DAVID MICHOD, “ANIMAL KINGDOM”

Originally posted online on August 11, 2010. Animal Kingdom is nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Jacki Weaver).

Like his stunning short films Netherland Dwarf and Crossbow, David Michod’s terrific and terrifying feature debut, the 2010 Sundance World Dramatic Competition winner Animal Kingdom, is a smoothly photographed, moodily scored tale of a trapped, dim and docile young man who suffers at the hands of a careless and, in this case, criminal family. As in his previous work, Michod relies on an insistent voiceover to provide biting interiority while the unrelentingly grim working-class Melbourne milieu is strikingly depicted in slow-motion shots and even slower push-ins. James Frecheville is stoic and sullen as the lead, who we first glimpse as he’s watching a rancid television gameshow next to an unconscious woman who turns out to be his just recently heroin OD’d mother. Brought into the fold of his criminal clan of uncles by his complicit grandmother, he quickly becomes their errand boy and accomplice in the brutal revenge murder of a pair of policemen.

Michod, co-star Joel Edgerton and editor Luke Doolan, who are just a few of the members of a promising bevy of Australian filmmakers working under the Blue Tongue Films moniker, specialize in unforgiving worlds. In Animal Kingdom, like Mr. Michod’s previous work and Mr. Doolan’s Academy Award-nominated short Miracle Fish, they bathe both us and their characters in a constant atmosphere of dread. Here, these characters are well drawn by a strong ensemble cast of actors that, save Guy Pearce as a detective, is made up of performers who, while well known in Australia, are scantly recognizable on this side of the Pacific. Jacki Weaver as the grandmother and Ben Mendelsohn as the most sadistic and yet emotionally needy of the brothers Brown turn in a pair of near-perfect performances. This is as impressive a debut as you’re likely to see all year. Sony Pictures Classics begins rolling the film out on Friday.

Filmmaker: You’ve been working in collaboration with a tight-knit group of Australian filmmakers for some time now. How has that collaborative network … Read the rest

“ANIMAL KINGDOM” | writer-director, David Michod

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm -- Egyptian Theatre, Park City]

Casting 17-year-old James Frecheville in the lead role. He’d never done a movie before; he was just one of 500 kids who came to a massive open casting. He was bigger and tougher than I’d ever imagined the character being and he was going to have to sit at the center of a big ensemble cast of some of the best and most intimidating actors in Australia. If he didn’t work, the movie wouldn’t work. But something about the natural detail in his audition performances just made me want to cast him. And the more I thought about him in the role, the more the movie made sense: What was sad about this character was not that he was a little fragile kid in a dangerous world, but that he was like a man-child in this world — big, naive and lonely. It made sense that he might find himself involved with hardened criminals but way out of his depth at the same time. And so we took the plunge, gave him the part on Christmas eve and every day during the shoot he surprised me. I could direct him the same way I could Ben Mendelsohn or Guy Pearce or Jacki Weaver. And never during the edit did I feel like we were having to cut around him to build a believable performance.

Casting Jimmy felt like a hard decision at the time, a scary decision. It almost felt like we had no other options. But then very often that’s how the No. 1 choice presents itself to you — it makes you feel like you have no other option.… Read the rest