Photo by Rhys GrahamIn the summer leading up to the devastating Canberra bushfires, two best friends are living a life of recklessness and love, negotiating life with the crazed haphazardness that comes with youth. With brilliant performances and jaw-dropping cinematography, Galore is a film that captures the thrilling highs and lows of teenage years, as a wall of fire edges threateningly closer. It’s a remarkable first film from writer/director Rhys Graham, who met with us on the eve of the film’s general release.VICE: I find it interesting what films directors choose to make their debut. Of all the films they will make, the first one acts as a statement: “This is what I’m about!” What was it about Galore that made it the first one out the gate?
Rhys Graham: I’d always had a bit of a general frustration with Australian films about kids. They always felt like they were told from this very adult perspective of the “coming-of-age” film, or reconciling with your parents. For me, the films that I’ve always loved about growing up are the ones that are told from a really confined POV. I always thought that when you’re a teenager, you kind of live for these really limited experiences: the insane pleasure some reckless experience or the whiff of danger, that’s being a kid. Often it’s irrelevant to you what your parents are doing, or what the adult world is doing. So we just wanted to make a film that felt like it was very much inside that experience, and make a film that you’re intimately involved in these first loves or first experiences of sex, or the friendships and betrayals, but try and take the audience into a more kind of sensory world.It’s quite a young cast, and they’re called on to do some really complex emotional stuff. But there isn’t a false note in any of their performances, it all feels quite real. How did you get that out of them? Was their youth an advantage of disadvantage?
There are some young actors who are just intuitively great. They’re amazing in terms of being able to connect with their emotions, as actors get older you get some people who can maintain that truth really well and can maintain that complexity, but adults get terrified. They get scared of experience, whereas a lot of young actors are really brave, and will do brave things. But I think that the dynamic of the film was that they have these moments of intense joy and pleasure, and these moments of intimacy, and moments of despair, and to get it was essential to us to get actors who were able to have that layered complexity. We were terrified of those false notes, so it’s good to hear that. A film like this lives or dies on whether you’re able to buy the drama, because it’s so easy to sink into melodrama. We had a long audition process to make sure we got the right people, and a very long rehearsal process, then we just let the four main actors loose in Canberra and made sure they made it feel really connected to them personally. Ultimately we were just very fortunate that the four of them formed an ensemble that allowed them to do brave, audacious work. And whatever the flaws of the film are, I look at their performances and go, “That’s a huge pleasure to watch young actors do work like that”.The film has premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival, at Berlin, at Shanghai—
It’s in Shanghai at the moment. We took it to Sweden, Edinburgh, Czech Republic, it’s done a circuitous route around the world.What differences are there in terms of audience reaction? I’m thinking international vs. national. I’m not sure there’s any country that has it harder than Australia to connect with its own audience.
It’s just this really bizarre cultural thing where we are really distrustful of our own films if they take themselves seriously in a dramatic sense. It’s totally fine if we do a genre film—we have really great crime filmmakers who make audacious brilliant films—but as soon as you make a film that’s just a character drama everyone just assumes it sucks. I actually have no idea why that is. I had a chat with a journalist recently where he was saying, “Were you worried about making a kitchen sink drama?” and I was like, “Well, no. Just cause it’s about characters.” It’s like a projection we put onto it. If that film were coming from a US independent, or Western Europe, you wouldn’t think twice about it. It’s one of those things I’m curious about. I was determined to not get fearful of that response.It’s a film about a bunch of kids growing up, making bad decisions, working their way through sex, love, parties, whatever, but that’s interesting to me. It’s interesting to me how their friendships shift, how their relationships shift, how there’s stuff to be learned from that. What we did find from that was when you show it in Berlin you get these insanely passionate audiences, these huge numbers of kids come. Without doing any press we sold out four screenings, there were about a thousand people. Lots of young people saying: “We are so connected to this story. I don’t recognised this landscape, I don’t recognise some of the cultural differences, but I recognise the character elements.” And that’s what it should be about. But here we like to pretend we’re a lot harder than we really are, so as long as it’s got a gun in it, we’re all right. If anyone’s talking about a relationship, fuck that.I love the metaphor of the bushfires, the parallels they strike with the characters. Just on a purely technical level, how did you get that footage? You didn’t start fires, right?
