Hey guys, here are a few topics recovering on the Ringer.com this week. Recovering the midterm election, Julia Roberts' new show Homecoming, and the worst person of the week on the good place. Also, make sure you check out the rest of the Ringer Podcast Network for more pop culture conversation. I'm Sean Fenniss, the editor-in-chief of the Ringer, and this is the big picture, a conversation show with some of the most interesting filmmakers in the world.
Today, we have a nice chat with a filmmaker named Julius Avery who made a movie called Overlord. Overlord looks like a war movie, sounds like a sci-fi movie, and ultimately feels like a horror movie. I chatted with Julius, but before we get to Julius, I'm here with my pal Chris Ryan Chris. What's up, man?
I'm going to be here because I've been taunting you with Overlord for a couple of weeks now. I saw it a couple of weeks ago, and I know you love a horror movie. I don't know if you love a body horror movie, and this movie, which is produced by Bad Robot, and like I said, it's set during World War II, but ultimately starts feeling pretty damned gross, kind of pushes the limits for what a mainstream movie can be. I think in a good way, but I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what makes a good gory horror movie, and kind of what is too far.
So in your mind, what is the platonic ideal of this kind of movie? The thing. Yeah, John Carpenter's movie. So the thing has atmosphere, it has eerie, it has our own worst enemy, it's like the enemy within stuff, but then it also has, we were doing an autopsy and this guy's chest caved in and an alien ate my doctor.
And that is one of the grosser things I think I'd ever seen up until that point the first time I saw the thing, but it's kind of a line, not the line that I draw it on, but it's body horror that works within. This is the worst thing that possibly happened to someone in the worst place for it to happen, which is like this Arctic research center that they were stationed in the thing. When you saw that movie, were you like, I don't want to watch this anymore, or were you sort of oddly compelled by the grossness? You know me so well, and yet, like I think that you think I'm sort of shrinking daisy.
I don't like to work blue. It's well known that you have a certain- Sean, do you want to do this right now? Yeah, we're doing it. We saw Tracey Morgan at the Apollo like 10 years ago make a very, very, very vivid description of his digestive tract.
Right. And I was like, I could have done without that. And ever since then, it's like I'm Julie Andrews, do you? You acted like a coward.
And in the meantime, I'm like, did you see the raid? That person gets his face cut off his face. And you're like, yeah, yeah, but now I'm sort of being- I dig it. I mean, like you have to have a foil.
It's a good bit. I guess I am interested though, because it's a hard sell at times to say like watch the most disgusting thing you can imagine, but I still have to figure out what it is I'm responding to and why I like it. John Carpenter obviously has this incredible ability to create ambiance and atmosphere around things that are really ghoulish and intense and sort of like on the surface visceral. Most horror filmmakers can't do that.
They can get one or the other. They can do the rig baker effect or they can do something that's really creepy. Blending those two things together is difficult. When Julius and I were talking, he cited the thing.
I think he was reluctant to name too many classics or type. Sure. Movies like the Thing and, you know, in Crone Big, you mentioned before, you know, they did everything old school nailed. I didn't have CJ.
They had to do everything with animatronics and puppetry. Because he didn't want to unfairly compare it to those movies. It's tough to offer directors because I think as soon as you start dropping references, you just get put in a headline where it's like, why this movie is this movie's step child? Yes.
And Overlord is a really cool movie. And one of the things I liked about it was some of the surprise, which I'm kind of spoiling here by even having this conversation with you in the conversation with him. So I would encourage people to check it out. But what is it about seeing that stuff that gets us excited?
Well, I think that horror is about exploring that part of your mind that you try to keep out of reach, right? And so I think that we all know that our bodies are just these bags of blood anyway. And so to imagine being put in that situation, it's like the quince scene in the quint-death and jaws, right? It's like we can have all these like slights of hand and it's in the dark and there's the skin and you don't really see it.
But when you get down to it, that's what getting eaten by a shark looks like. Yeah, that's true. And it's like it's grotesque and like that it's all that stuff happens. And I think what happens is certain directors can push past that moment and start to use the gore almost for lack of a better turn, like a paint color that they're splashing on a canvas.
And I mean, I haven't had a chance to see Sespiri yet, but I mean, I'm sure that there's like elements of that in it where it's like the body and blood and terror and the fear of what your body contains can almost be this color that's being used in the film. Yeah, that's an interesting point. And I think, you know, Sespiri and Overlord would be quite an intense four hours of film going this weekend. If you wanted to subject yourself to that, you know, the original Sespiri and the movies of Dario Argento specifically, I'm thinking of sort of Tenebres, Perfondo Rosso, the slasher movies that he made, the Sespiri is not a slasher movie, the slasher movie scene, they do exactly what you're saying, which is they take violence and make it about color and what that color makes you feel.
