Paying homage to the cheeky Confessions comedies of the 1970s, Secrets of a Wallaby Boy follows a horny young gay chap who thinks his new job as a cycle courier might help score him some action. But he has no idea about the sinister truth behind Wallaby, Inc…

With the film now available on Prime Video and Tubi, we spoke to some of its key cast and crew, including writer and director Kieron Moore (who, when he’s not making movies, is also part of the STARBURST team!)…

STARBURST: Can you remember the first film you saw that prompted you to say to yourself, “I want to do ‘that’ for a living!”?

Kieron Moore: It was my teenage fandom for Star Wars – particularly the prequels! – and for Doctor Who that first got me thinking about how film and TV is made. But my early creative influences were mostly TV comedy, actually. In school, I used to watch shows like That Mitchell and Webb Look and then make little comedy sketches with my friends, and then at uni I made a web series which was basically The Thick of It but in a student union!

In recent years, I’ve moved more into independent film, because to make TV in the professional world, you have to have someone commission you, and that involves meetings and getting people to like you, and probably having to go to London.

Which filmmakers have most inspired you along the way, and have any in particular directly informed your style, would you say?

There’s a broad, disparate range of influences you can probably pick up on from my work! On the screenwriting side, Russell T Davies has been a big inspiration, as has the irreverent comedy of Chris Morris. When it comes to the actual filmmaking, I have a lot of respect for John Waters – how he made his early movies for very little money, and how he knew his niche and made movies that were unashamedly queer – in a way that mainstream cinema still hasn’t caught up to. There’s a reason those films became much-loved and have endured for decades, and I find that all very inspirational.

The sex comedy returned after a long hiatus with American Pie in 1999 and, for better or for worse, never really went away, but Wallaby is very much a direct homage to the output of ‘70s Britain, most notably Robin Askwith’s Confessions series. Can you identify the keys to successfully replicating their tone in the present day?

When you hear about the Confessions movies today, your first instinct can be to assume they’re really dated and sexist. And okay, some of the humour is ‘of its time’, but they’re absolutely not nasty or mean-spirited films, and that’s because it’s always the Robin Askwith character who’s the butt of the jokes. He’s a well-meaning idiot who finds himself out of his depth. The tone is cheeky rather than leery, and a lot of the humour is very silly. I carried all of that over into Wallaby.

So what was it in particular that prompted you to resurrect the subgenre? We can’t recall anyone else having a crack at it since 2004’s Sex Lives of the Potato Men!

It was in the lockdown of early 2021 that I was watching Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema series, and there was an episode on British comedy with a segment about the Confessions films. I hadn’t seen Confessions of a Window Cleaner before and thought I’d check it out. I quickly went down a rabbit hole of watching more of these movies – well, I didn’t have much else to do at the time – and then thought, these are fun, but what if there was a gay version?

I had a lot of fun putting the first draft of the script together, and then sent it to [Wallaby’s producer] Pete Tomkies, who I knew from the film festival circuit. When the lockdown was over, we met up, and decided we’d actually have a shot at making this thing. I’d always had it in mind that my next project would be a micro-budget feature, and before long, we were deep in pre-production!

You mention it was micro-budget, are you allowed to give us an idea of what Wallaby was made for? 

Later on, when we were trying to look professional to impress distributors and festivals, we tactically described the budget as “under a million”. Which is true. But “under twenty thousand” is also true. At the beginning, Pete and I tried to work out what the cheapest we could make it for was, and decided on twenty thousand.

Most impressive! What route did yourself and Pete go through to pull that budget together?

This budget was mushed together from a range of sources: a crowdfunder; an investment from FAB Global Media; the profits my mid-length film Spectrum had made on streaming; some of my own savings; I sold some old LEGO I found in my parents’ garage; and loose change we found down the backs of sofas. We ended up with around fifteen grand – so less than our minimum – but decided, to hell with it, let’s make the thing anyway. I’m really proud of how good a film my team managed to make with so little, and of the fact that – excepting a couple of student volunteers – we were able to pay everyone.

Every production has its fair share of challenges, but given your severe budget limitations, we’d imagine you had to wrestle with more than your average film; of them all, what would you say was the most demanding challenge you had to overcome?

