Hi, my name is David Michôd.
I'm the writer and director of Animal Kingdom...
and I'm gonna try and talk right through the movie.
I have no idea what I'm gonna say...
but I'm gonna start here and hopefully I'm gonna get to the end.
So this is... Okay, here's a place to start.
Quite a considerable amount of work...
went into making J's mother here...
not breathe during this sequence.
We experimented for a while with getting these titles...
to sit over her chest, but that just looked totally phony and...
It's quite amazing the things you can do these days.
I mean, you know, with relatively limited resources...
we could stop her chest from moving.
It's all up to you, doll. Think clearly though.
So this location was in Yarraville, I think.
There was something I liked about the idea...
of opening the movie with, you know, an environment...
that was possibly not dissimilar to that kind of environment...
that people these days are so critical of in Australian films...
which is that it looks like a kind of bleak little film...
about, you know, working-class people with drug addictions.
And there was something I liked about starting the film that way and then...
And then completely turning it upside down...
with, you know, a grand, if not grandiose...
opening title sequence that would make you realize...
that you're about to watch something very different, but...
This...
This scene here is a...
This is one of the pieces that we tested...
our J's with.
And it was...
This was just one of those scenes...
where James in his audition, in his tests...
just stood head and shoulders above other people.
It was, you know...
The obvious natural impulse for most kids...
in a scene of this nature would be to, you know, feign...
distress or, you know, grief, and it always just felt so phony.
And James just had...
He just seemed to understand...
He seemed to have an understanding of subtle drama...
that is quite unusual in someone who...
You know, who's basically done nothing before of an acting nature.
And so...
Yeah. I mean, this is kind of what I was talking about before.
Just this building of something...
you know, with Antony Partos' score.
You immediately get a sense...
that something bigger and darker and meaner...
is about to begin than you might have otherwise expected.
That is a gorgeous piece of copper art that the Art Department found.
As soon as we saw it, we knew we wanted to use it in the titles.
It's hanging on my wall at home now.
This whole title sequence is one that...
initially Luke Doolan, the editor, and I...
came up with as a way of addressing a problem...
that arose quite early on when we were testing it with people...
which was, you know, I, in trying to be very clever...
had wanted to make a crime film...
in which you never really saw people committing crimes...
or, at least, not committing the crimes...
that were, you know, their business.
So I wanted a film about armed robbers...
where you never actually saw them committing armed robberies.
But what we found quite early on is that without...
Is that people didn't quite understand...
People spent too long trying to work out who these people were...
and what world this kid had walked into and...
And so initially, I thought...
You know, I thought I had made a mistake.
I should have opened the film with a heist.
You know, it's hackneyed, but it works and...
But if we... We couldn't afford to do that, couldn't go back and do that.
And so we came up with the idea of just...
We just found some of these CCTV stills and put this together.
This one here is a beautiful piece that Jeremy Saunders Photoshopped.
That's... That guy wasn't originally in that location.
But it just seemed to work straight away.
As soon as we did that, it was...
People just immediately knew that this kid was walking...
into a world of quite serious criminal activity.
And this voice-over here kind of serves a similar function too.
The original shooting script didn't have any voice-over.
And it just felt...
I think I had written these first few scenes...
a little too elliptically or something, and we just...
We just...
It just felt important to ground the film.
And also give these first introductory scenes...
J's voice as well.
And it allowed us to condense them a little too...
and move through them a little quicker.
Darren was only a couple of years older than me.
When we were little kids, he was like...
Now this was...
We spent a long time looking for this location.
I always knew I wanted this particular...
This particular house to be...
of a certain era and a certain style and...
And we looked all over Melbourne for one that worked.
I think that this one was built, I think, either in the...
I can't remember exactly. Either the late '50s or early '60s.
But I had a sense of a house that was kind of felt a little bit like a bunker.
Or felt like a...
And with really quite...
you know, the kind of almost stone and wood tones...
so that it felt a little bit like a cave.
And Grandma Smurf...
But this house is actually quite extraordinarily beautiful and it...
We had to shoot the house in such a way...
that it didn't look as luxurious as it actually is.
There's a whole beautiful gigantic pool out the back that was...
That we never shot.
And then this is...
This house, this is another one.
This is an interior...
separate to its exterior.
So this is Barry Brown's house.
And there's the delightful and awesomely talented Mirrah Foulkes.
Always.
This day we shot this stuff outside...
was just so horrendously windy.
In Melbourne at this time... This is a while ago now.
Strange how heartbreaking it'd be on the day when you're shooting.
I always had this image in my head...
of this being a kind of glorious, you know, almost picaresque sort of...
sunny suburban street.
And it was just howling with wind and gray.
And the Steadicam operator could barely walk straight...
it was so windy, and...
You can't quite see. You can see it sort of there, but it was...
I don't know, maybe it lends...
a kind of an ominous quality now but...
Who's not here?
But... Yeah.
Is this boring? It's probably boring.
Anyway, I'll just keep talking. I'll see if I get to the end.
Craig was selling drugs. He was selling lots of them.
This was a pet store in Footscray, I think.
It was so noisy.
This was one those scenes we had to completely rebuild in ADR...
because all of the filters and stuff...
on the fish tanks, you know...
were incredibly loud.
And, you know, Australian actors are often given to mumbling.
So we had to rebuild this one.
For a while there, I thought we weren't gonna...
It just wasn't gonna work, but we got there eventually.
Tell him to pull his head in.
The whole thing's falling apart.
Armed Robbery's gonna be disbanded.
I love Justin Rosniak.
I saw him when he came in and I was helping out doing tests...
for Nash and Joel Edgerton's film The Square.
He came in and tested for something. I had never seen him before.
I just thought, "I'm gonna use that guy one day."
There's just something so real and raw about him.
Which I think you can say of Sullivan Stapleton too...
who plays Craig here.
I had...
I had originally offered...
the role of Craig to someone else, who ultimately couldn't do it.
And Sully just happened to be in there. He was...
He came in, auditioned for one of the detectives or something.
And he had...
And he also helped us doing a little bit of reading...
in the auditions for other parts and there...
I just... I had actually originally...
I was aware of him back when I was at film school.
And he was kind of a kid.
And when he walked in to test for us for Animal Kingdom, it was just...
He just... He had grown into his body.
There's something so rough and...
There's something so...
Something so masculine and yet kind of warm and lovable about Sullivan...
which is exactly what this character needed.
On the page, it looked like...
you know, it could lend itself...
to something a little too cold or a little too psycho.
And I always knew I wanted Craig...
to be a kind of volatile but ultimately lovable guy.
I mean, you had to believe that people wanted to hang around him.
You wanted to believe that his house could be a honey pot and...
And Sully just...
Just chill, bro.
Sully just has a kind of a dangerous but delightful quality.
This was all in Port Melbourne.
You can see that smoke haze...
from the Black Saturday bush fires hanging over the sea there.
Did you get a little stiffy?
It was just fun.
It was fun working with Sully. He would do anything.
He would do whatever... He would...
He'd work hard and he'd work fast.
And he never complained.
And it was exactly personalities like that that I needed...
to have around me on something that was this big...
and that was my first movie.
It's one of the beauties of having... I mean it's...
Laura here, Laura Wheelwright was just so beautiful...
and totally green but...
Just so beautifully natural.
It was one of the beautiful things...
about having Joel Edgerton on this shoot with me too.
I'd known Joel for years actually.
And he was one of those...
