Rolf de Heer’s <i>Charlie’s Country</i> had a modest opening, taking $129,000 in 29 cinemas.
Rolf de Heer’s Charlie’s Country had a modest opening, taking $129,000 in 29 cinemas. Photo: Entertainment One

Apes still strong but tough times for Australian directors

Furry creatures continued to dominate the box office over the weekend. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, one of the year’s freshest Hollywood blockbusters, topped the charts again ending the week with $4.5 million, taking its total earnings to $13.7 million in 11 days. In a triumph for Hollywood marketing over quality, the disappointing comedy Sex Tape took $3.2 million in 315 cinemas. The strategy of stopping critics seeing the movie until late to avoid word spreading sadly worked. But it was another tough weekend for Australian filmmakers. Despite critical acclaim, Rolf de Heer’s Charlie’s Country had a modest opening, taking $181,000 in 29 cinemas. And Fred Schepisi’s bittersweet American romantic comedy Words and Pictures took just $92,000 in 25 cinemas.

Models, photographers and a boy comes of age

New films to be directed by actor Rachel Griffiths, Somersault’s Cate Shortland, The Rocket’s Kim Mordaunt and Bran Nue Dae’s Rachel Perkins have been given more than $500,000 in funding by Screen Australia. Griffiths is working on the comic drama B Model, about a young Australian caught up in the international modelling scene; Shortland has the thriller Berlin Syndrome, about a photojournalist trapped in an apartment after a holiday romance; Mordaunt is developing One Crowded Hour, a bio-pic of war photographer Neil Davis that will be shot in Vietnam; and Perkins has Jasper Jones, a coming-of-age story based on a prizewinning novel by Craig Silvey. Other films being developed that are set overseas include  Season's Pass, about a party-loving ski instructor in Canada who is confronted by a son he never knew he had, and Putney Grail, an action-adventure film about 14th-century knights who arrive in the present day to protect the Holy Grail from international criminals. www.screenaustralia.gov.au

The apocalypse beckons

Films dealing with the apocalypse continue to attract filmmakers. After David Michod's The Rover comes Zak Hilditch's These Final Hours, a lively drama about a man confronting what really matters in the few hours before the world ends, which opens next week. And George Miller has been finishing Mad Max: Fury Road, which is out in May. Nathan Phillips, who stars in These Final Hours, plans to direct his own post-apocalyptic film, Hadean, set in Australia in 2050. “It’s kind of like The Fifth Element meets Star Wars,” he said. Hadean is an adaptation of Phillips' short film Post Apocalyptic Man.  “I’ve got so many fabulous friends who are going to be in it like Thomas Wright, Angus Sampson, Alex O'Loughlin and Travis Fimmel," he says. "A lot of good Melbourne boys who’d love to come home.”

Watts, Collette and Worthington for Toronto 

While the Toronto Film Festival has been a valuable launch pad for Australian fillms in recent years, they are noticeably absent from the first announcement of its galas and special presentations this year. But there are films with Australian actors including Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, with Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as an uptight filmmaker and his wife;  Peter Chelsom’s Hector And The Search for Happiness, the Simon Pegg-Toni Collette film about a quirky psychiatrist who heads around the world to discover the key to happiness; and Sam Worthington in Daniel Barber’s The Keeping Room; about three women defending their home in the last days of the Civil War. Other notable films include James Marsh’s biopic of Stephen Hawking, The Theory of Everything; Ed Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice, about the famous Cold War-chess match between Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) and Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber); Captain America's Chris Evans directing and starring in Before We Go, about two strangers who meet at Grand Central Station; Kiwi director Toa Fraser’s The Dead Lands, about a Maori chieftain’s teenage son who has to avenge his father’s murder; the animated Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet; and Jason Reitman's Men, Women and Children, about how the internet has changed relationships. For more informations, visit the TIFF website here.

Two appointments to NSW advisory body

Iranian-born filmmaker Amin Palangi and producer Lois Randall have been appointed to the NSW Film and Television Industry Advisory Committee, which replaces the board of Screen NSW. They join five members of the previous board, chair Helen Wright, Darren Dale, Patricia Rothkrans, Bob Campbell and Sue Murray. Palangi recently won the Sydney Film Festival's documentary competition with Love Marriage in Kabul;  Randall, the chair of Northern Rivers Screenworks, produced The Gods of Wheat Street.

AWGIE Awards

Four films with a low profile are vying for best original feature film screenplay at the Awgie Awards: Matthew Cormack's script for 52 Tuesdays, which was released in May, Cut Snake by Blake Ayshford, My Mistress by Stephen Lance with Gerard Lee and Is This The Real World by Martin McKenna. Surprisingly, there are no nominees for best adapted feature film. The Australian Writers' Guild will present the 47th Awgie Awards on September 5. www.awg.com.au