And those movies are literally one of those movies that's called Deep Red. And that has a kind of metaphysical quality that, you know, you have to kind of reflect on those bags of blood that you're talking about that we all exist inside of, but also something that is almost spiritual about flesh versus spirit. And I don't know, I like when movies do that. Do you have, is there a limit for you?
Yeah, like I think Apostles right up at the edge of that. Okay. And you just talk to the film. Yeah, and he's one of the most electrifying filmmakers we have.
He made the two raid movies and he made this movie, Apostle, which starts Dan Stevens as a guy looking for his sister who he thinks has been kidnapped by a turn of the century cult off like an island in Wales, I think Michael Sheen's in it, he plays this religious leader and they have these sort of medieval torture devices on this island that they use on non-believers. And the torture scenes in that movie are excruciating, like literally for the characters, but for the viewer as well. And you know, I enjoy films that make me submissive. I enjoy being overwhelmed by a movie, but it's almost strange to be put in that situation where the torture or the horror of what's happening to somebody's body is the focal point.
It's not just a casualty of the action. It is the action. I think that's where I start to sort of get a little squeamish, but I still think I can hang with it. There isn't kind of an additional subgenre of these movies.
I'm thinking of the original last house on the left. I'm thinking of I spit on your grave. The original I spit on your grave. There's a couple of more, particularly strangers, straw dogs, like that kind of thing.
Straw dogs certainly, I was thinking more like hmm, cannibal Holocaust, which is sort of considered the most grotesque and severe movie in part because they use sort of real animals were killed during the making of it. There is like a, there's an over the line version of these movies that we don't really see anymore. I never got the impression that you were very interested in that stuff. No, not really.
My interest in is like, is John Hurt having something explode out of his chest because, you know, it's about what's happening in Alien, not just because I'm like, let's just run that back multiple times. Think about that. If the chest burster scene in Alien was just happening four times a movie or something as gross as that was happening four times a movie, it's the obscuring of that. I mean, you've really got my interest picked about overlord because the way it's being marketed with the ACDC score and kind of like guys on a mission and it's sort of Inglorious bastards meets a zombie movie, but you're making it sound way more like vivid than that.
Well, you know, Julius used a phrase that I think is resonant and he said, when I first read it, you know, half my in, I write down a note and I was like, completely bonkers, Indiana Jones on acid. In some ways that is very true. It goes a little bit further beyond that. But if you think back to Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, it's actually quite a gruesome movie when you get down to the sort of arc of the Covenant in the final scene there and there are elements of that in this movie for sure.
There's something fantasmical about the whole thing. Let's just talk for a couple of minutes about David Cronenberg, kind of the godfather of a lot of this stuff. Yeah. Where do you stand on his movies?
Deeply interested, but like not a frequent watch. So anything from existence to what was the J.G. Ballard, the car crash crash. Yes.
Right. Crash. And obviously the fly and some of the more, you know, classic tales, but like I'm not like constantly like we got to dial out some Cronenberg. I feel like he's like a better influence than he is a director for me, even though I obviously respect his direction.
What about more like the history of violence, Eastern promises style? Yeah. That's more your stuff. Yeah.
Okay, Chris, thanks for giving us a little bit of clarity into our own personal body horror. And now. Okay, I ask you one question. Of course.
I was curious. Where does this movie fit in with Bad Robot? Like what like, do you see this as part of like, not as part of the Clover Film mythology, like what do you think they're doing over there? It's kind of interesting.
That's a really good question. It was rumored to be a Clover Film movie and ultimately it was not a Clover Film movie. I think one of the interesting things about it is it's co-written by Billy Ray and Mark Elsmith to very sort of high minded, yeah, Reverend Kevin Phillips, Billy Ray wrote, you know, these are very respected Oscar nominated kinds of screenwriters and it's not that kind of movie. It's a mid-night movie.
Yeah. So it's interesting to think about it that way. Obviously we think about it that way. We think of Mystery Boxes.
This is sort of a mystery box, but not really. It's more like the Twilight Zone where it starts out one way and then the tone shifts and then the tone shifts. And that is a very difficult thing to pull off. Julius was successful and it's part of why I'm so interested in just kind of having this conversation right now.
As far as the bigger Bad Robot scheme, what is the Bad Robot scheme? I don't know. I was asking because the news came out this week that J.J. Abrams was basically shopping for like a mega deal.