He was one of those early champions of the script, you know...
who demonstrated early on that he would do...
whatever he needed to do to help me get this movie made.
And I knew... I mean, I knew from...
I had known for a while I really wanted him to play Baz.
Again another...
A character that needed...
to be hard and masculine, and yet...
warm and generous at the same time...
and these are all the things that Joel just is, you know.
He's one of those guys who's...
You know, hard as nails and that, you know...
you see him at barbecues...
you know, with other people's kids and stuff, and you just...
He's just a... He's just...
Especially with a beard, he's like, you know, a big teddy bear.
This was all shot at a restaurant in Victoria Street in Richmond...
in Little Saigon.
Roache said just pull your head in.
Restaurant called Thai Thai, I think.
And it's weird, those things where...
Yeah, that's my friend Ngugs, who I used to work with at a magazine.
Always promised... I promised her for years I'd get her in there.
But this is, you know, a scene I had originally written to shoot at night.
To do it at night was just, I mean...
Given our resources, it was near impossible.
We'd need to buy the restaurant out for the night, we'd need to...
It'd be quite a complex lighting job from outside and it...
So we ended up doing...
I couldn't wrap my brain around the idea...
why they were eating dinner during the day...
but I suppose it was Australian summer.
You know, the sun doesn't go down until 9:00 at night.
Are you all right to drive? You're not drunk.?
And...
Come and give us a kiss.
This is just...
I don't know. I just love...
Even that little moment there of Luke and Sully, you know.
You could just feel these dynamics...
between these actors the whole time we were shooting.
It was just...
It quite regularly had those moments...
where I'd just look at these guys fooling around with each other...
and feel like I'd cast the movie right, you know.
There were tensions, there were, you know.
They didn't necessarily always get along...
but they were always, on some level...
They could, you know, they can be...
They're big personalities, and they can be vicious...
but there was something always playful about it.
And it was just rewarding...
putting that jigsaw puzzle together, you know, the...
That, you know...
Putting together that puzzle of actors...
to embody characters, and to have those guys...
bring this entire world to life, and I really loved watching that happen.
Oi!
Are you all right, love?
I remember when we shot this scene, we...
I think Ben Mendelsohn, the maestro...
I think he ended up getting 15 takes out of me...
on just this simple one shot.
In part, because he'd just always ask for them.
He'd finish, decide he wanted another go.
He'd just say, "One more, please."
But it was also because there's something so...
There's something so wild and unpredictable about Ben...
when he's performing, I just always wanted to give him another go...
because I just wanted to see what he'd do next.
He just has a way of lending every single...
Every single take something new and totally organic and...
Which can make, you know, dealing with continuity...
in the edit a bit tricky.
But it's just so...
It's so exhilarating to watch...
when you're actually shooting it, that...
He just had his way of getting more takes out of me...
than anybody else did.
Yeah, well, I'm just talking.
Something to do also with the fact that...
This isn't to say that he's, you know, that...
I mean, most of the other actors work, you know...
in a totally constructive way, which is that they nail down...
You know, they spend time...
kind of refining the detail and getting into a place...
where they can replicate performance with adjustments...
and stuff, but...
You know, so that it's great and it's repeatable and...
But with Ben, it was just...
There's something about the unpredictability of it...
that you just wanted to have another go just to see what you'd get.
For me, this shot here in this little sequence...
is the moment where you...
Really, you... Well, hopefully, in theory...
get a sense of the fact that this movie...
is moving into a darker...
more unsettling territory.
It's kind of quite... In some respects...
kind of tonally...
Tonally ambiguous before that. You're not quite sure whether or not...
You can hear it. The times I've watched with audiences, you can't...
People are not sure whether they're supposed to be finding it funny or...
Or what kind of a crime film they're watching, basically.
They enter this little world, and with this particular music cue...
and Mirrah's trepidation.
And that sense of J being privy to a world...
that, on the surface, may look playful...
but is actually quite dangerous...
and that there are quite damaged...
personalities at play that are kind of threatening...
to, you know, unravel.
Here, mate.
Take that. That's my number.
We shot this at Priceline...
in Prahran.
That's my mom.
Cast her as an extra.
She gave herself a line, and now she's an actor.
I need some sort of change.
I love this scene. I mean, it's...
I just love watching these guys in it, you know.
It's just...
I think Ben's really kind of heartbreaking.
I mean, I'm possibly overstating it a little bit, but, you know.
You know, we wanted to play this scene a bit like a break-up.
But Baz is a good man.
He's basically breaking up with his best friend...
but promising to...
Promising to help him find his fate and...
I don't know if I got that in me. It's grubby.
You know, grubby business.
And I just think Joel's great here.
Look at Ben.
He doesn't know what he's gonna do.
This is... There was a whole sequence here...
that continued this Ben's lostness...
in the car park before this moment.
And I was saying, in which Ben is...
Pope's character is standing in the car park, watching shoppers...
you know, loading shopping into their cars.
And it's the scene about a man...
lost in line in the world, and it's quite a beautiful moment...
between Joel and Ben also.
And it was a scene that I had iden...
When we're talking to Ben about the script, it said:
"This scene is possibly the most important scene."
We ended up having to cut it out because it was, again, a hurr...
Melbourne hurricane day...
and the Steadicam operator couldn't even...
Could not stand still...
because the wind was howling, so we had bad, you know...
That was a... It was a horror day.
We lost the...
Both of our cameras broke down...
we were literally sitting around for three hours...
Two hours, waiting for a new one.
It started bucketing down rain...
and you just get through them.
I can't work out how, but you just make it through these days.
And they were good scenes.
- Fuck! - Hey, come on, baby, calm down.
Come here. Come on.
And suddenly, Joel... Suddenly, Joel's gone.
I remember there was a number...
of scenes I feel... Because you never see...
You never see Mirrah...
who plays Cath...
Baz's wife, after this point.
And some people, every now and then...
wonder where she's gone.
We shot a whole bunch of other scenes.
We shot a whole wake and...
But it just...
Once a certain kind of train was on the tracks, you just...
It felt... You could just feel...
You just... You could just tell, you needed to stay on it.
And that train is the bad juju that's bubbling away...
in Ben's point...
In... Sorry, in Ben's head from this point on.
Susan Prior's another one of my favorite actors.
I saw her do a...
She did...
Where was this?
I remember seeing her do...
a kind of 40... What felt like a 45-minute drunken monologue...
in a play called Riflemind at the Sydney Theatre Company...
that was just extraordinary.
She's so great.
She's one of those people who's unpredictable.
You...
You just wanna give her takes to see what's gonna come next.
And now...
it's Air Supply.
This was one of those shots where, you know...
And I can't... Obviously, I can't have the experience of a fresh audience.
I can't have the same experience that a fresh audience has...
but I remember when we were shooting it.
It felt...
It felt really special.
Certainly, I mean...
A certain kind of reverie that Ben lost himself in that...
That just felt...
Felt broken and strangely beautiful.
I mean, this song is one of those...
It's funny, you know, getting a...
It's actually quite a beautiful song.
And...
Yeah, Air Supply.
It's funny how you experiment...
When you're cutting, you experiment...
with pulling things out, putting things back, trying...
And this little sequence here, we tried...
We tried extracting from the cut at a certain point...
because it's not really moving the story forward in any way...
but we certainly discovered...
that without this moment here...
what happens later in the story just didn't resonate...
in anywhere near the same way. It was...
You wanna... Just, it's like a...
It's not just Pope's interaction with Nicky.
