Caffeinated Clint
Nick Giannopoulos & Vince Colosimo are back as those ever-so-lovable “Wogs” in the highly-anticipated sequel to “The Wog Boy”. Davin Sgargetta caught up with the duo in Melbourne.
Nick: You guys have been giving it to me in the last couple of years.
Davin: I haven’t been giving it to you.
Nick: Somebody has. The internet sites looove me.
Vince: Haven’t you got a type writer (laughs).
Davin: My Zia lost the plot yesterday when she found out I was interviewing you guys. How important were fans like that to getting this film off the ground?
Vince: Your Zia? How old is she?
Davin: She’s 40 something?
Nick: What’s her name?
Davin: Minuzia.
Nick and Vince: Ahhhh, Minuzia (laughs)
Vince: (Sings) I once met a girl called Minuzia.
Nick: All fans are important. We were never going to do a sequel. This kind of just happened. I was working on a project called Kings of Mykonos with Chris Anastassiades, who is the guy I write with – who is the genius I write with, ’cause he is – and I don’t know, we had been working on it for a while, we were working on it before The Wannabes and I put it away, did Wannabe, then we came back to it in ’05, seriously came back to it, and we started developing it in ’08 and I realized that the film would actually be stronger if we incorporated the characters from Wog Boy, Frank and Steve, into the storyline and then we got really excited and it actually helped us with it enormously. So what we had was a sequel that does play as a stand alone film. And that really excited me, ’cause generally, sequels are crap. So it was important to me that if we were going to go to all this effort, if I was going to go out and humiliate myself again, and have all the Moviehole guys have another crack at me (laughs)…
Vince (laughs): Did you have a crack at him the first time?
Davin: I haven’t been writing for that long…
Nick: Nah it’s important… it’s a tough gig, making films. You think about it, and the Moviehole readers will understand this, I think about 95 per cent of the people I meet want to be filmmakers.
Vince: Everyone’s shooting something…
Davin (laughs): I’m shooting a documentary right now.
Vince and Nick: There you go.
Nick: Everyone’s got a camera on their iPhone. Everyone’s making movies now.
Davin: There are film festivals for films shot on your mobile.
Nick: Mate, there are film festivals for making movies about the back-end of a baboon’s arse. There are festivals for everything. But you think about it: how must these blokes feel when they meet guys like us, that make films. ‘You fuckin’ arseholes’. I understand that. So that’s what I’m saying – we’re very lucky. We’re very lucky to be doing what we’re doing. But you make your luck too.
Davin: You still have to be good.
Nick: Exactly right. Ultimately, it’s not up to Clint or anyone else to decide, it’s up to the public. It’s the people who pay their ten bucks, or whatever the price of a ticket is now.
Vince (to Nick): How long since you’ve been?
(Laughs)
Vince: It’s been a while huh?
(Laughs)
Nick: I get discounts. And people walk straight out and they’re onto the facebooks and the twitter and the internet and the sms and you’re gone. You know, you’ve got a day or two. And the Americans have really ramped up their production schedule to the point now where any Australian film is always going to open with at least two first release American films. I mean, the weekend we open, six films open. Two of them, one’s a horror called Nightmare on Elm Street and the other is a J.Lo comedy called Back Up Plan. Now I can guarantee you that each of those films combined is 50 times our budget. And this is what we compete with, you know. The Yanks have really ramped up the schedule, to the point where they have just saturated the market. I mean, it’s tough.
Vince: They open up 300 cinemas Australia wide. We’ve got to prove ourselves before our distributors will say, ‘yeah will make 200 prints. We’ll put that on’. You just don’t get that.
Davin: How hard was it ten years on to write and play the characters. In the original they had so much personality, now they are a lot older and more mature, how hard was it write them like that but retain some of that personality?
Nick: Not hard. It was a lot of fun actually. It was great to re-visit the characters. You know, and look at them ten years down the track.
