Drew Turney
There must be both baggage and opportunity that comes with the name Bogdanovich in Hollywood, but Antonia, daughter of Peter (”What’s Up Doc”) might be able to forge her own path only because the moviegoing kids of today might not know the name any more than they would Hitchcock or Cukor.
After her first roles a a young girl, Antonia worked her way up in the film industry – even though she tells Moviehole.net she fought against it all the way – and by way of assisting George Miller on ”The Witches of Eastwick” and Hans Zimmer on ”The Lion King”, she’s making a splash with her first feature ”Phantom Halo”.
Starring Thomas Sangster Brodie (”The Maze Runner”) and Luke Kleintank, ”Phantom Halo”’s about a pair of brothers fighting poverty and their abusive, gambling-addicted father to make it through life, doing everything from performing Shakespeare on street corners to counterfeiting money to make ends meet.
What kinds of movies or pop culture influenced the film?
One of my biggest influences with this film was Animal Kingdom. I’m obsessed with that movie. Certainly the actors who have come out of Australia are amazing, Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, he’s an incredible filmmaker.
Also Ben Mendelsohn, who’s doing very well right now. I’d love to work with him, he’s a genius.
Any chance of you working with any of those names?
I’d love to work with Cate Blanchett, I have a film right now that I’d love her to star in. I’m hoping that becomes a reality, it’d be a dream come true to work with her.
The genre of Phantom Halo is hard to pin down, it’s partly family drama, part crime thriller. Was the mash-up approach intentional?
I tend to mix genres a bit. I don’t really think ‘I’m going to make a movie in genre xyz’. I wanted it to be a thriller but at the same time it was really about the family because I didn’t want to do a straight thriller or action movie.
I have written a couple of those, which I’m very excited about, but I love crime movies. Things happen that aren’t necessarily thriller tropes but usually I feature characters who are criminal. I’d say it’s a family drama with a crime element.
I wrote a TV pilot that’s a police procedural and teen drama and when I took it out people said ‘you can’t do that’ and I was like ‘why?’ Matt Weiner tried to get Mad Men made for 11 years, now it’s considered one of the greatest TV shows that’s ever been on the air.
Talk about the themes and motifs of Shakespeare and comic books in the film, is it just about opposing forms of art?
The film is really about escaping your present and escaping your past and how growing up in a creative and artistic family is hard. It was a bit like me discovering that I’m an artist as well, I didn’t really want to be one, I fought it. But we use art to escape out lives, we read poetry, we go to the movies to escape into a film.
I wasn’t allowed to watch TV growing up. My parents thought it was terrible and wasn’t going to help me learn or stimulate my mind – that’s before TV got really good. So I really wanted to watch TV but I wasn’t allowed, I was only allowed to watch classic films.
My Dad played a lot of jazz. He didn’t like hip hop which I was really into and he just thought that was crap. I was like ‘no, this is music and poetry to me’. It’s also a generational thing too so there was a lot of stuff I was trying to use as a symbol.
The metaphor is the father considers Shakespeare and literature and high art are the only things his son should be focusing on and comic books are crap. They’re lowbrow.
A review online said the story can be interpreted as a superhero origin story. What do you think of that idea?
I love that idea. We created the comic book for the movie and we were hoping to partner with a comic book publisher but it didn’t happen.
It’s absolutely an origin story. Phantom Halo the comic book character was stuck in the mud on his home planet for many years, just like Samuel [Brodie] and Beckett [Kleintank].
He decided in this particular moment he was going to move his pinkie finger, and he focused all his energy on that. Once he was able to do that he broke out of the mud. It was like he had to focus only on one part of his body.
He came to planet Earth and had superpowers like being able to change things, like change garbage into money. There was this parallel between the comic and the boys and what they go through.
So it definitely has that parallel of escaping to another place. Maybe he could be a superhero in a sequel.