It's also about giving Pope a moment.
A sense of...
A sense of his solitary life.
His...
That kind of confusion that he feels when he's alone.
Or with someone who happens to be asleep.
Jacki Weaver...
was the very first person I knew I wanted to be...
in this movie.
It was Tom Noble's suggestion, originally.
Tom, who acted...
as the script consultant on the movie.
But who used to be the chief police reporter...
at The Age newspaper in Melbourne.
And it's quite liberating...
when you want someone to play a particular character...
because you can start writing with their voice in your head.
And writing this character with Jacki in my head was fun.
She's so sweet and...
And so good.
Look at that.
I love... Ben's just such a great actor.
I think he's possibly my favorite Australian actor.
And it's just a...
I was really excited, literally...
just being able to give him...
something meaty to chew on.
Luke Ford was...
We actually auditioned Luke with this scene.
And Luke was in fact the very first person we auditioned for any, um...
Any role in the movie.
And, actually, you know what?
It can be a bit disconcerting when you audition somebody...
and they come in and they give you something that's really great.
And it's first-off.
It's the first person you've seen that...
I found it disconcerting anyway.
Because I thought, "If the very first person who walks in"
"and impresses me like this, then maybe I'm not thinking..."
"with enough critical rigor to..."
"About the words on the page."
- And you want to make yourself a gay drink...
But it was just, I think...
one of those strange coincidences...
that the best person for the...
The best person for the job was the first person to walk in the door.
Again, he has... It's...
This character needed a gentle...
A sweetness or a fragility...
but sort of couched in a...
In quite a tough exterior.
And, again, that's exactly what Luke is.
You know, Luke is...
Luke's a tough kid.
There's something genuinely sweet about him.
And the dynamic between him and Ben on set was...
It was...
colorful.
- We wouldn't be having this conversation...
because he'd have already done something about it.
Now, if you don't wanna do anything because you're scared...
Is it because you're scared?
It's all right if you are.
And there were certain points during the shoot...
when Luke wasn't even necessarily sure that...
Because there's a lot of scenes that he's in...
where he either says nothing or has a couple of lines.
And I started to wonder after a while...
whether or not Luke fully appreciated how...
How important and how present he is in the movie...
because I think he's so...
I think he's really, really great in this but...
You go get me a Commodore or something like that...
But feels in a way like he, you know, doesn't have a lot to do.
But he's just...
He's doing stuff all the time.
Because I told you to.
James is wearing underpants.
We had originally wanted to shoot this sequence here...
of J stealing the car in the car park of the MCG...
on the night of a day/night cricket match in...
Which would have been amazing.
I think it would... Just those incredible flood lights...
and the sea of cars around the stadium but...
We shot that sequence, actually...
of him stealing the car before the shoot started.
It was like... We used it a camera test and...
It just... It was gonna be too much of an ordeal to...
I don't even know if we would have got permission...
to steal a car from the MCG car park.
This is Darren's apartment, which was in St. Kilda.
This was the first day of the shoot.
I remember feeling quite calm on the first day of the shoot.
Actually, it was... It just felt like a doable day.
I think it was a reasonably light day. It was...
I just remember feeling calm on that first day.
But that changed very quickly after that.
We shot this at some kind of a TAFE or something in Collingwood.
This is a beautiful music cue from Sam Petty...
who was our sound designer as well.
Tim Phillipps. Had a...
I wanted these two young cops to...
I mean, what's...?
I wanted them to feel young, you know. The...
Boroondara's units are all tied up at present.
Just the tragedy of lost youth.
That's Michael Cody's voice there.
My friend Michael Cody...
after whom the entire Cody family is named.
One of my best friends.
Sam's quite...
Sam has this beautiful quality.
Sam's done sound design and score...
on a number of things I've done before.
And he just has a beautiful...
A beautiful way of melding sound design and music...
or giving sound a musicality...
or making music feel earthed...
which was exactly what I wanted for...
this particular sequence.
Where did we shoot this?
It's set in Hawthorn, but I think we shot it in...
In Heidelberg?
I can't remember.
This is probably our biggest lighting setup, this one.
There was, like, cranes in the street and...
I think Adam Arkapaw got excited this day.
This was a big day.
Yeah.
This was a hard day too.
And, obviously, wasn't a pleasant one to shoot.
Turn around, pig cunt.
But it was one of those big, hard days.
And I just remember wanting it to be over.
Back to the first day of the shoot again.
This was...
I remember also feeling relief.
Whenever you cast an actor who hasn't...
You know, who's green, as James certainly was...
you're always...
You're always...
anticipating that first day when...
Anticipating what the kind of...
The working... The work will be like.
I remember feeling incredibly reassured...
on this first day of the shoot that...
That...
That working with James was gonna be smooth and easy.
Hello?
That his first and natural instincts are believable...
and that he's capable of taking direction.
And if you got those two things then...
Then you're laughing.
He obviously doesn't know.
So it was cricket here.
Pope watching the cricket. I remember, cricket was a...
Hey. Hey, this Sri Lankan guy here...
There actually isn't much left in the film. There's a number of scenes...
I just wanted that sense of Australian summer.
Of the cricket being the kind of game it is that it's on for...
Games go for what feels like an entire day...
if not five days.
Just that kind of... That lazy...
That it becomes like the soundtrack to summer...
in some ways.
- Where you going? - Just gonna go to my room.
Listen, you know if you ever wanna talk about anything, I'm there, right?
I mean, if you need help with anything or whatever.
But those voices like Tony...
Those just classic Australian cricket commentating voices...
just seem to kind of ring in the background in summer.
And so this is the point at which...
J's world...
I love Ben's face in this close-up.
His eyes are just like black pools.
That's my dad leading James there.
We shot this is some office building on St. Kilda Road.
And so this next scene...
this scene here is obviously where, uh...
G'day, Josh.
We see Guy Pearce and Anthony Hayes for the first time.
There's Kieran Darcy-Smith in the background there.
I felt he had a...
He's a good friend of ours.
And he very generously agreed to just come down and help out...
just be in this one scene.
Or in a couple of scenes...
and he had one line, and I end up cutting that line out.
And now he's, like, a half of head over Tony Hayes' shoulder there.
But Kieran's a great actor.
Joshua Daniel Cody.
So it's funny, when we are talking with Guy, we were...
I remember at a certain point, Guy was doing a play... We...
Guy had agreed to do the movie...
about a year before we actually got it up.
And I didn't have a lot of contact with him...
but I remember at a certain point before we went into pre-production...
I just had this idea that I wanted to have...
I wanted him to have a mustache.
And got in contact with him, to just run the idea past him.
And...
And fortunately he came back and said...
funnily he'd been thinking the same thing.
I couldn't quite work out what it was, because I didn't want...
It wasn't that, you know...
I wanted him to have a kind of hackneyed cop mustache.
I think it was more about the fact that in this day and age...
for a cop like him to have a mustache...
is almost kind of anachronism, you know.
There's something kind of endearing and odd.
Whereas, you know, say, 20 years ago...
probably would've been almost the norm for cops...
to have mustaches.
There's something... I wanted Leckie to have a slight...
I wanted him to feel like a character...
who is slightly outside the norm.
Someone who wasn't a kind of part of the boy's club.
Anthony Hayes. Without a beard.
You don't see that very often.
This scene was also one of the ones that I tested the J...
The actors auditioning for J with.
And it was the one where James just...
He made it his.
And in part he did... And again it's quite extraordinary...
because he's so inexperienced.
