A blend of ‘The Warriors’ and ‘From Dusk Til Dawn’, ‘Proceeds’ is an all-female badass crime-horror caper with a bizarre dark comedy slant.

Styled in aesthetics from the Berlin techno underground, this powerful female gang rules the night. Their mission is to cut the hair off beautiful women and sell it on the black market but they soon find out they aren’t the only predators lurking the streets after dark.

Inspired partly by the ‘Piranha’ hair attacks in Venezuela.

Director’s Statement

The idea came about when I was introduced to famous barrister Charles Waterstreet (the TV series ‘Rake’ was made about his life) he wanted to fund a short film about a gang of women with shaved heads cutting off other womens hair. This was all inspired by similar attacks by female gangs on women in Venezuela and Brazil. I thought this was a great idea for a short film so I went away and wrote a short script and off we went!

The film took 3 years to make and took 4 years to release. Because of funding being sporadic, we shot the film in two parts, one proof of concept scene in 2015 and the bulk of it in 2017. There was one point where I nearly gave up on the film, it’s such hard work pulling favours with no money but I persisted and enlisted a great team with DOP Aaron McLisky and VFX company Gloria FX. Max Colt was our VFX producer. They helped create the vampire teeth and snakeskin of the evil women at the climax of the movie. Blood and gore effects were also done by them. Practical SFX was also designed by Lucy Wooflman, a very talented special effects make up artist in Sydney.

We shot on the Arri Alexa with Panavision Spherical PVintage lenses around the gritty, industrial area of Marrickville in Sydney, Australia, an area which looks like downtown LA and gave us an amazing look and feel. I wanted it to be dark and creepy and this was the perfect area to shoot at night with nobody around to bother us.

My main cinematic reference was ‘The Warriors’ a NY gangster film from the 70’s but I wanted to make it female focused and modernise it! I’d been travelling to Berlin each year and frequenting a night club called Berghain which has the most amazing fashion styles, a mix of black leather BDSM outfits meets sportswear and punk fashion. I wanted to blend that grunge rock look with a techno-punk aesthetic.

My main actor Sabrina Haley, I’d been following her on Instagram and she was the inspiration for Miss Hogg. She is the manager of a famous grunge rock bar in the city ‘Frankies’, and everyone knows her in that world. She’s a real life badass, she loves bats, the occult, demons, mostly dark stuff. She embraces it, so this film was perfect for her. ‘On brand’ you could say!

I cast from real life and she re-shaved her head for the role. She also got more tattoos between filming each section of the film including a neck tattoo saying I AM DEMON which further added to the vibe of the film…. a cheeky continuity issue that we got away with. It was quite hard to find a few shaven headed women who can act and look the part but I used Facebook to ask people if they had any friends with shaved heads. I actually cast one of my primary school friends Ashleigh Mcfarlane who happened to also live and party in Berlin and wore the alternative fashion style I was looking for. Since I had been inspired by the people and sights around me in Berlin, I ended up casting those people that I was originally fascinated by due to their unique styles and attitude.