Vince: To play them was an absolute ball. It’s still hard though, you know, people say it must be great to do a comedy because I’ve been doing all this heavy stuff lately. You know, it’s sometimes more fun playing the bad guy than being the charming, funny slapstick character that has to make people laugh. It’s not easy, it’s about timing, it’s about getting it right, it’s about the relationships working in the film, it’s very important to get all that stuff right. And of course it goes back to the writing as well because if that’s not working, it’s hard for the actor to make anything work. So, it’s a combination of all those things. But it’s great that you created the character more than 10 years ago on stage and put it in a film and now bring it back again now 10 years later, it’s like, where’s he been all this time? You make up a world that fills in the gaps as well before you come out and play the character.
Nick: You did a few heavy dramas so you enjoyed the opportunity to come out and just do comedy again.
Vince: Just to relax and not go home tense every single night.
Nick: And I had done a lot of work too… not really. I was just doing a lot of writing and playing pinball. Do they still have pinball?
Vince: (laughs)
Davin: Any temptation to set it in Melbourne?
Nick: It always had to start back in Melbourne, because that’s where these characters come from and that’s what they’re about. You know? They’re Australian born characters of Greek and Italian backgrounds, grown up in the Western suburbs. It was important to establish that background before we made them a fish out of water… out of water. Because this is a fish out of water times two story. The whole appeal of doing this film was that, we had all experienced as Aussie born, first, second and third generation kids of European parents, that experience of when you go to your parents country for the first time, the country where they came from and it’s like, going to Mykonos all these years, I experienced that phenomenon. It’s quite amazing to see how Aussie you really are. And that’s the thing that freaked me out. Because I was such a proud Greek, you know, until I went to Greece. And then I realized I was a Yobbo.
Davin: My mum said the same thing. She said she didn’t really feel Australian ’till she went back to Italy.
Nick: My dad, who used to bag Australia, until he went back to Greece… he was in Greece bagging the Greeks and saying how much he wanted to go back to Australia.
Vince: Yeah, my dad just wanted to come back.
Nick: So this is what I was talking about. If we were going to do a sequel, this is what I wanted. It had to be a progression from what we started. And also, I wanted to kind of explore that great Aussie humour that we have. This film is opening in Mykonos like two weeks after it opens here in Australia, which is amazing, because the Greeks very rarely release Australian films theatrically. So here’s an Australian film that is getting a theatrical release in Greece and hopefully will do some really good sales in the rest of Europe and the rest of the world. But the thing the film has going for it and I think the best thing about the film is the Australian culture that we bring to it. And it’s kind of ironic that it took a couple of Wog Boys to do that. And I’m kind of proud of that at the same time. People ask me what my favourite scene is in the film. There’s a scene where I talk about Gallipoli as a Wog Boy.
Davin: It’s a great scene.
Nick: Oh, you’ve seen the film?
Davin: Yeah, I’ve seen the film.
Nick: Fuckin’ awesome. There’s a twist to that scene that I fuckin’ love. I love the idea that… our whole lives there’s been this fucking struggle to convince people that we are as Aussie as them, you know? And I love it when Steve tells the story because it’s my favourite Australian story. And I love the fact that we are the only country in the world to have a national holiday for a battle we lost. Only in Australia, you know, I fucking love that. Then the skill in the film is in twisting that and making it funny and I don’t want to give that away but it has a beautiful twist in it. And that to me is what the essence of the film is about. It’s about finally, for once and for all saying we’re as Aussie as you, we’re here and we’re a part of this country and it’s about putting it out there that you don’t have to be Anglo-Saxon to be… it sounds really old-hat but it’s not. That stigma is still there. Anyone who is a Wog, knows this. It kind of shits me when people separate our audience into Wogs and Aussies. Aren’t we all Aussies? I’m sick of that argument. We’re all tribes, you know, that’s what we are. We’re a tribe.
“The Kings of Mykonos : Wog Boy 2” is now showing