But it's a long scene.
It's like four... Four or five pages of dialogue and...
If... And James just intuitively knew to give every line its own beat.
Every line was a new thought.
Every line was a response to a new question...
and he knew to do that instinctively.
His initial instincts weren't necessarily always right...
but he was then able to adjust as necessary.
And this scene, you know, when it's played...
just like a kind of a one-note wash...
just drags, but...
I mean, I don't know, maybe people think that it still does.
But I really like...
You know, there's so much detail in his performance.
And in Guy's too, in the scene that...
It was this scene that made me know, in a way...
that James is the character.
And James...
You know, it took me a while to work around to the idea...
that James could play the character.
I had always imagined the character being much smaller...
and much more fragile.
James is a big kid.
He was 17 when he did this, but he's a big... A big kid.
He was still at school when we did this.
And the more I thought about it, the more I actually liked the idea...
of the character being embodied by a big...
You know, a big almost man-child, you know.
A kid who actually...
Who looks in some way plausible in this world, and yet...
Looks like, on some level...
physically he should be able to match with this people...
and yet he's...
You know, he's still a kid.
Craig's here.
We shot this scene in the city at a diner...
near the treasury buildings.
Maybe you should start taking your pills again.
This was a long night, I remember.
For some reason, this was one of the scenes that I just covered...
I think we did...
There's one scene around the table...
and I think I had 14 setups or something.
I don't know why, but I just knew. I just covered the shit out of it.
I think it was in part also coming out...
Coming out of a really long dialogue scene...
that was quite still and...
Coming into this one, where there was a different energy...
I knew I wanted it...
I wanted the camera to be participating in that energy somehow.
Not by waving it all over the place, but just by having options.
I remember this was just a long night.
By the end of this night, all of these guys...
as good as they are in it, were so over it.
What's he saying?
I actually remember this night feeling quite tense by the end of it.
How should I know?
These guys were sitting around that table for about eight hours.
Could I help?
Yeah, you could get the knives and forks.
And now we're back at Nicky's house.
This is another one of those...
You know, I really love this location.
It was...
It just feels warm and beautiful and...
- How was yours? - It was good.
You know, and it was...
It was a really kind of complex jigsaw puzzle.
This... Putting all of these locations together.
There's Clayton Jacobson.
He made Kenny.
He's one of my... He's a very old, close friend.
I really loved being able to put him in this movie.
We've been doing little bits and pieces together...
for years and years and years.
And I just...
He very generously put me in Kenny.
And I loved being able to stick him in here too.
I mean, strangely enough, you know, Clayton's had...
you know, experiences that...
They're not the same, obviously, as this movie.
But, you know, where he grew up and where he lived...
and he's brushed, in some way or other...
against, you know, a number of, um...
...you know, Melbourne gangland incidents.
- Yep. - Your uncle's at the door.
You know, in the same way...
a just kind of regular, law-abiding lovely family.
Like Henry... Like Nicky's like.
Yeah.
All right, mate.
- Hey. We gotta go. - All right.
It was nice to meet you. See you.
Hey, Daz.
I wish I'd been able to give Susan Prior more to do.
I mean, I think she's...
Her performance is great, and she's...
And the character, even though it's small...
is so important, I think, to the way the whole thing feels...
but I'd love to be able to give Susan something...
something meatier and wilder to play with one day.
She's so good.
I love that.
I love that house too.
It's... So many of these locations...
the exteriors are not the same as the interiors.
We had to move around quite a lot...
which we were having to do anyway, but I just wanted...
I wanted this movie...
to be as much about Melbourne as anything else.
So now we're at a house in Brighton...
with Dan Wyllie.
What were you doing in there so long?
Dan's so great.
Dan actually did a test...
I did a thing, a kind of...
It was actually kind of just like a short film
called Ezra White that was...
I did as a test when I was trying to get...
When I was trying to get Animal Kingdom up,
And it kind of failed in a way because it was...
I didn't really treat it as a short film...
I treated it as, like, a couple of test scenes...
and Dan played the Ezra character in a different world.
It was like Ezra three years later...
having a meltdown of some kind.
I just loved, you know, again, being able to...
You know, Dan's played a lot of...
He regularly kind of plays... Gets cast as, you know, criminals...
or, you know, people with mental problems.
But there's actually something quite...
Something quite earthy and yet sort of regal about Dan...
that I really like.
And that I don't... And that goes...
That doesn't get utilized often enough, I don't think.
Yep.
There's nothing to worry about.
Hey, do you want a cold drink? I've got lots of different kinds of drinks.
It was Ben's idea to spend the entire scene...
with his head in his arms.
Which was great, because as soon as we started thinking about it...
we realized it gave us an opportunity...
to make the most of that.
Is that my stomach growling?
Anyway, whatever.
So we shot this at...
This is a service station in Brooklyn...
which is in Melbourne's west.
Again, Sully's just great.
I mean, it's... I think after...
When this film played at Sundance, and that month afterwards...
when we were all just hanging out in L.A., everyone...
It felt like everyone was going nuts for Sully...
because, you know, like, in a "where did this guy come from" sort of way.
Because there's something just so raw and great...
and dangerous about him...
that, you know, he's just been sort of languishing...
in Australian television for so long...
and, you know, and working as a builder...
and a grip as well.
It was really exciting to be able to watch...
Actually to kind of watch Sully's whole life change once this...
Once Animal Kingdom played at Sundance.
This we shot out past Werribee, I think, somewhere.
This was... There's Andy McPhee.
He's Kodi Smit-McPhee's dad.
- Can we go hunting? - Maybe.
I got a few things to do. Can you not blow holes in my silo?
This was day three of the shoot.
And this encapsulated everything.
This was... I remember at one point turning to...
We shot all of that outside stuff there...
and the stuff that comes after this scene...
first up in the day.
And it was day three of the shoot...
and I remember turning to Liz Watts, the producer...
and, you know, just feeling so kind of almost ecstatic, you know.
This script that I'd been writing for so long...
I was finally getting to make it.
And look how beautiful it looks.
You know, that stuff we got to...
Shooting the death of Craig, and it was just...
It was... It felt big and it felt...
It felt beautiful, and I was so excited...
that I was finally, after all these years, being able to do this thing...
make this thing that had felt like a pipe dream for so long.
But, you know, that morning got away from us...
for all sorts of reasons, you know.
We had problems with the guns and all that, and it just...
And I was... Day three...
and I took too long shooting the stuff outside...
such that by the time we got inside to shoot this stuff...
we had 45 minutes to do the whole scene...
and I felt like my world was caving in around me.
We had to completely rethink the way we were gonna shoot it.
We just... I remember, at one point...
we were gonna set up a wide shot of the whole scene and just shoot that.
And I remember Adam Arkapaw...
my beautiful DP, coming over to me at one point and just saying:
"This is ridiculous. We can't shoot this.
I reckon I should just throw it on my shoulder with a 35-mil lens...
and just grab it."
So we came up with some coverage...
Just very basic coverage to do that, and just had a go at it.
And so again, Sully was so beautiful...
because Sully got, I think, one or two goes at this stuff.
And it was done in a panic and...
But he was just there, you know. He knows how these things work.
And he just did what he needed to do.
And it was, you know...
And I wonder whether or not, you know...
it would've worked the same way if I'd been working with an actor...
who didn't have Sully's kind of understanding and enthusiasm.
This is more of that stuff that we shot in the morning when I was just...
