Since learning about the Halo 2 Alternate Reality Game (ARG) "I Love Bees", I've always been a fan of interesting marketing campaigns for movies and games.

In addition to These Final Hours' ARG, which you can check out here, Motherboard has teamed up with Vice and the marketing company to make some interesting prequel shorts prior to the release of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Whilst some are stronger than others, it's great to see new things being made that expand the scope of these worlds.

As great as these are, I do wonder how the marketing departments prove return on investments of these videos.  

How do these convert people who are on the fence, or weren't interested in the films and put bums on seats?

Either way, it's still great to know that there's platforms for these to exist.

I got to meet Richard Kiel today who was most famous for playing Jaws in the James Bond series. 

Zak directing Nathan Philip and Jess De Gouw on the set of These Final Hours

Can you tell us how you got to make your first feature film?

[Laughs] Who let me do that exactly?  How it happened I guess, was putting myself in the right place at the right time, and having chiselled away at the last ten years or so before it, with a few backyard features, a few self funded shorts, a few funded shorts.  Constantly trying to develop my craft as a writer/director and I think that there were other projects that I thought were maybe gonna be my first funded feature film that fell by the wayside.  I am a believer that everything happens for a reason and I kind of look back at the disappointment I had in those projects falling over but I really felt like they deserved to fall over, and this one withstood the fire and brimstone of development because there was enough meat on the bone, enough of a cool central idea and enough of an emotional journey that the main character was going to go on.  Just all the right elements and at the end of the day just a really interesting story and a very basic premise of ‘what would you do on the last day on earth?’.  I think all those planets aligned just in the right way.  Ever since we put the first draft, which I call the vomit draft, that I just vomited out of my system into the inaugural Springboard that Screen Australia were running, with my producer Liz Kearney.  Ever since we put that in, literally it felt like the right people read it, the right people gave me the right encouragement and told me to really stick at it.  It wasn’t great on the page, but there was enough there for people to really tell me to “stick with this one Zak” and “you might have something here”.  It was getting into that in 2009/2010 and in being able to make a short film through that development scheme, called Transmission, where I just felt like I was working at a higher level than I ever had before, with the most experienced crew we could get, great actors and everyone getting paid the right way.  Doing a film properly.  It really solidified Liz and my relationship as a director-producer.  I feel making the short and chipping away at the feature, and then the right people then saying “yes” to the feature to get the bit of funding we needed from ScreenWest, followed up by Screen Australia, followed up by MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival), everything just sort of came together, with just enough money to pull it off.  

In terms of the Feature Navigator program, where you make a short first, what sort of impact did making Transmission have on the later feature These Final Hours?

Transmission wasn’t at all a short version of These Final Hours, it was a very moody, tonal, companion piece to the film, almost from an aesthetics style, but story wise they were incredibly different.  It galvanised myself and Liz and our DP Bonnie Elliot, who we found through the process of doing the short, and we definitely wanted to keep that relationship together for the feature.  It was almost like a big dress rehearsal, but it also got me writing for the first time in a  genre way.  I’d never really contemplated doing a sci-fi film before, and These Final Hours and Transmission, they’re not just genre films, I guess you’d call them elevated genre.  The most interesting genre films to me are the ones that focus on the people dealing with the extraordinary situation, be it a horror film, or an apocalyptic film, or set in space, whatever it is.  It’s always the ones that focus on the people and give you characters you can relate to, despite the far fetched situations they’re in, they’re real people.  It resonates with me.  That’s what I was trying to do with this film, my own take on 12 Monkeys or 28 Days Later, my favourite sci-fi films that are fantastic in examples of the genre but also there’s a real human story behind them as well.  It’s just a really simple hero’s journey.

In that way, was there a challenge in going to the longer form?  That presents its own obstacles, but was that a thing you found daunting?

It was incredibly daunting, but I had done three backyard features off the smell of an oily rag leading up to it over the last ten years.  I had already experimented and given it a shot, because you have nothing to lose, everyone was working for free out of the kindness of their own hearts, just testing the waters, finding what it takes to tell a long form story.  So I’d done it three times by the time we got to These Final Hours but it did feel very much like doing it all again.  Because that’s how you feel with every film I guess.  Subconsciously it must of helped a lot, yet being on set, day one, it all counted for nothing.  It was just “wow, I really hope we don’t fuck this up.”

