Completed OOMPF Film - A Basement On A Hill

Cassidy Hill and Charlie Lewis first met in 2003 when they were members of a film-making group at the Film & Television Institute (FTI) in Fremantle, Western Australia. They worked together on numerous short films for others before making their own no-budget project "Laundrette". Their short "Brood" was also no-budget and screened at the prestigious Bradford Film Festival, won a WA Screen Award and Best Horror Short at the Bare Bones Festival in Oklahoma. 

Their recently completed short "A Basement on a Hill" was successful in receiving OOMPF funding from FTI and is their third project together. It is their first film to be released under their new production company title "Lonesome Twin Films".

Directors Charlie Lewis and Cassidy Hill discuss their approach to making "A Basement on a Hill". 

Charlie: Director, editor and writer

Cassidy: Director, writer and producer. 

Charlie: We both had input in both areas. Cass had final say on visuals. And I had final say on performance. 

Charlie: The origin of the story is that we were trying to write a horror film to submit for funding. We decided on writing a horror story based on repression and control, but we removed the overt horror elements when we rewrote the script later. We decided to focus more on the central relationship.

How did you find your actors? 

Cassidy: For the roles of Zoe and Anna, we spoke to Walter Hanna, an actor who worked on one of earlier films, and asked for a list of recommendations. Based on that we held auditions and found a lot of people who auditioned well. Whitney (Richards) wanted to audition for Zoe, she was reluctant to audition for Anna.  But when we played the audition tapes back she was a brilliant Anna. She had this great haunted look in her eyes. 

Charlie: Angelique (St Jorre) plays Zoe and she had the character down from the beginning. 

Cassidy: She had this James Dean kind of masculine swagger, which was perfect. We changed the character a little before we started shooting, decided to make Zoe a little more vulnerable and nervous when they first meet. Angie was great however we asked her to play it.

Charlie: Incidentally, Whitney and Angie already knew each other really well, I think that helped a lot, they've got a great on-screen chemistry. 

Charlie: It's gone through heaps of revisions, about ten drafts. What we finally shot should count as the eleventh draft.  It's changed many times but Anna and Zoe remained basically the same through all the drafts in terms of their relationship. Because we'd stuck with them through many revisions, we felt close to them as characters. Having revised a script for so long, you are asked many questions about characters and their motivation, so by the end we were confident about what we had done. 

Cassidy: Mostly in Charlie's old house in Nedlands, which was great for the storyboarding process. We were trying to create strong and stylised images. And having the location so far in advance really helped. Instead of abstractly imagining the shots, we had mental maps in our head and we knew where characters would go and where the light sources could be placed. Or we could even pace around the actual locations and work out the blocking for the characters while storyboarding.

Cassidy:  To reinforce the themes of the film, the editing and cinematography is quit rigid and composed. The formality of the editing disintegrates later according to the story. It gets choppier in the 'escape' attempt and you see more of what is a traditional style these days. (jokes) Hand-held, jump cuts.

Charlie: It's the Bourne Identity bit of the film (laughs). A ninja jumps out of a cupboard.

Cassidy: People see a title like "A Basement on a Hill" and they expect ninjas in cupboards. It's a Pavlovian response (laughs). 

Charlie: Our first film was a romantic comedy set in a laundrette called "Laundrette". The next one was a horror film called "Brood". It won a West Australian Screen Award for the writer, Mark Hudson. "Brood" also won Best Horror Short at the Bare Bones Horror Film Festival at Muskogee, Oklahoma. It played at the Bradford Film Festival which is a very prestigious event and we were very proud of its being there.

Cassidy: It also received a marketing grant from (the Western Australian government film agency) ScreenWest.

Cassidy: It mostly shows visually. There's a shot where one of the actors leans against the wallpaper and that cost quite a bit because we had to buy the wallpaper and stick it up. We wouldn't have been able to do that previously.

Charlie: (jokes) If you divide the wallpaper screen time by the amount of money we spent on it, it probably works out to about the same as Brando in Apocalypse Now. It was the most expensive actor in the film. 

Cassidy: The wallpaper was our Brando,

Charlie: It makes a difference being able to buy props.

Cassidy: Being able to pay actors a little, rather than nothing is a morale booster.

Charlie: The aspect of Basement that we wanted to get right was that we wanted to achieve a feature style arc within the constraints of a short film. 

Cassidy: A proper arc for the story and the characters.

Charlie. A lot of short films are just set up, then punchline, or a 'twist'.  We wanted a proper storyline with the characters changing. Now we realise why people don't do it more (laughs), because it's really fucking hard.

Charlie: I'd always pictured this as a cold and quiet film. As Cassidy said at the time, the way the relationship between Anna and Zoe played, changed that - so now it's warmer and more human and it works better that way. The relationship is really the centre of the film.

Charlie: Those guys were guns.  Natalie would really think about the back-story of her character. She would hit the line take after take and always do it the same way. James is like our Jack Nicholson. 

Charlie: It's a short relationship film, about a couple trying out bondage for the first time, called "Bonds". It's going to be able the frustrations and compromises of any relationship, but looked at through that.

Cassidy: Basement is pretty long by short film standards, because of the type of story we were trying to tell. But for our next project, which will probably be "Bonds", we are going to try and make something about half the length for twice the budget.