The Big Picture - Body Horror to the Extreme With ‘Overlord’ Director Julius Avery | Interview (Ep. 96)

Episode Date: November 9, 2018

Sean Fennessey sits down with ‘Overlord’ and ‘Son of a Gun’ director Julius Avery to discuss his winding path from a rough town in Australia to making films in Hollywood. Before the two chat, Chris Ryan joins to assess the amorphous state of mainstream horror and gore films. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, here are a few topics recovering on TheRinger.com this week. Recovering the midterm election, Julia Roberts' new show Homecoming, and the worst person of the week on The Good Place. Also, make sure you check out the rest of The Ringer Podcast Network for more pop culture conversation. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show with some of the most interesting filmmakers in the world. Today we have a nice chat with a filmmaker named Julius Avery who made a movie called Overlord. Overlord looks like a war movie, sounds like a sci-fi movie, and ultimately feels like a horror movie. And I chatted with Julius, but before we get to Julius,

I'm here with my pal, Chris Ryan. Chris, what's up? What's up, man? Chris, I asked you to be here because I've been taunting you with Overlord for a couple of weeks now. I saw it a couple of weeks ago, and I know you love a horror movie. I don't know if you love a body horror movie. And this movie, which is produced by Bad Robot, and like I said, is set during World War II,

but ultimately starts feeling pretty damned gross kind of pushes the limits for what a mainstream movie can be I think in a good way but I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what makes a good gory horror movie and kind of what is too far so in your mind what is the platonic ideal of this kind of movie the thing yeah John Carpenter's uh Thing. So The Thing has atmosphere, it has eerie, it has, are we our own worst enemy?

It's like, is the enemy within stuff? But then it also has, we were doing an autopsy and this guy's chest caved in and an alien ate my doctor. And that is, you know, one of the grosser things I think I'd ever seen

up until that point, the first time I saw The Thing. But it's kind of the line, not the line that I draw it on, but it's body horror that works within, this is the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone in the worst place for it to happen, which is like this Arctic research center that they're stationed in, in the thing. When you saw that movie, were you like, I don't want to watch this anymore? or were you sort of oddly compelled by the gross you know you know me so well and yet like i think that you think i'm some sort of shrinking

daisy i i don't like to work blue it's well known that you have a shot do you want to do this right now yeah we're doing it we we saw tracy morgan at the apollo like 10 years ago make a very very very vivid description of his digestive track right and i was like i could have done without that and ever since then it's like i'm julie andrews do you you you acted like a coward and in the meantime i'm like did you see the raid that person gets his face cut off his face and you're like yeah yeah but now i'm i'm sort of being pie i dig it i mean like you have to have a foil it's's a good bit. I guess I am interested though, because it's a hard sell at times to say like, watch the most disgusting thing you can imagine. But they're, I still hard for me to kind of figure

out what it is I'm responding to and why I like it. John Carpenter obviously has this incredible ability to create ambiance and atmosphere around things that are really ghoulish and intense and sort of like on the surface visceral. Most horror filmmakers can't do that. They can't, they can get one or the other, you know, they can do the Rick Baker effect or they can do something that's really creepy. Blending those two things together is difficult. When Julius and I were talking, he, he cited the thing. I think he was reluctant to name too many classics of the type. Movies like The Thing and, and and and you know in cronenberg uh you mentioned before you know they did everything old school in the old days they didn't have cg they had to do everything um with

animatronics and puppetry and because he didn't want to unfair be unfairly compared to those movies it's tough now for directors because i think as soon as you start dropping references you just get put in a headline where it's like, why this movie is this movie's stepchild. Yes, and Overlord is a really cool movie. And one of the things I liked about it was some of the surprise, which I'm kind of spoiling here by even having this conversation with you and the conversation with him. So I would encourage people to check it out.

But what is it about seeing that stuff that gets us excited? Well, I think that horror is about exploring that part of your mind that you try to keep out of reach, right? And so I think that we all know that our bodies are just these bags of blood anyway. And so to imagine being put in that situation, it's like the Quint scene in the Quint Death and Jaws, right? It's like we can have all these like slights of hand

and it's in the dark and there's the fin and you don't really see it but when you get down to it that's what getting eaten by a shark looks like yeah that's true it's like it's grotesque and like that it's all that stuff happens and then i think what happens is certain directors can push past that moment and start to use the gore almost for lack of a better term like a paint color that they're splashing on a canvas. And I mean, I haven't had a chance to see Suspiria yet, but I mean, I'm sure that there's like elements of that in it, where it's like the body and blood and terror and the fear of what your body contains can almost be this color that's being used in the film. Yeah, that's an interesting point. And I think, you know, Suspiria and Overlord would be

