From Nightmare Vision To Dream Come True: Filmmaker Billie Pleffer on 'Fysh'

Sometimes the things that come back to haunt you are well worth tapping into.

That was the case for filmmaker Billie Pleffer and Fysh, her new short film set to enjoy its NSW premiere at Bondi's 27th Flickerfest, before the mini-movie showcase heads off on a national tour.

Troubled by a grotesque nightmare while studying photography and English at the University of NSW's College of Fine Arts, Pleffer's sleeping mind threw up a bizarre image of her walking around clutching a dead fish. "It was disgusting," she recalls. "So I did a nightmare series for my graduate photography exhibition, including a boy holding a fish against his bare stomach, and I love that image. It's always stayed with me."

This vision wasn't finished with her. Pleffer always held it in the back of her mind, wanting to do something more with it. That layby thought was eventually coupled with another flash of inspiration while on a car trip with her parents. "We were driving up this really steep hill and there was this old man speeding down the hill on a bike with the biggest smile on his face, and I just thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen," she says. "You never see old people do something reckless and joyful like that."

The 13-minute long Fysh stars Ronald Falk, best known for the role of Norm on the ABC's Jack Irish series. It fuses these fleeting images of very different, yet equally unforgettable, scenarios. A tired old man sitting out a heatwave in a deckchair on his lawn, shoos off the neighbour's cat. Falk's frazzled character is shocked out of his ennui by a startling rain of fish from the sky. What he decides to do next draws on the joy Pleffer can recall in that old man's face. "It's a metaphor for death, but with a different perspective on it, of a positive, joyous experience," she says.

Falk is certainly a joy to behold, revealing so much within his expressive face and soulful eyes in what is a largely non-speaking role. Pleffer says that both she and her regular casting director collaborator Danny Long knew they had the right man immediately. "Danny is amazing, I've worked with her on my last three films, and when Ron walked in he brought a lot more warmth and humour to the character than what was originally there, and we just fell in love with him. He's just so talented and can do so much without saying anything at all."

"It's a metaphor for death, but with a different perspective on it, of a positive, joyous experience."

Succinct storytelling via a largely visual format enraptured Pleffer at an early age, with The Wizard Of Oz sparking a passion that has endured. Gregory Crewdson's epic photography was another seminal inspiration. This attraction to conveying a lot with a little ensured that when Pleffer went on to study short filmmaking as a post-grad at the Victorian College of the Arts, her graduate film Bino, about a marginalised albino boy, went on to win two awards at the Berlin International Film Festival. "It was a bit of a shock," Pleffer acknowledges. "I thought I'd just test the water and see how I go, whether I can do this and whether I'm any good at it, so Bino doing so well was a nice surprise. But then you know you're only as good as your next piece of work."

Her third short, Fysh, is very good indeed. Its startling impact is magnified by incredible special effects work, realised with both old-school and cutting-edge techniques; a sea of gasping fish caught out of water, all without harming any of them. Pleffer had some A-grade help achieving this remarkable vision in Lion director and former advertising whiz Garth Davis.

With Fysh funded by the Screen Australia's Hot Shots initiative, Davis came on as a mentor while he was in pre-production for the Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman-led biopic that went on to become the fifth best-selling film of all-time at the Australian box office. His experience in creating lauded ads for Tooheys Extra Dry beer, most notably digitally recreating a nocturnal stampede of deer through Auckland's city centre, meant he had a few technical tricks to share as well as wise words of encouragement.

"He is the most lovely man you can imagine and so generous," Pleffer reveals. "It was amazing that he gave me any time at all and agreed to be my mentor when he was doing something so huge and life-changing for him."

Flickerfest has been a similarly rock-solid support, as well as a constant source of inspiration for Pleffer, who says she has been particularly impressed over the years by the festival's strong contingent of foreign shorts. She credits the festival as an important part of the short-film ecosystem in Australia and a major supporter of her emerging career. "They have screened every single one of my short films, and it's lovely to have a hometown screening for our New South Wales premiere. It's a great festival, outdoors in the middle of summer, and they always have really high-quality films."