Interview with Mike Hoath and Tennille Kennedy

30 June 2008

Organisation

OOMPF (One-Off Members Production Fund) funded ‘Dogs Run Loose Around Here’ is the latest film from Western Australian Director Mike Hoath. At a recent screening to industry insiders this dramatic film that features a single take recieved a mountain of praise.

The film is produced by Tennille Kennedy, making this her third short film to be released following collaborations with Karen Farmer and Zak Hilditch.

We caught up with the collaborative team on the eve of the Revelation Film Festival where their film will feature in the ‘Get Your Shorts On’ focus on WA filmmakers.

Graeme Watson
Where did you come up with the idea for your new film ‘Dogs Run Loose Around Here’?

Mike Hoath
I was working at a bottle shop, the shop where we shot the film, and I saw this maintenance worker start beating up this African kid with an extendable Police baton. It was a pretty crazy scene. Then the African kid and his friends retaliated. It was crazy.

Afterwards, when it all died down, I had to go back to work, and I got to see all the different reactions from people who had witnessed the event. As they all bought different things I got hear their different perceptions of what just occurred and it was all pretty far out of whack from what I saw.

Graeme Watson
Was the idea behind the script to capture that range of emotions?

Mike Hoath
Pretty much, I just wanted to show how people’s perceptions can be altered.

Graeme Watson
How long did it take to make this idea into film?

Mike Hoath
Well, it took a while to find out about the funding, you guys took a while to get back to us, it took maybe about four months, we’d almost forgotten about it, and we were away on holiday in Queensland when we found out.

But writing the script wasn’t an laboured process, I wrote it very quickly. Originally we developed the project for something else, then a week before the deadline we decided to put it in for the OOMPF funding. So basically I wrote the whole thing in a day.

Graeme Watson
Tennille, you’ve made a number of short films in the last months, all very different and all with different Directors, how do they compare against each other. Are they like siblings from the same family?

Tennille Kennedy
Yeah, pretty much

Mike Hoath interjects
Who’s your favorite son?

Tennille Kennedy thinks for a moment
That’s not such a nice question to ask.

Graeme Watson
I didn’t ask it, Mike did.

Tennille Kennedy laughs
Oh yeah, I like all of them, they all stand alone and I like them all for different reasons.

Graeme Watson
What kind of reaction have you received about this new film since your first screening?

Tennille Kennedy
Great reactions, everyone has been saying great things and everybody has loved it so far. There’s been really positive feedback. Sometimes you get little nit picking comments when people say, ‘You should have done that’, but then often when you think about it you realise that that might have been really good too.

Graeme Watson
Do you find the film generates discussion?

Tennille Kennedy
Yeah, yes it does.

Mike Hoath
Yeah, there have been drunken discussions at parties

Graeme Watson
During the recent cast and crew screenings there was actually a lot of laughter, were you expecting that?

Tennille Kennedy
It was very surprising actually, for me I thought the humour was very subtle, I didn’t think people would laugh as they did.

Mike Hoath
I think when it’s a private screening and everyone pretty much knows everyone; that kind of audience is very generous I think, and I hope that’s the case. Other ways they’re just laughing at the acting and the direction. Maybe if they haven’t figured out what the film is about yet, they think, well I’d better laugh.

Graeme Watson
I thought the laughter worked really well, because when you got into the serious stuff it gave you such a great contrast.

I worked in a liquor store when I was twenty and the character that inhabit your film seemed very realistic, I felt like I was seeing some people I knew really well. Does writing about what you know well make your writing stronger?

Mike Hoath
I don’t know, I know what you’re saying though, drawing influence from what you know and basing character on people who really do exist, I guess it does have an effect.

Graeme Watson
So what’s the plan for this film now that it’s finished.

Tennille Kennedy
We’re doing the festival circuit, entering into lots of competitions. We’ve got a screening at ‘Get Your Shorts On’ during the Revelation Film Festival. We’re working on an international broadcast distribution deal.

Mike Hoath
We’ve entered in lots of US festivals and now we’re just waiting to hear back.

Graeme Watson
Mike, another one of your films has just been a finalist in a film festival.

Mike Hoath
Yeah, we made a film called ‘Sprawl’ in 2006, me and Maziar Lahooti. It’s really low budget and we found this festival called the Door Post Film Competition in the US and there were just huge cash prizes. So we submitted it and got into the top fifteen.

So now they give us ten thousand dollars to make another film about hope, it has to be about hope in some way. Then the top 15 films about hope compete, we go their, to Nashville in September and the winner of that gets a hundred grand basically.

Graeme Watson
So when you entered ‘Sprawl’ was it just a film you had sitting on a shelf that had lived its life.

Mike Hoath
Yeah, but for the competition they were looking for films that had certain themes like love, pain, greed, redemption. When I looked it up I thought, well ‘Sprawl’ fits under greed perfectly. It is all about corporate greed. So we just chucked it in and bang!

Graeme Watson
So now to create the film about hope, how long do you get to do that?

Mike Hoath
It has to be submitted by August 15th, I’ve just sent the script in for approval. So the pressure will be on, we basically get a month. So it’s not a long turnaround but we’re confident we can do it. We’re going to shoot on a RED camera.

Graeme Watson
So Tenille, with three short films traveling around the festival circuit at the moment, what’s next up for you?

Tennille Kennedy
Not much in the way of short films, I’m heading up to Broome soon for the filming of the second season of ‘The Circuit’ for Media World Pictures. That’s very exciting and it’s probably going to take up the rest of my year. But I’ve got a couple of other projects up in the air that we might be submitting for LINK, we’ll wait and see.

‘Dogs Run Loose Around Here’ was funded though the Film and Television’s OOMPF scheme and can be seen on Thursday 7th July at ‘Get Your Shorts On; at the Revalation Film Festival at the Astor Cinema in Mount Lawley.