quite an intense four hours of film going this weekend if you wanted to subject yourself to that. You know, the original Suspiria and the movies of Dario Argento specifically, I'm thinking of sort of Tenebrae, Profundo Rosso, the slasher movies that he made. Suspiria is not a slasher movie, but the slasher movies he made do exactly what you're saying, which is they take violence and make it about color and how that color makes you feel. And those movies are literally Spiria is not a slasher movie but the slasher movies he made do exactly what you're saying which is they take violence and make it about color and how that color makes you feel

and those movies literally one of those movies is called Deep Red and that has a kind of metaphysical quality that you know you have to kind of reflect on those bags of blood

that you're talking about that we all exist inside of but also something that is almost spiritual about flesh versus spirit and I don't know i like when movies do that um do you have is there a limit for you like are you yeah like i think apostles

right up at the edge of that okay and i think uh and you just talked to the the film to gareth evans yeah and he's he's a one of the most electrifying filmmakers we have he made the the two raid movies and he made this movie Apostle, which stars Dan Stevens as a guy looking for his sister who he thinks has been kidnapped by a turn of the century cult off like an island in Wales. Michael Sheen's in it. He plays this religious leader. And they have these sort of medieval torture devices on this island that they use on non-believers. And the torture scenes in that movie are excruciating, literally for the characters, but for the viewer as well. And I enjoy films that make me submissive. I enjoy being overwhelmed by a movie, but it's almost strange to be put in that situation where the

torture or the horror of what's happening to somebody's body is the focal point. It's not just a casualty of the action. It is the action. And I think that's where I start to sort of get a little squeamish, but I still think I can hang with it. There is kind of an additional sub-genre of these movies. I'm thinking of the original Last House on the Left. I'm thinking of I Spit on Your Grave, the original I Spit on Your Grave.

There's a couple of more. Strangers? Straw Dogs? Like that kind of thing? Straw dogs, certainly. I was thinking more like, hmm, Cannibal Holocaust. Oh, yeah. Which is sort of considered

the most grotesque and severe movie, in part because they use sort of real animals were killed during the making of it. There is like a... There's an over-the-line

version of these movies that we don't really see anymore. I don't... I never got the impression that you were very interested in that stuff. No, not really. My interest in is like, is John Hurt having something explode out of his chest because it's about what's happening in Alien, not just because I'm like, let's just run that back multiple times. Think about that. If the chestburster scene in Alien was just happening four times a movie or something as gross as that

was happening four times a movie, something as gross as that was happening four times a movie. It's the obscuring of that. I mean, you've really got my interest piqued about Overlord because the way it's being marketed with the ACDC score and kind of like guys on a mission and it's sort of inglorious bastards meets a zombie movie, but you're making it sound way more like vivid than that. Well, you know, Julius used a phrase that I think is resonant. And he said, when I first read it, you know, halfway in, I, I, I, I wrote down a note. I said, and I was like completely bonkers, uh, Indiana Jones on acid. In some ways that is very true.

Um, it goes a little bit further beyond that, but if you think back to Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, it's actually quite a gruesome movie when you get down to the sort of Ark of the Covenant and the final scene there. And there are elements of that in this movie, for sure. There is something phantasmagorical about the whole thing. Let's just talk for a couple of minutes about David Cronenberg, who's kind of the godfather of a lot of this stuff. Yeah. Where do you stand on his movies? Deeply interested, but like not a frequent watch. So anything from Existence to, what was the J.G. Ballard?

The Car Crash. Crash. Crash, yeah. Great. Crash. And obviously The Fly and some of the more classic tales. But I'm not

constantly like, we got to dial up some Cronenberg. I feel like he's a better influence than he is a director for me, even though I obviously respect his direction.

What about more like the History of Violence, Eastern Promises style? Love that shit. Yeah, that's more that shit. Yeah. That's more your stuff. Yeah. Okay. Chris,

thanks for giving us a little bit of clarity into our own personal body horror. And now can I ask you one question? Of course. I was curious, where does this movie fit in with bad robot? Like what, like,

is this, do you see this as part of like, not as part of the Cloverfield mythology, but like, what do you think they're doing over there? It's kind of interesting. That's a really good question. It was rumored to be a Cloverfield movie. And then ultimately it was not a Cloverfield mythology, but like, what do you think they're doing over there? It's kind of interesting. That's a really good question. It was rumored to be a Cloverfield movie and then ultimately was not a Cloverfield movie.

