David from Film in Revolt spoke with the director Thomas M. Wright about his debut film Acute Misfortune. Tense and deeply moving, Acute Misfortune is a film that has been gaining praise, winning the Age Critics Prize for Best Australian Feature Film.
What inspired you to make a film about Adam Cullen and what would you say is your connection to his art?
That’s really interesting because people don’t often ask that. They ask how did you stumble across it? But of course, you don’t stumble upon something and start to make something about it without having some personal connection to it. So, I thought the story of Adam was exceptional for a number of reasons: one, because of the extremity of his behaviour; I don’t know how much you can talk about that specifically. Adam really courted controversy, he worked to embody the persona of the is wild outsider artist and ended up becoming extraordinarily accepted in the mainstream. At 42 years old he had a solo retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he still remains the youngest painter ever to have had one. However, he was a person that was extremely destructive and violent and his passing at the age of 46 is really untimely, obviously. I think that I was first of all fascinated by that, with regard to Adam. And his art was interesting to me because, making a film about an artist – film is a visual medium – and you’re given a visual key in an artist’s body of work to try and get closer to them; to try and unpick what their psychology might be and what might be motivating them. When someone like Adam has turned his life, effectively, into a crime in the way that he ended it, you are put in the position of being somewhat of a detective; using his work to try and draw conclusions about this person behind all these screens and veils. I was really interested in that. Practically, the intergenerational story that occurs between a pupil and a teacher or a child and a father interested me as well. So, there’s a lot of dynamic range within the film.
Considering that you are an established actor did you take any experiences that you had from acting and apply it to the way you directed Acute Misfortune?
You can’t help but do that. Often, I felt – just personally in being quite candid about it – it was often what I felt less confident and I found it harder to negotiate because acting exists in a strange unholy place between the personal and the professional. People like Dan and Toby had to bring so much to the film and make themselves so raw – and such complex performances ended up in the film. It took a real toll and it was a very difficult negotiation to figure out because as a cameraman you say, “that light’s too bright turn it down” or as a production designer “I don’t like that lamp there” or “that pheasant you stuck on the wall looks fantastic”. With an actor, it’s not possible to be so direct. You really need to understand how people work and relate to them in that way. Some actors like to rehearse, and some don’t, some people want to do the lines as written while others want to change everything which results in you constantly having to adapt to individuals.
Going on from talking about Toby Wallace and Daniel Henshall, when it came to the casting process did you already have Henshall and Wallace in mind for these roles?
I knew I wanted Dan. I don’t know if you’ve seen Snowtown but when I saw it his performance floored me. It is one of the greatest performances in recent Australian film memory, even going back further than that. I’ve got to say that his performance in this film rivals it. He is astounding in this film. Toby was different, I didn’t know Toby. We auditioned about 150 people for the part of Erik and Toby leaped out at me, since I felt that it would be easy to cast someone that looked like Erik, in the physical characteristics. I mean there’s a difference between physical characteristics and character; characteristics is whether someone is tall or short or what background they come from, character is what drives and compels you. Erik is very vulnerable in this story, he is highly intelligent and very inquisitive, but what I needed, was that I needed a brawler, someone who on an emotional and personal level not only had street smarts but also someone who was invested in the idea that you need to suffer in order to learn. Toby just has that in spades, he goes so deep, he is so emotionally available and when he put down his first tape, everyone around me thought that he was wrong. I was adamant, and I kept testing him. We ended up having three long tests. I’d get him to get in the car with me and go to the supermarket and we’d get a razor and shave off any facial hair he had to make him look younger and more vulnerable. We shot stuff in my car driving around with friends of mine, to try to put him in that position. What I ended up seeing from Toby was mercurial. I think Toby Wallace is one of the strongest actors in this country. He is very young (only 22) but I think he is prodigious and he’s such a damn good human being too.
How would you say it helped to have Erik Jensen and Cullen’s parents with you when making the film?
Well they weren’t with us, in fact, neither of them was with us when actually making the film. Erik was there for the three years leading up to the shoot and Erik and I wrote the film together. The film couldn’t have been written without Erik. Erik’s book is an extraordinary piece of writing, the book on which the film is based. The film took the book as an object to argue with, as a question to interrogate. That was a really active thing that Erik and I did over the two and a half to three years that we ended up writing the film. It was very difficult and confronting, since he’s talking about himself in the third person every day and talking about a version of himself that everyone would probably be – well the people reading this are probably quite young- but when you get older you look back on your younger self from a few years back and you can’t believe the way that you were and how you acted and how you presented yourself. I think going back and looking at those questions and motivations ended up being so important. Then having Adam’s parents meant that we filled the film with reality. The film is shot in many of the real locations, using many of the real materials, using lots of Adam’s actual artworks and talking with Adam’s lawyers and doctors and painting assistance and mentors – and in the film when Daniel Henshall is painting, he is painting with Adam’s paints and brushes. To have that level of reality was extraordinary and it was obviously a very difficult process for the family too, based on what happened to Adam.
He also wore some of Adam’s clothes as well within the film?
He did, he did, there were an enormous number of props, a lot of weapons for example. I worked very closely with John Bowring who is an armorer in New South Wales and with his team. They helped build up Adam’s enormous collection of guns that we had in the film.
