directed & produced by Chris Pahlow starring Nicholas Kato, Maya Aleksandra, Christine Lui, Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall, and Clayton Jacobson

featuring music from , Mantra, Nathan Liow, Lower Spectrum, Aaron Choulai, Speed Painters, Brothers Hand Mirror, Ron Rude, Polo Club, Aoi, DOS4GW, Yes/No/Maybe, Merc Swazey x Nettsmoney, Gus Rigby, Patinka Cha Cha, Dyl Thomas & Must, Spacecadet Lullabies, and Villains

85 minutes / HD black & white / english / not yet rated / 2015 stills availible at: http://www.playitsafemovie.com/press contact: [email protected]

sales: publicity: chris pahlow annette smith, Ned & Co. [email protected] [email protected] +61 (0) 419 578 925 synopsis

PLAY IT SAFE is the debut feature flm from writer/director Chris Pahlow. The flm stars Nicholas Kato as Jamie, a 26-year-old musician who is out of work and down on his luck. When Jamie’s band breaks up, he’s left with no money, no career and no girlfriend. Now he teaches piano at a soul-destroying music school. Will he take a risk and follow his dreams? Or will he surrender to his new-found unhappiness and play it safe?

about the film

Following in the footsteps of flmmakers like Andrew Bujalski, Lena Dunham, Noah Baumbach, and the Duplass Brothers, PLAY IT SAFE explores a generation caught between endless opportunity and the pressures of conformity. The flm features unobtrusive black and white camerawork, naturalistic dialog, and unafected performances. The result is an engaging, refreshing look at twenty-something life flled with authentic emotion, humour, and pathos.

In many ways PLAY IT SAFE is a love letter to ’s music scene, and the soundtrack features music from over twenty incredible Melbourne-based acts, including: Big Scary, Mantra & Nathan Liow, Lower Spectrum, Speed Painters, Brothers Hand Mirror, Ron Rude, Aaron Choulai, Polo Club, Aoi, DOS4GW, Yes/No/Maybe, Patinka Cha Cha, Dyl Thomas & Must, Spacecadet Lullabies, Merc Swazey X Nettsmoney, Villains, Gus Rigby.

“A sharp-witted and efortlessly quirky dramatic comedy that’s deftly judged and hugely likeable... With Play It Safe Pahlow marks himself out as a director to watch and an exciting new talent who’s not afraid to follow a curve ball.” - Stephen A Russell, The Lowdown Under

“Play it Safe is what I want other Australian flms to aspire to. Pahlow has created a flm that is refreshingly real and startlingly engaging.” - Sharona Lin, Pop Culture-Y

“There is a sense of immediacy and a fresh rawness to this style of flmmaking that reminds me of John Cassavetes’ flms... Chris is a terrifc director, and it was a pleasure to be part of the frst of what I think will be many great flms from a great talent.” - Clayton Jacobson, “Kenny”

2 director’s statement

In 2006 I saw Andrew Bujalski’s second flm MUTUAL APPRECIATION at the Melbourne International Film Festival. I left the screening irrevocably changed. I’d never seen a flm like it before. Even though the story took place on a diferent continent and the characters spoke in diferent accents, I could relate intimately to what I was seeing on screen, more so than with any Australian flm I had seen before. Outside the theatre, I asked my friend Maia: “Why doesn’t someone make a flm like this in Melbourne? A flm made outside the system, where the characters talk and act just like the people we know in real life?” A few years later I decided to do just that.

PLAY IT SAFE explores a generation caught between endless opportunity and the pressures of conformity. It comes from the experiences of myself and other young people trying to fgure out how they can pursue all the passions and dreams that Hollywood tells us we deserve, while balancing the responsibilities and realities that come with adulthood. This flm is my attempt at capturing an authentic look at twentysomething life and all the awkwardness, humour, and anxiety that comes with it.

Stylistically, PLAY IT SAFE is inspired by the flms of Ang Lee, Richard Linklater, Mike Leigh, the Mumblecore movement, and of course Andrew Bujalski. I wanted every aspect of the flm - from the performances to the production design - to be as authentic and believable as possible, and a restrained use of cinematic devices were key in bringing this to life.

Both characters and dialogue were developed in collaboration with the cast (comprised of both trained and non professional actors). Using a scriptment as a starting point, each scene was workshopped and rehearsed extensively through improvisation to get to the truth of each character and their behaviour. This process continued on set, as I encouraged the actors to surprise me and each other with each take.

