Hands-on Melbourne filmmaker Greg Pakis makes an impressive feature film debut with The Garth Method, a crowd pleasing character comedy about an aspiring actor desperate to be noticed.  He not only wrote, starred in, produced and directed the film - he’s also its marketer, exhibitor and god knows what else.  Pakis chats to In Film Australia about his unique niche in the film industry.

By Luke Buckmaster

On a lonely stretch of freeway leading out of Holbrook, a small NSW town that marks almost the exact halfway point between Melbourne and Sydney, a young man stands by the side of the road with a thumb puncturing the air as he watches streams of traffic sail by. It’s no secret that hitchhiking isn’t the most prosperous form of commuting nowadays; since the arrest in 1994 of backpacker murderer Ivan Milat most drivers won’t pause for a moment to contemplate picking up a stranger to take along for the ride. But for Chris Farley, 58, a jazz musician and stringed instrument repairer who can still smell the asphalt from moments of his youth spent in similar circumstance, there was never a choice.

Farley pulls over and picks the man up, who he describes as “self-assured, polite and friendly.”  His name is Greg Pakis, an independent filmmaker from Melbourne who’d been scurrying across the countryside shooting footage for a documentary about hitchhiking. In the days and nights preceding their encounter Pakis bunkered down in a weird array of resting places: sleeping on a pile of sand at a construction site, on a hill by the side of the freeway and, most outrageously, amongst the tombstones, dead flowers and chilly vibes of the town cemetery. He mentions a film he’s trying to promote - his own recently completed full length movie conceived entirely by himself and financed with only the slightest of budgets.

That’s when Farley drops my name in conversation. “My mate Luke is a real film buff,” he says. “Been writing about movies for years. Loves ‘em. You should get in contact with him.” Pakis takes a mental note of my name, telling himself he’ll Google it later. The young filmmaker thanks Farley for the ride and steps back into the steamy summer air.

About six weeks later the temperature is still hot and sweaty as I shuffle into a decked out warehouse in North Melbourne for my annual gig as a judge for South Side’s In on the Filmmaker short film festival. It’s early and few people have arrived but I barely have time to christen a stubby before I find myself engaged in conversation with a short man perched at a high-stool bar table, rolling a cigarette and casually panning his gaze, as if he were scanning the immediate area for new potential conversations. He’s small but built, groomed in short hair and stubble and wearing a t-shirt printed with a large image of a smirking face that looks a little bit like his own. Below it chunky lettering spells ‘The Garth Method.’  On his head a white baseball cap sits, brandishing the same three words; pinned to it are two white badges repeating the string. He tells me his name is Greg and he’s promoting a feature film he conceived and produced entirely himself. When I mumble my name and what I’m doing here; well, it’s almost as if he’d heard of me before.

Turns out Greg did send me an email asking if I could review The Garth Method but in the clutter of press releases, spam and hate mail that is my inbox it must have got lost in the vortex. No matter - a few hours later, beer in hand and feet comfortably reclined I switch on Pakis’s movie, unsurprised by the screener DVDs absence of menus and corporate decoration.  My surprise came from the film itself, which turned out to be a great late-night beer drinking treat and a rigorously entertaining conclusion to the evening.  The Garth Method is a very funny and very endearing blue-collar character comedy about a zany would-be actor turbo-charging into an obscene mission for self promotion.  Greg Pakis’s mission as a director to make the movie is a great reminder that cinema culture in Australia runs pretty deep: here is a man whose first accomplished foray into feature filmmaking, bankrolled by a shoestring budget without the shoe, is smarter and funnier than the vast majority of taxpayer funded comedies that come out of the industry every year.

Commingling super 16 film with digital video diary footage, captions preceding The Garth Method inform us that “in 2001 unemployed actor Garth Petridis was imprisoned for one of the most unusual crimes in Australian history” and he “kept a video diary of the whole process.” He then, according to Garth Method lore, handed the tapes to Pakis (his cousin, apparently) and asked him to recreate the ‘truth’ of the events preceding his arrest. The Garth Method is essentially about an actor trying to get made and a young man trying to get laid, but it has almost no sleaziness about it and is so innocently romantic the film’s surface itself erupts from black and white into colour as soon as Garth beds his first skirt, as if congratulating him on a job well done. It is one of many little quirks that audiences will find refreshingly zany.

