CraveOnline: Is that your next film then?
Mark Hartley: Yeah, I hope by the time that we premiere Electric Boogaloo that I’ve got another film that’s ready to go. Justin [King] who wrote Patrick is working on another one that we hope to make that Tony Ginnane, the producer of Patrick, is really keen on so we’ll see what happens there. There’s another script from a couple of guys in Queensland, the two Sha(y)nes who wrote Bait 3D have written a lot of films. They’ve got a script that I really love that hopefully will get up as well, which is like an anti-Misery.
Anti-Misery sounds interesting. What is the genre of the other one Justin is writing?
It’s a remake of Fair Game, the Australian film. I don’t know if you’ve seen Not Quite Hollywood.
I’ve seen Not Quite Hollywood and the Australian Fair Game.
Well, Fair Game is famous for the protagonist getting stripped nude and tied to the front of a monster truck, so we actually want to strip all that stuff out of it and just make it a very, very sparse, no dialogue chase/revenge film. I like to say a cross between The Naked Prey and Duel.
A no dialogue chase film sounds awesome.
And hopefully we can get a really good actress to play the role and get it to cross over.
Sharni has already done something like that.
Not in the Outback.
So the decision is to take out the sort of exploitive elements?
I know you haven’t seen the original Patrick but the original Patrick is very different than the Patrick we made and I think it’s all about keeping the central premise and putting your own take over it. The one thing that’s been really gratifying about the response to Patrick is that everyone seems to have liked the way we’ve adapted it. The fact that we haven’t been slavish to it but we’ve still been reverent to it. So I think it’s the same way with Fair Game. We need to reinvent it.
Are you keeping the title? Because since Fair Game there has been not only the Joel Silver produced Cindy Crawford Fair Game, but the Valerie Plame movie Fair Game.
Look, that’ll be up to the distributors but certainly I think as far as the producer is concerned, if you’ve optioned the remake rights to a film, it’s a waste of time changing the name. A friend of mine is Jamie Blanks who made Urban Legend and Valentine. He remade the Australian film Long Weekend a few years ago but in America they retitled it Nature’s Grave, which not only is the worst title of all time but negates the fact that it is a remake of a film that might not have a high profile in America, but the people who’ve seen it certainly love it.
They were worried about confusion with The Lost Weekend?
Isn’t it also an American Pie clone as well? Isn’t there a film called Long Weekend?
I can’t imagine they were afraid of the Chris Klein barely released Long Weekend. Are you prepared to direct intense action like it sounds like Fair Game would be?
Yeah, and I’m very, very keen to. Obviously a big hero of mine is Brian Trenchard-Smith and when you look at the action in The Man From Hong Kong and things like that, hopefully if we get a decent schedule, which that was our big struggle on Patrick, not having enough time. But if we get a decent enough schedule, we want to do it all practical. We have Grant Page, Australia’s foremost old school stuntman, stunt supervisor on Patrick and he just kept on saying to me, “Why can’t I do more on this film?” So in Fair Game I want to turn him loose.
Do me a favor and keep the action steady, not this shaky handheld style.
No, no, look, the one thing that I’m very proud about Patrick is that there’s not one single handheld shot in the film. I like traditional old school coverage. It’s interesting, when you watch films like The Rock and Con Air, they are beautifully photographed because they’re so precise and choreographed. They don’t seem like someone’s just grabbed a handheld camera and gone, “Okay, well, the action’s over there, let’s swish over there. The action’s happening there, let’s swish there.” It’s all about planning and that was the one thing that was interesting about Patrick, the way we could get as much coverage in the time that we had was everything was pre-planned to the nth degree.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