So what were the main challenges in getting it off the ground?  What was the biggest obstacle you found, that once you overcame it, it was all downhill from there?

I think like anyone, writing is just such a… who would want to write anything?  It’s so painful and so horrible, and you’ve really got to have a thick skin and be passionate enough to listen to the naysayers, and take on board what they have to say, but also stick to your guns.  The early drafts of These Final Hours, I would say I didn’t get the encouragement from the people employed to tell you what’s wrong with the script and say maybe you could try this, this and this.    It really was hammered and I really felt like “Oh my god, maybe there is nothing here.  Maybe I’ve got it wrong again.  Maybe it’s back to the drawing board.”  And I really could have given it all away at a certain point, but then when we got into Springboard, a completely different set of eyes and a different set of people read the same exact material and said “hang on, there’s something really good here, it’s not right yet, but stick with this.”  For me it was about that encouragement and deep down knowing that I thought that there was something there with the script.  But then having the right people who could teach me the right set of skills to fix my own script, that was a real game changer.  I would say that the Springboard process and Jonathan Rawlonson and Simon Van de Board, they really smacked the script upside the head, but in the best possible way.  I learned so much through that workshop about something I’d been doing a lot, writing but looking at it in a new way.

What sort of ways were that?  Can you go into a bit more detail about what they were focusing on?

The thing is it was nothing new. I’d read a couple of the screenwriting books, but at the end of the day, I really just write on instinct and then try and fix it after the vomit draft stage, and they really came in with a really simple formula, of breaking your film down into eight short films, eight sequences and making sure everyone of those sequences needs an active question from your main character; Will James leave his girlfriend?, will James go to the party?, will James help the little girl?  And I realised these things were subconsciously in the script, I just had to really make them clearer, to make the audience sit there, understanding that there’s always gonna be that very active question - there is something on the screen happening and that is the immersive part of it.  They’re really rooting for this guy and from one of those eight shorts to the next, that make up the entire film.  It might not work for everyone’s script but for our particular story the process actually really did line up nicely.  They just really simplified the craft of trying to write a screenplay.

So what was your relationship like with your producer, Liz Kearney, in terms of how that evolved over time and then even to the financiers?  How were you able to carry the conviction that you had something great and you could get all the funding you required to make it happen?

The good thing about Liz is that we were friends before we worked together as a director/producer, so I really kind of trusted her when we decided to start working together this way.  We’d worked together on other things, other scripts we were getting developed and falling apart.  But this one was good, because we’d been through all of that together, we’d been through these development workshops, and we’d thought we had something and we didn’t.  So we’d been from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows.  With this one, when it really stuck and was starting to take better shape, you know, it really galvanised us, and we thought “you know what?  Finally, we might actually have something here worth telling!” and that was exciting, because we had done the hard yards together the years previous, it was great.  We’d come through the ranks together and yeah, finding a good producer is so hard.  It isn't the easiest thing in the world to find and having someone you can trust is such an important part of it.  And having someone that can tell you when they think something's shit, and why, is also so important.  Us making our first film 'for realizes' with a proper budget and everything, we definitely learned so much through making this movie and I really couldn't have done it without her.

And what were the hardest things in terms of the actual production itself?  As a director, what was challenging you the most when you got on set?

Just the day to day battle.  We only had 25 days and trying to pull of a convincing end of the world, look and feel, and it was making sure that everyone was on the same page.  We just didn't have time to fuck around.  We didn't have time to not be a strong unit, working towards the same goal.  Luckily we just had them.  We just managed to put together an amazing cast and crew.  Just looking at the cast, using the little girl and Gary from the short in the feature again was like a great dress rehearsal, and to meet her on that short and go "Oh my god, this is a child prodigy, how could we not cast her in the feature?".  Then getting Nathan Phillips, we cast it all around Australia and we never expected it to be him playing James, but his audition absolutely blew me away.  Again, when people absolutely demand that you cast them by just showing you what they can do, who are you to say no?  He absolutely got the character.  It was a perfect match.  Having the two together to bouncy off each other, you never know how it's going to go; child actor and your leading man, but he was  so encouraging of her and they just bonded so well.  He's just got such a big heart, especially with kids.  If we had an arsehole playing the lead with all these things he's gotta do with this little girl, someone who didn't have that compassion or that ability to just be there for her, it could have backfired horribly.  But the two of them got on like a house on fire and it's one of those situations where you can't imagine anyone else playing those characters, and then you back it up with all the supporting actors who appear in the film.  I still look back and think "How the hell did we get such an awesome cast?"  Everyone blew me away and were so much more experienced than me.  To have Dan Henshall, Sarah Snook, Catherine Beck, Jess de Gouw and Lynette Curran, was amazing to have that cast.

