Collision, a local smash hit
Posted: September 6, 2011 Filed under: On Dit Leave a comment »
Unsurprising spoiler alert: Collision ends with a crash. Darting back and forth through the memories of sad-eyed office drone Michael (Scott Marcus), this recent short film from director and producer team Nick Matthews and David Ngo attempts to recreate the split-second emotional and psychological epiphanies of a traumatic motor accident.
That isn’t to say the film is part of a subtle, arty new road safety campaign (though it’s stark, slow motion money shots of breaking glass are certainly indebted to the genre). Rather than a cautionary tale against inattentive steering, Collision riffs on the grey isolation of dense, inner-city living and feelings of disconnect and numbness which colour the relationships blooming within its confines.
“The seed of the story came a week after we’d met up in Sydney,” Ngo explains. “We knew each other from other projects but both had a ‘dirty secret’, Nick wanted to move into directing and I wanted to produce.” Career aspirations aside, the encounter also brought another common thread to light. “That night we both spoke about our experiences of pretty bad car accidents. I had a nasty one overseas ten years ago. I was thrown out of a vehicle and had to be resuscitated, which is what happens in the film,” Matthews said. A week later, Ngo had completed a ‘spine of an idea’. “The basic story of a relationship and a car accident and how that can inform your memories of other parts of your life” he recalls. While the titular catastrophe bookends the film, its nucleus (or dare I say, heart) lies with Michael’s dalliance with manic-pixie-dream-girl type Mia (Kathryn Beck).
Matthews explains “The accident itself incites the story, but it’s really about the relationship and its breakdown. The experience of a really dangerous situation and what happens psychologically in a bad relationship, there’s a definite parallel between the two.”
While concrete jungles and dense, modern city environments have provided vibrant settings to countless films past, from Chungking Express to Ghostbusters, Collision exploits the urban potential of Adelaide in surprising ways. While much of the film lingers on the melancholic overtones of Michael’s existence, in many ways the film also serves as a love letter to that very environment, with the Adelaide CBD and Chinatown providing a vivid, bittersweet backdrop to the twin wrecks of his life.
“A lot of people are surprised when they asked where it’s filmed, most didn’t know it was possible to create an ‘urban tale’ in Adelaide,” recounts Matthews. “It’s not that we’ve dressed up the city in a way that doesn’t represent it, just by being selective we’ve used areas that have a density and a texture to them, and Chinatown is a big part of that aesthetic. It’s partly the faces and the people too. A lot of the cast were cast from the Exeter and around the street, not actors just great faces and real characters who felt like part of the fabric of the city.”
Screened in Adelaide earlier this year, the South Australian production recently won a place in the 60th Melbourne International Film Festival, making it technically eligible for Oscar nomination, an exciting string of words for any film maker. “Melbourne’s considered the most prestigious of the Australian festivals, with the most international interest,” Ngo explains.
Even for filmmakers a decade into their careers, the local industry is to some degree one of constant reinvention, learning and proving oneself. “A film like this is definitely a festival film, proof of our new roles more than our film making skills,” Ngo continues. “Nick’s been a cinematographer and I’ve been an editor for a long time, but this film has seen us stepping into different chairs (director and producer) for the first time, basically the Film Corp gave us some money to test whether we could do it.” Following Collision, the pair have managed to snaffle some funding courtesy of FILMLAB, currently embarking on a creepy-looking new feature collaboration in 2012, One Eyed Girl.
Article originally appeared in a mock-up Student Election edition for On Dit Volume 80.
