It is more than 35 years since New Zealand-born filmmaker Jonathan Ogilvie walked into a job centre in the Elephant and Castle, south London, and walked out with a job on Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
He had previously worked on the London shoot of Michael Winner’s Death Wish 3 and had the transferable skills needed to do special effects on the US director’s war movie. He blew up buildings in east London where Kubrick recreated south-east Asia, describing his role now as “one of the minions looking after the smoke machines”.
“When we were prepping all the walls, drilling holes in the concrete to put the [explosive] charges in, this old geezer in an army jacket used to come round,” Ogilvie recalls. “ I’d say ‘who’s that old guy who keeps coming to check things out?’”
Yes, it was Kubrick. In those days the US auteur was a recluse and so very few people knew what he actually looked like.
Full Metal Jacket was a key formative experience for Ogilvie who went on to become a director himself. Now, his latest feature Head South has been chosen to open the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) today, January 25. Set in the New Zealand city of Christchurch in the late 1970s, it’s an unashamedly autobiographical affair, a coming of age yarn about a young outsider, played by Ed Oxenbould, who teaches himself to play the bass guitar and forms a band. Marton Csokas plays his affectionate but exasperated dad.
The writer-director was also one of the producers of Head South. He himself approached UK sales agents Moviehouse, whose principals Gary Phillips and Mark Vennis became executive producers, to rep the film. Further backing came from the New Zealand Film Commission in association with Head South Cohort, Black Frame and I&G. The post production was done at Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post.
Melbourne-based boutique distributor Label has already come on board to release the film in New Zealand and Australia.
Sold-out screenings
Head South is the director’s second feature selected for IFFR. His Joseph Conrad adaptation, Lone Wolf, starring Hugo Weaving, screened in Big Screen Competition in 2021 – but he wasn’t able to attend because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ogilvie is delighted to attend the festival this year.r. “Six screenings have sold out and they’ve just asked if they can add a seventh,” he enthuses.
The filmmakerr jokes anything that seems unbelievable in the new film is almost certainly true. His father really did go every year “to have a cream bun at the year’s anniversary of my grandmother’s death on her orders, because she believed in reincarnation.”
In the film, his protagonist poses nude in the hope of getting his first bass guitar. “[But] I posed nude to get an 8mm camera,” the director admits he and his fictional alter ego aren’t exactly identical.
As a teenager, Ogilvie devoured copies of NME music magazine, which took many months to reach New Zealand. He formed his own post-punk band, Youth For Christ (the name was intended to “piss off the local Christians”). He acknowledges he was heavily influenced by ex- Sex Pistol John Lydon’s Public Image Limited.
“We had our moments. We were quite successful,” he remembers of tours to Auckland and even one occasion on which he was arrested.
The song the band, Daleks, plays in such raucous fashion in Head South was written by Ogilvie. The bass guitar in the movie is the very one that the director used all those years ago.
Ogilvie expects his film will have a special resonance in New Zealand. He has recreated the Christchurch of his youth, before the 2011 earthquake transformed the city. “70% of the landmarks have gone,” says Ogilvie of his home city. He is now based in Australia.
It needed careful location scouting and some creative use of geography to portray Christchurch as it was in 1979. “It was quite limiting in terms of where I could shoot.”
Oxeenbould, who plays the lead, is a former child star who has appeared in some high-profile US movies, including M Night Shyamalan’s The Visit. He’s the only Australian in the cast. “As it turns out, I live in Bondi, he lives in Bondi,” Ogilvie explains his lead actor turned out to be a near neighbour.
The 22 year old plays the list with a wistful comic irony. “That character with the wrong actor could be a nasty little shit but, of course, Ed brings his charisma to it,” says the director.
Ogilvie combines his filmmaking with teaching at Australian Film Television and Radio School. He has a new project in development, Geebung Darts Club, an “old school heist movie.” It is about members of a darts club in a hospice who decide to rob a bank - and is being put together as an Australian-New Zealand coproduction.
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