One of the challenges of working with a micro-budget is that you have to get a lot done with not many people. On a typical shoot day, we had a crew of six or seven, which went up to a maximum of eleven for the ‘set piece’ days with more complex scenes.

What this meant was that everyone was doing jobs which, on a ‘properly’ budgeted movie, would be split between several people. I was director but also a unit driver; Katie Widdowson is credited as production director but covered everything to do with props, costume, set design, and also a lot of the catering. There was one day where pretty much everyone had to be an extra for a montage sequence, which meant that our first AD had to be the sound recordist while the sound guy was busy in front of camera – that kind of thing. It was all very intense!

But as well as a challenge, working with a small crew is something I enjoy. If you have six or seven good people who are dedicated to the project, you can achieve a lot, and you get to bond as a team more than you would otherwise. I don’t know how I’d cope if I had to be in charge of fifty people!

Hopefully it won’t be too long before you find out! So can you recall a particular shot or scene that proved the most difficult to pull off, whether it be budgetary limitations or otherwise? 

I was expecting those set piece days, with big locations and more complex scenes, to be the most difficult part of the shoot. But in fact, the toughest day was Day 2, when we were shooting some simple scenes of Tim and Jade at home.

The problem was, we were using my small flat, which didn’t have anywhere near enough space to put all our crew and equipment. For each shot, pretty much every spare inch of floor not seen on camera was covered in kit bags, and having to constantly move everything around cost us so much time. We ended up falling really behind that day, which worried me – if that happened every day, the film would basically not get made.

Thankfully, none of the other locations proved as difficult, and my amazing 1st AD Becky Casey managed to reschedule everything we’d missed into another day.

Speaking of challenges, it must be tricky to promote the film given that its plot goes in some very… erm… ‘unexpected’ directions, without giving anything away. Has it been difficult to resist revealing more of these aspects of Wallaby upfront in order to broaden its appeal? 

We’ve been focusing the marketing on the retro sex comedy angle, and it absolutely is that – fans of that genre won’t be disappointed or feel misled. But you’re right, the story does enter different territory in the second half.

I’m too cynical about the state of the gig economy, and the way workers are treated by all these new tech companies, that I couldn’t write a script about a delivery app courier without venturing into the dark side of it. One of my inspirations there was Boots Riley’s fantastic film Sorry to Bother You, which starts off as this daft comedy about a call centre worker before taking a seriously unexpected, dystopian twist.

So, there is something like that in Wallaby, and it has been tempting to put more of that into the marketing, but we’ve kept ourselves to just hinting at it – saying no more than I’m telling you now! The best way to experience the film is not knowing what’s coming, and hopefully preserving that experience will ultimately help the film to spread by word of mouth.

Wallaby’s cast ranges from unknowns to industry legends such as Mark Benton, Laurence R Harvey, and, of course, Colin Baker himself. As a longtime Doctor Who fan, how did you handle the fact that you were now working with the Sixth Doctor himself?

I was so thrilled when Colin liked the script and agreed to come onboard as the voice of Bruce, the AI wallaby mascot of the delivery app. Working with a Doctor is the dream of many a creative nerd, and directing the Sixth Doctor himself as a character of my own creation – wow!

We had a half day recording with Colin over video call, and he was a delight to work with. My main direction was that Bruce should sound like a somewhat flamboyant British actor who’s been hired by Wallaby Inc to voice their mascot, but is going too corny with the Australian accent – Colin took this and ran with it. It’s such a funny performance that adds so much to the film

Brandon McCaffrey [who plays the titular Wallaby Boy, Tim Coaster] is also a big Who fan, and joined the call from a side room at his day job. I was worried one of us was going to get sidetracked asking Colin about Who, but we both managed to keep it professional!

As a writer, how much research did you have to do to nail Bruce’s Australian dialect? Were there many Neighbours marathons involved?

Nah, I spent half an hour googling Australian slang and then winged it.

Fair dinkum, mate. So from a filmmaker’s perspective, what’s the most important lesson you learnt from directing your first feature? Any cautionary tales you can impart to those readers wanting to follow in your footsteps?

While the shoot was intense, the two hardest parts of the whole process were at either end – finding funding and finding distribution. Those are the bits they don’t teach you at film school!

