Kiss Kill Shoot Thrill <p>shoot Thrill

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday September 4, 1997

TONY SQUIRES

Lover turns killer. Friend becomes enemy. In Bill Bennett's Kiss or Kill, nothing is quite what it seems. TONY SQUIRES asks "How well do you really know that person next to you?"

House lights dim.

Before titles:

FADE UP: Smoke fills the screen. Reveal close-up of ashtray struggling to hold an active volcano of butts.

WIDER: A man, five-o'clock-shadowed and threatening, drags the guts out of a cigarette and pulps it in the ashtray.

JUMPCUT: The man is midway through another cigarette, coughing and letting the smoke roll out over his darkened chin.

JUMPCUT: He is lighting another cigarette, in profile.

TIGHTER: Move in to extreme close-up of the lit end of the fag, glowing dangerously. We hear a scream.

CUT TO: Wide shot of reporter standing in doorway near man's table.

REPORTER

Sorry, bit the nail right down to the quick. Running very late. Is this the place for the Kiss or Kill interviews?

MAN

Next door.

REPORTER

S - - - .

TITLES UP

Voice over:

Threatened? Disturbed? Shifting uncomfortably in your seat? Probably not. Live through the opening sequence of Bill Bennett's new film, Kiss Or Kill, though, and you'll be greeted by more genuinely in-your-face stuff in the next bunch of frames. Relief doesn't come quickly ... but it comes. Here is a classic dark psychological and physical thriller. It's about landscapes - those we waltz around on, and those inside our heads.

And it's bloody brilliant.

So, not having met the director of this carnage, it's impossible not to construct the vision. I see a sort of Bob Ellisian figure. Shambling. Magnificent but broken down. A shop-soiled coat decorated with ash and red wine stains below a head that views eye contact as an abomination.

But Bennett is out the back of this Kings Cross coffee shop where I can't get a look at him. He's talking very seriously, no doubt, to The Movie Show's David Stratton, presumably about the minutiae of his filmic methods. "So, what are you up to next?" is gonna seem very shallow to this bloke after he's done the Stratton thing. Damn. Scrub that question from the list, leaving two.

Matt Day, the young spunk male lead of the film, who manages to match strides with the brilliantly rampaging Frances O'Connor as the lovers and fighters, has escaped the SBS cameras and strolls over easily to grab a hand.

("I'm interviewing Bill Bennett and Matt Day tomorrow."

About a hundred girls: "You're interviewing Matt Day?"

"Yeah, and the director, Bill Bennett."

"Wow. Matt Day! God, he's a dish.")

The dish is slightly dishevelled. He's refreshingly real, to tell the truth, as he talks about a recent newspaper feature story listing him with a few other young stars who are getting a heap of movie work but may be in danger of "overexposure". Day has appeared in a number of the hip Australian films of the past couple of years: Muriel's Wedding, Love and Other Catastrophes, and Doing Time For Patsy Cline (opening September 25). It's a funny old world when a group of young people in an industry with such a unemployment rate are told they're working too much.

"At first I thought it was a pain in the arse, then I thought it's better to be one of them than not," says Day of being included in the "chosen ones" article. "If you weren't in that list you'd think it was a pain in the arse. What do you do? You have no say in this; it's a media construct. They look at it from ... all these movies and they're using the same people.

"As far as I'm concerned, I went in there and I went through the audition process as much as any other actor. If they've got a reference point, and have seen some of the films, know I can work in that medium ... It's like any other business. You build a reputation. I've been working for 10 years now professionally. You'd expect you should be able to get some work and kudos out of it."

Day is at the end of the publicity trail, which has dragged him around the country to get a really good look at the inside of hotel rooms and the ends of microphones. He's keen for the film to simply get onto the screens, so people can make up their own minds. But he'll do the publicity hype if it helps put bums on seats. He did The Midday Show.

The macarena? Come on, you have to ask.

"No, I don't do some things. You know, get dressed up in the latest Melbourne Cup fashions or 'Knitting patterns with Matt', or 'At home with his pets'. I'm happy to talk about the work."

You got any pets? Come on, you have to ask.

"Well, Fluffy I bought when he was six months old ..."

Matt Day has a good sense of humour.

MATT Day needed a good sense of humour making Kiss or Kill. It was shot, largely, on the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia in late-spring heat. What's more, its content - the story of a couple of kids with dirty backgrounds and a loose grip on the law, road-movieing their way across country, pursued by all manner of good and evil, and leaving dead bodies in their wake - was an intense thing to capture. The relationship between Day's and O'Connor's characters was emotionally gob-smacking, telling the story of love and trust turning to suspicion and fear.

And then there was the Bill Bennett style. He walks to the table now, so un-Bob Ellisian it's not funny. Fit, distinguished, urbane, movie-star handsome. This is the man who moved from current affairs and documentaries on television, with This Day Tonight and Willesee at Seven, through to a string of hard-hitting feature films, all blurring the edges between doco and fiction. He's coped with tough shoots, like that other road movie, Backlash, and has a reputation for experimentation and improvisation.

Bill Bennett asks questions of his actors and crew. Over the years, they've been happy enough to give the answers.

"With the improvised nature of the thing, you could never switch off," says Day. "You'd go in and think you had an easy scene and it would become intense. Things like that would happen every day. You'd turn up somewhere and think, 'Oh, yeah, this will be easy', and next thing you're screaming and beating people up and rolling around in s - - - . And that was the comedy relief. The light stuff. That was the love scenes."

