People make low budget feature films for two reasons: as a stepping stone to making higher budget films, and/or for the freedom of expression that lo-bo allows. Of course, 'freedom' depends on how you look at it. Lo-bo operates within obvious constraints but so do financed films, mostly to do with justifying or recouping investors' money. And in both cases, these restrictions aren't necessarily the death of creativity but the wellspring. Even so, vast resources and endless technical capability can make film-makers lazy. Where is the ingenuity of Georges Melies, or the subtle off-screen suggestiveness of Fritz Lang or Hitchcock? Lo-bo demands their inventiveness and relies upon a more idiosyncratic form of cinematic narrative.
My director buddy Ian Dixon and I have a long relationship that goes back to high school in the 80s. Over the years, we have collaborated on four main projects - 3 theatre plays as part of a collective in the mid-nineties, and a half-hour film for SBS at the beginning of the 2000s. There is no doubt that our film ambitions have been focused on traditionally financed projects but we both have a genuine love of lo-bo and its possibilities. Last year, Ian introduced me to Stephen Cleary, whose astute understanding of what makes lo-bo unique in its conception and development was eye-opening to both of us.
Stephen's view is that lo-bo films do not tell stories that financed films could tell better. They tell stories that can only be told within the parameters of lo-bo's freedoms and constraints. An example is 52 Tuesdays, shot on one day a week for a year.
The idea for The Perimeter germinated in a few weeks workshopping with Stephen at the end of 2013. His crucial suggestion that lo-bo starts not with an idea but with your available assets - out of which you construct an idea - in effect set us to reverse-engineer a story to suit the actors and locations and shooting possibilities that we already had access to.
We built our story on two critical assets: Ian's house in the Dandenongs and his new baby daughter.
Now, maybe horror isn't where everyone would have ended up with a gorgeous innocent baby as your central figure, but we did. Maybe we watched Eraserhead too many times back in the 80s. I have two daughters who are now no longer babies and, while occasionally horrible (mostly to each other), they are not in any way horrific. In the end, we also added another older child to the story in the belief that we knew enough children between my own and those of friends to cast that role. Oh and we put in a dog. Because Ian has a dog.
So, we've found ourselves with a project that works mainly with children and animals (thank you WC Fields) in a genre that throws up all sorts of tricky welfare issues for these young people, whom we don't intend to expose to the sort of disturbing content that the film will ultimately expose our adult audience to. Doing it with no money is starting to look like the easy bit.
