Instant success a long time coming Mark Hartley says he wanted to make a horror film that evoked the rollercoaster thrills of the past, giving its audience a real adrenalin rush while they watched. MARK Hartley shared the ambition of every student in his class at Swinburne Film and Television School. He wanted to make a feature film. "That's the only reason you go to film school," he says. We all said we were going to make our feature film before we were 30. That was more than 15 years ago. Hartley made his first documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, the zippy reminisce of our "Ozploitation" movies of the 1970s and 80s, when he was 39. "And here I am, 44 when I was making Patrick," he says, smiling. But I think I'm still the first person in my class to make a feature. You've just got to keep at it, never give up and if you're lucky, things happen. It may have been a long time coming but Hartley hasn't been one of those film graduates whiling away his time in an inner-city cafe tinkering with his screenplays. He is very much a Melbourne boy and he has spent his time directing music videos and advertisements while maintaining an entertainingly critical eye on cinema as a film critic on the Melbourne institution, 3RRR FM's Film Buffs Forecast. He entered film production and criticism with aplomb, winning multiple ARIA awards for music videos for artists ranging from Powderfinger and the Cruel Sea to Sophie Monk and Popstars, working on film documentaries for special DVD releases and winning an AFI award for Not Quite Hollywood. His career wasn't meant to be so varied. He recalls the film school mentality, when he went through in the 1990s, of conditioning graduates to "direct films and nothing else." Students emerge from film school wide-eyed and are then stunned by the small and impenetrable industry. But Hartley's patience has paid off. He recalls working as "an assistant, assistant, assistant editor" on Strictly Ballroom 20 years ago. Now Hartley has just completed his first narrative feature, a re-imagining of the 1978 Australian horror film Patrick, with editing by Jane Moran, who was assistant editor on Baz Luhrmann's film, with its editor, Jill Bilcock, having helped Hartley and Moran with notes. "So these things pay off," Hartley says. You realise you need to start off and work your way up and thankfully I did that through music videos. There were times when I thought, 'Oh well, that's it, I'm never going to get to make a narrative feature' and it happened. You know how few films are made in Australia, how many people are making Tropfest films wanting to make feature films, so you're blessed on set directing a feature film and I certainly realised that. Patrick wasn't the only narrative feature Hartley planned. It was the first one that raised its funding though, thanks to the chutzpah of producer Antony Ginnane, who produced the original thriller starring Robert Helpman, Susan Penhaligon and Rod Mullinar. Hartley is a keen student of genre films and he has updated Patrick in a shrewd manner. The original tale of the comatose boy who uses telekinetic powers to seduce a hospital nurse was of its time with limited special effects. Yet it was memorable and charming enough in its own way to make an impression on a young Hartley -- it was the first VHS he ever bought -- and Rachel Griffiths, who takes on the role of the matronly nurse overseeing the mayhem. "Her love of the original was what made her read the script," he says. Hartley also attracted a well-cast Charles Dance to play the manipulative doctor overseeing some dastardly experiments and Sharni Vinson as the object of Patrick's attentions. Hartley notes he and screenwriter Justin King "overwrote the script from the start." "We made a point of writing it so it read incredibly smart so people wouldn't know there were these dummies wanting to make a horror film in Australia," he says. It was written as a florid script so they could sell it as "a smart dumb movie in a way." Nevertheless, that smart, dumb movie was also meant to be a "prestige thriller," which is part of the reason he cast name actors in the key roles. He knows enough about Australian genre cinema to know what blighted many of them was their casts of no-names. "We really wanted to aim this at a prestige international marketplace and the cast certainly helped internationally," he says. Hartley doesn't believe he's updated the film exactly. He prefers to think he took it further back. "We wanted to give it the atmosphere we don't think the original had," he says. Looking at the original film now, he sees a film all set in broad daylight in the city without the "spook factor" he wanted. "In a way we went back a generation and made a film that evokes Hammer horror films," Hartley says. We wanted to make a gothic chiller. This Patrick is a very different film with a different sensibility to both the 1978 film and today's generally tedious horror genre. "Never once on set did I, or possibly any of the crew, think we were remaking someone else's film," Hartley says. We all felt we were making our own film. And that film aimed to evoke classic horror films. The director compiled a library of clips for cast and crew of scenes from such films as The Orphanage, and those directed by Brian De Palma and Dario Argento. And he secured the services of Pino Donaggio, the Italian composer of Carrie, Don't Look Now and Dressed To Kill, to add to the classic flavour. The combination is fun and has worked well with fans of the genre recently at the FantasticFest in the US and this week at the Sitges Film Festival, where Dance was honoured. Patrick stood out from the pack, as a very accomplished throwback from a director who knows and celebrates cinema. Consequently, the film has secured international sales, including this week confirmation of US distribution, and should have a long life in its genre. "It's funny, people now see horror films as films where people are just nasty to each other," Hartley says. And for me, that's not what horror was about. It was about old-fashioned rollercoaster rides and jump scares. We've made a point of not being apologetic about the jump scares in this film. And now they're a dirty word. That's what watching horror films are about, that intense adrenalin rush every so often when a cat jumps out of the shadows. But that's the only cliche we didn't use in this film. Patrick opens tomorrow.