A nervous bride-to-be (Shabana Azeez) is invited to her own fiancé’s (Mackenzie Fearnley) bucks party, but when uncomfortable details about their relationship are exposed, the night takes a feral turn.
Taking inspiration from Australian new wave cinema, BIRDEATER is an unapologetic look at how Australia’s iconic masculinity identity has become incompatible with contemporary gender politics. Bringing outback cinema to the North Shore private schoolboy, it comments on co-dependency in both romantic relationships and platonic friendships in an iconic bush location peppered with nangs, joyrides and ketamine.
As Birdeater flies into Australian cinemas on July 18, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s co-writers and director, Jack Clark and Jim Weir (aka Fax Machine) about creating characters without morally judging them, making a movie that feels safe until it’s not, and their upcoming Schoolies thriller!
Nick: I want to kick things off with something Jim mentioned to me when we spoke about the film last year, and that was the fact that Birdeater was a film that is “safe, until it’s not safe”. I’m curious to know whether that was always the intention when you were creating the narrative, and how that notion evolved as you made the film?
Jim Weir: I think that was there largely from the start. We talked a lot about using archetypes really early on, setting up characters where you really quickly get a sense of what type of character they’re going to be. They feel familiar. You can see the path they’ll take in the film, then subvert expectations kind of at the second and third act.
So, the characters that you’re kind of most concerned about at the start of the film end up being the characters that you might like most by the end of the film. And the ones that you’re concerned about are maybe the ones that prove to be the most villainous, I guess.
Jack Clark: But it’s also working with the fact that it’s a black comedy as well. I suppose it’s always a question of boundaries, and it’s inherently different for every audience member and where they draw the line as to whether they can laugh about something.
I think you have to be willing to go into that great territory to find that perfect kind of middle ground where you’re in between boundaries for certain audience members. That’s a really fun place to be.
Nick: It’s interesting you both mention the characters in that answer, because it feels like the characters in this film cover a wide spectrum of morality. I guess it’s a bit of a “chicken or the egg” question, but did you create the characters based off of the morality spectrum and then flesh them out from there, or did you create the character archetypes first and then weave the morality into their personalities?
Jack Clark: It’s a good question! I think it was definitely a character thing first, but I think it was more of what would the opposite tones of characters look like, rather than morality. What would be fun tonal choices to put in a room together, and from that, it became more about the moral questions.
I suppose we don’t necessarily morally judge any of our characters, I would say. Apart from perhaps Louie. He is the closest we get to a moral judgement of a character. I’d say we do judge him. But just about everyone else, I think we try to not make a particularly clear statement on. But again, I suppose it’s using archetypes like Jim was saying. Use them at the start of the film, and then the audience will assume a morality onto that character, and find themselves conflicted by that later.
It was really important to us to not be too moralistic in terms of talking to the actors as well. They’re all kinda the heroes of their own movie. None of them are the “bad guy”, you know? Louis least of all! So, that was actually quite fun, to take a fairly amoralistic perspective on all of them that would lead to very funny moments.
Jim Weir: Yeah, you can’t make the moral judgement on your characters because you need to be able to talk to the actor from that character. You can’t speak from a place of judgement. I’m very glad people weren’t privy to the conversations we were having with the actors who were playing the most problematic characters, because we would really try and walk through the logic of what would make a guy like this, behave this way and why they were actually justified in doing that.
So, Mackenzie [Fearnley], as he was playing Louie, he truly thought he was the hero of the story. He really brought that into [his performance] because that was the only way we were going to really have an authentic portrayal of this type of guy.
Nick: I’d love to stem off that, and I don’t want to spoil too much, but there are reveals about characters in this film that does subvert the expectations, like you both said. I’m curious to know, from a screenwriting perspective, how do you decide when certain bits of information will be revealed to the audience?
Jack Clark: Yeah, I mean, it was kind of the nature of the film… yeah, it’s a tricky question because a lot of it is very intuitive! I know the big moment that you’re talking about, and we wanted it to be at a time of the movie where you really want to see the characters kind of going at it. Sort of having an argument and putting everything on the table.
That’s what people expect sometimes from relationship dramas, you withhold the truth of people’s feelings until a big moment when it’s all on the table. And I think we were very conscious then of playing with that format and using that in the edit to sort of cheat a little bit!
Jim Weir: It is really one of the ongoing conversation you have as you’re making the movie, because it’s the difference between something being intriguing and something being confusing. Like, it’s fine to withhold information from the audience, but the audience needs to know that information is being withheld. They need to have that promise that they will get the full picture later down the track. If not, they think there’s a missing piece of the puzzle, and that’s not an enjoyable experience.
Often when we were shooting, we would film a version that would clarify specifics, maybe 20, 30% more. We weren’t necessarily using that in the edit, but often in the edit we would remove 20% of the detail so we could have a bit more intrigue to play with.
You’re kind of doing that in the writing stage, as you’re shooting it, as you’re editing it, and that’s where showing the movie to fresh eyes really helps. We had test screenings to see if people were getting confused. I hate being confused! So you never want an audience to be confused if they don’t have the information.
Jack Clark: We actually ended up going back and reshooting something, kind of adding inserts because we felt like we were leaning too much on intrigue rather than tension in certain moments. Using tension or suspense rather than telling the audience something really deliberately and have that hang over a scene versus the opposite happening. It’s like characters are not saying the thing the audience needs to know, so we did switch a few things around.
Nick: Being such a character focused film, I have to talk about my favourite performance, which was Ben Hunter as Dylan. I read that his first time meeting the cast was actually the scene where he gives his speech at dinner, which was some truly great shit! You guys obviously saw the potential there for him as an actor, but can you take me back to that night, when you saw him deliver that monologue, and give me what that initial reaction was like?
Jim Weir: Yeah, that was my favourite night on set probably, filming that dinner scene. It was a risk from a scheduling point of view, but it made sense to shoot the dinner scene at the start of the second shooting block. We were chucking Ben into the deep end, but he had proven himself in the auditions.
He didn’t have a chance to work with the other actors beforehand because it was COVID, but he really seemed to understand the psychology of Dylan, and we knew he was good at improv. We knew he could hold a room for an extended period of time, and yeah, we just tried to empower him, give him a bunch of confidence. It was a risk that happened to pay off!
Jack Clark: It was a good wake up call for everybody else as well, because all of the other actors were using the dinner scene as the centre of their characterisation, or they were spiralling their perspective on their character out from that.
They’d all already shot stuff, but we need them to kind of revitalise and rethink their characters, and having Dylan’s big speech at dinner, which essentially sets the table to be something new, something they didn’t expect. Something that was surprising to them on the first day of the second shooting block. It meant they all had to transform a little bit, in a good way!
Nick: That’s incredible, and he was great! It’s one of my favourite scenes in the film. I’m getting close to my time here, but as I said earlier, this was my favourite film out of BIFF, so I’m excited to see what you guys do next. I’m curious, as a fan, do you have anything else planned?
Jack Clark: We’ve got a Schoolies thriller on the way. It’s something we want to shoot very soon. It’s something a little bit bigger, a little bit meaner, a little more muscular. It’s kind of a combination of some slightly different genre elements, but at the same time, trying to keep everybody on their toes… without giving away too much!
Jim Weir: Yeah, its our demented take on a coming of age film.
Thank you so much to Jack and Jim for their time, and to Umbrella Entertainment and NixCo PR for organising the interview. Birdeater is in Australian cinemas July 18, and you can read Nick’s 5-star review here.
