In-depth conversation with 'Animal Kingdom' director David Michod

(David Michod) Well I think I learned during the making of Animal Kingdom was...you know people had always said to me that, you know, you need to have stamina.  And I always had assumed that that meant that you had to do exercise and eat fruit.  What I came to realize during the course of the thing was that it was an emotional stamina that I needed.  Those peaks and troughs that come with filmmaking.  On a short film they're over in a couple of weeks, but on a feature they drag out over months.  And when you care about something as much as I cared about Animal Kingdom...when you're in a trough, where you've lost perspective, and you don't know what the movie is, and you're not entirely sure if it's working, you know those troughs can be emotionally challenging.  And so I needed to strengthen myself.

(DM) I think I've been influenced by all different kinds of movies, not necessarily crime films.  In a way, as strange as it sounds, I'm kind of influenced in some way by the fact that I love reading books.  I love novels and I love the richness of novels and I love the detail...I love cinema and I love that mash of all different art forms that it is.  You just get lost for weeks in the world of music or sound, or, you know, performance or whatever.  It was always...I just wanted this thing to be rich and substantial, and whilst being as I hope it would be...a kind of just big dangerous crime movie that works a way a crime movie should, that it would have that weight of detail and just surprising characters underpinning it. (Cuts to Animal Kingdom clip)

(DM) I think it was just principally about my having moved to Melbourne from Sydney when I was 18 and discovering this big new kind of dark gothic Australian city.  A city that in Summer for instance is so brutally hot it's kind of maddening.  You know in some way these new neighborhoods, as I was exploring them I was also building this, what I hoped to be this big crime story in my head...but this crime story that happens in this Victorian city that is also brutally, brutally hot.  I remember when we shot the film...it was a couple of weeks before we started shooting, when we were location scouting and pre-production the Black Saturday Bush Fires happened, literally just outside of Melbourne.  It was frightening, it was about 200 people died and... you could feel it in the air.  No one actually knew that people were dying until about seven o'clock that night but you could feel all day that day...there was just badness in the air...it felt evil.  I wanted to somehow encapsulate the brutality of what Melbourne can feel like in the middle of Summer.

(DM) I think it's...you know it's almost inevitable that you will...outside of your work with the actors, where you're intimately involved with them, and working with them to kind of nudge and adjust performance and stuff.  The two key relationships are with your cinematographer and your...for me...with your first AD, your first assistant director.  Because I came to realize...the cinematographer for obvious reasons but your first assistant director because I came to realize that that...after a couple of days they start to slip away from you and by the end of the day you're having to rethink your shots and everything because you've run out of time.  And very quickly you realize that your first assistant director...in some ways should be your closet ally, because this is the person who is helping you keep the whole thing moving.  Helping you to think about the last shot of the day while he's setting up the first shot.  And luckily we had a great one in Phil Jones.

(DM) My favorite scene in the movie is one that Jackie Weaver does with Dan Wyllie and Justin Rozniak...it comes about two-thirds of the way through the movie and it was the very last thing we shot in the whole shoot.  And it was just such a beautiful way to end the shoot.  it felt great, it felt great to end that whole experience and that whole kind of crazy, anxious experience of the shoot with Jackie Waver, who is kind of Australian royalty in a way, doing something that felt, to me, really special and surprising, and I kind of hope would sit at the center of the film and be the kind of thing that made the movie feel special.

(DM) The advice that was so often given to me by people before I actually started shooting the feature was that I needed to make sure that I enjoyed it, because you'll only ever get to make your first movie once, and it's important that you enjoy it.  And I found it almost impossible to do.  I was just living in a state of anxiety the whole time.  And in a weird way I think you need to.  It's when you're anxious that you're thinking with a critical rigor that you need to do good work.  And at the time I felt like it was just horrible and anxious the whole time.  But as soon as it was over...I now look back on it with fondness.  I miss it, and it was fun.  I just didn't realize it at the time.