If you're going to make a movie for €1,600, you have to do everything yourself, director/actor/producer/ designer/caterer Scott Ryan tells Michael Dwyer
At a time when so many independent film-makers boast about how cheaply they made their movies, Australian director Scott Ryan may well be able to claim a record with his first feature, The Magician, which cost a mere €1,600. It was shot in 10 days over the course of a year with a cast made up of Ryan and his brother and four of his fellow multi-media students at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
Ryan plays Ray Shoesmith, a fictional 34-year-old Melbourne hit-man eagerly discussing his life for a documentary a film student is making. The Magician, so named because of Ray's ability to make people disappear, is a confident, entertaining dark comedy driven by Ryan's engaging portrayal of the loquacious, self-absorbed killer.
Along with directing the movie and playing the leading role, Ryan scripted it, co-produced it and helped edit it. He was quite philosophical about all his multi-tasking when we met last week in Dublin, where The Magician was the closing presentation in the Wolf Blass Australian Film Festival at the Irish Film Institute.
"When you're doing a really low-budget film, you just have to do it yourself," Ryan says with a shrug. "Who else is going to do it? But I would have preferred if I didn't have to produce it. Being a people person really is not me, but I had to organise everything: costumes, catering, the lot. It's a lot of pressure."
Most first-time directors are so preoccupied with the challenge that they wouldn't complicate their lives further by taking on the leading role, but Ryan was undaunted.
"I had no acting experience, but I was curious to see what it was like, and I enjoyed it. It was funny because when I was in college, we had an acting teacher who got us to do a scene from GoodFellas. She said: 'You're never going to be an actor. I can tell you right now.'
"One of my lecturers told me that I wouldn't be able to act in a film and direct it as well. Another told me that it probably wasn't a good idea to make a film about a hit-man. Everyone was telling me what I couldn't do, that I couldn't make a feature film with no money and no crew, and that those films never get seen by anyone."
Isn't it a fact that most of those films don't deserve a cinema release?
"I know, I've seen some of them," Ryan says. "It's hard enough to make a film with money, and some of them are totally horrendous, too. Some people try to make low-budget films and try to make it look like it isn't low-budget, which I find quite sad. If you have no money, you should revel in that and go on from there. There are so many positive things about it."
He probably will never have as much freedom on a film again, I suggest.
"I know," he says, citing a garage scene where Shoesmith is first seen at work, shooting another man in the back of the head. "When we started on the film there were just two characters and no killings, and I began to think that a film about a hit-man should show him killing people. So I rang my brother Adam and got him to play my victim, and we shot it in my dad's garage with my dad behind the camera. That's the thing about technology these days. We shot the film on digital and you can do things you never could have done before, and so cheaply."
As we talk, Ryan seems surprised at several observations I make about his film, such as a remark that it questions the authenticity of the documentary form - which so many viewers take as a given - as the director is drawn closer to his subject and that subject is clearly savouring this attention and performing for the camera.
"That's true, I guess, although it was accidental," he says. "I guess I'm one of those people who tends to believe everything I see in a documentary because I get so caught up in what I'm watching."
The Magician invites favourable comparisons with the Belgian faux-documentary, Man Bites Dog (1992), and the Australian drama, Chopper, (2000) a fictionalised film about the eponymous killer.
"I'd seen Man Bites Dog, but I hated it," Ryan says. "It had this guy talking to the camera all the time. He was so boring, and he was a nasty piece of work, not someone I'd want to know and more like someone I'd like to kill. I'd read all Chopper's books. There are about 10 of them now. There's a character in those books called Dave the Jew, who's a really prolific hit-man, and Ray's partly based on him. And I read a lot of American biographies for my research."
On the evidence of all three films, professional killers are vain and take pride in their work.
"They're basically egomaniacs, most of them, which is why they write all these autobiographies," Ryan says. "They are proud of what they do, and they want to tell everybody."
Ryan estimates that 90 per cent of the dialogue in his movie was improvised.
"I had come up with a story structure and we just took it from there," he says. "Because it's improvised you don't know exactly what you're going to get. When it came to editing it and watching it back, I kept wondering, who is this guy? He looks like me, but he's not me. It was surprising in that way, and some of the stuff we came up with was very funny. I don't know where some of it came from. I'm surprised by the other actors in the film and what they say is way better than anything I could ever have written."
But Ryan gets to take sole screenplay credit. "Yeah," he laughs. "That's what it says: 'written and directed by Scott Ryan'. There you go."
The Magician is, I note, one of those rare films in which there isn't a single line for a woman.
"That didn't occur to me when we were making the film," Ryan says. "Although a few people mentioned it since. It just happened that way. I wasn't going to do what a lot of film-makers do, which is to stick a woman in a scene just for the sake of it."
Ryan seems surprised again when I note that his movie is strewn with dialogue that appears to express masculine insecurity, as when the documentary director asks a shocked Shoesmith if he's ever been to the gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, when they discuss a secretly gay Hollywood actor (whose name had to be removed in the editing room for fear of lawsuits), and when the director drops his pants to share a bed with Shoesmith, who is aghast.
"The bed thing actually happened with my brother and me," Ryan says. "We had to sleep somewhere and there was only one double-bed. I would have preferred not to sleep with another man, but I had no choice. I jumped into bed and my brother started taking his clothes off. I asked him what was he doing and he said he couldn't sleep with his pants on. I told him he couldn't sleep next to me with no clothes on. He said: 'But I'm your brother.' I said I didn't care and I told him to put his pants on. So that's where that scene came from."
When I raise the movie's difficult juggling act between callous violence and black humour, Ryan has a simple answer. "Well, it's a good thing, really, because it's a criminal killing criminals," he says nonchalantly. "It certainly saves the police having to do it."
Ryan has a strong screen presence, making his amoral homicidal character fascinating and oddly charming.
"It's a character-driven film," he says. "So if you don't connect with the main character it's not going to work for the audience. Evil characters are often much more interesting and at the end of the day what makes this guy interesting is that he's not completely evil. So many of these hit-men I read about in books are guys who care for their wives and children and are loyal to their friends."
And giving Shoesmith an army background anaesthetises him to killing? "That's true," Ryan says. "As a soldier, you get paid to kill people by the government, and you get medals for doing it. Being a hit-man is the same thing, except that it's not the government that's hiring you but the private sector. That's why he has no qualms about what he does for a living. There's also the simple fact that everybody who's a criminal is a criminal by choice. Nobody tells anyone they've got to be a criminal or a drug-dealer. Everybody who goes into that world knows the risks involved, that they could get caught by the cops or could get killed. But they do it anyway."
• The Magician opened at Cineworld and the IFI in Dublin yesterday