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Melissa Giles talks with two directors whose films feature at the Brisbane Queer Film Festival: Spencer Schilly (The Houseboy) and Denie Pentecost (Sexy Thing).
Spencer Schilly is a filmmaker from New York City, whose recent credits include editing RuPaul’s Starrbooty.
While Schilly has worked on many comedy films, he describes his third directorial feature, The Houseboy, as a “quiet, intimate film about a depressed young man”.
After wasting a lot of money on a previous film, he resolved to make a movie on a much smaller budget and planned his script accordingly.
“Honestly, I just thought I wanted to write something that I could shoot in my apartment,” Schilly says.
He and his boyfriend of fifteen years, producer and director of photography Derek Curl, shot the film at home over the 2006 Christmas holidays. They were the only two crew members on the set of The Houseboy (complete with Schilly’s collection of kitsch ceramic animals).
The main character, Ricky (Nick May), has been disowned by his parents and is the third wheel in a ménage à trois.
The other two men, who are a couple, leave him to house-sit while they go on holidays, but not before Ricky discovers that they want to end their relationship with him. As a result, his house-sitting experience is characterised by loneliness, desperation and self-destructive behaviour.
In this ‘coming of age’ story, Ricky is struggling to find his place in the world, trying to fit into the ‘gay lifestyle’, believing that he has to have sex with men to connect with them, Schilly says.
He explains that the storyline was pitched squarely at the niche audience of gay men and gay film festivals, which obliged him to devote a large proportion of film time to portraying men taking their clothes off and having sex.
“That’s what matters in gay film festivals,” Schilly admits. “But on top of that, I think I told a compelling story.”
He doesn’t hide his excitement about the interest generated in The Houseboy and the positive way it has been received. It won Best Feature at the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 2007 and will be released in the US and Canada this year.
Another filmmaker whose work will be screened at the Brisbane Queer Film Festival is Sydney’s Denie Pentecost.
The former Matildas soccer player works with props in the film industry and, through this valuable on-set experience in many films (including Holy Smoke and Matrix II and III), she has learnt most of what she knows about how to make movies.
Pentecost wrote and directed her debut short film, Sexy Thing, which is set in the 1970s in Sydney’s western suburbs, where she grew up. The story explores the taboo topic of sexual abuse from the perspective of a 12 year-old girl, Georgie (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence), a tomboy who “survives by transforming pain into beauty”.
Pentecost reveals that sexual abuse is an issue that has affected many people she has known. From this, she was interested in how people cope with abuse and considers whether an androgynous-looking girl like Georgie might choose to accentuate this appearance as a consequence of being sexually abused.
After years of trying to write the script, Pentecost showed it to script editor Lyn Chick, and was at first devastated when told to throw it away.
“She gave me all these writing exercises and I sat down and wrote down all the stuff I knew about Georgie,” Pentecost says. “I really explored her life.” And after a total of five years’ preparation, Pentecost eventually wrote the final script in one afternoon.
One interesting technique used in Sexy Thing is that of the four main characters (Georgie, her best friend, and her parents), Georgie’s mother is the only person given dialogue.
Pentecost felt that the mother was able to improve the situation, and as such was given a ‘voice’, but the father, who abused Georgie, “already had enough power”, she says.
Particular sounds, music, lyrics and instruments were used to represent emotions and characters. Georgie ‘speaks’ through the lyrics of ‘Beautiful Child’ and ‘I was made for lovin’ you’.
Sexy Thing was selected to be shown as part of the short film competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 and more recently earned Pentecost the Queer Perspective Award and Audience Choice Award in the 2008 My Queer Career short film competition.
In contrast to Schilly, Pentecost made her film for a broad audience. While she is gay, she doesn’t want her work to be constrained to a ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ category. She emphasises that her aim is to reach and affect as many people as possible.
“I think it is really important to remember that we are people first, before being gay, and we have as many interests as everybody else. As filmmakers, our stories are as wide and varied as straight filmmakers.”
The Ninth Annual Brisbane Queer Film Festival is on at the Brisbane Powerhouse from May 23 – 29. See brisbanepowerhouse.org for the full program.
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