15 min

English

Australia

Bondi Beach, Australia; Director Biography - PHILIPPE SUNG, BRANDON FAYETTE This is the first short from Philippe Sung and the third short from Brandon Fayette. Directing At the Edge of Night was a collaboration, with Brandon & Philippe co-directing on set production - Philippe writing and directing post production. Philippe began his creative career as an actor, graduating from Actors Centre Australia's full-time course in 2011. While living in Los Angeles he found a love of writing which lead to this first piece. Philippe is currently developing & writing an Australian-Chinese film set during the sunset years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Brandon is a VFX supervisor by trade, having spent almost 2 decades with JJ Abrams' production company, Bad Robot. He has written and directed two previous shorts and a handful of series pilots. [see production photos for Brandon's headshot] Director Statement [Writer/Director's Statement] I was living in LA when I first put pen to paper and, when I started, I didn't really know what this film was about - it was my first 'writing thing' and, frankly, I had no idea what I was doing. I found a stepping off point in an illustration by Tomer Hanuka, called Old Moab (I think it was for a short story that Barry Hannah wrote for Playboy magazine but, not being a playboy subscriber, I never read it). From there I followed hints and clues of inspiration to unpick a story that felt grounded and relatable, while still trying to have some of Tomer's original magic in it. Once I had the bones of the characters and the story, it was just a matter of giving them a place to fill out in. I grew up in the suburbs but - being a bit of a ratbag kid - was always drawn to the live music scene of the inner city, and moved there the first chance I got. Licking passouts and sneaking into gigs was a weekend go-to. While this film is set around LA - a consequence of where I was living at the time - it is film is very much influenced by those wild and raucous days. In LA, I had bought this old brown 1980s grandpa van in Tehachapi - which I called Bryan Brown - to explore California in. It was a piece of shit, but it made it out to Joshua Tree, Mojave and Death Valley a couple times (and with a busted piston). The deserts of California are places of contrast - hot as hell during the day, but beautifully magical between dusk and dawn - and the towns out there are populated with patriots, dreamers and meth-heads. The high deserts felt like the perfect place to set the film - especially considering Tomer's original illustration - and contrasting the poetic scenery of the deserts' quiet whispering with a heavy metal soundtrack seemed most fitting. So we begged people (who I will be eternally grateful to), borrowed kit and stole locations, shot the film (flew back to LA on a skeleton to shoot some more), patched together a post crew and, in the end, finished it. For me, while there are themes of love and hate, sexuality and loss in the film, ultimately it is about letting go. There's a lot of homelessness in Hollywood (in a literal and figurative sense), and I sometimes wonder why people endure the physical hardship. In most cases there's a complex and many versioned history of mental illness (inherited or acquired) that sits behind it. At the Edge of Night is but one version of this - where an acquired trauma sets in motion a path to letting go, or not letting go - exploring the idea that, sometimes, the things you can't let go can come back to haunt you. And I hope you enjoy it. Love, Philippe

Philippe Sung and Brandon Fayette