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

Nearly seven months after his debut feature Animal Kingdom wowed Sundance, found American distribution and repurposed Air Supply's "All Out of Love" in the most harrowing way possible, writer-director David Michôd is readying for the rest of America's reaction to the Australian crime-family drama. If the critics are any indication, he has nothing to worry about -- except, maybe, how to follow it up.

After all, it takes a fairly special import to make instant Stateside stars out of inveterate Aussie actors like Jacki Weaver and Ben Mendelsohn, who appear as two-fifths of the bandit clan into which young Josh (rookie James Frecheville) is inducted after... well, no spoilers here. Let it suffice to say Michod's tale of power, desperation and revenge in Melbourne is one of the best first films in recent memory -- a rich synthesis of character and vision that rewards multiple viewings, and an exquisite cinematic expression that belies the decade Michôd needed to hone his chops on the page and behind the camera. The investment was worth it: Animal Kingdom will no doubt be around long after this Friday's limited release and the upcoming awards season where it promises to make a showing.

Movieline caught up with Michôd during one of the filmmaker's recent New York stopovers to discuss his debut success, his very prolonged development process, keeping his distance from Guy Ritchie, and his follow-up philosophy.

I just want to tell you I've had "All Out of Love" stuck in my head since Sundance.

[Laughs] Well, that's good.

Where did that scene come from?

I knew I just wanted to have a scene in the film where that happens. It's Ben Mendelsohn's character having this psycho-emotional episode. I knew I wanted to involve him watching on a television something about a childhood that was probably pretty toxic, but also reminding him of a time that's gone and the melancholy you associate with that. But he's also looking at a world he just does not understand, and the darkness that brews in him. For me there's no better way to do that than to find a song that is both strangely arcane -- and almost kitsch -- and yet really quite emotive and beautiful at the same time.

And yet there's this drone beneath it that really ups the horror.

Yeah, really just to unsettle the whole thing, you know?

You worked on this script for years. Is that the kind of thing that comes out of years of development? These little ideas here and there that finally just all fit?

It took me 10 years on and off. I did a lot of other stuff in that time. But an element like that came relatively late in the piece. A scene of that nature had been in the script for quite a while. At one point, it was just Baz, Joel Edgerton's character, just strumming an acoustic guitar. Drunk, just doodling on the guitar. At some point it changed from that into a song and a video. I don't think "All Out of Love" even came up until pre-production.

So 10 years off and on... When did you know you were finally ready to make it?

When people starting telling me the script was good. Or at least when people started telling me I needed to make the script. It was after years of going through that process that I assume so many writers have been through before -- giving the script to people to read, to get their feedback, and just having them sit you down and tell you everything that's wrong with it. And I had assumed that that's the way the process always works -- that it's never going change, and at some point I needed to decide for myself when the thing was ready make. Strangely, I did work into a draft that stopped eliciting criticism. People started saying, "This is great. When are you making it?" But between that and making Crossbow -- the short that played Sundance in 2008 -- it was really no longer a matter of me feeling ready. Even if I wasn't, the thing was going to happen. It felt like the train had left the station and I was powerless to stop it.

How and when during that time did the ensemble come together?

There were a couple of people, like Jacki Weaver and Ben Mendelsohn, who I knew I wanted. I wrote their characters for them. Even Joel Edgerton, though he was slightly later in the process. Guy Pearce was my first choice for his character, and we met with him maybe a year before we shot. That was a confidence-builder because he said "Yes" rather quickly and rather enthusiastically. The rest of it is really just putting together these bits and pieces and this mosaic of characters. Some of them were actors I was familiar with; some of them had changed. Some of them I'd never seen before in my life. Some of them were just the kids. There's that wildly nerve-wracking but exhilarating, open [period] where you hope that kid will walk through the door. Luckily, I think they did.

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.

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.