We’re Not Here to Fuck Spiders is my second feature. It’s a micro-budget, found footage crime film, or Found Noir as I like to call it. The premise: someone’s broken into an ice dealer’s house and rigged it with hidden cameras, for reasons that gradually become clear. The whole film is drawn from footage from those cameras, as well as a button-cam he sews into his jacket later in the film.

To make it, we rigged a house with cameras and improvised the film, in sequence, across a week. The actors didn’t know the story going into it, they only knew what their characters would actually know, and how they interrelated with the other characters.

 

Authenticity was important to me in this, not just in performances and look, but also in atmosphere. As a result, there are whole sections where not a lot of consequence happens, although inevitably important details are interwoven amongst these. This is not everyone's cup of tea, especially in our age of attention deficit, so we understood going into making the film that there'd be an audience attrition due to this. We were comfortable with that, one of the great advantages of making something for no money is the freedom not to appeal to everyone. And the film does build to a more intense last act, so persistence is rewarded.

It stars Lindsay Farris (Ash vs. Evil Dead, Primal), Stephanie King (Observance, The Code) and a bunch of other talented people.

It debuted at A Night of Horror 2020 in Sydney, winning Best Australian Feature and Best Australian Director, and had its North American premier at Nooga Underground Film Festival in Virginia in April 2021, where it won Best Film.