Into the Library with Aimée-Lee Xu Hsien

Aimée-Lee> It was an absolute joy directing a promo spot for the ABC. The bombastic nature of this kooky narrative was right up my alley. I just love characters who are super passionate about something (in this case, ears), but ultimately slightly inept. The agency had originally imagined a large man in a moo-moo as the Supreme Leader but as soon as I read the script I knew I wanted Sabrina Chan D’Angelo, an actor I’ve worked with before and who we ultimately cast, and I knew I wanted her in a hot pink power suit. 

This spot is all about flying the freak flag high and was just so fun to put together. Working with the team at Uncanny Valley to record the soundtrack was wild. My brief to them was a Flaming Lips concert - but even bigger. They really elevated it into a TVC meets rock opera. 

Aimée-Lee> Potentially my favourite thing I’ve directed. I wanted to craft a narrative that was both poignant and playful. It’s about a young person dealing with the death of their mother, and finding solace and freedom in her old blue wedding dress. I struck gold in casting William Oakley as the lead - he is incredibly gentle and highly attuned as an actor, capable of delivering really beautiful nuances in his performance in a totally instinctive manner. This was also the first time I’ve directed something using a tracking vehicle, and I was like a little kid in a candy store when the Scorpio Ops team arrived on set with their huge camera crane and cars.

Aimée-Lee> This was one of the first short films I directed and is really special to me. Made with no budget but looks a million bucks on screen. It stars a young Hunter Page-Lochard and Lâle Teoman, who also wrote it. Both their careers have really skyrocketed since then. We had a tiny crew of about six people on this shoot and we all slept on the set. It was filmed in an empty shed on a rural property in Bathurst, and our Production Designer dressed the entire space with everything you see on screen. People always say not to work with animals and we had six dogs in one scene - they were provided by enthusiastic Bathurst locals and none of them were trained for film. In the final scene I got to pay homage to the feasting scene in the Robin Williams film Hook, which I just loved as a child so much. 

Aimée-Lee> It was a real thrill to shoot this bizarre neo-Western about a matriarch gone wild in this old pioneer town. I’m really proud of the huge narrative arc we managed to cram into a short song - it’s got a fight scene, a wedding, and some domestic man-slavery to boot. The art direction and the tongue-in-cheek story is very ‘me’. We only had four hours of shooting time to film everything you see here and I have no idea how we managed to pull it all off. The bump out time was incredibly strict and by the time we were filming the last shot it was just myself, DOP and an actor while everyone else in the crew was madly dumping all our gear outside the main entrance as the gate was being closed.

Aimée-Lee> These scripts were very basic when they came to me, but I really embellished the characters and the settings in order to cram as much detailed storytelling as possible into 15 seconds. I love the physical comedy and the overall silliness, and the situations are also so relatable.

Aimée-Lee> This was made around the time I decided I wanted to move into TVCs, having cut my teeth with so many music videos and short films. I didn’t have anything on my reel that looked like a TVC and so I visualised this as a commercial. The opening scene for example, has an aesthetic of a breakfast ad, which is what I was aiming for. In typical Aimée-Lee fashion though, the characters are all slightly offbeat. I wanted to subvert this generic, white, upper-middle class family as much as possible, but also had to keep in mind the country artist’s main audience in Nashville and how far they were willing to push it.

Aimée-Lee> How do you murder a band of alt-country musicians with line-dancing? That’s exactly what we ended up doing in this clip, featuring an evil, vindictive Santa Claus played by Andy Golledge, locked away in a creepy basement where it is eternally Christmas. When I was a kid, I loved the horror-comedy Christmas film Gremlins. That 80's aesthetic, with its bold, lurid colours and over-the-top characters, is exactly what I wanted to pay tribute to here. We made this clip with a lot of free beer from Young Henrys, who sponsored it. 

Aimée-Lee> Two women lose control of themselves in orgasmic bliss in the cinema. Who wouldn’t want to direct that? The first thing I gravitate toward when reading a script is the characters, and I had a lot of fun writing a detailed backstory for these two women, which I presented in the pitch and also used when working with the actors. Particularly as the clients and agency really wanted a sense of their friendship to shine on screen, without using dialogue. Needless to say, the director’s cut is way raunchier than what you see here.