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Ant Timpson (left) on set for Come to Daddy. Photo: Jamie Leigh Gianopoulos.
Ant Timpson (left) on set for Come to Daddy. Photo: Jamie Leigh Gianopoulos.

MediaFebruary 25, 2020

Parental guidance advised: Local hero Ant Timpson on making Come to Daddy

Ant Timpson (left) on set for Come to Daddy. Photo: Jamie Leigh Gianopoulos.
Ant Timpson (left) on set for Come to Daddy. Photo: Jamie Leigh Gianopoulos.

He’s been the country’s leading supporter of the strangest films in the world, and now he’s made his first feature film. Sam Brooks talks to Auckland film champ Ant Timpson about his directorial debut, Come to Daddy.

My first encounter with industry legend Ant Timpson was from afar, at a 2010 screening of The Room, the notoriously bad Tommy Wiseau vehicle that’s spawned midnight screenings across the world. Timpson hosted the night, where people would yell out lines from the film, throw plastic spoons (unthinkable in 2020, I know) and engage in the kind of euphoric revelry that happens when a group of people come together to enjoy an unashamedly (also unknowingly) bad movie. He was maybe the happiest of us all. Not just because he loved The Room as much as we did, but because he loved bringing The Room to us.

His is an enthusiasm that’s infectious. Even when we talked over the phone, it was hard not to catch secondhand excitement. This is a guy who loves film, and especially loves the kind of lowbrow (like, so low it’s basically a beard) films that you’re actually encouraged to scream, laugh and holler at. Even though he’s been part of the film industry for decades, founding both the Incredibly Strange Film Festival – which he helms to this day – and the 48Hours Film Festival, the breakneck filmmaking contest for everyone from cinemaphile high schoolers to the staff of professional production houses.

While he’s produced the horror-comedy anthology films The ABCs of Death and The Field Guide to Evil in the past, his latest project is his first as a director. Come to Daddy, starring Elijah Wood, is cut from a similar bloody cloth as his previous output, but with another layer of depth. It follows Norval Greenwood, a privileged man-child (read: kind of an asshole) who responds to a letter from his estranged father who he hasn’t seen in 30 years. When he arrives at his father’s too-idyllic cabin, Norval finds that he has no memory of sending the message. Daddy issues, well, ensue.

It’s been a year since the film’s world premiere at Tribeca, and since then it’s played the Overlook Film Festival, Frightfest and other festivals around the world. Timpson talks about the film’s release with his trademark enthusiasm. “You suddenly realise you’ve been living in this festival bubble – where everything’s a little bit more intense and it’s all kind of heightened. You start to think ‘I don’t know how it’ll actually pay to a stone-cold audience who are turning up paying hard-earned cash outside of a festival’.”

Ant Timpson (second left) on set directing Come to Daddy.

Before making Come to Daddy, Timpson didn’t have any burning desire to direct a feature film. He’d made short films a few decades ago, but he was fulfilled producing other people’s work, and wasn’t looking at scripts with any need. It was when his father died that he got a wake up call. “It was like, ‘Hi, Grim Reaper here knocking at your door, might be a good time to get some shit together before you shuffle off into the mortal coil.’ It was the impetus for me to do something, and it had to mean something – who wants to go and make a Chucky movie or whatever?”

“It had to resonate and come from a place of purity to drive me, because I knew without that I wouldn’t follow through.”

Come to Daddy has been described and compared to seemingly incomparable films, from Manchester by the Sea to Under the Silver Lake, not exactly films that sit within the silly, scary and over-the-top brand of Incredibly Strange. Come to Daddy is not necessarily just a horror comedy film or an exploitation flick, though it incorporates tropes from both genres; it’s a film about the inherent trauma of not knowing where you come from, and how that vastly affects where you’re going. “Toby [Harvard], the writer, and I wanted to play with the expectations of an audience who are savvy and have seen a lot of material. You know you’re on that path when people can’t actually tag it properly – it’s horror, horror comedy, thriller, dark comedy, dark horror thriller? So straight away they can’t pigeon-hole it, which to me is good. It means we’re in the right zone.”

Elijah Wood stars in Come to Daddy.

After years producing other people’s work, the pressure to make something worthwhile was significant, Timpson says. “Even though [Come to Daddy] is aligned in the same vein [to his previous productions], my prior knowledge just disappeared and I was back as that filmmaker decades ago, trying to focus on the basics.

“Obviously the producer’s hat never goes away. Make your days, that’s the number one thing that I brought in from my producing background. You have to get everything in the can on the day, otherwise we’re fucked. We have no money on these films, so whatever you get, you get.”

Despite the stress of its production, he’s happy with how the film turned out. “I knew when I was with the editor and we had close to a locked cut. From that point on the cliche is ‘I don’t care what anybody thinks, I made it for myself.’, I just knew that we had all done a very good job and it was hitting all the marks it needed to.”

Timpson knew that the audiences that would flock to Come to Daddy are the same ones that he’s cultivated over the years. If you build it, or in this case, if you make it, they will come. They’re the kinds of people who book a ticket to every single film in the Incredibly Strange programme, and the kinds of people who show up for every screening of The Room possible.

“It’s cool that there’s still a lot of people from the very very early days that followed a lot of the programming and curation that I’ve done, which I’m so thankful for. They’re the best cheerleaders you could have in life, they’ve been super supportive.”

