Heath Davis pulled over on Sunset Boulevard to sob about his failed film career. Then he flew back to Sydney to teach high school English.
“It’s hard to live life accepting your dream’s never gonna come true,” he says.
Except his dream did come true – eventually. Davis’s film Book Week – an earnest if acerbic comedy about a defeated high school teacher with loftier aspirations (ahem) – is now a thing; a thing in cinemas, even.
Alan Dukes stars as Nick Cutler, a novelist condemned to teach disaffected teenagers in western Sydney, who spectacularly torpedoes his last shot at success over seven seemingly cursed days.
Davis’s own story involves less self-sabotage, though the same amount of ironic cosmic interference.
After studying communications with a double major in public relations and film at the University of Western Sydney, Davis began making short films while paying bills as a journalist. When one of his shorts – Spoon Man – was selected for international festivals, and a feature-length script he’d written earned some positive attention, he moved to Hollywood. He’d written a story about “people” that he wanted to make into a film. The town had other ideas.
“I had a meeting with these really powerful agents who were convincing me to turn a story I’d written into a were-zombie film,” Davis tells Guardian Australia.
“Zombies but monkeys,” he clarifies. Then, by way of further clarification: “This was a serious conversation.”
“I actually went home and I tried,” he says, describing an attempt to write a vampire flick. In Book Week, Cutler kowtows to publishers by considering their pitch on the same subject (“World War V”).
“[Writing’s] a long, painful, lonely process and, if your heart and soul’s not in it, it’s hard to actually get the words out,” he says.
Still, Davis came close to getting his script made on that first jaunt to the States. When financing fell through (the result of producers wanting to “make a lot of money” and setting unrealistic budgets, he says), he returned to Australia, and the screenplay languished in “development hell” – unproduced and awaiting financing. His parents and “everyone else along the way” suggested a fallback plan, so he got his diploma of education. It was on the teaching staff at a western Sydney high school that he found some restless kindred spirits – former authors, musicians, actors and scientists.
“I wasn’t alone with being at that crossroads in life, thinking, ‘OK, the dream’s over and this is what it is, and I’ve sort of just got to get on with it,’” Davis says.
He returned to the US and, again, it seemed like his dream was going to come true and the money was about to come in. Until it didn’t. Twice.
“When it looked like it was all together, the last bit of financing fell out at the eleventh hour; shut the whole thing down,” Davis says. The project collapsed literally the day before shooting.
“I just thought, ‘This was the third time, and third time you’re out.’ I remember getting out of my car and crying in the gutter off Sunset, having a bit of a panic attack.” He remembers fumbling for a Xanax to help himself calm down, and accidentally dropping the pill down the drain.
“Three weeks later, I’m teaching high school kids again.” Their vibe? “Disinterested.”
In “a down, dark place”, Davis wrote the partly autobiographical Book Week, “as a sort of therapy”.
Getting back to writing was enough to shake off the cobwebs, and he wound up crowdfunding $40,000 for his first feature: 2016’s aptly titled Broke, which wound up costing not quite $100,000.
His next Indiegogo campaign for Book Week stalled: he moved the crowdfunding goalposts to $100,000, “just to get it done” and not rely on his own investment; he managed just $41,000.
“I made some money on Broke, and I threw that on the table, and that was the gap that got us over the line,” he says.
Screen Australia, Dymocks, the booksellers, and brewers Young Henrys mopped up the rest. The result is a far cry from the million-dollar projects brokered in Los Angeles, but Davis says he prefers his moviemaking model. It doesn’t end with him crying in LA gutters, for a start.
“It’s incredibly hard and [requires] lots of favours and sweaty investment,” he says. “You don’t get paid upfront or anything like that, but you do get your film made. You make it the way you like it.”
Davis didn’t just write Book Week, he produced, directed, did odd jobs – it’s easy to imagine him catering too, cutting crusts off the crew’s sandwiches. He also called in favours for shooting locations.
“We needed the school to be populated with extras and we didn’t have a budget for that,” he says. “We opened the doors to all the locals, for all the schoolkids to come in on the holidays and play extras.”
They weren’t uninterested any more: 2,000 of them rocked up.
Despite Book Week having finally made it to cinemas, Davis is not ruling out a return to the classroom. He has even begun teaching at film schools: “I’ll probably be back there next year, if they’ll have me.”
• Book Week is showing nationally at select cinemas