I loved the way it was looking and feeling and...
And then lunchtime came, and it was... People were saying to me:
"You've gotta move faster...
because this day is gonna get away from us."
And it did.
But fortunately, I think it all kind of worked.
Look at this, Sully...
I mean, again, Sully just kicks his thongs off, his flip-flops.
And just runs barefoot through this.
It's full of rocks and whatever you get in the ground at farms.
And he, you know...
I don't recall him complaining once.
We made him do it a bunch of times.
What did you tell her?
So this scene we shot at...
This actually... This was shot at Glendyn Ivin's house.
Glendyn Ivin, Australian...
Great Australian director.
He made a film called Last Ride recently.
Is it up there somewhere?
And I can't remember, I think I'd been there for dinner once or something.
Maybe it was Jo Ford's idea, the production designer...
but just felt like...
what Leckie's house should feel like, I think.
Had to drop him.
Why didn't anyone call? I would've got the Soggies out there.
Look, there was no time for that. He just lost the plot.
All right, give me a sec to think.
You don't see... This is, like, the only moment really where you see Guy not...
Guy kind of in his own world, and it felt important to do.
Just so you had one moment, at least...
where you just got a sense of what kind of...
What kind of... Because, you know, his character...
as is the case so often with detectives...
is so kind of buttoned-down and...
You know, kind of wears his language and his clothes like a disguise.
You know, to not reveal his inner life, but it...
And Guy is so great at making even that compelling.
But it felt important that we have one glimpse...
of what kind of a guy he is and what kind of a world he comes from.
If you hadn't have got in his ear, Mum, about turning himself in...
there'd be none of this shit. None of this carry-on.
Did you think about that? Did you?
And Jacki.
I remember we could only do this a few times, because...
We take it out on whoever turns up.
- Jacki's wrists...
couldn't handle whacking Ben too often.
- Come here, mate. - Don't you touch him.
So this day also, where we're heading now is...
This was Guy's very first day.
And it's quite strange when you've got someone of his caliber.
This was the very first thing of his that we shot in the movie and...
G'day Josh. I've got some bad news, mate.
It's... You know, it can be...
It makes you nervous when you got someone of Guy's caliber turning up.
You're now about three or four weeks into the shoot.
And you're in a groove and...
But still every day is like a battle, having to get through it.
And then someone like Guy comes onto the set...
and, you know, because of his...
you know, prior requirements and all that stuff, you know, I hadn't really...
I'd a couple of days talking to him, but I hadn't...
I hadn't seen him do the character, and you've got...
You know, during a little bit of rehearsal and blocking...
you've got just what feels like 10 to 15 minutes to...
nail down big-picture sort of character stuff.
And fortunately, you know, the conversational talking...
that Guy and I had done was productive and...
But, you know, I remember feeling kind of nervous.
I had to, you know, kind of...
Going to Guy in that kind of 10 minutes...
while we were blocking or whatever...
and asking to make what felt to me like quite big adjustments...
that he would have to carry through his entire performance.
But, you know, it was just one of those things you...
If you don't do it upfront, day one, then you're not gonna do it.
And fortunately, Guy is a...
Not just a great actor...
but an incredibly easy actor to work with, you know.
I get the impression he probably doesn't suffer fools...
but, you know, if he gets a sense that he trusts his director...
that he's incredibly accommodating...
and collaborative.
- But anything you do say can be used as evidence in court. Understand?
- Yes, he understands that. - Okay.
Dan Wyllie.
Okay, now picking up where we left off, when we last spoke...
you were telling us how upset your uncles were over the death of Barry.
It's a tricky character, the Leckie character, because it was, you know...
As I said, you know, he'd... I mean, the nature...
These cops, by their very nature, don't reveal very much about themselves.
And I knew when I was writing the script...
that I didn't want this thing to be a police procedural.
You know, you get more than enough of that...
probably quite inadequately, on television.
And so I...
I didn't really wanna see much of Leckie outside of the family.
I wanted our experience of Leckie to be much the same as J's experience.
But that also meant that it's a kind of...
a narrow bandwidth that Guy has to work within.
One of the great things about having him...
was that you can give him that narrow bandwidth...
and yet he still fills it full of detail...
and makes it, you know, always compelling.
He may think he's doing the right thing...
but his foot's covered in shit and it's stuck in his mouth.
I'm pretty surprised you let him get anywhere near you, to be honest.
Look at that body.
I told you to go get the car.
- You never fucking mentioned it to me. - I don't wanna hear this.
So...
I mean, this is... You know, I wanted Dan to be...
I wanted Ezra to be...
getting ready, getting changed into tennis gear or something and...
You know, and... Because I wanted that sense of this...
This guy seems kind of intimately involved with these people.
And yet he's got another life, he doesn't...
This stuff is not his life. This is...
You know, this is very much his work.
But he can walk away from this and go do other stuff, you know.
He's not trapped in this world the same way these other people are.
Mate, I can't help you with the "how" part.
You just gotta be looking out.
What, so he's my responsibility now?
I'll call you tomorrow.
This is bullshit.
You know I'm not telling them anything.
And so...
- they're onto you like a rash.
If you stick close by, everyone will keep calm.
You know, this is...
How should I know?
Go in your room and do some coloring in, mate.
This... I don't know, I have nothing to say.
I mean, I think it's great. I think Luke is great in it.
- What's going on? - Don't be a stickybeak.
And it's one of those scenes...
I remember on the page, feeling like it felt...
It felt like something that was from an earlier draft of...
You know, it felt possibly more naive...
than some of the later writing I'd done, but...
When it finally...
When we actually got it up and got it moving and it...
I was really relieved to...
It, you know... That...
To find that it felt natural and, you know...
I remember pushing James quite hard on that day, just to...
Just so that we could get that sense of the clamps closing in on him.
Shot this at a bowling alley in Northcote, I think.
Do you love me?
This is a considerably original... Original.
Considerably longer scene when we first...
When we originally shot it.
And, you know, it's just that those rhythms that you feel when you...
At this point in the story, we didn't wanna be...
Didn't wanna be, you know, kind of, not languishing, but...
Just kind of languidly sitting in scenes...
for any longer than we needed to be.
It's a great location.
Well, I have a feeling that they were about to shut this bowling alley down.
Originally it was set in a bar and I...
You know, we looked at a few, but it was...
I don't know, there was just something about this place that was...
You know, it actually felt quite seedy.
A kind of place where...
people might go to drink when...
You know, without... And...
You know, and it didn't necessitate us...
finding some kind of pub or something, and filling it full of extras.
Without feeling like we were shooting at Lassiter's in Neighbors or something.
This is one of those moments that, at one point in the cut, we had removed.
You know, I just...
I remember just thinking I could... You know.
Laura did such a subtly beautiful job in the whole movie...
that it felt... I just felt I couldn't...
I couldn't not put this just...
You know, just beautiful little moment of hers back in.
Just give her a little moment by herself as well.
Which is, you know...
Which she doesn't have anywhere else in the film, I don't think.
- Hey. - Is J here?
No, J, he's... He's gone down to the shops.
But come in. Come and wait for him if you want.
He won't be long.
So, yeah, this is...
Have a seat.
You know, a particularly... Not a particularly pleasant scene.
There's been people at the screenings that we've already had of the movie...
where, you know, some people have questioned why it is that, um...
Questioned why it is that Darren, Luke's character...
doesn't physically stop...
Pope from killing Nicky.
I mean, you know, and if people are thinking that, then that's...
