acolytes
Filmmaker notes - Director Jon Hewitt
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| Acolytes |
Acolytes is about a trio of teens living on the edge of the city who are driven by the desire for revenge on a guy who has brutalized them all their short lives. Then suddenly an opportunity arises where they can blackmail a killer to deliver vengeance upon this nemesis. Of course, it all goes to shit.
I like stories to be layered, freaked with subtext. So on the surface Acolytes is a chiller - a story of twists, turns, shocks and reveals that inhabits that edgy generic territory found between drama and horror.
But what lies beneath is a desire to experience the unfamiliar and unknowable through cinema, to achieve insight through storytelling, to fathom truths through art.
So Acolytes becomes a work about the conflict between the primal and the human; a meditation on the normalcy of aberration; a dramatization of the banality of evil; a paean to innocence consumed by abuse, revenge and violence.
Acolytes marks a significant advancement on my style, developed over three previous features, of marrying strong, accessible and marketable genre elements with adventurous storytelling aesthetics in a hard-hitting dramatic work that resides on the bleeding-edge of technique, performance and cinema.
For me, performance is everything - what happens between the actor and the lens is the flashpoint where a work is born, or is DOA. So Acolytes is an ensemble drama, character driven and truthfully cast. It was essential that the three teenage leads are the age that they play in the story - 16, 17 and 18.
My early feature Redball was one of the world's first digitally shot films, and I wanted to return to an experiment with digital to film technologies that I started back in 1996. I love the flexibility and low-impact nature of digital capture, the way it affords me the freedom, both technically and financially, to work with the actors on performance through longer takes and a less obtrusive and rigid filmmaking process. My ongoing desire as a filmmaker is to close the gap (in a performance sense) between theatre and cinema.
The first feature production in Australia to shoot on the extraordinary Viper Filmstream camera, I open Acolytes with a statement - a long-take pan across a breathtaking landscape vista shot in broad daylight in cinemascope - theoretically a shot that you can only shoot on film. It is one of the most beautiful and pure shots in the film.
Jon Hewitt, 2008
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