Body Blow is a sumptuous, neon-drenched, queer thriller, following disgraced cop Aiden (Tim Pocock), who must go undercover in Sydney’s gay night-life but is quickly charmed by Cody (Tom Rodgers), bartender and assistant to Fat Frankie (Paul Capsis). But Frankie isn’t just a drag queen – Frankie’s got every cop on Oxford Street under his thumb, and Aiden’s next.
I spoke with the director and writer, Dean Francis, about reclaiming the erotic thriller, Sydney’s queer history, and Paul Capsis playing the nastiest queen yet. – Parker Constantine.
Parker: I feel centrally it’s a film about desperately trying to not lose control, and the ramifications of when we try to push everything down, and, of course, that physically manifests as a cock cage, but also I feel Aidan’s character is fetishizing his own power and his control. Where was that idea planted for you?
Dean Francis: The idea for the story came from Surry Hills. There was a time when we had undercover cops come around for our building’s security system, and I got talking to them. I learned that a couple of them were gay cops, and this was around the time cops were assaulting LGBTQ+ people, and I was struck by the inner conflict that must come up – that feeling of being a gay cop when there’s such tension between the gay community and the cops and such a history of violence.
Within that tension inherently, I think there’s ideas of repression and attempted self control and self-censor – that conflict between your desire and the expectations that are placed upon you. I wanted to make something that I would want to watch and find entertaining, and be less concerned with, you know, the marketplace, that kind of stuff.
PC: It’s like when you’re so acutely aware of trying to not do something, it feels like everyone else around you is doing that thing. Even though Aiden is no-fap and he’s trying to not have sex, everyone in the film is horny – even the mailman is horny. There’s so much sexuality. When you started writing this, did you always want to create a psychosexual noir, almost like a queer Basic Instinct?
D.F: Literally, yeah. I grew up in the 90’s when there was much more in the way of erotic thrillers around. I mean, when it came out you could not avoid hearing people talk about Basic Instinct.
Since then, sexuality has really been repressed in cinema and I wanted to bring back that idea of the erotic, to use sex in the narrative not so much in a gratuitous way, but in a way that points us into the inner world of characters and becomes a crucial part of their own exploration of identity.
Even Body Heat was a huge inspiration, and Body Heat was also really inspired by Double Indemnity, so there’s this noir lineage that’s going on. Body Heat is an incredibly erotic and controversial film, so I wanted to lean back into that and try and break down some of the conservatism of film.
PC: We’re talking about influences and there’s so many I can see; Gregg Araki really sticks out to me, but I think you’re referencing a lot of older queer history – I saw a lot of Derek Jarman, a bit of Kenneth Anger, and Wendy Carlos’s score.
D.F: Yeah, all those references are there. In pre-production, we had a little Body Blow collection and we pulled out a lot of those. Specifically the Derek Jarman world, and Ken Russell’s films.
Much like in a Derek Jarman film, we’re stepping into a new world, a created world where sexuality is different, where basically all the characters in Body Blow, except two, are gay.
And I love when a film can take you fully into a world and completely leans into a surreal artifice, but it is also still grounded in places I recognise. A lot of the action takes place on Oxford Street and in the Cross, which also calls to mind films like Two Hands and Going Down. When they were making Two Hands, they were just filming a place, but then years later it’s become this archive – do you feel you’re contributing to a living archive of queer history with Body Blow as well?
D.F: Oh, absolutely, very consciously. One of our main filming locations for Fat Frankie’s Bar was Stonewall on Oxford Street, and very sadly that has now closed down. We are literally the last thing that’s been filmed there. Something that was really important to me was to reflect this tension between the LGBT community and the police, and talking about things like the cliff top murders, which were called suicide for decades by the cops, and the outrageous nightclub raids that used to go on.
The challenge is not to do that in a way where it’s really obvious, but actually to embed that in the story and to make it a setting for drama. That history was a great touchstone for the cast. Paul Capsis has been on that scene for many, many years, and he could relate very strongly to the character through his lived experience. Paul grew up in Darlinghurst, we wanted to make this a homage to a community, and also to examine the way that it’s changed over the decade, and what has stayed the same.
