about a cop who’s going “a bit stir crazy for whatever reason. But the stakes are raised a little this time because he’s got a gun”. The project has Film Victoria development funding and is eight drafts in. Saville reckons he’ll finish the script soon. He’s also working on an opera with his wife, Bryony Marks, the composer who has done the music for all his films.
Tell me about the opera.
Bryony has briefed me to write the libretto for a one-hour opera funded by the Australia Council. It’s called Media and it’s about the taping of a current affairs show. The premise is a stroke of genius, being that those programs are the opera of our day because they are all about familial betrayal and simplistic binary notions of how people deal with one another: there is “good” and there is “bad”. I’ve no idea when this will be ready. At the moment I’m just writing the words and she’s writing the music. I didn’t think there was something harder than making a film in Australia but there is, and it’s putting on an opera.
What are your views on the current state of filmmaking in Australia? As you imply, it seems like it’s more difficult than ever to get a film up.
I have had trouble but I’m not going to cry about it because you could interview a bureaucrat about exactly the same thing and they’ll say, “Well, we don’t have enough funding”. It is difficult, but if it was easy everyone would do it. At some point, filmmakers just have to make their own decision as to whether to continue dwelling on how hard it is or whether to continue on the journey they may or may not want to take, which is being a filmmaker. And if you do it in this country, you choose to do it with certain difficulties. And what if you do go overseas? It may be easier but the rent’s not so cheap, or the weather’s not so good. So you’ve got something else to whinge about. That’s the catch, I guess: if you can find a country that’s easier to make films in, then I suggest you emigrate.
Would you work overseas?
If I wrote a script set in Antarctica, I wouldn’t try and shoot it in Melbourne. I’m not that parochial, but environment is important and I don’t think Roy would work if it was shot in Sydney.
Do you aspire to be a fulltime filmmaker?
I kind of think I am. I don’t wait tables, I don’t do corporate videos, and I don’t do ads (and I won’t do them ever again). But I’ll happily do titles design or whatever. I just love the process of filmmaking. I love it physically. I love the sound of a camera rolling.
And then, as our conversation winds up, Saville asks me a question that echoes one of Roy’s funniest lines: “On a scale of One to Wanker, how did I rate?”
Well, I suppose I’d better give him a “1”.
LINKS
Trevor Blainey InterviewFilm VictoriaSpecial Broadcasting Service (SBS)Australian Film Commission (AFC)
For more information on Roy Höllsdotter Live, contact Trevor Blainey at Retro Active Films:
Level One, 179 Johnston St, Fitzroy
Victoria 3065, Australia
(t) +613 9417 6622; (f) +613 9417 0597
(e) retro@netspace.net.au
MATTHEW SAVILLE FILMOGRAPHY
2003
Sweetheart (writer/director/co-producer) 13 mins
2002
Roy Höllsdotter Live (writer/director) 53 mins
Happy Hour (director/contributing writer) Sketch Comedy Pilot for Channel 7
Gents (writer/director/co-producer) 3.5 mins
Rhonda and Nigel (writer/director/co-producer) 7 mins
2001
Jam (writer/producer/director) 3.5 mins
2000
The Hammer (writer/producer/director) 3.5 mins
The History of the Comedy Channel (writer/director) Series: 26 x 1 min
1999
In the Home (writer/director/producer)
1998
Accidents Will Happen (writer) 22 mins
1997
Franz and Kafka (writer/director/producer) 6 mins
1995
Two pots, a caffe latte, a scotch and dry, a vodka lime and soda and a small antipasto with five forks (writer/director) 11 mins