Prime Mover: keep on truckin’
Dubbo Gypsies with Bright Halos and roaring 200 tonne vehicles inhabit David Ceasar’s Prime Mover. Paul Hayes put on a trucker cap to talk to the man behind this unusual combination.
Don’t let the title- or the setting, the world of middle-Australia’s long haul truck driving industry – fool you. Prime Mover is not a film just about truck driving. The film’s writer/director, David Caesar, will be the first one to tell you that.
“It’s a love story,” he said. “It’s about two people falling in love and then trying to work out a way to stay in love while he pursues his dreams.”
Prime Mover follows a young man named Thomas (Michael Dorman) whose dream is to own and drive his very own prime mover truck, but who also has to find a way to hang on to that dream after falling in love (with Emily Barclay’s character, Melissa ‘the gypsy’) and starting an unplanned family.
According to Caesar, it is not the trucks and driving that are important, but what they represent.
“I always thought the film was like a fable about love and dreams,” he said.
Given his work with past films such as 2001’s Mullet, one could be forgiven for thinking Prime Mover would be a gritty, realistic portrayal of life in regional Australia.
That is most definitely not the case; by adding highly stylised visual elements such as bright halos and colourful angel’s wings (with VFX by FSM’s Phil Stuart- Jones and his team), as well as some singing and dancing, Caesar has created a world where feelings and emotions can be seen, rather than requiring an explanation. It’s a world that he considers his own brand of magic realism, in the vein of South American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and shot digitally by DOP Hugh Miller.
“I was interested in the sense of how you get into someone’s head and how you get in to the emotional territory of the feel, without it just being people making speeches about it,” he explained.
“I wanted to try and represent that in a visual way, so those stylistic elements are a way to express what the characters are feeling without them ‘Dr. Phil-ing it’.”
DRIVING IN WIDESCREEN
Regardless of the loving and singing and dancing and angel’s wings, Prime Mover remains a film set against the backdrop of truck driving.
A brief time as a truck driver in his late teens left something of an impression on Caesar. It was then when the project was first conceived, although it would have to wait until 2002 to be fully realised as a script.
“I found truck driving a weird, almost magical, experience,” he said. “You’re out driving a truck and it is very cinematic because you are out looking at the world through a widescreen windscreen.”
The combination of these experiences, shooting on location in and around Dubbo in New South Wales, and a life lived in the bush, brought Caesar and Porchlight Films producer Vincent Sheehan to the idea of a regional release. For two weeks prior to its release in the country’s major markets through Transmission / Paramount, Prime Mover will screen in parts of regional NSW, the very world depicted in the film.
According to Sheehan, the regional release is a chance for the inhabitants of that world to feel more of a connection with the film.
“The film is set in Dubbo, but it is a trucking love story and is about the entire regional Australia,” he said. “That made us think we should let regional Australia own it. They always get films way down the track, so let them have it first.”
Releasing to a regional market ahead of time also creates something of a unique buzz around the film that other Australian entries into the box office race may have missed out on.
“Releasing films in a crowded urban market is tough,” Sheehan said.
Caesar agrees with the advantages of having the film stand out a little before it hits the big city screen.
“It is a way of making it different instead of just putting it out there with the other 40 Australian films this year and hoping for the best,” he said. “There has been a bunch of Australian films, especially this year, which have ust been dropped on the market without any sort of care in terms of finding an audience for it.
“They have been thrown out there with the wolves and had to hope for the best.”
The project received script development investment from the extinct Australian Film Commission, and was also invited to the NSW Film and Television Office in 2004. The FTO supported the film financially through its Regional Filming Fund, with additional private investment coming from Media Funds Management.
The timing of Prime Mover is also significant in that it was one of the first films to take advantage of the Producer Offset. With no precedents to call upon, wading through the Offset was something of a challenging experience for Sheehan as producer.
“It was unfortunate only in that we were learning as we went,” he said. “There were no agreements, the various lenders who were learning against it had no precedent, a final certificate had never been provided.”
Prime Mover will be released nationally on November 12. ■