He's going around to studios to Disney, Warner's, Comcast, a couple of other these companies and just saying, by the whole thing, like, let's go. I want to do theme park stuff. I want to do video games. I want to do music.
I want to do movies, television, digital, like everything. I don't see an overlord theme park coming into this. No, of course not. But like I think that I felt like he was building something towards that and before Star Wars, it felt like he was like, I'm going to go create my own Lucas film that is, it got its own universe of characters and maybe some overlapping stories and interlocking stories.
And then when he went to Star Wars, he kind of took a divergence from that. And I wonder whether this is an effort to get back to that. But obviously with things like Goreville Paradox, there have been snakeups. Yeah, I think it's a very difficult thing to ask.
With the exception of J.K Rowling and essentially Wizarding World, we haven't really had somebody build something from whole cloth. We haven't had a target to be that. Yeah, right. I was sorry theoretically could have been, but there's just not enough product with Harry Potter Rowling and you know, subscribe to binge mode if you're not right now.
The world is so big. It's not just those original books. It's now the sequel books. IP that you can build this world.
Bad robot doesn't quite have an interconnected universe yet. And you know that you need that to make this constellation of success. So we'll see. Yeah, I'm really fascinated to see because I just we haven't seen a figure like him with this much pull, but sometimes when you actually look at the statue, you're like, oh, wait, like, they're kind of do a hit soon.
They're kind of do like a major thing. Yeah, I mean, are you many Machado or are you by Sarpa on the free agent market? I can tell. I'm out of the room and hold your head.
Chris, thanks so much for doing this. Now let's go to my conversation with director Julius Avery. Welcome to France. What happened here?
Some questions are good answers. I'm really delighted to be joined by Julius Avery. Julius, thanks for coming in. Thank you.
This is awesome. So Julius, I saw some of a gun and I liked it, but when I saw this movie, I was caught completely by surprise. I didn't know this was the sort of thing that you could do or would do. And I'm just kind of wondering at the start, like where did this movie come from and how did you get involved in it?
Yeah, I, you know, different called some of the gun that starred Yuma Gregor and Alicia Vikander. It was a crime drama set in Perth, West Australia, where I grew up. And you know, I took that film to Hollywood, to Los Angeles and showed it to the studios. This bad robot came to the Paramount screening and they thought it was cool and said, you know, come in and talk about what you want to do next.
Let me know for a second. What is that like where you are sort of taking something that you've worked hard on and then kind of pitching it around town? What does that experience like? Well, whenever you finish a film and you give it, you know, you hand it to the world, you know, you're really nervous.
You really obviously want people to like it and people to understand where you're coming from. And so it's kind of nerve-racking to let go of the baby and let it go off and to the world and become its own thing. I wanted to grow and healthy and to someone that you love and respect and you want other people to respect and love that kid as well. But, you know, for me, going to Bad Robot for the first time was really kind of, I was nervous as hell.
I mean, I'm going to meet JJ and the rest of the gang at Bad Robot and, you know, they make big movies. They sounds like a cliche, but I'm a kid from the country from Perth, West Australia, and you know, so far, from anything that I grew up with. And so, but as soon as I got into room with JJ, he sort of just put me in ease, you know, and kind of, he's very disarming that way. It really makes you feel like you know what you're talking about and, and yeah, all that kind of pedestal stuff sort of gets thrown out the windows and you meet, you meet JJ.
And we spit bought a few ideas around and he gave me the script overlord and said, you know, check it out. And you know, when JJ says, check out something you obviously do. Did you go into that conversation with like, I've got 10 dream films I want to make and I'm going to pitch you on my ideas. And he says, that's great, but I feel like you would be able to crush this.
I just went in and said, hey, listen, I'm open. I just don't want to repeat myself. I don't necessarily, I said, look, you know, this is the type of movie I want to do now. Next, you know, this is the type of things I'm into just broadly.
And what were some of those things you told? My films, even my short films have, you know, these themes running through them. It usually involves like a young guy who's thrown into the deep end and has to, you know, basically single swim, you know, and I was like a guy walking into bad robot. Yes, exactly.
And so I knew that I wanted to explore that further. And so when I spoke about the things that I was into, you know, they said, well, we've got the script overlord and I was immediately drawn to the concept because it was completely different from what I'd already done. I did a crime drama and this was like a world war two mashup of horror and sci-fi. And so I took it home and I read it and, you know, half I in, I wrote down a note and I was like completely bonkers Indiana Jones on acid.