In getting your words on their feet, was there a big rehearsal period leading up to the film?  How did that evolve, and how did you work with them?

There wasn't really too much time.  I had a couple of days with Nathan getting to meet Angourie for the first time, and we'd go out to lunch, then back to the office and we'd run through a few scenes, just basic line reading, just talking about the scene and whatnot.  We did a little bit of rehearsal, but I didn't want to overcook anything for Nathan's sake.  If anything, he's so organic as an actor, I'd rather keep him fresh, as would he.  With Angourie, we would have had to do a lot of that, if she wasn't such a mature soul.  She was just ready to go.  I didn't really overcook the rehearsal period. With the other actors and their schedules, just flying in and out, we tried to get as much rehearsal time in with them as possible, but again,  they were so experienced, it was just a matter of mores talking about the scenes and characters, rather than having to workshop them too much.

In terms of visual style and collaborating with your Cinematographer [Bonnie Elliot], was it a very hands on relationship, or were you very focused on performance and her on the image?  Or was it a constant conversation?

That's where someone like Bonnie Elliot absolutely took the bull by the horns with this movie.  She has such an amazing eye, much more than I have.  I had to get schooled on what a colour palate even was!  I'd never thought about a colour palate!  But with Transmission and These Final Hours, it was like me going back to film school with Bonnie Elliot.  She totally showed me things about cinema and visual style and visual language.  I was like "Oh my god, that's something I'm going to keep forever thank you very much!"  So I guess I am more of a performance focused director.  I've got the shot in my head, but I just love the moment when you talk it through with your cinematographer and your shot becomes an even better shot, or it becomes a completely different shot.  Or their shot is so much better than anything you thought for that scene.  It's just those discussions where its such a collaborative process, especially with your cinematographer, it's just so much fun just getting our hands dirty and thinking through, from scene to scene, what is the best way to cover this?  We had a rising colour palate that constantly changed, from gold to orange to red as it got hotter and hotter throughout the film, so that was great for this film, to always be very clear on what the colour palate needed to be.  Bonnie's just such a talented DP, she just brought so much to this film.  

I suppose your other main collaborator was your editor.  What was that process like?  How long did it take you, what were you struggling with and how did you work through them, identifying the problems of the film and making them better?

Again, Nick Meyers is a genius.  He was doing things to scenes which I didn't think were possible. To walk in and go "Wow, we can actually do that?", "How did you cheat that?", "How did you cut around that problem?"  Again this was me getting schooled with someone who was so experienced but so passionate about the film and even wanting to do the film in the first place was amazing, he's a big sci-fi fan and he really wanted to have a crack at it.  We were able to shoot pickups as well, which we absolutely needed during the editing process and again it was great working with Nick, and in a different way where I wasn't even in the edit suite all the time, I'd just let him do his thing, come in and it'd be amazing, and we'd talk about two or three things that I was questioning, or maybe thought wasn't working.  It was just such an easy way to work, but just handing the keys over to someone, to a maestro who is just that experienced, that was just amazing and very liberating.  

We've been hearing, the film hasn't been widely released yet, outside of its premiere at MIFF, but what has been the industry feedback in response to it so far and how have they responded to you as a  director?

Yeah, we premiered at MIFF, in July 2013 and  that was just a great time.  To have picked up The Age's Critics Award for Best Australian Film, that was some stiff competition!  We went to the awards ceremony thinking "Ok, this is going to be a great night, we'll have some drinks and have some fun" but then we actually won the award and it was very surreal.  We were up against The Turning, The Rocket and the list goes on and on, there were so many amazing Australian films there.  So Liz and I were gobsmacked to say the least and from there, it’s since screened in competition in Adelaide, which was also a great response to the film.  We screened down in Busselton at Cinefest Oz and so far with our domestic screenings we’ve had a great response.  It really couldn't have gone better.

