It is our honor to introduce a new name to your cinephile vocabulary: Alex Munt, writer and director of LBF (Living Between Fucks). Munt tells FilmBuff how he came into contact with the material for his film and how he set the wheels in motion to begin production on his passion project, “a story of love, loss, and desperation.”

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LBF was made on a shoe-string budget. It’s part of the micro-budget feature momentum, which I think is a really interesting trajectory of independent cinema today.

As writer/director of ‘LBF’ it was certainly an interesting ride, at times on the brink of chaos. The film is based on the novel Living Between Fucks by Australian author Cry Bloxsome. It gathered a cult following online back in the days of MySpace, where it was big in the ‘Favorites’ section—both from readers in Australia and abroad. I actually came across it on the shelf at a bookshop, an attention-grabbing cover to say the least. I read Living Between Fucks’ in the span of a few hours and knew it would work for the screen. Bloxsome’s writing was bold, pacy and immediate. I liked the inner-city setting. I call ‘LBF’ a story of love, loss and desperation.

When I say ‘screenplay’ this is overstated, since there was no final script heading into production. Instead, for ‘LBF’ I put together a collection of images and scene fragments, which I published at Blurb.com in a book format. You can see the cover here. It has an earlier working title: ‘Between Days.’

Music is a really big part of ‘LBF.’ At the time, I was listening to a whole range of new Australian indie music thinking, “This is great,” and it would work really well on-screen. In ‘LBF’, four live-performance songs structure the story, and give a sense of the main character ‘Goodchild’s’ state of mind at any given point. I’d seen this approach used in Michael Winterbottom’s low-budget digital film 9 Songs, and recalled his view that a good pop-song can say a whole lot more about what it means to be in love, than either exposition, dialogue or narration.

In terms of microbudget, this scene works well in providing a cinematic location full of light, texture and colour (shot at Ruby Rabbit nightclub). It didn’t require set-dressing and for ‘LBF’ we didn’t have the luxury of a production designer. We did have one costume designer in Alex Smyth-Kirk, who did a great job with limited resources.

‘LBF’ proved to be an experiment in many ways. The film was written, shot, edited all at once in an organic fashion. Editor Andrew Soo was key creative on ‘LBF’, who was with the project from the early stages, as the film was constructed from blocks of shooting over time. From my perspective, it takes longer, but this process is creatively interesting since it lets you re-shape the film, the characters, their trajectories—you can literally find what the story needs, go and shoot it, then drop it back in the edit to see if that works. It makes filmmaking less of an industrial process.

‘LBF’ had its world premiere at SXSW in 2011, followed by its Australian premiere at Sydney Film Festival. It played the Revelation Film Festival closing night and the Cine/B Film Festival in Chile as part of a showcase of ‘visceral and resonating cinematic experiences from Australia.’ So, if you like what you’ve read, you can, of course, watch ‘LBF’ right now at FilmBuff!

For interesting stories from the set of LBF, check out Alex Muntz’s guest blog.