By Dov Kornits
“I was trying to find the most extreme point to start a lead character from,” writer/director, Grant Scicluna, tells us. “I wanted to create a truly dark hero, so this story could be as dramatic as it could be. I wanted to see someone come through a story 180 degrees…I wanted to find an extreme situation.”
When it comes to leading characters and extreme situations, you can’t get much darker than Downriver’s James Levy (Reef Ireland, from Blessed, Tangle, and Puberty Blues), who we first meet as he’s exiting a juvenile detention centre, where he’s been doing hard time for his role in the drowning death of a young child several years prior. “It’s inspired by a number of cases that I came across in my research,” Scicluna tells FilmInk. “There are lots of cases of children who have committed atrocious crimes, some of whom have expressed remorse and found ways to go on, and others who haven’t. It was fertile ground for the story.”
Twisted with guilt and uncertainty about the crime (he blacked out at the time of the killing due to an epileptic seizure), and propelled by a burning need to understand what happened and to atone for his role in it, James heads back to the sleepy rural community on The Yarra Riveroutside Melbourne where the tragic drowning occurred. While there, he deals with a mother (Kerry Fox) desperate to move on with her life, and the looming, shadowy figure of his friend, Anthony (Tom Green), who was with James when the boy was killed. Coming between James and Anthony is the sensitive Damien (Charles Grounds), who sparks powerful feelings in both of them.
A striking tale of redemption and the lingering horrors of abuse, Downriver marks an auspicious debut for Grant Scicluna, who previously impressed with his 2012 short, The Wilding, also starring Reef Ireland.
Not surprisingly considering his film’s dark subject matter and subversive tone, Scicluna found himself pinching pennies after a precarious pre-production period that saw several financiers and distributors pull out of the project. “We were given the choice of making it for a certain amount of money, or not making it at all,” the director says candidly. “So we just asked ourselves, ‘What can we do for this amount of money?’ I made changes to the script, but they weren’t necessarily story changes or cutting a heap of characters. I combined a lot of scenes, so that we didn’t have to set up two lots of coverage for two different scenes and waste time doing that. We used our limited resources to make the most impact, and we scraped through. With a low budget film, you can’t put a title card at the start of the film that says, ‘This is a low budget film, so please forgive us certain things.’ We didn’t want it to look like a low budget film, and for it to apologise for itself. We scraped together what we had and we went and did it.”
With a core of finance from The Melbourne International Film Festival’s Premiere Fund (“We exist because of them,” says Scicluna), the young filmmaker was able to secure a number of venerable performers for his cast in the form of Kerry Fox (An Angel At My Table, Shallow Grave), Helen Morse (the star of the legendary Caddie, amongst others), and Robert Taylor (the lead in the US TV series, Longmire). “I was thrilled when they said yes,” Scicluna says. “Everybody did this film for the love of it, because there obviously wasn’t a lot of money, and it was tough. They responded to their characters, and they wanted to work on something interesting. The young actors got the chance to do something meaty. They’ve all done a lot of other work. They were excited about it because they could really show their chops.”
Despite his film’s sexually ambiguous characters and its slot at Sydney’s Mardi Gras Film Festival, Scicluna is hesitant to place Downriver into any one obvious box. “I don’t see it as a queer film in a genre sense,” he says. “I see it as a thriller or a drama or a mystery, that happens to have a kind of queerness through the centre of it. I have a problem in the general sense about labelling films as queer films; it’s so restrictive. If you look at the sexuality of the three lead boys, it’s important to look at their sexuality as complex. It’s too simplistic to say that they’re gay or even bisexual. Their sexuality is part of what makes their actions interesting, because they’re not necessarily motivated by a need to connect with another person. Anthony is motivated by power, and he uses sexuality as power. Whether you read that he’s gay or uncomfortable with being gay, it’s up to interpretation. My feelings about the sexuality of the lead characters is that it’s undefined and up for grabs. Living as a gay man, that’s how I see it. Gay is just love for another person, and that’s what I was trying to get across – those tender things.”
Downriver will screen at The Mardi Gras Film Festival, which runs from February 18-March 3. For all information, head to www.queerscreen.org.au.