But it’s far from a one-way relationship. Timpson has been an avid supporter of not just the kinds of films that you might see at a drive-in or a grindhouse, but the people who make them as well. After all, it means nothing to support the films if you’re not supporting the people making them. “I’m just a good ‘gardener’ – terrible in real life – but in industry terms, I’ve had a lot of success laying a good garden and then watering it for a long time.

“It feels great to see others go on to success that have maybe learnt or been inspired by whatever madcap scheme I initiated but these things were never just me – they were supported by many others for decades, and without them, I doubt they’d be successful as they were.

The 48Hours Film Festival, now in its 17th year, might just be the best example of the Timpson ethos. The film contest feels like the perfect distillation of his vibe: It’s run on fumes, a crate of V, and as much enthusiasm as a human being can muster. And it’s been the springboard for some of this generation’s most successful filmmakers, including yes, recent Academy Award winner Taika Waititi.

“We’ve been using Taika as the poster-kid for the competition for decades,” says Timpson. “He’s won an Oscar now so you can bet your arse we’re going to use that until his lawyers step in.”

You can watch Come to Daddy in selected cinemas now.

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MediaFebruary 24, 2020

Mike Hosking image hijacked for Bitcoin scam promoted via Google ads

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First the broadcaster was caught up in an online swindle using Facebook – now it’s surfaced via the other media giant, with an ad that sends you to a fake NZ Herald site. The Herald says it’s seeing an ‘exponential growth in fake and fraudulent content’.

“Hosking’s Latest Investment”, went the headline on the Google-served advertisement, complete with a photograph of the award-winning broadcaster, placed on a New Zealand news site. “New Zealand’s citizens are already raking in millions of dollars from home …”

Click through – who could resist? – and you find yourself at the New Zealand Herald. Or, rather, a slapped-together sham Herald. “SPECIAL REPORT: Mike Hosking’s Latest Investment Has Experts in Awe And Big Banks Terrified.”

It goes on to promote a Bitcoin scam, falsely claiming the endorsement of Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

The story fabricates quotes in which Hosking promotes an investment platform “that’s helping regular people in New Zealand build fortunes overnight” and provided him with “the biggest and easiest money I’ve ever made”.

According to the story, Hosking revealed his investment epiphany, a “wealth loophole” worth millions, during an interview with, of all things, a rival breakfast programme. “The AM Show co-host Duncan Garner was left in disbelief as Mike Hosking pulled out his phone and showed viewers how much money he’s making through this new money-making program that now has everyone in New Zealand whispering.”

In the fabricated story, Hosking is said to have urged viewers to dive in “before the banks shut it down”. Believe it or not, “minutes after the interview was over, ASB called to stop Hosking’s interview from being aired”. Which is a huge challenge for a live-to-air broadcast, but there you have it.

The bogus story uses precisely the same wording as an earlier version featuring New Zealand billionaire Graeme Hart, but with Hart’s name swapped out for Hosking’s.

Similar scams have been promoted recently on Facebook, with paid posts appropriating the image of Hosking as well as a range of other public figures including Hayley Holt, Richie McCaw, John Key and Jacinda Ardern. While the advertising platform has in the past been Facebook, however, the new Hosking scam was promoted via the other online global internet behemoth, Google, which automatically serves ads to participating sites. In this case the ad was served by Google via the New Zealand politics news site, Politik, last week. On Friday Google said the account that placed it had been detected, and the ad removed.

However, another version, featuring Paul Henry rather than Duncan Garner, was viewed by a reader in a prominent spot on the Guardian website this morning.

Late last year celebrity chef Annabel Langbein was reported to be considering legal action against Facebook and Google following a flurry of ads using her likeness in attempted scams.

A spokesperson for NZME, which owns both the Herald and Newstalk ZB, said the company had detected an “exponential growth in fake and fraudulent content including ads, pages, profiles, etc, on media sites”.

She added: “This is an issue targeting not just us, but media outlets and high profile media personalities in general. The moderation of these fake ads is initially the responsibility of the relevant ad network as they place the ads programmatically.

“The trust readers put in our content is a priority, so as a company we are investing time and money to remove fake content and reduce the frequency of such issues.”

Approached for comment, Hosking directed The Spinoff to his earlier remarks about the Facebook hosted ads.

Then he told listeners: “It’s not just about me. This is a broader thing … What these scumbags do is they target so-called well-known people and they link their name and their pictures to ads and things.”

He had been surprised to learn that a number of reasonable people had been suckered by the ads, despite the fact that they seemed to many so “obviously fraudulent”.

Hosking was especially appalled by the company’s reactive approach.

“The only way to get them down is by reporting them … which is such a stupid, pathetic excuse,” Hosking said.

“It’s like me on this show, playing any old ad I want, saying literally anything, legal or illegal, whatever you like, and then saying, look, the only way you can get those ads off the programme is if you ring us up and let us know. Because that’s the way we run things.”

He added: “Facebook’s standard line is that we don’t want fake ads on our platform. They may not want them, but they take them. They take the money and run them. And they will keep running them until you ring up and complain.”

Facebook subsequently said it had removed all the Hosking-related ads.

Google declined to answer specific questions about the emergence of fake ads co-opting identities, but said that its own systems had detected the sham Hosking ad and removed it.

“We have strict policies that govern the kinds of ads we allow on our platform, and ads that intend to mislead or deceive users are a violation of those policies. When we find ads that violate our policies, we remove them,” said a spokesperson in a statement.

The risks of misinformation and disinformation take on an extra significance with an election less than seven months away. Last week the Ministry of Health warned of a fabricated story on a bogus news site that was spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.

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