Still: Production still from Strangerland
Strangerland is not your usual Australian fare. It can be seen as a film about the hunger for intimacy, for love, for touch, for self, and how that hunger grows terrifying and voracious when it is repressed. And the way in which that need is expressed for men and women through their differing sexual identities and their public roles.
Director Kim Farrant’s approach is very character driven, with that kind of internal approach which allows startling journeys into primal and unconscious motivations. Among her influences she claims training with Eric Morris, an American actor and teacher whose work derives from Lee Strasburg and Martin Landau, and followed this with the Actors Centre in Sydney. She has also taught at Melbourne’s 16th Street Actors Studio, which is influenced by Ivana Chubbuck via Kim Krejus.
She also has a more conventional arc as a film director with an MA in directing from the Australian Film Television and Radio School. She makes commercials through Renegade, has directed three episodes of Rush, made three festival shorts and three documentaries.
Her feature documentary Naked On The Inside is a fair indicator that she is in pursuit of exposure, vulnerability and insight. She includes sixteen minutes of the film on her own website.
In her director’s statement, Farrant said, ‘When I was twenty-two, my father died. Even though I knew he was dying, I was still not prepared for the overwhelming grief and surprising primal desires I experienced in the face of his actual death. I found myself wanting to connect, to feel fully alive, to make love, to fuck, to feel something… anything… other than the dark cloud of grief shrouding my heart.’
She took the tendrils of that experience to writer Fiona Seres, ‘who understood life’s tragedies, and together we sat in a room for two weeks and told war stories and shared crazy moments of our youth and brainstormed characters and story strands and created an eerie world for these people to be strangers in. A land far unknown to us city girls – the Australian desert.’
Thirteen years later, she had Nicole Kidman on board, along with Joseph Fiennes, Hugo Weaving, Lisa Flanagan and emerging international model Maddison Brown. Behind the film was an Irish-Australian co-production, which committed her to P.J. Dillon, known as the cinematographer on Vikings and Ripper Street, with music from Keefus Cianca, who worked on True Detective and The Fall. Producers are Naomi Wenck and Macdara Kelleher; Transmission and Alchemy are the local and international distributors. That all adds up to solid funding clout and a lot of very different mindsets on the same production.
Farrant met Kidman in Nashville, and then built up the role through phone conversations about the character, her arc, the themes and the storyline.
The film was meticulously planned with the whole panoply of director’s notes. As she explained on the phone, ‘I do all my homework, all my prep, I have prepared a massive director’s bible – not just a visual bible but what’s happening in each scene, what does this character want in this scene, what does each character fear, what are their inner and outer obstacles, what is their overarching objective, blah blah blah…’
But she never brings it to the location. It is the starting point for an encounter. ‘My approach is that if I want someone to open up or give of themselves, I have to be equally prepared to give of myself and equally as transparent and open,’ she said.
‘In the rehearsal phase and the development phase I share a lot of my own experience around the themes that are raised in the film, my experience around certain bits of plot in the story, my issues around – for instance – how we act out in times of crisis and whether that is through work or blame or sexualising, and share it on a very deep level.
‘Both through one to one face to face, sharing emails, phones, whatever it took to make the actors feel as safe as possible with me in the understanding of where I was coming from. I think that makes them feel safe to open up on set and in front of the camera. Basically it is an approach to creating that form of intimacy.’
The rehearsal process is driven very much by the needs of the actors, though it is clear that Farrant brought an extremely tight script to the encounter.
‘Some actors want to talk about their character and the character’s objectives and obstacles both inner and outer and talk through the beats, whereas other actors want to get up on the floor in the rehearsal space and go through the scenes. So it just depends on what they each needed, and being flexible enough to incorporate those different requirements plus my own needs for exploration and trying things out and getting a feel for the relationship dynamics, and even exploring the blocking if it was a tricky scene to block.’
“The main thing I want to be on set is to be completely one hundred percent present, not only to what the cast gives me in the moment but the combination of what the cast is offering, the electricity of that, plus the production design, plus the way we are shooting it plus the locations plus the weather – all those elements create the extra exciting unpredictable, unknown quality.’
For some performances improvisation before or during a take enabled the actors to find the specifics of their own history to service a character’s objectives. Sometimes they worked more privately, challenging themselves with the​ir reading of the script.
Living in her own moments, Farrant remembers this as ‘a lovely collaborative process in terms of adapting and using different techniques. At other times it was purely them using their own process and intuition to get where they needed to get.’
‘Everyone works differently and I just try to accommodate them all in different ways.’
In some ways, this must have been a ferocious experience. Nicole Kidman and Hugo Weaving are extraordinarily experienced. He roams like a great bear, and his thrumming life is absolutely credible inside the realistic tradition, aided by his lover, Lisa Flanagan. But Kidman’s journey is far stranger, as a wild girl tamed into despair, and is now lost in an emotional desert as her own daughter bursts forth with the same deep sexual keening until disaster strikes for both her children. The search for her daughter leads into her own self, as the identities blur and meld.
But Nicole Kidman is always game, and committed to delivering everything she can give her director and her performance.
‘I feel like Nicole in particular had a very deep understanding, awareness, sensitivity and compassion for exposing those different aspects of sexuality and the kind of power, allure and sometimes a ferocious need, of desire, of wanting connection, needing connection through touch, needing life force affirmation through touch,‘ Farrant said.
However, Kidman has been in strange and often erotic spaces many times, from Eyes Wide Shut, to Dogville, Stoker and I guess Moulin Roug​e.
‘I think a lot of French and Danish cinema allows and normalises this kind of deep sexuality in their cinemas, perhaps more than we do in Australia, so it wasn’t like NIcole had never experienced this as an actor, I think it was probably very refreshing to translate this into an Australian character in an Australian film where she is speaking with an Australian accent, and really inhabit that.’
What was the most illuminating part of the experience?
‘I really experienced a great satisfaction in doing the preparation but then letting go and just trusting the incredible skill and talent of the cast. It was mostly letting go and just really seeing how gifted these people were and that I just had to steer very gently. That actually, less is more, in a way.
‘I’m a director and I love that collaboration and that I could just say one word, one note and change the performance if I needed to.’
The younger actors had no real experience of performing at all, certainly on material with such confronting intensity. For them, improvisation was a very useful tool, often working physically around walk and posture, the nuances of character in presentation and the way they worked with languaging, to use Farrant’s term. But she is not using improvisation to break away from the scene as offered in the script, which is very carefully worked out. Instead, it is a tool to find the truth of the activity.
‘I learned to really trust my own instincts that when I did need to get in with an actor and improvise with them,’ she said. ‘Having a certain degree of flexibility around how much we used improvisation. Trusting in the text and what we had – but also trusting that sometimes the actor will just offer one slight shift or variation on a line and then you get something more. And that was great.’
With the young actors and the veteran adults, Farrant learnt to work with the children first. ‘The first time they react when you film them is often the most instinctive response, so you had better film the rehearsal with the camera on them first. The older and more experienced actor can wait, and recreate what they need take after take.’
Like most Australian features, they were racing against the clock. They had thirty days to shoot, including pickups, with three widely scattered locations across NSW.
‘So it was rigorous,’ she said. The biggest challenge of the shooting was nothing to do with the cast or the crew. They were all amazing. It was just time.
‘It looks beautiful and I am really proud of how we got the metaphor and symbology we wanted in the pictures under such a gruelling schedule. That was amazing.’
