Feature
Beach Party
Becky Bartlett meets the director of Vacation! and some of his cast to discuss Matthew McConaughey, fish-headed girls, acid and cult movies.
In 2009, one of the breakout films of EIFF was Modern Love is Automatic, the story of a bored nurse who becomes a dominatrix. Some people, including us at LIFM, found the trashy aesthetic appealing and the plot entertaining and different, others just didn't get it. EIFF director Hannah McGill must belong to the former category because this year Zach Clark, the man behind Modern Love is back, with a bunch of familiar faces and an “existential beach party movie” featuring four girls, some wigs, a corpse and a man in a gorilla suit.
Clark's new film is Vacation!, the story of four friends who decide to spend some time at the beach together, until boredom makes them take some acid... One very strange trip later, and DeeDee (played by Melodie Sisk, the lead of Modern Love) is discovered face down in the pool, forcing the other girls to make some quick decisions. Make no mistake, despite an almost entirely all girl cast, this is no chick flick. “I hate that term”, Clark declares. “I think it implies that women only like films with Matthew McConaughey in. Speaking as a non-woman, I find that term really offensive”. So what was the reason for featuring only two hapless men in the film, one a dim-witted, nameless surfer, the other advertising a solution to an unfortunate bowel condition? “I'd just much rather spend two weeks at the beach with a bunch of cool girls than a bunch of guys”, Clark admits. “I think I just know more females who are dynamic on screen. If I knew more guys I really wanted to put in front of the camera, I probably would, but in this movie I pretty much wrote the roles for the actresses, so I knew who I wanted”.
The cast of Vacation! will be familiar to anyone who managed to catch Modern Love last year, with three of the four lead girls (Melodie Sisk, Maggie Ross and Lydia Hyslop) appearing in both films. As Clark says, “if we didn't directly know one another, we knew each other through other people”. While Sisk and Ross both enjoyed substantial screen time in Modern Love, Hyslop recalls being invited in to shoot just one scene. “I got a myspace message, saying 'hi, do you want me to fly you across the country and will you be naked in this movie'”, she laughs. “We I got there, I asked Zach why he wanted me to do this [scene] and he said 'because I'm working on this other movie”.
It is hard to imagine anyone else successfully managing to play Lorelei (Hyslop's character), because of the girls, her reaction to the death of her friend is the most outrageous, and without giving too much away, suffice it to say it requires her utilising an electric toothbrush, a washing machine and eventually a blender. “I think the character's really fun”, she says. “In addition to having to have a sense of humour to do some of the things, when I read the script I knew I'd have fun with it”.
The chemistry between the characters on screen seems very natural, because they are all friends off screen too, having known each other from school or through mutual friends. So Vacation! seems to be a labour of love for Clark – a chance to unite the people he wants in a film that pays homage to the cult and exploitation films he grew up on. “This movie, more so than the last one, and probably more than whatever the next one will be, I really wanted to do something kind of similar to the way I made things in high school – just get your friends together and be like, you, you're awesome at doing this and you, you're great at doing that, and you're kinda like this, so do that”, he explains. And while he wanted his film to emulate the beach party genre, he wanted it to remain faithful to his style. “I didn't want to replicate those films”, he clarifies. “I didn't want to set it in the sixties, but I did stuff to remind myself that that's where I was coming from. So the characters' names are all from those movies and there are a few lines that I took, and it's shot in Cinemascope because they were.”
But what about the most important character of all, the man in the monkey suit? He pops up, along with eight fish-headed girls (“it turns out there are no good fish masks available for prices that make it affordable at all”, Clark rues), a talking fish, a scarily made-up woman out of the aforementioned bowel treatment infomercial and a host of bright lights, quick cuts, seemingly nonsensical ramblings and four neon girls in wigs for an extended, pop art acid sequence. “The monkey?”, Clark laughs. “There's always just a guy in a gorilla suit in those movies”.
Becky Bartlett