Because it’s set in 2003, the month before those big bushfires, there was a lot of imagery from that time, and it’s so fucking apocalyptic, it’s insane. It’s like Mordor when you actually see the footage. And there’s no way we could have used anything that was from that time because you wouldn’t believe it on screen. But what we wanted to create was not so much a metaphor, but the reality of summer in places like that. There are always plumes of smoke on the horizon. You see it every summer, or second summer, there’s a bushfire haunting the edges of town. So we worked with just a team of three digital artists, and they created everything.That was digital?
All digital. It’s amazing. It’s totally amazing. Initially I was terrified by it, like the false emotional notes. It was terrifying that when you finally see the fires, they might look rubbish. We got really inspired by films like Monsters [the 2010 breakout film from Godzilla director Gareth Edwards] where you have one guy working on his own to make really elegant, brilliant-looking special effects that are totally plausible. The guys that we worked with, the poor fuckers just ended up totally immersed in a world of smoke and flame for three months, but what they did was amazing. No one can seem to believe it was digital.It didn’t even occur to me that it was digital.
I love the idea that you thought we just went up there and started these massive bushfires.That was an easier assumption to leap to than it being CGI.
Actually, the local fire department did allow us to light up a paddock. A guy had a paddock that needed back burning, so we took a couple of crews out there and they just set fire to everything. But the reality is those forest fires are just the most insane forces of nature, and they stretch for kilometres, hundreds and hundreds of metres high. Anyone who’s been around for Black Saturday or the Canberra experience knows how bizarrely beautiful they are—and fucked up.What’s next for you?
We’re doing two [films] concurrently. We have a film that we sort-of almost got up at the same time as Galore, which we put on the backburner. It’s a film about a young guy who retraces his sister’s footsteps through the backtracking trails in northern Columbia. It’s half set here and half in Columbia. So we were meeting and talking with co-producers in Columbia and trying to get that up, but it’s obviously quite ambitious. In a way it’s still about these young people negotiating their desires and stupidity and recklessness, but it’s a bit more of an epic journey. At the same time, I’ve got a micro budget film which I’m going to do about three friends who find a handgun in a vacant lot, and it’s kind of like a poisoned chalice story where each of them is trying to desperately trying to get their hands on the gun and being the one who looks after it, at the same time they’re desperately tyring to find bullets so they can at least fire it once. I’m still doing stuff that’s pretty small in its nature in terms of the stories, but my hope is getting something done quickly. Bored of sitting on my hands now.Galore is in cinemas now.Follow Lee on Twitter: @leezachariah
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Rhys Graham: I’d always had a bit of a general frustration with Australian films about kids. They always felt like they were told from this very adult perspective of the “coming-of-age” film, or reconciling with your parents. For me, the films that I’ve always loved about growing up are the ones that are told from a really confined POV. I always thought that when you’re a teenager, you kind of live for these really limited experiences: the insane pleasure some reckless experience or the whiff of danger, that’s being a kid. Often it’s irrelevant to you what your parents are doing, or what the adult world is doing. So we just wanted to make a film that felt like it was very much inside that experience, and make a film that you’re intimately involved in these first loves or first experiences of sex, or the friendships and betrayals, but try and take the audience into a more kind of sensory world.It’s quite a young cast, and they’re called on to do some really complex emotional stuff. But there isn’t a false note in any of their performances, it all feels quite real. How did you get that out of them? Was their youth an advantage of disadvantage?
There are some young actors who are just intuitively great. They’re amazing in terms of being able to connect with their emotions, as actors get older you get some people who can maintain that truth really well and can maintain that complexity, but adults get terrified. They get scared of experience, whereas a lot of young actors are really brave, and will do brave things. But I think that the dynamic of the film was that they have these moments of intense joy and pleasure, and these moments of intimacy, and moments of despair, and to get it was essential to us to get actors who were able to have that layered complexity. We were terrified of those false notes, so it’s good to hear that. A film like this lives or dies on whether you’re able to buy the drama, because it’s so easy to sink into melodrama. We had a long audition process to make sure we got the right people, and a very long rehearsal process, then we just let the four main actors loose in Canberra and made sure they made it feel really connected to them personally. Ultimately we were just very fortunate that the four of them formed an ensemble that allowed them to do brave, audacious work. And whatever the flaws of the film are, I look at their performances and go, “That’s a huge pleasure to watch young actors do work like that”.