And I still got that script. And the scripts are really intimidating. They give you a script that's been printed on red paper so you can't copy it. And they also have like this special wording on the front saying, you know, this script is being tagged with a tracking device, yada, yada, yada.
And I was like terrified that I had some sort of like, you know, mission impossible kind of self-destructing script that would, you know, catch on fire or something at some stage. But anyway, so I read this group and I immediately dropped everything and said, clear the decks. This is what I want to do. And I went after it hard and it took quite a bit of work to get the film.
And it was like many, many meetings and, you know, getting on the same page and making sure that we're, you know, we knew what we had the same idea for the movie. But in terms of like just putting together something for the studio and the pitch and everything especially when you're first starting out and you don't have many films under your belt, they kind of put you through the ringer. And you know, but it was all good. It was all good foundation work for the film.
And it made me, you know, think about what I wanted to do with it. And one of the first things that I, when I read the opening pages, which is an intense aerial battle sequence, we follow these World War II paratroopers as they're being dropped behind the lines and they've got to take out this radio tower and this small French Normandy village. And there's this huge aerial battle sequence. And on the page it felt like, you know, something very intense and, you know, something like, you know, the D day landings in, in, in, in, in, say, right, right.
And I was like, how the hell am I ever going to be able to match that? And, and so I was like, you know, the first thing I came up with is like, okay, I've got to make it feel like we're writing shotgun with these, with these paratroopers. I've got to make it feel really subjective. I've got to make it feel like it's first person.
And the first thing I came up with was this one that I'm not a very big believer in one as unless they actually had a service story. And in this case, it did. And I wanted to, because I wanted the subjective feeling to, to resonate and. This is the falling out of the plane.
Yeah. And so I went to the beginning of the film that is shot entirely seemingly from the perspective of the character that we spend the most time with. For me, it was like, how do you, how do you keep it subjective and, and, and visceral and, and immersive and long takes and you usually give you that sense of tension and sense of, you know, dread when you're trying to bail out of a plane that's, you know, caught on fire and, you know, that's falling out of the sky. And, you know, it was, it was a long, like that was my initial, not to myself.
I wanted to try something that was completely bonkers and out there. And when I first presented that to JJ, he was like, this is complete madness. But you should go for it. Go, go and do it.
That's what JJ does. He really once he hires you, he empowers you as a filmmaker and he gets behind you. And, you know, he really sort of helps at a studio level, uh, convince, you know, people that, yeah, I mean, it sounds crazy what this director wants to do. But, you know, I'd give him, give him the chance.
And if it hadn't have worked, it would have been a completely embarrassing thing because we didn't have any coverage. We shot, we only shot it one way. And so, you know, thank God it worked out in the end. There are a series of things in this movie.
And we can talk about some of them that feel like sort of a filmmaker obstacle course, you know, like you are not only doing this subjective point of view at times, you're trying to make a movie with sort of three different genre elements all at once. You have this pretty uncast. How do you like was that part of the thinking of taking on the project was like, I want to push myself as far as I can because it does feel like almost like SAT questions for a director. Yeah, look, uh, this is not something that you can easily classify.
It's not something that you can go put into one box. It's like it's, it's a mashup of, uh, you know, sci-fi horror action. And, you know, one of the things that I knew I would be kind of, um, not going into this film, I would be protected by bad rep because that's what they do. They, they like to take risks.
They like to do things outside the box, you know, when you go and see a bad robot, maybe expect the unexpected and JJ was always up for the trying to, you know, create this completely Frankenstein bastard child, uh, that, that is overlord. And, but one of the things that we spend a lot of time getting right was the characters. We really wanted the characters to feel free to love them. You know, JJ always talks about getting the audience to lean in.
And I believe that you do that, um, when you, when you love your, your characters, when they get dropped into hell, you, you kind of, you feel the jeopardy, you feel the risk, you feel the, the terror, um, because you don't want to see them get hurt. When you don't care for a character, I feel like you, you kind of drop out of the movie and you just, you just sort of just sort of washes over you. So we spent a lot of time trying to thread that needle and we also spent a lot of time getting the tone right, like trying to, even though this was the movie, you know, transition to something, you know, completely fantastical and fiction, uh, we wanted to make sure that we, we started off with a something feeling very real. And that was basically because of tension.
I wanted this is a, this is a move full of tension and it's got great action and body horror and so forth, but there's a lot of tension that's in the movie. And I, and I feel like we, we, we tried to set up early that anything could happen. You know, in the, in the trailer, you'll see a lot of these guys die in the first 10 minutes and some of the characters that you, that you get to love in the first 10 minutes, don't make it. Uh, and you know, it's, it's all to try and get the tension, like, you know, any moment, one of these guys can die.
