Production Details
Production company: Salt-Pan Films/Royce Smeal Film Productions
Budget: c. A$250,000 with most coming from the new federal government funding body, the Australian Film Development Corporation, and an investment and facilities deal from Sydney-based Royce Smeal Film Productions. The budget was initially set at $215,000, with $20,000 in deferred producer/director fees. Smeal and the AFDC were pari passu pro rata until their investments were returned.
Locations: Sofala, New South Wales, Wattle Flat
Filmed: October 1973, four week shoot (Peter Weir put it at five weeks in a Cinema Papers interview)
Australian distributor: B.E.F. (originally M.C.A.)
Theatrical release: Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals June 1974 and then Australian Cinema, Melbourne 10th October 1974. Four weeks at Rialto West End London June 1975.
Rating: M
35mm Eastmancolor Panavision
Running time: 91 mins (Oxford Australian Film)
DVD copy timing: 1'23"42 (excluding ScreenSound head animated logo)
US VHS: cover lists 76 minutes.
Box office: despite its later cult reputation, The Cars That Ate Paris was a commercial flop on initial release in Australia.
It did so badly that M.C.A., the original distributors, were dropped, and B.E.F. hired, and the advertising campaign was changed from horror movie to art house film - an angle attempted at the Canberra 'Australia 75' arts festival - but once a film misses, it generally misses.
The film also missed internationally, with a rumoured deal with Roger Corman never eventuating, and with a tepid release in London's West End. The film was given a release in the United States but never broke wide, remaining a speciality flick.
The vigorous pre-release publicity campaign at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1974 - featuring the film's "killer Volkswagon with spikes" car - drew attention to the film world wide, and remains a favourite image of cult horror enthusiasts, but the publicity was deceptive in relation to the film's early commercial prospects.
However the flm has enjoyed a long ancillary life, and remains essential viewing for cult enthusiasts.
According to David Stratton in The Last New Wave, only $112,500 had been returned to the producers by 1980, less than half the budget.
Opinion
Awards
Australian Film Institute Awards 1974-75:
Winner, Filmways' $500 prize for best original music (Bruce Smeaton, jointly for his work for both The Cars That Ate Paris and The Great McCarthy) (first award in this category).
Screened Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals 1974
Availability
The film has been released in region 4 by Umbrella with correct 2.35 ratio, derived from a good restored print, with decent sound.
There's also some trailers - both Cars and The Plumber, but also for Weir's Picnic and Green Card - and a relatively impoverished and poorly designed stills and poster gallery.
By far the most useful bonus is director Weir's only telemovie, The Plumber, which is well worth a look despite the 16mm image. On a limited budget Weir managed to generate a nicely edgy atmosphere around an unsettled middle class female academic, interested in the primitive but unable to deal with it when it lands in her apartment in the shape of a plumber.
The Cars That Ate Paris is also widely available elsewhere on DVD, but region four cultists need look no further than the Umbrella edition.
For those determined to miss the full length cult classic, the ASO has three clips from the film here.
1. Source:
The film continued Weir's partnership with New Zealand based writer Piers Davies, who trained as a lawyer. They had worked together on Homesdale, and their work together displayed a fondness for gothic and comedy horror.
This time Weir took the screenplay credit, with Piers Davies credited as one source for the story. Weir and Keith Gow were the other story credits. Gow was a veteran documentary director who'd made films for the Waterside Workers' Federation Film Unit in the 1950s, and who had eventually ended up at Film Australia, where in 1979 he made Now You're Talking, the third part of Film Australia's screen history The Pictures That Moved.
Weir was also a Film Australia regular, having made the segment Michael in the Film Australia feature Three to Go in 1971.