I can't say that they're wrong, because that's what they're thinking...
but I always find it quite strange, though...
because it feels totally...
Oh, it's fun.
It feels entirely plausible to me, given everything we know...
about these characters, and everything we know...
about Pope's power over Darren...
and the dynamic between them generally...
that Darren would feel paralyzed in this scene, you know?
You can quite clearly sense...
that he thinks that what is happening is wrong...
and yet feels completely powerless to do anything about it.
And...
And it's...
And I think it's, you know, again, another one of those scenes...
where you can feel that stuff that Luke is doing is...
I really like, because he's, you know...
He's having to do not very much...
and yet say quite a lot, and...
Look at me. Look at me.
Ben was...
Ben was very sweet with Laura on this day, you know?
I mean, I think it was... You can get those days when people, you know...
We know it's a heavy scene, and so everyone starts...
possibly kid-glove-handling Laura a little too much.
You know, you can actually put stress on an actor when you're...
When you're overly concerned...
with their emotional well-being, you know?
It can actually cause them greater stress.
They feel there's too much attention on them.
But Ben was, in a cert...
To a certain extent, you know, Ben just picked this day...
as his day to be...
To be incredibly generous with Laura, you know?
He kind of...
He took that duty on himself and...
What the fuck?
I think as hard as, you know, as...
As unpleasant as you would imagine this day might have been...
I think Laura enjoyed it because she was working so closely with Ben...
and Ben was being incredibly generous.
I think Ben had actually...
I remember, when he kind of swaggers off there.
He'd actually put something down his pants...
like a hairspray can or something, just to...
I don't know.
Yeah.
This is another...
All these moments that... I remember, we were shooting this stuff...
we had, you know, virtually no time to work this stuff...
with Ben carrying Nicky.
This is another one, Adam Arkapaw, just going in...
pushing in on those doors, was...
You know, that day at the motel, we...
The day had gotten away from us, and Adam...
I knew I wanted that shot.
I was...
I don't know why, but I just knew I wanted it.
I remember Adam and I sneaking off with the grips...
and getting them to set up a track...
because everyone else was telling us...
we aren't allowed to do it, but we just went and did it.
We believed it could be done quickly, and we just went off and got it.
And I'm glad we did.
You want a sip of my drink?
All of this stuff at this motel we did in one day.
It would've been nice to have longer to do it, but it was...
You know, we spent the entire morning...
shooting, you know, Guy's monologue.
And wanted to spend the time doing that because...
You know, it was basically Guy Pearce talking for five minutes.
You wanna...
You wanna make that...
You want everyone to feel like they've given that...
the best opportunity to work they possibly can.
Bananas.
Let's go sit outside for a bit, eh?
I always do...
I just knew I wanted to have Guy walk into a room...
and say nothing other than, "Bananas."
You know what the bush is about?
It's about massive trees that have been standing there thousands of years...
and bugs that'll be dead...
This was really...
"Exciting" is probably the wrong word, but it was exciting to shoot because...
You know, on the page, you do this and you write the...
I think this was about, like, a solid one and a half, two pages...
of stuff.
And you write it, and you go, "Well, I like the idea of it...
because it's kind of bolshie," you know...
to just have...
Just to have a good, solid, you know, monologue, basically, like that.
But you look at it, and on the page you go, "I hope...
I think this is gonna work, but I don't know."
And there was something exciting about finally...
You know, we get there, and...
And again, this was the first time I was hearing Guy actually do it.
And it was exciting because it felt good...
and it looked good too.
I remember Adam Arkapaw and I, you know, kind of...
at some point between setups or something, standing there and talking.
We'd shot a whole bunch of Guy already, and...
It felt like a kind of seminal moment in the shoot.
It felt like we'd...
You're shooting all this stuff...
and you're gathering all the pieces that make up a movie.
But it felt like one of those moments that we'd shot...
that really felt like we were shooting...
you know, a movie.
- Is all the proof that you need.
Watching, you know, one of Australia's great actors...
doing a big scene...
And I think you know that I can help you.
But I can't keep offering. You've got to decide.
It felt exciting.
It just felt like it was one of those moments...
that made you wanna step...
That allowed me to kind of step outside...
just the daily panic of making a movie...
and go, "Look what we're doing."
Yes, you do.
This motel was at Chadstone.
It's a pretty seedy place too.
Okay, we're going home.
There were lots of people...
wanting to have their photos taken with Guy that day, I remember.
Justin. We're leaving, mate.
That's off the Bolte Bridge.
That looks...
That's Melbourne's Docklands.
Hi, sweetie. Where you been?
Just at Nicky's house.
Yes, Ben...
Ben very, very specifically wanted...
to be eating peanut-butter sandwiches...
with a glass of milk.
The dangerous kid that he is.
He's here. He just walked in.
Fuck, calm down, Darren.
So this whole sequence, basically, was one that was...
You know, it was kind of tricky to build...
because very quickly into the edit, you...
Any sense of the tension or otherwise in it...
is, you know, on an emotional level, is kind of lost to us...
to, you know, me and Luke Doolan, the editor...
and to Liz Watts, and...
Any tension in it is gone because we've watched it become just...
We've watched it so many times...
the whole thing kind of becomes a technical exercise, and...
You know, you show it to people, and you get a sense of how it's working...
and you just start making decisions based on what you...
intuitively or intellectually, think that you...
Fucking car keys. Where the fuck...?
Think you can get away with, basically, you know?
Give us yours, I'm gonna take your car.
How long you can hang on things. You know, to what extent...
have you earned the tension to hang on things?
I mean, for instance, that shot of James running before...
was originally shot as a part of a sequence...
that had Ben chasing him.
Ben was chasing him down these kind of back alleys in Ivanhoe.
And...
We made the decision to cut the Ben-chasing-him part...
out of that sequence because it felt like...
when James finally got away from him...
was just too young and fast for him, that we'd let the...
We'd let the pressure off.
Such that it was possibly better to start...
You know, better to never even start that chase...
than to start it and then let it peter out.
And so this scene is...
This is one of those moments where, you know, we shot...
J having his breakdown or whatever it is...
when he kind of finally realizes...
what's happened to Nicky, and...
We did different versions of it. James is incredibly good at this stuff.
This one was, I think, the last one we did...
and we just told him to go big with it.
And at the time, I remember thinking we won't be using this one...
because it felt too big on the day when we were shooting it.
But what we kind of found when we were cutting it...
was that James...
That J's character was so kind of shut-down...
and emotionally traumatized...
for so long during the movie...
that it actually felt like you wanted him...
to seriously emote at this point.
You want finally for those walls to collapse, and...
And I think it's, you know, I just...
Makes me now retrospectively realize how important it can be sometimes...
when you have the time and the resources...
to do different options of things because...
We're gonna go for a ride.
You know, sometimes...
Some of the things that you intuitively thought were not quite right...
can suddenly feel right when you put them...
into the bigger picture.
This is one of those things I was talking about.
I think we did about a hundred different versions...
of how long this sequence took, you know?
To what extent had we earned the right...
to sit with this stuff, you know?
How...?
I think, you know, we... There were times where we...
There was points in the cut we thought...
that we'd just been sitting on that driveway shot for too long.
It had to be shorter. And I remember thinking:
"We should just... Well, I think we've earned it."
This day was kind of horrible. It was, you know...
There was gonna be a car crash, so we had two cameras and then...
The second camera went down, and was irreparable...
we couldn't get a replacement, and the sun was going down.
