The best film Baz Luhrmann never made – with a Star Wars actor, superstar DJ Paul van Dyk and exclusive from The Cure – is due for a revival.
Imagine a rave counterpart to Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and you have Paul Currie’s vivid 2004 feature One Perfect Day, filmed in Naarm/Melbourne with an auspicious Australian cast and blockbuster soundtrack.
Long before making his directorial debut, Currie was a drama teacher and established The Reach Foundation with footballer Jim Stynes in 1994. But he aspired to enter the film biz.
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These days the rave movie is a genre unto itself, with classics like Danny Boyle’s gritty 1996 Trainspotting and Human Traffic. Currie conceived One Perfect Day as a contemporary retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice set in a hedonistic underground – declaring it a “modern-day opera.”
He cast local star Dan Spielman as Tommy Matisse, a prodigy who, studying abroad at London’s Royal Academy Of Music, challenges the classical world’s fusty conventions. Our protagonist returns to Melbourne when his raver sister Emma (Abbie Cornish) dies from a drug overdose.
Fascinated by sound, Matisse becomes curious about electronic music and DJ culture. Meanwhile, his opera singer girlfriend Alysse (Leeanna Walsman, fresh from playing bounty hunter Zam Wesell in 2002’s Star Wars: Episode II – Attack Of The Clones) is preyed on by a villainous nightclub mogul and drug dealer.
One Perfect Day may be a coming-of-age story with a creative struggle and doomed romance, but it’s also a cautionary tale about party drugs – the tagline “All you have to do is listen.”
At the time, Currie recognised that raving is “a tribal experience,” but stressed, “What we’re saying is that drugs allow young people to express themselves, but let’s look beyond that – if we can find other ways of expressing ourselves, then the need for drugs is less.”
Currie had pitched One Perfect Day early to Melbourne DJ/promoter Richie McNeill – the pair bonding during a screening of Darren Aronofsky’s (harrowing) Requiem For A Dream. A cinema buff, the Hardware Corporation founder had promoted the night Soundtrack Saga at Revolver Upstairs. He even had A&R experience from a stint at DanceNet/Mushroom Records.
And so McNeill acted as advisor. He taught Spielman to DJ for his role. He also staged events around Melbourne for the party scenes.
McNeill approached the Green Ant crew (behind Rainbow Spirit Festival) to throw a free bash at Cheetham Saltworks outside Geelong with Matisse ‘DJing’ and pyrotechnics – “a real outdoor Burning Man-style doof,” McNeill says today. “There was no one there when I got there and then, within an hour, all these people just started turning up in droves of cars.”
Bigger again was the Kabuki party at Melbourne Park with German super-DJ Paul van Dyk headlining. Currie even filmed at McNeill’s Hardware Records in Prahran.
McNeill served as the music supervisor together with Monsted – a Luhrmann associate brought in after shooting. They commissioned local techno pioneer Josh Abrahams, renowned for his global hit Addicted To Bass and another Luhrmann cohort, to lay down electronica, while David Hobson composed the score.
The One Perfect Day soundtrack curation would rival that of Human Traffic with additional exclusive and licensed tracks. Brit acid house legends Orbital cut the ambi-house anthem One Perfect Sunrise (used in the Cheetham doof scene), having been offered the chance to collaborate with Lisa Gerrard, who’d lately delivered the Gladiator OST alongside Hans Zimmer. “They kind of freaked out and said, ‘Fuck – we’re in,'” McNeill recollects. The duo subsequently released an extended version on The Blue Album.
Incredibly, Currie convinced The Cure’s Robert Smith to let him sync Pictures Of You (off 1989’s Disintegration) – Eora/Sydney’s Paul Mac boisterously remixing it with Smith’s re-recorded vocals. “I remember Paul Currie went out to his little cottage in England to meet him and talk to him about the film,” says McNeill.
Van Dyk – known for 1994’s trance classic For An Angel – contributed the film’s theme, One Perfect Day (Epic Dance Mix), with soprano Ali McGregor, heard at its powerful close.
Inevitably, One Perfect Day generated discussion on the infamous inthemix forums, with some in the dance music community questioning any sensationalisation of recreational drugs.
Mainstream reviews were positive, though, not unreasonably, Philippa Hawker critiqued the gender representation, with Alysse merely a tragic muse. Yet Christos Tsiolkas – whose 1995 debut novel Loaded was adapted into the queer fave Head On starring Alex Dimitriades – castigated the film in an op-ed melodramatically entitled “Bad Australian Cinema, Or How Watching One Perfect Day Made Me Want To Make A Bomb”.
Ironically, when One Perfect Day came out, the halcyon days of the rave movement were already fading amid the EDM festival boom – a trend McNeill himself precipitated in the late ’90s (he promoted the film at Two Tribes). But, two decades on, this cult movie is primed for a nostalgic revival.
The Australian Screen Directors Association awarded Currie “Best Director Of A First Feature”, but he’s since largely focused on production – his latest project the Robbie Williams bio-pic Better Man.
McNeill briefly covers One Perfect Day in his recent book, True Faith: 30 – 30 Years Of Hardware, Tales From The Dancefloor. Now he posits it as “Dogs In Space for the rave era.”
“I think it just helped sort of put Melbourne on the map and just reaffirmed how big [the scene] was and that Melbourne was really at the centre of Australia and a player globally in this whole rave culture, electronic music culture, on a scale greater than any other city. Sydney’s obviously doing big shows now and whatever else but, back in the day, in the ’90s, Melbourne was where it was at… I think the film really paid tribute to that.”
For more on One Perfect Day, head here.