Interview: Caleb Landry Jones and Justin Kurzel on the Making of Nitram

Language and imagery matter when it comes to depicting a certain kind of violence on screen. Ahead of my talk with the director and star of Nitram, a fictionalized portrait of the events leading up to the massacre that imprinted itself in the Australian consciousness, the team releasing the film conveyed several ground rules on behalf of the filmmakers around referring to the events portrayed. Don’t mention the name of the man who inspired Caleb Landry Jones’s eponymous character. And use phrases such as “single person mass shooting” to refer to the events that took the lives of 35 people in Port Arthur in 1996.

These talking points represent more than just a public relations play. Rather, they’re in keeping with the care that director Justin Kurzel brings to the representation of a violent individual who commits a heinous act. The violence itself isn’t the point of the film. In fact, Nitram never directly shows any of the bloodshed. Kurzel is fascinated by the long tale of atrocity that both precedes an outburst of rage and extends long beyond the deed itself.

Landry Jones’s menacing presence bottles up all that potential energy and wrings unbearable tension from it as he and Kurzel chart Nitram’s slow spiral toward the inevitable. Their partnership takes the full measure of this disturbed young man, showing both the internal and external factors compelling him toward carnage while also highlighting the forces still in place that could produce another Nitram within Australia today.

I spoke with Kurzel and Landry Jones ahead of Nitram’s U.S. release. Our conversation covered how they handled the fidelity to the real event, the film’s cultural and emotional specificity, and why some Australians still wish that Nitram had never been made.

There’s a famous maxim attributed to François Truffaut that there can be no anti-war film because even depicting it runs the risk of glorifying elements of it. Do you think there can ever truly be an anti-mass shooting film?

Justin Kurzel: The film was made in quite a specific way to Australia, in that after these events happen, our gun laws changed forever. It had a seismic impact on the way Australians view guns and how they want them in the community. I think that the film was written in a kind of fever by Shaun Grant, who was living in Los Angeles and had a couple experiences that were pretty close to him in regards to shootings. He wrote it as an anti-gun film, but I think things that evolved as we started making it that started to speak more to these outliers in life. Those [people] you pass every day that feel familiar and recognizable but also kind of dangerous.

How does the film’s unconventional relationship to real events affect the way that you two collaborated on the character of Nitram, who’s as much an idea as a person?

Caleb Landry Jones: Justin gave me a lot of things to put in my head and think about, from perspectives to music to films to certain activities. And so within that, I think he was very precise in what he was wanting me to think about and watch and do—and very smart in getting me to a place that I got to feel like I came to it on my own. I was looking at [my performance] from a big place, and Justin kept funneling it for me.

Justin, what was the material that you provided Caleb in order to help him make sense of ’90s Australian masculinity?

JK: Well, he was kind of surrounded by it because we were shooting down in Geelong. It’s a really strong surf culture there in Victoria where we were. And, obviously, there’s an element in the film where the character wants to sort of be part of that tribe. Surfers look at you in a particular way if you’re not part of their tribe, so I think you’re responding to the environment you’re in as well. We shot this in a Covid bubble, and we were all living together pretty close, so there was a lot of stuff that was just organically happening. But yeah, there was definitely a kind of to-do list that Caleb really got stuck into, which was to look at a whole lot of Australian television from the ’90s and do certain things that enable you to quickly understand the world and place that we’re in. Caleb’s such an immersive individual anyway, so it was pretty easy to get him focused on these sorts of things, which created the color of what the character was.

Did the social effects from that Covid bubble spill over into the production itself?

CLJ: I think it was fantastic that we were able to live and work together and enjoy each other in that way. I think it made for a much stronger film.

JK: Yeah, for sure.

Was it tough at all for you, Caleb, given how you’ve described getting into the loneliness of this character?

CLJ: I mean, I was surrounded by a lot of Australians and New Zealanders. So, I wasn’t alone, and I wasn’t in my room very much. I was around other people as much as possible.

How did you approach understanding Nitram without tipping over into excusing his actions or sympathizing with him?

JK: I don’t know how much Caleb was aware of that. He was in a space with the character. But for me, as a director, I was constantly thinking about how much you empathize with someone and when you don’t. Especially with this film, where it’s moving toward the ending that it has. It was interesting because I think we got a lot of shades within the takes and scenes. There are moments where, if we felt as though the character needed to feel more dangerous in a scene, we would focus on that. And there were times where we wanted to bring more dimension to the things that felt like family scenes. They felt like this really beautiful family drama at times.

It’s hard when characters are based on real people, because in the end, the character becomes the character. You’re not fully aware of what you’re trying to emulate, but it starts to take on its own thing. It was a real tightrope of when to lean on something and when not to. What we didn’t want to do was just create, right from the beginning, some sort of one-dimensional monster. He obviously becomes a monster at the end, but there was someone there that felt familiar and recognizable. He was the guy that you crossed the street to avoid walking past, that type of thing. He was a son, to a mother and father in a suburban street, and you need to always think about that when you’re dealing with these sorts of characters.

It was interesting because when we did get to the end of the film, we really struggled to know how to play him and where to put the camera. It was really quite difficult. We actually had a scene that happened after the shootings with the character at the cottage when he was surrounded by police. I think for all of us, including Caleb, it was actually really hard to work out how to have that relationship with him after in the story he had done the shootings.

Were you deliberately shooting scenes from different emotional angles so that you could build the character in the edit?

JK: I remember our coming back and reshooting a scene that we felt needed a different mood to it. Elsewhere, Caleb’s instincts on how to play the character in certain scenes were just spot on and didn’t need any sort of variants. I didn’t do too much in the edit that sort of swung between the two different types. It really was looking at what was the best take to tell the story and what was the most moving take for the performance.

Caleb, as an American and Texan, you probably had a different experience growing up with a saturation of guns around you. Did you have to fully reset your bearings to understand Australia, or were you able to draw on your own background here?

CLJ: No, there wasn’t any resetting. I think part of the reason why I loved Shaun’s script so much is because of how I feel about these things. It was a lot more than just a film about gun control for me. Yeah, I’m from Texas, of course, but my thoughts didn’t change.

What have the conversations been like in Australia around the film since its release, especially in Port Arthur where people were so opposed to its making from the start?

JK: I think there are some, especially down in Tasmania, who were really close to the events and didn’t want it made. And I completely understand that. It’s an event that, for some, feels like it happened yesterday. I think a lot of the discussion, when it was first understood that we were making a film about the events, most people thought that the shootings would be included and that there would be a very particular take on it. When people started watching the film and saw that it was something different, it definitely changed the conversation. But there are people—and I’ve spoken to them—who wish that it’d never been made.

Justin, many of your other films are about men who aren’t inherently violent but get drawn in by the allure of violence that you show them perpetrating. But in Nitram, you show pretty much everything leading up to that moment of violence, only to not show that violence. Do you feel the film has a connection to your previous work?

JK: I think that was a really interesting thing about why to do the film for me. In the past, I have brought a level of violence to the screen, and it’s been explicit in a way to tell the story. Then, in this, it was sort of watching the lead-up to that violence, and the suggestion of it. I think that was quite different from what I’d sort of done before. But it was still about these outliers. It still is about masculinity, especially in Australia. There were definitely kind of things there [in Nitram] that we were looking at again, yeah.