I think one of the interesting things about it is it's co-written by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith, two very sort of high-minded, yeah, Revenant, Captain Phillips, Billy Ray wrote, you know, these are very respected Oscar-nominated kinds of screenwriters and it's not that kind of movie. It's like a genre movie. It's a midnight movie. So it's interesting to think about it that way. Obviously, we think of Bad Robot, we think of mystery boxes.

This is sort of a mystery box, but not really. It's more like The Twilight Zone, where it starts out one way, and then the tone shifts, and then the tone shifts. And that is a very difficult thing to pull off. And I think Julius was successful. And it's part of why I'm so interested in just kind of having this conversation right now. As far as the bigger bad robot scheme, I don't,

what is the bad robot scheme? I don't know. I was asking because I, you know, the news came out this week that JJ Abrams was basically shopping for like a mega deal, like a deal. He's going around to studios to Disney, Warner's, Comcast, a couple of other these companies and just saying, buy the whole thing. Like, let's go. I want to do theme park stuff. I want to do video games. I want to do music.

I want to do movies, television, digital, like everything. I don't see an Overlord theme park coming anytime soon. No, of course not. I think that I felt like he was building something towards that. And before Star Wars, it felt like he was like, I'm going to go create my own Lucasfilm. That is, it got its own universe of characters and maybe some overlapping stories and interlocking stories. And then when he went to Star Wars, he kind of took a divergence from that. And I wonder whether this is an effort to get back to that. But obviously with things like Cloverfield Paradox,

there have been some hiccups. Yeah, I think it's a very difficult thing to ask. With the exception of J.K. Rowling and essentially Wizarding World, we haven't really had somebody build something from whole cloth in the last 25 years. We're waiting for Avatar to be that, right? Avatar theoretically could have been, but there's just not enough product. With Harry Potter, Rowling,

and subscribe to Binge Mode if you're not right now, the world is so big. It's not just those original books. It's now the sequel books. It's the play. It's all of the films that came out. It's the new films that are coming out. There's so much IP that you can build this world. Bad Robot doesn't quite have an interconnected universe yet. And you know that you need that to make this

constellation of success. So we'll see. Yeah. I'm really fascinated to see because I just, we haven't seen a figure like him with this much pull, but sometimes when you actually look at the stat sheet, you're like, oh, wait, like they're you actually look at the stat sheet you're like oh they're kind of due a hit soon they're kind of due like a major thing yeah I mean

are you Manny Machado or are you Bryce Harper on the free agent market you never can tell Mallory Rubin hold your head Chris thanks so much for doing this

now let's go to my conversation with director Julius Avery welcome to France. What happened here? Some questions don't have good answers. I'm really delighted to be joined by Julius Avery. Julius, thanks for coming in. Thank you. This is awesome. So Julius, I saw Son of a Gun and I liked it. But when I saw this movie, I was caught completely by surprise. I didn't know this was the sort of thing that you could do or would do.

And I'm just kind of wondering at the start, like where did this movie come from and how did you get involved in it? Yeah, I did a film called Son of a Gun that starred Ewan McGregor and Alicia Vikander. It was a crime drama set in Perth, West Australia, where I grew up. And I took that film to Hollywood, to Los Angeles, and showed it to the studios. And Bad Robot came to the Paramount screening and they thought it was cool and said, come in and talk to us about what you want to do next. Let me interrupt you for a second.

What is that like where you are sort of taking something that you've worked hard on and then kind of pitching it around town? What is that experience like? Well, whenever you finish a film and you give it, you know, you hand it to the world, you know, you're really nervous. You know, you really obviously want people to like it and people to understand where you're coming from and uh and so it's kind of nerve-wracking to let go of the baby and and let it go off and into the world and become its own thing you obviously uh want it to grow and healthy and and to a into someone that you you love and respect and you want other people to respect and love that kid as well. But for me, going into Bad Robot for the first time was really kind of,

I was nervous as hell. I mean, I'm going to meet JJ and the rest of the gang at Bad Robot and they make big movies. It sounds like a cliche, but I'm a kid from the country, from Perth, Western Australia, and so far removed from anything that I grew up with. And so, but as soon as I got in the room with JJ, he sort of just put me at ease, you know, and kind of,

he's very disarming that way. He really makes you feel like you know what you're talking about. And, yeah, all that kind of pedestal stuff sort of gets thrown out the window as soon as you meet JJ. And we spitballed a few ideas around and he gave me the script overlord and said, you know, check it out. And, you know, when JJ says check out something, you obviously do.

