Ant Timpson is the creator of the Incredibly Strange Film Festival, purveyor of insanely gory films and possessor of a deep streak of black humour. He likes horror and mayhem and what most normal people might regard as sicko stuff.
Do you know what trepanation is? I didn’t. Timpson does. Of course he does. His first short film, Crab Boy, involved “a pregnant woman who got hit on the head by a falling giant crab claw and died during childbirth”. The practice of trepanation – which involved drilling holes in people’s skulls to let evil spirits out and which presumably is now out of medical fashion – featured in a script he wrote and, god only knows how, got a grant for.
He had an obsession with holes in heads and “that jaw-dropping home movie Heartbeat in the Brain, where Amanda Feilding drills into her own head in 1970″. What do you mean you’ve never heard of it?
You really wouldn’t want to drill into Timpson’s head. It must be incredibly strange in there. I read him a quote: “Really, I reject people’s attempts to portray me as some sort of unprincipled smut peddler. To be honest, I think I’m doing a public service.”
He said: “What? Michele, are you trying to stitch me up? I’m trying to peddle my PG movie here.”
Here is one of his earlier attempts to peddle an Incredibly Strange Film Festival winner, Hobo with a Shotgun: “It’s as if director Jason Eisener had downed a keg of Street Trash Viper, blended it with some chunks of Texas Gladiators 2020 and Class of 1984, then vomited it all up in Technicolor.” You’d rush to see that. “It had a certain percentage of the audience definitely frothing at the bung to see it.”
His PG movie will leave his reputation for being a smut and gore merchant in tatters. He has made Bookworm, his second feature, which he directed, and also wrote in collaboration with his mate Toby Harvard. It is a warm, funny and lovely film about a strange, bookish girl, Mildred (the infuriating, engaging Nell Fisher, who was 11 when the film was being shot), who speaks as though she has swallowed a dictionary – and quite possibly has. After her mother (Morgana O’Reilly) badly shocks herself making toast for Nell’s tea and ends up in the hospital, her father, Strawn (Elijah Wood), with whom Nell has never had any contact, arrives from the States to sort of take care of her. He is a failed wannabe telly magician who insists on being called an “illusionist”. His illusions are crap. Nell is not impressed.
Nell is on the hunt for the elusive Canterbury Black Panther, which some Cantabrians insist actually exists. There is a $50,000 reward for photographic evidence that it does indeed exist. Nell’s mum is in dire financial straits. Nell needs to win that money.
She insists that Strawn accompany her on a camping expedition. Strawn proves hapless and hopeless. His attempts to do camping things, like putting up a tent, are comical. Nell does not find him comical. She doesn’t bother to conceal her contempt and nobody signals contempt like an 11-year-old girl who has swallowed a dictionary.
It is charming. It looks stunning. You might shed a tear or two. It is truly wonderful, and full of magic despite – or perhaps partly because of – Strawn’s risible magician’s skills. And it has been made by Timpson. Golly. He knows. “It’s unusual, considering my background.”
More magic: the opening credits. There are magical things to look at, including a cat tapestry I covet. Can I have it? I am nothing if not an opportunist. “It’s got to find a home somewhere,” he said. He later emailed to say he was on the trail of the kitty tapestry.
In the film, I was waiting for the black panther to rip Strawn’s throat out. “It’s in the final cut.”
We agree to believe that the black panther really does exist.
“We want to believe in these things. I’ve always loved that urban legend. I think we don’t have enough great New Zealand legends. I was a Bigfoot kid growing up.”
If you are making a film about the panther, you inevitably run into people where “everyone’s heard of someone or a cousin who’s had an encounter and we came across someone who had a really vivid description and I completely bought this. There are obviously large feral cats down there. Monsters. We knew someone had shot one. And so it doesn’t take much to extrapolate.”
Funny and Eloquent
He never made that trepanation film. His mother died and he lost interest in holes in heads and in making films at all. He was grieving; the hole was in his heart. He writes about this in an essay, The Very Long, Dark and Strange Journey to Directing My First Feature, for the website talkhouse.com. He writes about his parents, their lives and their deaths. The essay is affecting and funny and eloquent. He is funny and eloquent.
He really loved, and liked, his parents, which is not always the same thing. After we spoke, he sent an email: “My father [Tony Timpson, founder of Cavalier Carpets] was a laconic, stoic Southlander, who was born in the Depression and started shearing sheep as a kid. He had a wry sense of humour, sharp mind, good cryptic crossword solver, liked a few drinks, pretty decent boxer, good rugby captain and a solid cricketer who captained the Dad’s Army social team [at Auckland’s Cornwall Park]. And a born leader. His teammates in the Timpson’s Tigers rugby team called him the General. He had a fiery temper at times, but was also supportive and loving. Loved him and feared him when I was young. He once called David Lange a reverse Robin Hood on television. Making him laugh ‘til red wine came out his nose made me happy. He backed good journalists and was proud of losing shitloads on the Independent newspaper.”