And we just had to shoot it with one.
I remember that being kind of heartbreaking.
That little girl in the background dancing with the...
The little hat was a...
She just happened to be there.
I didn't even notice her there until we were looking at the rushes.
So this whole...
I remember when we...
There was actually a particular song I wanted to use in this sequence.
It was a Bonnie Prince Billy song.
And...
You know, it...
I remember, I think I actually managed to somehow...
get in touch with him personally.
Because he very rarely licenses his music to movies.
And I had always assumed that the reason why...
The reason why he's generally so reluctant is because...
you know, he's scared that a...
That he would be worried that a song of his might end up...
in, you know, Dude, Where's My Car? Or something.
And so I thought if we could just cut this sequence together with his song...
and show it to him somehow, that he'd be okay with it...
and what I found... What I discovered in the process was that...
if anything, his fears were actually much the opposite...
which was that he was more concerned...
that the song would end up in a film...
that might be really good, and that people from that point on...
would then associate his song with that movie rather than...
Rather than letting the song kind of live and breathe itself.
Which is kind of interesting, and which I totally understand, but, so...
Antony Partos and Dave McCormack...
came up with that piece.
It was fiddly, but it worked really nicely, I think.
This scene we... I think I actually wrote this scene in pre-production...
because it just occurred to me at one point before the shoot...
that there was no one moment in the movie where Leckie and J...
just felt comfortable together.
Where J almost felt like it's been one hard, horrible road...
but maybe finally I've found a place where I feel safe.
So that you could then take that away from him.
This was the set that...
That the wonderfully talented...
and beautiful Jo Ford built...
after she and I did a kind of...
Had a little tour of the Melbourne Assessment Prison...
which used to be the old remand center...
just to get a sense of what those...
What it looked like and what kind of...
What form, you know...
prison visitation took, you know.
Contact visits and non-contact visits.
What do you think he said?
You know, I think she did a great job...
given we had virtually no money to really build things.
- Don't fucking start up again, Mum. - Hey.
If you let anything happen to him in here...
What? What are you gonna do?
What are you gonna do, Mum?
It was a difficult scene to cut, this one.
Again, Ben...
Ben got a lot of takes out of me, and they're all just wonderful but...
You know, physically... The physicality of them...
was all over the shop and...
So it actually took me and Dools quite a while...
to piece this scene together.
But then it's at this point, I think, that you kind of...
This is a little common street in Melbourne City.
What do you mean?
This was the last day of the shoot. We shot this in the morning.
This incredible storm rolled in...
and we just manage to grab it before this monumental storm rolled in.
It was huge.
It almost felt like we were shooting, by the end of it...
like it had turned to night at 11 in the morning.
But the very next scene was the one which was the last thing we shot...
in the whole shoot.
This is the point of the movie where the movie becomes Jacki's.
Becomes Jacki Weaver's.
And I love her in this scene so much.
It's so exciting to...
You know, Jacki's been around...
Jacki was a part of that whole Australian cinema renaissance...
of the '70s...
and is like an Australian institution and...
J's gone.
You know, she does way more theater than she does anything else.
But it was just so exciting...
Look, I know you got a problem, Janine.
- Watching her do this stuff.
So this scene was the very last thing we shot in the movie.
And it was such a great note to end on because it's...
Is that what this is about?
Because it's...
Well, because it's my favorite scene in the movie.
I love the way it looks.
You know, this was a location that we actually...
The location we were gonna shoot in we lost the day or two days...
before we shot here, and we just had to find somewhere quickly.
This one looked nothing like the one we were gonna shoot in.
But I think it's just one of those fortuitous things, you know.
And it's actually day... This is the day that storm rolled in...
and it actually looks like this is happening at night.
It was actually so dark outside because of the storm that...
It's just dark.
I like the way it looks. I like... Jacki's so great in it.
It was... I think the cut of this scene is virtually unchanged...
from the very first assembly...
that Dools showed me.
I didn't think I even bothered going back...
and looking through the other rushes.
I don't think I bothered looking at other takes or anything, I just...
It just felt right.
Randall...
I feel sick about this.
It was such a nice night to end the shoot on, you know? Just Jacki...
To end with Jacki doing this scene.
Just because we don't wanna do something...
doesn't mean it can't be done.
It felt nice. I remember I just felt nice.
I remember being incredibly emotional on that last day of the shoot.
I remember actually kind of, you know...
wanting to do a little speech for all the...
For the crew at the breakfast on that morning.
And then kind of, the second I started it, I burst into tears.
They had no idea I had all this bottled-up...
emotional weirdness inside me...
and just delivered this kind of horrible, sort of, you know...
convulsive sort of teary speech.
I get to the end, and everyone's just standing there...
looking at me and...
And then I hear Dan Wyllie pipe up, saying:
"Jeez, mate, you really fucked that up, didn't you?"
- What do we do? - Surrender, there's six of them.
This we shot at Altona Meadows.
I'm not fighting a war over some kid. Fuck that, I'll shoot him myself.
What are we gonna do?
This was...
There's Luke Doolan. Actually Luke Doolan is one of the...
Fuck it.
One of the drug squad guys.
Open the fucking door! Open the door or we'll bust it down!
We're Witness Protection!
- Calm down! - Open it now!
- All right. Okay. Okay.
Shit.
You'd think the executives at that station...
This is one of those moments where I remember, you know...
Because, constantly, when you're shooting things...
I would always be in state of semi-anxiety.
You're re-writing and re-working and re-blocking and all this stuff.
This was one of those moments where I saw Jacki doing the blocking.
We had the big bowl, and she was mixing cookie mix or something.
I thought, "That looks corny. Gotta have something else.
She's gotta be doing something else. Some other kind of business."
And I remember... And Jacki was the one who said:
"Just don't... Before you go and panic and change it...
just think about why you wrote it in the first place."
You know, and...
And we started talking about it. We suddenly realized that...
I mean, it was kind of deliberately corny.
It was, you know...
This woman, who had just been...
in the previous scenes we'd seen kind of...
engineering to have her own grandson killed...
- but it also has to be somewhere no one we know would go.
- Was also the same woman who could just, you know...
bake cookies.
And that juxtaposition was what actually made the...
The baking of cookies interesting, you know.
This was one of those moments where Jacki...
Jacki reminded me that I needed to...
I needed to always remember what my initial instincts were.
What my initial intentions were.
Where that leaves us now is to decide how best to proceed...
This is Anna Lise Phillips.
This thing's going to trial with or without J, that's a given.
What we want is to win it.
Anna Lise is another great actor. I mean, this is a kind of tricky...
Again, it was late in the shoot.
Anna Lise came in to...
To do one day, one big day, and to...
You know...
And she...
You know, it can be...
Sure, it can be difficult for actors doing that.
When you walk into a movie...
where everybody else has found their stride...
and they're all very much in the same movie...
and they know they're in the same movie.
You ask an actor to come and do a big day like this and...
And especially a scene of this nature, which is just a kind of...
A kind of legalese.
Or dressed up in a kind of legalese...
that, you know, can often lend itself to...
a kind of television performance.
But Anna Lise is so...
Anna Lise is so good and...
That...
That I think we made it work.
You'll notice Sam Petty insisted that we have the sound of a toilet...
that had only recently been flushed going...
as they walk past the bathroom.
They heard something funny was going on.
It was just a fucking mix-up.
This scene's the closest that...
Leckie's character gets to kind of emoting.
Well, this and another scene coming up, but...