Did you go into that conversation with like, I've got 10 dream films I want to make and I'm going to pitch you all my ideas. And he says, that's great, but I feel like you would be able to crush this. I just went in and said, hey, listen, I'm open. I just don't want to repeat myself. I don't necessarily, I said, look, this is the type of movie I want to do next.

This is the type of things I'm into just broadly. And what were some of those things that you told me? You know, I was, my films, even my short films have, you know, these,

these themes running through them. It's usually involves like a young guy who's thrown into the deep end and has to, you know, you know, basically single swim, you know, and.

Almost like a guy walking into Bad Robot. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so I knew that I wanted to explore that further. And so when I spoke about the things that I was into, you know, they said, well, we've got the script overlord. And I was immediately drawn to the concept because it was completely different from what I

had already done. I did a crime drama and this was like a World War II mashup of horror and sci-fi. And so I took it home and I read it and halfway in, I wrote down a note. I said, it was like completely bonkers, Indiana Jones on acid. And I still got a note. I said, it was like completely bonkers Indiana Jones on acid. And I still got that script. And the scripts are really intimidating. They give you a script that's been printed on red paper so you can't copy it. And they also have like this special wording on the front saying,

you know, this script has been tagged with a tracking device, yada, yada, yada. And I was like terrified that I had some sort of like, you know, mission impossible kind of self-destructing script that would, you know, catch on fire or something at some stage. But so I, anyway, so I read the script and I immediately dropped everything and said, clear the decks, this is what I want to the decks this is what I want to do this is what I want to do and I went after it hard and and it took quite a bit of work to to uh to get the film and it was like many many meetings and uh and and you know getting on the

same page and making sure that we're that we're you know we knew what we really had the same idea for the movie but in terms of like like just putting together something for the studio and the pitch and everything, especially when you're first starting out and you don't have many films under your belt, they kind of put you through the wringer. But it was all good. It was all good foundation work for the film. And it made me think about what i wanted to do with it and one of the first things that i when i read the opening pages which is this intense aerial battle sequence um we follow these world war ii you know paratroopers as they're being dropped behind enemy lines and they've got to take out this radio tower in the small french normandy village and there's this

huge aerial battle sequence and on the page it felt like, you know, something very intense and, you know, something like, you know, the D-Day landings in Save Private Ryan. And I was like, how the hell am I ever going to be able to match that? And so I was like, you know, the first thing I came up with is like, okay, I've got to make it feel like we're riding shotgun with these paratroopers. I've got to make it feel really subjective. I've got to make it feel like it's first person.

And the first thing I came up with was this one-er that I'm not a very big believer in one-ers unless they actually serve the story. And in this case, it did. And I wanted to because i wanted the the subjective feeling to uh to resonate and is this the the falling out of the plane yeah it's a pretty amazing sequence at the beginning of the film that is shot entirely seemingly from the perspective of the character that we spend the most time with it's for me it was like how like, how do you keep it subjective and visceral and immersive? And long takes usually give you that sense of tension and sense of dread when you're trying to bail out of a plane that's caught on fire and that's falling out of the sky and, you know, it was a long, like that was my initial note to myself that I wanted

to try something that was completely bonkers and out there. And when I first presented that to JJ, he was like, this is complete madness, but you should go for it. Go and do it. And that's what JJ does. He really, once he hires you, he empowers you as a filmmaker and he gets behind you and, you know, he really sort of, you know, helps at a studio level, convince, you know, people that, yeah, I mean, it sounds

crazy what this director wants to do, but, you know, give him the chance. And if it hadn't have worked, it would have been a completely embarrassing thing because we didn't have any coverage. We only shot it one way. Wow. And so, you know, thank God it worked out in the end. There are a series of things in this movie, and we can talk about some of them, that feel like sort of a filmmaker obstacle course, you know? Like you are not only doing this subjective point

of view at times, you're trying to make a movie with sort of three different genre elements all at once. You have this pretty young cast. How do you, like, was that part of the thinking of taking on the project? Was like, I want to push myself as far as I can? Because it does feel like almost like SAT questions for a director. Yeah, look, this is not something that you can easily classify. It's not something that you can go put into one box. It's like it's a mashupup of uh you know sci-fi horror action and you know one of the things that i knew i would be kind of um knowing going into this film i would be protected

by bad robots that's what they do they they like to take risks they like to do things outside the box you know when you go and see a bad robot movie, expect the unexpected. And JJ was always up for trying to, you know, create this completely Frankenstein bastard child that is overlord. But one of the things that we spent a lot of time getting right was the characters. We really wanted the characters for you to love them. You know, JJ always talks about getting the audience to lean in, and I believe that you do that when you love your characters.

