Generation Hipster

16 September 2014 | 1:27 pm | Hannah Story

"It’s very different I guess than any Australian films that have been made."

Writer/director/producer double act Chris Mitchell and Yoav Lester are behind Start.Options.Exit, Melbourne Underground Film Festival’s opening night film.

With co-writer Ari Neville, they’ve created a film that takes the “generational” aspect of Dogs In Space and pairs it with the fast-paced dialogue of Kevin Smith and the surreal aesthetic of The Mighty Boosh. It’s something they don’t reckon Australian audiences have seen before.

"We managed to jot down a scene during the day and the next day we were filming a small dick anxiety scene at a urinal with Ron Jeremy."



“It’s very different I guess than any Australian films that have been made,” says Mitchell. “In its tone and in its humour and the places that it goes are quite confronting and quite honest. So it’s a black comedy but the response from a lot of reviewers has been about how unique and how different it is from a lot of the content that’s coming out of this country and we’re proud of that.”

Lester and Neville star as Yolis Jenkem and Neville Carlisle, two twenty-something hipsters navigating a kind of “hyper-real” Melbourne, filled with oddball characters. The oddball characters were played by some pretty famous people: porn star Ron Jeremy, the late ‘Chopper’ Read and socialite/pop star Tottie Goldsmith.

They managed to convince Jeremy to feature when they started chatting at the 2013 Eros (adult industry) Awards; “He loved the concept… We managed to jot down a scene during the day and the next day we were filming a small dick anxiety scene at a urinal with Ron Jeremy,” Mitchell explains. Then in terms of Chopper, he really wanted to go his own way, as Lester tells, “It turned into a very big improvisation sort of session, which worked in our favour I think: we came up with very unique stuff that we couldn’t have written and only would’ve come out of Chopper’s mouth.”

But amidst all the standout scenes, laugh-out-loud moments and strong cameos, there’s a story, a story that takes the knife to Gen Y’s self-absorbed culture. “Yoav and Ari were the two leads and they’re the disgustingly quintessential model for international hipster—” begins Mitchell.

“I wouldn’t say disgustingly quintessential,” Lester interjects. “I’d identify myself and Ari as part of that culture, and I don’t know, for the past five years, it’s depressing. People glorify ignorance, take opportunity for granted, treat choice as a burden; we’re a huge narcissistic culture and I think to put a mirror in front of Gen Y and sort of satirise it… in the contemporary dialogue that our generation speaks, and with the kind of humour we hold, I think it’s important... To be honest in Australian film I’ve never ever seen any good attempt at hitting Gen Y on the head.”

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