When her beloved family dog, Nugget, falls sick over Christmas, Steph Stool (Vic Zerbst)must abandon her very elegant holiday plans with her boyfriend’s family, and return instead to her small coastal hometown to confront the chaos of her own… less elegant family. In he week leading up to Christmas, each member of the Stool family must grapple with the mortality of the one thing that unifies them.
As Nugget Is Dead: A Christmas Story premieres November 21, only on Stan, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s director, Imogen McCluskey, about being a dog lover, the key elements to an Aussie Christmas, and the catharsis of finding comedy in family issues.
Nick: I would love to start with a question that I also put to Jenna [Owen] and Vic [Zerbst] the other day, which surprised me when they mentioned no one had asked this yet, even though I thought it was an obvious question – are you a dog lover?
Imogen McCluskey: [laughs] Yes, I love dogs! We had a dog growing up called Snowy, a little Parsons Jack Russell. And she was like, 1000 years old when she died. She was actually like a 30-year-old dog. She saw us through childhood!
And when I was pitching on this project, I went back through my home videos that my family have digitised and was sort of thinking about why we are so moved by stories about dogs and pets. What is it that really hits us when we see pets on screen?
And I was just seeing Snowy zipping in and out of frame, running off into the distance, and that’s when I wanted to bring the idea to the film of how our pets are really witness to our childhood. They have this significant place in our coming of age, and when we look back on teenage-hood, or childhood, there’s this sentimentality and love there.
That’s really what’s at the heart of the film. Ruben, our dog who plays Nugget is also the most beautiful, little dog.
Nick: That sentimentality is really a driving force of the story, but the way this film is able to find levity in these themes of family and grief and identity is also very prevalent. I’m curious to know, from a directing perspective, what the process is like of finding humour in those places we might not usually?
Imogen McCluskey: Yeah, that’s a lovely question. When I read the script for the first time – and of course, Jenna and Vic wrote this really incredible script – there was so much specificity in it. I wrote things in the margins of the script like, “This is my mum” or “This is my family”.
My initial reaction to the script is something you need to hold onto as a director, because that’s your purest interaction with the text. And you hope that the audience will feel that too when they watch it on the screen. That kind of comedy was really rooted in the characters, and I was very cautious of that, and hopefully we’ve succeeded in that.
There is a world where this could have become a bit… like punching down on the characters. One of my favourite Australian films is Muriel’s Wedding, or even Looking for Alibrandi, where there are these dark themes, but all the comedy comes from the specificity of the characters and their sort of interactions with each other.
Like, the relatability of Muriel’s Wedding—I’ll never shut up about Muriel’s Wedding! – is some of the best because it’s brilliant, and so specific and so real. It’s timeless. There’s a line where Jodie, the mum, says that “We need to guard every shit with our lives” [laughs]. And she genuinely, with every fibre of her being, believes that. She’s like, “This is my battle now”. And Gia Carides is obviously an icon and legend, so she delivered that perfectly. As did the whole cast. They were just the most warm, caring, generous cast. They made such a believable family.
Nick: Jenna and Vic really brought so much of their own lived in experiences to the script, which obviously adds to that relatability and specificity, but I’m curious to know how you then made those specific things feel so universal? Was there a point where you knew you had something that would feel so relatable for audiences?
Imogen McCluskey: Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. My mum will come at me for this, but this is like a carbon copy of my family. So, I think that love for the characters comes from that feeling.
Our costume team and Bridgette Hungerford did an incredible job of sourcing a lot of second-hand stuff to make it feel real. I used photos of my dad’s wardrobe for John so we could get shirts that feel like they’ve been worn for 20 years, you know? Like the level of detail gave more specificity that then lends to the universal feeling. I think when people hear ‘universal’, they think ‘generic’. But the more closely homed in you can get to that lived experience, the more people will connect watching it.
And Jamie Cranney, our production designer, deserves a million shoutouts. His team absolutely killed it, particularly in the Stool house. It was exactly what I wanted. It felt so bare when we first walked in there, and he painted all the walls, and got all the furniture. But it felt so much like my family home from 30 years ago back in Brisbane. And I would send all these photos of my family’s cluttered bookshelves, with all this stuff combined over 20 to 30 years, and four kids! I think it was so important to pull that off.
Nick: I’m a Brisbane boy, and the Stool house felt exactly like my grandparents house. I think you definitely pulled that off! This story also explores characters really finding their identity, and I think movies, and fiction in general, can play a big part in helping audiences find their identity or understand aspects of their lives that they might be struggling to. What role has fiction played in your life to help find out things about yourself or understanding something that was happening?
Imogen McCluskey: I think it’s definitely a way for me to understand the world and other people, you know? Particularly in times like these, where it’s getting a bit freaky and scary, people naturally reach for stories either as a relief or a way to understand the world. Like, a lot of people I know are rewatching The Handmaid’s Tale, which is a little to eerie right now!
But, like, I remember when I was a kid, my dad would have to drop me at school at like 6:30 in the morning because of his work, and I would help set up the library with the librarians. And because I was always in this goddamn library, they would let me take some extra books. One of the librarians gave me Seven Little Australians, and that was the first book I remember reading at 12, and it made me weep so much. I was absolutely devastated by that book! And when someone’s words, and imagination, from 150 years ago, resonated with me in 2004, I think that’s so powerful. It’s so easy to overestimate it, but I think stories help us make sense of the world or our place in it.
It’s such a privilege to work in this space, and in this industry. I think I’ve always been gravitated towards stories. I have an Irish background, and we love a yarn! But, it’s such a privilege to do it as a career.
Nick: Throughout your career, you’ve directed a fair few of your own scripts. But I’m curious to know what your experience was like directing someone else’s work. Does your directing process change when you have to bring to life the words of Jenna and Vic?
Imogen McCluskey: Totally! That was something that was completely in the front of my mind for the entire process. We didn’t know each other well before we started on this, and they were the first people that I pitched to. I think part of the whole journey was to earn their trust and let them know that I care about this as much as they do. That this was my family as well. I’m not taking it away from them, but it’s something we can shared together that I will guard and defend just as fiercely.
I was aware that it was their first feature film. They’d had a great career doing TV at SBS, but they’d never done this before, and it is a different process. I’m very into preparation and pre-production, so I had a 100-page Canva document when I broke down the tone and gave examples from other movies of what I felt the rhythm of a certain scene might be. And I just broke down the entire movie before we shot it.
I shared all of that with them and looped them into every conversation. It was just constant communication. I wanted to do something that usually is done in TV, but not usually in film with screenwriters, which is a tone meeting. So, I sat done with Jenna and Vic for multiple hours, and we went through every single scene, finding the heart of each moment, or the punchline and what’s funny, just so they knew what I was doing, but so they were comforted that I was going to protect their baby, because it is a lot of trust to have in someone to do that, particularly for the first time.
Thank you so much to Imogen for her time, and to Stan Australia for organising the interview. Nugget Is Dead: A Christmas Story premieres November 21, only on Stan.