When they get dropped into hell, you kind of feel the jeopardy, you feel the risk, you feel the terror because you don't want to see them get hurt. When you don't care for a character, I feel like you kind of drop out of the movie and it just sort of washes over you. So we spent a lot of time trying to thread that needle, and we also spent a lot of time getting the tone right, like trying to, even though this was the movie, you know, transition to something, you know,

completely fantastical and fiction, we wanted to make sure that we started off with something feeling very real. And that was basically because of tension. This is a move full of tension and it's got great action and body horror and so forth. But there's a lot of tension that's in the movie and I feel like we try to set up early that anything could happen. You know, in the trailer you'll see a lot of these guys die

in the first 10 minutes and some of the characters that you get to love in the first 10 minutes don't make it and, you know, it's all to trying to get the tension. Like, you know, at any moment, one of these guys can die. I just think, like, when we get to the horror elements in the movie, it makes it all the more horrific because we've grounded in that reality, if you will, even though what we're doing is completely fantastical and not medically possible.

Yeah, as I was watching it, I was like, this feels like, this is kind of a thing you see on a poster, but it's like if David Cronenberg and John McTiernan made a Twilight Zone episode, it has all of these interesting disparate elements. When you were reading it, were you excited by that every time it kind of takes a slight shift? Yeah, I was excited by the shifts.

My last film starts off as a gritty prison drama, then it ends up transitioning into a kind of big heist movie. And I like when you're constantly getting surprised inside a movie. I'm not a big fan of movies that are just very one-dimensional in the sense that they're just an action movie or they're just a sci-fi or they're just a horror. I'm very, very much into the idea of mixing genres. Maybe it's because I've got attention deficit order.

I don't know. So I hope you receive this as a compliment. This movie is very, very gross and in a way that is very effective and fun and has at times kind of like a midnight movie quality. And I'm interested how you actually did that and what was the balance of sort of the practical with the digital effects and all the things that you were trying to do to make people feel the visceral quality of the movie. Yeah.

Look, we spent a lot of time putting a lot of attention into detail. Like, you know, we don't have hordes of Nazi zombies. We have, you know, a few super soldier creatures, whatever you want to call them um and we put a lot of time and effort into getting getting those guys being as scary and as cool as possible and i wanted to do the movie very in camera and practical so that includes like all the special effects makeup and action um you know stunts and uh why did you why was that important um i want i feel like when you get into CG, it's a great tool. I think it's, you know, we use it in the opening sequence of the film to good effect, I feel.

But for me, I like my horror especially to be very visceral. I like to have a tactile reality. And, you know, I feel like you can only get that from an analogue experience. So they talk about like this, you know, the uncanny valley, which is basically, you know, no matter how much time and effort you put into getting a CG shot right, the audience will always notice something not quite right.

And I think it takes you out of the moment. And so, you know, we had a very, apart from, you know, some small sequences in the movie, everything was very practical and in camera. So the horror elements for me had to match everything else we were doing. So we did something really cool. Like, you know, movies like The Thing and, you know, Cronenberg you mentioned before, you know, they did everything old school in the olden days.

They didn't have CG. They had to do everything with animatronics and puppetry. And so we did that with our movie. We did the moment in the movie where one of our soldiers snaps his neck back so violently that it breaks it. Incredible sequence. And, you know, we did that with, you know, old school puppetry and animatronics.

And then we used CG to just do cleanups and so forth. And, you know, I just don't think the audience would have, they wouldn't get that gross feeling you're talking about before. That thing that hits you in your stomach, that primal thing where you just sort of curl up into yourself. I don't think you would get that if it was CG. It's a really fun feeling though, that sort of like stomachache meets laughter that you're really kind of tapping into in the movie. Did you watch a lot of movies that had these different elements beforehand? Do you have a lot of points of reference or are you

the kind of person that just sticks to the script i mean obviously you watch i mean i'm i watch a lot of movies i've been i used to go to the video store when i was a kid and and um uh i'm sort of giving away how you know my age here but like we had an account at our local milk bar we call them in australia um like grocery store i guess you call them and my mom would you know i had to ride on my bike. It was like a five mile ride to get to the. That's far. Yeah.

