It began, as these things often do, with a few dads and the half-joking idea of starting a band.
“We were just a dad band from the school,” director Shane Abbess recalls. “As parents, I thought it’d be great to have a couple of jams, and that’d be that.”
It didn’t stay that. The band became MILFHAMMER, a name worn with a wink, and one that, crude on its surface, actually stands for “Mothers I Live For”. What started as a bit of fun grew into real gigs around Sydney and, eventually, the wild ambition of a tour of the United States. And somewhere in there, a film was born.
“We started to connect to some of the things about youth, but it was a very different time in our lives,” Abbess says. “It wasn’t like we had a number one hit or anything momentous happened. What felt momentous was actually these very simple day-to-day challenges, and then the craziness of trying to mount a US tour.”
The result is Milfhammer: The Movie, a scripted feature drawn from the band’s true story, with the men playing themselves. It’s a rock-and-roll comedy on the surface, but underneath it’s something far more honest: a look at how a group of middle-aged men overcome the realities of midlife through their music and their friendship.
For Abbess, the project was personal.
“I always say it’s almost like you die twice,” he says. “Once when you stop really seeing the adventure in life, and then the second time when you physically die. I started to feel that. In work, in my life, I was treading water, and this band and these guys started to ignite a lot of feelings, a lot of ideas, a lot of inspiration that I hadn’t had for a long time. So I thought: try to capture that, document it, and put the real people in the film.”
That instinct for story is hard-won. Abbess is a Sydney filmmaker whose debut feature Gabriel became one of the most commercially successful independent Australian films of all time, sitting in the all-time top 10 alongside Crocodile Dundee and Mad Max, and launching the late Spartacus star Andy Whitfield. Signed to global agency William Morris Endeavor, he went on to make the cult sci-fi Infini, a Netflix title that topped the box office across much of Asia, and Science Fiction Volume One: The Osiris Child, released through Lionsgate, Hulu and Amazon. More recently he produced the upcoming series Black Sunday and the Russell Crowe MMA film Beast in Me. After years working mainly in sci-fi, fantasy and horror, this is a deliberate change of key.
And it’s a local one. Lane Cove isn’t just a backdrop here, it’s “a huge part of the heart and soul of the film”, shot largely in and around the suburb, with the production leaning on community goodwill from local clubs and organisations. Abbess likes the thought that audiences in every country the film reaches will get to see a slice of Lane Cove on the big screen.
As for whether the band actually makes it to America, Abbess is keeping that close.
“We’ve tried very hard to keep a lot of the true story, past a certain point, away from the world,” he says.
For a film that started in a school playground, it’s gone a long way. And it’s still, at its core, a story about our own backyard.
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