by Anthony Frajman
Only a few years ago, New Zealanders, director Armagan Ballantyne and actor Jackie van Beek, had never met. But when they spoke to discuss the possibility of working together, both knew they had to team up. That meeting sparked the beginning of what would become their first collaboration, Nude Tuesday.
Starring van Beek (The Breaker Upperers) and Australian Damon Herriman, the film follows a frustrated couple who attend a retreat run by a shaman (comedy powerhouse Jemaine Clement).
We caught up with Ballantyne to find out where it all began.
How did Nude Tuesday come about?
Jackie and I met, we just really enjoyed each other’s company, we creatively sparked off each other and thought ‘let’s make something together’. We came up with several ideas for films, sometimes we’d write them together or the idea that she’d direct one or I’d direct; different ways of collaborating. We looked at our ideas and Nude Tuesday was the one that actually felt like it was kind of calling to go now. So, in that one, it just made sense for Jackie to play Laura and me to direct it. And Jackie and I worked on a story together.
The film relies heavily on improv. Did you have that in mind at that stage?
We worked for a couple of years on the story, but the gibberish idea that Jackie had didn’t exist. That came later. We had quite a lot of the story in place, and it was coming together, and we were enjoying it, it was film festival time in New Zealand… We were seeing all these foreign films with subtitles and that just stimulated Jackie’s imagination. She woke up one morning and rang me up and said, ‘Come here, I’ve gotta talk to you about this thing, it’s just mad’. She told me this concept that she had, which was that we’d invite comedians to interpret the film and write the dialogue. And my immediate feeling was like, ‘this is just brilliant’, and it opened this Pandora’s box of ideas of like, ‘we could do gibberish songs’. The world is now suddenly absurd, which allows us a lot of freedom to be playful in the way that we do it, but it also deeply connects with the theme of the film.
How difficult was it shooting during the pandemic? New Zealand was one of the only countries able to film at the time.
We were probably the only filming country in the world. Quite mad, isn’t that? (laughs). We didn’t feel like that because we were just this tiny little independent film where it’s a small crew and cast. And, so it was a bit like a family. We all stayed at that camp, and there was this one big lovely, bar room that we’d all congregate in and play bar games and pool and talk about what we were gonna shoot the next day. The community were all involved. That would’ve happened potentially with or without the pandemic, it’s just that it was heightened because of the pandemic; there was no one else really coming through, and there was this sense of ‘this could all stop at any moment’.
Everything was so kind of upside down. (The town we were shooting in), they embraced us and we embraced them and we became this bubble. And all the actors hadn’t been able to work and, so everyone had this intense time. We all just came together in this tiny little place.
How was working with Damon Herriman, and how did that happen?
He’s so brilliant. Jackie and I had been thinking who could play that role. And because it’s an Australian-New Zealand co-production, we were encouraged to have an Australian actor, which we were very open to, we’d been looking at his work and thinking, ‘Gosh, this guy is so great, and he’s just so capable of comedy and drama’.
I came to The Breaker Upperers screening at the Sydney Film Festival and Damon approached Jackie and said ‘Hi’ and that he enjoyed the film and she dragged me over and said, ‘Meet Damon’. And so, then we all like chatted and he was like, ‘It’d be great to do something together’. And Jackie and I were thinking, ‘Yes, we know what that should be’. And then we got in contact with him not long after that and said, ‘Look, we do have this project, but at that stage, it was still in a very rough draft form, but we had the gibberish idea that we’re working with. And, he very generously committed to the film before he had much of a script.
He took a leap of faith and was like, ‘yeah, I’m in’. He’s got such range, some artists like working in a similar playing field and others really like to stretch themselves into different places. And he’s very much someone who is totally capable of comic timing and, drama acting.
What was working with Jemaine Clement like and how did that come about?
Jemaine’s so brilliant and funny. We were so happy when he agreed to do it. Jackie and him have been friends for like 25 years. They’ve known each other for a long time. That thrilled me as a director, because we’ve already got this trust and this relationship here. So, it meant that we were already jumping into something that we could just push, like that whole lake scene, we could push the potential of what that could do. Also, I’d worked with him on a commercial like a million years ago. We made this short with Damon in Sydney, just to try out the language and, to see if it worked and how it would work and so we cut that together and we showed Jemaine that, and he was like, ‘Oh, okay. Now I get what you’re trying to create’.
Did Jemaine bring a lot of his own contributions to the film?
Totally. He’s a brilliant improviser. So, several times in the movie, there are things, he would just riff and go on tangents, like that whole toast where he accuses Bruno, I mean, that just wasn’t there. And, when he runs into the water and he is like kicking the water. Andy the cinematographer and I were chasing him down to the water, and I just really encourage that because it’s a wonderful thing to have all of that spontaneity and ideas and playfulness, and because he’s been doing it for so many years, he can bring brilliant stuff.
What was the biggest challenge of making the movie?
Going up the mountain and shooting in the cold, where everyone has to be nude, even though, we had this amazing intimacy coordinator and we worked hard to make sure that all the cast felt comfortable and knew what was happening. We checked in with everyone. But then on top of that, it was really cold. It was as cold as it feels when you’re looking at it.
And it was planned like a military operation. We did rehearsals down below with everyone. We worked it out with the safety people. Everything was absolutely down to a tee, and we had to helicopter up to that spot, and the weather was shocking. We hadn’t even got to the dialogue of that scene. And the safety officer came up to me and said, ‘We’ve got an unexpected storm coming in and we are gonna need to get you off the mountain’. And I knew we’d never get back up there again because it’s so expensive. It was the most expensive day. And, (cinematographer) Andy, and I just talked to each other and we were like, ‘We’ve gotta just go for it’. We said to the safety guy, ‘Give us as much time as you can’ and then we just shot like crazy. And we were still shooting as they were choppering people off the mountain. We were shooting that final scene and a lot of it, we got once the final person got off that mountain, and then we all went to the pub and sat around a giant fire and celebrated, and everyone was zingy because the production, the crew, and the cast had done this amazing feat.
Nude Tuesday is in cinemas and on Stan now.
