Negative reviewers can eat their words: Hughes
Red Hill director Patrick Hughes is glad to say the reviewers who anticipated little international life for the film have been proven wrong after its sale to Sony in the US.
“They can eat those words; they were surely wrong about that one,” Hughes jokingly told Encore. “We made this film independently and it’s going to have a life around the world.”
The western premiered at the Berlin Film Festival to mixed reviews; some glowing and some questioning its international potential. So far, the film has already been sold to the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany and other territories; a considerable success for any Australian film, but what makes it even more remarkable is that production was 100 percent independently financed and made without any distribution deals in place.
Hughes said he’d had a one-line pitch in his head for some time, about a modern day western, a prison break and a man trying to seek revenge on the cops that put him there. Fourteen months ago, he sat down to write the script, and the rest happened quickly.
I find it revealing that a practitioner with fairly extensive commercial experience had ‘no idea’ about the scale and competitiveness of the international film market before visiting a large trade show himself. Does a reality check like this suggest something narrow-minded about education and training mechanisms here? That we overrate our importance to world cinema? That all too often we ignore what’s happening in commercial markets internationally because of a paucity of exposure or curiosity or professionalism? This isn’t a criticism of Hughes or his admirable undertaking, but I think it might reflect poorly on various arbiters of the ‘national’ who continue to foster a skewed perspective of local cinema that is non-representative of our meager position in the global film market.