Interview: David Michôd Talks Animal Kingdom

“I moved to Melbourne from Sydney when I was 18, and the city was so foreign and a little bit intimidating to me. What I had known of Melbourne at that point—Melbourne in the ’80s, especially—had been a pretty dark and weird place. All I knew of it was a city where bad things happened,” first-time Australian filmmaker David Michôd recalls about his early days in the capitol of Victoria and his detached perception of a city with a well-known, lurid reputation. “There were long-running and seemingly antagonistic, hardened gangs of armed robbers and an almost renegade police squad that was, you know, made up largely of cops who, in that era, had the most difficult job in the police force. They were known as the hardened men of the Melbourne police; they were the men dealing with the most dangerous criminals, these gangs of heavily armed and dangerous, very professional criminals.” Over the course of the eight years it took to sculpt the narrative trajectory of Animal Kingdom (the 2010 Sundance winner in the World Cinema Dramatic category), Michôd had a chance to really observe and dissect the goings-on of the menacing, well-reported criminal activity, which extended throughout the city and ultimately inspired some crucial events in the film. With Animal Kingdom’s release set for this Friday, August 13, Michôd sat down with Slant to discuss his background in film journalism, the infamy encapsulating the Melbourne crime circuit, and premiering his first feature film at Sundance.

Did you always have a fascination with film?

No. I mean, I really loved movies, and I was totally obsessed with Star Wars when I was a kid. I remember those early movie experiences; first movie I ever saw was Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, and the second was Star Wars, and I saw Star Wars about 50 times as a little kid. I knew every line of dialogue; I’d act out scenes in school at lunchtime, but I didn’t have any aspirations to be a filmmaker. I didn’t pay any attention to how films were made. I just liked being immersed in the world of a film. It was just at some point in my early 20s and I had finished a degree at university—it was one of those general liberal arts degrees, the ones that enrich your inner world and yet don’t necessarily vocationally qualify you for any particular position. I said, “You know what, I’m going to have a crack at film school and see what happens.” And I loved it.

I read that when you came out of film school, you went into entertainment film journalism. Did you write film criticism or was it more like profile pieces and interviews with actors and directors?

It was more of a film craft magazine; it was for and about filmmakers. It was a weird time for me. I had lived in Melbourne for 10 years and moved back to Sydney and I just desperately needed a job. I wrote a story for this magazine, Inside Film Magazine, and they needed someone to answer the phones. I said I would do it. I didn’t care at that point; I’d do anything. It was very loose and chaotic back then. Within six months, I was the Deputy Editor and edited the magazine for about three years. I had never had any journalistic aspirations, but I learned so much about the craft and how the business works, from the very beginning to the very end. And I met a lot of people. It was a great opportunity.

You’ve said that the seedy elements of Melbourne lent to certain aspects of the film, and Jackie Weaver, who plays the matriarch of the Cody clan in the film, also mentioned that an infamous Melbourne crime family inspired some events of the film and how the mother of that family has become a public figure in the Melbourne media.

It could be quite unsettling, in Melbourne especially. You aren’t quite sure at what point that happens, when people turn from someone who has had their name in the papers because, in some way or another, they have come to the attention of police or the courts, and then suddenly become newsworthy identities in of themselves. Every now and then there are certain kinds of famous criminal identities who will—you know, Chopper will write an opinion piece for the newspaper, commenting on some criminal activity that has been happening in the city at that time. The ex-wife of a very notorious criminal identity in Melbourne nearly ended up on Dancing with the Stars, and you wonder at what point when [the criminal shifts to a celebrity]. What is that fascination about?

Would you say it’s their notoriety?

Yeah, I think it’s a little bit about notoriety, but I don’t think the public is interested in these people in the same way they would be interested, you know, in Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, or some mid-level soaps star or sports person. This fascination functions on a kind of nourish level; it is very specifically about crime, and it’s about the perceived danger with which these people lead their lives. And on that level I understand it, because these criminals are living incredibly stressful, high-stakes lives that make for such rich dramatic material. That fascination makes sense to me, but I think it has the capacity to drift into unsavory tabloid sensationalism.

How difficult was it to raise the budget of the film?

It’s really complex, but there is a way that Australian films get made that [producer] Liz Watts is very experienced with. We’re very fortunate that we have a supportive government and taxpayer money. The federal government, for instance, will only ever give you 50 to 60 percent of your budget, and you need to raise the rest privately. So there are ways you can piece [the remaining budget] together: You have a little bit of money from state government, and in order to get government money, you have to have a local distributor attached, cable TV presale, a little bit of money from our sales agent, and a little bit of private equity. The next thing you know you’ve pieced this complex jigsaw puzzle of money together. With Animal Kingdom, it’s funny, all that time it took me to write the thing and finally get to a point where I thought the script was ready—when that happened, in conjunction with the shorts that were being well-received, it felt to me like the actual putting together of that money happened really quickly.

