The Brag

Peter Marshall in The Horseman

The Horseman
Steven Kastrissios talks about his revenge thriller.
By Paul Rankin

Filmmaker Steven Kastrissios is twenty-eight, warm and confident. His demeanour is characterised by repose – like a person impossible to bait into argument. He welcomes me into his one-man office in Newtown, Sydney, where the walls are adorned with posters for films including Apocalypse Now, The Evil Dead, Heat (which I’m impressed to see is autographed by DOP Dante Spinotti), and a Boba Fett helmet sits by the window.

I spot a copy of Dances With Wolves and am intrigued to hear that this is Kastrissios’ all-time favourite film, something that may seem surprising for a director whose debut feature is a self-proclaimed genre film containing seat-squirming violence. “My father beat me and my mother introduced me to blowtorches,” the director jokes. (He also remarks that the black R18+ rating looks nice on the dark poster.)

Some background: Kastrissios shot The Horseman four years ago, on two small video cameras, in limited locations around Brisbane’s outer suburbs, on the kind of shoestring budget that so-called low-budget productions would spend on catering—“we had less than two-thousandth of a percent of the budget of Transformers,” he quips. Since then, both he and the film have been edging toward eventual distribution. “When things are going well you don’t mind the length. But if you told me when we shot it that it would have taken this long to get out I probably would have had a nervous breakdown.”

It’s not that people don’t want to see the film, as several sold-out festival screenings prove; rather, it seems, that things move at a snail’s pace when you have peanuts for funding. “I always really loved the idea of doing a super-independent, micro-budget feature. When I was 18 I made a film called The Park for $600; that was almost an hour-long action movie. I mean, it’s a silly sort of movie, but we got very close to shooting a feature for under a thousand dollars. So it always felt within reach.”

The Horseman is a simple revenge story about a father (played by Peter Marshall) who seeks out those responsible for his teenage daughter’s death, and kills them. But don’t discount it as another of the torture porn subgenre; the film walks a line that falls between Texas Chain Saw Massacre-esque exploitation and a tender story of a father’s connection with his child.

“There have always been middle-aged women who feel compelled for some reason to come up to me after the screening and tell me how much they enjoyed the film, which has probably been one of the most satisfying elements of getting to the end, because it’s not just been teenage boys who have liked it, and that writing as a young man, I’ve managed to craft a story that a middle-aged woman could connect to, is really flattering and encouraging.”

This being the case, Kastrissios makes no apologies for the masculine violence. “At [A Night Of Horror Festival] the first question was ‘why so violent?’ and, well the concept is a guy killing people; if you can’t get on board with that then what do you expect? Then the second question was a girl who got up and basically asked how could I could possibly have female friends in my life. Fortunately I was onstage with three women.

Expanding: “Charlie’s Angels don’t exist in the real world, in the real world women get raped and murdered all around the world as we speak, in crazy numbers. I would think it to be more offensive if [the film ended differently]. It may get uncomfortable to watch, but it’s trying to do a cheesy concept, but in the real world.”

What: The Horseman, Dir. Steven Kastrissios
When/Where: Opens July 8 exclusively at The Chauvel.