PLAY IT SAFE’s entire production process (including flming with multiple cameras) was built around capturing these real moments. Coverage was deliberately restrained to a very limited number of setups per scene, both in an attempt to make the cinematography less obvious and intrusive, as well as to allow us as much time as possible to focus on the performances. Visually, the one notable exception to this emphasis on naturalism was the decision to present the flm in black and white. While practically benefcial (a la Kevin Smith’s CLERKS) this was primarily philosophically motivated (a la the work of Jean Baudrillard) as an acknowledgement of the artifciality nature of flm (even extremely naturalistic flm), as well as an afectionate nod to the history of this style of flmmaking (which goes all the way back to John Cassavetes’ SHADOWS).

The Melbourne music scene is central to PLAY IT SAFE’s story, and the flm’s soundtrack is one of its most important elements. While PLAY IT SAFE does not include a score, it diegetically employs more than twenty tracks from local Melbourne musicians: ranging in genres from indie rock & pop, hip hop, house, electronica, and contemporary jazz. Coming from a background in music videos, developing PLAY IT SAFE’s soundtrack was uniquely challenging and stimulating. With music videos and traditional narrative cinema, the goal may ostensibly be to create the perfect combination of story, visuals, and sound, with all elements working in concert. For an extremely naturalistic flm like PLAY IT SAFE, this approach was not appropriate. My music supervisor and I would often fnd songs that were too perfect for a scene, where the movement of the music matched the emotional development of the scene so beautifully that it would completely shatter the illusion of realism. The challenge then was to fnd songs that would place the flm both in space and time, while subtly enhancing the viewer’s emotional experience of the scene, all without revealing the flm’s artifce.

Creating PLAY IT SAFE has been a completely life changing experience. I started this project feeling like an outsider. As far as I knew, I was the only flmmaker in Melbourne interested in telling stories like this, in this way. However, since I frst commenced developing the screenplay, I have been lucky enough to meet a number of locals flmmakers on this same path, interested in telling diferent Australian stories, without the need for approval from the Australian flm establishment. I feel extremely excited and honoured to be part of this new wave of Australian cinema.

3 about the cast & crew

Chris Pahlow : writer/director/producer

Chris Pahlow is a failed musician and an award winning flmmaker. He has spent the last ten years bringing stories to life through music videos, documentaries, and short flms.

Chris attended the Univervity of Melbourne’s School of Creative Arts, which focused on avant garde art, and covered everything from flm & photography to theatre & poetry. In these early years Chris experiemented with diferent forms of flmmaking, and his short documentary-animation “Fraught” won Best Australian Animation at the 2007 Melboure Animation Festival, before going on to screen at a number of international festivals and on Swedish TV.

Chris has a passion for the local music scene (developed during his early years gigging around Melbourne) and has directed videos for a number of local artists . His videos for Mantra’s “The Fear” and Allday’s “Girl In The Sun” were both featured by . “Girl In The Sun” was featured in the 2014 St Kilda Film Festival’s Soundkilda Programme and, as of August 2015, it has been played more than 600,000 times on YouTube. Dom Alessio from Triple J described it as “fun and rough, like a lo-f Michel Gondry clip”, while one annonymous internet commenter described it as “sickeningly cute”.

Chris has spent the last fve years bringing PLAY IT SAFE to life and he can’t wait to share it with you.

Musical Trivia: Chris’ most successful live performance was an improvised spoken word accompaniment to Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints”. This rendition was appreciated by an audience of three elderly gentlemen.

Nicholas Kato : jamie

Nicholas Kato is a young actor based in Melbourne. He is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, where he received the Richard Pratt Bursary for excellence. He has performed in a wide number of theatre productions including Attempts On Her Life, The Ship of Fools, The Cherry Orchard and Electra. Play It Safe is Nicholas’ frst feature flm.

Musical Trivia: Nicholas’ love of music began at a young age, when he and his mother realised that the only way to stop his younger sister screaming her head of, was to blast Whitney Houston from the car radio.

Maya Aleksandra : sarah

Maya is a young actor based in Melbourne. She has appeared in several tv commercials, including being the face of Bupa’s recent campaign. TV show appearances include Wilfred, Winners and Losers, and Neighbours.

