by Dov Kornits
Kiwi-Australian Marcelle Lunam has forged a circuitous path to making her first feature film as director. Music videos, commercials, children’s TV, documentaries, animation and even logos.
“When I finished film school, I was working with Bruna Papandrea very early on,” Lunam says about the trailblazing producer who worked with Reese Witherspoon in the US before coming back to Australia and founding production company Made Up Stories. “Bruna was a young producer and I was a young director out of film school. We were working with Unjoo Moon and Dion Beebe’s company doing commercials. I did a lot of graphics as well animation and the Made Up Stories logo.”
Appropriately enough, Lunam makes her debut as a feature film director with romcom Addition, produced by Made Up Stories.
Getting the gig, though, wasn’t just about knowing Bruna Papandrea.
“I had to go back to New Zealand to look after my mum. When I went there, I got together with a group of people and started up a new innovative mental health facility because my brother has a chronic mental health condition,” says Lunam.
“[Made Up Stories’] Jodi Matterson called me one day and said, ‘we’ve got a script we’d like you to read. It’s based on this great novel [by Toni Jordan], Becca Johnstone’s written a screenplay’. I was like, ‘What for? Graphics?’ And they said, ‘To direct it’.”
Matterson asked Lunam what she would do with the film? “I really loved the story, it really spoke to me and resonated with me because it was about celebrating difference and making the central character not about their diagnosis,” says Lunam about the unconventional romcom, whose central character (played by Teresa Palmer) is suffering from arithmomania, an OCD condition.
“I wanted to try to do something a little bit different with it because romcoms are a much loved genre. I could have taken the route where I just went straight out romcom. But I wanted to change that up a bit and make it a little unusual. Make bolder choices in the directorial visualization of it and the audio. I wanted to make it really commercial but surprising.
“I particularly love the Nouvelle Vague era and Neorealism. You’ll notice that I’ve used a few things in the film that are unconventional for a romcom. For example, I did some timelapse of Teresa cycling through the emotions of Grace in the film and just focused on her face.
“And a countdown… a visual indicator of that moment when you make a decision to do something that changes the course of your life. I wanted to stop people in their tracks in a scene and go ‘Bang! We’re going to the next scene now’. I wanted to try to, um, add something to it, for want of a better word. I wanted to show a little bit of the darker side of Grace’s mental health journey.
“I wanted to anthropomorphize the illness a little bit,” Lunam says about the appearance of Nikola Tesla (Eamon Farren) in the film. “Rather than just having this imaginary friend character, what I wanted to do was to go, ‘he can be this validation of Grace’s mental health or he could also be her sickness’. I thought that he was like the warm cardigan that she would put on that would make her feel safe and validate herself. But on the other hand, it’s like an abusive relationship. It’s like a toxic relationship because he’s stopping her from having agency, or ergo, the illness, right? So, there was that, that we sort of played with and that kind of comes a bit from my love of absurdist theatre.”
Addition is in cinemas now.
