‘He Died With A Felafel In His Hand’, John Birmingham’s cult diary of a terminal share-house hopper, is one of those books that entered into legend entirely through word of mouth. Richard Lowenstein, director of ‘Dogs in Space’, another legendary exploration of the flipside of destitute share-house living, immediately saw a kindred spirit when he picked up Birmingham’s book, and after enlisting his mate Noah Taylor to play the lead role, took on the challenge of bringing ‘Felafel’ to the screen.

‘It struck me as a quite endearing look at some different characters and scenarios,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t too aware of its reputation. I didn’t actually realise until just recently what sort of fan club the book has, especially up in Brisbane.

In adapting the book, Lowenstein had the challenge of creating a story and a group of consistent characters from the countless faces and anecdotes that make up Birmingham’s book. Using a few of the choice moments from the story as a base, he created a lead character, Danny who, he explains, was ea Frankenstein’s monster of a character that was a mish-mash of John, Noah Taylor and myself.’

Taylor’s involvement with ‘Felafel’ was so critical that the film was delayed by several months to allow the increasingly star-bound actor to work on an overseas production. As the book has no real dialogue, Lowenstein needed to do some serious research on share-house living to put words in the characters’ mouths.

‘I was living above a flat full of film school students and out of work actors,’ he explains. ‘Noah arrived with a couple of friends to be in one of their films and ended up there for two or three months. Being around them and either going out with them or going to the pub brought me in the loop to a lot of share-house style dialogue.

‘Noah himself is an extremely funny guy, and he’d just broken up with a girlfriend, so a lot of the dialogue would come from these group discussions. I would be scribbling on the butcher’s paper in the cafE, ripping off a corner and stuffing it in my pocket,’ he laughs.

‘The big rave that Flip gives to Danny at the end, talking about going to the rehab clinic, actually came from a friend ringing me up from the clinic and talking to me. I had the conversation and I realised afterwards how incredibly powerful it was, so I just wrote it down and used it in the film.’

Lowenstein’s adaptation has drawn a lot of criticism for its loose treatment of the source material, but he defends his choice to amalgamate characters and introduce a love interest as a natural evolution for the story.

‘It’s my own story but, in a way that I hope the fans appreciate, it’s actually John’s story that’s not in the book as well,’ he explains. ‘John would just splurge out storiesohe’s a great raconteur and he would just talk about things that hadn’t made it to the book. One in particular was this female best friend he had going between all the different houses and only lately, at the time we were sitting down writing, he’d become romantically involved with her after ten years of shared housing.

‘That struck me as an emotional throughlineothat’s really a John Birmingham story.’

Being Australian, and having lived through a rather erock and roll’ life, Lowenstein has his own sizable collection of share-house anecdotes.

‘Unfortunately I’d used most of my sharehouse experiences in “Dogs in Space”,’ he laughs.

‘One time, the first punks in Melbourne decided that they needed to visit the only 7-Eleven in the country, which was in Ballarat, to get flavoured milk at four in the morning. On the way home, they stopped in a paddock, saw this little baby lamb, bundled it into the car and drove back, then promptly got home and collapsed in heaps on the floor. The little baby lamb was walking around amongst this desolate pile of drugged punk rockers on the floor when I woke up.’

There’s a school of thought that says you have never truly lived until you have woken up in your kitchen at five in the morning to find three housemates and six strangers channelling spirits from the dishesoshare-house living is a universal Coming Of Age process, designed specifically to supply you with enough anecdotes to get you through the rest of your life. Nothing has captured its essence quite so eloquently as ‘Felafel’, and even if Lowenstein’s film is not identical to the book from which it gets its title, it will also endure as a testament to the glory of living with strangers.