If movie sets are where the magic happens, editing rooms are far more sobering locations: sterile technical environments where creative visions are dissected into second-by-second and frame-by-frame footage.
When writer-director David Michôd sat down to edit his debut feature film, 2010’s Animal Kingdom, he was months away from basking in the warm reception of what we now know as one of the most critically acclaimed Australian films since the turn of the century – and undoubtedly among the country’s finest modern crime dramas.
Animal Kingdom is an immensely assured film, with consummate production values, a beautifully written screenplay and great acting (including Jacki Weaver’s Oscar-nominated performance). But Michôd, a self-professed “emotional being”, was too close to the material and too green to fully comprehend what he had made.
“When I was cutting the movie, I had no idea what it was and I was chronically depressed. I had a pretty open fear that maybe I was making a gigantic mess,” he says, on the phone from LA where he is in pre-production on War Machine, a US$60m satire starring Brad Pitt.
“We had test screenings throughout the edit and people would come in and say very nice things, but I just assumed they were lying because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”
The moment Michôd contemplated the extent of his achievement – a film rightly described by the Guardian’s own Peter Bradshaw as “the nearest we’re going to get to an Australian GoodFellas” – finally arrived when Animal Kingdom received a rapturous response from an auditorium full of strangers at the Sundance film festival.
“Always for me that first memorable buzz was the one we had at Sundance,” he says. “We went there with a film nobody was talking about. It really felt like the second that first screening happened, everything went nuts, and didn’t stop for about a year and a half.”
Inspired by Australian gangland crimes of the 80s and 90s, particularly subjects such as the Pettingill family and events such as 1988’s Walsh Street police shootings, Michôd began working on the screenplay after moving from Sydney to Melbourne when he was 18. He developed an interest in true crime, finding crime books “a strangely useful cultural and geographical guide to the city”.
The story is an ensemble drama told from the perspective of teenage protagonist Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville). After his mother dies of an overdose, Joshua moves in with his grandma Janine aka Smurf (Weaver) and her handful of ne’er-do-well sons – including the menacing Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) – who are in the midst of a violent war against police. Detective Senior Sergeant Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce) tries to persuade Joshua to turn on his family, reciting a now-famous monologue about the weak versus the strong and how “everything knows its place in the scheme of things”.
For Michôd, the writing process was not just slow but endlessly revisionist; not a single word from the original draft made it into the final version. Working with Screen NSW script development , he sought feedback from a range of professionals including producer Liz Watts, who would play a crucial role in making and releasing the film.
Michôd’s career trajectory is a familiar one, moving into feature film-making after graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts where he made a bunch of shorts. But it also marks a rare transition from film journalist to film-maker. Almost broke after graduation and desperate to keep his crawlers in the game, Michôd worked as a reporter and later as the editor of trade publication Inside Film (IF), where he collected contacts and amassed useful insider knowledge.
“I was lucky enough to get a job at IF and for six years, I spent that time learning about ways in which the industry functions,” he says. “I learnt about stuff that film-makers, especially early in their careers, don’t normally have access to: the worlds of marketing, distribution and publicity.” When the time came to push Animal Kingdom toward production, Michôd knew the lay of the land.
The shoot was tight – just 35 days – but the cast was a dream team. Guy Pearce, Joel Edgerton, Luke Ford, Dan Wylie and others joined Mendelsohn and Weaver, who Michôd specifically wrote roles for.
Mendelsohn’s character, Pope, is a powder keg of menace powered by one of the actor’s many dynamic and unsettling performances. A scene depicting Mendelsohn sitting on a couch blankly staring at a TV playing the music video for Air Supply’s All Out of Love, his gaze moving onto a teenage girl passed out on the couch, is profoundly unsettling. It’s one of several moments in which the film-maker takes a prosaic setting and masterfully imbues it with intensity. Michôd disagrees he ruined the song for everyone: “I think you can give Ben the credit for that.”
And, of course, there’s Jacki Weaver. The veteran actor’s performance as the family matriarch – that dragon smile, the way she holds herself, the tender lilt in her voice and sinister gleam in her eyes – lifts Michôd’s well-written character to sinister heights.
There is something serendipitous in the fact the moment her character orders a hit on a member of her family – what the director describes as Weaver’s “Oscar’s scene” – was the final one they filmed. Even the self-doubting Michôd sensed its significance.
“I remember experiencing the feeling so acutely, in a way I hadn’t to that extent felt at any other part during the shoot, that we had done something special,” he says. “I remember leaving that last scene on that last night thinking, if nothing else in the movie works, at least that scene is kind of great.”
- Guardian Australia film club will screen Animal Kingdom at 2pm on 19 July at Sydney’s Palace Verona. Luke Buckmaster will be joined by Animal Kingdom producer Liz Watts, Kath Shelper (Ruben Guthrie) and Tristan Roache-Turner (Wyrmwood) to discuss making debut films in Australia. Book tickets here
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