By Simon de Bruyn
The Nothing Men, the first Australian feature to be shot on the revolutionary Red camera, will screen in Los Angeles this week for an audience of industry representatives and distributors.
Martin Dingle-Wall, who starred in and produced the film with Andrew Windsor, said the screenings – organised by Red – were the culmination of a long journey that started with the crew testing the camera before production, when many in the industry were still skeptical of its capabilities.
“The industry knew about the camera but myth surrounded it. We did some tests and it looked stunning and we decided to use it. As a result it has set up a launch pad for us that our resources could have never put together,” he said.
Indeed, Nothing Men actor David Field was so impressed with the footage he saw that he opted to use the Red cameras for his directorial debut on The Combination, which just wrapped shooting in Western Sydney.
The producers will also be armed with a new cut of The Nothing Men to screen in LA. After screening the film at the growing Dungog Film Festival earlier this year, the filmmakers polled audience members and decided to invest in altering the cut so it played better with their target audience.
The film’s director Mark Fitzpatrick told Inside Film he was glad they had revisited the film, despite the time and money it took, as it gave them time to step back from the project and see it with the audiences’ eyes.
“[At Dungog] there was a lot of conjecture about the ending, and when we went back to look at it we ended up looking at the whole film. We revisited every scene and made them much sharper, just trimming bits here and there,” he said.
“I’d rather be really proud rather than sit there with an inferior film and we felt we had a real opportunity after the screening to make some changes that we couldn’t see needed to be made as we had become to close to the film after sitting in the editing room for three months. So we cracked it back open, re-edited it, and re-graded it. We’ve just sent that version out to distributors and the response has been very positive.”