Was he worried that the genuine article was closing ground on Series 7? "When we heard about Survivor, we were like, 'Oh it's so tacky, nothing will ever happen with that.' Were we wrong!"Up against some stiff competition, Series 7 is provocative with the worst of them. So convincing is it, in fact, that you might accuse Minahan of having his cake and blowing it away with a big, shiny gun. And when he tries to pooh-pooh this complaint, the issue seems to get away from him faster than Jack Dee out of a celebrity compound. "I'm presenting it with quotation marks, for your consideration .. it's very exaggerated. I want to piss people off so they'll talk about it..."After a bit more to and fro-ing, Minahan disarmingly acknowledges the problem. "I had to make a film that was exploitative and violent did I make a film about exploitation or an exploitation film? I'm not sure, but it's a very exciting position to be in!"Were it simply an extended skit, Series 7 would be unexceptional.
In the event, the film's cracked love story does considerably more than its fun pastiches to reveal the simplistic and invasive "truths" of reality TV. Dawn and Jeff's tortuous relationship is a Jerry Springer humdinger: Dawn loves Jeff, who loves neither her nor his wife; Dawn, though, must kill Jeff to secure her unborn child's future And so on... Actors Brooke Smith (Buffalo Bill's captive in The Silence of the Lambs) and Glenn Fitzgerald bite their lips and play it straight. "Jeff and Dawn are there to give the film a heart, because otherwise there'd be nothing at stake," says Minahan "It's a very believable relationship .. It's also high melodrama, a total soap-opera.
But it's credit to the actors that they found the truth in that story."Minahan's next project is a psychological thriller set in contemporary LA, and it promises to be no less a queasy mix of violence and high emotion. How do I know this? Minahan lets me into a secret he's hoping to emulate the style of Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriting "genius" (his words) behind films such as Basic Instinct, Sliver and Showgirls. You deserve a couple of weeks on The Contenders for an admission like that.'Series 7' is out on 1 June. A lot of the darkness lifted last week. What with the latest findings in stem-cell research, I am wondering whether we may not have the whole life problem wrapped up in the next year or so.
