By James Mottram and Chelsea Wick
What were your high school days like?
I went to a really small country school. I’m from the Tasman Peninsula; Port Arthur, which you may have heard of for some unpleasant things. It was a small area so there weren’t many people at my school. I didn’t play football so I was one of the few arty people there. We then had this wonderful thing where we got to go to college in a different institution in Tasmania so they’d pick us all up and ship us off to a city which for me was Hobart. When I was there, I was exposed to this mish-mash of culture including emos; they were probably starting to wane in popularity at that point but I was seeing them for the first time. I thought those guys were pretty cool. I would have never been brave enough to be like them but they offered this amazing alternative and just being able to see that they were alternatives to being a teenager, being a man, being a dude was important. There were very few options where I grew up so to arrive in a place which was a melting pot of culture that offered different options was amazing.
Even at that age, did you see life as an emo as a possibility or was it a far off idea?
When you are a young person, you don’t really have many hopes which I think is a tragedy. I was tricked into studying film by a media teacher. I had wanted to be an actor but when that fell apart, I was still doing film. I was then thinking ‘this is quite fun’ and I was accepted into a great school in Melbourne and it kind of kept snowballing from there.
Where did the idea for the film EMO The Musical come from?
Well, first it was a funny idea but it was also a bit gimmicky so I was sitting on it for a while. Then the Holy War aspect came out; in the film there’s a Holy War where the Christians are fighting against the emos so I was thinking that I could make a short film, at least that has legs. When I went to college, there were emos and goths and they were in a music room with a bunch of Christians and there was sort of a weird, ideological difference between those two groups. The idea came out of that.
How different is the short film [made in 2014] to the feature we see now?
The cast is different because our other cast had grown older by the time we were shooting it but they are all featured in the feature film in some way, whether it’s voice or visually on screen. We hit some of the beats, we really wanted to keep the tone and the style that was in the short film because I think the audience really responded to that. While the actual structure of it isn’t completely original or breaking out of the ball park, we decided we liked that because it allowed us to do some original things on top of it. We could be really playful by sticking with the framework that people recognised and we found that was really fun. Part of changing the film into a feature was adding some competition, adding more complex back stories and making the universe bigger. There’s 10 characters in the feature film who all get a character arc whereas in the short film, there are only three leads and I think only two of them get a full arc.
Considering parts of the film where the kids set fire to Christian imagery, were you worried that you could offend people?
When we were filming, we were definitely worried about that. The actors were really nervous about lighting the Bible on fire. I think that was a really big moment, as well as when the crucifix fell down and they set that on fire too but there was a feeling that it was a little bit more home made as we built that crucifix ourselves. I think we just had to assume that the audiences were smart enough to know that we weren’t condoning it, especially the younger audiences because it is a film about finding yourself, working out who you are but I think that the audiences know we are not condoning suicide or supporting burning down crosses but at the same time, it was quite fun to do as it was extreme.
In many cases, the emo kids mock the Christian kids. Were you careful that you did not mock Christianity as a faith and a lifestyle choice?
Out of the eight different characters, we had four Christians and I think we do make fun of the most extreme parts of Christianity but the rest looks at a way that Christianity could be worked into their lives healthily. It was really important for us that Trinity [Jordan Hare] began the film as a Christian and ended the film as a Christian. I think she does do a lot of ridiculous and stupid things throughout the course of the movie that I think Christianity can do, but I think at the end of the day in regards to her core beliefs in Christianity, we didn’t want to make fun of that. We wanted to make a lot of crap around it – the political stuff – but we did not want to make fun of the fact that she inherently believes in Jesus, she finds solace in that and she connects to other people through that which was really important. It was the same for the emos; Ethan starts the film as an emo and finishes the film as a rather complex emo.
Have you seen the film Sing Street? How would you compare it to your film?
I think we finished our film a good seven months before Sing Street came out in Australia so I was watching it being a bit more relaxed as I didn’t have to watch it for research. John Carney’s work is amazing and the way he approaches music is different to us in that he kind of does more diegetic stuff in how people are performing in a space. We wanted to elevate it a little bit beyond that. I think that our emo bands approach music in the way that Sing Street does whereas the music by the Christians is more like La La Land, so it’s interesting. The Christians break out into song randomly like they do in La La Land which is quite traditional.
Do you think there is a sense of a musical revival especially after the success of La La Land?
I think there’s been one for a few years. We were talking a lot about Pitch Perfect. I think Pitch Perfect is a great film but it wasn’t really praised as a huge intellectual work. I think it was really clever and really witty the way that they approached their musicality and the way that they make fun of themselves while still making you want to see these characters win a silly contest. I have a lot of respect for it.
EMO The Musical is in cinemas from May 4, 2017.