When Jill is watching TV, where is the footage of the screaming Fascist fella from? Was it filmed for the film, or found footage (I know there was some stuff from Salo, which I figure may have had screaming fascists at some point...)

If memory serves me right, that would be Monte Cazazza.

Sorted through many of the HARDWARE vids here, btw.

Cheers matey. My copy of the DVD arrived in the post yesterday and Richard Stanley says it's Premier Boelgaxof, played by Chris McHallem. An impressively scary performance.

A bit of trivia: Boelgaxof is a fictional despot, created by Stanley and friends way back. You can see the poster on a deleted scene in Dust Devil, the Season of Soft Rains script opens with the assassination of Boelgaxof, etc. Last I checked, Stanley even had some of the original posters stashed away.

So, was Dust Devil in the same universe as Hardware? I always thought Dust Devil was 'now'.

Exactly. That's the original idea of three films of the apocalypse. The concept was something I think Stanley developed after Hardware, after figuring he could have subsequent films depicting different eras on the march towards or beyond the world already shown.

One of the themes turned out to be Global Warming, which was knitted into the Namib setting as 'Pray for rain' and Hitch's subtle hints towards rain, the preachers cry for rain in the radio, etc. In the Hardware world, there's hardly any rain, as climate changes have been affected by the surrounding Zone. The city appears rather deliberately as a purgatory.

Season of Soft Rains was supposed to be the third snapshot from the same continuum, and more directly a successant of Hardware than Dust Devil was. Fortunately, the script is in the Writing section, made available by Stanley.

Read more if inclined.