Patrick Hughes

Who is Hughes? A geeky cineast who views films in strict genre order or a wild rover getting all blokey in the bush?

Just when I think I've got Patrick Hughes pegged - an amiable blokey Melbourne film buff with meticulous viewing habits and a geekish penchant for British comedy show Red Dwarf, - he goes all rugged bushman on me.

So far we've been chatting about movies, a subject which inevitably brings out the nerd in any director. His father fed him 'the wrong films too young' - 2001 terrified a six-year-old Hughes - and ever since he's been methodically working his way through the greats and the not-so-greats of cinema. There's something OCD about the way he picks a genre and systematically ticks off every film in the back catalogue.

Unsurprisingly, he's itching for his two-year-old daughter to get past her Dora the Explorer phase so he can share the joys of geekdom with her. "I can't wait to play her the films. It's almost like you get to be the DJ and she's the newbie who's never been to club and you're playing the fresh beats to her," he enthuses.

So just as a feature about Hughes alphabetising his DVD collection is writing itself in my mind, the genial Aussie reveals himself to be a man of action, an adventurer. Surfing and motorbikes loom large in his life. He takes advantage of international shoots to catch the world's best waves and ride through the planet's most diverse scenery.

It's not all boards and choppers though - back when he was 17 Hughes went out brumbie chasing (chasing wild horses) with his dad and a family friend. "It was really amazing, beautiful experience," he gushes. You're out in the bush, and there's no one around and you're on horseback. You can just disappear into the wilderness for days, weeks, months."

Listening to Hughes talk wistfully about the wilderness, the anachronistic mining towns that puncture the bush it's no surprise that he's planning to shoot a film out in rural Victoria. Red Hill emerged from Hughes experiences of the lonely, lawless outback, and it's due to be shot in May.

"You go to these old goldmining towns and it's like going back in time. These towns are about 200 years old - which doesn't sound like much to people in the UK - but In Australia that's as old as it gets. You find these policing outposts, where you get an area of 10 km sq radius and they're the law men. You can't help but think but jeez there's a western in there," he explains, He describes the film as a cross between High Plains Drifter and No Country for Old Men - a melding of his action man adventure streak and thorough film buffery.

It's the story of a young police officer who arrives at a new village from the big city with his pregnant wife. On the first day on the job, there's a prison break in Melbourne and an old aboriginal man escapes, returning to the village to wreak vengeance on the corrupt cops who sent him away for murder 15 years previously.

"I felt like Australia hadn't had a modern day western but the mythology of the landscape had been gagging for it for years. And it involves the aboriginals, indigenous Australia and there's a lot of issues about land disputes. When you look at westerns that's what 90 percent of them revolve around."

Red Hill will be the first feature that Hughes has shot, but it's not his first venture into movie territory. In fact, it's his third script. But unlike the previous two this is first time one of his scripts has come to fruition. On leaving film school - Victoria College of the Arts - Hughes wrote a movie script that was almost immediately optioned.

"It was going to be this Hollywood movie, this ridiculous notion, but you know when you're young and bright eyed and believe everything is possible," says Hughes with a chuckle.

But Hughes was to find that everything wasn't going to be as easy as he had naively imagined. For a while he found himself trapped in limbo, directionless, as his script did penance in development hell. His film was churned through the machinations of the studio system, and inevitably his emotions ricocheted between hope and despair.

"The highs are high and the lows are really quite low," he muses. "You go 'wow that's amazing I got my screenplay optioned and I'm going to make a movie', and then you get stuck in this rut as everybody does. In hindsight I know that my reason was because I was trying to make something quite big. I was getting flown around the world and I was quite young. It was really exciting but at the same time all you want to do is put film through a camera, so that was quite frustrating. I felt like creatively I wanted to keep the juices flowing."

It was time to make a change. So Hughes returned to the short films that had seen him through high school and university. As a teenager he had made films which largely centred around "guys that went out and did bad things when they were drunk". In 2001, he entered a short into Tropfest, Australia's largest outdoor film festival. Out of thousands of hopefuls, his entry was selected to be screened and scooped top prize. The next year, he was invited back to write and shoot the TV and cinema campaign for the festival.

"I guess it was my first commercial," Hughes reflects. The first of many. Released from the constraints of the sluggish movie industry, Hughes had discovered an avenue that would release him from his creative purgatory and, more importantly would get him out on set camera in hand and shooting as frequently as he desired. Commercials.

After some initial internet research, Hughes paid a visit to @radicalmedia, where he's been directing ever since.

That was back in 2003, and since he's shot jobs for everyone from (XX). Time and again throughout our conversation, Hughes keeps returning to his compulsion to work, his hunger for stimulation. "You get to work with some of the best creative people in the world in terms of the crew members, the experience they have and the stories they have to tell," he says. He's constantly learning, and every international shoot gives him the chance to explore different cultures - usually on the back of a motorbike.

Of course, even after finding his stride within the world of commercials, Hughes is upfront about the frustrations of the job. For example, he's been around long enough to experience the typecasting that comes about whenever a particularly good job raises his name

And then there's the tight turnaround. "There's the reality of being on set when there's an hour left of light and you're boxed n a corner and you've got to make decisions. It's not all a bed of roses," he says plainly. He's balanced in his outlook though, and beneath the pragmatism it's obvious that his inner adrenaline junkie feeds off the excitement and stimulus.

In fact, Hughes can think of one time when he felt completely relaxed on set - and he ranks it as his worst ever shoot. "It's shockin'. I had really bad hayfever. I was a state, so I went to get a hayfever tablet and took it. And about 30 minutes later I started hallucinating. I had taken a rohypnol. I don't think it gets much worse than that. So you've got to pretend … with directing there's not much you can hide behind, on set. It's not like being a car park attendant where you can just fall asleep on the job, you can't just have a nap somewhere. That was horrible, really horrible because you've got to fight off sleeping tablets.

"When you try to fight one off you go through a progression of stages - you hallucinate in the beginning, then you can't quite string a sentence together, and then you feel really mellow - I don't think you should ever feel mellow on set. I think you should always feel on edge."

Thankfully Hughes the kind of limitless physical and mental energy to cope with the pressure. Even at the end of a busy day of shooting, he still has energy to spare - at least that's one explanation for his ritualistic 'wrap dances' that conclude every shoot. He now has hundreds of videos of himself break dancing in various locations around the world. Of course, maybe he's just storing up plenty of embarrassing dad-dance footage to inflict upon his daughter a few years down the line.

The good-natured goofiness of the wrap dances epitomise not only his energy and enthusiasm, but also the pleasure he gets from a job that combines his two greatest passions: film and adventure.

Indeed his fondest shoot memory combines the two. On a recent Mexico-based shoot, the crew found themselves filming second unit shots on a Spanish galleon. They wrapped by 11 am, and when the production manager reminded them that the boat had been hired for the whole day and suggested they sail it back to town. "We sailed back and got quite drunk. We got to captain the ship and hang out with all the boat staff who were dressed as pirates. That was an incredible moment - I went back home with a suntan. And if you get paid do it… well it doesn't get much better than that."