CUT TO 20 YEARS LATER: AN ORAL HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA'S CULT SLASHER FILM

FANGORIA X MONSTER FEST 2019: In 1999, four young men set about resurrecting a neglected narrative within the Australian film industry – the horror film. They had little experience – for screenwriter Dave Warner, producer Martin Fabinyi, director Kimble Rendall, their collaboration represented each one’s feature film debut; composer Guy Gross had industry cred (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, 1994; Blinky Bill, 1992), but he had never scored a horror film. Together, they conceived of a slasher film deconstruction, a teen splatter film set within a teen splatter film; the project would be called Cut, a pun riffing on the central themes of murder and movie-making, and it would star Molly Ringwald, Kylie Minogue and Jessica Napier.

Twenty years later, to celebrate Umbrella Entertainment’s 4K restoration of the film, the four men were brought together by Fangoria x Monster Fest | Sydney to revisit an ambitious, fascinating and wholly undervalued slice of Ozploitation cinema. For a Q&A hosted by Festival Director and SCREEN-SPACE’s Managing Editor Simon Foster, the team behind Cut recalled its conception, production and reception; an edited transcript of the evening reveals the passion and frustration it took to bring home-grown horror back to Australian screens… (pictured, above; from left, Fabinyi, Rendell, Gross and Warner)

Dave: We’d been working on a Mushroom Pictures documentary and Martin said to us at the Bayswater Brasserie one day, "I have been thinking we should do a horror film, because one of the things we have in Australia is young talent on shows like Neighbours and Home and Away." Kimble and I said, "Yeah, that is a great idea." It was just before Christmas. I didn't go away that year and in the six days of Christmas I wrote a script, and that started it. (pictured, right; Kylie Minogue as director Hilary Jacobs in Cut)

Martin: We worked on it fairly consistently together. I remember being in your office at Flat Rock on Bayswater Road, and we worked on it there with Kimble.

Kimble: We met at a Chinese restaurant and ended up in a cinema watching I Know What You Did Last Summer. At that time, there were no Australian horror movies. Even though there's a great history of making genre films here, going back to the days of 10BA, there was none of them being made. We thought we could do it low budget with some soapie stars. I'd worked with Kylie on a short film called Highway to Hell. Martin was at Mushroom, the home of Kylie. So it was, "Ok, we'll get Kylie in it".

Kimble: Originally, we were going to cast Daryl Hannah, and Martin went to Los Angeles, because apparently Daryl Hannah bought a horse every time she did a movie, so every movie was worth a horse or two.

Martin: She agreed to come out and do the movie, and so we started pre-production and we were halfway through and then she dropped out because her boyfriend told her it was bad karma to do a horror movie, or something like that.

Martin: Yeah, she was a very weird person. So Molly came on board and she was far, far better, and loved it. She loved the experience. (pictured, left; Molly Ringwald as actress Vanessa Turnbill in Cut)

Kimble: Molly was the biggest star in the world at one point, and everyone loves Molly. We approached her and she got the joke and the whole concept. We started in New South Wales and ended up filming in South Australia, and Kylie and Molly turned up and away we went.

Martin: We shot in July 1999, in the dead of winter and it was in the mountains in the Adelaide Hills, so it was particularly cold.

Dave: We had this foreign minister called Alexander Downer. He was famous for the photograph of him wearing silk stockings. That was the house that he grew up in. That was his family house. (pictured, right; Rendell, right, on the set of Cut)

Martin: So it already had a horror element to it (laughs).

Dave: Adelaide, as you know, is a great place to shoot a horror movie. Then we were lucky enough to get a great composer, in Guy.

Guy: I was another Mushroom staple, part of the Mushroom world. We hadn't worked together; we got thrust together. This was the days of old synths, of low budget, so it was a seven foot rack of synthesizers doing that orchestral score. And it was nice working with those old clichés and dipping back and forth into both old film and new film [styles]. I love absorbing whatever I hear and I did hear some old horror films, and went oh, that's the harmony. It's a musical thing you do. You have to just absorb yourself in a style and then dive into it.

Dave: I loved horror movies. When Scream came out, that was really exciting for us, because it completely re-enlivened that genre.

