Burke & Wills - An Interview with Mathew Zeremes

What do you do when you’re fresh out of acting school and can’t get a lead role in a feature film? This was the question facing Oliver Torr and Matt Zeremes, graduates from the Queensland University of Technology. The answer they came up with was to write, finance and direct their own film – now a festival hit called Burke & Wills.

Zeremes is totally down-to-earth about how it happened. “Ollie and I just got out of acting school, and were trying to do as much proactive stuff as we could to get our careers going,” he says. “We’d got a spot at a theatre to put on a play we were working on about two guys called Burke and Wills who share a house. Then one day Ollie said to me ‘this would work pretty well as a film’ and I agreed.” The two actors, who’d met in Brisbane, sprang into action immediately. “That afternoon I was ringing around getting quotes for film and camera hire,” says Zeremes who plays Wills. Five weeks later they we ready to start shooting.

It’s a story of guerrilla filmmaking at its best: two driven actors with a clear idea of what they wanted and a simple yet compelling story to work with. They made the film for less than $20,000.“We knew the kind of film we wanted to make and we changed the original story quite a bit because we were now working with cinema”, says Zeremes. “The play was lighter. For the film we wanted something more dramatic but with touches of humour. We also started adding things that would really challenge us as actors. It seemed a perfect opportunity and silly not to play to our strength.”

The result is an intense character study of two young men who share a house in suburban Sydney. Burke is unemployed and dreams of travel and girls. Wills is less wistful, a troubled soul who seems nourished only by visits to his grandmother. As Burke seems to grow, Wills slides into the darker spaces of life. It’s a candid drama, laced with a black, honest humour. But the most distinctive feature of the film is its style, shot in black and white with long takes using wide-angle lenses. The final look is reminiscent of some of Jim Jarmusch’s films – Coffee and Cigarettes or Stranger Than Paradise. Yet what drove the style was the need to keep the budget down. “ We were quite insistent that we shot on film,” says Zeremes, “but we could only afford 20 rolls.” So the two first time directors realised that they would have to minimise shooting, filming as many of the scenes as possible with one shot and in one take. As an actor, Zeremes was happy with this limitation, one that would turn many film directors off. “We knew very early on that we had to play with fixed cameras and wide lenses. This set up a space a bit like a theatre, and as long as the actors stayed within the boundaries it worked really well.”

Despite the choice of name for the film, there is no particular connection to the Australian pioneers who died in the outback. “Things didn’t work out so well for the explorers,” says Zeremes, “and they don’t work out so well for our characters, but really we just liked the way that the names worked together. They’re the kind of names people take notice of.”

Yet when the film was finished in 2004, there weren’t many people taking notice of it. Zeremes was worried. “We entered a few festivals and shopped it around to Australian distributors. We had one screening, but nothing eventuated,” he says. “After two years, we thought that maybe it had run its course.” As a last hope, they sent the film to the Tribecca Film Festival based in New York. Then they forgot about it. “Out of the blue we got a call that we’d been accepted,” says Zeremes. “They flew us over there and we had four screenings that were all packed. It was the first time we’d screened the film in front of people, and suddenly we knew that we had a film that worked when people laughed in the right spots. It was amazing.”

After the success of Tribecca, the Australian media showed strong interest in the film and this helped to finally secure a distribution deal. Zeremes now realises how much work is needed once a film is finished. “I think that if we’d known what had to be done before we started, we wouldn’t have done it. It’s such a hard thing, but we just learnt everything on the job.”

And although the learning is proving useful for the next film project, the pair is finding it difficult to get finance. “Even though people know who we are now, it’s tough,” says Zeremes. A second script is ready to go, one that places them once again in the lead roles. But Zeremes wont let a little problem like money get in the way.” We directed and produced Burke & Wills because of our desire to play a lead role on film. We’re certainly happy to do that again if we need to.”