When director Kimble Rendall takes to the stage with the Hoodoo Gurus in Perth on Sunday, it won’t just be the first time the band’s founders have performed together since 1982.
Rendall and producer/DoP Helen Barrow will shoot fly-on-the-wall scenes at the concert for a trailer which they hope will lead to a feature-length docu on the durable rock group.
Screen West is funding the shoot at the Scarborough Beach Amphitheatre, which will feature all past and current members of the band.
“The docu will look at the band over the course of 30 years and what happened to each of us,” Rendall, who played rhythm guitar, tells IF.
The producers intend to work with Leap Frog Films’ David Doepel to release the film via cinema-on-demand platform Tugg.
In addition to that project, Rendall plans to write and direct a sequel to his 2012 hit Bait 3D, which has the working title Nest. The premise has a group of Australian scientists visiting China to investigate the origins of funnel-web spiders where, needless to say, they are confronted by the deadly arachnids.
Like the killer shark movie, the aim is to shoot the sequel as a co-production with China. Rendall is flying to China to meet with potential investors before Christmas, working with Arclight Films’ Gary Hamilton, who executive produced Bait, and Mark Lazarus.
Back to the Gurus: Rendall co-founded the band as Le Hoodoo Gurus with singer Dave Faulkner, James Baker and Rod Radalj. He left on amicable terms after three years to pursue a career as a director but kept in touch, shooting music videos of the band.
On Thursday he had his first rehearsal with his former colleagues, admitting, “I was a bit rusty.”
Perth producer Tenille Kennedy is producing with Barrow. They plan to finance the docu via screen agencies and a crowd-funding campaign, raising enough money for multi-camera coverage of a Gurus concert.
Year after Rendall left, the band broke up in 1998 as the musos went off to perform and record with other people. But they missed each other so much they formed a new band, the Persian Rugs, which they insisted for years had nothing to do with the Hoodoo Gurus, except that the two bands shared exactly the same line-up for a time.
In 2003 they put an end to that charade and reformed as the Hoodoo Gurus.