INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL JOY ON AT THE MOVIES

MICHAEL JOY: This project came out of a real want to communicate stories that both John and I had heard of fathers and friends of ours - men communicating and not being able to communicate and trying to find ways.

So we were, one, looking for a voice for us that we could really work with, and this story was something that came through issues that were going on in my life at the time, and I found myself going along to a men’s group and it was an extraordinary evening of five blokes sitting around talking and just listening to these men talk about what was going on in their lives, or what wasn’t going on, and the frustrations that they were going through.

MARGARET: Did you sit down and write the screenplay?

MICHAEL JOY: We started with a list - we just started with lists of stories and thoughts. Now, at that stage we didn’t know how many characters. We had a loose idea.

And we didn’t know exactly who the characters would be, so we drew up these lists of points that we wanted to make and critical turning points in people’s lives that we knew, or stories we knew. So we knew the journey.

So we could clearly communicate that to all the actors when we were having conversations with them, because there wasn’t a casting in that respect. We just called people we wanted to work with and we started a conversation.

From then, from there we worked with the idea of different stages of emotional distress that we all go through in various different crises within our lives so we worked with those themes and we then just started - I started session with the actors.

MARGARET: Tell me how you shot this, because I must say that if there’s one criticism it would be - and certainly I found it interesting that some of the early camera work is unsettling and it seems to stabilise through the film.

MICHAEL JOY: Oh, yeah. No, it does. Look, it does. It was - that was a really interesting thing. I didn’t want to go into a rehearsal process where any of the actors would reveal anything about their character to each other.

We had a rehearsal where they all had the bit in their mouth and weren’t actually allowed to reveal, but just get a feel for it. We then did a half a day in the room with all of the cameras and everything where we all, you know, they realised that suddenly we were not going to be, you know, over there, we were going to be right here. It was all going to be right in their face, and they had to get very used to that and, you know, not seeing that.

So it was when we first started shooting, there was the cinematographer, Geoff Wharton, one other camera operator and myself all operating, and it was hard. We shot sequentially, so we were going through the same process that the characters were going through, which was: Where are we? How do we make this work? How is this all going to go? And it was: we’re not going backwards. We always move forward.

So even if we were unhappy with certain things as far as, you know - or wasn’t brilliantly happy with some of the way the camera moved, I really came to this feeling that this was how the characters were feeling. They didn’t know where they were. They were unsettled. The cameras didn’t know where they were and they were unsettled. So the reason it settles is because we got used to the space. We got used to how to work in that space.

http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2402308.htm