Are Hollywood Franchises Killing Genre Film? Australian Director John Hillcoat Talks ‘Triple 9’

In the lead-up to a film’s release, cast and crew will say a lot of things about the director; usually that he or she is a genius, great to work with, heaps of fun on set — or, in the case of Triple 9’s John Hillcoat, “insane”.

At least, that was the (affectionate) word from the film’s composer Atticus Ross in a recent interview, so I felt it was only fair to let Hillcoat know Ross’ assessment of his character. “The funny thing there is, that’s exactly how I’d describe him,” Hillcoat says, roaring with laughter. “So there you go. Maybe that’s why we worked so well together.”

Certainly “insane” — or words to that effect — has been a hallmark of the Australian director’s work since his 1988 narrative debut feature, the grimly violent Ghosts… of the Civil Dead. That film set the tone for a career that has, at times, seemed at pains to redefine cinematic bleakness, from 2005’s The Proposition to this week’s Triple 9.

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How An Australian Dived Into American Culture

Triple 9, Hillcoat’s sixth film, finds the director in tonally familiar territory: it’s a morally complex, often dour, and occasionally very bloody tale of police corruption in Atlanta, Georgia, which takes its title from the police code (999) for “officer down”. It’s also the Australian expat’s third time working within a very American filmic milieu, after 2009’s Corman McCarthy adaptation The Road and 2012’s Lawless.

“I’ve been trying to do a contemporary crime thriller for the longest time, something very contemporary and urban that also comments about where America is today,” he explains, calling from the Los Angeles press event for the film. “My struggle was to find something that was more unexpected — how do you find something fresh again? — and the whole idea of this came out of cop friends [of the writer] who told him about a ‘triple 9’.”

The writer, first-timer Matt Cook, saw his script (then styled as 999) rank in 2010’s Black List, the annual roundup of Hollywood’s hottest unproduced screenplays that has highlighted Juno, The Imitation Game and Edge Of Tomorrow, among many others. As it turns out, Hillcoat was involved even then. “They put it up there because we hadn’t made it [yet]. Sometimes that happens, even though people are attached; they stick it on the Black List to give it some momentum.”

It certainly didn’t hurt, as buzz immediately began to circulate about the project, which soon populated its cast with an almost incomprehensibly “starry” roster of talent that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Winslet, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie and Aaron Paul. Anticipation reached fever pitch when its stylish — or “insane”, to borrow the parlance of both Atticus Ross and film bloggers everywhere — trailer dropped late last year.

That momentum has also, for better or worse, carried Triple 9 into a highly-charged political climate, despite at its heart being far more a downbeat genre thriller than a political movie by any stretch of the imagination. Still, issues that were simmering in 2010 have reached a rolling boil in 2016 (and it perhaps begs some scrutiny, viewed through the prism of #BlackLivesMatter, that Triple 9’s starriest corrupt cop and military contractor are black, while their more principled peers are white).

With a sour-tasting smorgasbord of themes laid out before him, Hillcoat was keen to focus on the militarisation of not just the police force, but the criminal underworld. “Over these past five or six years everyone’s just been tossing petrol onto the flames,” he says. “When you realise that the criminal landscape has changed so much [that] we’re looking back at the Italian mob and the Irish mob as being quaint and having ethical codes that everyone understood — ‘respectable’ by comparison — it’s not just the police that have become more militarised but the cartels, the Russian-Israeli mob; it’s a much more lethal clash. There’s an acceleration.”

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Serious Blood And Guts

The film is grimmer than it is flashy (not for nothing, New York Magazine film critic David Edelstein called Hillcoat an “Australian bad-vibe specialist”), and though its violence is often (but not always) bloodless, its impact is always felt. The body count in Triple 9 is high even by Hillcoat’s own bloodcurdling standards, but crucially, the film often grinds to a quiet standstill during moments of abhorrent brutality, as though letting the horror of certain situations sit with the audience. It doesn’t jazz it up with kicky camera angles and bursts of music.

