Animal Kingdom Director David Michôd on the Ups and Downs of His Acclaimed Debut

Let's take one at a time, because a lot of American viewers aren't familiar with someone like Ben, for example. How did you two develop this... guy?

It was tricky. I mean, again, I wrote that character for Ben -- because I think Ben Mendelsohn is one of the greatest actors in the world. And he's been doing it for a long time now. He just hasn't had the right canvas to paint on, or the right stage where he can really flex his muscles. One of the reasons I really wanted him for this particular character was for him to sit at the head of a criminal family -- or at least the alpha male in a family of armed robbers. I needed a powerful personality, and for me, there is no more powerful personality than Ben Mendelsohn. He's a force of nature. It's exhilarating to be around him, and I knew if I could put him at the head of that family, then I could build everyone else around him.

But at the same time it meant that when we got into the rehearsal process... Well, the character is incredibly complex, and it wasn't immediately apparent to us exactly what that meant. I don't think he would mind me saying this, but rehearsal was tense. And intimidating.

How?

Well, when you've got a forceful actor with his ability and power, and he hasn't found the character -- when we haven't found the character -- rehearsal can feel a little aimless. And frightening for him, I'm sure. It can feel unfocused. It lacks the specificity to make it feel whole and complete and know what your work is. So that frustration and tension manifests. There's a clear feeling that the onus is on me -- as the director and the writer -- to engineer the environment is which the character can be found.

You've done some acting yourself as well, though, right?

I've done a little. I have an affinity for what actors do, and I consider myself an actor. I know how it works. I know what it's like to feel at sea, I know what it's like to be badly directed. I know what it's like to feel like I'm having to engineer my own performance, and I may horribly embarrass myself in the process. What I want to do is to relieve actors of that fear.

How hard was it to find the balance between the dangerous, powerful crime figure and this guy who's struggling to be a father figure in the family itself?

Yeah, I mean, this is exactly the stuff I'm talking about. The character was complex because of these things. He's the alpha-male patriarch of this family, and yet he's infantile -- and deeply confused and damaged. It was us -- Ben and I -- trying to find that. And doing it clumsily in an early rehearsal made it very apparent that he and I were going to have to sit down for two solid days in his hotel room, go through the script beat-by-beat, and map the character out so we could have the shorthand and the clear and comfortable sense that we were in a coherent zone.

Did you sense any apprehensions at all about taking such a bad guy to the next level?

No, he really wanted to do it. I'm sure Ben must have been frustrated by the fact that whilst his services are so regularly sought, having something genuinely meaty to chew on was... Well, I'm sure this true for so many actors. Those meaty and complex roles are so few and far between. I'm sure he loved the complexity and the darkness of Pope. He was exhausted when he'd done the film; he'd just done five films back-to-back in Australia, but he said he just hated the idea of one day going to the movies and seeing someone else playing that character.

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