Musical Trivia: Maya’s frst CD purchase at the age of 12 was (unfortunately) “Music Box” by Mariah Carey.

4 about the cast & crew (continued)

Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall : jeferson

Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall is an Australian Canadian standup and sketch comic based in Melbourne. He has written for the TV shows “Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell”, “The Project”, and “Dirty Laundry Live“

Musical Trivia: Like his character, Alasdair would really like to be able to rap. “It’s a useful skill, you never know when you might need it!”

Clayton Jacobson : dad

Clayton Jacobson is an award-winning writer, director, & producer. His debut feature flm “Kenny” was a massive hit at the Australian box ofce and currently holds a 100% fresh rating on rotten tomatoes. Clayton has also acted in a wide number of flms including the multi-award-winning 2010 flm Animal Kingdom.

Musical Trivia: As a child Clayton used to regularly practice the drums in the empty space beneath the foor of his family home.

Mantra : android MC + original music

Mantra is an Obese Records alumni with three albums under his belt, an outstanding amount of airplay and, above all, the kind of respect that earned him the label “your favourite rapper’s favourite rapper”.

Nathan Liow : composer

Nathan Liow is an acclaimed and award-winning pianist, composer and producer based in Melbourne, Australia. After performing extensively throughout the Australian Jazz Festival circuit, he has received high praise from Australian jazz luminaries including Dr Tony Gould, Simon Barker, Paul Grabowsky and his music has been featured on ABC Radio, Triple J, PBS, RRR and 3MBS.

Musical Trivia: Nathan can play piano and (if pressured) french horn, bass clarinet, guitar, violin and saxophone. In Year 8, Nathan fred a spring-loaded projectile into his music teacher’s head.

Sherwin Akbarzadeh : cinematographer

Since completing his studies at AFTRS, Sherwin has worked as a cinematographer and gafer on promos, drama and music videos in Australia and the United States.

Musical Trivia: Seeing himself as a born bassist, Sherwin rote-learnt the complex rhythms of many Joy Division songs, but failed to learn a single scale. He gave up the bass soon after.

Jaque Fisher : cinematographer

Jaque Fisher graduated Bachelor of Film and Television from the Swinburne University of Technology. He has acted as cinematographer for a wide range of productions including the indie feature flm “Bush Weed” (currently in production).

5 excerpts from interview with Reel Good (November 20th, 2014) http://www.reelgood.com.au/featured-flmmaker-chris-pahlow

What are some of your main infuences, both in your style and content?

I really admire directors like Ang Lee, Richard Linklater, and Michael Winterbottom, whose work is not only consistently great but also incredibly diverse. I’d love to have a career like that, where each project is something completely diferent and challenging. Guys like Michel Gondry and Mark Romanek have also been incredibly infuential on my approach to flmmaking. I learned so much from watching their videos, and hearing Mark Romanek talk about the way he imposes rules and restrictions on each video he makes has been a massive infuence on all of my work. I’ve also got a lot of love for (in no particular order) Andrew Bujalski, Mike Leigh, John Carpenter, Don Hertzfeldt, Hayao Miyazaki, Edgar Wright, Tony Ayres, Hirokazu Koreeda, John Cassavetes, Keith Schofeld, Hexstatic, and the early Pixar flms.

What element of flmmaking do you enjoy the most?

For me, the development process is defnitely the most exciting. There’s nothing I like more than coming up with a fun idea for a music video, and then pushing it further and further until you have a really great cohesive concept. I love it so much, I’m kind of addicted to it. The tough part is then actually getting the project of the ground! Developing Play It Safe was very much the same. Working on the script with my co‐writer was lots of fun, and then getting to workshop and rehearse with the actors was a dream. For me, that’s what it’s all about. It’s such a creatively free experience, where you can just play and see where ideas take you. And the best part is that it doesn’t cost anything, unlike the rest of the flmmaking process which costs heaps!

What are some of the bigger hurdles you’ve faced in flmmaking, either in a particular flm or in a broader sense?

