2004 Commonwealth Film Festival and Onfilm Magazine May 2003 Reviews
"Gert is ordered by a dump owner to deliver his beautiful mute daughter, Princess Plum, to her wedding. The two embark on a mystical journey through strange, stunning monochrome landscapes peopled with a menagerie of monsters and freaks. 28 year old Kiwi Florian Habicht could be the bastard son of Bela Tarr and Guy Maddin if his talent weren't so uniquely original. His innovative film combines a wicked sense of humour and larger-than-life characters with lush, dream-like imagery. The memorable soundtrack was recorded before any visuals were shot, with the actors invited to improvise their parts around it, to disturbingly dreamlike results. Woodenhead is a striking experimental fairytale which, unlike traditional bedtime stories, wears its perverted, bleeding heart on its sleeve. A visionary film sure to confound expectations of what cinema could or should be." - COMMONWEALTH FILM FESTIVAL 2004
Woodenhead is a collaboration between director-sound designer Florian Habicht and composer-sound designer Marc Chesterman. Woodenhead is the tale of Gert, a naive dump-hand who believes he is the luckiest man under the sun. Interestingly, the filmmakers were interested in "pushing the synergistic qualities of audio and picture." To this end, the entire dialogue/soundtrack for Woodenhead was pre-recorded, with the visuals then shot to fit the soundtrack, reversing the usual priority. (Music and dialogue were recorded late 2001, while the five-week shoot in the Bay of Islands and Far North kicked off in March 2002). Says Habicht, "This technique allowed us to first focus purely on sound and then - during shooting - focus entirely on the visual performances. It also enabled us to use untrained-actors in lead roles. The type of people I chose to cast were real people with peculiar, odd and/or unique personalities. People with an 'X factor' who would conventionally be more suited for documentaries than fiction. An extra-ordinary combination of real personalities, actors and musicians would otherwise not have been possible, and contributed to Woodenhead's oddball magical fairytale world." "Separate auditions were held for visual performers and for voices. Some of the visual performers speak/sing the voices of their characters or have 'voice cameos' for other characters, while the main characters - played by Teresa Peters and Nicholas Butler - have their dialogue and singing supplied by Auckland musicians and singers Mardi Potter and Steve Abel (reminiscent of '80s pop duo Milli Vanilli!). According to Habicht, recording the dialogue and soundtrack first didn't inhibit the visual performances. "Actually," he says, "approaches to performance were often decided after the soundtrack was completed. This was because I encouraged the visuals to often contradict the sound. The soundtrack is innocent, like a radio play for children, and yet the visuals are sometimes grotesque, violent or subversive. For example, during the first sex scene, the narrator sweetly tells us that "Plum and Gert had kissed for the first time..." Despite the film's success thus far in being selected for film festivals, "I wouldn't say we have perfected the approach by any means," says Habicht. "Woodenhead is experimental and we could make another film this way to capitalise on what we've learnt." 'Knocking on Wood', Onfilm Magazine, May 2003
