David Michôd on Animal Kingdom

First published on 4 Jun 2010. Updated on 23 Aug 2010.

You were editor of Inside Film for six years. How's it feel to jump from journo to filmmaker?
It's funny in retrospect because I never really felt like a film journalist in the first place. I went to film school and somehow fell into the IF magazine job. I learnt a lot and met a lot of people, but it never really felt like where I was supposed to be.

Did having been on the other side of the industry make you determined that your debut feature would be a good one?
It did definitely - feeling like I had been in a privileged position where I could see where it was that I thought [Australian] films were getting it right and getting it wrong. I knew I wanted to make something that felt really rich in terms of character and story and detail. For whatever reason, and it's possibly to do with budgets or resources, but very often, Australian films can feel unnecessarily modest.

What were some of your inspirations for this script?
When I first started writing it in Melbourne I started reading a bunch of books, particularly by a guy called Tom Noble - he's my favourite Australian true crime writer. He used to be a chief police reporter at The Age and he wrote the book Neddy that Blue Murder was based on.

Were you inspired by the Moran Family saga?
Not really, because that stuff seemed to be a whole series of thugs engaging in retribution killings. What was interesting was that, in Melbourne, this whole criminal underworld operates in and around regular society, and when it explodes it happens in public places. The other fascinating thing is Melbourne's propensity for turning its criminals into celebrities.

The mother is a fantastic character. I don't think I'll look at Jacki Weaver in the same way again.
I always knew that I wanted Jackie to play this part. I wrote the character for her. Everything that character carries inside of her I wanted to be hidden inside a bubbly and effervescent woman, and that's exactly what Jacki is.

Your young lead, James Frecheville, is a real find.
James is actually nothing like what I imagined the character to be. I saw him as smaller and more childlike. Even though he didn't look like the character, I just kept returning him. Then the more I thought about him, the more I liked the character in his body. I thought it was more plausible, with a kind of man-child at its centre.

The structure of the film is great; it really reminded me that the most important part of a movie is the ending. Did you know where the film was going all along?
Not from the very beginning, no. The very first draft of the script is laughably bad - there is literally not a line of dialogue or a single scene that's still in the movie.

You won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema at the Sundance Film Festival...
It was kind of exhilarating. We weren't prepared for how intense and dizzying that buzz would be. It was a bummer; I left the day before Sundance ended and they play the winning film again on the final day and there was a standing ovation. I was kicking myself for not having been there for that. Nick Dent