Industry recognition for Maras

By Fotis Kapetopoulos

WRITER/director Anthony Maras won best short feature at last week's AFI Awards for his hard-boiled Spike Up, a story of a veteran cop's imploding life.

Maras was coming to terms with the award, "It's amazing to be recognised by the AFI and one's peers, that is an honour that I do not take lightly. It's a privilege but it should be noted that many people worked on the film."

Discussing Spike Up he said, "I wanted to create a sharp narrative based on an interpretation of many things...of little stories which put a hook in you."

Adelaide, where Anthony Maras was raised, the city of churches, art festivals and caf?s is also infamous for its dark underbelly of crime and drugs. In the late 1980s Adelaide's chief police commissioner was also Mr Big the key heroin distributor.

It is from this milieu that Maras embroidered this menacing short film on cops, drugs, and the blurring of ethics. Spike Up revolves around ethical deficiency as Roy Billing, playing a veteran police officer contends with an uncontrollable drug-addicted Aboriginal, his wife's infidelities and his disintegrating home life, and a younger undercover police officer's drug addiction.

Marcus Graham is brilliant as a counterpoint to Billing's slow burn role. As Maras points out, "I heard about this undercover cop who lived a double life and the confusion he suffered between his responsibility as a cop and his life in the underworld'.

"The other prominent aspect of Australian psyche is the drug mule... so many Australians fall into that narrative in real life", he added. Spike Up avoids police drama clich?s instead building complex characters and realistic situations leading to a dramatic revelation about the demand of police and personal life.

Maras has made a highly credible film, provoking the audience to respond to the ethical and moral concerns confronting all of us at times. Best of all the film refuses to moralise.

Maras' next project is a death row drama based in West Texas, "It is based on a screenplay which secured the prestigious Nichols Fellowship as part of Academy Awards as the best unproduced screenplay," Maras points out. "The Nichols Fellowship receives over six thousand scripts a year, I feel very lucky to have secured options on it."

Maras Hellenism as a template for his passion, "Hellenism is about human story telling, our impact on the world of drama and theatre is at the centre of my work", he continued, "All the stories, the ethical failures, the tragedies, the complex human strengths and weaknesses, that we deal with in cinema are in essence Hellenic...look, Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus have all written about it before."

Anthony Maras is one our most intelligent emerging filmmakers and if his trajectory maintains he will surely be one of our most important.