Producers Hal and Jim McElroy had worked with Weir on a script several years earlier - for which the finance fell over - and Weir then approached them about Cars:
Hal McElroy: ... It was after Homesdale and he wrote this and we couldn't get it going. He then came to us early this year (1973) with the new script and asked us to produce it. He was hoping at that time to get the money from the A.F.D.C. He in fact succeeded so as Jim said it was a sort of unusual situation where the director wrote the script - and originated the project - and approached us as producers to produce it for him. It appears to have worked successfully. I suppose it's fair to say that there are even less people producing in Australia than are competently directing and there's not very many really good directors. (Cinema Papers, January 1974)
Weir hadn't written the screenplay with Panavision in mind:
Weir: ... I think it was always in my mind a sort of black and white film and certainly not that wide format, and after the initial reaction, which was one of excitement, I started to think it may be wrong for the film. I went and saw a couple of Panavision films immediately after the news that we were going to use it, and I saw a bad one which gave me a shock. It seemed such a crass format or something. Then I began to think about the town and the western feeling of the film ...
2. Production:
Royce Smeal was the local agent for Panavision, and he suggested using it to Weir, who decided to go with it because it helped with the "western feeling" of the film.
Weir:... it took me a long time to get used to it though I wouldn't say that I've got it now. After all those years of 16mm. this was a tremendous shock, but I'm starting to learn a lot about it. The terrific thing about it was that I've always loved wide shots and I like details, particularly with humour. The wide shot always works so well for that sort of gag. Once you start cutting about you can lose the joke because the audience is jarred slightly. It all becomes unsubtle. Panavision is just like your eye-sight masked off by hands placed at the side of your head. That's the wider angle lens anyway. So you can have somebody over in the corner there doing something funny and your main action going on over here and you can look between the two of them. It's so exciting. You don't have to say now we'll cut in and see what he's doing over there and then you'll think Oh, it's not really very funny. Is it worth that special close-up? (Cinema Papers January 1974)
The Panavision gear came with super speed lenses (T 1.2) which substantially reduced the amount of lighting required for the night shoots. Unlike the United States, in Australia re-voicing was then still a developing art form, and the producers anticipated using something like 95% of the location sound rather than doing post-synch.
Weir saw the film as a personal one - he didn't accept Tim Burstall's notion that the director was as important as anybody else and no more - and the set was run on autocratic lines, partly a response to the pressure of low budget shooting:
Jim McElroy: He ... does his homework and knows what he wants to shoot the next day, and he also sticks to the script except on dialogue changes. He disciplines himself and that's why he's a successful director. He doesn't go on to this creative wack where the director's got to have freedom, though a director should be given as much freedom as possible, but if he's going to be changing things, there is going to be a problem ... (Cinema Papers, January 1974).
In the same Cinema Papers production report, there is an interview with DOP John McLean and gaffer Tony Tegg, in which they discuss the lighting. Some scenes in the film were shot day for night:
The reason we're doing it day for night is that it culminates in a big accident with the caravan and a car running off into the ravine. To light such a scene would take a tremendous amount of lighting, in fact certainly more than is available to us; and day for night is therefore the only practical way. You find that the average person accepts day for night for what it is. Sophisticated audiences now realise that it is day for night and I think you should approach it like that.
Actor John Meillon was by the time of filming in the advanced stages of his battle with alcoholism. (He would die of liver disease in 1989. He had been the voice of Victoria Bitter - VB - beer for years, and had a pub named after him, presumably on the same basis that drowned Prime Minister Harold Holt had the Harold Holt Swimming Centre named in his honor. Meillon's wiki is here).
In a memoir and study of Weir's Master and Commander for Quadrant magazine January 2004, Neil McDonald recalled how students from the Mitchell CAE and the local dramatic society were recruited as extras for the filming in the small NSW town of Sofala:
Film crews being what they are, there was the inevitable gossip about the star John Meillon's heavy drinking. At the time no one realised the tragic reality of the alcoholism that was to destroy him a few years later. Nevertheless Meillon was able to gently encourage the inexperienced Weir to give him--and just about everybody else---increasingly precise directions as to how he wanted the scenes played. Meillon's technique was so formidable that he could execute exactly any idea Weir might put to him. The result was one of the actor's finest performances.
