XXX
Words: Elizabeth Bacchetti
Illustrations: Sharni Brear
Group sex, drugs, prostitution and guns. Apparently that is what can happen when you trawl the streets of Kings Cross. I’ve never witnessed it myself, but I read books, watch movies and talk to people like Jon Hewitt. And he is enough of a local, ‘most of the hookers won’t ask if I want a fuck because they know me.’ So that counts for something, right? Aside from all that, Jon Hewitt makes films. His most recent, ‘X’, follows a night in the lives of two prostitutes, one high-class about to escape the Cross, and one who has just arrived. SPOOK speaks to Jon about living and shooting films in the Cross, fuckaware parties and facing critics like Jon Faine.
SPOOK: Hi Jon! Your film X was just released here late last year, how did audiences and critics take to your latest film?
Jon: Audiences who have sat in the cinema and watched the film have really liked it and have responded to it in a way that one probably would. It’s a pretty fast moving thriller and there are thrills, spills and shocks. Critically, it’s either been understood and appreciated or criticized in a good way. Or, what I see as a good way, as nobody has said it was dull or couldn’t sit through it because it was so boring. Generally people, who have a problem with the film, have a moral problem with it. They think it’s exploitative and misogynous. It has received that kind of criticism certainly, but nobody’s said it was a badly made boring piece of shit.
SPOOK: And how about internationally?
Jon: The film has been incredibly successful internationally. It was released in America in May. It’s been to Korea, Japan, Canada and France. It will be released in the UK in February. I mean, it’s one of our plans to give the film an international profile before we did anything with it in Australia.
SPOOK: The script was a long time in the making, were you forced to censor any material out over time?
Jon: No, my wife Belinda McClory and myself wrote the first draft of the script in 1999. We live in Kings Cross and we write and make films together. We wrote the script, a cool thriller about a couple of prostitutes. And then things happened like 9/11 and some of the finance went away and that opportunity just evaporated. But by then we had a pretty cool script, so we continued to develop it and tweak it. Scripts are very organic things they keep changing and transmogrifying. There was never any censorship going on, we had free reign to do what we like. It was my desire as a filmmaker to make something very truthful to what we see out of our apartment everyday of the week for the past decade. Just that crazy-arse life of the Cross.
SPOOK: So living in Kings Cross is your catalyst for inspiration when creating films?
Jon: Absolutely. Kings Cross is like this mythical place for Australians. It’s one of the few places in the world that has a body of work, like pulp fiction dedicated to it. There are about 60 or 70 novels written about Kings Cross. There are not too many places in the world like that. It’s our own Montmartre or Times Square you know. And it has just been every-changing for that last 100 years. It’s life lived on the streets, very much in your face, 24 hours a day you can see junkies and hookers, crims, bikers, but also everyday people and welfare workers. Everything collides here. I come from Melbourne originally and people often ask me why I live in the Cross, but I’m going to say it’s the most like Melbourne Sydney gets.
SPOOK: Yeah. Of all the pristine, comfortable and exotic places to live in the world, the Cross certainly isn’t one of them.
Jon: It’s funny; there is a tremendous sense of community here and a sense of honesty because people are very tolerant. You know, if your walking down the street of Paddington and there will be something going on and 95 per cent of people will be pretending its not happening or they’ll be pretending that that person living in a cardboard box isn’t there. Whereas in the Cross, it’s all very open and tolerant. But that’s not to say it’s very kind and benevolent, it’s violent and unkind and cruel.
SPOOK: Do you know or talk to real prostitutes?
Jon: Absolutely. Shit, you know, I’ve known prostitutes all my life. I used to have an office in Green Street in St Kilda in the 80s and that was like hookers on the street 24 hours a day. I’d have a chat to them when I got to work, or grab a coffee with them. I have friends who are either working right now or have been in the past and you know, they are the most unlikely people as well.
SPOOK: Are the characters in your films based on anyone then?
Jon: Well they are based on people that we’ve met. There is no one specific. Not that I’d tell you their name [laughs]. But for instance, it’s people we see on the streets. In 2000, a young girl arrived on the streets of the Cross. She would have been about 15 and she was very beautiful and youthful looking. But within 12 months, she was pregnant, addicted to heroin and looked about 40. That’s the sort of things you see around here. So we do see a lot of the shit that goes on around here. I can walk along Darlinghurst Road and most of the hookers won’t ask if I want a fuck because they know me. But they’ll ask the person I’m with.
SPOOK: There is a scene at the start of X that I heard you describe as a ‘fuckaware’ party [laughs]. What is exactly is that and do people actually have them?
Jon: That is based on some experiences I had as a younger person. In the 70s and 80s I went to a few, I call them fuckaware parties [laughs]. And I’ve had some recently. What’s going on in that scene is that Holly [played by Viva Bianca] is introducing a young prostitute to a room full of women. She’s road-testing them in front of him so they can look at him and go: ‘that’s his body, that’s his dick, that’s how he can handle himself sexually. I think I might want this guy to take me to the opera next weekend, then we’ll go to dinner and end up in the sack.’ This sort of shit goes on all the time. The reason Holly is in her lingerie is very important. Some people have said, why is she fucking with her lingerie on? But it’s not real. Later we show people completely butt naked. But what is happening in that scene is the women are there to see the guy. I’ve been to those situations; I’ve seen people fucking in situations like that.