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It’s in Shanghai at the moment. We took it to Sweden, Edinburgh, Czech Republic, it’s done a circuitous route around the world.What differences are there in terms of audience reaction? I’m thinking international vs. national. I’m not sure there’s any country that has it harder than Australia to connect with its own audience.
It’s just this really bizarre cultural thing where we are really distrustful of our own films if they take themselves seriously in a dramatic sense. It’s totally fine if we do a genre film—we have really great crime filmmakers who make audacious brilliant films—but as soon as you make a film that’s just a character drama everyone just assumes it sucks. I actually have no idea why that is. I had a chat with a journalist recently where he was saying, “Were you worried about making a kitchen sink drama?” and I was like, “Well, no. Just cause it’s about characters.” It’s like a projection we put onto it. If that film were coming from a US independent, or Western Europe, you wouldn’t think twice about it. It’s one of those things I’m curious about. I was determined to not get fearful of that response.It’s a film about a bunch of kids growing up, making bad decisions, working their way through sex, love, parties, whatever, but that’s interesting to me. It’s interesting to me how their friendships shift, how their relationships shift, how there’s stuff to be learned from that. What we did find from that was when you show it in Berlin you get these insanely passionate audiences, these huge numbers of kids come. Without doing any press we sold out four screenings, there were about a thousand people. Lots of young people saying: “We are so connected to this story. I don’t recognised this landscape, I don’t recognise some of the cultural differences, but I recognise the character elements.” And that’s what it should be about. But here we like to pretend we’re a lot harder than we really are, so as long as it’s got a gun in it, we’re all right. If anyone’s talking about a relationship, fuck that.
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Because it’s set in 2003, the month before those big bushfires, there was a lot of imagery from that time, and it’s so fucking apocalyptic, it’s insane. It’s like Mordor when you actually see the footage. And there’s no way we could have used anything that was from that time because you wouldn’t believe it on screen. But what we wanted to create was not so much a metaphor, but the reality of summer in places like that. There are always plumes of smoke on the horizon. You see it every summer, or second summer, there’s a bushfire haunting the edges of town. So we worked with just a team of three digital artists, and they created everything.That was digital?
All digital. It’s amazing. It’s totally amazing. Initially I was terrified by it, like the false emotional notes. It was terrifying that when you finally see the fires, they might look rubbish. We got really inspired by films like Monsters [the 2010 breakout film from Godzilla director Gareth Edwards] where you have one guy working on his own to make really elegant, brilliant-looking special effects that are totally plausible. The guys that we worked with, the poor fuckers just ended up totally immersed in a world of smoke and flame for three months, but what they did was amazing. No one can seem to believe it was digital.
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I love the idea that you thought we just went up there and started these massive bushfires.That was an easier assumption to leap to than it being CGI.
Actually, the local fire department did allow us to light up a paddock. A guy had a paddock that needed back burning, so we took a couple of crews out there and they just set fire to everything. But the reality is those forest fires are just the most insane forces of nature, and they stretch for kilometres, hundreds and hundreds of metres high. Anyone who’s been around for Black Saturday or the Canberra experience knows how bizarrely beautiful they are—and fucked up.What’s next for you?
We’re doing two [films] concurrently. We have a film that we sort-of almost got up at the same time as Galore, which we put on the backburner. It’s a film about a young guy who retraces his sister’s footsteps through the backtracking trails in northern Columbia. It’s half set here and half in Columbia. So we were meeting and talking with co-producers in Columbia and trying to get that up, but it’s obviously quite ambitious. In a way it’s still about these young people negotiating their desires and stupidity and recklessness, but it’s a bit more of an epic journey. At the same time, I’ve got a micro budget film which I’m going to do about three friends who find a handgun in a vacant lot, and it’s kind of like a poisoned chalice story where each of them is trying to desperately trying to get their hands on the gun and being the one who looks after it, at the same time they’re desperately tyring to find bullets so they can at least fire it once. I’m still doing stuff that’s pretty small in its nature in terms of the stories, but my hope is getting something done quickly. Bored of sitting on my hands now.Galore is in cinemas now.Follow Lee on Twitter: @leezachariah