Bait set to capture 3D thrill-seekers

The Age

Wednesday December 23, 2009

Karl Quinn

Cane toads! Killer sharks! Tsunamis! The Australian 3D film industry kicks into gear, reports Karl Quinn. AUSTRALIAN cinema will swim into the 3D age with Bait, an action thriller in which a group of humans is terrorised by ravenous tiger sharks in a Gold Coast shopping centre after it is flooded by a tsunami.The film will be directed by Russell Mulcahy, a man well versed in the action-horror genre. Mulcahy directed Razorback in 1984, in which travellers in the outback are terrorised by human psychopaths and rampaging boars.He also directed the Highlander movies and comic-book adaptation The Shadow, though he is perhaps most famous as the director of numerous video clips for Duran Duran in the early 1980s.Bait will be the first 3D action feature filmed in Australia, and became the first 3D feature to receive government funding when Screen Australia announced last week that it was contributing an undisclosed amount to its production. Its budget is believed to be somewhere around $20 million. Filming begins in April on the Gold Coast.It will not, however, be the first 3D film made in Australia. That honour will go to Cane Toads: The Conquest, Mark Lewis' feature-length reworking of his 1988 cult hit documentary, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History.Australian cinemas are set to embrace 3D technology in a big way, spurred in large part by James Cameron's megapic, Avatar. In the past six months, hundreds of theatres have added 3D capacity. When Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs opened in July, 150 of the country's 2000-odd screens could show 3D. Now it is 230. Hoyts is well on track to have 350 of its own screens 3D-compatible by the end of next year."Avatar has turned 3D from marginal to really viable," says Ruth Harley, chief executive of Screen Australia. "It's really opened the door for everything else, and Bait is one of the things that's going to swim through that door.""This is like the beginning of mobile phones," says the film's executive producer, Chris Brown, whose vampire flick Daybreakers opens next month. "Everybody's going to want one and the technology is really going to move very fast now."Brown insists that, much as Cameron's film has given impetus to 3D films, Bait was always conceived as such."Russell [Mulcahy] is a great fan of 3D. He's seen every 3D film that's ever been made, and it's something he's always wanted to do," Brown says.That Screen Australia is funding the film is significant. Traditionally, government money has tended to go to small-scale auteur-type pictures, in which a writer-director seeks to express a personal vision. Bait is, by contrast, a genre film aimed squarely at the multiplex.Ruth Harley has publicly spoken of wanting to back films that have mass-market potential, and insisted she wants the agency to support "genre" films "capable of being released on 100-plus screens".Bait, she says, "is a perfect fit."What attracted her to it? "The fact that it's 3D; that the premise is a lot of fun; that I think it will be a big-release film; and that it will be targeted at a young audience, which most of our product is not," she says.For the record, Harley professes to be quite thrilled at having discovered that the collective noun for sharks is a shiver. "None of us knew that," she says. "But we were pretty excited when we found out."For his part, Chris Brown insists that he's not at all miffed that the film won't claim the "first 3D film" title outright from the documentary Cane Toads."It's great they took the initiative, God bless them, but I'm happy we're doing the first action movie," Brown says."If they were killer cane toads, though, I'd have a problem with it."