I lived in the middle of nowhere. And it was also doubled as a video store. And I'd also had fish and chips and kind of, you know, and milk and bread. And anyway, so my mom would send me off to get milk and bread. And, you know, the deal was if I was going to ride it, do a round trip of 10 miles that I would, I could get some, I could get like five weeklies. Okay. And, and so I used to, I used to be able to put weekly, like get five movies and put on mom's account. And the guy there used to let me get whatever I wanted. So like I would, you know, I was 10 years old and

I was like, you know, get watching things like Mad I would, you know, I was 10 years old and I was, like, you know, watching things like Mad Max and, you know, all the cool R-rated movies that you're not necessarily like kids today, you know, have access to, but they have a lot of access to other things. But anyway, I'm dreading that. My son is 10 and he's a huge Fortnite player. You need to watch the parental controls and all that stuff. So, anyway, so, you know, my experience was, you know,

with this film was like just sort of, you know, it's all in the back of your subconscious, you know, but your formative years as I just went, what would the 10-year-old kid in me, you know as you but if your formative years um as i just went what would the 10 year old kid in me you know love what would what would he like be like um you know grossed out by or get off on and so that's that's sort of you know how i approached everything and and john carpenter is probably um the master of threading threading action drama and sci-fi on horror and so you know he was a big influence on mine um you know even you know one of my favorite films even though it's not totally

this right for this movie it was you know big trouble in little china that was you know my favorite but like uh uh the other thing that really drew me to this to this um this movie because it's a war movie um as well as an action sci-fi horror and my grandfather um was in the world war ii in the african campaign and he took a lot of pictures he had like um he had a couple of photo albums you know filled with his uh his adventures and he uh you know used to sit on his knee and he used to take me through the pictures and and you know he also had these other things like bayonets and disarmed grenades and bullets and stuff, which was us completely.

As a young kid, I was completely obsessed with. But he used to tell me his stories. And one of the things that really impressed on me, even at an early age, that there was something big that happened. It's much bigger than him, much bigger than me. And I think that's where the journey began for me. And that's where all the interest started. And I always wanted to make a war movie. Yeah, it's much bigger than him much bigger than me and I think that's where the journey began for me and that's where all the interest started and I always wanted to make a war movie yeah it's interesting I'm always curious the filmmakers if they have kind of a checklist of

the kinds of films that they want to make especially in their first few if there is a significant genre difference like what are some of the other kind of categories of movies that you're interested in tackling I've always wanted to do, I've always wanted to do a big space opera. It's something that I've, um, I read that you may be doing that. Yeah. I I've, I'm hard at work on, uh, on, on flash Gordon right now, which I can't really talk about, but it's, it's, it's, I've always wanted to propel a guy that's way, way in over his head into space, you know, and, and see what happens. Why is that theme so resonant for you?

Why do you keep coming back to it? I don't know. Like, I'm not sure. I mean, I grew up in the country and, you know, I got into a lot of trouble as a kid. And I used to hang out around with the wrong crowd and get into all sorts of trouble. And, you know, Jerry Cam, my short film, is sort of loosely based on one of my stories. And I don't know, like, I knew that I guess the moral compass of like, you know, a character who can sort of be completely corrupted in that environment, but then at the end of it fights through it and doesn't end up

uh on the evil side of the line has been something that i've struggled with as a person as much as um you know growing up as as much as is it my the theme in my movies you know i um grew up in a pretty rough crime riddled town and son of a Gun is very much loosely based on my story, even though I didn't hang out the side of helicopters and machine guns and so forth. You know, the relationship in that. How many heists did you pull? Yeah, dozens.

By the time I was 12. No, the relationship in that film, Brenton Thwaites plays a young guy who gets taken under the wing of Ewan McGregor in prison. And then they go on this wild trip into the gold fields in Western Australia and do this heist. And it's about a kid that's searching for a family, searching for a kind of a parent.

And my dad died when I was very young. And so I was always searching out father figures in all the wrong places. And I grew out of it, thank God. You know, I ended up getting invited to go to an art school in the city when I was 15 and it saved me. You know, a lot of my friends who I grew up with arrived in prison and dead.

So that really kind of informed the story of Son of a Gun and I don't really want to get sort of typecast into any sort of one genre. I just know that I'm probably going to just keep on telling the same sort of story but in a different setting, a different kind of fashion. I don't know.

I've got a lot of shit to work out. You know, it's a very very expensive form of you know, therapy. You know, it's a very, very expensive form of, you know, therapy. High grade, high tension therapy. No, that's, I mean, that's so, that's the story of so many filmmakers though, you know, trying to find new ways to kind of understand how they feel about the world and using different formats. How did you actually make yourself into a filmmaker?

Like I had never heard of you. I hadn't seen your shorts before Son of a Gun. Son of a Gun kind of came out of nowhere. And I think I was really just made aware of it because it had the A24 connection. And I was like, oh, okay. I know that brand and I know the people that work there. So I'll be interested in that. But it does feel like you kind of came out of nowhere and obviously you come from Australia, but how did you make yourself into a professional filmmaker? Do you want the short story or the long story?

