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

Did you experience the same types of character hurdles with Jacki Weaver's character that you did with Ben?

No. In some ways it felt simpler. Which is strange, because the character in so many respects is as complex as Pope is. She is in many ways as emotionally damaged as her sons are. Her inappropriately intimate love for her sons is as much about her selfishness as it is any kind of genuine parental concern for them. But for some reason it just seemed kind of simple -- and about setting up certain ground rules up front: which is that Smurf is a disarmingly delightful person. The relationship that most actors have with their characters is that she is not to judge that character herself. She was not to -- in any way -- see herself as a villainous person. She was just very experienced in life, and very pragmatic.

But she has a very romanticized view of this world as well -- down to the fact that she kisses her sons on the lips. Are her maneuvers in the last act her response to preserving her place in this world or preserving her family?

Well, this is a woman whose whole sense of self is built around her relationship to her sons and the power that relationship carries with it. And as soon as she gets the sense that she may be about to lose all of them in one way or another, she has to make cold and pragmatic decisions. They're probably the kinds of cold and pragmatic decisions she's had to make a number of times in her life. Not necessarily so extreme. But this is what I was alluding to before: Her love for her sons is not necessarily about her genuine parental love for her sons. It's about her sense of identity and her sense of power being born out of her relationship to these young men. The idea of losing that terrifies her.

You've previously drawn an interesting contrast between this film -- and your approach to the subject matter -- and the type of approach we might see from Quentin Tarantino or Guy Ritchie. Can you elaborate on that?

On the most basic level, I knew I wanted to make a crime film that took itself very seriously -- as opposed to the Guy Ritchie/Quentin Tarantino mold. And I feel uncomfortable lumping those two together, because they're very different filmmakers. But at least they make films that exist in a heightened universe. That wasn't the kind of universe that I wanted Animal Kingdom to exist in. I wanted it to be something that took itself very seriously and therefore could carry what I hoped would be a classic, big, if not operatic crime film. And to that end I hope it carries the menace that I hoped it would carry as well -- that sense of menace and danger. It needed to exist in a very truthful world.

But it also reflects a very specific historical period of history in Melbourne -- which I presume is something you didn't want to trivialize.

That's true. There is an event in the film -- the random revenge killing of two young cops -- that did happen in the late '80s. And even though I fictionalized the world around it, it would have been wildly inappropriate to something that was a light kind of crime movie based on that subject matter specifically. It wouldn't have been kosher.

How do you follow something like Animal Kingdom? What do you want to continue, what do you want to change?

What do you think? [Laughs] I'm asking you seriously! Really, it carries a strange pressure with it. It's such a weird thing. I could not have hoped for this movie to unfold better than it has both here -- beginning at Sundance -- and now back at home. It's been just dizzying. But with that comes an incredible world of options and opportunities, and part me pines for that day when I had no options. All there was was that one thing in front of me that I had chosen to do, you know? I don't know. I'm waiting for the Animal Kingdom smoke to clear.

At the same time, I need to remind myself to enjoy this. Look where I am! I'm in a board room in New York City. This is amazing! And yet I am panicking about what I'm going to do next.

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