There is comic madness in their method Lachlan Woods bursts through a set of doors in the basement of an office block in Armadale, his shirt dripping wet, co-star Jessica Clarke slung daintily across his shoulder, a comic book clenched between his teeth. As entrances go, it's suitably dramatic. Woods has the lead in David Parker's madcap comedy The Menkoff Method in only his second film role, and already the 28-year-old VCA graduate can see a pattern emerging. "I do my best acting when drenched," he observes drily. His first role, filmed last year, was in James Cameron's coming Deep Sea Challenge documentary. He plays Jacques Piccard - the Swiss oceanographer who, with American Don Walsh, reached the deepest point on Earth, the bottom of the Mariana Trench, in 1960 - and his part was shot at Docklands in winter. "It was great, but very cold and wet," he says. And here I am, cold and wet again. In some respects he's been training for this all his life; he is a former butterfly sprinter, good enough to compete at state and national level until bad shoulders and early starts got the better of him. "You can't go to drama school and be up at 5am for training," he observes. Three floors up in the office block at 590 Orrong Road - the subject of a bitter dispute between local residents and developer Lend Lease that finally ended in the Supreme Court a few weeks ago - the soon-to-be demolished building is home to several sets. There's the St Kilda apartment where David (Woods) lives; there's the city office where he works, crammed full of cubicles barely big enough for a cat to sit, let alone be swung; there's the boardroom where the bank's chief (Robert Taylor, briefly home from the cable series Longmire) rules the roost. Noah Taylor, who plays Russian management consultant Menkoff, has been and gone, shooting his part in a three-week break from Game of Thrones in Northern Ireland. The writer-producer-cinematographer of Malcolm and The Big Steal, both directed by his wife Nadia Tass, says the method of the title has a local relevance that couldn't have been anticipated at the outset. "It turns out to be a method using . . . 'supplements', I guess, is a nice localised term," he says. They lace the water coolers, so the workers become droids, basically. They don't communicate, they just work. Parker says the young writer of the screenplay, Zac Gillam, drew upon his own experience of working in a data processing unit in London. But it's a comedy, not social realism, and, Parker admits, it all springs from "an outlandish concept." "But if you're going to tell this story you have to tell it as if it were completely feasible," he adds.