Within the film, you explore different themes such as toxic masculinity, so I was wondering in the film did you have any political message you wanted your audience to see? Or did you make it more to observe the injustices that arose from Adam Cullen’s point of view?
No, I certainly didn’t make it advocate for Adam and I didn’t make it advocate for Erik either. I think film is a conversation. If you want to make definitive statements you can be a speechwriter, you can be a writer, you can be a poet, but an hour and a half is a long time in storytelling terms and it’s too detailed to deliver heavy-handed messages like that. I mean you can in certain political environments that would be appropriate, and film can be a form of resistance. For me, I wanted to have a conversation about culture and this country and how culture has been shaped here. Who’s been rewarded by culture? How’ve they been rewarded? And what types of behaviour have been permitted? It’s obvious to say Adam’s behaviour is aberrant, there’s something wrong with it. You don’t go around shooting people and being racist and being sexist and misogynist and all those things that Adam could be; however, Adam was not just a bloke in the pub, he was the biggest contemporary artist of his generation. He had swastikas tattooed on his arms and he’s got paintings hanging in Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull’s house. My question was, what has happened here? What has happened culturally that created the infrastructure to support this or make him feel like he can get away with it? We are all in some way very confused by what artists are and what they meant to be – and in reality, they can be anything – but, there’s a certain type of artist that is rewarded and gets rewarded and there’s a certain type of way of being rewarded in this country and I feel like a lot of that is changing, mostly for the better. Masculinity is not a cut and dry object. Toxic masculinity is something that sits outside of people – and people that espouse toxic ideas can also become a victim of those very ideas, because Adam was a violent person, but he reserved his greater violence for himself. He died at 46 and my question was then to structure the film as a detective story and say why? And I do think obviously that some of those masculine ideas just did not fit with Adam Cullen. They were on him like a shell on the outside of him and they had a terrible impact on his life. I was interested in that and I was interested in the fact that this was a person like anyone and it’s a discussion that I felt was interesting.
What films made an impact on you in your youth?
In my youth? That’s fascinating man because nobody ever asks you that. I saw Akira when I was twelve years old. It completely blew my mind; I could not believe it. I couldn’t believe the feeling, I couldn’t believe the framing I couldn’t believe the sound and that score, still to this day I think it’s one of the greatest film scores of all time. Beyond that then, seeing Jane Campion’s films, in this part of the world seeing The Piano at a certain age, Stanley Kubrick, early Scorsese films, early Kurosawa films. Then as I got older, too seeing people like Bresson and seeing Lawrence of Arabia, there are just too many to count. To be honest a lot of the early influences they’re pretty pulpy which are the things that I love. There was some really obscure stuff like American Beauty. Like a lot of people will hear that now and not think a lot of it, but American Beauty changed the language of American cinema at a certain point. It’s incredibly beautiful and shot by Conrad Hall, one of the greatest cinematographers of all time. The list is endless, I mean there’s Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, the early Coppola’s… you could just keep going on that train all day and I still just love cinema. I can’t live in cinema as I used to, since I’m a dad for god sake. I got to see Magnolia at the cinema when it first came out and I remember walking out of that film more than anything else – walking out the back of the Nova cinema in Carlton and feeling like my whole perspective of the world had been changed. This is why people have to get out and see films in cinemas, it’s because you go into a transitioning space and there’s nothing else and you see something, and the balance of your empathy shifts and moves and you emotionally engage and you come out of it changed. I think for that reason cinema is still just the most visceral of art forms for me and a film like Hereditary, you can barely even walk after seeing that movie. I think that those moments are so powerful, and I view cinema as a machine of empathy, and its function is to change your perception.
If you could give advice to your younger self, what advice would you give regarding the creation of film? Or what advice would you give someone wanting to get into film?
I would just say this since I had huge doubts about my ability to do it, I had huge doubts. My biggest doubt was that I had nothing to say, that I was empty, I felt like I was a fraud. My biggest piece of advice would be to be brave and keep talking and thinking, look closer and deeper. Nobody can give you permission to go out and make films. You just have to say that you’re going to do it and you have to just go and do it. You have to be willing to take all your knowledge and put it into the film and take criticism. Get a really thick skin and when someone says that your shit isn’t working, cop it on the chin and listen to them, since you don’t have all the answers. Film is often about making the best possible compromise and knowing when you’re wrong, so you need to be able to listen to people; work with people; and grow your empathy and understanding. With Acute Misfortune, I’d never made short films before, I’d never made film, I’d just spent time around a lot of filmmakers, and I felt I just had to go for it, all in. I thought I was going to fail. To anybody listening go and see the film and I really hope you appreciate it.
It’s definitely an amazing, film when it comes down to just the details such as the 4:3 aspect ratio.
Just about the photography for the film, that’s such an interesting question. Film is a question of form and content and shooting on that 4:3 ratio, also called the Academy ratio. By using it there’s nothing left to look at in the film except the people. In that squarer ratio, what else do you have to look at? When you’re looking at someone’s face there’s no wide shot or landscape around them you are absorbed into their faces. It also has this kind of claustrophobia because you can’t see either side of them and it looks like a portrait and Adam was a portrait painter, so it felt like the right kind of choice – for the form to mirror the content and the content to support the form.