I just think like when we get to the, to the horror elements, uh, in the movie, it makes it all the more horrific because we've grounded in that reality, if you will, even though what we're doing is completely fantastical and not medically possible. Yeah. As I was watching, I was like, this feels like, like this is kind of like thing you see on a poster, but it's like if David Cronenberg and John McTyrin made a Twilight Zone episode, like it has like all of these interesting disparate elements, when you were reading it, were you excited by that? Every time it kind of takes a slight shift.
Yeah. I was excited by the shifts. I, you know, my last film starts off as a gritty prison drama, then it ends up transitioning into, uh, you know, into a, uh, a kind of big, high smoothie. And I liked when, you know, you know, you're constantly getting surprised inside a movie.
I'm not a big fan of movies that are just very, uh, one dimensional in a sense that they're just an action movie or they're just a sci-fi or they're just a horror. I'm very, very much into, um, the idea of, you know, mixing genres. Uh, yeah, maybe it's because, you know, I've got, um, tension deficit or I don't know. So I mean, I hope you receive this as a compliment.
This movie is very, very gross and in a way that is like very effective and fun and has at times kind of like a midnight movie quality. And I'm interested how you actually did that and what was the balance of sort of the practical, with the digital effects and all the things that you were trying to do to make people feel the visceral quality of the movie. Yeah. So we spent a lot of time putting a lot of attention into detail, like, you know, we, we don't have hordes of Nazi zombies.
We have, you know, few super soldier creatures, whatever you want to call them. Um, and we put a lot of time and effort into getting, getting those guys being as scary and as cool as possible. I want to do the movie very in camera and practical. So that includes like all the special effects, makeup and action, um, you know, stunts and, uh, why did you, why was that important?
Um, I want, I feel like when you get into CG, it's great tool. I think it's, you know, we use it in the opening signals of the film to great, to, to good effect, I feel, but for me, I like my horror, especially to be very visceral. Uh, I like to have, I like to have a tactile reality. And you know, I feel like you, you can only get that from an analog experience.
So they, they talk about like this. You know, the uncanny valley, which is basically, you know, no matter how much time and effort you put into getting a CG shot, right. Um, the audience will always know there's something not quite right. And I think it takes you out of, out of the moment.
Um, and so, you know, we had a very, um, apart from, you know, some small circumstances in the movie, everything was very practical. And in cameras of the horror elements, um, for me had to match everything else we were doing. So we did, uh, it's not really cool. Like I, you know, movies like the thing and, and, you know, in chronic, uh, you mentioned before, you know, they did everything old school in the old days and have CG that had to do everything with animatronics and puppetry.
And, and so we did that with our movie. We did the moment in the movie where one of our soldiers snaps his neck back. So violently that it breaks it in critical sequence. And, uh, thank you.
And, you know, we did, we did that with, you know, old school puppetry and animatronics. And then we used CG to just do cleanups and so forth. And, you know, I just don't think the audience would have, that gross feeling of talking about before, uh, that thing that teaches you in your stomach, that primal thing, the way you just sort of curl up into yourself, I don't think you would get that if it was CG. It's a really fun feeling though, that sort of like stomach ache meets laughter that, you know, you're really kind of tapping into in the movie.
Did you watch a lot of movies that had these different elements beforehand? Do you have a lot of points of reference or the kind of person that just sticks to the script? I mean, obviously you watch, I mean, I watch a lot of movies. I've been, I used to go to the video, so I was a kid and, and, um, uh, I'm just getting away help, you know, my age here, but like we had an account at our local milk bar, we call them in Australia, um, like grocery store, I guess you call them.
And my mum would, you know, I had to write on my bike was like a five, five mile ride to get to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, you know, I lived in the middle of nowhere. Uh, and, uh, it was also doubled as a video, video store. And, uh, I also had fish and chips and kind of, um, uh, you know, and milk and bread. And anyway, so my mum would get, send me off to get milk and bread.
And, you know, the deal was if I was going to write it, do a round trip of 10 miles, that I would, I could get some, I could get like five weeklies. Okay. And, uh, and so I used to, I used to be able to put weekly, like get five movies and put on mum's account. And the guy there used to let me get whatever I wanted.
So like I would, you know, I was 10 years old and I was like, you know, getting, watching things like Mad Max and, you know, all the cool art movies that, um, you not necessarily like kids today, you know, have access to, but they haven't little access to other things. But anyway, uh, I'm dreading that my son is 10 and he's a huge, um, fortnight. He needs to watch the parental controls and that stuff. Yeah.
