After being transferred from juvenile to adult prison, Mel Blight (Vincent Miller) is taken under the wing of both Mark Shepard (Cosmo Jarvis), Australia’s most despised criminal, and Warren Murfett (Guy Pearce), a soon-to-be-a-paroled inmate. As a paternal triangle grows between them, we see that even the worst of men have a little bit of good inside that will be their undoing..
A gripping crime thriller set within the confines of a prison, writer-director Charles Williams’ feature directorial debut plunges into the intricate complexities of human limitations and rehabilitation with compassion and empathy. Departing from traditional genre expectations, it focuses not on physical escape but on the internal struggles and ethical dilemmas faced by its characters, embarking on a metaphorical voyage through inner turmoil and moral reckoning. It is a film about the prisons into which we are forced and those we make for ourselves.
With Inside releasing in Australian cinemas on February 27, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s writer and director, CHARLES WILLIAMS, about using the volatile environment of a prison to explore emotional vulnerability, and the depressing but rewarding process of writing a film like Inside.
Nick: Charles, it’s a pleasure to meet you! And congratulations on the film, it’s truly incredible. I’d love to start with the opening scene of the film in which we see a home-video recording of a wedding in prison. I’m curious to know what the narrative or creative decision is behind showing the audience this moment through that format, as opposed to maybe a traditional flashback or montage of this moment?
Charles Williams: I think that it had to do with memory. Like, look at that character, he wasn’t there, but he may have seen that event only in terms of home video. So, it was a matter of, well, how would I think about or recall a memory of my parents’ wedding. I would probably recall the home footage.
But it was also a reference to a documentary that I watched a long time ago called Barred Wives, and it was about women who have these relationships with men in prison. And they had a great wedding scene in a prison, and that was a good reference for me, where you could see a similar sort of environment. That was a great inspiring kind of influence.
Nick: You’re working with cinematographer Andrew Commis here, who I think is brilliant! What were those conversations like with Andrew in capturing not just the claustrophobia of the prison setting, but the emotional walls that really close in on the characters?
Charles Williams: Yeah, I mean we spent a lot of time way before productions together, and he was so generous. We were very details about everything in terms of the cinematography, and I think Andy said that he’d never done as much testing on a film before, in terms of lenses and cameras.
There were a lot of conversations about the colour palette, and there is a lot of overlap with the production designer, Leah Popple. We all had conversations about wanting the prison space to sort of feel like a kind of purgatory. The space needed to have a neutrality to it that didn’t just feel like an iron-barred place of dread, because that’s actually what most prison’s looks like in real life. They have these calming, neutral looking places for practical reasons, hopefully to have less violence.
Even the flashbacks were things we wanted to make sure didn’t feel like “flashbacks”. Sure, they have a slightly different emotional aesthetic to them, but they’re not black and white, or high contrast, but they had to feel like they were present. Like the past was happening right now.
I could talk about working with Andy forever. We just had that collaboration where the lexicon that you’re building up departs and becomes something else.
Nick: There is a flashback in a car that really highlighted the sound design of this film for me. How important is sound design as a story telling device for you as a filmmaker?
Charles Williams: Sound design is massive. I guess it’s right up there with casting for me. And I try to write as much of it into the script as possible. I try to write things that I think will translate well to sounds. And not every scene needs it, but particularly things that are memory based, I always feel that sound is a real key when I recall something, or how something felt.
I think even more than visuals; sound pinpoints an emotional perspective on a scene and not make them feel over dramatized. I find memories for me, especially if they’re shocking or disturbing, don’t ever feel like they’re in “close up”. They’re a bit out of body, they are detached. And I wanted that kind of experience when you’re floating through something, and sound is popping out and creating the experience.
Nick: Inside is a film set in a very traditionally volatile environment, but there is a lot of humanity explored within these characters, who themselves have varying levels of intensity with their unique personalities. What was the experience of exploring these characters on paper like for you?
Charles Williams: Pretty depressing [laughs]. No, no, I mean, it’s the exciting part of the process. You put yourself in the shoes of Guy Pearce’s character, who is an unintentionally funny guy. He’ll start a sentence saying one thing, and then he ends up saying something else. And he’s not self-sabotaging, but he’s often not acting in his best interests, and he can’t figure out why. So, that was interesting to explore.
And then internally, Cosmo Jarvis’ character has more damage there. But again, not without some humour. It’s not—I don’t like bleak movies, and I didn’t want to make a bleak movie. But there’s obviously a lot of weight here. The perspective of Cosmo’s character was a fascinating place to be, because he’s trying to make sense of who he is, and that’s not necessarily a nice place to be. He’s not great, and he’s trying to control these impulses.
Nick: With Cosmos’ character, Mark, I found he was doing a lot of that self-exploration through religion, and these meticulously written sermons he delivers. What did writing those sermons for Mark do to help discover more about the character as you were writing it?
Charles Williams: I mean, I was quite religious growing up, probably a little too much. So, it came from some of my own thoughts about these things, and just me going, “He probably hasn’t really read the Bible”. Like, I think these are things that he’s heard from a prison chaplain, and that he’s appropriated his own childlike understanding of them.
He’s also not totally off-base with the stuff he’s saying about what a scapegoat is, and how societies used to not lock people up. They would blame an animal, and kill the animal, and there may be some value to that. He’s got a lot of ways of essentially finding forgiveness for himself and other people. He believes that being ashamed of what you’ve done constantly is probably going to make you continue to do it and then beat yourself up all day long. It’s not a solution to making amends.
I don’t know if he’s right about that, but I also think there is validity in that perspective. Whereas Guy’s character is the complete opposite of that. You have to beat yourself up, and you need to find very pragmatic and existential ways to rehabilitate yourself. I don’t know if either of them has the answer. Sometimes things work. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes people do find change in either of those things, and sometimes they do not.
Nick: Is there a sort of catharsis in creating art for yourself? Having a religious background, and examining those aspects of Mark, or even the prison element of the film itself – do you find yourself understanding more about yourself when creating these characters?
Charles Williams: My immediate answer is no, but it’s not like there’s nothing there. I think you get a bit sick of your own problems, so you end up writing something that you think is different and new.
David Lynch once said that “you can only talk meaningfully about your obsessions”, and I think there’s something to that. So, whatever is nagging at you, whatever’s itching at you, you can’t help but return to it because that’s the thing you’re probably most qualified to talk about.
And I think that’s what is happening here, you know? These are things I think about all the time, and I want to do something that’s not self-important, but something that’s meaningful, and believable, and fun for an audience. I’m going to talk about this sort of stuff because it’s the stuff that’s most compelling for me.
Nick: Would you say you’re more driven by curiosity then?
Charles Williams: Yeah, exactly right! Exploring the vulnerability of these men in an environment that is scary, being locked up with people that are unpredictable, is fascinating to me. You’re having a hard time controlling your emotions. There’s often family issues happening in the background, they might be terrified of being released. And so, there is a lot of vulnerability. And sometimes that doesn’t come out with the best intent for others, right? There’s a hyper-sensitivity to that environment, actually. It’s like a David Attenborough documentary. There’s ultra-alertness because people are overly reactive.
And I was drawn to certain films that were exploring that kind of stuff. I’d watch movies when I was pretty young, some pretty R-rated stuff, about characters that weren’t easily likeable and easily understood, where you could watch them just in an emotional way. There’s an empathy you could have for people like that who weren’t easy to empathise with. And it definitely drew me to a certain type of filmmaking.
Thank you so much to Charles for his time, and to Bonsai Films and NixCo PR for organising the interview. Inside is in Australian cinemas from February 27.