The idea that Bennett and crew turn up with a camera and a notion of where a scene is vaguely headed, then hand it over to the actors is nonsense. Sure, there can be chaos, but it's controlled.

"I was always conscious that choosing to do it this way and bringing people in of the calibre of Matt and Frances, Chris Haywood, Barry Otto and so forth, they have a contribution to make," says Bennett. "My task as a director is to set parameters and stand back. Often I would set up a scene and, although we'd talked about it first and so forth, I'd set up a scene, then put it into rehearsal and see what happened. I was very conscious in this film that ... if you bring smart people in and make a film with this process you can't deny them what they would bring to it. That's stupid. You're not using the resources of that person.

"The thinking behind it was to blend drama and documentary. Bring the actors and the crew to a place where you're living and breathing it. Having said that, it was a very disciplined process, because you can't create a film shot off the hip. It looks like it ... but it's carefully choreographed."

The film's idea of discovering something new and threatening about a person you think you know well was born in a shearing shed in South Australia when Bennett was working on Backlash in 1986. A crew member, whom Bennett considered a friend, dragged out a knife and detailed how he was going to kill the director. Which is probably not the first time a crew member has had such thoughts about a director. Bennett genuinely didn't know if he was joking. (He was.)

"I've been married 15 years and I sometimes look at my wife and I think, 'I don't know you.' I think that's probably the Alzheimer's. Certainly, what happened in the shearing shed was the trigger for me to start to really think about this very intriguing notion that you perhaps don't know the people you are close to."

Look around you, people ...

AL, the character played by Day, is worlds away from his gawky Bryce in Muriel's Wedding. It's as far apart as Allan Wilkie and Tim Bailey, if you're thinking TV weather people. For example. Likewise, the style of the two films are at either end of the tug-o-war rope, with Kiss Or Kill slapping its audience with a furious jumpcut style to match the "jagged, distorted lives" of its characters, as Bennett describes them.

"Just a bit different," says Day of the roles. "But you should have seen the stuff they cut from Muriel's, where I bash her. Punch her in the face, then I punch the bean bag. Bryce comes back to the church and blows everyone away. Bill Hunter's going, 'You're a f...ing psycho'." Need it be pointed out that he's kidding?

The only similarity between the two films might lie in the fondue scene, in which the wonderful Max Cullen keeps the pot warm with an oxyacetylene torch. Day admits that the whole thing was a new thing for him - clearly too young to have lived through the fondue party craze.

"I thought, what is this? It looks like a cup full of sick," says Day. Bennett 'fesses up: "I've always been intrigued by the mechanics of fondue. It's that '60s and '70s era when things were so wonderfully tacky."

But Bennett's key obsession, obvious in his documentary and feature film work, is with the land. He is clearly intrigued by the way in which the country impacts on the individual. Road movies aren't just about travel. They're about destinations and the surroundings being passed through.

The obsession with wide open spaces was nurtured on A Big Country, where Bennett gravitated towards the extremities of the country.

"I found the most interesting characters had lived either in far north Queensland up around Cape York, or the southern part of Tasmania. So I found myself going back to those two parts of the country. Big Country was the most wonderful opportunity for a young film-maker to get out in the Australian bush and really learn something about the people and their relationship to the land.

"The thing I missed most when I was working in America was the country, the bush. [He was directing Sandra Bullock and Denis Leary in Two If By Sea.] Because there was something so very primitive about it, which I find absolutely intoxicating, also malevolent. That's one of the things I try to get across ... it is a malevolent place out there to people who don't belong. In the film the only character who really had any sympathy with where they are is the black tracker, Possum.

"I find it really fascinating that our most extreme political views correspond to the geographical extremities. I don't know that I, as a film-maker, have the right to make that picture in another country, because I don't really understand it. I think you have to live there for a long time before you do. No doubt that people like Beresford can make a film like Tender Mercies. Wim Wenders makes Paris Texas and so on. As an outsider, you can come in and comment on a culture and interpret it through different eyes, see ... another side of the crystal, if you like. I felt uncomfortable trying to see it through, if you like, American eyes."

Matt Day's eyes were opened in Melbourne - an inner city boy with country experience with relatives in Shepparton. He spent a lot of Christmases going out to the country to his grandparents', but grew up "hanging out in Lygon Street down at Johnny's Green Room, knowing the difference between a macchiato and a latte at 14. 'Bulls- - -, don't give me that cappuccino, give me an espresso.'"

So, when filming Kiss Or Kill, he could still feel the enormous effect of the outback. He felt like an alien in the country.

"And the locals have zero tolerance for wankers. You can't be a wanker out in the bush. There's no place to hide."

FADE UP: Tape recorder sitting in middle of cafe table, unfinished pasta lying limp in a plate. Coffee cups empty, but stained with the crusty leavings of their contents.

CUT TO: Point of view of recorder. Bill and Matt lean back in their chairs.

Voice over: Born and raised in television documentary and current affairs, Bill Bennett has continued to be informed by the style. Still, he's quick to say that, programs such as Sunday aside, current affairs is a poor imitation, is "entertainment masquerading as journalism". His time in the TV trenches taught him about this country, its people and the political process ... all tools for his current career.

BILL

I think it's unwatchable. I was trained on This Day Tonight, the ABC show before 60 Minutes started up. I went to Willesee at Seven. Won a Logie for reporter of the year in seventy ...

MATT

You're a Logie winner?!

BILL

Yep.

MATT

Wow! You're the second Logie winner I've worked with.

BILL

You a Logie winner?

MATT

No.

BILL

You're not?