Um, so anyway, so, uh, um, so, you know, I, um, my, um, my experience was, you know, uh, with this film was like just sort of, you know, it's all in the back of your subconscious, you know, as you, but if your formative years, um, as I just went, what would the 10 year old kid and me, you know, love what would he like, you know, grossed out by all or get off on. And so that's, that's sort of, you know, how I approached everything. And, and John Carpenter is probably the master of threading, threading action, drama, and sci-fi on horror. And so, you know, he was a big influence on mine.
Um, you know, even, you know, one of my favorite films, even though it's not totally this right for this movie, it was, you know, big trouble little China. It was, you know, my favorite, but like, uh, uh, the other thing that really drew me to this, to this, um, this movie, because it's a war movie, um, as well as an action sci-fi horror. And my grandfather, um, was in World War II in the African campaign and he took a lot of pictures. He had like, um, he had a couple of photo albums, you know, filled with his, uh, his adventures and he, uh, you know, I see on his knee and he's taking through to pictures and, and you know, he also had these other things like bayonets and disarms grenades and bullets and stuff, which is completely, you know, as 10, as a young, young kid, I was completely obsessed with, but he used to tell me that he's, he's stories and one of the things that really impressed on me, even on the early age that there was something, something big had happened, you know, as much beginning, much bigger than me.
And I think that's where the journey began for me. And that's where it all the interest started. And I always wanted to make a war movie. Yeah, it's interesting.
I'm always curious with filmmakers if they have kind of a checklist of the kinds of films that they want to make, especially in their first view, if there is a significant genre difference, like what are some of the other kind of categories that you're interested in tackling? I've always wanted to do, uh, I've always wanted to do a big space opera. That's something that I've, um, I read that you may be doing that. Yeah, I, I'm hard at work on, uh, on, on Flash Gordon right now, which I can't really talk about, but it's, it's, it's, I've always wanted to propel a guide.
It's why, why, why are you in his head into space, you know, and, and see what happens. Uh, and why is that theme so resonant for you? Why do you keep coming back to it? Um, I don't know.
Like, uh, I'm not sure. I mean, I grew up, uh, in the country and, you know, I was, I got into a lot of trouble as a kid and I used to hang out around with the wrong crowd and, uh, and get into all sorts of trouble. And, you know, Jerry Cam, my short film is sort of loosely based on one of my stories. Um, and I, I don't know, like, um, I knew that I guess the moral compass of like, you know, a character who can sort of be completely corrupted, um, in that environment, but then at the end of it fights through it and doesn't end up, uh, on the evil side of the line has been something that I've struggled with as, as a person as much as, um, you know, growing up as much as my, as the theme in my movies.
You know, I grew up in a pretty rough crime, real town and some of the gun is very much loosely based on my story, even though I didn't hang out inside of helicopter machine guns and so forth. You know, the relationship in that, how many hosts did you pull? Yeah. Yeah.
Dozens, dozens by the time I was 12. Uh, no, uh, the relationship in that film, Brinson's way, it's plays a young guy who gets, you know, gets taken under the wing of Euma Gregor in prison and then they go on this wild trip into the gold fields in Western Australia and do this highest. And it's about a kid that's searching for a family, you know, searching for, um, a kind of a parent and my dad, my dad died when I was very young and, uh, you know, so I was always searching out, Father's League is in all the wrong places. And, uh, I grew out of the thank God, you know, I ended by getting invited to go to an art school in the city.
And when I was 15 and, uh, and it saved me, you know, a lot of my, a lot of my friends who I grew up with are over in prison were dead. So that really kind of informed the story of Son of a gun. And I don't really want to get sort of type cuss into any sort of one genre. I just know that I'm probably going to just keep on telling the same sort of story, but in a different setting, different kind of fashion.
I don't know. I've got a lot of shit to work out. You know, um, it's, it's a very, very expensive form of, um, you know, therapy, high grade, high tension therapy. No, that's, I mean, that's, that's the story of so many filmmakers, though, you know, trying to find new ways to kind of understand how they feel about the world and using different formats.
How did you actually make yourself into a filmmaker? Like I had never heard of you. I hadn't seen your shorts before Son of a gun. Son of a gun kind of came out of nowhere.
And I think I was really just made aware of it because it had the 824 connection. I was like, okay, I know that brand and I know the people that work there. So it's interesting that, but it does feel like you kind of came out of nowhere. Obviously you come from Australia, but how did you make yourself into a professional filmmaker?