Kimble: Wes Craven, John Carpenter and of course, Alfred Hitchcock. I've wide, eclectic tastes, but I love the classic horror movies. From a filmmaker's point of view they're great fun to make, all the prosthetics and visual effects stuff. I would like to have another go at the prosthetics in Cut, but in those days we had the incredible guys from Makeup Effects Group. They did the baby in The Matrix and they've done some fantastic stuff since. (pictured, below; actor Frank Roberts with Makeup Effects Group artist transforming into Scar Man)  

Kimble: In Australia, it did okay. In France, it was the second most popular [Australian] film, after Strictly Ballroom, and it did really well all around the world, so it did connect to audiences.

Martin: It actually made its money back, internationally, which is really remarkable for a local film.

Kimble: It's the marketing. I'd been working on some commercials, which ended up being the most successful anti-smoking commercials in the world. So I said to UIP, the distributor, "Why don't we bring in the creative team behind the ad campaign?” These guys came up with some great ideas. Instead of creating our own posters, we were going to slash everybody else's posters; we were going to have fake murders in cinemas and have people carrying bloody stretchers out. So I took the two guys into this meeting with UIP and said, "These guys can help us," and all the marketing guys from the film side said, "There's no audience for horror in Australia." I said, "I don't think that's correct. I think if you market to that audience, then it'll connect with them." They said, "Well, we're going to release it on Gay Mardi Gras weekend.” I said, "Um, you've got Kylie and Molly in it, so…I guess." They literally never spoke to us again. It came out but it didn't really connect and it was to do with the marketing. Overseas, it got into a festival and there were hundreds of people who’d seen the film throwing snowballs at me, yelling, "We love Cut! Cut, we love it!" and I thought wow, there is an audience. They had a fantastic marketing campaign.

Guy: Technically, we've got a lot more control these days and synthetically, I could create much fatter and big sounds, but it sounded orchestral. I was happy, not embarrassed. I'll walk out chest out (laughs). For me, the film rocks along quite fast. I expected it to be a lot, lot slower than it's come out. Credit to you guys. It really stood up well.

Kimble: I actually haven't seen it since I went to that festival. That's not uncommon. You make a film and you don't watch it again, so I was quite happy. Of course, there are things I would have loved to have another go at, but I have a soft spot for it. You love a film, sometimes you don't. I enjoy it, I think it looks good and you listen to the score and you go, that's a really good score. It's fantastic. (pictured, above; the villainous Scar Man)

Martin: Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I jumped and laughed seeing it again 20 years later. Literally, I haven't seen it since 2000. I think the number of people who worked on the film who've gone on is remarkable, including everyone here. I just think it was a real fun time, as much as films can be. (pictured, below; Stephen Curry as Rick Stephens in Cut)

Dave: I was in awe of the filmmaking ability of Kimble and Guy. They did a fantastic job. For me, I really wish they'd filmed my fucking second draft (laughs), which I thought was a lot better than the final one. It's a weird thing when you're a writer and you've got elements to it but not the whole thing. Despite that, I enjoyed it because of the great craft of those guys and Martin for putting it together. Compare that to what you've seen from other people with a lot more tools at their disposal, I think it was a brilliant job.

Kimble: A scene that we cut out had Scar Man on the balcony of the house and we're playing music and he did this mad rap dance thing. One of the producers, the really insane one, said, "You've got to have that in the movie. It will be a hit if you put it in." He might have been right, but we didn't think so, so we took it out. He wasn't right. (pictured, below; Jessica Napier, star of Cut)

Dave: I always think that in classic horror [narratives] somebody has breached a moral code, which we may not know about until [it’s] too late, so I was careful. I can see [my] overall story arc - there's a tragedy on a film set 20 years ago and then a new crew returns to finish the cursed production. Halfway through our film, a different producer took over and rewrote my script, so it's a weird experience because you conceive of something that changes. In fact, in the original one, it was a #MeToo film really. I didn't have Scar Man in the original. It was purely within the character, so there wasn't a supernatural element to it at all. Once those building blocks are gone, it's hard to re-scramble the egg, but if you've got talented people working on their craft, it doesn't matter. They get the essence of what's going to work, so I wouldn't change anything of that. But if you went back two drafts or three drafts, yeah, it changed quite a bit.

Kimble: Martin went on to make Chopper and Wolf Creek. Guy, of course, went on to do some amazing films, as did Dave. I went to this whole Hollywood world as well. It was the start of our journey, the film that sort of kicked it off, strangely.