SPOOK: How open were you with the actors about the naked scenes they’d be doing?
Jon: Look incredibly. I’ve been on set when people spring stuff on people and try and get them to do shit. I mean, I was completely honest from the get-go that they were going to have to go beyond. In some instances, some of the people who are butt naked, like the pole dancers, are professional body models, they do that shit as a living. I’m not the sort of person who tries to get people to do it in the moment. For anybody getting naked it is relatively challenging. I mean, I wouldn’t do it [laughs]. There are instances where in the moment pressure comes on and people are telling the actors, ‘oh can you just take your shirt off.’ That shit goes on all the time and it’s horrible.
SPOOK: How do people who live and work in the Cross take to you shooting on location?
Jon: It was all shot on location. We shot a film in 2003 called Dark Love Story. We actually shot that out on the streets of the Cross. What we found doing that was that the Cross is this incredibly tolerant place and 95 per cent of people on the streets are there for other reasons. And they really are not interested in what else is going on. So you can actually get out there with 2000 people on the street and only a handful of people will look at the camera and go, ‘what the fuck is going on?’ The rest are just living their lives. But if you take a camera crew to the streets of Paddington, or St Kilda, most people will come over to see if Brad Pitt is there. We don’t impose ourselves on a location though. I like to think we have captured the Cross like no other film.
SPOOK: I can’t imagine the brothels being too welcoming?
Jon: We obviously have to get permission and pay them a little bit of money. But not the money, say Underbelly has to pay them, because we don’t have that sort of dough. I mean, they were relatively flexible, but they just wanted us to get in and get out without scaring their customers away. We had to shoot very quickly. One of the scenes where Hannah [played by Hanna Mangan-Lawrence] runs off the street through the strip club that was shot in two takes. It’s a brothel called LoveMachine, masqueraded as a strip club, but it’s actually a brothel. The guy said, ‘it’s eight o’clock, you’ve got to fuck off by ten past eight.’ If I had the time, I would have done ten takes. The bright side is the shot has a lot of energy. The scenes in the bedrooms are actually the interior of a brothel. Out in the corridor was an 18 or 19-year-old girl with a customer waiting to use the room. It was very confronting for the actors. We shot all at night; it wasn’t some glamorous shoot with trucks or Winnebagos.
SPOOK: Obviously the film isn’t just about violence and hookers. Is there an underlying theme you wanted to explore?
Jon: It’s nice of you to say that because everyone just focuses on the sex and violence, hookers and so on [laughs]. I mean that is just the fabric of the story. What it really is about is changing your life and that’s the most common human experience. You know, it’s like quitting your job, giving your boyfriend the arse. It’s that moment in your life when you’ve just got to do something; you’ve got to change. It’s the scariest thing you’ll do. It’s about those efforts, those efforts that change your life and they can be liberating, but they can also be annihilating. You know, that’s why it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do. I’ve been in relationships, I’ve been in jobs where I’ve got a company car and earning $150 grand a year, but I’m unhappy so I am going to quit and not have a car and have to money and be happy.
SPOOK: What do you plan to do next – do you have any more outstanding aspirations to fulfill as a filmmaker?
Jon: I’d like if I could keeping making movies. It’s a bit of a disease, once it’s got its claws in you. I write films because I must. Belinda and I are writing films at the moment. One is a low budget horror, ambitious art film, about rape and revenge. Jodie Foster won an Oscar as a rape victim 25 years ago, but now it doesn’t happen. When have you seen an examination of that phenomenon recently on film outside of a war movie in another country?
SPOOK: I caught your interview on Jon Faine and they were saying ‘X’ was exploitative and lurid.
Jon: Oh yeah! I half expected it. Basically they are safe, middle class people. Kate Herbert, her whole thing is ‘I used to be a junkie prostitute and I now have a copyright on the experience.’ She thought she was going to see some Thelma and Louise. But she’s obviously forgotten that Thelma and Louise starts with a rape and ends in a suicide. That was an interesting experience. I was there with the Commissioner of Human Rights, who is an awesome woman, and actually lives in Kings Cross believe it or not. There is violence against women in the film, but the women are very strong, they fight back. In a modern world, you can’t show stuff anymore, because you get accused of this, that and everything. Could we even make Last Tango in Paris today? I’d say no. No one would have the balls to even go there.
SPOOK: True.
Jon: [Laughs] It’s interesting you were listening to John Faine, sitting there listening to the ABC. I thought you’d be some groovy 3RRR listener!
SPOOK: Ah…[Laughs]
Jon: [Laughs] No it was a bit of an ambush and a bit of a wake up call to what was going on. If someone is dishing out violence, there has to be a prurient aspect to that. I mean, sure some people are looking at the girls going ‘holy shit, how gorgeous are those girl’ with a shaved pussy. I can’t say no, no, no it’s about another thing. And it is about another thing, but there is also that element. I think they were suggesting I was some director making this film with my eyes popping out [laughs].
