David Michôd Speaks About his Not So Futuristic New Film 'The Rover'

David Michôd, Robert Pattinson, and Guy Pearce. Photo by Matt Nettheim.

In 2010, an Australian film called Animal Kingdom took the world by storm, winning ten AFI Awards, the World Cinema Jury Prize at Sundance, and an Oscar nomination for Jacki Weaver. It was the first feature film for writer/director David Michôd, who suddenly found every door was open to him. Eschewing numerous Hollywood offers, Michôd returned to Australia to make The Rover: a powerful film set in a semi-futuristic Australia, in which Guy Pearce’s mysterious traveller is forced to join with Robert Pattinson’s naïve American kid.

The Rover had its worldwide premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and recently enjoyed a massive Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival. On the eve of its cinema release, David Michôd spoke about the difficult second album, the shadow of Mad Max, and casting the Twilight heartthrob in a very different role.

VICE: It was amazing seeing this film at the Sydney Film Festival in the enormous State Theatre.
David Michôd: Were you there on the Saturday night or the Sunday morning?

Sunday morning.
I don’t know how the Sunday morning played, but the Saturday night felt really good. It’s weird, it felt very different to Cannes as well, like Cannes was all about silence and tension, but screening at the State, it felt alive. The audience was making noises. It felt to me like good noises, but maybe I was just kidding myself.

Was it hard to decide where to go next after Animal Kingdom? What made you settle on The Rover?
It was a little bit, but only because after that screening of Animal Kingdom at Sundance, I felt like my life turned upside down. Suddenly a world of opportunities opened up for me that simply hadn’t existed before, and I wanted to take all of those opportunities seriously. I wanted to look at them, to know what they were, and I wanted to know what they meant. I wanted to stay open to the possibility that the second movie might come from anywhere. But deep down I kind-of knew I would come full circle, I knew I would discover after years of research that I like to build my own worlds from the ground up. I like to feel not just in control of the movie but in control of the content, I love to be able to be on set talking to actors and head of department about a script that I know more intimately than anybody else on Earth. And I particularly loved The Rover because I knew that I would be able to play in a tonal world that was similar to Animal Kingdom, a world of brooding and menace, but I also love the fact that on a formal level, The Rover would be entirely different, rather than being a sort-of tapestry of criminal characters in a social realist drama; The Rover could play like a really elemental Western that almost takes the form of a dark, violent fable.

It’s certainly got that vibe, the mix of the Western and the post-apocalyptic. There’s such a great history of post-apocalyptic films in Australia. How large did they loom in your mind?
Not very large; I knew as soon as Joel [Edgerton, co-writer] and I started talking all those years back about a film that we might write that had cars and a desert – I don’t even know that the future was a part of it back then – we still knew that we were heading over to a post that [Mad Max director] George Miller had firmly pissed on. But at the same time, I found it very easy to push it to the background. I knew from the outset that tonally it would be a very different kind of movie. I knew I didn’t want to make movie that was set in a post-apocalypse. I didn’t want the events of the movie to be on the other side of a completely inconceivable cataclysm. I wanted everything that was wrong with the world to feel connected to the world today. You can almost feel that world of The Rover over the horizon right now.

The most disturbing thing for me about the film is that they’re not in, like, a Thunderdome. It’s so recognisably our world. We don’t see any cities, but it’s still recognisable desolation. That was obviously a very deliberate choice, to make it all look so familiar.
Yeah. It’s interesting, I was doing a lot of thinking, especially when I revisited the screenplay after I had made Animal Kingdom, it was not long after the financial crisis, not long after the ETS [Emissions Trading Scheme] had died a horrible death in the Australian parliament, and I just started wondering what the hell we were all doing. We don’t seem to care about the things that are important, and yet we’re surrendering the world to psychopaths in suits. And that kind of despair and anger that brewed in me the more I thought about this stuff, I started funnelling into the world of the movie. I wanted the world of the movie to feel like the kind of world we might be leaving behind.

The most surprising bit of casting in the film is obviously Robert Pattinson. I think he’s really great in the film, and he’s playing against type so much, that even though it totally works, I can’t imagine how you would arrive at that place where you would think of him for that role. What was the process there?
One of the privileges that came as a result of Animal Kingdom being so well received in America is that I was able to get people to look at whatever I was proposing to make quite seriously. It meant that when it was time to start casting for The Rover, I was able to have a number of very accomplished actors come in to test for me, and Rob was one of them. I had a meeting with Rob before I even knew that I was going to make The Rover, it’s just one of those half-a-million random Hollywood meetings you get sent out on. And I really liked him. I didn’t know anything about him, I hadn’t seen any of the movies that he’d made, but I had been told by a couple of friends that he was a really interesting guy. When I met him, sure enough I found that to be true, I really liked him. He had this really wonderful awkward physical energy, had a really kind of beautifully interesting face, and so when it did come time to start casting for The Rover, I knew I wanted to see what he could do. I didn’t know what he could do, I just wanted to have a look. He came over to my house, and within five minutes he just had this beautiful reading of the character that was damaged and dirty and yet beautifully open and vulnerable. Didn’t feel like he was pushing the handicap too hard. He was always keeping it in a world that would sit plausibly with whatever Guy [Pearce] was doing. It was exhilarating for me, because I could just see the movie come alive.

Do you know what’s next on the horizon? Do you have a project in mind?
I’ve got a couple of things that are bubbling. I feel like I need to let the Rover dust settle a little bit. We’re literally right in the middle of the selection campaign! But as I said before, when I did Animal Kingdom, I went from having zero options to a thousand, and I’ve been able to spend the last few years getting some of my ducks in a row more efficiently than I was able to do before.

The Rover is in Australian cinemas now.

@leezachariah