She’d send me a different daily video from her bedroom. With Milla, Eliza and I had to find how she moved and danced, so Eliza would dance every day. If you took all the words out of Babyteeth, you could still understand almost everything that’s happening. As someone who used to love dancing, and love watching choreography, the physicality of those characters is just as important as the words they’re saying. With cinema, though, there’s a disconnect between the actors and their bodies. Theater, as you’ve pointed out so well, is a wide shot. And that’s sometimes the thing that gets lost. MURPHY: Yeah, my work, even in the theater world, was always considered really physical. RUBINSTEIN: Movement in general seems important to you you did a miniseries about an Iraqi-Australian boxer. I wanted the characters to have an intimate connection with the cinematographer, Andrew Commis, and created some choreography that would make that energy happen. In terms of framing, we looked a lot at the work of Cassavetes, who I think was really amazing at capturing freneticism. For costuming, I follow the energies of the characters, so Milla starts off quite yellow, and then becomes more lavender as she’s connecting more to Moses because that’s more of his color. We looked at a lot of William Eggleston photography, which feels so contemporary still today, but of course isn’t, and that’s something particular to his colors and palettes. MURPHY: We talked a lot about how we wanted Babyteeth to feel timeless. RUBINSTEIN: The film is adapted from a play how did you add a frame to what you saw onstage? Coming up with the seaglass-colored palette, for example. Characters at their wit’s end often display quite a heightened reaction-in some ways a theatrical performance, but when you’re dealing with that kind of intensity, it’s about still making sure it’s grounded and believable. So allowing an audience to see that is quite a gift of a moment, if you can make it as authentic as possible. People can behave in ways that they might usually be ashamed of, or that they might have never tapped into before. And so crisis is an incredible intersection in our lives, which of course is high drama, but also which, psychologically, is really complex. MURPHY: When you see people at a point of crisis, it’s an interesting way to understand a person-how they react says a lot about who they are, or who they’re trying to become, or who they’re trying to run away from. Do you think pain and trauma are the keys to getting at a character? Y our episodes, like Babyteeth, are pretty painful, especially for a stylish show. You went on to direct some of Killing Eve. They definitely don’t make it easy for women. I wanted to congratulate you for competing at Venice. From the Gold Coast, Murphy got on the phone to discuss Milla’s love, Jodie Comer’s laugh, and Scanlen’s dancing.īESSIE RUBINSTEIN: Hi, Shannon. From there, Murphy’s talent for infusing tenderness with a dose of irreverence took her, logically, to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s female-driven serial killer TV series Killing Eve, for which she directed two episodes. In Murphy’s hands-ones equipped with a theater background, a university short film that made it to Cannes, and an obsession with body language-the film is sweet, yet unsentimental enough to let Milla’s first and final love story be a lot less than perfect.īabyteeth secured a competing spot at Venice Film Festival, beating two sets of odds as a feature debut by a female director. In the film, an adaptation of Rita Kalnejais’s play about a girl diagnosed with cancer, a dying high schooler named Milla ( Eliza Scanlen, of Little Women fame) falls in love with a drug addict named Moses who may end up robbing her house at night. Her new film, Babyteeth, is a teen cancer movie that’s more healthily irreverent than it is syrupy. But the Australian director Shannon Murphy believes the genre, with its inevitable loss of innocence and doomed teen love, doesn’t have to be melodramatic. A coming-of-age film can be seen as gluey and sentimental a coming-of-age film about a girl is almost certainly deemed so.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |