By Franca Lafosse for Film In Revolt
In the Spring of 2025, lapsed high-school besties Clare, Angie and Isabel spend a luxury birthday weekend away at the six-star Lothian Gate Southern Highlands farmstay with their partners in tow. While the women share a nostalgic bond, the men are strangers, and the simmering social machinations test the couples’ loyalty. Meanwhile, across the manicured grounds, the fraught relationship between the farmstay’s conflicted caretaker and his anti-establishment partner threatens to derail the weekend.
Franca: You’ve mentioned in other interviews that you “feel it necessary to make the type of films often overlooked by funding bodies and mainstream studios” and that “Moonrise Over Knights Hill is [an] example of that”. What exactly did you feel was overlooked that you wanted to shine a light on with this film?
James: I think we were speaking to films that have a bold voice or an authorial voice. I find when films go through the funding body wringer, they get sort of sanded away or homogenized or sanitized, and all of the things that made the film unique and exciting to those funding bodies in the first place are now gone. That’s what happens when you have too many cooks in an artistic process, the bell curve comes into play, so the film is made “safe” and ultimately less interesting for audiences. That’s a natural part of a corporate process perhaps, of a funding process. Like, with The Fall Guy, for example, Screen Australia and Create NSW gave that film, an American film, a total of 45 million dollars, and sure it’s good fun and there are incredible artists that got to work on it, but if you gave 45 local, emerging filmmakers with bold voices 1 million dollars… you’d see them soar artistically and commercially.
So, I think when we say we want to make films that funding bodies overlook, it comes down to that authorial voice. And I would like to think that manifests in this film with a complex script that doesn’t treat the audience with disdain, it manifests as a risqué camera, and some more difficult subject matter. That’s what producer Steph and I set out to achieve with this film: something that is bold, mature and doesn’t treat audiences with disdain or disrespect.
And have achieved, I think, because you can read into so much of what’s happening between the characters just from looks or certain camera angles, without it needing to be said or spoon-fed.
That’s really nice to hear! Yes, there’s a chart somewhere of each of the characters with lines to each other character, what their goals and motivations are for each other person. For Mark (Ben Gerrard) and Clare (Nicola Frew), his arc is essentially, until he gets bored of it, to commodify Clare because she’s this “cool artist” and he wants to own her. Which… that’s niche motivation I guess but it was amazing to watch them bring that dynamic to life, and yes a lot of that plays out in glances and energy rather than didactic scripting.
Well, so much of the film is centred around this nuanced chemistry between all the characters, and the shifting dynamics throughout the trip. What was it like putting this group together, I understand you had worked with some of the cast members before?
It was invigorating. I’d worked Ben Gerrard, Josephine Starte, David Quirk, Sapphire Blossom and Grant Lyndon before. So, for example, in the case of Ben he plays Mark McDonald, who is this heir to a weapons company, he’s kind of the insidious face of the military industrial complex, if you will. I worked with Ben on a short film a few years ago called Svengali. He played a villainous, murderous real estate agent, it was a more heightened space than this world, but the seduction that he brought to that role made his “evil” very tantalising. So, with his character in this film, I wanted to replicate that feeling of being seduced by the fascism that he’s selling but streamline it and bring into a more naturalistic world.
For Josephine, who plays Angie Olsen, I worked with her as a producer on the short film An Athlete Wrestling a Python (which Stephanie Jane-Day, the producer of this film, directed), and she was the lead in that film. She has an incredible, nuanced naturalism, and her range as an actor is crazy to witness. So in her case, that part of Angie was very much written hoping that she would take it on.
But then, for other characters, like Annelise Hall who plays Izi… on the page Izi started as a kind of vehicle for satire and I guess the script didn’t initially treat her kindly, but she’s incredible, she brings such strength to this role. A role that, on the page, was subservient to Mark but then on the screen, you don’t feel that at all, you feel that they are equals in a really icky relationship, and that’s all down to Annelise’s naturalism, skill and gravitas.
It’s a really interesting dynamic, and it struck me too that each of the three women have such different views on power, on sex, without maybe realising it…
They are all incredibly different, these women, and I think for me the scene that encapsulates that best is when they’re talking about their old-school principal, Mr Buxton, because their views on a patriarchal figure, on patriarchal power, are so different. Angie’s response is to find strength in deconstructing it intellectually (“he did have that avuncular female empowerment thing going on”), but she’s ultimately happy to benefit from it. Clare on the other hand reveals that she never experienced those benefits (“with you maybe”) finding space in opposition to that power, whereas Izi is like “I was so scared of him”, for her that was the scary-man figure and she ultimately accepts the power structure. I thought a lot about, not gender specifically, but relationships to power structures and power that manifests in a social setting, so that informed a lot of the writing.
And the story takes place in the Southern Highlands, which is where you actually shot the film – it’s beautiful! – did this location influence the writing from the beginning too?
