Garry Maddox, The Age, reports
FOR a director with two Oscar nominations and five AFI awards, David Bradbury has been living dangerously to showcase his latest documentary in cinemas.
He has hired cinemas for one-off screenings around the country to convince distributors there is an audience for On Borrowed Time, his feature-length documentary about veteran filmmaker Paul Cox.
As well as looking at Cox's prolific career - 22 films and 11 documentaries including Lonely Hearts, Man of Flowers and My First Wife - it focuses on his near death from liver cancer and recovery after a transplant almost two years ago.
''He's a living legend who cheated the grave which seemed almost certain it was going to swallow him up,'' Bradbury says.
But trying to find that audience is costing him dearly.
''I'm one step ahead of the bailiff,'' Bradbury admits. ''I've got to come up with six grand to pay the editor the rest of his fee for doing this long version by the end of this month.
''I've had to pay for the posters and the web design, and take the punt that I can actually make a go of it, then entice a film distributor to come on board. I'm somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 out of pocket.''
Bradbury, 60, became one of the country's leading documentary makers when two of his films were nominated for Oscars in the '80s - Frontline, a portrait of combat cameraman Neil Davis, and Chile: Hasta Cuando?, about General Pinochet's brutal rule.
After getting to know the director, Bradbury began filming interviews when it looked like Cox was dying.
He also interviewed many of Cox's friends and collaborators, including David Wenham, Phillip Adams, Aden Young, Jacqueline McKenzie, Wendy Hughes, Chris Haywood and Bob Ellis, who is full of praise but intriguingly describes him as a ''prophet/charlatan'' who he wouldn't let near either his life savings or his daughter.
''Paul fortunately was generous enough to see it as a tongue-in-cheek comment,'' Bradbury says. ''I wanted to show Paul with those that loved him but also those that had a sense of his human foibles.''
While ABC Arts, Screen Australia and Screen NSW put up $240,000 for a 57-minute TV documentary, Bradbury believes the 86-minute version is one of his best films.
''The clips from Paul's film career are nostalgic flashbacks for the audience who liked those films in the '70s and '80s,'' he says. ''It's an attempt to see … if there's an art-house audience who are interested in looking at the themes that Paul made his films about - love and fidelity within marriage, marriage breakdowns and facing our mortality.''
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