PC: You can feel that history. I’m so glad you mentioned Paul Capsis, because I was just about to. I’m such a big fan of Paul, and then to see him be this amazing scream queen, finally having his moment, it’s so fantastic. Did you always imagine Paul as Fat Frankie?
D.F: You know, it’s funny, because Paul came into the production at a much later stage due to a series of happenstance. So, no, not originally, but I remember when we did our first table read, and no one knew that Paul was on the project, and he came down the stairs into this room full of people, in character, and gave us the first fat Frankie shriek, and the room just fell apart.
We knew that we had something very special. What’s so cool is that we spend so much time trying to create these likable gay characters and give everyone a happy ending, whereas Paul really lent into the idea of a pure evil drag queen.
PC: And there’s no one else that could do this. Was the character of Fat Frankie a reference at all to Sydney’s pink mafia in the 80’s?
D.F: Oh yeah. Paul talks about his recollection of this time when there would be queer nights when it was sort of illegal to be gay, as it were, so by being part of a community that’s based around illegality, everyone in that community is particularly vulnerable. There were some business owners at the time who ran venues, and there were some things – people torching their own venues, shady deals with the cops, corruption, all sorts of stuff going on.
PC: In talking about the ways that genre can end up being a vehicle for drama, really, Body Blow is a love story wrapped up in all of this neon-lit genre, but as soon as our central characters leave the city, that’s when all this big drama happens, it’s like the city allows them to cover up those big emotions, was that a conscious thing?
D.F: Yeah, the contrast between that really gritty, but very powerful neo-noir setting of the inner city, where Aiden travels into, with Aiden’s outer-suburban existence, which is on the very fringes of suburbia, it’s a kind of Truman Show-esque world, where the footpaths aren’t even finished yet.
And then they leave the city and that’s a different layer. I think that all of these settings unveil different layers of the characters, but I think the other setting that was really important is, of course, the setting of inside cars.
Whenever we’re inside a car in the film, we are dealing with the world of secrets, the world of exposing things that are hidden, and there’s an intimacy that comes out of being together in that setting.
From the very start, it was a really deliberate choice to shoot all the car interior scenes using front projection, which is a filmmaking technique that doesn’t really get used much anymore, it’s quite old school, but you’re literally projecting onto something behind the car, so it gives it that sense that it’s not quite real, we feel like we’re in some sort of strange space.
PC: I loved the front projection, and it really did have such an effect on me, because it instantly made me feel like I was watching an Alfred Hitchcock film. I also think it can be quite hetero as well, typically it’s a man and a woman in the car, but then you’ve taken that language and you’ve made it your own.
D.F: That’s great. I’m really glad it had that impact on you.
PC: At Film and Revolt, one of the things we like to do for our last question is ask if there was a film that you watched in your youth that made you be like, film is for me, I gotta go do this?
D.F: Wow, really? In terms of me really understanding the full power of film was probably, very early on, I went to see The Shining at the Astor Theater in Melbourne, and had one of those, almost like an out-of-body experience, where I was in another world, I was terrified, it was something that was not within human experience. How the hell did Stanley Kubrick create that feeling? You want to find out more about the magic of that.
As far as Body Blow goes, I mentioned Basic Instinct and Body Heat, but even those wonderful films, which I probably look back on now and feel quite differently, like Dirty Harry, which used to be on commercial television almost every day, so I would be staying up late at night, watching these films. There’s something about that aesthetic, those incredible car chases, and that kick arse-ness, but again, the politics of it was always really strange, and obviously very hetero-centric.
There’s really not much place for queer identities within a lot of these really great erotic thrillers, and that’s absolutely part of what was motivating us was let’s take it back. I can’t wait for people to finally see it in Australia.
Body Blow premiere’s on June 10th at Event Cinemas as part of Sydney Film Festival, followed by a special live show featuring performances from the cast and crew.