Creating a new print of cult classic Dogs in Space was no walk in the park, Richard Max Lowenstein tells Ben Walters
“We decided to restore it for the pirates,” Richard Max Lowenstein says of Dogs in Space, his 1986 cult classic of the Melbourne post-punk scene, playing in IFFR 2010's Signals Regained strand of restored films. “As far as I'm aware, it hasn't been screened for twenty years and hasn't been available, except for a few battered prints floating around Australia, the odd VHS copy with bong marks on the cover, and pirated versions.” These, to the director's frustration, are invariably taken from second-rate prints. “If you're gonna pirate, pirate a good copy...”
Set a few years earlier than its production, the film is a picaresque portrait of a scene suffused in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, set around a chaotic houseshare. The focal point is Sam, lead singer of a band with the same name as the film, played by Michael Hutchence. Lowenstein knew Hutchence from directing videos for his band, INXS, and decided to approach him to play the lead. “I had an instinct from dinner conversations that he could do this thing quite well – he was quite the raconteur. The character was so posey and mannered, like the New Romantics of that era – all lemon-sucking cheeks, aware of their charisma. A lot of critics thought that was Michael. They said 'Oh, he's so stuck-up and self-involved.' Yeah, that was the character! Michael was the most professional actor on the set – which wasn't hard. He knew his lines, he turned up on time, he was a total gentleman. It was the people I cast off the street who were the prima donnas.”
The restoration was made possible by the rediscovery of a good Dogs in Space print. “We found the original materials in a tea chest in a garage in a Melbourne suburb,” Lowenstein says, along with footage shot for a documentary about the making of the film and the Melbourne post-punk scene in general. There were still hurdles to clear around copyright and financial paperwork issues, as well as the need to find funding. Official national film body backing was not forthcoming – “because of the content, Screen Australia don't like to consider it up there with Picnic at Hanging Rock and Breaker Morant” – but a DVD company made the investment.
“I've never seen it look this clean or sound this good,” Lowenstein reports. “It was one of the first films in Australia to use Dolby and we had the original tracks so we could remix it in 5.1. I always wanted the soundtrack to have a kind of Altmanesque overlapping quality but whenever I saw it screened it would be so unclear it would make me cringe.” Already released in Australia as a two-disc package with documentary We're Livin' on Dog Food, the restoration will roll out internationally later in the year, accompanied by limited theatrical rereleases.
Sam's charisma, as well as his drug use and singing about suicide, are all the more poignant given Hutchence's own suicide in 1997. “It was strange seeing Michael so alive in the feature footage and the documentary footage,” Lowenstein says. “With a performer like that, unless someone's doing a fly-on-the-wall about you, you've generally just got promos, videos and interviews. Watching the footage, part of you thinks he's right there but your mind says no, he's dead.”
The restoration is dedicated to Hutchence and the other members of the production who have died – “about eight of them,” Lowenstein says. “There was a lot of intravenous drug use in that era. Twenty years on, even if you escaped overdosing, you're gonna have liver problems or Aids or whatever. It was a huge problem – the hygiene was appalling. We found documentary footage that talks about kids shooting up with water from toilet bowls.”
Lowenstein is now seeking final funding for a new project about a real-life 1970s educational experiment, “a hippy school that appeared for two years and collapsed in chaos – young student teachers, parents who were arguing about the Communist Party and ignoring the kids, sex scandals, all quite Lord of the Flies. It's a comedy, of course...”
More about Dogs in Space here.