You know, where you can really... Closest you can get to feeling...
the pressure that he's under.
The pressure that he's under.
We shot this in...
It was on Queen Street in Melbourne.
You wanted that sense of, you know...
There was actually another safe house we shot, that we didn't end up using...
but that sense of J's escalation through the process...
to the extent that he's almost now staying...
He's like, you know, almost like a rock star...
in a hotel room.
This is... I really like this cue.
This is another of Sam Petty's cues.
Music cues.
We shot this at...
I think it was at the...
The Parliament Buildings in Melbourne.
We couldn't use the real supreme court.
There's my dad again, in the background.
There he is again.
Hi, Dad.
And so, yeah, we...
- Is this true? - Yes.
We shot this scene in the National Gallery of Victoria...
which was fortunate.
I wanted a space of that kind of size...
and austerity.
I mean, this was kind of...
I mean, it was in part for practical reasons.
I didn't wanna have to use...
I didn't want a court scene, because I didn't wanna have to...
I didn't wanna have to dress it. Didn't wanna have to fill it full of extras.
I didn't wanna deal with that whole circus.
But it was also because I just didn't want a courtroom scene.
I just felt...
At this point, in this particular movie,
it just didn't feel like the place for one.
It didn't feel like...
You don't need to lie.
It didn't feel like a place to get bogged down in the...
You know, in the accoutrement of...
The stuffy accoutrement of the justice system.
So to some extent you feel responsible for Nicole's death?
And also because the machinations of a kind of betrayal...
or legal betrayal of this kind, that J's doing...
You wouldn't feel the same way in the courtroom...
as you would in being somehow privy...
to its planning or rehearsal.
It's good.
You feel okay?
You okay, sweetheart?
Yeah, I'm fine. Can you grab us a drink or something?
Of course. There must be a drink machine...
I really love this next cue of Anthony's.
Murdering scum!
There's Tom Noble there, just to the right of screen...
with this bald head.
Script consultant and...
Tom was so helpful to me for so long.
He's just... He was a great research...
Source of material.
And I really enjoyed all that time I spent with Tom.
It's Dan Roche there. Dan played the co...
One of the cops in a short I made called Crossbow.
He's just got... There's something so great...
and real about him.
Nick Batzias.
Anyway, that's Nick dominating that frame.
This was Guy's last day.
This is getting very right towards the end of the shoot.
Yeah.
I mean, this was...
This was a hard day. We shot all of that going into the courtroom...
Into the courtroom stuff and...
That line there, "Have you worked out where you fit?"
Some audiences, especially, you know, non-Australian...
I'm not sure, maybe even Australians.
- Sometimes struggle hearing what that line is...
which always causes me certain pain because it's, you know, important.
And a beautiful light outside there.
That's all due to this trauma.
Now, this is...
We shot this at the Hilton, I think, in east Melbourne.
- And a young kid like J...
There's me and Adam Arkapaw sitting there.
I'd never do this again.
This whole kind of being in a scene...
and trying to direct it at the same time was...
I mean, I had done it bef...
I mean, I'd done it in some way before, but I had...
I just found this, you know, kind of right...
In the seventh week of the shoot, just suddenly realized...
how completely not on-the-job my mind was...
when I was in the scene.
I can't... I don't think I'd ever...
I mean, I'm not even doing anything, but I still couldn't concentrate.
And this was...
I think this was in Brighton, this supermarket.
That actually kind of worked well, given that we didn't...
We weren't able to lock the supermarket down.
That's a whole bunch of just regular shoppers in there...
with Guy Pearce...
doing his weekly shopping.
But it made it quite difficult for sound, obviously, so we had to...
I really don't.
We had to pretty much rebuild this scene in ADR.
I hope you catch the people who did that terrible thing.
But Guy's incredibly good at it.
If you're as smart as I think you are...
you'd know to walk by me like we've never seen each other before.
He's very good.
He was shooting that Katie Holmes horror film in Melbourne...
when we did the ADR for this, and literally kind...
He was able to just come in...
knock all of his ADR off in one quick hit...
and it was all perfect.
But I don't, Nathan.
This next shot, you'll notice this shot was actually an establisher.
Meant to be used earlier in the movie.
There's all... There's Craig's car and the smashed-up BMW...
and Barry Brown's car.
I was wondering when I'd see you again.
Been missing you. You okay?
There was one point at which we had contemplated...
you know, just for...
To simplify things, had contemplated shooting Pope...
at the barbecue.
You know, instead of having the whole...
you know, J going to the bedroom and waiting for Pope to come in.
We just thought, "Why doesn't he just walk out there and shoot him...?
Just shoot him in the head at the barbecue?"
It'd be, you know, some kind of iconic Australian ending.
Murder at a barbecue.
But as soon as we started thinking about it, it beca...
It felt wrong.
It felt peculiarly psychotic to do that, you know?
To murder him in front of his mother and his brother...
felt...
It felt psychotic in a way...
that I didn't want J to be at the end of the movie.
I wanted this to be very careful...
and, you know, kind of almost reluctantly necessary.
You know, so that he would have, at least, the foresight...
you know, or as strange as it sounds, the consideration...
to take it away into another room and to do it...
To do it privately and discreetly.
And then to keep his, you know... To keep...
To keep Jacki away from it once it had been done...
and to own it, in a way.
It's a crazy fucking world.
Yeah. It didn't...
Fortunately, we got that in one.
Darren in the backyard, holding a sausage.
It's quite amazing being in...
You know, when finally we got to Sundance and had our...
I mean, I had totally lost the plot.
I mean, I'd gotten some sense from people that it was working...
but it wasn't until we got to Sundance...
and had that feeling when you're with a big audience...
and you're with an audience that, you know, doesn't know me...
and couldn't give a shit about me and...
You can feel, you know...
You can feel the way it moves, and the sounds that it makes...
and that getting to this particular moment...
you know, the killing of Pope, and the closing titles.
It just... I remember feeling a kind of...
Well, actually, it wasn't even really an elation...
it was like a relief that...
That this thing that had taken so long...
It had taken, you know... It had been...
It had... When I first started writing it, it had felt...
Not... Like, I mean, a pipe dream. It felt delusional.
There were all those regular moments...
where I'd be writing the thing, and then going:
"What am I doing? This is..." You know?
"I'm never actually gonna get to make this."
You know.
And, "Is this just some kind of, you know...
you know, juvenile aspiration to work in show business...
or something? I should just, you know...
abandon this and do something else."
But, you know, you get regular little approbations and affirmations...
that make you just keep working a little longer...
and keep going, and finally I got to make the thing...
and then the making of it was just, you know.
I mean, it was tumultuous.
I mean, and... But for me, in so far as, you know, I just...
You know, it's all about a kind of terror of...
Like a profound fear of future embarrassment, you know?
You...
You just wanna do whatever you can...
to make sure you don't kind of horribly embarrass yourself...
when finally people get to watch this thing and...
So to have that experience...
at Sundance, when finally it had played...
and you could just feel almost immediately after...
As soon as the credits started rolling...
you could feel something good in the air.
And it...
And it continued for that whole week afterwards.
It was so great...
having so many of our people over there, you know.
You know, Ben, Joel, Jacki, Mirrah, Sully...
James, every...
And a whole bunch of the crew too, and just... You could...
Everyone just felt excited about what they'd done, you know?
And I just remember feeling relief...
that this whole kind of weird...
long road...
had ended somewhere.
Somewhere good.