Where Did The Idea Come From?
DAVE: It was about November of 1997 at the Bayswater Brasserie, in Sydney, that Martin Fabinyi said to me he had an idea for a film. He said he wanted to do a teen-horror film using a young cast. How about I wrote it, Kimble Rendall directed and he produced? We would keep the budget under $2 million if we could. All of us had been in development hell on features that never got made so I said, why not? Kimble’s a great director and Martin has a knack of homing in on what a market will like.
At this stage Scream had played in Australia but not as of yet Scream 2. I threw out an idea about film students making a ”cursed” student film where each time somebody tried to make this film, starting in 1974, through to 1987, and then the present, somebody was brutally murdered. Kimble and Martin had both been students at film school and loved the idea of taking the piss out of film school pretensions. The three of us trooped off to see I Know What You Did Last Summer in December ’97, afterwards we had Korean noodles.
Kimble and Martin were heading for holidays, I wasn’t, so I wrote the first draft of CUT over about two or three weeks. We met for a coffee in Double Bay around the first week of February ’98. Martin got to work with Beyond and just like that the movie was happening.
Three meetings – now that’s the way to do it! Kimble’s great achievement has been to take a genre that is distinctly American, and yet give it an original flavour which is not American, all at the same time. He’s stayed true to the genre, there’s no Aussie flag-waving, and yet somehow, with the humour and all, it is more Australian than so many pics that try so hard to be so.
Cut had its world premiere in Sydney on March 1, 2000.