Stuart Stanton is putting the finishing touches to his self-financed debut feature comedy Charlie Bonnet before shopping it around to Australian distributors.
The Melbourne-based filmmaker includes bad acting in the comedy of errors — but only because it’s a key part of the storyline!
Charlie Bonnet tells the tale of a nervous, struggling actor who wants two things in life: to find the love of his life and to make a living from his passion for acting.
Peter Stanley, who wrote and produced the film with Stanton, plays the title character. They met while studying film at RMIT and were both born in the UK and moved to Australia with their families when they were children.
“It’s why the film’s comedy is English in style,” Stanton told IF Magazine. “I knew if the crew wasn’t laughing it wasn’t working. We would constantly rewrite jokes and dialogue on set if things didn't feel right.”
Other cast members include Eddie Barcoo, who also has a script credit, Miranda Skerman, who plays the love interest who lives next door, and Diana Joselle the femme fatale.
“I knew we could pull it off ourselves and I wanted full control," said Stanton, who is full of praise for all the cast and crew, who worked on deferrals. "Once we started, people jumped out of the woodwork to help … We filmed every month or so from January last year until early this year because it was easier for me to do it that way financially."
The entire filmmaking process was documented over 18 months on a Facebook page that now has 1400 followers. Through them, 8000 people were notified last week when the trailer was loaded on YouTube, where it has had 650 views.
“Right now we are waiting on final delivery of audio including the music score composed by Pseudo Echo's frontman Brian Canham and then we are pretty much done. We were pumped that he agreed to do it.”
Stanton is one of the two co-owners of corporate production company Final Focus Australia, which has many cinema owners among its clients. But he produced Charlie Bonnet under Glass Eye Projects, the company through which he has channelled all his short films.
The film was previously called Inside The Actor’s Actor.