PATRICK HUGHES

Best Western

“The film came from a point of frustration from struggling to get my first film up”, Patrick Hughes says of his new feature film Red Hill.” I just  stood up one day and said ‘right, I’m gonna mortgage my house, I’m gonna shoot it for this much money, in four weeks, I’m gonna write a bad-ass movie, and I’m gonna give it to these actors’. And this is the funny thing: not one person ever said no. Not one person. I had three other scripts fall over, and I thought ‘fuck that, no one’s gonna produce your film harder than you will, so just get off your arse and go and do it’. I studied the way George Miller did Mad Max, and that’s pretty much how we made our movie.”

The film Patrick Hughes is speaking about is, of course, his directorial debut Red Hill, which tells the tale of a neophyte cop’s baptism of fire when a brutal criminal comes to the titular town looking for revenge. Although loudly and proudly an Australian film - it even boasts the presence of Aussie icon Steve Bisley - it’s most obvious influence is the venerable Western genre.

“It came from the landscape,” Hughes explains. “Every time I went to a small country town in Australia, they’re really fucking creepy at night time. You can stand on a main street on a Saturday night, there’s no cars, no people. I thought: there’s something inherently creepy about these towns. And I thought, why hasn’t somebody modernised the western, because what’s the difference between an hundred years ago and today? It’s mobile phones and cars, but there’s still that sense of isolation. If shit went down, there’s nowhere to go. What are you gonna do, run off into the desert?”

Elaborating further, he says: “You can’t help but be influenced by the history. Omeo [Victoria, where the film was shot] is a stunning town, but it really is a boom town that’s gone bust. If you look at the old photographs and etchings from back in the day, it looks like Deadwood. That town was thriving. Three people a week got shot on Main Street. It was literally the Wild West. The classic westerns were all about those kinds of towns; to modernise it was to say, well, what’s happened to those towns now. It’s about the survival of a town that’s lost its way. It’s a dying town, and I like that notion that, with isolation, things can become a little bit corrupt, a little bit bent, a little bit loose. You might start with your strong moral fibre, but maybe it starts to fray over the years, and a bitterness creeps in.”

The most obvious example of that bitterness is the character of Old Bill, essayed by the aforementioned Bisley. Hughes explains: “It makes a statement about the posse mentality, that as a group these guys will commit horrific acts of violence, but as individuals they’re all weak, feeble, almost childlike. It’s kind of the stranglehold that Old Bill has over these men. He’s not willing to accept that it’s over. So it’s a changing of the guard story, with the young constable from the city who’s got a very different moral code, but I guess every western is about moral codes.”

_TRAVIS JOHNSON