Kingston (Anderson) mentioned you’ve been approached by Hollywood, is that correct? 

[Laughs] I wouldn’t say ‘approached by Hollywood’ but I went to LA before the end of the year and haver since picked up an American agent and manager, and am reading a whole bunch of scripts and writing my own scripts, thinking carefully about the next project.  

And so how did that process eventuate?  You get your first feature under your belt and you head over there, what is that like?

It was amazing.  I’ve been to LA a few times before but never for this amount of meetings.  This manager of mine, he organised meetings with producers and agents and sometimes I’d have three a day driving around town and navigating crazy LA traffic, going from one to the other.  It was insane and full on, but I met some amazing producers.  It was just great being able to start that process, which I’d never really experienced before, and I just hope that now it’s gonna lead to something good.

What sort of projects are they offering you?  There’s the old adage, that they expect you to make the film you just did.  Is that what’s happening in this case or are you looking to expand and challenge yourself in a different narrative style or genre?

I just want to tell good and interesting stories.  I am reading a lot of elevated genre screenplays.  I literally have a pile I’m working through.  So I guess that’s the niche brand that I’m being labelled with after the film, but I would work in any genera as long as it was an amazing story.  Nothing can trump an amazing idea or amazing story.  That much is clear to me now.

So what advice would you give to budding filmmakers who’ve made a couple of shorts and looking to make the next step?  Are development projects the way to go?

I think development is absolutely the way to go, because you can’t keep these things insular.  You can’t do it all yourself.  And if you want the money, you have to do the development.  I think it’s important to listen to enough people when they’re saying this isn’t right, or maybe you should change this or this, and if all that starts lining up, maybe they’re right.  But at the same time, that happened on quite a few of my projects, and in hindsight they absolutely were right.  Until that led me to the one that I did with These Final Hours.  Knowing that there was that thing the others were missing, which was that central core idea that would withstand anything because it was such and interesting premise.  You’ve gotta have a thick skin, but you’ve gotta listen.  But you’ve also got to know when you’re right.  Hopefully other people will also think that you are.

So what’s next?  Can you speak a little about this transmedia project and what that’s leading towards?

So that’s just a really cool way to help promote the film, but to give fans of the film - hopefully people who will go and see the film their own experience of the last day on Earth.  It’s all about that user experience right now with what we’re doing.  It’s going to be a really cool idea and I’m not a gamer, not the person who would have ever thought of this as an idea, but now that we’re here, I think it’s gonna be something really innovative.  I don’t know if an Australian feature has ever done anything as elaborate or ambitious as what we’re trying to pull off with it, so we’ll see how it goes.  We’re really excited about it, because it’s further exploring the story world that you see in such a small microcosm in the film, of the last 12 hours through one characters eyes in Perth, but this is fleshing it out to a worldwide story.

It sounds great and I hope it does really well.  Thanks for speaking to us and we wish you all the best with the film.

Thanks for having me.

Watch Zak's short film Transmission below.

Can you tell us how you got to make your first feature film?

It evolved from a short film that I made a few years ago.  I was making a short about the lives of two war survivors from the war in Singapore in 1942 and as a part of making that film I ended up interviewing a lot of war survivors and POWs, and it sort of sucked me into this world of individuals sent off to foreign, hostile lands where they had no idea what was gonna happen.  What I found in all these stories they told me, was a common through line of young people feeling vulnerable and not knowing wether they were going to survive.  I felt that was something quite universal.  Most of us have never been to war, yet we could possibly tap into the sense of fear, unknown and the vulnerability that these young people were experiencing.  For me a lot of war films are the big events, the big spectacles but their stories were all about the intimate; the personal; the universal.  And that was something that really attracted me as a screenwriter to this story.  

And so how did you meet these veterans?  What was the experience of actually getting in touch with them like?

