David Michod’s gripping debut feature film, Animal Kingdom, opens nationwide today. Charting the fall of a Melbourne family of criminals, the film stars Guy Pearce, Joel Edgerton and Ben Mendelsohn. After winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Michod has been in hot demand. We caught him on the phone in LA, to ask him about his creative inspiration behind this cracking crime-drama.
FLICKS: I thought I would start with asking you about your connection to the subject material.
DAVID MICHOD: It was just a fascination that I developed not long after moving to Melbourne from Sydney when I was 18. The city was so big and new and unfamiliar. I started reading quite a bit of Melbourne true crime writing, particularly a couple of books by a guy named Tom Noble, who used to be the chief police reporter at The Age. And he was there during the ‘80s, covering what was in essence the decline of armed robbery as a professional criminal pursuit, and also charting the decline of a particularly hardened core of the armed robbery squad in Melbourne. And as I was reading this stuff I found myself imagining what I hoped would one day be a big Melbourne crime story, which I started writing when I left film school.
Is it important for you to be able to personally relate to the characters, to be able to tell this story?
Completely. Without relating on a detailed and emotional level to the characters, you are almost always just peddling in genre cliché. So in order to write those characters it felt very important to me that they be rooted in some kind of real and mature observation of people and families. So much of these characters is actually based on people or relationships that I have observed myself and then transposed into a really heightened and dangerous criminal world.
The film has some terrific sequences of suspense. As a director, what do you reckon is the key to creating suspense?
That’s an interesting one, because the classic Hitchcock sense of creating suspense revolves around either the element of surprise or the ticking bomb under the table. You can either involve an audience in moments of suspense by throwing them completely off guard, or letting them know quite clearly that something bad is coming, and making them wait it out. Or doing some kind of combination of both, which in many respects is what I was trying to do in Animal Kingdom. A lot of what’s going on in the film is very clearly telegraphed, and yet hopefully it feels quite tense and menacing nonetheless. I always I knew I wanted it to make it feel like a really measured and menacing crime film, to lay certain foundations and then let the kind of insidious energy that a couple of the characters carry, build slowly, but powerfully over a period of time.
The soundtrack music was interesting. There were several popular songs used, combined with the sombre, tragic orchestral score. What were you hoping to achieve with the music?
What I knew from very early on, given that I wanted to make a genuinely menacing crime film, was that I therefore needed to make a crime film that took itself very seriously. And in order to achieve that, I knew that I wanted to create a score that had a size and almost classic austerity to it, which I then did with my composer, Antony Partos. But I also knew that I wanted this world and its characters to feel real, and real people fill their lives with the popular music in one way or another. It’s very often where they find their levity, and it felt important to me that these characters feel real. Real people look for levity in their lives regardless of how otherwise anxious those lives might be.
And were there any specifics of sound design that you were conscious of?
Well one thing I knew I wanted to do was make a Melbourne crime film that was set in the maddening heat of a Melbourne summer. You know, that kind of heat that induces a considerable lethargy in people, but also can actually feel quite tense and volatile. In order to achieve that kind of lethargy mixed with volatility I knew I wanted the sound design to have a certain kind of menace and stillness to it at the same time, and then breaks of silence.
Could you talk through your concept for the visual style of the whole thing, because it felt like it was both quite raw and yet quite stylised at the same time?
Yeah, well we’re so used to seeing crime, or at least cops and robbers, on television that I wanted the film first and foremost to feel cinematic, if not classically cinematic. But at the same time I didn’t want the thing to get swamped by unnecessary visual flourish. My cinematographer [Adam Arkapaw] and I very strongly believed that if the lighting and the performances were doing what they should be doing, that the visual look of the film could, and should, be quite simple. So that was kind of our guiding principle. I wanted at various points in the film to be able to drop into certain moments of visual and aural poetry, for want of a better word, which is where some of those moments of slow-mo come in.
Are there any films that you took as inspiration for Animal Kingdom?
There are none that I was using specifically when we were prepping the film. It has kind of strangely only been in retrospect that I’ve been able to observe the extent to which a film like, for instance, Apocalypse Now, which just happens to be my favourite film, is the closest thing that I can find that might have served as a template. That film is obviously a very different film and a considerably larger film, but that mixture of a kind of grand narrative filmed in detail that manages at regular moments to step out into a more heightened and poetic space, was in many respects the kind of thing that I wanted to do with Animal Kingdom.
And is this the sort of film where you spent most of your time directing actors, just really focussing on their performances?
I really enjoy the casting process because it’s putting together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that a film will be and I generally feel that if you cast the film right, work that you need to do with those actors is actually relatively simple and fun. I don’t recall ever having to try and squeeze a performance out of an actor who was not giving me something like what I needed, I mean Ben Mendelsohn’s character was particularly complex and it took us a while to find it, but I never doubted that we would. It’s almost a cliché, but if you cast the film right, 90 per cent of your work is already done and the remaining 10 per cent is just simple fun.
So on a typical day on set for you, how much have you prepared and do you stick to an absolutely rigid plan, or do you keep things kind of loose and leave something to chance?
I prepare pretty meticulously, I don’t do storyboards but I shot list quite pedantically, mainly because the thing that causes me the most anxiety on set is just coverage, you know, making sure that I have the shots I need to put the story together. But as is the case with all film sets, there are a constantly shifting and unwieldy beast and almost every day that shot list gets chopped and changed. And that can be terrifying, but it’s kind of exhilarating at the same time.
Are there any specific details of art direction that you were deliberately pursuing?
I don’t know there was any overarching philosophy, other than that I just wanted the movie to feel rich and detailed and authentic. I think one of the things I love about making films is that those conversations that you have with art directors and production designers, they’re in essence the same as the one that you have with actors and cinematographers and editors – you’re always talking about the rich and detailed life of the characters of the world. This is what I love about cinema, this is what I love about making films, I just simply love having those details and rich conversations about life.
This is your debut feature film – how do you get to that stage, how have you attracted enough attention to be able to get the financial backing and interest from actors?
It’s just a long, slow, slog in a way, In the more than ten years it has been now since I finished film school in Melbourne, I just kept practicing, just kept honing and maturing the script while making short films in order to attract interest and confidence in me as a director. The process took a long time, but I just had this feeling that if I did the things that I needed to do that I would one day get myself into a position where Animal Kingdombecame an attractive proposition for people. And there was a long period there where it felt like the film was barely on anybody’s radar, and then I made a short film calledCrossbow, which played at Sundance in 2008, and from that point on it actually felt like my fortunes shifted quite profoundly. Crossbow got so much good attention that suddenlyAnimal Kingdom went from something that felt impossible to something that felt inevitable.
Have you got a follow-up project on the way?
No, well this is one of the reasons why I’m over here in LA at the moment. I’m just kind of having all sorts of conversations about what the possibilities are. Certainly since the amazing experience that we had at Sundance, it feels like the possibilities are plentiful, you know, then that just simply makes the decision making process harder.
