by Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier
Writer/Director Charles Williams examines flaws of human nature in Aussie prison drama Inside.
Following the success of his Palme d’Or-winning short film All These Creatures, director Charles Williams makes the leap to feature-length storytelling with bold new film Inside.
Starring Academy Award-nominee Guy Pearce, Cosmo Jarvis, Toby Wallace, Tammy MacIntosh and newcomer Vincent Miller, the film interrogates the innate, flawed wiring of human nature and questions whether some of us really are just ‘born bad’.
The film’s title can be held, then, as an examination not just of what life inside the penal system can do to a person, but what prisons are inside some people and their inability to escape that.
Speaking to Williams, the challenge was to narrow the focus of our conversation as the film raises so many questions about the nature of choice and why some people are as they are.
We begin with the discovery of the film’s lead Vincent Miller, fifteen-years-old at the time of filming but possessed of a depth of emotion that suggests many years beyond.
“It’s such an important role,” Williams says of the film’s lead character, a juvenile delinquent whose apt character name, Mel Blight, never had any chance of a well-adjusted youth. “I really needed to find someone who had these innate qualities, someone with this great mix of innocence and maturity… An ability to empathise with a character who doesn’t always make choices that are easy to understand.”
The process began with a call-out from Williams’ casting directors Nikki Barrett and Natalie Wall to find any actor between the age of 14 and 30, regardless of acting experience. The Australia-wide search culminated with first-time actor Vincent Miller landing the film’s central role.
Miller simply sent an audition tape, which took him to the final round of casting against a handful of performers from different states in Australia. It was Miller’s capacity for empathy that won him the part.
“He just had something behind his eyes,” Williams elaborates, “that you could read on-camera. You just wanted to know what was going on with him; he just has a real, amazing talent.”
Miller soon after landed a crucial role in Brendan Cowell’s powerful Plum series for the ABC.
The development of Inside’s story stems from themes introduced in Williams’ short film All These Creatures, specifically those of damage caused by past traumas and the nature of damaged people themselves.
Those questions of how people reckon with these damages, and whether people can change, became the leading inspiration for the feature. It soon dawned on Williams that the film could not operate in any other setting than a prison.
“To me, that just found its way as being, ‘where else would you put that story?’ But it’s also about the prisons that we make for ourselves, the ones that we’re born into,” examining the congenital damages some are born with as well as “the disfiguring experiences in life” that some suffer in their earliest years.
Williams was conscious, however, to avoid the common tropes of prison dramas, such as corruption of authority or sequences of inmates digging tunnels under barbed wire.
In his own research, the filmmaker found that many of the inmates with whom he spoke didn’t want to leave the prison, so accustomed to the inside had they become during their sentence.
“They’re afraid of homelessness,” he says, “they’re afraid of their own behaviour once they leave prison; they’re afraid of the addictions they’re going to fall into, you know, the relapses…”
A standout sequence of the film sees Guy Pearce’s character awkwardly attempt to reconnect with his son, now grown into a young man since they last saw one another.
At its core is a scene-stealing performance from Toby Wallace, who not only holds his own against Pearce but seizes every ounce of dramatic tension in the room.
Wallace was the second member of the cast signed on to the film, a move for which Williams is grateful given the scene’s brief length.
“He saw the potential of it, rather than the screentime as his determining factor. It was really important for me to get him,” Williams admits, “a really great actor, to be able to push Guy around in that scene. For Guy’s own performance, he needs to be on the back foot, unmoored, and that’s a very big scene. It’s rare in a movie you can hold a scene for ten minutes – it’s also the best scene I’ve ever written, I knew it was the best bit of writing I’d ever done – so I just needed great people.”
Across the board, Charles Williams draws convincing and genuinely affecting performances from each of his actors, all of them marred by their own personal histories and emotional maladies.
A triumphant transition to feature-length filmmaking, Inside proves Charles Williams is a director with many more stories to tell – and each of them worth hearing.
Inside is in cinemas 27 February 2025