It just sort of evolved.  I randomly met Bill Flowers who was an ex-POW from Singapore, which then evolved into me speaking to more of his friends and then at the time I was friends with Bud Tingwell, who was a pilot in Europe during the Second World War and he introduced me to some of his friends, “you should speak to these guys, they’ve got great stories”.  A lot of these people have stories about either being shot down and isolated by themselves in a foreign land, or as soldiers off in journeys where they were by themselves or with one other friend.  There was such a connection between all these stories - the more I heard, the more connections there were between their experiences on a very intimate, individual level.  

The film is somewhat impressionistic.  How did you feel the audience would respond to its particular style?  It is rather mute - not a traditional film in that sense - it works great as a film, but I wonder what you were intending from that choice.

I guess I didn’t really think of it as a film without dialogue when I first started writing or making the  film.  It just felt very natural, given the stories I heard, they were about people, individuals in a world where they wouldn’t be talking to somebody.  There wouldn’t be a lot of dialogue; it’d be down to a lot of body language or different forms of communication with the world they were in, or maybe the other person they were with.  It felt very organic and when I wrote the script  it evolved out of how those stories felt to me - I wanted the world to be a character as well.  I wanted the jungle to be not just a backdrop, but a character that has a voice, through the sounds around us; as day turns into night, how the sounds shift or how sounds that are foreign to us at night sound quite imposing and threatening.  They play with the minds of the character in that situation.  And if you add the sounds of war to that, it’s an extra dimension of the unknown.  Is it a threatening sound that could cause my death, or is it just the jungle playing with my mind.  I really wanted to explore the world as a character with a voice, rather than consciously thinking of not having dialogue.  

Speaking of sound, this was the first Australian film to use the Dolby Atmos mix.  Why did you go for that particular format?  What did it offer?

We spent a lot of time in our sound design, about seven months, we recorded a lot of sounds in Singapore and brought them back and manipulated them to add to the voice of the jungle.  We’d already created such a rich soundscape but the opportunity to do the Dolby Atmos mix came up when we were approached by Dolby, because they’d heard about our film and felt it’d be a good starting point for launching Atmos in Australia.  Because the film relies very little on dialogue, it allows us to play with the world and give it a voice; similarly giving it depth and layers.  The Dolby Atmos has so many tracks and opportunities to play with placement of sound that we can separate a lot of these sounds, be it the war, the jungle, the humans moving through the space, that it gives us the chance to make it really dynamic and something quite, not necessarily unique, but quite special.  I think our desire to make it a rich sound piece, plus Dolby’s interest in our film as something that would really showcase the technology, those things really came together and that’s how we came to be doing the mix.  We had a lot of support from Soundfirm, in putting this all together over the last few weeks.

Was there something specific to it, something you were really drawn to?  It felt like there were sounds moving over the top of you throughout the film, but was there a particular thing that took your fancy?

I think in general, there’s a lot more speakers in roof and subwoofers in the back and there’s more speakers in the front sides, so if a sound is moving from the front, beside you and around the back, it’s a lot smoother.  For example, there’s a scene where we’ve got our Australian soldier burrowed into the undergrowth, and then there’s soldiers moving around him, it’s a tense moment where we hope he doesn’t get discovered.  I guess the new technology allows us to pan that sound and spread it around the sides and the back a lot more seamlessly than would have been achievable.  It just makes it a lot more immersive for me as director in placing the audience in the space with out character.  At the same time you can have sounds moving overhead, dropping from the roof to the floor - so if you’re in a jungle and you’re hearing a log fall, that might be catching the attention of the solider, you can achieve that a lot more realistically in the space of the cinema than you could have previously.

Speaking of that immersive quality, there was definitely something about your long, steadicam shots and using that to establish the geography that was otherwise difficult, because it was a shot of dense jungle, but because you had the camera moving in depth through the space, something translated and it almost felt like a stereoscopic shot.  How did that come about?  It feels like a very deliberate choice.

I think that when we first approached the jungle, we didn't want it to feel like an amorphous space - we wanted it to feel like a house with rooms, and as you move from one to the next you're experiencing different textures and sounds.  So to do that we carefully chose each location in Singapore to feel different from the next.  As our character moves through it, as day turns to night, the experience becomes different. It raises the levels of tension so he feels like he’s being manipulated as he moves through the jungle.  The way we captured that, we used a lot of steadicam, but also a few tricks with flipping shots and changing the perspective so it feels a little more disorientating than it would otherwise, from more traditional angles.  We wanted it to feel like the audience is there with our human characters.  In juxtaposing that with now we’re with the jungle and the canopy, then back to humans.  To make it a little more hypnotic but also at times consciously reminding people this isn’t a safe haven - you rip them out of that and make them aware that there’s more to fear in the jungle than first thought.

