Australian writer and director David Michod’s movie, Animal Kingdom is brutal and feral, and never betrays that this taut film noir is this talented and humble director’s first full feature. With a strong command of the material and a clear trust in his well-cast actors, Michod’s sets boldy where few new directors go these days: a genuine crime drama where less is so brutally more
From the opening scene alone you know Animal Kingdom is not your average family drama. The ponderous soundtrack leads the way to clarify that the woman bent over in front of the TV is plain dead and the young man sitting next to her, seems either shell shock or indifferent. The haunting voiceover clarifies the situation as much as it pollutes it: ‘Mom kept me away from my family because she was scared’. And soon you will be very sacred too…
Animal Kingdom is populated, for the most part, by a who’s who of Australian actors (Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton) and it features Australia’s acting wonder, Jackie Weaver, as Smurf, the lioness in this animal kingdom. In Michod’s story, Smurf is a force to be reckoned with and a mother who fiercely presides over a family of criminals with a preference for armed robbery. Young J (newcomer James Frecheville) ends up living with his very strange family after his mom o.’d.s. Grandma Smurf and her sons are strangers to J….and soon J learns what’s going on…but also that the family criminal foundation is a bit wobbly….so there are efforts to go into drug dealing and or perhaps play the market.
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Two months ago, I spoke to David Michod during a pause in his press tour or as he puts it, while he was ‘trying to enjoy the best part of this process’. Part of our conversation appears below:
JF: How do you feel now that your movie has been embraced by audiences in the film festival circuit and the critics? (Animal Kingdom won the 2010 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance)
David Michod: In some ways it’s some kind of relief. I’ve been working on this for so long…
JF: Where you afraid no one would come see your film?
DM: More nerve wrecking than the idea that no one would see it,… is that it would be bad and I would be embarrassed. I wanted to be better than good.
JF: At what point did you stop worrying?
DM: Sundance, even before we won. It was not until I was able to put the film before an audience and see how almost immediately this buzz started to build – then I felt like I was finally able to relax…
JF: What’s so compelling about this family that you had to tell their story?
DM: Well…it was a gradual evolution. I knew I wanted to make a crime film. Grand Melvin crime film specifically. It came out of my experiences when I first moved in from Sydney and my observations of the city’s (Melbourne) rich criminal history.
JF: How hard was it to cast the lead female, that alpha mother who kisses her sons on the mouth a second too long…?
DM: I knew early on I wanted to have Jackie Weaver. She was the
