Late Night with the Devil

Cameron and Colin Cairnes present the film as a recovered tape of a live talk show broadcast on 31 October 1977. Cinematographer Matthew Temple shot the broadcast as a three camera studio of the period would: cameras on pedestals or a crane, compositions deliberately clumsy. Temple says telling an operator the shot was terrible counted as praise, because that is what 1970s television looked like. The backstage footage inside the commercial breaks was handheld, and first planned in colour. Once editing began the brothers felt the gap between studio and backstage was not landing, so they turned those passages black and white in post, modelled on a grainy Fuji stock. The show is set in New York; shooting happened on a Docklands sound stage in Melbourne, where the set including audience seating was built from nothing. Using artificial intelligence for three brief interstitial stills drew argument days before release; the directors said they had experimented with those images and edited them. It won Best Independent Film at the 52nd Saturn Awards, and drew 14 nominations at the 14th AACTA Awards without a win. A good fit if the fright you want comes from the seam between broadcast and backstage rather than the acting. Not for anyone who cannot take a bloody finale in which several characters are killed on camera.