In terms of the jungle, the film was very obviously shot on location in Singapore, how did that come about, and as a director, how was the logistics of actually getting over there and assembling a crew over there?

I’d worked in Singapore for a bit before we shot the feature, with Singaporean crew, so it was a natural choice to work them.  The film itself symbolically connects Australia and Singapore and our shared history that predates WWII, and really climaxed during the war.  I wanted to explore that sense of connection throughout the filming, so we had probably a quarter of the crew Australian, the rest Singaporean and at some point there were about four or five different languages being spoken on set, which was quite an interesting mix of people.  It was a really great collaborative project.  As far as locations go, I’d scouted the locations for three or four years.  We’d gone through all the natural spaces in Singapore and Malaysia to try and find the right feel.  We settled on Singapore because apart from the locations being close to each other, there is a lot of Chinese graves scattered throughout the jungle and those graves themselves have a strong presence in the story.  There’s a strong spiritual side of the story that we wanted to explore; again this is not just a backdrop of jungle, it is a character with a voice that affects the mood of our characters through the space.  The inclusion of the Chinese graves lends something a little more spiritual and mysterious to this world, something that maybe the Chinese character of the film is conscious of, or has a respect for but the Australian character doesn’t appreciate or even realise until the film moves on and he subconsciously becomes aware that there’s something else at play; some other presence other than the literal humans moving through it, or the war beyond what he can see.  Something otherworldly perhaps.  For me that’s really intriguing because I wanted the overall experience to feel like the individual is immersed in this foreign world, but almost from the beginning, he pierces the world as a pilot who crashes through the canopy.  From that moment, it’s almost as if he’s reborn and has to learn the skills to survive.  Everything he does is almost instinctive and he has to learn how to survive in this new world.

Following up on the idea of scouting a jungle, does it change a lot over time?  I imagine over months, years and even seasons as you go there it’s going to be vastly different.  Did you find that to be a challenge?

A little bit.  There are some areas where people manicure the jungle and we had to ask them not to, because we want it to feel overgrown.  The Chinese graves have been there since the late 1800s, so we wanted it to feel like this was an area that had human interaction with it - it wasn’t totally a wilderness, but at the same time we didn’t want it to feel like manicured Singapore.  Despite what people think there’s still a lot of natural wilderness to Singapore and we really wanted to capture the scale of that in the film and make it feel like we are in Singapore.  It was a conscious choice to shoot there because we wanted to be in that world and utilise the quality of light that exists there.  It’s very different to Australia.  The foliage is different, the sounds are different.  If you’re from Singapore, you going to hear the sounds in the film are from there.  They’re not general jungle sounds.  So as much as we could, we wanted to feel like we are in that space where these soldiers and servicemen were placed during the Second World War.

In terms of directing through a language barrier, how did you find that process?  What was that like and how did you work around it?

So one of my key cast members is from Taiwan, his name is Tzu-yi Mo and he speaks English not terribly well and my Mandarin is pretty bad.  We’d fumble through talking in both English and Mandarin but ultimately what we found was that we developed a short hand, a non-verbal form of communication, which is interesting for me because you adapt and you learn new things as a director.  You find what is the most efficient way to communicate what you want in a scene.  We found that once we got into filming we were communicating through gesture and he could read my wants.  That was quite enlightening for me.  Also it mirrors the connection between the two human characters in the film in the sense that they can’t really communicate for fear of alerting the enemy around them to their presence.  So their connection and communication would be non verbal, which again is something that happened on set which relates to the story.

Can you go into a bit more detail on that?  I’m really interested in how you direct through gesture, what sort of gestures are you describing?

