Mental As Anyone

Tweed Heads-raised writer-director PJ Hogan's new film Mental sees him re-team with Toni Collette, after their last collaboration, 1994 hit Muriel's Wedding. Comedy Mental is a semi-autobiographical study of Hogan's early life – his own mum had a breakdown and was quietly shipped off to an institution. His dad, a local pollie who was running for re-election, told Hogan and his four siblings to say mum was on holiday.  “Nobody votes for a bloke whose wife is bonkers – so we kept mum about mum,” Hogan says. Like the father played by Anthony LaPaglia in the film, Hogan's dad was desperate, unable to tame his five ratbag kids, so one day, on impulse, he stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. “She looked trustworthy [to him] because she had a dog,” Hogan says. “We got home from school to find this woman on our couch, rolling a cigarette, hunting knife sticking out of her boot, and she looked around and said, 'Bit of a mess in here, isn't it?'”

This was Shaz, a real-life, couldn't-make-her-up character faithfully recreated by Hogan in his screenplay and Collette on film. “I took off from the real person to write the character, but a lot of what you see onscreen is what the real Shaz was like,” Hogan says. “She says a lot of the things Shaz said. Toni Colette nailed her.”

Hogan says the real Shaz stayed in his life for 20 years, but he doesn't know where she is now, or whether she's heard of Mental. “She was the most inspiring person I ever met, but like a lot of brilliant people, she was mad,” he says. “When you're 12, you accept these outrageous claims – 'Mmm, could be true, maybe scientists are after your brain, you seem really smart' – but it wasn't until much later in my life that I realised she was actually crazy.”

BAZ MEETS SHAZ 

Baz: So Shaz, what's your worst habit?

Shaz: Well, just like a former root of mine, Kevin Rudd, I never make mistakes and if I do they're usually someone else's fault. I warned Rudders not to trust that Julia Gillard slag, especially after she walked in on us that night in The Lodge and I knew she was crushin' on Rudders herself. Hell hath no fury like a short woman with a bad hairdo scorned.

B: And your greatest talent?

S: I turn straight women into rampant lezzies. Take Taylor Swift: she writes this song about our drunken one-night fling. I says its title to her as I prized her painted fingernails offa me: “We are never gettin' back together, Taylor, ya demented lezzie,” I says tenderly. Taylor leaves off the last four words and it's a huge hit. Sadly, readers so inclined, me lezzie days are behind me (unless that's you texting me, little Missy Higgins).

B: What's your favourite book?

S: Me real life adventures outdo most books and I'm usually smarter than 'em too – I'd figured out the code 20 pages into that Da Vinci crap; Fifty Shades Of Grey shoulda been called 2000 Pages Of Boring, there was nothing wrong with those two pervs that an electrified butt plug wouldn't have fixed; Moby Dick was disappointingly about a whale.

B: Tell us about life on the road.

S: I seen all types hitchhiking, mostly perverts and psychopaths. Ya can always tell a psychopath: they seem completely normal. Even when ya confront 'em with their psychopathy they still keep insistin' they're “normal” and it sometime takes a few cuts of me knife before they finally admit they're after me in a deviant and pervy way.

WHAT: Mental

WHEN: In cinemas nationally Thursday 4 October