Yes, it was a location we knew we had access to early on, so that informed a lot of the writing and the logistical producing stuff. But the Southern Highlands is where Sydney’s elite go to buy farms and mansions and spend their Easter-long weekends, so it’s very bougie… and in order for the film to function as a social satire I felt that the location needed to feel real. If these people are as wealthy as they’re supposed to be in the script, you needed to believe that they would holiday in this place.
And, also, it is beautiful. The location is just outside of Robertson, it’s got a beautiful rainforest climate and it’s very tranquil, very healing. So – in theory – quite nice to shoot a film there. I say ‘in theory’ because it was very stressful.
Was it four weeks of shooting?
It was 15 days! We shot it in two and a half weeks, so it was really quick. Part of that was the camera approach, shooting on smaller cameras so we were able to be quite nimble, we also had a core crew of 13 people, and then a relatively small cast. So, we shot it quickly, but it only felt rushed on a handful of occasions. The cast are so damn good that if we had to get a scene quickly, we could. But we did around 10 takes for most scenes, and I feel like the 9th – or the 1st! – would be the zenith.
That’s great, I’m always interested to know how many takes directors do… did you find it difficult process to switch hats from writer, to director, to also thinking about the edit?
It came naturally, I think this goes back to the benefits of a film with an authorial voice, I knew exactly what each scene needed to be. Someone asked me in an interview: ‘is it hard to shoot and direct?’, but to me the two are complimentary, for me it’s hard to direct and not shoot.
And as far as the edit, occasionally I’d be like ‘we need this because we’ll need to cut to this or that’, so for boring coverage reasons the editor’s hat comes on. But the thing I love about the style of this film and the rhythm of the camera is that it does really inform a seamless edit, cutting on handheld movement is so much easier than stark cuts between rectilinear frames. I also didn’t want it to be just cutting on dialogue all the time. For me, a reaction to the dialogue can be more interesting, and for viewers hopefully, so generally I would just choose the shot where the most weighty subtext was bubbling.
Totally, and I think the character of Felix is one of the clearest examples where you see so much being said through subtext. He has such a different connection to the environment compared to the group, who get to just come in for a weekend, do their “luxury getaway experiences” and leave… they seemed to have such a superficial interest in the outback.
Yes, in the Southern Highlands a lot of the farms are trying to replicate Oxford or whatever place in the UK, I think Jim and Claire speak to that in the first scene… this horrible estate, weird bougie thing in the Aussie outback and how incongruent it is. And it’s totally true when you drive through the highlands, you’re like ‘this is beautiful, but why does this place have manicured hedges and so many statues?’. So, there is that colonial element to the Southern Highlands despite its immense beauty, and that is very present in the film in an increasingly obvious way.
And with Felix (Robert Preston), he’s a bit conflicted because he benefits from the colonial regime as it manifests in 2025 because he’s got this job where he needs to be the erudite host for these rich people, but he hates that. The servitude does not sit well with him, so he holds it together until he doesn’t.
Which is why it’s fascinating to watch [Spoiler Alert] the tearing down of the house at the end – which, how did you do that?
Good question, so many people never mention that at all! So, how we did it… the house was next door to our location and it was a house that was being demolished anyway, so we took advantage of that. And it looked exactly as the location needed to, but it had mould and asbestos, so we had to strip it back to just foundations and then re-dress it in two weeks. Which was an incredible job from production designer Paula Santos and art director Cris Baldwin. Everything you see in that house is designed, and then my uncle drives bulldozers… so he showed up with a bulldozer and then taught Robert Preston how to drive it. And we rigged the bulldozer with a GH5 in the cab, a go-pro in the front, 9 go-pros and another GH5 in the house, a drone up above (that we didn’t use, but it was there) and then two cameras on the house.
The scary thing was we that didn’t know exactly what would happen, our structural and safety people gave us estimates but there was no precedent. In the script the bulldozer goes through the house and cuts a scar through it… But when this thing showed up on set it was like a tank, it was massive. And it knocked the whole thing down. So by the final moment when it collapses, I was running on instincts, we couldn’t have a coverage plan because we didn’t know what would happen. And those are the shots you see in the film.
That’s insane! I have a final question… how many candles were on the cake?
I want to say 90… but I’m actually not sure. But the funny story with the cake is… I guess I wrote ’90 candles’, you know, when you write the script months before. And then because you’re talking about everything else, we never actually discussed: ‘do we actually need 90 candles?’. And then on the day… we obviously had 90 candles.
And that’s actually the only scene in the film that is not scripted, because they just sing ‘Happy Birthday’, and we were losing light, so the production designer lit the candles and it caught fire in the way that you see and I was like ‘let’s send the cake in and see what happens!’. It’s one of those weird, crazy, wonderful things about film where you think of a thing, and then people have meetings about it, and they make it happen. And then that became the teaser trailer, that whole scene.
Incredible, thank you so much James for chatting to us and, speaking of the teaser trailer, you can watch it here OR see Moonrise Over Knights Hill at the closing night of the Inner West Film Festival on April 17, get your tickets!