Blue Mountains filmmaker Kane Guglielmi has sold the family’s Leura home for more than $1million to finance his first feature film Cooped Up, and the gamble appears to have paid off.
The quirky comedy which stars former Home and Away actor Charles Cottier and Wentworth’s Kathryn Beck, was filmed primarily between Katoomba and Leura in May and June, and will premiere in Sydney before the end of the year.
Guglielmi hopes Mountains cinemas will pick it up too.
“I would love it to play at Glenbrook cinema. My wife and I went there a lot to watch films ourselves,” said the 28-year-old, who grew up in Mt Riverview and attended Blaxland High, later moving to Blaxland and then Leura.
With a young family – his daughter Lucia is almost 12 months old – selling a home to finance a film could seem a big risk, but Guglielmi says “it’s not that big a deal.”
“People that don’t know us will think I’m crazy. I’ve wanted to do this for a very long time. I’ve built up our financial position over the last 10 years to do this,” Guglielmi said. “For us it was quite an easy decision.”
Having been burned badly in 2013 when a deal in Hollywood for a Michael Caine film from the 80s fell through, Guglielmi lost faith in the industry.
“I didn’t want to be in the film industry any more. If not for my wife [Nicole] I wouldn’t be in the industry. She kept pushing me and believed in me,” Guglielmi said.
That experience was a big motivating factor to finance Cooped Up himself.
“My dream has always been to make a film," Guglielmi said.
He has moved to the Kiama area now to be closer to family, and has several projects on the go – another fictional feature film, a true story feature film, a TV series and a web series.
Guglielmi’s short films have already drawn acclaim. In 2007, Useless gained entry into the prestigious New York International Film and Video Festival. In 2009, Dear Diary screened at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.
And in 2011, he beat campaigns by some of the country’s biggest corporate giants to win the top NSW/ACT honour at the Australian Cinematographers Society awards for his commercial for Emu Plains chocolate manufacturer, Zokoko.
People that don’t know us will think I’m crazy. I’ve wanted to do this for a very long time.
- Kane Guglielmi
