The Working Class Goes to Hell: Sam Dixon on A GRAND MOCKERY

The writer/director/star of BE FEST selection A GRAND MOCKERY explores the origins of his soon-to-be cult classic.

We here at BLEEDING EDGE are elated to open up the second annual BE FEST’s film screenings with the Toronto premiere of A GRAND MOCKERY. Showing our first-ever film from Australia would be a big enough deal, but it’s truly exciting to highlight such a genuinely strange film, both in terms of its tone and form. Wowing audiences both in its homeland and at festivals like Fantasia, Aussie maverick filmmakers Sam Dixon and Adam C. Briggs collaborated on directing for the first time to make something as deeply personal as it is experimental. The aforementioned Dixon stars as Josie, a Brisbane cinema employee coasting his way through a dull life of work, hard drinking, and his small social circle. Gradually, the mundanity of his existence begins to be punctured by a Kafka-esque transformation, captured in equally grotesque and hilarious ways via gorgeous 8mm photography.

BLEEDING EDGE was lucky enough to chat with Dixon over Zoom (despite the 14-hour time-zone difference between Toronto and Brisbane, it should be said).

Bleeding Edge: Can you talk about how you and Adam C. Briggs met and became a filmmaking duo?

Sam Dixon: Adam and I had known each other for a long time. We were aware of each other's work. Brisbane is a relatively small town. We've both been making films since we were kids. We were aware of each other and liked each other's work and slowly became friends, but we weren't [collaborators]. We were just acquaintances with mutual respect for one another. Then I moved away from Brisbane for a number of years. I lived in Melbourne and Sydney. And Adam continued to work with people whom I also worked with from Queensland. Then I moved back to Brisbane a number of years ago, which led to Adam and me becoming closer, especially when he had just finished Paris Funeral, his first feature, and he was a little bit cooked from that experience. I had just made a short film with Screen Queensland, and I was feeling a little bit cooked after that.

We both felt like we still wanted to do something free from the shackles that we felt. We wanted to make something together. There were a lot of things happening in Brisbane at the time that informed the ideas behind the film. We didn't initially set out to even make a film together. We just started writing together. The cemetery postal system that's in the film is based on something that we did do when we first started writing the film. Neither of us sort of set out to write, direct, and produce with someone else, but just all happened very organically, and it felt like the right way to do it. There were pretty much no disagreements amongst us, even during the creation of it. It was just one of those instances where the film felt like it made itself.

BE: You mentioned the cemetery postal system, but besides that, what were the general origins of this project: the feelings, the settings, the inspirations, etc.?

SD: Well, I was genuinely working at a cinema, at the cinema that we shot in as well. And I lived directly next to a cemetery. I was going through a weird time of readjustment when I moved back to Brisbane initially. And this was around the time that Adam and I were wanting to make something together. It was informed by stuff that I was going through at the time, but then very much exaggerated to the degree of insanity that it reaches in the film. I also think we really wanted to represent Brisbane as a character in and of itself. And I haven't really seen Brisbane represented the way that we have in A Grand Mockery, which has a slightly hallucinatory quality to it, the city. We wanted to try and capture that quality in the film, which is a lot of the reasoning behind the use of the Super 8 mm as well. We thought it would give it a dreamlike quality.

BE: You mentioned the movie theater job. I feel like one of the things that's really great about the film is how it's very honest about the deadening nature of those working-class jobs. So definitely that cinema worker position you had was influential in the film, but are there even other past jobs you'd had in your life that influenced the film? Were you and Adam both deliberately conjuring the feeling of being stuck in this sort of deadening cycle?

SD: Yeah, for sure. Every day is the same as the last; it's like Groundhog Day. I've worked in an infinite number of jobs like that. That's very much a thing that I think everybody can identify with, that crippling monotony of day-to-day working-class life. I worked at bottle shops for many years; it was the same thing, customer service [too]. I think all of that feeds into what ends up coming through in your work. But yes, I feel like a lot of people have identified with that particular aspect of the film, especially cinema employees have been like yeah, that's what it feels like to work at one.

BE: You also mentioned your depiction of Brisbane. Something interesting I noticed from browsing the Letterboxd reviews, and I'm guessing a lot of these were from the film's initial Australian premiere last year, but a lot of them were saying this film really accurately portrays the city, and even Australia in general, in a way that hasn't been seen on screen before. When I think of Australian films I've seen, even pessimistic genre films, I feel like it's always still sunny onscreen. Instantly, this film sets itself apart with just how dark it looks throughout. So, what were the specific haunted qualities of Brisbane that both you and Adam wanted to portray?

SD: A lot of people have spoken about the sounds and the sound design. The Super 8 mm is something that people jump to talk about first for obvious reasons, because it is a unique way to shoot a feature film. But we put a lot of effort into that sound design. I feel like the Super 8 gives it a kind of haunted visual quality, but I feel like our sound design really brought that home. All the sounds that you hear in the film are very quintessentially Brisbane sounds. Like the particular crow sounds, the particular bird sounds. We have a possum here that sounds like a deranged cat. You don't hear those sounds in other cities, at least. And I've been around. They're uniquely Brisbane sounds. We built a soundscape around Brisbane, and a lot of people who have spoken to us about the film feel like that's one of the things that really reinforces that quality of ringing true of Brisbane. We put a lot of effort into that sound design.

