By Cara Nash, Dov Kornits & Jim Mitchell
A former ad man, Matthew Saville was initially inspired by the careers of Alan Parker and Ridley Scott, directors able to move from commercials to feature films with great success. But as Saville acknowledged to FilmInk back in 2003 with the gift of hindsight, Alan and Ridley never had to direct Red Rooster commercials.
Graduating from the Victorian College Of The Arts in 1995, Matthew Saville went on to make a few well-travelled short films, before writing a feature length script called Roy Höllsdotter Live in 1997. The original script just missed out on receiving funding as one of the Million Dollar Movies, an initiative by SBS Independent and the Australian Film Commission, which resulted in low budget feature films such as La Spagnola and Fresh Air. Unable to apply for a government grant due to the fact that neither he nor his producer had any feature film credits, Saville heard about a new initiative by SBS Independent, the then Australian Film Commission and Film Victoria to fund nine 50-minute films. “I knocked Roy back to 50 minutes as an exercise,” Saville told FilmInk. “To prove to myself that basically I didn’t want to cut it down, but then read it and went ‘actually, it works.’ You could even argue that it’s a better film for being shorter. The rest of it was clearly padding…. But that’s an untested theory.”
The well received “mini-feature” revolves around Roy Fitzgerald Höllsdotter (Darren Casey), a gifted stand-up comedian plying his gag trade – in between lines of coke and heavy doses of self-destruction – to pissed patrons in sticky-carpeted pubs. When his mate discovers that Roy is stalking his ex-girlfriend, he decides to keep an eye on his friend to make sure he doesn’t get into any trouble. “I’m not going to admit that,” laughed Matthew Saville when FilmInk asked him whether Roy Höllsdotter Live’s storyline is in any way autobiographical. “I’m a happily married man.”
Aged 38 at the time of the release of Roy Höllsdotter Live, Saville freely acknowledged that he felt his ambition to become a feature film director was slipping away. “For some reason, Who Magazine puts everyone’s age in bold. Have you ever noticed that? So, you read something like ‘Quentin Tarantino, 36…’ And you go ‘He’s only…!’ Yeah, you do worry about that stuff because Orson Welles was 24 when he made Citizen Kane. And you have all these ingénues like Richard Kelly, who was 29 when he made Donnie Darko. But the film I would have made when I was in my twenties would have probably been something really derivative. Also, I think I’m more honest with what I’m writing now. When I was that age, I was listening to too many Smiths records, so everything was post-adolescent dirge. I still don’t mind writing bleak stories but at least I offer hope occasionally, which I think comes from maturity.”
Saville delivered a mature full-feature writing/directing debut indeed with 2007’s quietly mesmerising and richly stylised Noise, which he directed after working on TV shows like We Can Be Heroes, The Secret Life Of Us and The Surgeon. In Noise, Constable Graham McGahan (actor and playwright Brendan Cowell), a self-doubting, sardonic young policeman, comes into contact with both the decency and darkness of human nature when a massacre on a suburban train rocks a small community. Tortured by tinnitus (an at times overwhelming ringing in the ears), McGahan is assigned to a community police van set up to garner information on the crime, and soothe the collective consciousness of the damaged community. It’s a seemingly innocuous posting, but it introduces the diffident young cop to a selection of people affected in very different ways by the horrific crime. The interaction forces Graham to come face to face with an inner strength that he perhaps never knew he possessed. “The film is an ode, a valentine almost, to human beings; we have these incredible failings and foibles, but extraordinary things are ultimately done by incredibly ordinary people every day, and so we all must have this nobility in us,” Saville told FilmInk in 2007. “It’s just a matter of tapping into it or the circumstances that draw it out of us.”
In what would become a characteristic career route, Saville worked solidly in television (on high-quality, blue-ribbon projects like The King, Tangle, Cloudstreet and The Slap) before returning to the big screen. Saville kept the quality high with 2013’s Felony, an excellent police drama scripted by co-lead Joel Edgerton. “Having seen Noise, my heart was set on getting Matthew,” Joel Edgerton told FilmInk in 2013. “I just hunted him down and sent him the script. I then put in a phone call, and he initially declined me. I kicked the dirt for a while, and went off with my tail between my legs. But what it took to get Matt across the line was not so much bugging him, but leaving him alone and letting the idea just roll around in his head. Then he contacted me after about three months and said, ‘What are you doing with this project? It’s stuck with me.’”
Felony pivots around a flawed but inherently decent man who digs himself into one very deep hole. That man is Malcolm Toohey (Joel Edgerton), a drug squad cop, who recently scored a victory on the job and is heading home after a few too many celebratory drinks with his co-workers. The trip turns fateful when Malcolm clips a young cyclist and knocks him out cold. When the ambulance arrives on the scene, he makes the split-second but shattering decision to lie about his involvement in the accident. Malcolm’s actions spill into the lives of those around him, including his wife, Julie (Melissa George), and the two police officers who arrive on the scene. They’re veteran detective, Carl Summer (Tom Wilkinson), whose rumpled charm hides dark secrets, and straight-shooting rookie officer, Jim Melic (Jai Courtney), who grows increasingly suspicious of Malcolm. The way that each of these characters respond to the situation opens up a challenging ethical debate, with Edgerton’s script wrestling with the weighty notions of justice, guilt, innocence, punishment, and forgiveness.
While the film’s rich themes were no doubt a draw, what really lured Saville in was the sheer quality of Edgerton’s writing. “There are two things that were in the script that really attracted me like a moth to a flame,” Saville told FilmInk in 2013. “Firstly, it was emotionally honest. No one ever behaved in a way that didn’t make any sense just for a plot contrivance. And the other thing is that because Joel’s an actor – and he’s probably spoken so much bad dialogue in the past – he’s got a poet’s ear for dialogue. He knows how people talk, and he can create characters with cadence and language.”
Saville returned to the big screen fairly quickly, writing and directing the 2015 comedy-drama A Month Of Sundays, a far different project to the director’s previous crime dramas. Anthony LaPaglia effectively plays Frank Mollard, a middle-aged real estate agent ticking all the boxes for a midlife crisis. His wife, Wendy (Justine Clarke), who has moved on and become a successful TV actress, resents the fact that Frank is so clingy and aimless. When Frank receives a phone call from Sarah (Julia Blake), an older woman who resembles his deceased mother, he decides to befriend her, leading to a number of subtle life changes. “I wanted to make a film that my parents wouldn’t be ashamed of,” Saville told FilmInk in 2015. “When they saw Noise, they were very nice and were clutching for nice things to say. ‘Nice cinematography.’ My mum was just like, ‘There’s so much violence in the world.’ And she’s quite right. Don’t even get me started about when they saw The Slap [he directed a couple of the episodes of the controversial TV mini-series]. So I wanted to make a film that they would like, with no violence and no swearing.” The result was singularly charming.
Since A Month Of Sundays, Matthew Saville has been busy with more blue-ribbon television, getting behind the camera for highly regarded titles like Please Like Me, Seven Types Of Ambiguity, Friday On My Mind, Rake, Upright and Black Snow. But it’s on the big screen that Matthew Saville really belongs…
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
