Writer/director Samuel Genocchio’s dark and abstruse thriller Bad Bush is set in a remote farmhouse, where a young woman and her newborn baby spend a night alone with a drug-crazed dope grower. The film is a creepy cat-and-mouse story intelligently handled and resourcefully shot, squeezing every penny out of a total budget of $220,000 (including marketing). Bad Bush premiered at this year’s Dungog Film Festival and will be released in select cinemas across the country from June. Genocchio sat down to chat about the film with Luke Buckmaster.

What a crazy twist at the end! Obviously we won’t spoil it for anybody who hasn’t seen Bad Bush but boy, I’m guessing you received some strange reactions to it?

You bet, most people don’t see it coming and are shocked. It’s great because unlike a lot of films which people forget the moment the leave the cinema, this one stays with them for days and it’s the twist that gets them thinking. I’d rather people left thinking than saying ‘well that was a laugh, lets go to maccas!’

Bad Bush is an unusual and difficult to define thriller. The script seems to make it intentionally difficult to get a handle on the characters – their beliefs and motivations are obscured by secrets and ambiguities. Was the intention to make a film in which in the audience cannot second-guess the characters?

It was the intention to make the characters extremely complex. We worked heavily in rehearsals on subtext and motivations, the characters had full rounded histories. This was necessary to pull off the incredible character arcs they have to go through, in doing so we made them very real. Most people are hard to second-guess in real life. The intention was certainly to make them complex, rich and yes a little obscure, as the piece was always meant to be a bit mysterious.

If you were reviewing Bad Bush, how would you define it? What words might you use and what genre would you put it in?

I’d call it a psychological thriller in the M. Night Shyamalan style. So a quirky psychological thriller.

Where did the idea come from to make Bad Bush? Was it influenced by other films or filmmakers?

Yep. It has a bit of Hitchcock, Kubrick’s The Shining, Straw Dogs, Sixth Sense and Death and the Maiden, so it’s probably more old school. But the idea was really out of necessity. I had to make a film fast because I was sick of waiting. A two-hander set in a remote farmhouse was just the easiest option at that point in time for me.

How long was the shoot, how much was the budget and how did you raise the funds?

It was a 12 day shoot. We got 220K from script to screen, which included marketing and distribution. There was 120K for the shoot, 70K for post, 30K for marketing distribution. The budget was a combination of private money, Movie Network Channels and Frame Set and Match equity. I wouldn’t have been able to raise it without the EP’s Tom Kennedy and Mark Tesoriero and some family members and regular benefactors.

What’s the best and worst response you’ve had to it?

Someone said it was as brilliant as Hitchcock, someone else said it was boring. Most people are kind of stunned.

Sam you’ve been able to find some screens in a variety of independent cinemas in Australia. How have you approached distribution? What methods have you employed?

With such a low budget we actually have a chance to make a profit, so the business model was to self distribute so as not to get a distributor taking first position and no-one making any money for seven years, which is kind of standard. I followed a method pioneered by John L. Simpson, Paul Brennan and others. It is simply to make personal relationships with cinema owners and bookers by visiting them and continually wearing them down until they say yes. But when you do it yourself you can offer them a better deal, no policy, meaning they can play it whenever they like and pull it if they want, so they aren’t forced into screening it over and over. This is attractive for bookers and cinema owners, but the hardest part is getting past the stigma of Australian movies, and that is that no-one sees them. You have to try a grass roots marketing approach, think of the film as independent theatre, make it an event rather than just another film, get down and dirty and work your butt off! I have done a lot of driving.

Sam you were set to direct a $5.5million movie about car racing that was scuttled by the death of Peter Brock. Is that correct? What happened?

Well Peter died and it sent the film sideways. We were all so shocked as we’d been working with him a lot and had got to know him and he was a really nice bloke. The film went through a myriad of rewrites. He was a ghost at one stage, there were horses, it got a little out of control. Anyway, it has come full circle and Peter is now a poster on the wall, but the film is still there and will be going ahead soon. It’s become a full-on action drama themed around motorsport. An Australian Fast and the Furious with a heavy dose of V8 muscle cars. The last gasp of the gas guzzling Aussie Icon machines…It’s going to be fun! Think Mad Max meets Running on Empty with a bit of Fast and the Furious and Initial D thrown in.

Any other projects on the go?

There’s King of the Mountain, the motorsport film. Halestorm, which is about the last Australian Dogfighter George Hale, who shot down two Migs in Korea. There’s Knife, a martial arts film in Singapore. Also, there’s a film about a family band in England in the 60’s, a slasher about a bunch of Indian cricketers who crash land in the outback and get hunted and murdered by pig shooters. Geez, the list goes on. There are more but that’s enough for now!

Vist Bad Bush’s offical website.

Watch the Bad Bush trailer: