Animals movie: Director Sophie Hyde talks filmmaking and Australian audiences - NEWS.com.au

Australian director Sophie Hyde was faced with a conundrum after her Sundance success five years ago.

The Adelaide born-and-bred filmmaker picked up a prestigious Directing Award at the respected film festival for her movie 52 Tuesdays, and then later a Silver Bear at Berlinale. Then came the advice.

“People wanted to talk about what I wanted to next,” Hyde tells news.com.au. “There is a certain amount of pressure and people try to tell you things.

“‘Your next movie has to be a festival film, so don’t make it too commercial’ and then someone else will tell you to make a commercial one and ‘don’t turn everything down’. I had before that generated my own work so I wasn’t sure I wanted to anything that was outside of that.”

Then Animals, which is out in cinemas this week, came along.

Hyde initially boarded the project as a director-for-hire, but ended up becoming much more creatively involved, helping Emma Jane Unsworth redevelop the script adapted from Unsworth’s own novel of the same name.

“There were things in Emma’s book that I felt I wanted to see if it could translate to film,” Hyde says. “I remember Emma and (producer) Sarah (Brocklehurst) saying to me, ‘We don’t want to make something disposable’.

“That really connected me to the kind of film we could make.”

Starring Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat, the Australian-Irish production premiered earlier this year at Hyde’s old stomping ground, Sundance, to great reviews with critics praising the movie’s strong portrayal of a complex and co-dependent female friendship.

Grainger plays Laura, an Irish woman coming up on 30 with her aspirations of becoming a writer languishing somewhere around the first paragraph mark. She and her friend, American Tyler (Shawkat) live together, party and drink together and wake up hungover together.

It’s an intense friendship that changes when Laura meets a guy, Jim (Fra Fee) — it ends up becoming a bit of a break-up movie. Its depiction of female friendship is something Hyde rarely sees onscreen.

“We value romantic relationships so much more than we do friendships, particularly in film. There are so few films about women and their friendship, really and truly. People are say to me, ‘This is part of a big tradition’, well, no. I can think of a handful over 10 years.

“So many movies are about the end of the romance, but female friendships break up over the course of growing up. You drift apart, you need to remove yourself from each other because they’re very intense friendships that can’t sustain forever.

“In some ways, watching the end of that and giving it importance actually values what it is, and that’s a really crucial part of what we were trying to do — genuinely celebrate what they had and what it gave Laura.”

A key reason why Animals works so well is the chemistry Grainger and Shawkat are able to build between their characters. You really believe that, at one point, these two women would die without the other.

It’s surprising to learn before rehearsals, Grainger and Shawkat had never met each other. Grainger was cast early on before Shawkat and, Hyde explains, the prospect of working together was part of the attraction for both actors.

“We’d cast them a long time before and the film nearly didn’t get made but they stayed on for ages, which we’re really pleased about.

“When Alia came in (to Dublin where the film was shot and is set), we went out for dinner and then we met Holly at a bar, and that was the first they’d ever met.

“They’re exceptional actors. They’ve been on screen since they were kids so I knew they would manage their own chemistry, they would create that because that’s what good actors do.”

To facilitate that onscreen relationship, Grainger and Shawkat were sent out on “tasks” around Dublin and spent a lot of time in the rehearsal room talking and world-building.

“And because we were all in another place, like school camp, you become really connected to each other. And they certainly did.”

Hyde co-founded Adelaide-based Closer Productions alongside her creative partners including personal partner editor and cinematographer Bryan Mason.

South Australia has produced an outsized share of prominent filmmakers for a city removed from the production centres of Australia’s east coast capitals.

Just this past year Anthony Maras released Hotel Mumbai, and Justin Kurzel premiered The True Story of the Kelly Gang at Toronto International Film Festival this week.

“Apart from people like Rolf (de Heer) who is amazing, there has been traditionally not as many local filmmakers and I think one of the great things about Adelaide is we put our head down and work really hard to build things.

“But you aren’t at drinks and seeing people all the time, so you don’t have access to another part of the industry and you’re not reminding people of your existence all the time.”

For Hyde, that means Closer Productions tends to originate their own projects including the documentary In My Blood it Runs, the ABC series F**king Adelaide and TV drama The Hunting, which starred Asher Keddie and Richard Roxburgh and aired on SBS earlier this year.

“There’s a desire for TV, everyone wants your TV stuff, it’s crazy, like a flood,” Hyde says. “And it’s so financially hard to do films.”

Hyde says she’s working on “a bunch” of TV ideas — “biggish sort of shows”.

Oddly, Hyde feels the movies she and her partners have made have resonated more overseas than with an Australian audience.

“I don’t know why that is. It’s really hard to get films seen in Australia by Australians. We have a much bigger older audience and young people aren’t going to the cinema for arthouse films as much.

“Maybe Animals will be fine because it’s set in Dublin. But also, that’s terrible because somehow we’ve missed nurturing an audience. Because I think there is a young audience in particular that loves cinema but we’re not tapping in.

“We don’t get much of a chance. They come in for a week on the screens and then it’s gone. It’s very hard for anyone to see those films.”

Hyde says while there’s great variety in the stories Australian filmmakers tell, perhaps some of “big ones we think of when we think of Australian films” are not kind of movies that would help attract a younger arthouse crowd to local movies.

She looks around the conference room we’re in, the walls lined with posters for movies such as John Crowley’s Brooklyn and Steve McQueen’s Shame — films that are grand in their emotional weight and visual language but far from the kind of blockbusters cinemagoers usually pack a theatre out for.

“I love going to the cinema because it’s so immersive and enjoyable, it’s one of life’s greatest pleasures.

“There are big films but then it’s these very small films like Shame and Moonlight that feel intimate. They’re the ones I want to see in a cinema because I don’t want to be distracted. And Animals is designed to be seen on the big screen.”

Animals is in cinemas now

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