3. Release:
Jim McElroy explained the then current state of box office returns in an interview in relation to the film in Cinema Papers in January 1974, and why they wanted to keep the budget under $250,000:
Jim McElroy: One thing I would like to say is that it is possible, and we're proving it, to make films for under $250,000 and the reason you've got to make under that, is that the rough ratio to get a return for your money is for every four dollars spent at the box office by your audience, producers will make about one dollar back. So if you want to make a movie and you want to get a bit of money, you've got to make a million dollars on a $250,000 picture before you can expect to make your costs, and a million dollars is a fair amount of money.
That's why you have to keep your costs down, because for every $50,000 that you save on production, you're more likely to make your money back. That's why we try very hard to keep it under budget, and it's not impossible. I think you've possibly noticed that Peter was generally happy with the first takes. It was only a technical problem that would make him go to three or four takes ...
The film was dubbed with American voices for its release in the United States.
After the film failed in Australia, it was eventually picked up for release in the United States, but not by Roger Corman, who was initially mooted in the trade press as the film's buyer. Corman was in the end content to use Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000 to add a futurist destructo car fantasy to his catalogue.
When the film was released by New Line Cinema, it had a new title The Cars That Eat People, with new top and tail narration, and a number of cuts that saw the running time drop from c. 83 minutes to c. 76 minutes.
The cut included egregious explicatory dialogue of the worst American kind, and wasn't approved by Weir. The web page Taking the Scissors to Weir's Work, provides details of the changes. A few examples:
Opening:
The movie opens with the final shot from the film: Arthur driving away from Paris into the night. We get the following voiceover (by an obviously different actor):
"You won't believe it, but I just escaped from Paris. It's the weirdest place I've ever been. That's Paris, Australia I'm talking about, not Paris, France. And I'll tell ya, I'm not going back for as long as I live. I mean, what happened in that place - wow, I can't believe it
We see Arthur and his brother driving down a road, past the men shoving a calf into their trunk. We get the following voiceover:
"It all started in Brooklyn with my brother George. He says 'Let's drive across Australia.' I say 'what, are you crazy?' And the next thing I know, here I am out in the middle of nowhere. You know sometimes I hear a little voice inside of me says 'Arthur Waldo, don't'. Next time, I listen.
Closing:
As Arthur drives off, we get the following voiceover:
"So that's the end of my story. Incredible, huh? A whole town living off car crashes. My brother George is dead and buried in Paris, but I can drive again. You win some, you lose some, right?. I'll tell you one thing though, I'm getting the first plane out of this crazy country. It's goodbye Australia. Brooklyn, here I come."
Then the picture fades out, and we hear the sounds of a car crash and lions growling! Credits roll.
If nothing else, it helps explain why the film did not do any meaningful business in the USA.
It's also ironic in this context that producer Jim McElroy at the time thought they were making an international film:
One other thing I should point out is that we're not trying to make an Australian film. This is for a number of reasons: there's no point to it, it's not a selling thing and we're more interested in sales everywhere, as much as possible. Not only that, it's just not an Australian type of film; it doesn't show an Australian character, nor does it make a study of anything particularly Australian. The story could have happened anywhere, in America, France, England or wherever, just that the scenery is slightly different. That's the only thing that's different about it. So you can see we're not being nationalitic in any way. (Cinema Papers, January 1974)
Looking at the film now, it is remarkably idiosyncratic, in its humour and its performances, in an Australian way.
While the story could have happened anywhere, these characters are a part of a satirical vision of Australiana from the get go, beginning with the opening send up of television commercials and a bunch of sheep as extras on a country road, not to mention cattle duffers stuffing a calf into the boot of an FJ Holden under the head credits.
The film later became an inspiration for a musical theatre work first performed by Chamber Made Opera in a large crash repair garage in Melbourne in 1992, details here. This show has since turned up in a number of locations.
4. Piers Davies:
While Weir is well known internationally, the writer who collaborated on the script is less well known. For full details of Piers Davis, barrister, solicitor, screenwriter and poet, see Homesdale on this site here. Davies' workplace details were online at time of writing at WW&D Limited here.