Written Interview: David Michod (Animal Kingdom)
Today’s written interview is with David Michod, the Australian writer-director of several movies including three short dramas Ezra White, LL.B. (2006), Crossbow (2007), and Netherland Dwarf (2008), two documentaries Solo (2008) and Inside the Square (2009), and newest, the full-length feature film Animal Kingdom (2010), which won the Grand Jury prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It opens in the U.S. in NYC and L.A. this weekend. Here are some excerpts from the interview:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for the story?
DM: I moved to Melbourne from Sydney when I was 18 and the city was so foreign and a little bit intimidating to me, because from what I had known of Melbourne to that point, Melbourne in the 80s especially had been a pretty dark and weird place. All I knew of it really was that it was a city where bad things happened. There were a number of high profile, lone gunman type massacres, and a couple in the space of two years. About 12 people were killed in each of them, just nut jobs with machine guns that go walking down city streets. But also, [there was] this long running seeming antagonism between these hardened gangs of armed robbers and a kind of almost renegade armed robbery squad that was made up largely of cops who in that era had the most difficult job in the police force. They were known as the hard men of the Melbourne police because they were the men dealing with the most dangerous criminals — these gangs of heavily armed and dangerous and very professional criminals.
Q: Was this in the 80s?
DM: This was in the 80s. It was around that period of the decline of armed robbery as a serious criminal profession. In a way, they were the last days of that kind of old school bandit. But, in those last days, it was that antagonism between these gangs of armed robbers and the armed robbery squad which was very intense. It seemed that people [in Melbourne] were being shot dead by the police at a rate astronomically higher than anywhere else in the country. So anyway, I moved into this city and it felt physically different to Sydney. Sydney is all hills and beautiful little old houses and water and all that kind of stuff and Melbourne felt like a mini-Chicago or something. It was just old Victorian buildings and it had an industrial feel to it. I was reading about all this stuff that had been going on in Melbourne, reading a lot of Melbourne’s true crime writing, and it was suddenly giving personality and flavor to these new streets and neighborhoods and I started building what I hoped would one day be a grand Melbourne crime story.
Q: How long did it take you to write the script?
DM: Eight years. I wrote the first draft in December 2000. I was fresh out of film school and I didn’t really know what I was doing and the first draft was bad. It took a long time to get it to a place that not just I but other people felt was good enough. It just took a long time for my writing to mature. Over the course of those years, I think I started the thing from scratch about four times literally. I realized my writing had matured to an extent that there was no point in me tinkering with what I’d already written. I needed to just throw the whole thing out and start again. It was a good thing. I mean, I was doing a lot of other stuff over the course of those years, but this was my pet project and I kept returning to it. I’d walk away from it for six months or I’d walk away from it for a year and then do other stuff and then come back and go, “Okay, I’m going to have another crack at that Animal Kingdom script.”
Takeaway? How about this: It took Michod eight years to complete the script for Animal Kingdom. Moral: Writer, persistence is thy middle name!
For the rest of the interview at Collider, go here.
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