By Anthony Frajman, Dov Kornits & Christine Westwood
2014’s touching, finely crafted low budget Aussie drama, 52 Tuesdays – about a teen dealing with her mother’s gender reassignment – announced two major talents in the form of dazzling young actress, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, and then 37-year-old filmmaker, Sophie Hyde. This gifted Adelaide writer and director (who also co-runs the innovative production company, Closer Productions) lit up the festival circuit with the film, snagging The World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award at The Sundance Film Festival, and The Crystal Bear at The Berlin Film Festival for her soulful and unconventional feature debut.
Born in 1977 in Adelaide, Sophie Hyde’s fascination with the arts really developed in her teenage years when she worked on her acting skills at The Unley Youth Theatre (later Urban Myth). Hyde later studied film and theatre at Flinders University in Adelaide and then moved onto La Trobe University in Melbourne, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1998. From there, Hyde moved into intimate drama with a series of shorts (including My Last Ten Hours With You) and documentary work, including My Last Ten Hours With You and Necessary Games (three short dance films for The Restless Dance Company), along with the critically acclaimed 2011 feature documentary, Life In Movement, and the online project, Wastelander Panda. Hyde also worked on projects documenting stories and experiences of young people for arts organisations.
An ambitious experiment, Hyde’s daring debut 52 Tuesdays goes against the grain in both plot and creation, with Hyde shooting the film piecemeal-style, one day a week for a year. “We had no idea what was going to happen next, just like in life,” Tilda Cobham-Hervey told FilmInk. “This gave the film a strong authenticity.” As well as this authenticity, 52 Tuesdays is also nothing short of an emotional tour de force. “I hope that the audience will feel moved,” Hyde told FilmInk at Sundance, where 52 Tuesdays made its first big international splash. “I hope that they will have a chance to reflect on their own lives and experiences in their relationships. I hope that they will feel immersed inside a world with these characters, and feel that they are seeing the inside worlds of other people – people who they might not necessarily think at the outset that they have a connection to, but in the end, they surely do. I hope that their attention will be drawn to time, and how it keeps moving through our dramas and domesticities and lives.”
Sophie Hyde followed up 52 Tuesdays in 2019 with the stylish, winningly against-the-grain Animals. Mixing reckless debauchery, the verse of WB Yeats and millennials trying to understand who they are, the film stars Holliday Granger (The Borgias, Cinderella, The Finest Hours) as Laura, and Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development, Search Party, Transparent) as Tyler; hedonistic best friends in Dublin, Ireland. Living it up like one big party and avoiding the monotony of suburbia, the girls find themselves facing competing futures when Laura announces her engagement to Jim (Fra Free).
“They’re really different movies on the surface, and they’re both the kind of films that people go in thinking they’re going to be one kind of film, and they are different to what they’re expecting,” Hyde explained to FilmInk in 2019 of making her second feature. “With 52 Tuesdays, people often think it’s going to be very sort of wordy. And it’s quite a different movie. There’s a lot of that teenage stuff, and the sexuality part of it. That is not what people anticipate. And similarly, with Animals, people think it’s a buddy movie, a girls getting drunk film, but it’s really about someone trying to find who they are. Both films are about central characters that are very curious about the world. They’re trying to work out their place in it. And doing that in a way that’s full of conflict, and that isn’t really clear; their wants are based on muddled, conflicted ideas. Both films are like that. And they’re both very frank in their exploration of sexuality and being a woman, or human.”
After working on the TV series The Hunting, Sophie Hyde returned to the big screen in 2022 with the UK comedy drama Good Luck To You Leo Grande. Essentially a two-hander set in a hotel room, the film stars Emma Thompson as a former schoolteacher of religion, a recent widow who hires an escort, played by Daryl McCormack, so that she can experience delights of the body that she has repressed for so long.
Written by comedic performer Katy Brand, and with Emma Thompson attached, Hyde was sent the script off the back of her work on Animals. “It was a very early draft of the script, a very short draft,” Hyde explained to FilmInk. “I had a meeting with them and said what I wanted to do with it. Then we worked on the script for 11 drafts quite quickly. Katy had sat down and written a story about these two characters. She’d written a script where they met three times, and she knew it was an early draft. She knew she wanted to go further with it, but it was short at 70 pages. It was dialogue. And then we expanded it to be the fourth meeting and changed a bunch of the story.”
Working on such a contained project, with the film shot in nineteen days with a minimal crew, allowed Hyde to work at her best. “I had a monitor, and I was offset a lot, just outside the hotel room,” Hyde explained to FilmInk. “As a director, I have to have a direct line to my actors, even if I’m a long way from them, because I go to them a lot. If anyone stands in front of me and the actors, I get really annoyed. It’s one of the only things that annoys me on a set, actually. That’s really important to me, that direct line to them and the sense that I can get to them fast, as soon as they cut.”
As well as her strong visual sense and taste for the daring and unusual, it is this sensitivity towards actors that really gives Sophie Hyde her directorial power. A fine filmmaker who marches gleefully to the beat of her own drum, Sophie Hyde is nothing short of a national treasure…and should be recognised as such.
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