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Creator Shane Abbess Vs. The Illegal Downloaders

Guy Davis

“It’s fucking stealing."

While Abbess, whose successful action thriller, Gabriel, inevitably prompted the call from Hollywood, was attached to a variety of high-profile projects while there, including the Jake Gyllenhaal sci-fi adventure Source Code and a sequel to the Jim Henson fantasy, The Dark Crystal, “I left every project,” he admits.
 
“When I say left, it’s because I was not happy with the parameters that were being established. Gabriel was successful and I had lots of offers, but in meetings with studios and producers I was hearing, ‘We want your vision for the film, Shane, as long as you do exactly what we want you to do the way we want you to do it and with the people we want you to do it with.’ I couldn’t deal with that; I had a very specific opinion about the way films should be made.”

It sounds frustrating but it was also educational, providing Abbess a crash course in the ‘business’ side of show business. “I used my time over there to learn how you set yourself up, how you get a film off the ground and how to understand the marketplace right now.” And it paid off. Abbess is about to release his second film, the intense science-fiction thriller, Infini.

"The idea was to create expectations and by the time you get to the end of the film have you go, ‘Wow, what was that?’”

Using a somewhat familiar set-up as its launch pad – a tough-as-nails search and rescue team dispatched to a deep-space mining facility to retrieve the lone survivor of a biological outbreak – Infini soon travels into some dark and unexpected territory. “Gabriel was a love letter to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and with this one I wanted to go back to ‘79 to ‘82 – a very specific period, a seminal period for genre material exploding into the mainstream.” Abbess cites the likes of Alien, Apocalypse Now, The Empire Strikes Back and John Carpenter’s The Thing as influential. “We wanted to draw from those inspirations, and then with the script it was about taking all the notes we received in Hollywood – you know, audiences need to have this certain thing at this particular point – and then not do that. The idea was to create expectations and by the time you get to the end of the film have you go, ‘Wow, what was that?’”

Infini is now available via digital platforms such as iTunes and Google Play. Abbess says there were initially plans for a cinematic release prior to Infini being available through other platforms but on crunching the numbers he and his colleagues realised a video-on-demand release would be more cost-effective. And while he says he doesn’t want to get “too deep into the piracy debate,” he does have some strong words regards illegal downloading. “It’s fucking stealing. I know so many filmmakers who have made films people have loved but never paid for, and these guys literally work at car washes. They hear all the time, ‘Hey, when’s your next film coming out?’ Well, they can’t make another film because you didn’t pay for the first one.”