“I’m standing in my lounge room right now looking out the window at two prostitutes standing on the sidewalk down there hooking,” says Hewitt, who I chat to from his apartment in Sydney’s most infamous suburb. “I live next door to McDonalds, across the road from strippers, between Porkys and Cherry Girls. It’s pretty much Kings Cross ground zero… It’s not possible to live in this place without it really effecting you”.
The result is Hewitt’s latest film X, an erotic thriller about high-class hooker Holly (Viva Bianca) and teenage runaway Shay (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence) who are thrown together one fateful night in the Cross. Holly plans to do just one last job before she turns 30 and quits the game, escaping to Paris to start her life anew. Shay is learning the game the hard way, turning to prostitution to survive her first nights on the streets. It was supposed to be an easy gig, but when everything goes horribly wrong the duo must join forces to remain alive.
While Hewitt certainly doesn’t shy away from the steamier side of the sex trade, X is a film with a surprisingly moral core. For all the gratuitous shots of buck-naked women, the story is at its essence about the struggle for new beginnings. “People have called it misogynist and exploitative and voyeuristic, which has always confused me, because voyeurism isn’t a pejorative term for me. Cinema is voyeurism. There’s no other way around it.
“The prostitution, the sex, the violence, the guns, the action, that’s the fabric of the story but what the story is about is not the sex industry… For me, it’s about changing your life – which is that most common human desire – … and having the courage to try it. But also understanding that the effort can liberate you but it can also annihilate you”.
X is the second film in Hewitt’s ‘Red Light Trilogy’, all of which take place on Kings Cross’ mean streets. The first, darklovestory, screened at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in 2006. Starring Aaron Pedersen and Hewitt’s wife Belinda McClory, Hewitt describes it as a “dialectical fairytale” about an interracial couple battling to stay together while external forces try to rip them apart – a metaphor for race relations in Australia. Hewitt envisages the third film, Five Hits, as being somewhat more ambitious, interweaving five real-time tales of junkies trying to score.
Hewitt has been making films in Australia for now 30 years, though until recently he has remained something of a subterranean name. He shot to fame after shooting Acolytes in 2008, a big budget teen horror flick starring Joel Edgerton, but Hewitt’s desire to make genre films has not always been an easy road. Australian film funding bodies have only recently come around the idea of supporting genre cinema. The script for X was written in 1999, taking ten years to get the green light for production.
Working in the underground, Hewitt and his long-time Director of Photography Mark Pugh have finetuned a guerrilla style of filmmaking that allows them to shoot quickly amidst the bustling streets. X was shot in 35 locations over three weeks, meaning the cast and crew were moving between at least two locations every day. Hewitt’s distinctive aesthetic creates a palpable sense of place, capturing not only the Cross’ streetscapes but its pace and energy, in all its sleazy glory.
Such fast-paced shooting schedules have taught Hewitt to roll with the punches, encountering many happy accidents along the way as a result. One of the film’s most visually arresting scenes, in which the camera chases Shay through the neon-red entrance hall of a club, was shot in only two takes. “We shot that in the Love Machine that is a brothel here on the strip,” recalls Hewitt. “The guy said, ‘Listen, you’ve got ten minutes. It’s eight o’clock and you’ve got till ten past eight because you’re scaring our customers away, so do your stuff and then fuck off’.
“That’s the sort of scene where if we had the time I would’ve done ten takes, but we just didn’t have the time. It was intimidating, but the upside is there’s an energy in the film that we couldn’t have gotten any other way”.
X has already been released in most territories around the world, and has been gone “absolutely ballistic” in the US. Viva Bianca’s role in American TV series Spartacus: Blood and Sand has pulled huge audiences, with the film jumping to number 14 on IMDB’s MOVIEmeter after its DVD release nine weeks ago.
Success like this could see Australia’s most longstanding underground filmmaker moving into the mainstream, but Hewitt plans to continue making movies whether Hollywood comes knocking or not. “As a filmmaker, there’s nothing more thrilling than feeling like you’ve emotionally engaged an audience… It’s like a drug. That’s what keeps you doing it. It keeps me doing it anyhow. It’s such a vicarious thrill. It’s unbelievable”.