Do you have a medium version? A medium version. So where I grew up, there was no access to video cameras. It was in that really tricky time between Super 8 and video cameras, and I was in the sort of dead zone where it wasn't really around. But my mother bought me for my 10th birthday a Stills camera and promised to develop a roll of film every month. So developing film was expensive back then. You know, and also it was like, it wasn't like the immediacy you have now.

You take a selfie and you can check it out. It took bloody a week to come back or 10 days. I like that you also had all these bargains with your mother, you know, like getting the videos and getting the film developed. Yeah, yeah. Yes. You know, you can't let your parents take advantage of you i mean come on so i used to uh take pictures and at first i was really shit i was so bad at it everything was out of focus everything was like blurry and and um overexposed and no good but eventually

mom never never gave up on me and and just let me keep on developing these expensive rolls of film. And eventually I sort of got more into it and I loved it more than I liked because I was doing a lot of drawing and painting at that stage and I got accepted into an art school. It didn't take me long to find the photography part of the campus and I just find the photography part of the campus. And I just loved the immediacy of it because I could, instead of taking weeks for the film to come back, now it was like, you know,

I was able to develop my own film and instantly get gratification. And I was always too impatient for painting, you know, oils takes forever and I just loved it. And then I found out they had a video department and film department, and I took out video cameras and followed all my friends who were skaters and followed them around. And at first they were all acting like gooses for the camera, but then they got so bored of me that they just started just acting naturally, and that's when I was like, there's the magic.

I didn't quite realize what was happening at the time, but the magic was in the fact that I was just being a fly on a wall and they didn't take any notice of me. Them playing up for the camera wasn't as amazing as what they were doing when they just forgot that I was there. Were you thinking you would do documentary work then because of that? I didn't really have a plan, man. I was like 16. But I just got off on it. And I ended up by going to getting into film school, and then I did a short film which got funded by the state government

called Little Man, and that then got me into one of the top film schools on the East Coast. So it got me out of Western Australia, which I've always wanted to do. I hated where I grew up. I sort of hate love it now. But growing up, I certainly didn't have any love for Western Australia. But I love it now. Looking back on it, I have fond memories as well as bad ones.

So I went to VCA Film School and it was great. It was so amazing to be around a bunch of other filmmakers. The teachers were okay and I had all these big hopes and dreams for what I would learn there. But at the end of the day, it was just about hanging out with other filmmakers. And it was the first time I really did that in a very intense way because I was living away from home and I got to, you know, go into a pressure cooker situation where we had to do, you know,

a film pretty much every month, you know, and you had to just churn them out. And in my class I had Adam Akpour who's gone on to shoot, you know, True Detective Season 1 and God knows what else. Yeah. And Justin Gazelle was in my class as well who uh you know did macbeth and and uh and other great films and and um what a luminous uh yeah it was it was great because we were like we're all super competitive yeah so you know when you go into the movie and you're like fuck oh man i'm you got you get jealous you know well i'm probably not in the

same way that you do but sure yeah i i like i'm like oh my god you you get jealous. Well, probably not in the same way that you do, but sure. Yeah, I'm like, oh, my God, you did it. You've blown my socks off. And how am I ever going to top that? Yeah. Fuck. So anyway, so Justin did that with a short film that got into Cannes in his first year.

And I was like, you bastard. And then the next year, I ended up getting into Cannes in his first year and I was like, you bastard. And then the next year I ended up getting into Cannes. And so I don't know, he's a super competitive guy. Like his father was like a, he was trying to make him into a tennis prodigy and his brother who's Jed, who now I work with, Jed Cazell, who did my score on Son of Gun and Overlord. But anyway, so it was really great to be around

all these really great other filmmakers and we bounced off each other and it was a great experience. And then I won Cannes. Just breezing past that one. That's a pretty big deal. With Jerry Cannes and that opened up a lot of doors. I got representation in town. Was your aspiration then, and even among your classmates,

did everybody want to be Hollywood filmmakers? Was it more like we'll make films in Australia? No, fuck, we wanted to be the greatest auteurs of all time. No, I've always wanted to make action movies. That's always been my goal because that's what i loved growing up you know watching and uh uh i had a bumpy ride like after can i had a film that fell fell over and i had all the money in place it was very much like um romeo and juliet uh set in the desert it was a full-on, really dark, gritty tale. And it had all the money in place, but then, you know,

the funding body down in Australia said no to it because you go through evaluation. So it crushed me because I had all this momentum and then I was like, fuck, what do I do now? And then I just went, I picked myself up, sobbing mess as I was, and wrote Son of a Gun. And I took the same story that I keep bloody recycling and put into that but made it a much more commercial kind of venture and uh and it ended up by getting funded and Ewan McGregor read it and he was a real advocate for me and and

um when he said yes the to the movie pretty much it all just was a domino effect and sort of just happened really quickly. Did you get a sense of why Ewan responded to it and said, I'll take a chance on this person who hasn't made a full length, who hasn't done something like this before? Yeah, I bribed him. I wrote him a letter. And the letter was a very personal letter to him. It was basically about my childhood and growing up, and that relationship that I grew up with in my life was very similar to the one that's in the script.

