In 2002, Tony Ayres' broke your heart when HIV interrupted lives in Walking On Water. Five years later he did it again with the deeply personal The Home Song Stories. Now he's simply working on scaring the hell out of you. The period drama Cut Snake leans heavily on prison thrillers and while there's no HIV or immigrant heartache, Ayres ensures some of the staples that are close to his creative heart have been smuggled in.

Loosely based on the fire-bombing of Brisbane's Whisky Au Go Go nightclub, Cut Snake opens in Sydney circa 1974 when Pommie (a bruising Sullivan Stapleton) leaves jail. He is intent on meeting up with former cell mate 'Sparra' Farrell (Alex Russel). But Sparra has moved to Melbourne, started afresh, plans marrying his girlfriend Paula and doesn't want to be dragged back into Pommie's dangerous world. Fate, of course, has other ideas.

On paper, and to some extent on screen, Cut Snake is the kind of genre flick from a world that fans of Getting Square, Two Hands and Underbelly immediately understand. “I always loved Blake (Ayshford)'s script,” said Ayres. “The way it twists and turns, like a cut snake really, appealed to me.” Directing a genre film was something new for Ayres who, these days, is better known for his work in TV: notably The Slap, Glitch, Bogan Pride, Nowhere Boys and Christos Tsiolkas' upcoming Barracuda.

“It is definitely a different kind of experience,” he said, “but as a filmmaker I'm always looking for different kinds of approaches to my work. This is a classic three-act genre movie, so trying to satisfy the genre tropes while smuggling in bits of the story was that I found most interesting – like the central relationship drama – was appealing.”

And twist and turn it does, that relationship taking the narrative into truly unexpected territory. For what happens in prison doesn't always stay in prison much to Sparra's distress and Paula's shock. But rather than give in to stock characters and stereotyped situations, Ayshford and Ayres take you somewhere movies like these never dare to go. And they had fun getting there.

“Absolutely,” said Ayres with a laugh. “I was really interested in setting up the heterosexual paradigm, then subverting it. But also in the idea that villains are usually 2D characters who don't change. Essentially it's a love story but it's also an opera.” Setting the story in 1974 enabled him to expand those ideas in ways that wouldn't be possible now. “The choices that Sparra makes made more sense in that period. Attitudes are so different now that I think it would be harder to understand his choices, and why he felt he had no choice. Pommie, Sparra, Paula - they're all creatures of their period.”

None the less, the themes still resonate loudly today. “The world is not black and white, and things we think are certain, when you explore them further, are very uncertain.” It sounds like a recurring theme for Ayres' work; an honesty which has made it so tangible. “Yes, I think so,” he chuckles. “And my life too.”

// COLIN FRASER