Sea Legs: Web Premiere

By Brodie Lancaster / October 26th, 2011 in Film / Melbourne / 449 views

Johnny Divine is a single romantic, a writer who can’t pick up his pen and a lover of boxed wine. Sea Legs—the short film from director Alexander Watkins of Melbourne-based collective Who By Fire—follows our self-declared “barren” protagonist through a day of disappointments that culminates at a house party, where he assembles a band of costumed comrades who unwillingly lift him from his familiar, mid-20s funk on a spontaneous trip out of town.

“A lot of people I know are banging their heads against walls trying to make something creative of their life,” Watkins told us of his inspiration for Johnny’s mind-set, “I think most writers invest their characters with qualities they’re familiar with through their experiences or the people they’ve met. I also think that it’s important to write about something you know, to help give a project integrity…Although the film is not autobiographical, it does stand as some kind of a document which represents a particular period and place in my life. It was the right film for me to make at that time.”

Watkins spent two months working on the script at his local library, headphones permanently attached to his ears to drown out the noise of local school children (“Maybe that’s why music came to play such a big part in the film”).

“A lot of the film was set in my stomping ground around the Melbourne inner-north, but the story was developed only a couple of months after the Black Saturday bush fires which killed a lot of people here in Victoria and I set some scenes in an area which was decimated by the fires. We didn’t have permits or shotlists, just a 1951 red Morris Minor convertible and a bunch of talented young creatives with a week off. The film’s producer, Sian Darling, did a lot of work on bringing the soundtrack together while I edited most of the film in an isolated bush house on the Australian south coast in between visits to the local surf break. It’s taken some time to reach an online audience, but now finally here it is.”

Before its premiere here on Portable, Sea Legs has been met with accolades following screenings abroad at Nova Scotia’s Atlantic International Film Festival and Connecticut’s Silk City Film Festival, as well as locally at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image and at Beg Scream and Shout, a series of independent film screenings held in the heart of the city.

Just as the sweeping skyline of Manhattan plays a supporting role in films set in New York City, so too does Melbourne appear as a character in Sea Legs, providing a warm and familiar backdrop against which to tell Johnny’s story.

“Melbourne was always a core element of the story,” Watkins says, “I never felt like the city or its young cultures were represented in film enough since the olden days of seeing Michael Hutchence in Dogs In Space. Too often I see short films which focus on outlandish crime stories, chase sequences or plot twists at the expense of a genuine sense of time, place or character. It’s great to see the film resonate with a lot of young Melbourne people. Some Melburnians have identified with stuff like the alleyways, the local music, the Gem hotel, the Bolte bridge and the ubiquitous Melbourne house party. The house party was especially important to have in there and we decided pretty early on that the only way to recreate such an event was to fill a bathtub with beer, order some huge vats of vegetarian curry, organise some live music and encourage our actors and extras to get into it.”

The aural element to the story is an integral one. Watkins used tracks from local bands including Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Love Connection and Art of Fighting to create a realistic portrait of a 20-something’s musical landscape.

“I love it how you remember a time in your life according to what you were listening to at the time. It was really important to me that the film tapped into that and I think in many ways the soundtrack adds a lot of the texture and a sense of time and place to the story…One Saturday night a couple of weeks before we went into production, I was on a tram which stopped at an intersection in Fitzroy and the doors opened for passengers to get off and this excellent raw blues sound came flooding in from the street. There were two young guys standing on milk crates hollering out what sounded like an old Leadbelly number. It was a great moment, so I got off the tram, approached the buskers and asked them to be in the film. They came with their band, Rupture Farms, and played the party scene.”

Despite being an inherently localized film filled with colloquialisms, characters and places Melbourne locals with undoubtedly attach themselves to, Watkins is right when he explains its universal appeal lies in the fact that “people are able to relate to the main character of Johnny as a young person trying to become a creative person whilst trying to work things out in his own head…That may be a universal story for a lot of people in their 20s.”