His mother, Julie, was “a beautiful woman with a great sense of humour. When a caricature artist was drawing her in the 70s and asked her what she did – she said, ‘I work in an abortion clinic’ – and so the artist just drew her with a kitchen spoon waving it after four kids.” He used to watch horror movies with his mum when he was about 15.
You can see how he was probably destined to grow up to make a film about a pregnant woman who got hit on the head by a giant crab claw. He inherited a love of the absurd, the amusing, and for having fun. His entire career has been about the absurdly amusing and the ability to have fun. That’s not a bad inheritance. He says his work has never felt like work.
Collecting Ephemera
His brother, Matt Timpson, a fellow film nut, owns the Hollywood Cinema in Auckland’s Avondale. Under the cinema is a bunker called The Vault. It is where Timpson the elder keeps what I, in a slip of the tongue, called “all of your shit”. He said, with mock outrage: “Did you call it shit?” He calls it “ephemera”.
He is slightly – slightly! – obsessive about collecting, er, ephemera, which is mostly reels of old films and film memorabilia. None of this is allowed in the house he shares with his wife, Rebecca Wadey, and their two sons, Tobias, 16, and Vincent, 14. “Hell, no! Once we got shacked up, it became sort of much more cleaner, linear and more curated and not as chaotic and cluttered as previously. And I kind of like it. I have areas of my life that are still prone to that, but home life is less cluttered.”
His wife is the co-founder of the online fashion and culture magazine Ensemble. She is very stylish. It is fair to say he is not. “She’d say that, for sure. Yes, serviceable. I think that’s probably the term that’s been used.”
He spends money on film things. “I spend a lot on film, like collecting film prints over the years, so it’s probably been my biggest vice. It hasn’t been sartorial. I haven’t dropped a lot on my wardrobe. It’s usually been film prints and food and booze. That’s pretty much it. And a lot of books.”
He wanted the sets for Nell’s house to look like “an old man’s study … lived and tended by a collector, someone who obviously loved literature, but also the odds and ends of nature and just jam-packed. The brief was, ‘I don’t want to see one inch of normal wall space. To make it look kind of fun for a kid to actually live in. Like they had their own enclave, kind of like a secret study …”
In other words, it looks like his fantasy house. And mine. Look, there’s my cat tapestry!
He told me off for asking about dosh. His dad, was, or so I believed, worth millions. He said he had a stack of Cavalier Carpets shares that were worth 30c each. He said he’d give them to me if I wanted them. “Where did the money go? Great question. Let me know when you find out.”
He was supposed to be a lawyer. It is impossible to imagine him as a lawyer.
Were his parents horrified when he ditched law for gore? He thinks they may have been horrified when he got expelled from his uni lodgings in Dunedin. He was infamous for his keg parties.
I don’t know what a keg party is. He is incredulous: “How long have you lived in New Zealand?” He painstakingly explained that a keg party is where you buy a keg, have people over to your mouldy flat (blokes mostly, presumably), get pissed up and tell fart jokes. I may have made that last detail up.
He might have been a bit of a yahoo. He might still, at heart, be a bit of a yahoo. He says he is now “very vanilla”. Which you don’t believe for a second. That barely lurking, beneath-the-surface larrikinism is an endearing character trait. He retains the pure delight he has had in cinema since he was a kid obsessed with the flicks.
Fond Memories
How to out-gross the king of gross. I was determined to give it a go. We were talking about carpets because of those worthless shares. He retains fond memories of people having purple shag-pile carpet.
I tell him that as a child, I lived in a house with cream shag-pile carpet. Does he want to hear something disgusting? Of course he does. Here goes: We had a golden cocker spaniel who liked to scratch his bum on the carpet, with a predictably gross result. I provided further disgusting details which don’t bear repeating here. Is that disgusting enough?
“That’s a memory I’m not gonna get out of my head for a while,” he says. “Okay, that’s a score. You’ve grossed me out; you’ve won the lottery. Excellent.”
He wrote again about his father after his death: “I looked down at my dear old dad and imagined him as a young feral child, running wild through a rugged high country.”
Bookworm is also a “tone poem and love letter to the memories of New Zealand that I grew up with as a child of the 70s. The freedom and the less sort of helicopter parenting. The whole sort of Tom Sawyer aspect of it all. I feel like it’s, it’s tragic that we’ve sort of lost that.”
Here is my review of his film: it is gorgeous and it is made by a top bloke. Truly, I’m not just saying that because I really, really want that cat tapestry. Obviously, if I don’t get that cat tapestry I will denounce him as a bounder. l
Bookworm is in cinemas nationwide from August 8.
