From Snowtown to Macbeth, SA director Justin Kurzel is wowing the critics

HONOURED for his portrayal of the grisly true-life murders in Snowtown, Justin Kurzel graduated to the bloody tragedy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Justin Kurzel, director of new film 'Snowtown' pictured at Rushcutters Bay in Sydney, ahead of his film debut appearance at 2011 Cannes International Film Festival at Cannes in Southern France.

ALL HAIL Justin Kurzel, once a boy from rural Gawler, now a new voice in film taking his place alongside the greats who have mastered Shakespeare’s bloody and prophetic Macbeth.

The list includes Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa and Roman Polanski. This year add to that Justin Kurzel on just his second feature film. How did an unknown director from South Australia suddenly catapult to such acclaim?

And how did his first film, Snowtown, with its unflinching portrait of the grooming of Elizabeth teenager Jamie Vlassakis – now serving four life sentences at an undisclosed jail for his role in the Snowtown killings – prepare him for this?

Kurzel, 41, was at The Lion in North Adelaide when the offer was made to direct Macbeth starring Michael Fassbender, one of the great actors of his generation. (French actress Marion Cotillard came on board later.) Kurzel was in town with his actress wife Essie Davis, who was making the small-budget horror movie that became a critical hit, The Babadook. Through Snowtown, Kurzel had got to know Academy Award-winning producers of The King’s Speech, Iain Canning and Emile Sherman, and Sherman had a pared-down script of Macbeth ready to go. Would he like to do it?

He was interested but tentative.

“Then he said ‘Fassbender’s attached’ and I said instantly ‘yes!’,” says Kurzel. “It was a very strange, quick kind of all-the-stars-were-aligned moment.”

Kurzel, who trained in set design, met Fassbender when they bonded at the London Film Festival over Snowtown, based on South Australia’s horrific “bodies in the barrels” serial murders. The film, with the soundtrack by Justin’s musician brother Jed, was so divisive it was denounced by TV film critic Richard Wilkins as one of the most “disgusting, horrific, depraved and degrading films” he had seen – “I’ve seen it so you don’t have to”, he told viewers – yet it won a slew of awards including the 2011 Critics’ Week prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

“Michael had seen it and we caught up and met and we were both admirers of each other’s work,” Kurzel says by phone from Malta. “I could just see him as Macbeth. I could see a very fresh Macbeth. And suddenly the pieces of how to make the film fell into place.”

Locating the film in the craggy, foggy Scottish landscape was critical to his vision. Landscape has been important to Kurzel’s view of the world since he was a child who took long drives with his father from Gawler to Sydney or Melbourne. He was seduced by the power of landscape even then. “I’m kind of scared of it,” he says. “I think we all are, as Australians, travelling through the vastness of it, feeling quite fearful and intimidated but at the same time sensing a strong connection with the beauty of it.”

All of his favourite Australian films are firmly embedded in their South Australian settings; films like Peter Weir’s Gallipoli shot in Beltana, Port Lincoln, near Coffin Bay and Quorn; Picnic at Hanging Rock again in Adelaide, the Clare Valley, Aldgate and Mintaro; and Breaker Morant in Adelaide, Burra, and the Clare Valley. He feels a deep cinematic connection to the Gawler landscape and it has affected the way he sees things.

DURING the making of Snowtown, he made the trip from Elizabeth to the mid-north at least 50 times. Part of it was to trace the journey Jamie Vlassakis made in the company of the other killers. On one of his last trips Vlassakis was in the car with the final victim, David Johnson, who he lured to the bank at Snowtown on the pretext of buying a computer.

“You can’t help but look out the window the same way that they would have and look at the landscape passing by and somehow think about what sort of impression that would have made on them,” Kurzel says. “Like in Snowtown, the landscape became very important in defining a point of view of the character.”

