Limitations can be beneficial: De Vries
According to Carmilla Hyde director David De Vries, independent filmmakers can benefit from working with limitations and even make a profit from a strategic release of their projects.
“Budget and time limitations can actually work to your advantage,” De Vries told Encore.
“Limitations encourage people to give their best and requires everybody to be at the top of their game,” he added.
Carmilla Hyde is a dark thriller about an introverted virgin who is seduced and humiliated by her housemates, and whose hypnotist releases her repressed memories and a wild, sexual alter ego, the title character. It was made on a shoe-string budget of $250,000, 17 shooting days.
Long time comic book artist and first time feature film director De Vries cited The Castle as an example of a project where quality was a result of restraint.
“I knew that if they could shoot to that level of quality in 20 days, then Carmilla Hyde, which had similar limitations, could also be shot.”
On the film’s self-raised budget, the South Australian production team (including producers Andrei Gostin, Tony Ganzis and Fiona De Caux) decided they didn’t want the financing to come from the film funding bodies.
“We thought that process would take too long. It’d be easier to just go out and shoot the bloody thing,” admitted De Vries.
It’s clear that the team behind Carmilla Hyde weren’t in it for the money involved. More valuable to them was the experience of working in a key role in a feature film.
“For everybody it was a step up. It’s the old problem that you need to experience to get the work and you need the work to get the experience,” said De Vries.
The project rolled from script to production with a momentum that little films seem to muster, with the script and the shooting schedule being written side by side in two and a half weeks.
“I wanted to target an audience that would respond to my type of material, so I wrote Carmilla Hyde for the 18-35 demographic,” he explained.
With the independent distribution of the film, De Vries and his company Dark Mirror Pictures are taking the new school approach in recognition of a technology savvy audience. Although it has not yet recouped its production budget, Carmilla Hyde’s release journey has so far been profitable, having made money at specialty screenings- and then using that money to enter into festivals (with upcoming screenings in Thailand, Ireland and the UK) to gain more visibility.
“That’s what has been driving the publicity and has been a self-sustaining exercise.
“It is very unusual for a film to actually be able to go out and screen and make money by being screened.”
Since its completion in 2009, Carmilla Hyde has won several awards, such as Best Guerrilla Film at last year’s Melbourne Underground Film Festival, and Best Picture at the South Australian Screen Awards (SASA).
The film had a limited opening season at the Mercury Cinema in Adelaide last August, with further screenings this year as part of the SASA season. This August Dark Mirror Pictures will release the film directly on DVD and Blu-Ray, bypassing a wider cinema release, a move which De Vries explains is a strategic one in the current media climate.
“People don’t go to the cinema they way they used to”, he explained.
This he attributes to the shrinking window between the theatrical and DVD/download releases of films: “Going to see a film in the cinema out of necessity is no longer relevant, and the experience of watching at home isn’t as different to watching it on the big screen as it used to be’ as more and more households are sporting home theatre systems.”
DeVries is currently working on another project, Vampire on the Barossa, a genre film that will be more action-orientated than Carmilla Hyde‘s psychological, dramatic thriller.
-by Micah Chua
