Biography
An early reader and avid TV junkie, Paul Anthony Nelson grew up as an obsessive devotee of DC and Marvel comic books, in between trips to the movies every school holidays and a childhood which took far too much advantage of the early days of VHS players. But it was seeing 'Die Hard' on VHS at the tail end of the 1980s that sent him on the path of devoting his life to the movies, and he's never looked back.
Bored one afternoon in 1990, he took his parents' new VHS-C camcorder and made a ridiculous short all by himself - acting opposite a man made of pillows with a football for a head, cutting in-camera and scored by a film playing on the TV as he was shooting - but barely picked up a camera over the next six years, only making a few silly homemade comedy sketches with mates, until he discovered the late and lamented White Gloves Film Festival, where emerging filmmakers made cut-in-camera shoot-to-show one-reel films on Super 8mm and 16mm over a weekend, not seeing them until they were projected on the big screen in front of an audience over a month later.
His first White Gloves short, (1996's 'The Ritualistic Dance of the Newly Single Man') was a harsh lesson on how not to light a film or pack 30 minutes of story into 3 minutes, which so appalled him he burned his copy and vowed to quit filmmaking altogether. Thankfully, his second, 1999's 'In Broad Daylight', about a vampire who discovers he's immune to sunlight, went over much better, as did the third and most ambitious yet, 2002's '2:24', a (very) loose parody of the hit TV show '24', where an Afro-wearing, moustache-slinging hero had 2 minutes and 24 seconds to save a kidnapped girl from various villains.
With his friend and '2:24' collaborator, Paul co-directed the 2004 music video 'Platinum Scissors' for Melbourne indie band Life Imitating (later Bluestar), which screened on ABC TV's iconic music video program 'Rage' and Foxtel's Channel V. Next, he made 2008's 'Interchange', an ensemble drama about AFL football fans, which won a prize in the Super Short Film category at the 2012 L.A. All Sports Film Festival. In 2009, he directed the backstage comedy short 'Why Must The Show Go On?' to a successful premiere at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image, and he and his partner Perri Cummings formed the independent production company Cinema Viscera, aiming to create fresh spins on beloved genre conventions for 21st century audiences.
In 2010, Paul graduated with High Distinction from RMIT with a Diploma in Screen & Media; his graduation short, 'Scope' - a tale of a blind female sniper, shot in a 1970s 'grindhouse' style - displaying a grasp of film history and playful subversion of genre tropes. In 2011, Paul entered the ABCs of Death 26th Director contest with the horror short 'T is for Talk Radio' (aka 'Talkback'), a "blunt force social commentary" upon the evils of manipulative conservative media.
After a five year hiatus of writing and development, Paul wrote, directed and edited the short thriller 'Cigarette' in 2016. A "cautionary fable" about assumed consent, as male privilege crashes headlong into female pain, 'Cigarette' world premiered at Monster Fest in Melbourne.
After this, Paul and Perri made Cinema Viscera's first feature film, the modern comedy/Film Noir 'Trench', premiering in 2018. Costing just $27,363, 'Trench' was the first ever feature-length film to premiere at the Setting Sun Film Festival, screening in Melbourne's historic Sun Theatre.
Cinema Viscera's second feature, the modern Australian gothic horror-thriller 'Apparitions', again made on a micro budget of just $55,000, made its world premiere at Melbourne's Monster Fest in 2021 and was released in the US and UK by 4Digital Media.
After making a couple of no-budget shorts ('Interchange' and 'Hungry') in and around their homes (the first due to Covid-19 lockdowns, the second just for fun) in 2020 and 2022, Paul and Perri made the ambitious short film 'Three Sisters', using Shakespeare's 'King Lear' as a springboard to an immersive comic tragedy submitting to film festivals over in 2024/25, all the while working on features in various stages of development.