“This is a film that generally appeals to most people,” Pakis tells me early one morning over the phone (well, it was ten o clock).

“It’s not an arty, academic movie, and it’s not about a weird subculture or anything. It’s kind of like a mainstream indie movie. I think it’s accessible.

Quite right, although it turns out accessible is a word that applies only to the film itself and not in its literal meaning.  While most audiences will find something greatly worthwhile in The Garth Method the vast majority of them by sheer definition of numbers will find it difficult to find a cinema screening it, for the simple reason that it’s not being screened at any cinemas. Always favouring the hands-on approach - and now with a finished feature film tucked up his proverbial armpit - Pakis took it upon himself to iron out the small details like distribution and exhibition. He voices an opinion on the subject I’ve never heard a filmmaker articulate before: he doesn’t want his film to be picked up by a distributor.

“Putting a film like mine in a cinema wouldn’t last too long because there is so much product around the world to compete with,” he says.

“Another thing is the way Australian stuff is marketed nowadays.  If you give your film to a distributor, are they going to market it right?  Are they just going to give it a quick release and push it to DVD, because for them it’s just another movie and they don’t really give a shit?”

Instead of trying to jimmy open a short run in cinemas Pakis prefers the idea of The Garth Method arriving soon at a Pub Near You, where viewers can eat and drink and slouch on couches and watch the film in a more carefree and social environment. In March 2006 The Garth Method commenced its first wave of public screenings at the Old Colonial Hotel on Brunswick street. Admission costs five dollars, with Pakis’s ‘Films 4 Charity’ incentive donating two dollars out of every ticket going to cancer charity Camp Quality.

The Garth Method has been a long time in the making: after three years of writing and preproduction filming finally commenced in August 2001 and wrapped after six separate shoots in November 2002. It was shot DIY guerrilla style using rented equipment and borrowed friends. Pakis’s father financed a good portion of the budget, which was mostly spent on super 16 film, and which couldn’t afford more than one or two takes per shot.  He told me that one night he slept next to boom mikes and tripods in a van stacked full of equipment because it was a more appealing option than having to heave all of it upstairs and then down again the next morning.

“You gotta do all sorts of crazy things to make a movie,” he says. “And once you’re filming you can’t afford to cut corners or get lazy. If you do you can usually see it in the final product when it’s blown up on the big screen. I really whipped my ass into gear to get it all done properly.”

The gruelling motions and tenets of ultra-indie filmmaking didn’t however mollify Pakis’s determination to find an audience, and by the time post-production wrapped he’d already reinvented himself as his own agent, marketer and merchandiser. Pakis publicizes screenings of his film at events like Tropfest (where, in Melbourne this year, he distributed more than 500 flyers) and Popcorn Taxi screenings (where in February he hovered outside cinema exits and gave out flyers as people left the building). On other days Pakis has been spotted jiggling on the sidewalk of Brunswick Street, striking up conversations with strangers and convincing some of them to sit down and watch The Garth Method trailer, which he then screens by seating them on a bench and unfolding the screen of his laptop. Greg Pakis is not just a Guerilla filmmaker - he’s a Guerilla Exhibitor.

“There’s a real adventure to do it,” he says. “Because it’s so hands, on you’re at it from every angle: making the film, attending events, handing out flyers, meeting organizers. You can have a lot of fun doing it.  It’s not just a means to an end.”

It’s safe to say Greg Pakis isn’t in it for the paychecks. He is in fact the most approachable kind of filmmaker you could imagine: a guy whose natural habitat is a corner hotel with a projector screen where he can schmooze amongst the beer patches and tobacco mists of the crowd while his film quacks in the background.

But Pakis shoots a lot higher than simple gregariousness: he makes a stalwart impression of practicality.  His first feature film is the work of straight-shooting, unpretentiously entertaining urban artisan who has completed what most aspiring filmmakers complain they never had enough resources to do. Making a film is a tough grind, we all know that, and many directors will testify that the experience at times tips precariously close to insanity. Arranging marketing and exhibition - often literally to the point of counting chairs - on top of constructing a film from the ground up requires a certain kind of madness Greg Pakis must breathe like oxygen.