Interview: Jon Hewitt

When Australian thriller Acolytes is released in cinemas this week, it will cap off a year of unprecedented success for maverick director Jon Hewitt, one of Australian cinema’s true innovators.

Having cut his teeth making no-budget features Bloodlust and Redball in the nineties (“flaky, underground and oddly financed,” he describes them, tongue-in-cheek), Hewitt received international acclaim for Acolytes, which was selected to screen at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival and genre tastemaker Fantastic Fest.

Producers Richard Stewart and Penny Wall initially approached Hewitt with a script by first-timers Shayne Armstrong and Shane Krause, a thriller about a trio of teens who discover a body in the woods, track down the killer and attempt to blackmail him into burying a dark secret of their own.

While it was still in the early stages, Hewitt was immediately struck by Armstrong and Krause’s evocative use of the landscape of their home state, Queensland.

“It just seemed a little different than a story set in the suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne,” he says.

“That Queensland milieu is quite different from anywhere else. One minute you can be in a million-dollar housing estate, and you can walk a couple of kilometres and be in the middle of the bush.”

The kids in question are Mark, James and Chasely, played by Sebastian Gregory, Joshua Payne and Hanna Mangan Lawrence. Mark and James have an undisclosed connection to a recently paroled thug named Gary Parker (Michael Dorman). One afternoon, the trio uncover the body of a dead Canadian backpacker buried in the forest bordering their town.

Their first instinct is to call the police, but James soon has another idea – track down the killer and blackmail him into killing Parker. The only problem is the culprit happens to be a creepy serial killer, played by a near-unrecognisable Joel Edgerton.

“I’ve always thought that Joel is the best actor of his generation, and for me he proves it in this film,” Hewitt explains.

“Joel’s relatively recognisable, in a good way, in most of the roles he does. Perhaps not onstage, but certainly he is on screen. But in Acolytes he transforms himself. He makes himself look at least a decade older, and really plumbs the darkness.”

Continuing his trend of setting new benchmarks (he was embracing digital filmmaking well before the medium became fashionable among the Hollywood elite), Hewitt and cinematographer Mark Pugh used the same high-definition camera David Fincher employed in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

“We were breaking new ground,” Jon says.

“Nobody working on the film – and we’re talking Queensland crews who are the only full-time crews in Australia – had seen one of these things before, and they were pretty intimidated.”

In an interview with Brad Miska of horror website Bloody Disgusting, Hewitt praised Pugh for achieving “one of the best looks of any digital film made to date.” Even David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz praised his handiwork, noting in particular the gorgeous opening shot – a broad daylight pan across a forested valley.

“One of the reasons I opened the film with that shot is because, theoretically – and I’m sure you’ll still get people who will say it to you – that’s a shot you can only get on film,” Jon says.

“I just wanted to show everyone that if you treat digital properly and know what you’re doing then it’s as good as 35mm. In fact, it’s fucking better.”

While he continues to eke a living working “schlep jobs” in Melbourne, the overseas success of Acolytes has finally given Hewitt the profile to make a tilt at the big time.

“I couldn’t think of anything better than taking on some lame-ass Hollywood genre film and trying to make a good movie out of it,” he chuckles.

“I see it as my place to marry those genre storytelling elements – marketable and easy to describe in a couple of words – with something more ambitious. I want to tell really cool stories that reach a broad audience, but push the envelope as much as possible both technically and thematically. That’s my dream.”