Daniel Millar, Laura Hughes and Bryan Moses.
This week a new Australian film will premiere at Utah's Slamdance, the festival at which first-time, low-budget filmmakers can strut their stuff.
Slamdance has seen the world premieres of films such as The King of Kong, Paranormal Activity and Following, the debut of a 29 year-old Christopher Nolan.
The Tail Job is the debut feature of Bryan Moses and Daniel Millar (co-writer-directors) and Laura Hughes (producer). The crew usually consisted of just the three of them. Hughes is an experienced actress, with credits on 8MMM Aboriginal Radio, Spirited and Laid, while Moses and Millar have worked together in TV and commercials for years.
Bearing the tagline "If you love someone, set them free, then follow at a safe distance", the micro-budgeted comedy follows Nicholas, who discovers his fiancé Mona has been sending text messages to a mystery man and decides to tail her in a cab.
His driver, Trevor, turns out to be slightly unhinged, but Nicholas is desperate and Trevor is keen to keep the meter running, so they embark on a comical odyssey across Sydney in which they cross paths with lowlifes, psychopaths, and Sydney’s most notorious gangster.
"We've worked together on and off for a decade", Moses and Millar said.
"And each time we created a great-looking piece of cinema for a corporate client we thought to ourselves 'when are we gonna put our skills and effort into something that’s just for us!? The Tail Job turned out to be that opportunity."
The production had to work around the day jobs of its cast, and the biggest expense was the taxi in which the two main characters spend most of the film. The entire thing was shot with a combination of Canon 5 and 7Ds.
The idea came from a story the duo heard from a buddy.
"When a friend tells you that, in a jealous rage, he’d confronted his fiance believing her to be having an affair with a man named Sio Bohan, after finding that mysterious name in her cell phone, there are two things you can do. The first is to console him, tell him it was an easy mistake to make, and assure him that everything will be fine. The second is to turn his hilarious misadventure into a film."
"We began to speculate how the situation could potentially escalate if he didn’t decide to confront her straight away. How far could a situation like that go? How long would it take to figure out he was jealous of a man who didn’t exist? It was these questions that led to us eventually putting pen to paper".
Aaron Marshall, Programmer at Slamdance, said: "There are a select number of classic movie characters whose very names can drive a story, even when they aren’t on the screen. Harry Lime. The one-armed man. And now, we can add Sio Bohan to the list — the inamorato seducing Nicholas’s fiancée. The search to find him employs such solid filmmaking it’s scary: the writing is clever, the performances are hilarious, and every moment is milked for maximum payoff. Seriously, it’s a balls-out farcical hunt from start to credits."
The Tail Job premieres in Park City this Sunday, January 24.