The physical landscape of Kurzel’s Macbeth drives the film’s poetic power, as does Jed Kurzel’s spare and melancholy music. It opens with a dead child lying on the ground; stones are placed on its eyes and the funeral pyre is lit. By Macbeth’s side is Lady Macbeth, grief-stricken and shrouded in black as she mourns the loss of their child. It cuts then to the brutal man-on-man combat at the Battle of Ellon from which Macbeth emerges as the Thane of Cawdor, on his murderous way to becoming Scotland’s King. Off to one side in the yellow mist, watching men slaughter each other in battle, stand the witches whose prophecies feed Macbeth’s madness. Kurzel reimagines them as wandering prophets at home in the Scottish landscape, not witchy hags hunched over a cauldron.

“Like in Snowtown, the landscape became very important in defining a point of view of the character,” he says.

“It kind of informs who Macbeth is as a warrior, and someone who is fighting over land, but it also gave some sense of presence of the witches. We were interested in the idea they were more nomadic and part of the landscape.”

Most of Macbeth was filmed in harsh conditions on the remote and forbidding Isle of Skye and Jed Kurzel watched his brother battle bad weather and difficult shoot. He succeeded and the awesome, majestic landscape is the third star, after Fassbender and Cotillard.

While Justin is a new name to directing, he has been around film for a long time. At age 17, he left Gawler after winning acceptance into NIDA where he studied set design. Jed, the younger brother, followed a few years later after leaving an arts degree at Flinders University to pursue his music. In Sydney Jed formed The Mess Hall with Cec Condon – which still exists, when Jed has time – and Justin directed The Mess Hall’s film clips.

Almost two decades later they work together as brothers can, drawing on a huge store of shared knowledge. Jed says the music for Snowtown was in one sense easy because Adelaide’s north was their playground. The drifting music, which at times gives off a kind of stressed thrum, reflected what he already felt.

“Instead of looking at other influences or music, I started making music that I felt related to the kind of feelings and tone and colour that I felt in that area as a child,” says Jed. “I could access a lot of those memories and feelings. There was a familiarity in it, I guess, that I leaned on.”

FOR Macbeth, the starting point was the cliche of Scottish folk music which the brothers instantly discarded. They wanted to achieve the same kind of feeling without relying on the norm. The music doesn’t intrude but it’s a crucial part of the palette.

“For me it was again about the landscape and finding this kind of rustic element in the music that could be grand as well,” says Jed. “My soundtracks add to a film tonally, then we can sculpt some of the emotion around it as we go through.”

Jed says if the actors are great, you don’t need to push the audience to obvious places with manipulative music. And in Fassbender and Cotillard, the brothers were working with the best. After working on Snowtown with largely untrained actors, Justin was now directing Fassbender who arrived on set having read Macbeth 200 times. Cotillard, an Academy Award winner who has French as her first language, needed more help with the nuances of Shakespeare but Justin compares directing them to driving a finely-tuned Ferrari that allows you to redirect with minute adjustments.

“When they come together their craftsmanship is extraordinary, they are very prepared but they are very open emotionally,” says Justin. “It is about what they give to each other in that moment and how open and receptive they are in listening to each other.”

The film brought Justin back to Cannes in May when Macbeth was honoured with its world premiere as one of 17 films selected for competition for the Palme d’Or. It was his third visit; before Snowtown in 2011, his short student film Blue Tongue played in Critic’s Week in 2005. Macbeth lost out to the dystopian love story The Lobster (its Australian premiere is at the Adelaide Film Festival next month) but the film critic at London’s Daily Telegraph had this to say: “Kurzel’s chilling debut feature, the 2011 true-crime thriller Snowtown, suggested that the Australian filmmaker, then 37, was a talent to watch. However, this towering, consistently ingenious film establishes him as a director to cherish.”

