ANGST AT 25: AUSTRALIA'S TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY TEEN ODYSSEY IS BACK.

"Write what you know," is any mentor's most sage advice, and Anthony O'Connor took it very seriously. The Australian screenwriter was an inner-city cool kid when he penned the script for ANGST, the raucous, rude and genuinely endearing comedy-drama that turns 25 this year. To coincide with the remastered re-release of the cult film, O'Connor reflected upon the ANGST experience with SCREEN-SPACE editor Simon Foster...:

SCREEN-SPACE: There's an authenticity to the film - its characters; it's understanding of the contemporary teen scene - that suggests you were writing from experience. Were these your people, your life?

ANTHONY: Angst was very much a reflection of my life, with a few changes here and there. I was nineteen when I wrote it and up until that point everything I’d churned out had been basically bad, derivative versions of the horror movies I loved (The Evil Dead, Shivers, Brain Damage etc.) With Angst (at the time called Angst For the Memories) I tried something a bit more personal, although obviously heightened and made more over-the-top for comedic purposes. A lot of the vignettes in the video shop really happened and some of the characters were loosely based on friends and loved ones. Mainly, though, I wanted to get across what it felt like to be young in the late 90s, working in video shops, living in Kings Cross, getting into shambolic misadventures and occasionally stumbling into love. It was a unique time in my life and, looking back, a unique time in the history of Sydney and I suppose Australia in general.

SCREEN-SPACE: Angst makes me think of the edgier, more authentic teen fare, Aussie films like Dogs in Space or He Died With a Felafel in His Hand or Fast Talking. Were there works that inspired you, that you looked to as a kind of mood-board during your writing (from any country)?

ANTHONY: Felafel came out the year after Angst, although I adored the book by John Birmingham, and Dogs in Space is such a classic - both were absolutely influences. I was also a huge fan of Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. Pretty much any film that had a lot of walking and talking. Some of Woody Allen’s early stuff, Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch; I worked in many video shops all across Sydney so I had unfettered access to the best indie cinema had to offer and I just ate it up. I was also obsessed, like OBSESSED, with horror movies so I tried to channel some of that into the script as well, making Dean (named for Dean Cundey, the cinematographer of John Carpenter’s The Thing, just quietly) write a screenplay set in the Cross where he saw everyone as zombies.

SCREEN-SPACE: When momentum built for the script, and production began to feel like a real possibility, what do you recall of that time? Relate for us the 'young screenwriter' experience...

ANTHONY: I spent a lot of time working on the script over a few years with Daniel Nettheim (director) and Jonathon Green (producer), so it was always just a part of my life to one degree or another. And then it got development funding and everything changed. We were suddenly greenlit and things seemed to move so fast. I remember one night, after attending a goth club (which was something I liked to do back when I had cheekbones and a lower back that didn’t ache), I was staggering home though the Cross and the exterior of the video shop where I worked, IN VIDEO, had been redressed as Video Boy (the store’s name in the movie). Now, I’m sure Dan and Jonno had told me this was going to happen but I’d completely forgotten, and I distinctly remember gaping up at the sign and wondering if I’d slipped inside my own subconscious. It was a wild time, honestly, that was both outrageously exciting and genuinely scary. I got to meet legends like director Alex Proyas who literally called me into his office to say he loved the script and wasn’t at all mad that I made fun of goths and The Crow. I ended up doing some work with Alex and quite a few others, dialogue punch-ups for various TV and movie projects. It was surreal how quickly and dramatically my life changed.

SCREEN-SPACE: Were you there for the shoot? Often writers farewell their words and have no input when the director and actors take over; did you have a say in how the final film was formed?

ANTHONY: I was there for the shoot quite a bit. I played Toaster Junkie who appears in a few of the Kings Cross scenes and because I lived nearby I’d come onto set, or various locations, and watch it all happen. I also lobbed up for some of the exteriors in Strathfield when Dean (Sam Lewis) breaks into the home of his ex, Heather (Lara Cox), with May (Abi Tucker). In terms of my input, I’d worked with Daniel for a few years by the time the film was done (on various other projects), so he sought my opinion and I gave it, but final say was absolutely his, which is as it should be. Daniel brought such richness and emotional depth to so many of the things that could have been just funny and prickly. I remember the late, great David Stratton said of the film that it was “sympathetic, engaging comedy reminiscent of a French relationship pic”, which thrilled all of us.

SCREEN-SPACE: The decision to remaster Angst suggests the film has a legacy, that for a generation of teens there was a truthfulness in the portrayal of their lives that is lasting. How does that make you feel...?

ANTHONY: It’s been quite a journey for how I feel about Angst. I loved writing it and then it came out and didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, which was a bummer. However, it did crazy numbers in video stores and we were told it was Australia’s “most stolen movie” (this is in the days before internet piracy was a thing). However, various companies collapsed or shifted and the DVD release never happened, which was also a bummer. Years passed and I would regularly have people asking me about Angst at parties or events, this little film that was basically impossible to find anywhere (unless you had a dusty old VCR player and a stolen copy). And then last year the good people at the Inner West Film Fest screened the old 35mm print and it went gangbusters! Really great screening, and not everyone who liked it was a crusty Gen-X’er like me! These days I see it as the work of a very young man that is naive but heartfelt and truthful and sometimes pretty funny. The fact that audiences still connect with it, arguably more so now, brings me a great deal of joy. The fact that it can now be watched in a brand spanking new remaster that looks genuinely gorgeous is so amazing. This thing was almost lost media! I’m incredibly grateful to Jonathon Green and the good people over at Screen Inc./Defiant for making sure that didn’t happen. Maybe it can be discovered by a whole generation of new people who want to know what life was like in those strange, heady days of the late 1990s.