BE: That's an interesting thing, because I feel like when people talk about movies depicting people going mad in New York, like say Abel Ferrera’s The Driller Killer, it's about the sounds of New York, of urban living in general, driving people crazy; just the people on the street, construction, cars, etc. But you saying it’s nature that's its own soundscape, that's a really unique thing that sets the film apart in terms of depicting a different kind of maddening urban center.

You've brought up 8mm, and I'm sure people are asking you a ton of questions about why you two used it. But what are the biggest challenges of shooting on 8mm? And were like people on the film, like producers, or financiers, discouraging you from using it?

SD: No one was discouraging us because there was no one above us in the making of it. We very much called all the shots, and we decided that we wanted to do that from very early on. And if anything, people were incredibly supportive of that decision because what kind of crazy person makes a whole feature film on Super 8? People were like, that sounds cool. Our cinematographer signed himself up purely because we were like, we want to make this feature film on Super 8. I think that was an attractive element that brought a lot of people and intrigue to the project. But the Super 8 itself did bring many challenges. We did our test shoots and all of that in the lead-up, and we felt like we had a good grasp on it. Also, Adam and I, just as a side note, have primarily made films on 16mm, each of us separately. So we're both very familiar with working with film. Anyway, another positive to Super 8 was that we thought it would be cheaper than shooting on 16mm, but it was not. It was no cheaper in the end. The cartridges last about two and a half minutes, so we couldn't do a take longer than two and a half minutes. And the cameras emit an incredibly loud whirring sound as soon as you roll it. So a lot of the sound of the film was bugging when we were recording location sound. So that took a lot of post-sound trickery to get that to sit well, and a lot of it's still in there. It just washes over you after a while.

The Super 8 cameras themselves were all like curmudgeonly individuals that had their own strange quirks. We went through three different cameras while we were shooting. We gave them all names. It was Schneider, Schwartz, and Schwaartz. Each of them had their own strange faults and defects, and one would need another. We needed one camera to prime the film for another camera. All kinds of eccentricities came with it; we had to be adaptable, essentially. Sometimes the cameras would just stop working whilst we were shooting a scene, and we'd have to fuck around with it for however long and figure something new out to do, and then it would burst back into life almost as though it was like dictating the scene to us in some way.

BE: What you said about the sound from 8mm is interesting, that it made it hard to shoot scenes, because I feel like that was like the line with IMAX cameras, that it was impossible to shoot dialogue scenes with them because they're so loud. I like that the two extremes, 8mm and IMAX film, both have the same problem at the end of the day.

SD: Exactly, but we did very little ADR, somehow. There's a tiny bit of ADR in the film, but somehow we got away with it. Most of it is the location sound. We also recorded, because we wanted the whole film to have a kind of analogue feel to it, a lot of the sound on cassette tape whilst we were shooting as well. Some of that cassette tape sound is what's used in the film. It's melded together in a way that's supposed to wash over you in the same way that the film itself begins to disintegrate.

BE: In terms of you and Adam's kind of working dynamic on set, being that you're the star of the film, how did that affect the directing dynamic?

SD: This was the first time either of us had co-directed something, and we fell into it quite easily. We were both just on the same page the whole time with what we wanted from the scenes. There was very little debate or disagreement amongst us as we were going. It was a very free-flowing experience. When it came to myself performing and directing, I would have Adam to defer to on where we were going with the scene. I've done a fair bit of acting, but it's not my [pursuit] in life. But I love acting, and this is the first time I've been the lead of anything, so I don't think I could have directed myself as the lead in a whole film, so it was good for Adam and me to be doing it together in that sense, where we could bounce off each other. But also, I've spoken to other actors/directors, and I feel like you just have a feeling when you've got it or not. And we couldn't fuck around much because we had very little money and very little film [to shoot on]. So a lot of the film we did barely more than a couple of takes of anything. And then a lot of it is just one take of stuff that was improvised. So it was a very unique experience. We made the film with people that we knew and friends; it was a very community-oriented creation. And it was easy for everyone to fall into the atmosphere as we were going along. So it all came quite organically.

BE: I mentioned earlier browsing Letterbox reviews, and something I've noticed as a running theme in them is people pointing out that there've been really interesting, rowdy Q&As for this film. Just out of curiosity, what have been some of these fun Q&A experiences you've had?

SD: I don't know why our Q&As keep ending up being so bizarre, but we've had some surreal ones. I guess it’s because it's a film that can create interesting discussions. I don't really know how to answer that yet. We've definitely had some rowdy Q&As. We had some late sessions in Montreal, and I feel like everybody's had a few drinks under their belt and then goes and watches a film like that, and they have things to say in a fun way. But we like to have fun with the Q&As, and I'd like to think we don't take ourselves too seriously. We like to have a laugh up there.

A GRAND MOCKERY will have its Toronto premiere at The Paradise on Friday, August 22nd at 6:45 PM. You can grab individual tickets or as part of the BE FEST packages.