And so I think I just went in with putting everything on the table and was just like, I'm all in. And I think, you know, actors have to be all in all the time. Like they put everything on the line. Like they're in front of the camera. I can hide behind the camera and, you know, they're putting their face on a big 40-foot screen. They're throwing themselves out there.

And I guess I just wanted to like from the beginning just throw myself out there. And I guess I just wanted to like from the beginning, just throw myself out there. And if I got laughed at or if I got like, you know, judged, so be it. But it paid off. He responded to it and he read it. I sent it on the Friday and I got a response on the Monday and said he wants to talk. And so it was... Life's crazy. Yeah, it was crazy. It was like mind bending experience

the whole thing setting aside Flash Gordon you know how do you figure out what you want to do next now that you've had this sort of big

Hollywood studio experience do you like working in this atmosphere or is this the kind of thing you want to continue to do yeah I I want to keep making studio movies

I want well I don't want to make movies that get a theatrical release. I'm a huge advocate for the cinematic experience, and, you know, I love going to the theatre. I love the community feel of it. Like there's nothing better than going to a Friday night movie, opening movie with, you know, 400 people,

and the energy of the crowd is electrifying. And I love in this town that everyone claps and, you know, 400 people and the energy of the crowd is electrifying and I love in this town that everyone claps and, you know, and, you know, we're quite reserved in Australia. We're very kind of very British in that way. This is a company town. Yeah. And so everyone's like, you know, is clapping and cheering and you really feel that spirit.

And also like the, I love big thumping soundtracks and I'm a big fan of Christopher Nolan's work in that regard. I like to play it as loud as I possibly can. Spinal tap up to 11. So if I can keep making movies that get a theatrical release, then I'm happy. But the basic principles are the same for me and everything.

Like it's essentially, you know, you've got all the cool action and all the bells and whistles that go along with a film of this nature. But really what it comes down to is like, you know, you've got a couple of actors in a room and a camera. And I'm selfishly a performance director and I try and make everything as real as I can for the actor because they give that extra 10%, that extra 15% when they can feel or touch a wall.

They can, for instance, Pilu, who plays Wafna, Pilu Aspek, he was in prosthetics makeup for five hours every day and then had to do a 10-hour day. And that was really gratifying to see because the other actors were shit scared of him. It was real for them. He was terrifying. And if he had a green sock on his face or tracking markers

or whatever and said, I'm scary, believe me, I'm going to be scary in post. It just wouldn't feel as real. And I guess if I'm going to venture into bigger movies, you know, I just want to keep them as in-camera and practical as possible. You know, trying to, you know, have in-camera, do the heavy lifting and CG do the, uh, do the, um, do the light work. That would be my goal. If I continue to, you know, make these big event movies. That'll be an interesting challenge when you're in space. Um,

Oh, well, you know, 2000, 2001, you know, he figured out how to do it. You can, you can figure it out. Julius, I end every episode by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing that they've seen. I suspect that you are an avid filmgoer to this day. So what is the last great thing that you've seen? The last great thing I've seen? Mission Impossible Fallout was amazing. That was, like I saw that in the Dolby Theater

and it blew me away. It's visceral, it's high impact the intensity that that that helicopter sequence in the end is like next level you know uh i really loved like they took some really they did some really bold things you know like the um the kind of imaginary sequence where you know tom cruise gets to kill a cop and so like like, it, there was some really great, uh, moments in that movie, but it was, it was, it was such an event movie.

And if I was allowed to ever be able to do a big action movie like that, I I'd be picking shit. We, we love that movie on this show. So that's a great one. Julius, thank you much for so much for doing this. Thank you very much.

Cheers. thanks so much for listening to this episode of the big picture please tune in next week when we'll be back with an oscar show and maybe a top five show we'll see how things shake out and if you're looking for something to read check out the ringer.com i have written about netflix and their pursuit of prestige movies which include r Roma and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and also a movie that is out right now called Outlaw King. So check that out on TheRinger.com. See you next week.