By Travis Johnson
In the ongoing short film series, Scrivano is teaming with a number of noted Australian actors to reinterpret various poems for the screen. The first installment saw Daniel Henshaw (Snowtown, These Final Hours) tackling T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (check it out here). Now Sarah Snook has stepped into the frame to interpret Noel Coward’s Alice is at it Again.
How would you describe the short? It seems like a difficult project to sum up quickly.
That is a tricky one. When I first came to the project the brief was to turn a poem that you like or that you have a relationship to into a moving piece, like a film piece. So in terms of a synopsis, it’s hard to distill I guess, because it’s sort of like a musing on the poem, Alice is at it Again, and what’s come out of that is something that is a lot more atmospheric and maybe even a lot more audience-driven – to create your own narrative from the images you’re given. Obviously not as totally surreal as that. I think it’s a poem, and thus a film, about a young woman discovering her sexuality and sitting inside that and carrying it through as a strength into her future.
How did you come on board the project?
Laura the director and I are friends. He pitched it to me, this idea. She had been commissioned to do some films through the Guardian. She’d done one already with Dan Henshall, another friend of ours. Ironically enough my poem that I would have chosen was the one that he had chosen, and I didn’t know that he had done it already. So, when we came to it, I was like, ‘I would choose this!’ and sh was, ‘Oh, that’s unfortunate, it’s already been done.’ (laughs) So I came to it through a collaboration with a friend. We’d always wanted to work together and try something new.
How would you describe Laura Scrivano as a filmmaker? What’s her chief area of exploration?
Well, she’s done a lot of movement based work. I think that’s probably a strength in creating something that is atmospheric and visual image driven – and that oftentimes is something you’re given, something you start working from in your burgeoning filmmaking career. The more achievable task is a short film, but Laura’s quite creative in how she’s able to expand that medium. Her background is actually in theatre so she’s probably, as an artist and as a creator, done more narrative-driven, image-driven stuff on stage, and transferring that into film has been her task over the past couple of years.
It’s a very impressionistic, non-linear piece. How do you, as an actor, approach that? Is it difficult to craft a performance for something like this?
It’s a bit hard sometimes, because you don’t know how it will be cut and edited. Part of it you feel sort of silly sometimes, ‘Oh, I don’t know how this will translate and I’ll have egg on my face. You really have to relinquish control. And that’s the case with any filmmaking endeavor – there are so many different creatives involved and the variables become exponential because of that – you just have to trust that they’re going to create the best that they can, and it’s the same with this. When it’s not an obvious narrative, you just have to give 110% rather than anything half-hearted, otherwise you won’t look very good and you won’t be very proud of it.
What was behind the decision to shoot in upstate New York?
Laura was living in New York at the time, and so was her producer and editor. So that was the location that she could use at the time – she had other work that she was doing and I was happy to go over for that. I think I’d just finished The Beautiful Lie at the time, so I headed over to New York.
The forest it was shot in, by a wonderful chance one side of it had had a forest fire the year before and the other side was still perfectly green and lush, so in terms of location management it was an easy sort of sell (laughs) – like, ‘Right, we can go across the road to shoot the other stuff!’ Making films on a tight short film budget, you have to be creative. Which is one of the reasons I wanted to do it as well. You don’t get opportunities like this – ‘Here’s some money, go create some art’ – that doesn’t seem to happen very often in filmmaking these days; they tend to have a commercial purpose or outcome defined before you embark on it. You don’t usually get the money first and get told ‘We trust you.’ That’s a real gift.
Now, you’re currently filming Winchester in Melbourne with the Spierig Brothers – how’s that going?
It’s really great! We finish up shooting next week. It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be super enjoyably. It’s been great working with the Spierig Brothers again, and they’ve got a lot of the crew [from Predestination, which Snook starred in] back together, so it feels like a family embarking on another project together again. It’s going to be fun.
Between that, These Final Hours, and Jessabelle, you’ve done a lot of genre material – is that something you seek out?
I tend to be genre blind in a way – if it’s a good story then it’s a good story, and you can’t really escape that. The good thing about genre I guess is the way that the story is told – the storytelling tropes that you use. But they’re just good stories – the Winchester story is awesome, and These Final Hours, that’s a great concept, So I guess I don’t necessarily see it as genre one way or another.
