It sounds pretty indolent to describe an exhilarating original feature like The Magician as the Australian Reservoir Dogs or this year’s Chopper, but in truth, such comparisons are impossible to resist.
Like Chopper, Scott Ryan’s debut feature provides a compelling tour of the killer scumbag circuit. And like Tarantino’s warning blast, The Magician boasts a neat line in gutter dialogue.
This faux verité mockumentary follows the misadventures of Melbourne hitman Ray Shoesmith. Having commissioned his film student neighbour to document his life and work we obviously get to see him pull the trigger. Mostly though, the movie avoids the grand moral dilemmas posed by Man Bites Dog in favour of brilliantly naturalistic comic dialogue.
Ray rows petulantly with a would-be victim stashed in the car-boot on whether or not Clint Eastwood was in The Dirty Dozen. Later, he and his cameraman discuss at length exactly how much money it would take for each of them to eat a ball of shit (“Depends who’s shit,” Ray sagely decides.)
“A lot of the dialogue was improvised,” Scott tells me. “I’d just say, ‘okay, we’re having a discussion about a ball of shit and I’m taking this position and you’re taking that one’ and we’d work it out from there. I think that made for better dialogue than anything I could have written myself.”
Having penned several screenplays to no avail, Scott, a multi-media student at Melbourne’s Royal Institute of Technology, decided to strike out on his own. He and his brother Adam cooked up The Magician’s opening murder scene in their garage with a mini-DV camera. With four classmates standing in as a guerrilla cast and crew, they shot the film in ten days. Having no budget to speak of, Scott found himself writing, directing and starring in the lead role.
“I never wanted to be an actor,” he says. “It’s not that I mind the idea of it. But it seemed like a lot of effort to do all the things an actor has to do for preparation. I was really surprised watching myself when we were first working with the sound that I’d managed to get into character and keep it up.”
Being a labour intensive industry typically involving squillions of dollars, cinema frequently proves the maxim necessity is the mother of invention. Classic B pictures cloaked cheap sets in shadow and that really is a shower curtain in the cockpit for Plan 9 From Outer Space. Still, one can only gasp at The Magician’s non-existent shooting budget.
“That’s why it’s shot like a student documentary,” explains Scott. “It’s got the same sort of resources and it was something I could make for cheap. But working in that way is actually very flexible. You have a lot more freedom than working with somebody else’s money.”
Screened as a short in a local film festival, The Magician attracted the interest of director and former stuntman, Nash Edgerton who passed Scott’s feature length cut on to Chopper producer, Michele Bennett. With their assistance and a post-production polish, the film would create a box-office splash in Australia before wowing audiences on the film festival circuit, including one Chopper Reid.
“Unfortunately, I never met any real killers for research until after the film was made”, says Scott. “I was mainly going on the book Contract Killer, an autobiography of a hitman in New York. But Chopper Reid was judging at the Melbourne Film Festival and we met him and won a few awards there, so that was great.”
Scott’s next port of call is Ireland, where he and his Cinderella crime flick will appear as part of the Wolf Blass Dublin Australian Film Festival.
“I’m really looking forward to it,” Scott explains. “My grandfather was from Dublin, so I still have relatives I have to meet. And I’m always amazed sitting down at screenings and premieres. I still can hardly believe that we’ve got the film out there.”