Not the short story, the long story. Media version. So when I, where I grew up, there was no access to video cameras. You know, it was in that really tricky time between super eight and, you know, and video cameras and I was in the sort of dead zone where it wasn't really around.
But my mother bought me for my 10th birthday, still camera and promised to develop a role of film every month. So developing film was expensive back then, you know, I had to, and also I was like, it wasn't like the music you have now. You take it self, you can check it out. It took bloody a week of getting to come back or 10 days.
I like that you also had these, all these bargains with your mother, you know, like getting the videos and getting the film. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
You know, you can't let your parents take the energy. I mean, come on. So I said, take pictures and read the first. I was really shit.
I was so bad at it. Everything was out of focus. Everything was like blurry and I were exposing my good. But eventually, mum never gave up on me and just let me keep on taking, you know, developing these expensive roles of film.
And, and eventually I sort of got more into it. And I loved it more than I liked because I was, you know, doing a lot of drawing and painting in that stage. And I got accepted into an art school. It didn't take me long to find the photography part of the campus.
And I just love the media. Cause I could instead of taking weeks for the film to come back now, I was like, you know, I was able to develop my own film and instantly get gratification. And I was always too impatient for painting, you know, oils takes forever. And, and I just loved it.
And then I found out they had a, you know, video department and film department. And I took out video cameras and followed all my friends and, you know, I was skaters and followed them around. And at first they were all acting like doos with the camera. But then they got so bored of me that they just started just acting naturally.
And that's when I was like, test the magic. That's, you know, I didn't quite realize what was happening at the time. But the magic was in the fact that they, I was just being the fly in the wall and they didn't take a notice of me. That they'd been playing up for the camera was, wasn't as amazing as what they were doing when they just forgot I was there.
Were you thinking you would do documentary work then? Because I didn't, I didn't really have a plan. I was like, you know, 16, but I just got off on it. And I ended up by going to getting into film into film school.
And then I did a, I did a short film, which I funded by the state government. Called Little Man. And that then got me into one of the top film schools on the East Coast. So it got me out of Western Australia, which I always wanted to do.
I never, I hated where I grew up. I sort of hate love it now, but growing up, I certainly didn't have any love for Western Australia, but I love it now. I'm looking back on it. I have fond memories as well as bad ones.
But so I went to VCA film school and it was great. It was so amazing to be around a bunch of our filmmakers. You know, the teachers were okay. And, and you know, I had all these big hopes and dreams for what I would learn the other day.
It was just about hanging out with other filmmakers. And it was the first time I'd really did that in a very intense way, because I was living away from home and, and I got to, you know, go into a pressure cooker situation where we had to do, you know, a film pretty much every month, you know, and, and, and you had to just turn them out. And in my class, I had a, at a Mark Paul, who's gone on to shoot, you know, true detective season one and got in those, what else is, and Justin Gazelle's in my class as well, who, you know, did Macbeth and, and other great films and, and, and, what a luminous, it was great because we were like, we're all super competitive. Yeah.
So you know, when you go into a movie and you're like, fuck, I'm out. You get jealous. You know, well, I probably had to listen with a YouTube, but sure. Yeah, I, like, I'm like, oh my God, you did it.
You, you know, you've blown my socks off and what the, you know, how am I ever going to top that? Yeah. You know, fuck. So anyway, so Justin did that with a short film that got into can in his first year and, and he busted.
And, and then the next year I ended up by getting into can. And, and so I don't know, it was like, he's a super competitive guy. Like his father was like a, he was trying to make him to tennis prodigy like, and his brother, who's Jedd, who now I work with, Jedd, Jedd, Jedd, Gazelle, who's my score on Son of Gun and, overlooked. But anyway, it was, so it was really great to be around all these really great other filmmakers and we bounced off each other and it was great experience.
And then one can and. It's pretty in past that one. That's a pretty big deal with Jerry can and that opened up a lot of doors. I got a, you know, representation in town and was your, was your aspiration then?
And even among your classmates, what did everybody want to be Hollywood filmmakers? Was there, was it more like we'll make films in Australia? No, fuck. We wanted to be the greatest authors of all time.
No, we, like, um, you know, I've always wanted to make action movies, you know, that's, that's always been my goal. Like, you know, because that's what I loved growing up, you know, watching. And I had a bumpy ride. Like after can I had a film that fell over and I had all the money in place as very much like Romeo and Juliet's set in the desert.
It was a full on really dark, gritty tale and I had all the money in place. But then, you know, the funny body down in Australia said, no, do it. Because it's, you guys were about to crush me because I had all this momentum. And I was like, what do I do now?