Money is the obvious one. It doesn’t seem to matter what kind of flm project you’re working on, making the fnances work is always a challenge, and it’s especially true for a really grassroots feature like Play It Safe. But even more than that, I would probably say the length of time it’s taken to get the flm made. It can be hard enough putting together a short in a few weeks or months, but keeping a project going for four years was not something I was really prepared for. In terms of the production itself, keeping the team passionate and engaged for that length of time was extremely challenging. Everyone involved in the flm has been working for free because they loved the story. They still have lives to live and all sorts of responsibilities outside the flm, so it was a big ask for them to put their faith in me and the flm for that length of time. I’m incredibly grateful to all of them. To give you a bit of an example of the level of commitment we had, the lead actor Nicholas Kato ended up keeping the same hairstyle for over two years to maintain continuity as we shot the flm gradually. He’d take reference photos and get his hair cut by his mum (who luckily happened to be a master hairdresser) so it would match perfectly before every shoot. That’s when you know it’s a really D.I.Y production! I don’t know how many actors would have been prepared to put in that level of commitment, and I’m immensely grateful. In addition to just trying to keep the project alive, there’s also the toll it takes on your personal life. There have been many times where all I really wanted to do was to just turn of my phone and sleep for a week. But that’s not something you can do when you’re producing and directing a flm on this scale. Once you’ve started there really is no chance for a rest or break until it’s fnished, and it’s a tremendous challenge. Doing the flm over this amount of time was really the only way we could do it without investors or government funding. It worked for us, and I couldn’t be happier with how everything has come together, but it’s not something I will do again in the same way. I’d like to do the next one a lot quicker. Getting it done in about a year is my goal, but we’ll see what happens..

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Do you think success in short flm translates to success in feature flmmaking?

You often hear people say that shorts are a great testing ground to see if a director knows how to tell a good story through flm. That may be true to some extent, but, in my opinion, shorts and features are fundamentally diferent. What makes a good short flm doesn’t necessarily make a good feature flm, and vice versa. Some people may be good at both, but I don’t think being good at one is any guarantee that they’ll be successful at the other. I think if you really want to make features, then make features. Don’t just make shorts for ten years hoping that an opportunity will land in your lap. There are flmmakers out there in Australia making indie features who are younger than me. My friend (cinematographer/director) Tom Swinburne is in his twenties, and he’s shot four feature flms and is currently in post on his frst one as a director. That’s how you learn about making a good feature, by making features.

Do you have any advice for young flmmakers?

Learn your craft, be open to diferent ideas and ways of doing things (not just what they teach you in flm school), and work your butt of. Put yourself out there, meet interesting people, and make connections. As cynical as it sounds, making good work isn’t enough, you need to meet the right people. Unless you’re super lucky, opportunities will rarely come to you. You’ll need to make opportunities for yourself.

excerpt from interview with Pop Culture-Y (November 27th, 2014) http://popculture-y.com/2014/11/play-safe-indie-australian-flm

On the flm’s inspiration:

This flm is Chris’ debut feature flm and while it isn’t strictly autobiographical, the original idea is heavily based on his friends’ and his own experiences playing in bands in their early twenties. Many of the cast and crew are musicians themselves, which adds to the authentic feel of the flm.

“More broadly,” Chris says, “the message of the flm is something everyone in the cast and crew connected with, and I think there’s a lot of people out there who will be able to relate to it. Everyone struggles with trying to fgure out how they can balance their passions with the realities of growing up and becoming an adult. For musicians, the compromise might be teaching music or doing things like corporate and wedding gigs. I think everyone has their own version of this, and I’ve defnitely had to do other work to stay afoat while working on indie projects like Play It Safe. I do things like commercial work and I also teach flm at a couple of universities, so in some ways you could say my career arc is not that diferent from the protagonist’s, just in the flm world instead of music.”

7 cast

Jamie Nicholas Kato Sarah Maya Aleksandra Chloe Christine Lui Jeferson Alasdair Tremblay-Birchall Spencer Spencer Gigacz Craig Kane Felsinger Android MC Mantra Dave Matt Lewin Raydar Jeremy Hopkins Dad Clayton Jacobson Mum Christina Kato Blake Matt Joe Gow Max Max Morgan Abel Abel Kinyondo

filmmakers

Directed & Produced by Chris Pahlow Written by Chris Pahlow & Jack White Cinematographers Sherwin Akbarzadeh and Jaque Fisher Editor Raechel Harding Composer Nathan Liow Music Supervisor Oscar O'Bryan Production Designer Jennifer Wong Casting Director Alexis Porter for Lilly Dawson Casting Production Manager Shannon Woodford 1st Assistant Director Michael Stratus Supervising Sound Editor Lachlan Harris Re-Recording Mixer & Dialogue Editor Thom Kellar

8