“That was very intentional,” Hillcoat says, pleased that the mournful treatment of certain scenes of violence has resonated. “In this film, I pulled back a little and put more emphasis on the consequences or the reactions, physical and mental, to things kicking off. I think we’re in a pretty violent world and it always comes out of something, it’s not just an accident; I think that complexity is important.”

Hillcoat’s fascination with violence — he’s said in the past that he takes it “very seriously” — is no accident, either. Having moved with his family to New Haven, Connecticut in the late-’60s, the charged atmosphere during anti-war protests and unfiltered news coverage of the Vietnam War made a great impression on the budding cineaste. It travelled with him when he began his career in Australia in the ‘80s.

“I watched a lot of cinema about violence in the ‘70s, as a young teenager, and was very impressed by a lot of those filmmakers that took traditional genres and really explored it in a complex, interesting way that was really immersive,” he recalls. “So all of that has, I think, informed my continued determination to tackle things in a different way. That’s why I’ve returned to Hollywood, to try and fight that battle.”

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The Problems With Australian (And US) Cinema

His use of the phrase “returned to Hollywood” is bittersweet for those who might have hoped the director would instead return to Australia, but Hillcoat maintains that genre filmmaking is near impossible in his home country.

“That drove me out of Australia, unfortunately,” he says, palpably rueful. “After Ghosts …Of The Civil Dead, just to give you an example, I had so much resistance [while making] The Proposition to the point that we scouted South Africa and we were going to make it there. The irony of trying to tell an Australian story (and Australian history) from a different perspective, and talking to Indigenous actors about how they would feel about flying to South Africa to recreate this world…” he trails off in disbelief. “That never left me, so that’s been a frustrating experience, because I’d love to do more work in Australia, and it’s a shame.”

While genre — science fiction, horror, crime thrillers, and other totally weird shit — was part of what made the Australian New Wave so fascinating, an industry reticence crept in around the turn of the century. Australian cinema became concerned with low-key miserablism, occasionally dabbling in broad comedy; the eternal falsehood that Australian audiences don’t see Australian films was reflected in poor box office results, and the rot set in. Funding bodies and producers were loath to return to genre, so the occasional box office successes — think Wolf Creek — were treated as outliers.

Hillcoat rallies, and wonders aloud whether the mood in Australia might have shifted in the past decade. “Since then, there have been some great [genre] films made,” he says. “In particular by Indigenous filmmakers like Warwick Thornton [Samson & Delilah, The Sapphires, The Turning], who is amazing, just amazing.”

Indeed, in 2014, genre films — led by Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook — revitalised the Australian filmic landscape, if not the box office, which recovered fully in 2015 with a Mad Max: Fury Road-fuelled biggest year in over a decade.

Three genre flicks down, does Hillcoat feel as though the mood is any brighter in Hollywood for those who wish to work outside, or at least adjacent to, the blockbuster machine? He’s only marginally less circumspect.

“It’s getting very hard in America because the franchise industry has, in the last ten years, accelerated to such a huge proportion,” he says. (In its US opening weekend, Triple 9 was blitzed by X-Men-adjacent Deadpool, and perhaps even more ignominiously, Kung Fu Panda 3.) News has also just come through that Cormac McCarthy has tapped Hillcoat as the preferred director to bring his ultra-violent Western Blood Meridian to the screen… but producer Scott Rudin, who owns the rights, is standing in the way.

“The problem with genre [films] is often they’re ambitious worlds, you know: sci-fi, crime, westerns,” he says. “I think what’s actually happened in the last ten years is the studios have lost their nerve and it’s actually TV that’s taken it over, in terms of the mature audience for a lot of genres. But I still believe in the idea of trying to take these worlds and trying to reinvent them, and I still believe there’s an audience there for it.”

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Triple 9 is in cinemas now.

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Clem Bastow is an award-winning writer and critic with a focus on popular culture, gender politics, mental health, and weird internet humour. She’s on Twitter at @clembastow.