by Helen Barlow

Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth is part of the competition at the Marrakech International Film Festival. She says festival director Christoph Terhechte told her that the film’s inclusion had nothing to do with the festival’s Australian focus this year.

Still, she notes it was fun to hang around at the hotel with her friends and colleagues in the evening.

Who are they?

“Richard Roxburgh, Simon Baker and Mirrah and David,” she says of married couple and powerhouse directors Mirrah Foulkes and David Michôd, who directed her husband Dan Wyllie in Animal Kingdom. Wyllie has been with her at the festival. “So, we’ve been seeing all of them as they’re good friends back home.”

Murphy, who trained at NIDA, had directed extensively for television (including episodes of Rake starring Roxburgh) though had mostly directed for theatre for a decade before making her first feature film.

“I didn’t have a huge passion growing up to direct film and TV,” she explains. “I was very passionate about theatre, so the transition came to me quite surprisingly at the Berlinale when I was watching short films in the Generation X section. I was in Berlin directing a play at the Schaubuehne – I got a scholarship to be mentored by Thomas Ostermeier, which was fantastic. So, when I saw the short films, they were so amazing and unique, and I thought that I want to start doing this. It was like an epiphany. I went to film school [AFTRS] for a year and I really loved it and now it’s all I want to do really.”

Babyteeth’s producer Alex White and executive producer Jan Chapman came to her with Rita Kalnejais’s script based on her play. “They thought I’d understand the connection between theatrical and filmic writing, but my theatre work has always been so character and actor driven,” she says comparing it to cinema. “My theatre work always had very dark humour but a very big heart.”

The Babyteeth story follows terminally ill teenager Milla (Eliza Scanlen), who falls in love with smalltime drug dealer Moses (Toby Wallace). (Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn play Milla’s parents.) When the film premiered in Venice, it was refreshing to see a youth-oriented story and even if the subject matter could be perceived as dark, Murphy goes all out to make it colourful.

“I never thought about this as a cancer film. I was thinking what it would be like to be in that situation. Rita based this on a friend of hers who died when she was young. She was so eccentric and lived her life in such a vibrant way. She would do things like take blueberries and stain her lips every day to have beautiful lips. She was still so in love and throwing herself at life and I think that’s how people behave. So, I just kept thinking how Milla would be more interested in being a teenager than anything else. I also talked to people who work with kids with cancer and say they’re acting out even more because they know they potentially have limited time. They’re busting out of the constraints of still being this child but wanting to become the adult.”

The very impressive Scanlen, who started out in Home and Away and already has the hit US series Sharp Objects to her credit, has a major role as Beth in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women releasing January 1.

“I haven’t seen Little Women yet but I’m excited to see it because the reviews are amazing,” Murphy says. “It was shot just before Babyteeth and Eliza had an amazing time. She had to learn the piano for Little Women and she arrived with us and had to learn to play the violin. So, she was frantically taking music lessons. She’s acting in New York at the moment on Broadway [as Mayella Ewell in Aaron Sorkin’s production of To Kill a Mockingbird] and she’s loving stepping into the theatre world. She’s there for quite a while actually.”

Did Murphy give her any tips for the theatre? “I did say it’s going to be a really long run and halfway through you might feel like you’re going mad, but you’ll come out the other side. She’s great because she had done Lord of the Flies at Sydney Theatre Company just before and it was a wonderful experience. I think particularly for young performers, theatre gives you a very warm and loving environment to develop as an artist. She’s very smart and is always going to make decisions based on her instinct and creative vision. So, I’m excited to hear what she’ll do next.”

KILLING EVE

After Babyteeth world premiered in the Venice Film Festival’s competition, Murphy flew directly to London for her next high-profile gig, shooting two episodes of the third season of the British spy thriller series Killing Eve.

“I’ve just finished shooting and now I’m editing until the end of January,” she notes. “I’ve been working with Jodie Comer more than the others. She’s masterful and I can’t get enough of watching her. It was a great shoot and I’m very fortunate to have a huge amount of time. The UK system actually gives you double the amount of pre-production time you’d have in Australia.”

How much input did she have into the scripts? “A lot. They’re a very collaborative team and want to hear your thoughts. The editor of Babyteeth [Stephen Evans] is cutting the episodes so it was great that they let me bring him.”

She says that directing each episode was not unlike making Babyteeth. “I actually don’t approach television that differently. I try to imagine the episodes as smaller features because so much work goes into them and the budgets these days in fact are almost identical. Each episode costs the equivalent of Babyteeth, around AU$3 million so the pressure’s just as high.”

Babyteeth is in cinemas in 2020

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