Fassbender, Cotillard and Kurzel clearly hit it off. Kurzel is on Malta at the start of a 15-week shoot based on the video game, Assassin’s Creed. Fassbender stars as Callum Lynch who explores the memories of his ancestor Aguilar and gains the skills of a Master Assassin. Cotillard is also on board in an unspecified role that, if it’s a hit, will be the start of a major new franchise for them all. The Weinstein Company, distributor of Macbeth, is involved.

Already Justin is missing home which these days is London where he is based with Essie Davis and their twin girls, Ruby and Stella, who are nine. Just as Justin and Jed’s careers have taken off, so has Essie’s. With a role in The Slap and as Miss Phryne Fisher on the ABC’s detective series, she is a television regular who won critical acclaim for The Babadook and has now been cast in Season 6 of Game of Thrones. She will play the member of a travelling theatre troupe in Braavos which stages a satirical play poking fun at Westeros and mocking Queen Cersei, not a woman to be crossed.

Juggling stellar careers isn’t as much fun as it sounds and Justin worries about abandoning his family. “It’s incredibly difficult the amount of time that the industry takes away from your family,” he says. “Fortunately I’ve got a very understanding wife and understanding kids but it’s tough and I feel extraordinarily guilty about it.”

He and Davis have been together for 20 years after meeting at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre where he was designing sets. They married in 2002 and are creative partners as well as soulmates. She and Jed are his creative beacons, he says.

The girls are at school in London and before he feels too guilt-stricken about missing them, he says they have a rich life which included being on a mountain in Skye on horseback next to Fassbender who was wearing a full suit of armour. “They’re pretty well-adjusted, amazing girls,” he says. “They get to have incredible experiences that hopefully one day they will look back on.”

Since Macbeth, he and Jed have worked separately. After Assassin’s Creed, Justin is developing a script from Peter Carey’s novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, Kelly’s supposed memoir as he flees from police. The script is being written by Shaun Grant, who also did Snowtown. Jed, whose body of work includes the score for Slow West, which starred Fassbender and ex-Adelaide actor Kodi Smit-McPhee, is about to work with a mate from Flinders, the super-talented director Benedict Andrews.

When Jed started at Flinders, Andrews was in his final year and they have stayed in touch. The film, Blackbird, is about two people who meet 15 years after they had a passionate affair and stars Rooney Mara and Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn.

JED is also about to try directing. He has a film in development that he hopes to shoot next year, about a tennis prodigy and the father’s obsession with the son’s success. He has written it as well. “He’s an extraordinary talent, he’s much more talented than me,” says Justin of his brother.

Jed laughs at this, saying Justin was having a crisis of confidence at the start of a long shoot. They will work together again at some point and tap again into their shared film language and view of the world.

He has nothing but admiration for his brother’s realisation of Macbeth, in the approach that he took, the risks he made and the results he achieved.

“It’s Shakespeare and there’s a hell of a lot of baggage that comes with that and I think he did a remarkable job,” Jed says. “And I watched him go through it all, and he was incredibly patient and also very open to trying new things and taking the film in directions that I think other directors wouldn’t have gone to. I am incredibly proud of it.”

The Kurzel brothers still have links with Adelaide where their mother lives, as do their two uncles who are brothers of their late father. Jed says he loves coming back to the footy and had the pleasure of seeing the new Adelaide Oval earlier this year.

“I thought it was brilliant,” he says. “It’s brought real energy to the city that I hadn’t felt before outside of the Adelaide Festival.”

Justin’s only Australian print interview was with The Advertiser in Adelaide because, he says, he is missing home a lot. There is a sense that Justin could not have tackled Macbeth before accumulating sufficient life experience. Rather than appearing fully formed from nowhere, Justin Kurzel is a 20-year work in progress whose presence is only now being felt. At 41, he has the authority and confidence to pursue his vision, and to extract performances from actors in Snowtown who had no formal training or stars as great as Fassbender and Cotillard.

“My favourite part of filmmaking is working with actors so I think I needed that lead-in through theatre,” he says. “I feel comfortable now for the first time on set. I feel kind of like ‘yes, I can do this’.” ●