TEDDY - award-winning gay short film

PRESS:
In Focus - The story of two men and a bear
by Hannah JV, Express, 6 May 2009

Every year, hundreds of GLBT films are picked for festivals here and around the world. From Spain to San Francisco, Auckland to Austin (yes, Austin Texas), films depicting GLBT relationships and themes are snapped up by promoters and played to enthusiastic audiences.

This year, a short New Zealand film by the name of Teddy has been selected. Hannah JV met the dedicated team behind Teddy, and found that a film doesn’t have to be long to be packed with drama – both on screen and off.

The team behind Teddy are warm and nice – a bit like the film’s namesake. Meeting at the express offices last week, the friendly crew – made up of director Chris Banks, producer Andy Jalfon and actor Alan Granville – are all smiles in the lead up to the film’s release at this year’s Out Takes Reel Queer Film Festival, and their enthusiasm is infectious.

Teddy is Chris’ first project since his 2005 feature Quiet Night In. Itching to make another film but without the funds to pay for a feature, Chris – with the help of Andy – tabled a series of short film ideas surrounding different emotions.

“We thought of different ways to encapsulate different emotions, eventually settling on regret. I came up with the idea for Teddy – guy who breaks up with his partner because the partner wants to move overseas and he wants to stay. In the film, the partner who moves comes to New Zealand, buys a house and meets a new partner. I quite liked the idea that there should be a symbol of the relationship the two shared in England; something that was quite special. In this case, it’s the teddy.”

So is that a cheeky jibe at bear culture? “It is a bit of a cheeky jibe,” says Chris, “It has a double meaning because the tagline is ‘the story of two men and a bear’, and the partner who moved away, Neil, now has a new man who happens to be a bear, so he has swapped a fake bear for a real one!”

The film was shot over two days, in a Kaukapakapa house and the Helensville train station, just north of Auckland. Andy says the train station shoot had to be on a Monday, because passenger train arrivals and departures are scarce in the area.

“The train only comes to Helensville twice a day, once at 6am and once at 7pm, so we only had one opportunity to get everything with the train in it. We literally had ten minutes when it came into the station to get everything shot. I was also the assistant director on the shoot, so it was a whip-cracking experience when the train came in. We had to get five shots done in the space of ten minutes.”

Despite the tight schedule placed upon the team by train timetabling, Andy says the Helensville station had the perfect look and feel that they wanted for the shoot – one that was in the countryside and had a warm character to it.

The film gives a number of nods to old world sensibilities – from lead character Tony’s desire to travel by train, to Neil’s beautiful classic Mini, the film harks back to a simpler time, like that of George and Mildred – the 70s British sitcom Tony and Neil watch in the film’s flashback.

“Trains and a Mini were the choices of transport in the film,” says Chris. “I think a lot of it comes back to Tony, who’s very old world and romantic, so I thought that these antiquated forms of transport would be more his style, and he loves George and Mildred, so you can see he’s very old world and doesn’t like change, hence why he doesn’t move to New Zealand with Neil.”

In the film, Tony first sees Neil’s new partner Phil in an awkward bedroom moment. Alan had his role increased from briefly featuring in online previews to a more revealing role as Neil’s new bear, Phil.

“It’s my major scene and I get my shirt off! I was very conscious about taking my shirt off on screen, but Chris reassured me it’d be fine. I haven’t seen it on the big screen though so that reassurance might quickly fade!”

But for both Andy and Chris, the bedroom scene is the film’s pivotal sequence. “It encapsulates the characters completely, and you get to see them all together in a tight space in a very awkward moment,” says Andy.

The bedroom scene may have been the film’s most trying moment, but behind the scenes, heavy rain and broken equipment were providing all the drama. “We encountered some very bad weather, which was very odd because it was shot in November,” says Andy. “What’s more, it was perfect weather before and after the shoot!” All agree that they were fortunate the rain at least held up for both days of shooting.

“To have one good and one bad day would have completely screwed us up,” says Chris. Meanwhile, in the hype and stress that was the train station shoot, the team’s camera broke. “We had a tight schedule beforehand, and everything did go to plan… except for when the camera broke,” says Chris. “It was touch and go there for a while, we thought we’d need to use the camera used for shooting behind the scenes footage, but we got it together.”

If you head to the TVNZ website, you can watch this behind the scenes action. Commissioned by film reviewer Darren Bevan, featured Teddy material includes an interview with the cast in front (and the frenzied repair of the camera behind), as well as Chris’ video diary. Andy says the support the team has had from TVNZ, as well as the wider GLBT community, has been spectacular.

“It’s good to see so much interest in the film before people have seen much at all,” he says. And now, with the film done and dusted, the team are planning to travel as much as they can with Teddy. Over the coming months, the film will be heading to Toronto, Boston, Fort Worth and San Francisco, which is home to the oldest and largest GLBT film festival in the world, Frameline, averaging around 80,000 attendees over its ten-day run. Chris says he won’t be going to every screening (as lovely as it would be to disappear for three months), but he will be heading to Toronto and San Francisco, amid hopes Teddy will be snapped up by the Los Angeles festival.

Looking ahead, Chris says he is keen to make more films, and admits he will probably use gay characters again, he won’t necessarily be angling at a ‘gay theme’.

“Most of the things that interest me tend to be ‘gay themed’ but I don’t think of it in terms of theming, I’m writing from my perspective and my life experiences. I was just saying yesterday, ‘there’s no such thing as a heterosexual themed film’, which is funny to think about but absolutely true.

We have to have GLBT film festivals in order to be able to see meaningful representations of us in film. Although things have gotten better, we still tend to be sidekicks or the butt of jokes in mainstream films.”

And as for his future projects, Chris is in the early stages of working on a new short, but he’s still angling for that next big feature. “Big features require money though,” he laughs, “so if you know of any rich homosexuals out there with $100,000 to spare, tell them to look me up!”