whats-on, music-theatre-arts

Ozploitation is coming to Canberra. Filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith, the genre-film specialist whose movies include Turkey Shoot, The Man From Hong Kong and BMX Bandits, will be celebrated with a retrospective at the National Film and Sound Archive. Trenchard-Smith will attend the opening night screening of DeadEnd Drive-In on Friday and participate in a Q&A; at Arc cinema. "It's an honour, an unexpected honour," Trenchard Smith said. "Some of these films were not well thought of when they were first released, but they seem to have developed a kind of cult following." Hollywood writer-director Quentin Tarantino is among Trenchard-Smith's fans. The British-born Australian was a major focus of the 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! "I'm very fond of genre movies. I grew up on everything - westerns, war movies, gladiator movies, all sorts of fun pictures." Trenchard-Smith said he was also a devotee of filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman but he wanted to make "the kind of movies I loved at Saturday matinees. Luckily Australia gave me that chance." In a career spanning more than five decades, Trenchard-Smith,73, has directed 42 feature films (including direct-to-video and television movies) in Australia and abroad and 43 television episodes, including Tarzan (1991-92) and Flipper (1995-97). He also made 100 film trailers "when I stopped counting". Having made his own 8mm films as a teenager and worked as a clapper boy for an English production company, he found his first job in Australia as a news film cutter at Channel Ten. The Gorton government began the revival of the Australian film industry in the early 1970s and after a series of jobs Trenchard-Smith formed his own production company in 1972. His 1973 documentary The Stuntmen won an award at the Sydney Film Festival and helped him get his first feature film, The Man From Hong Kong (1975), which he described as "Bruce Lee meets James Bond", off the ground. "I wrote it for Bruce Lee but he died just before I got on the plane to meet him," Trenchard-Smith said. "I got Hong Kong's number two star, Jimmy Wang Yu." Another Trenchard-Smith film, Turkey Shoot (1982) continued the director's love of genre hybrids. The movie - which he described as "1984 meets The Camp On Blood Island and they play The Most Dangerous Game" - received a lot of criticism for its violence ("Phillip Adams managed to see things that weren't there"). He said the film was made with tongue in cheek though it did have some political messaging smuggled in, as did DeadEnd Drive In (1986). In that film, set during a time of social unrest, young people were kept in a drive-in theatre concentration camp and given junk food, drugs and entertainment to keep them docile. "American critics embraced it, worldwide critics embraced it, but it said things that were a little uncomfortable." He also made more family-friendly fare such as BMX Bandits (1983) and said that even then, "Nicole Kidman had that star quality." Trenchard-Smith's most recent film was Drive Hard (2014). Although he would have liked to have made some more serious films, he said he was pigeonholed by his genre work. But he was happy to keep working. Since then, among other projects, he's written his first novel, Alice Through the Multiverse, and has been working on his autobiography, both to tell his own story and inspire budding filmmakers. The most important lesson, he said, was "persistence. "Never give up, never surrender." And he's still looking for that next job, whatever and wherever it may be. "Have viewfinder, will travel." The Brian Trenchard-Smith retrospective is on at the National Film and Sound Archive from July 13 to 26. Season passes and individual tickets are available at shop.nfsa.gov.au/event-tickets/.

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