Gabriel, the spectacular feature film debut from director Shane Abbess, is a dark epic-sized sci-fi fantasy about a fallen angel battling to save the souls of Purgatory. Shot on shoestring finances with borrowed equipment and a volunteer cast, it is an impressive display of budget ingenuity. Shortly before Gabriel’s DVD release (March 19) - and one day before Abbess jetted off to Hollywood - the young filmmaker chatted to Luke Buckmaster.

Q: You’re off to LA soon, I hear?

A: Yeah, tomorrow. I’ve been a few times now since Gabriel. It’s very exciting because of the energy we get there, and their attitudes. The energy around the film is really good. I think they kind of see what we did - the accomplishment of getting the film made. Hollywood’s a good place to be for that.

Q: You achieved a lot of things in Gabriel, from designing the master vision to some of the small touches and flourishes. I think perhaps the most significant thing was demonstrating what you can achieve with limited resources. Would you agree?

A: Gabriel was always going to be a strange film. It was always going to have a budget smaller than the average B horror film, but it had a concept that was up there up with some of the big Hollywood action films. So we knew going into it that we were biting off a lot to chew, and there were many times when we felt we had almost gone too far.

Now worldwide the DVD is coming out, and there are the people who saw it earlier. The feedback has been really good. I think people get it. It takes time; we always knew it would be a cult sort of movie. I think now that it’s on DVD it’s going to find the right audience. I think expectation is probably a bit easier, because people know what to expect. It’s not going to be a 100 million dollar film like The Matrix or Transformers. It;s a much more humble film, but if you take the time to get into it, it’s a really cool journey.

Q: Gabriel is unusually large in stature. Itâs very much an epic, but you’ve made it on a shoestring. That must have been pretty tough, right?

A: It was always going to be hard, but I’m glad we did it and I wouldn’t have wanted to do it any other way. As far as a first film goes it was a great trial by fire - to really push ourselves. We could have gone soft and just done something quite a bit easier, and something we knew would be quite accessible. But we took the plunge and went for it.

Q: There is a tremendous sense of ambition in the film, and it’s very well realised. What were some of the ways you navigated around the budget constraints? For example, I noticed there weren’t many exterior shots and there were quite a lot of close-ups.

A: Someone mentioned in the States “really like the way you’ve really tried to get in there on the characters.” I said it’s actually more because if I pan the camera left or right by about an inch, there’s a car park or the crew! I would have everyday stacked against me. I did the story boards for what I intended the scenes to be, and then I’d turn up on set and see what didn

twork, what hadn’t happened, which part of the set had fallen over, which parts of the crew couldn’t turn up. Everything that you normally have on a film, we didn’t have…So I would take what I originally intended, get there on the set, and have to look around and go well, how do we still shoot this with nothing working in our favour and still make it cool? So I kind of had to use every trick I had to get it across the line.

Q: I wrote in my review that it’s difficult in some respects to triumph and properly acknowledge the achievements of this kind of frugal filmmaking and budget ingenuity when we don’t know how much the film cost. In the comments below my review, someone wrote that it cost under $200,000 and in the comment below that somebody wrote that you had been gagged by Sony. Can you confirm any of this?

A: I wasn’t gagged by Sony, but the film did cost under $200,000 to make. Somebody said in America that for output for what we got and what we spent this has to be comparatively one of the biggest small budget films ever. A lot of people said we spent about 3 or 4 mill on it. I was like, keep going…I’ve seen that people have compared it to Undead and some of our lower budget horror films here. We were way smaller than those films! We were really up against the odds, but I’m stoked with how it turned out.

Sony didn’t want people to steer away from the film, thinking that’s too low budget, that it’s gonna be a couple of wide shot and nothing - no effects, no action, no anything. The film didn’t feel that way so they didn;t want people to have the wrong idea of it.

The reaction has been interesting. I maybe made a mistake and said the film should come out here in Australia first, because we were going to really embrace this as our own, and love the fact that it’s a real underdog thing. But it was exactly the opposite. I think the rest of the world has embraced this film a lot more than our own home country has, even critically and commercially. My favourite Aussie film from last year was Clubland. I thought it was amazing film. I think there is room for home grown films that are amazing, but at the same time I think we should be able to make more genre films that speak to a broader audience.

Q: In terms of your career progression, making this film was a brilliant move. Someone in a studio in Hollywood is going to look at you as a prime example of somebody they probably should be throwing cash at. Probably a really large amount of cash for you and a comparatively small amount for them. What sort of offers have you received from Hollywood? I heard some whispers about you were asked to direct a remake of Dark Crystal.

A: There have been a lot of offers…I guess it’s just a case of now making sure I make the right decision for what I am going to do next. With this film we demonstrated and ability to do a film with no budget, but now I need to make sure that with a budget and all the right infrastructure and support I get to make the film exactly the way I need to make it.

Q: Have you received any particularly appealing offers?

A: Yeah I have. A few of them are quite high profile projects so that’s why I don’t really want to talk about what they are until I have actually got them in the bag. But yeah I’m very excited. If one of them comes off I think everybody will be quite shocked.

Q: So can you confirm that you were asked to direct a Dark Crystal remake?

A: I can’t actually at the moment. It could be myth, it could be just people hoping that I do it. Maybe not, I am not too sure. It’s possible.

Q: Before or during the time you were making Gabriel, did people you know, like friends or family, ever say to you that you were crazy to spend so much time and resource on such an ambitious resource? And did you ever think holy crap - what if this all goes wrong?

A: There’s a line from a Tea Party song, and he sings “I would rather live numbered days as a lion then a thousand as a lamb.” I think for me I always knew we were doing the impossible. A big insurance company tried to shut us down on the first day. They said guys this is beyond ambitious, this is such a big project it’s kind of insanity, you guys aren’t going to get past the week of shooting. Let alone if you finish the shoot, let alone if you get it edited, let alone if you do full sound design. I think there was a mixture of naivety, in the sense that we just said “well fuck it, we’ll do it”

Q: I read that you’ve been making movies since you were 12. Have they all been in the fantasy genre?

A: I actually started doing surf and skate films and local sort of things. I didn’t know what a director did or any of those kind of jobs - I just wanted to be around making moving pictures. As I got older I sort of realised that somebody has to actually helm the story to make sure it goes in a certain direction. When I was about 16 I tried to grow a bad beard and told them I was 19, and went to Sydney community college on weekends while I was still in high school to do the film courses.

Q: $200,000 may be a small budget for a movie, but it’s still an awful lot of money. How did you raise the budget?

A: A lot of people put in small amounts of money to get the film across the line. We actually started the film with not enough money to shoot it - I think we started with about $90,000. When we were in week five, I new we were out, that we couldn’t shoot Week 6. It was the case of how do we push forward and keep going? What happened was, one of the guys - who was a truck driver mate I was doing some removals for to earn money - he said I will give you a bit extra. He had a mortgage and he couldn’t really afford it, but he was so passionate about what we were doing, and that we were actually doing what we said we would. He said “take a chance and give you guys some money.”

We promised everybody who put money in the film that if it never got sold or picked up, that we would work the rest of our lives to pay the money back. We were 100% serious about that. If no-one ever picked the film up, then Matt and I would have just been OK, right, cool…We will go and work 9 to 5, 5 days a week, until we pay the money back. It would have ten years or so, but we would have done it.

I think it (Sony acquiring the film) was a landmark historical deal - the fact that this was an indie film from Australia with the budget it had, and that it was picked up by such a major studio.

By Luke Buckmaster

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Gabriel trailer:

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