![]() “You just try to live as frugally as possible,” he says. As well as directing short films (the award-winning Excursion, 2003 The Funk, 2008), Jones has occupied himself with editing and intermittent teaching work for Film and Television at the VCA. A few rounds of development funding from Screen Australia helped with Byzantium, another round helped with Otto Bloom, as did MIFF, through its MIFF Premiere Fund. Making ends meet in the years from lean to big-screen has taken various forms for Jones. It’s beautiful stuff, and was definitely hugely influential on this project.” “The Tralfamadorians describe looking at a human being as like looking a caterpillar with an infant on one end and an old man on the other, and looking at the night sky as strings of luminous spaghetti. “There’s beautiful chapter in the middle of it where Billy Pilgrim is watching a documentary about the war on TV that’s just describing everything in reverse: the bombs being sucked up into planes, taken back to America, and then deconstructed into their constituent elements and buried into the ground so they’ll never be used again. “ Slaughterhouse Five was a hugely formative book for me,” he says. It features the Tralfamadorians, the fictional alien race in Vonnegut’s masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five who exist in all times simultaneously, past, present, and future. When I tell Jones the film’s treatment of those themes brings to mind the writing of Kurt Vonnegut Jr, he stands slightly from his chair, and I have the horrible impression I’ve offended him and he’s about to leave instead he opens his jacket to show me his T-shirt. “There’s a lot of consolation to be found in that philosophy, particularly when it comes to things such as losing someone you love – the thought that somewhere in time all those happy memories you have with that person will forever be unfolding is very hopeful, very positive.” Still from The Death and Life of Otto Bloom. This film is offers a post-Einstein view, where our perception of time is an illusion, and every single moment is equally and simultaneously real. “Time is the ocean we swim in and yet we think about it such limited terms: ‘I’m running late for work’, or, ‘It’s time to go to bed’. In terms of story there are no similarities between Byzantium and Otto Bloom, but thematically both films examine time and memory, life and death, love and loss. I think this is a much stronger project from having gone through that experience.” Director Cris Jones surrounded by the crew of The Death and Life of Otto Bloom. “It was difficult, sure, and I had to have a good long think about what I was doing with my life, but in a way I’m actually grateful it ended up the way it did. “Yeah, well, it was a choice of falling to pieces or taking that energy and using it as momentum for the next project,” he says. When it hit the buffers in 2014 he found himself caught between throwing in the towel or cracking on with another project, a situation he describes, euphemistically, as “challenging”. ![]() Otto Bloom was born of another feature-film project, Byzantium, which Jones started working on seven years ago. ![]() Watch the video The Death and Life of Otto Bloom trailer. Our scout just found the most wonderful locations which, shot from the right angle, helped us get away with it.” “A lot of the film was shot at Melbourne Uni,” says Jones, “even scenes that supposedly take place in New York City. ![]() She is one of several talking heads who recount Bloom’s story while action unfolds against a backdrop that’s recognisably, and not so recognisably, Melbourne.” “It’s the chronicle of the life and great loves of Otto Bloom, an extraordinary man who experiences time in reverse, passing backwards through the years while remembering the future.” Still from The Death and Life of Otto Bloom.īloom, played by Australian actor Xavier Samuel, is a Bowie-esque creature who has fallen to Earth at some point in the 1980s with soon-to-be-infamous abilities, charming and perturbing everyone he comes into contact with, including the neuropsychologist called in to examine him, played in the present-day by Rachel Ward. “I’ll give you a really brief one-liner,” he says, eyeing the ceiling, thinking it through. He started writing it in 2014, and only finished it in recent weeks, which might explain his still-slightly-halting elevator pitch. Still, he can take solace from the fact his debut feature, The Death and Life of Otto Bloom, will open the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) on July 28. Bearing in mind how much can go wrong in the financing and production of projects, how long do you think it would take from graduation to that first film screening? Five years? Ten? For Cris Jones, who graduated from Film and Television at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2003, it’s taken a little longer. Picture yourself studying at film school, with an ambition – naturally enough – to direct films. ![]()
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