Love The Beast

'Live with passion!'- Tony Robbins

Love the Beast
Director/Producer/Editor:Eric Bana

Eric Bana is famous for being a great Australian actor in successful films such as Chopper, The Nugget, Troy, The Castle, however there is another side to Bana that most people don’t know about and that is his passion for cars and motor racing. Love the beast tells the world of Bana’s knowledge of cars, after being brought up in Melbourne surrounded by engines influenced by his father’s love of cars, and spending most of his spare time tinkering under the bonnet of his prized possession a 1974 XB Falcon Coupe. The Falcon Coupe remains Eric Bana’s dream car and the same group of friends from his teens years help him with his racing career.

As a person who knows very little about cars I found the film very interesting and felt that the technical aspects and music along with Eric Bana’s likeable, honest personality allows viewers of all walks of life to connect to Eric’s emotional attachment to the car. We all have some strong emotional attachment to something in our lives and the car in Love the Beast can be used as a metaphor for our own loves.

The excitement and feeling of the beginning of the race is rubbed off onto the audience with pumping, tension building music and high helicopter shots.
The comic book style portrayal of the race is quite interesting, not necessarily a montage rather a clever way to show all aspects of the car during the race at the same time and is quite visually pleasing. Close ups of his father’s Thunderbird portray the car as an invincible, God like machine.

The film gives an insight and another perspective into the life of a ‘celebrity’. Bana reveals the people closest to him including his family and friends which shows the audience a ‘real’ ordinary human rather then what we assume through the tabloids.
I felt that using Jay Leno, Jeremy Clarkson and Dr Phil was a little corny, trying to make the documentary a life lesson. However it is more of a personal story and dream then a documentary that explains the attraction of speed and vintage cars.