Cade Lucas
Residents from Melbourne’s west who’ve been settling in for a bit of Netflix and chill lately, might have noticed some familiar scenery.
The 2015 Australian indie film, Pawno, which was shot in and around Barkly Street and the Nicholson Street mall, hit the America streaming giant on March 29, giving subscribers across Australian, New Zealand and beyond a window into the Footscray CBD.
As the name suggests, the film written by and starring Damian Hill and directed by Paul Ireland, is set in a suburban pawn shop, and where over the course of one day, the lives of 12 loosely connected locals intersect in a mix of drama, romance, violence and plenty of laid back humour.
In real life, Underwoods pawn shop at 217 Barkley Street, is Barkly Street Pawnbrokers & Jewellers and the owner, rather than the ageing and occasionally malevolent Les Underwood (John Brumpton), is Paul Anastasi, who along with his father, has run the store for 30 years.
Mr Anastasi said he only realised Pawno had been added to Netflix when his phone started buzzing with messages last weekend.
“I found out about it by one of my local jewellers watching it on his TV,” he said.
“Unfortunately our ugly green counters are a dead giveaway.”
While he’s received plenty more texts and photos of people’s TV screens since Pawno premiered on the platform, Mr Anastasi said those ugly green counters were one of the few parts of the shop that remained the same from when it was actually filmed.
“Unfortunately due to being ram raided, the shop front doesn’t look the same anymore,” he said of the different colour scheme, font and shop awning that greets his customers now compared to what is depicted in the film.
Unsurprisingly, Mr Anastasi said there were plenty of other differences between the daily life of being pawnbroker and what was portrayed in Pawno too.
“I think they hammed it up a bit,” he said.
“We’re not chasing people up for debts like that.
“The movie just lent into the stereotype that pawnbrokers are dodgy.”
Not that he resents the movie, far from it.
“Just seeing how it all sort of goes down and how they operated, it was cool” said Mr Anastasi of the moving making process which began when members of the production team came into his store for a visit.
“They came in, had a look at the layout and we lent them some stock and gave them the keys to roller shutters and the store for a few of the scenes.”
While Mr Anastasi’s old shop front was used extensively throughout the film, many of the indoor scenes were actually filmed in a vacant shop the producers rented a few doors up and which was fitted out to look like his.
It wasn’t the only thing belonging to him that they copied.
“They incorporated my dog which was nice, my dog’s memory lives on. Diesel lives,” Mr Anastasi said of his late pet staffy which inspired the use of a similar dog in the film.
But just like Diesel and the old shopfront, another feature of Pawno which is no longer around is its creator and star.
Hill died in 2018, just three years after his film premiered to rave reviews and he was heralded as Australia’s next star of the screen.
“It was really sad to hear that he passed,” said Mr Anastasi of Hill’s death.
“I didn’t have a great deal to do with him, but we had a few conversations. He was very easy to talk to and I think he was enjoying the process as much as I was.”
Pawno is streaming on Netflix now.