I spoke to Australian filmmaker Nash Edgerton earlier this year, and it is interesting when you compare the central themes of his film, The Square, with the themes and tones of Animal Kingdom. Specifically, both films expose the underbelly of the suburbs, the deviant behavior going on right under your nose. I’m wondering if you share a similar philosophy of filmmaking with Edgerton, with the kind of stories you want to tell?

I think one thing that you can see—in not justThe Square and Animal Kingdom, but in a number of films in this kind of new wave of Australian filmmakers—is an embrace of genre forms. And in the case of The Square and Animal Kingdom, what I set out to do, what I wanted to do, was make a crime film that worked the way crime films do, and yet felt rich and substantial and weighty.

That it could be part of this genre world…

Well, I wanted it to be rich. I didn’t want it to be some little crime thriller or a little crime action movie. I wanted to make something that was big and rich and full of details, and surprising too, but it was still a crime film. I think The Square functions in some ways within the noir conventions; certainly what Joel Edgerton and Matt Dabner, who wrote the film together—and then Nash—wanted to do was make a genre film, a noir thriller, but sophisticated and adult. I think, on that level, there are a number of Australian filmmakers that want to contribute to genres, or generic forms they grew up loving themselves.

Were there any films that inspired you during the process of writing?

As disingenuous as it sounds, I would say no, but yes in so far as to say, throughout the process, when writing, you would hit a stumbling block, and you just need to throw a rock in the pond and just watch a movie, any movie, a good one, one that I love. It could seemingly have nothing to do with Animal Kingdom, and yet there is something reinvigorating about watching a film that you love. Apocalypse Now is a film that I watch every year and I think will watch every year for the rest of my life. I just love everything about it. I love its messiness as much as anything else. I love its grand narrative, but I love its detail as well. I love everything I know about how the film was made, so I can just throw that movie on, and out of that, get enough fuel to keep working.

I really liked how the characters had nuances and layers, and had qualities that both were good and bad. How did you go about mapping the characters and their motivations?

What I wanted to do, and in a way was reflective of the idea of the animal kingdom and the grand idea of the concept, was having a film made up of a whole spectrum of different characters, that each of those characters would have within themselves a whole spectrum…

That each character would fit within the hierarchy of the animal kingdom?

Yeah, but not just a hierarchy. There is a whole ecosystem of people, and some of them have no idea where they fit in that world, possibly don’t even know they’re in it or any idea how close to danger they’ve drifted. But I wanted to have a sense of a whole spectrum of characters, different kinds of characters, cops and robbers, people with different socioeconomic backgrounds, but also that each one of those characters has within themselves a whole spectrum of moral permutations. None of the characters know if each character is both good and bad, and damaged and sympathetic, not sympathetic—all those different qualities.

How much of your family is in this film?

I certainly didn’t grow up in a criminal family. To write with richness and texture, I think you need to write about things you know, and you need to write about yourself, your observations of relationships that you’re familiar with, even when you’re transposing those observations into a world that is so far removed from your own. And in this case, a world of hardened and very dangerous criminals. Yes, the film is full of little moments that I’ve observed even from my own family, and Mom knows what they are.

What was the first day like when you brought all the actors together to read the material for the first time?

I didn’t do a table read of the script. I can’t stand table reads; there is no better way to kill enthusiasm for me better than having actors sit around a table reading the script like a book. I’ve sat in on those for other films. I said, “If I ever get to make movies, there is no way I’m doing that.” I’d rather just have everyone go to a bar and get drunk together, but those boys are big personalities. When you get them in a room together (and early on, they’re feeling each other out), it could get feisty. There were moments on set I thought they were going to start punching each other, but it’s great now. They’re all really proud of the movie.

How does it feel to have your first feature film have such international reach?

It’s been dizzying, actually. It’s almost a little bit overwhelming. When you know you have worked on a film for as long as I have, I would be disappointed if that simply ended with a two-week run back home, and I didn’t get to go anywhere. I had hopes that would be better than good; I really hoped that would stand out from the crowd. I never anticipated that Sundance would be as amazing as it was, and in part, especially when you’re cutting a film, you can lose sense of what it is. You do what you think you need to do, you cut it the way you want, but you have no clear sense of whether or not it’s working. So for it to then land at Sundance—it was exhilarating from day one. It was a pretty amazing surprise.