Scopofile: The Last Breadbox Press

Aired Wednesday, May 5th, 2004: Triple J radio, national, from Mel in the Morning (Mel Bampton).

MB: With digital video cameras there's a lot more opportunity with this kind of easy
technology for more and more people to get involved in filmmaking, and maybe
create the next Blair Witch Project or even Oscar-winning animations like Harvie Krumpet.
And documentaries are becoming even easier to make as more people get into handicams.
Brodie Higgs and Sam Voutas are a couple of young filmmakers who did just that by
self-funding their short docos all the way into the Real: Life on Film Festival, which has
happened all week in Melbourne, and moves to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide
over the next couple of weeks. Triple's J's Megan Spencer was there to catch up with them.

BH: Hi, I'm Brodie Higgs, I'm 24 years old. I live in Melbourne.

SV: Hi there, I'm Sam Voutas, I'm 25 years old. I live in Brunswick, Melbourne.

MS: So Sam and Brodie, this is the first time both of you have made documentaries,
and the first time both of you have had a documentary in a film festival. So your film,
Brodie, is about homeless men living in Melbourne, is that right?

BH: Actually street dwellers. I actually started driving around in the wee hours of
the morning, so I stumbled upon the wonderful world of food distribution and soup vans,
and my film is a vignette of the characters that I met along the way.

MS: And what about you Sam, your film is called The Last Breadbox?

SV: Yes, that's right. It's about Beijing taxi drivers in the lead up to the Olympic Games
decision in 2001.

MS: Sam and Brodie, both of you choose to make documentaries. And it doesn't sound so
fashionable in this climate of film being the "new rock" in a sense. Why do you choose
to make documentaries, what excites you about that artform?

SV: Well you see, what we're doing is we're making it the new rock. You know?
I mean, docos have been too boring for too long, so that's what we're doing.

BH: I don't know whether or not it's about rock, but I think less is more. And docos provide
a platform for me to explore the nuances of people and the quirky nature of friends and people
I don't know. I think it's an entertaining perspective of life. For me, it's a simple measure of
my place in Australia and as a person.

MS: For you Sam, are the possibilities with documentary endless?

SV: Ya, they are pretty endless. With fiction you've got rules, with docos, there are no rules.
You don't know what you're going to get.

MS: And that's what you love about it?

SV: That's right, it's totally unpredictable.

BH: Docos are being more noticed these days because the envelope is being pushed.
There are so many forms of doco, and the one thing that carries through is it speaks for
the voice of the filmmaker and their subjects, and that means a hell of a lot.