Not so much physical direction, but moreso my body language.  If I’m energetic and manic when I’m directing a scene, it would translate into what I wanted the performance to be and if I was really steady and calm, and maybe I’m gesturing something or I’m stopping to think about something, I thinkTzu-yi Mo would respond with something that was equally as meditative or calm.  He’s very instinctive as an actor and his style is very different to Khan.  I think he was able to respond to how I was around him.  We’d have moments where we’d stop and we wouldn’t say much.  We’d just be around each other, thinking.  We’d walk around the spaces, seeing where we’re gonna film and when we’d come back, he’d nod and jump in the scene and it’d be what we created by just being in that space.  It’s something that really evolved from being and living in that space; being in the jungle for weeks.  Also responding to the sounds we were hearing, what the jungle was saying to us.

So did that follow through to Khan? What was his experience, I imagine he wasn’t in quite the same situation, but did that change his performance or needs from you as a director?

A little bit.  I think it was interesting because Khan and I were obviously speaking in English, and  we did a lot of rehearsal where we were talking, but there were time when I’d put him in the jungle, just so he could be alone and not have to talk to absorb the space without people being in his ear.  What I found interesting about how I worked with Mo, he would adjust his way of responding.  He would adjust his way of coming to that way and I think Mo did the same.  I think that was also because I kept them separated during rehearsals, I let them explore the jungle separately, but I brought them together when we started filming, almost like as their characters meet in the film and have to learn to work together, so do these two actors, who have to adapt their acting styles to work in the scene.  They were constantly evolving, because we filmed mostly in sequence, over the course of the film, so that by the end, it feels like they’ve got a nice shorthand going on. It’s symptomatic of filming in that space.  We let the world as a character inform how the actors work with the space and together.

Does that looser directing style present a lot of challenges in the editing process?  I feel like your continuity person may have found that approach quite a challenge.  How did that translate further down the line? 

I think you’d say it’s a creative challenge for my editor Cindy.  I guess when we started editing we approached it as something a bit more poetic.  We didn't approach it as a linear narrative and we had certain beats, emotions and themes we wanted to convey.  But we let scenes speak to us, we let them play long as opposed to cutting them short.  We wanted it to feel organic as these characters move through the jungle, how does their journey evolve as they move through the space?  It isn’t just two guys moving through a jungle, as the film moves on its them changing as people as a consequence of being in the space.  So I think our editing was a little more unconventional but it was a lot more creative in terms of  Cindy and I finding what each scene was telling us.  What each landscape was telling us.  Was it different to the scene before?  Does it look quite different?  Does it need to?  That sort of thing.

How did you get this  off the ground with your producers, in terms of financiers?  I imagine it was something of a difficult sell in some regards.  Not that it’s entirely your area of focus, but it seems like a fascinating process and one you’d have to fight for in order to align everything.

Yeah, the interesting thing about the film is that it began as something much larger.  As a story about legacy and the war experience spilling out over three generations.  As we developed and started filming, we realised it was a story that could be spread across a few films, so what we’ve come up with is, if you think of Canopy as a film about the experience of an individual at war, the birthplace of trauma.  The second film which will be my next, will be about the effect of that trauma on the family when our soldier returns home.  Upon the next generation after that.  The idea being that when people return from war, it doesn’t end there, it continues in some form and in the generations that follow.  I think it evolved organically because we had time to refine the script and then find money, which is a bit of an unconventional approach to the story.  We ended up funding the film piecemeal.  We had a bit of money, did some filming, we stopped.  We got a bit more money, did some more filming, stopped, got more money and completed post production and so on.  That became a protracted experience over several years.  Because we were using private funding, it allowed us to more organically come up with how the film would look and feel, and allowed us to split it up into these two films. 

What influence did splitting it up have on the production itself?  It’s a very continuous film set over a condensed period of time, how did you keep the consistency when you were splitting it up so much?

I think there were distinct chapters.  There was the experience of war, and there was the return home.  As we were filming the Singapore chapter, it became clear that we needed to obviously retract the scenes and the action in the jungle to make it feel like a more immersive experience, but it was like you say, over one night, but to make it feel very immersive and claustrophobic, so that when you are released from this world, you can breathe.  It feels very different from what we take people into in the next film which will be Australians in a small country town, with a story told over several months.  It’s a different pace from where we’ve come from withCanopy.  It’s almost like Canopy, for people who’ve been to war might think back on as a memory fragment, or collections of memories. It’s not one clear memory, but something they might return to repeatedly.  That will stay with them as an experience.  So I wanted it to feel all encompassing over the period of one night; it was relentless as a film and as a memory in their minds.

