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Aidan Gillen as Francis with the rather literally femme fatale next door (Emmanuelle Seigner).
Mark Hanlon may have been born in California - in San Francisco, to be precise, four years before the Summer of Peace and Love. But, to judge by his career, his sensibility and his artistic allegiances belong much more in Central Europe, in a world where fear and doubt - the cosmic variety, about whether there really is a meaning to life - are more common states of mind.
Mark Hanlon
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Buddy Boy, his first feature to go into production both as writer and director, is set in a vaguely recognisable American city, with buses and supermarkets and people who need to get their holiday snaps developed (the title character works in a photo shop), but doors keep opening onto another world. And that other world is much closer to early Roman Polanski films like Knife in the Water, Cul de Sac and, above all, Repulsion, than to the sort of thing you find in the movies made by Hanlon’s fellow San Franciscans Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. The nearest the film gets to San Francisco is in its hints of Hitchcock movies like Rear Window and Vertigo. But the mixture is all Hanlon’s own.
Mark Hanlon’s directorial debut Buddy Boy could be described as the indie film that has everything - voyeurism, cannibalism, Catholicism, plus hints of Hitchcock and Polanski. Scary? Well, yes, it is. But it’s kind of weird and funny, too.
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His first screenplay was an adaptation of The Investigation, a novel by cult Polish author Stanislav Lem, another of whose novel’s Andrei Tarkovsky adapted into the sci-fi classic Solaris. Hanlon was then commissioned to write a screenplay for Robert Harmon, director of that other cult foray into a world of darkness and cruelty, The Hitcher.
For his first feature as a director, Hanlon has gone outside the studio system, naturally gravitating towards independent producer Cary Woods, whose distinguished - and distinctly cutting-edge - track record includes Harmony Korine’s julien donkey-boy (featured on page 44) and Gummo, plus films by Alex Payne (Citizen Ruth), Doug Liman (Swingers), Larry Clark (Kids), Gary Fleder (Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead) and James Mangold (Copland), not to mention the reinvention of the horror movie with Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s first produced screenplay, Scream.
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