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Australian filmmaker Shane Abbess drew upon the
Depression Era for his new feature, The Osiris Child:
Science FictionVolume One. Words Alesha Kolbe
T he Osiris Child: Science Fiction Volume
One is not Shane Abbess’s first rodeo.
His biggest films – Infini and Gabriel
– were both heavily based in science fiction.
Curiously though, sci-fi as a genre isn’t really of
huge personal interest to the director.
“I really love character – I actually love
character more than story,” he tells STACK.
“For me, it was always like, you get to a point
as part of a story and you go ‘oh, wouldn’t this
be interesting, to push this thing here or see it
done in this realm, or in purgatory, or we’ll go
to a space station and do a claustrophobic film
out there.’”
Abbess laughs that his future may herald a
very different scenario. “[Sci-fi] was just more a
kind of curiosity for me – a deep-seaded need
to go back to it. I love all genres. I’ll probably
end up doing teenage romantic comedy films in
my twilight years, because that’s where I have
the most fun.”
The story follows Sy Lombrok (Kellan Lutz)
and Kane Sommerville (Daniel McPherson)
– two outcasts that have come together to
rescue Kane’s daughter. In the future, alien
planets are being terraformed to make them
habitable for humanity, and the company
responsible – Exor – is also creating dangerous
experiments as a side
venture.
In creating the world
of The Osiris Child,
Abbess drew heavily
on the Depression Era.
“There was this sort of
naivety towards the era, but
with comic books there was
this outlet for people to distract
themselves. For me, we’re seeing that kind
of naivety again, this new wave of cynicism –
that’s where I think the world’s at again now.
It seems like such an angry, dark time for so
many people now. I felt like it would be good to
make a film that wore its naivety on its sleeve,
but then when I looked at the structure of the
film, I thought that I would want to go against
the formula. There’s definitely a formula at play
with those kinds of things.“
Shooting took place in Australia, with the
Coober Pedy location proving to be somewhat
dangerous territory. “They dig these huge holes
in the ground to check for opals. Years ago
when it was just the Wild West out there, they
would dig and then they’d just put a wooden
plank over the top, cover it with dirt, and that
was safe for the time. But over the years,
those boards rot, and now there’s just all these
holes out there,” he explains.
Abbess acknowledges that people have
met their demise in the red desert. “They just
walk along the ground and drop
90 feet to their death. Coober
Pedy has this thing where you
pretty much have to stay on the
roads, ‘cause anything off road is
pretty dangerous. Whenever we’d
shoot somewhere, we’d have to go
out there in advance to do safety checks
to make sure when people are running or
whatever, they don’t just fall down a hole. That
place is unlike anywhere else in the world – it
really is a Martian landscape. It’s a sci-fi movie
in itself.”
Which brings us to the film’s subtitle:
‘Science Fiction Volume One’ – an obvious
giveaway that further adventures set in
the universe of The Osiris Child are in
development.
“I’m actually working with Kellan right now
on Part Two,” confirms Abbess. “We wrote
stories for the next five instalments in the
series, just for our own thing so we know
what happens next. This film is essentially
the origin story of a young female mercenary
who’s obviously on a hunt. The people
that joined her on that hunt are
established in this film, but how
did she end up here, why does
she do the things she does? It’s
important to know why.
"With TV being so big these
days, people expect these
longer stories with a bigger
arc, so we have to take that
into account. I like the idea of
serialised cinema, but we’ll see.
We’ll definitely go to a number
two and see where the audience
wants to go from there.”
“I used to read my comic books out of order; I would get Issue #9, or Issue #20 first, and
then go back to Issue #1, and the first issue would make such a big difference as far as
characters and plot went – it kind of set my soul on fire in a way, ‘cause I had this preconceived idea
in my head that turned out to be completely wrong. I thought it would be interesting to do that in
a film, to take it and just jumble it as if it were a comic. Originally, the script was 15 chapters long,
completely out of order. We showed it to test audiences and they were super confused, and we just
thought ‘okay, we’ve gone too far.’ We put it down to seven chapters… it’s much more palatable, and
just a different way to manage stories.”
040 AUGUST 2017
visit DVD&BD FEATURE
• The
Osiris Child:
Science
Fiction
Volume One
is out Aug 23
I actually love character
more than story
st154_040_OsirisChild.indd 1 21/7/17 2:19 pm