Director Kimble Rendall will shoot the final concert featuring all eight current and previous members of the Hoodoo Gurus at the Vivid Festival next month for his feature-length documentary on the band.
Rendall won’t be able to call the shots as he’ll be on stage as a co-founder of the band, whose four original and four later members reunited for the Be My Guru concert at Scarborough Beach Amphitheatre last November.
So, working with producer/DoP Helen Barrow and Perth producer Tenille Kennedy, he will arrange the set-up of the 5-8 cameras and plan the shooting schedule. Tania Chambers is the EP.
Featuring Rendall on guitar, The Gurus will play sold-out concerts at the festival in Sydney on May 22 and 23. Funded by ScreenWest, he shot fly-on-the-wall scenes at the Scarborough concert.
He’s had approaches from an Australian broadcaster and hopes the documentary (working title: Hoodoo Gurus Gravy Train) will have event-style cinema screenings as well as the TV airing and DVD release.
“I always wanted to shoot a documentary about the formation of the band during the evolution of the punk and pub rock scenes in the 1980s,” he tells IF. “It will be told from the insider’s point of view.”
Concurrently Rendall is writing and will direct Nest, a horror movie about a multi-national group of scientists who encounter a swarm of deadly, man-eating funnel web spiders while searching for a missing colleague in a labyrinth.
Rendall decided to set the film primarily in China after the huge international success of his Bait 3D. It’s intended as a Chinese co-production.
Screen Australia is funding the development and the plan is to start principal photography in China and Australia in October. Arclight Films’ Ying Ye, Gary Hamilton, Mike Gabrawy and Mark Lazarus are producing.
Rendall aims to cast high-profile Chinese, Australian and US actors and hopes to work with an Australian VFX house on creating those spiders.
“It will be creepier if the spiders are life-sized,” he says. “It’s not a monster movie.”