And, I wish I’d thought earlier about approaching distributors. From pre-production through to post, I was putting that off as a “for later” problem, which was probably fair enough, but then I continued to put it off for another year while we entered festivals, meaning that there’s been almost two years between finishing post-production and the film getting released. Thankfully, we’ve now found a wonderful distribution partner in Bohemia Media, but I do wonder if we should have found them a year earlier!

You touched briefly on your time at film school there; it’s often a subject of debate amongst established filmmakers over whether its an essential route into the industry versus the ‘just get your iPhone out and start shooting’ model. Where do you stand?

I did a degree in Film and TV Production at York Uni, which personally worked for me, and not just because I was nowhere near mature enough at 18 to go out into the real world. I’m still not quite there, in fact. That course did a good job of teaching me a lot of the essential skills of filmmaking, though you shouldn’t assume that a degree alone is guaranteed to put you on the path to being a successful filmmaker.

Where I am today is as much down to what I did at uni outside of the course than within it – I was taking part in the student TV society, making my own web series, making friends with similar interests, that kind of thing.

Of course, skipping that entirely and just finding like-minded people to make movies with is a very valid route too – especially given that higher education, particularly for the arts, is in a much worse place now than it was when I was a student. Everyone’s got to find the route that works for them.

The UK film industry has always struggled, but seems to be completely on its arse right now. Can it be saved, and if so, how?

Yeah, it’s bad. A lot of people I know who are professional film and TV freelancers are struggling. In terms of the higher-end, well-budgeted stuff, there’s a lot less being made. Part of the problem is that the studios, and especially the relatively new streaming-based services, have been putting too much money into a smaller amount of really high-budgeted blockbuster movies and series, and neglecting to fund much low- or mid-budget stuff.

For now, I don’t know what the solution is, other than wait for commissioners to realise that funding ten £20 million movies is a better bet – and provides more employment – than one £200 million one. It’s an industry of peaks and troughs, and it’s in a deep trough right now.

The good news, though, is that there’ll always be idiots like me for whom even £1 million is a pipe dream and who are happy to go out and get stuff made with what little we have. It’s not a British example, but my favourite movie of 2024 was Hundreds of Beavers, which was made by a crew of six with a super low budget – though admittedly more than Wallaby – and it’s been really successfully self-distributed. It warms my heart. Indie filmmaking will always march on!

Returning to Wallaby, are there any plans to take Tim Coaster on any other adventures in the future? If money was no obstacle, for example, what would a Wallaby trilogy look like?

Brandon has an idea for a sequel – which he’d worked out before we’d even finished shooting – called Travels of a Wallaby Boy, where the characters all go to Amsterdam. I think he just wants a free holiday.

Personally, I’m reluctant to do sequels unless this becomes super-successful, but if I did, I’d probably go down the Confessions route of having Tim take on a different job every film, and getting into scrapes while doing it. Like with him being a cycle courier in this first film, I’d want them to be jobs that have some kind of modern relevance – maybe Secrets of an Uber Driver, Secrets of an Influencer, or Secrets of an SEO Consultant. Actually, maybe not that last one.

And outside of the Wallabyverse, what other genres would you like to explore in the future as a storyteller?

Anything I write is always going to lean into comedy, as I’m not very good at taking things seriously, and I intend to keep the focus on LGBTQ+ subject matter. That’s the remit of my company, Weird Rainbow Films – that most queer movies tend to be serious, issues-driven dramas, and it can get pretty grim, so there’s a niche for lighter, more crowd-pleasing fare aimed at the LGBTQ+ community.

But within that remit, I’d love to explore some more high-concept or genre-based stories. Maybe it’s time for me to write my queer vampire movie. And when that all takes off and makes me rich, I can make my sci-fi epic, Space Twinks. It could be a Megalopolis-level catastrophe, but it’ll be a laugh.

We learnt many of Tim’s secrets during Wallaby’s runtime, let’s wrap things up with you sharing one of yours. Tell us a secret, Kieron…

I stole someone’s wine in a bar last week. Accidentally. I picked up a drink which was in front of me and started drinking, then later realised it wasn’t actually mine. But no one got angry with me, so I think I got away with it.

Secrets of a Wallaby Boy is now available to stream on Prime Video and Tubi.