|
 Rave reviewer, TIM MILFULL crawled out of a quivering foetal position to chat with director, JUSTIN KURZEL about his confronting new film, SNOWTOWN.
South Australian, Justin Kurzel may not have grown up in Australia’s most infamous town, but he did grow up in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, and has a good idea about the kind of feelings that might have run through serial killer henchman, Jamie Vlassikis (Lucas Pittaway). After producer, Anna McLeish approached him with the idea of making a film about the “bodies in the barrels”, and the initial shock of the script passed, Kurzel was hooked: “I said, ‘Look, I’m really interested because I know the area really well.’ But I was absolutely blown away by the level of humanity in the story – even in the books and transcripts. I could see how it got there. I could see the thread, and in particular, that whole father-son thing I really associated with. Most of my friends were fatherless and looking for mentors and searching really hard for someone who’d show any interest. I understood this really well, and that was at the core of the film script, in terms of this pretty influential figure coming in and seducing a pretty forgotten place, and giving them a voice and an ideology – no matter how corrupt – and giving them some vision. I thought that was a really powerful thing in the story, and something that just hadn’t been reported before.”
Rather than focus on sensationalising the gruesome statistics – 12 people were murdered, up to 40 people were involved in direct and indirect ways, and over 10 years later, John Bunting, Vsallikis and others are serving significant sentences in gaol – Kurzel and screenwriter, Shaun Grant refashioned the original genre-based script into a harrowing personal journey: “I just wanted to really 100 per cent focus on Jamie’s point-of-view – make it a little more intimate – and if we were going to work with first-timers, just give them the freedom to own the dialogue.”
In an inspired move, Kurzel invited the low-profile, former Inala-raised actor, Daniel Henshall to prepare for his performance as the charismatic psychopath, John Bunting, by moving down to Adelaide early to help with the production, and at the same time ingratiating himself with the actual community brutalised by the murders: “I was really conscious of not having a profile actor. You say there’s a role to play an Australian serial killer, and there’s no shortage of people who are interested. But Dan went down for 10 to 12 weeks beforehand to help me with all the casting. He was involved in a soap that I didn’t know much about called Out Of The Blue, and it was really big down there, so people were coming up who knew him on TV. At first I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t want this!’ But it became a really wonderful dynamic in terms of mirroring that very charismatic, social, ‘I wanna talk to this guy and believe in him’ vibe that was happening between Dan and the locals.
“…he went camping with the kids; he went and sold phones with Lucas; he used to pick up Lou’s kid and cook dinner every night. That’s the way he went into the character as opposed to doing a whole lot of research on serial killers, or the psychology of serial killers. To us, the most important thing was: how does a man earn the trust of a community very quickly; how does he just dissolve into a community and become an everyman? What was really important was that those relationships – especially at the beginning of the film – needed to be effortless. Everyone needed to be so comfortable and at one with each other for the ease of that to happen. Then it’s about how that’s kind of turned and corrupted.”
With the script ready, and Dan and a cast of untrained locals picked from the malls and kitchens of the northern suburbs, Kurzel and his crew then set out to tell an alternate side story that no one had never really wanted to examine. “When we went down there, the community were desperate to talk about it – it had been such a taboo. People ask why I’m making this story – why do we have to see this and put ourselves through this? This kind of attitude is why it happened in the first place – the whole reason that John selected the people that he did was because he felt as though they were going to be forgotten people straightaway. You felt it down there – people wanted to chat about it… it was like this purge of why and how it happened, and you realised that for the last 10 years, they haven’t been able to because it’s been such an embarrassing blight, and the only way anyone can talk about is to go, ‘Bodies in the barrels’ and then kind of laugh or snigger afterward.” With the numbers of traumatised people escaping his new film, Kurzel shouldn’t be hearing any sniggering now.
SNOWTOWN opens in cinemas on Thursday May 19 [MA15+]. Check out www.snowtownthemovie.com for more information.
|
| Comments are submitted for possible publication on the condition that they may be edited. Poster's IP addresses are logged. |
|
Be first to comment on this article