And then I just went, I picked myself up, stopping me. And wrote Son of a gun. And I took the same story that I keep, like recycling and put into that, but made it much more commercial kind of venture and ended up by getting funded. And you're McGregor Redditing.
He was a real advocate for me. And when he said yes to the movie, pretty much it all just was a domino effect. And so it just happened really quickly. Did you get a sense of why you and responded to it and said, I'll take a chance on this person who hasn't made a full length, who hasn't done something like this before?
Yeah, I bribed him with, no, I wrote him a letter. And a letter was a very personal letter to him. It was basically about my childhood and growing up. And it was my and the relationship that that relationship that was, you know, I grew up with.
My life was very similar to one of us in the in the script. And so I think I just went in with putting everything on the table and was just like, I'm all in. And I think, you know, actors have to be all in all the time. Like they put everything on the line, like they're in front of the camera.
I can high bar the camera and they're putting their face on a big 40 foot screen. They're throwing themselves out there. And I guess I just wanted to like from the beginning just throw myself out there. And if I got laughed at it, I got like, you know, judged so be it.
But it paid off. He responded to it. He read it. He like he read it.
I sent it on the Friday and I got a response on Monday and said he wants to talk. And so it was crazy. Yeah, it was crazy. It was like mind bending experience, the whole thing.
Setting aside, Flash Gordon, you know, how do you figure out what you want to do next? Now that you've had this sort of big Hollywood studio experience, do you like working in this atmosphere? This is the kind of thing you want to continue to do? Yeah, I want to keep making studio movies.
Well, I want to make movies that get theatrical. I'm a huge advocate for the cinematic experience. And, you know, I love going to the theater. I love the community feel of it.
Like there's nothing better than going to a Friday night movie. I mean, movie with 400 people and the energy of the crowd is electrifying. I love in this town that everyone claps and, you know, and we're quite reserved in Australia. We're very kind of very British in that way.
And this is a company town. And so everyone's like, you know, it's clapping and cheering. And you really feel that that spirit. And also like the I love big thumping soundtracks and I'm a big fan of Chris Minnollum's work in that regard.
I like to play it as loud as I possibly can. What is, you know, it's final tap, put it up to 11. So yeah, so if I can keep making movies that get a theatrical lease and I'm happy. But the basic principles are the same for me and everything.
Like it's essentially, you know, you've got all the collection and all the bells and whistles that go along with a film like this nature. But really what it comes down to is like, you know, you've got to come back to the room and camera and I'm selfishly a performance director and I try and make everything as real as I can for the act because they give that extra 10% and extra 15% when they can feel a touchable. They can, you know, for instance, Pulu, you know, who plays Wafner, Pula Aspect. He was in prosthetics make up for five hours every day and then had to do a 10 hour day.
And that was really gratifying to see because the other actors were she's scared of him. It was real for them like that. He was terrifying. If you had like a green sock on his face or tracking markers or whatever and said, I'm scary, you know, believe me, I'm going to be scary in post.
It just wouldn't, it wouldn't, it wouldn't feel as real. And, and I guess if I'm going to venture into bigger movies, you know, I just want to keep them as in camera and practical as possible. You know, trying to, you know, have in camera do the heavy lifting and CG do the, do the, do the, do the light work. That would be my goal if I continue to, you know, make these big event movies.
That'll be an interesting challenge when you're in space. Um, oh, you know, two thousand, two thousand one, you know, he figured out. I do it. You can figure it out.
It's always, I never episode by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing that they've seen. I suspect that you are an avid film goer to this day. So what is the last great thing that you've seen? The last great thing I've seen, um, uh, Mission Impossible for that was amazing.
Um, that was like, I saw that, um, the Dolby Theatre and it blew me away. It's visceral. It's high impact. The intensity that, that helicopter sequence in the end is like next level.
You know, uh, I really loved like they took some really, that is really bold things. You know, like the, um, the kind of imaginary sequence where, you know, Tom Cruise gets to kill a cop and so like it was some really great moments in that movie, but it was, it was such an event movie. And if I could, it was allowed to ever be able to do a big action movie like that, I'd be picking shit. We love that movie on this show.
So that's a great one. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you very much. Cheers.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Big Picture. Please tune in next week when we'll be back with an Oscar show and maybe a top five show. We'll see how things shake out. And if you're looking for something to read, check out the ringer.com.
I have written about Netflix and their pursuit of prestige movies, which include Roma and the Ballad of Buster Spruggs and also a movie that is out right now called Outlaw King. So check that out on the ringer.com. See you next week.