The Illustrated Family Doctor almost ended Kriv Stenders' career before it got started. A surreal comedy  about white-collar office life with subtle body-horror elements. Doctor was unusual in Australian cinema,  confusion in how to market the picture and middling reviews meant it got pulled from cinemas before  finding an audience. Yet in retrospect, it’s a fascinating first film, an enthusiastic grab-bag of genres  and proudly cinephilic. It also sits at the end of the celluloid era, giving it a tactile edge that we can  no longer take for granted.  What's also interesting is the way Stenders dealt with the critical and commercial failure. Doctor had a  budget of 3 million dollars, but the director was prepared to use guerrilla filmmaking tactics and go  micro-budget (with Blacktown and Boxing Day) to put himself back in the game. This ultimately led to  directing Red Dog (2011), one of the most successful Australian films ever.  But as movies have gotten dumber and more visually homogenised, Doctor is an ambitious curio aging  nicely in the cellar. Currently seen as a cult film for those in the know, it sits ready for critical revision  and exploration again. But we must first go back to the director’s personal heartbreak on release..  Kriv Stenders kindly sat on the therapy couch to explore what happened and his thoughts on  IFD 20 years later ..    The cutthroat and sometimes absurd corporate world personified by  Emma Randall In The Illustrated Family Doctor (2005)    Mike Retter: Before going into the making of the film and your artistic intentions, let's go straight to Doctor's release, its reception and where that put you in your career. What happened?  Kriv Stenders: Back in 2005, even though we had Palace Films distributing it, who at that point were the  champion of Australian films, despite them trying to work out how to market the film and connect with an  audience, it failed spectacularly at the box office. It made something like $34,000 in its first week of release on a budget of $3m. When you make those sort of numbers, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, the film ends  up losing screens straight away, then again the following week and it's just a death by a thousand cuts  or death by a hundred screens.  At that point in time, there was a lot of hand-wringing and self-flagellation about the state of the Australian  film industry. A lot of self-hatred and I think the film became a bit of a whipping boy. I'll never forget there  was a front cover of The Age or Sydney Morning Herald magazine insert where they had a picture of  Samuel Johnson on the cover looking really quite unwell and the headline was "Why is our film industry  so sick?" And I remember reading that thinking, "Oh my God, I am toast." And it was a very dark, dark  couple of weeks.    The Illustrated Family Doctor (2005)    I was young when it came out, but I do remember some of the reviews, they weren’t all super-negative, but a bit middling.. I think they were middling, it was often given threes out of five. (Author's note: It is commonly perceived by the Australian public that locally-made films are championed  and get overly positive reviews, which could equate to en extra star out of five. Thus a three-star review  in the public's eyes could mean two.. ) I'll never forget, I remember David Stratton telling me on the way to an interview in an elevator at the ABC building saying, "Oh, by the way, I didn't like your film. I'm not going to give it a good review, but I just  want you to know that, because I'd hate to have met and interviewed you, then you see the review and  it's a bad one. I just want to pre-warn you..” and that was a bit devastating for me because then I had to do an interview with them which was a bit surreal.  It was when I realized that there are three certain things in life, death, taxes and film reviews. And I've  learnt not to read them now because for every good review there's a bad one and for every bad review  there's a good one and they kind of cancel each other out. So, you know, you can't expect every review to  be great and you can't expect every review to be bad. So why put yourself through that pain? I'm just trying to look at it all very philosophically now.  For me, it was probably more a dismantling of my own expectations. I was a little bit taken aback and  naive about how people would respond to it. My assumption was that everyone would understand the tone, appreciate the style and find it funny. That's when I realised, audiences don't owe you anything. You owe  the audience everything. And whilst the films that influenced it are ones I love, I realised it's a diverse  audience and not everyone likes what you like. Tastes can be very diverse. And I think sometimes IFD  was maybe a little bit too clever for its own good.  The reviews sort of shocked me a little bit and I went, "Wow, people have got an opinion and there's  nothing I can do about that". I realised I had to really expand my wheelhouse. It was important to look at  different styles and genres. Eventually I made Red Dog, a family film, which ended up connecting with  audiences on a huge level. You grow and learn from your films, from your experience, you learn from  reviews, you begin to understand how audiences and the market works, how culture works and where  you sit within that universe.    Samuel Johnson after reading initial reviews of The Illustrated Family Doctor (2005)    Samuel Johnson gives a great, sickly and cuckolded performance.. But at the time in 2005, his  voice was burned into our brains as the narrator of Channel Ten's drama The Secret Life Of Us  and voice-over for Hungry Jacks whopper commercials.. Could this have affected the initial  release, audiences and critics finding it hard to accept the guy who said “The Burgers Are Better  At Hungry Jacks” as the lead in an intellectual body horror?  Maybe, maybe.. Yeah .. Before you answer that question - I would say it probably did effect things, but this is a case of  where the film dates really well as those TV memories diminish and we can now view the film on  its own terms.  Thanks for that.  Look, I really liked Sam. He just had a quality about him, this gormless quality that I thought was perfect  for the character. To me 99% of directing is casting. I like casting that subverts people's expectations and  he just has a physicality, his lankiness, he just personified Gary for me. As to whether the public  perceived him in a different way, whether that had any effect on the box office, I'm not quite sure. I just  think people didn't know about the film. The film was released, those that didn't like it gave it a really bad  rap and whoever liked it were few and far between.   Blacktown (2005) was shot on a Sony PD-150 camcorder in standard definition interlaced video on DV-Cam tape.   So what did that do for your career? Where were you standing as a film director after its release?  Well, it was a dark couple of months. It was my first movie. Its a pretty brutal industry, you really only get  one shot or chance. Even though there was a lot of love for the film in obscure quarters, there was a  certain contingent of people who really enjoyed the film and appreciated what it was doing, I just think that  overall there was a general consensus that the film was a failure and that I had my shot, that was it, that  was my attempt and I blew it.  But interestingly and thankfully I had already shot a micro budget, Dogma95 style film before I'd made  The Illustrated Family Doctor, a film called Blacktown, so my editor Gabby Muir decided to say “Hey,  listen Kriv, let's finish Blacktown”. She kind of grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, dragged me out of  my depression and said let's complete the film. So we finished editing this picture I had shot in 2002, cut  it on Final Cut Pro Three, got it ready, spat it out on DVD, sent it to the Sydney Film Festival where it  screened as part of the Australian sidebar in the festival that year and ended up winning the Audience  Award.  So in the space of a few months I'd gone from zero to hero and that film rescued me. It put me back on the  rails and the fact that the film was made for virtually no money and was a very different kind of picture to  The Illustrated Family Doctor really reset or recalibrated my position, which I think threw a lot of people.