Has their been much industry follow up to the film?  You had a great reception overseas, but what’s been the follow up from the industry more broadly?

We’re yet to have our Australian premiere, that will happen at the Gold Coast Film Festival on the 12th of April, then our Australian cinema release after that.  But from my peers and fellow filmmakers, I’ve shown it to a few of my close friends, who are filmmakers, and their feedback really helped during post production in refining the film.  But I think everybody’s been really good at providing feedback on the films own terms.  Not as “it should be structured like this”,  but assessing it on its own terms, which I think is really bold and  really interesting from my point of view, because we’re a bunch of filmmakers who make different films.  We don’t all make the same pieces of work and for my money we should be supported to make a diverse range of films.  We are a collection of individuals, as filmmakers, who make different things and different inspirations.  For me it’s really rewarding to have peers who are able to engage with what I do and provide feedback on that work, not what they would see done.  That’s really exciting because it sets the tone for a really vibrant community.

What advice would you give to filmmakers who follow your kind of path?

I guess there’s really no rules.  You can go down the line of seeking government finance but ultimately whatever you choose to do and if you believe in it, that you’re pushing ahead into preproduction on a feature, is that you don’t give up, don’t stop.  You keep going.  There’s always going to be people who say you can’t do something or you shouldn't do it. That’s fine, but if you believe in it enough to want to push ahead and make your film, then the only thing I would say is don’t stop.  Don’t give up.  It’s going to be tough because you’ve got to come back to the question “Do you believe in this enough to keep going?”.  If the answer is yes then don’t stop.  There’s risk attached with everything but if you believe in something enough then you’ve got to see it through to execute it properly, despite what people say.  You’ll also find that people will come on board who will support you if you do believe in what you’re doing, which is ultimately affirming for you and your creative vision.

You had a list of crowd funders in the credits, people who assisted with funds in that method.  As a story teller what impact did that have?  You often have to reveal a bunch of the production to entice people to donate.  How did that assist or hinder you as a director?

It’s interesting launching a crowd funding campaign because typically with films, and typically doesn’t make sense anymore, because the world’s constantly evolving, but you wouldn’t release part of your film before you’re finished.  You wouldn’t put part of a trailer out before you’re finished.  It’s just a very odd thing to do.  But with crowd funding we had to create a trailer from an unfinished film, that hadn’t been sound mixed, with incomplete visual effects and show it to the world, and hopefully attract people who might be interested in helping us finish.  The advantage is that it forces you to really think and make strong decisions about what is it that you really want to put out there and tell people.  You distill what the film’s about and focus on the key things that you think are important for an audience to know in an instant.  That’s what we did and we backed up our campaign launch with a strong Facebook presence which we’d already nurtured.  I think that’s important to have a strong following before you launch, so that when you launch you’re not finding people, well you are, but you’re using an existing base to try and reach new people, from a base who are helping promote what you do.  In our case we raised enough funds to complete the film.  One of the added benefits, apart from raising extra finance for the film was that you reach a whole new bunch of people who will come on board to ultimately promote the film in the future, and hopefully fans of what you’re trying to do. They get to come on that journey with you and become a part of your team, and you keep them updated and I think it’s a very interesting thing, because before we were finished we were already interacting with the greater community about what we were trying to achieve.  That’s very heartening for a filmmaker, because you get to see straight away a response to something you haven't even finished creating yet.

What was the hardest thing in this process and what would you take away as a director for future projects?

On a personal level, the benefits of not giving up, that despite what people say, you just keep pushing it.  On each film you’ll do things differently.  You’ll approach them differently, but you learn a lot.  As long as you’re open to learning from what you do, and always surrounding yourself with people who are damn good at what they do and most likely much better at that they do than you are at what you do, it helps you grow and develop your creative vision, so that next time you don’t necessarily do things better, but that you come from a more informed place.  That’s the goal for me.  I think as a director you become more aware of why you make films when you complete a feature.  For me I think that because I’m such hyperactive person, everything in the world is happening so fast, I realised that I make films the way I do because they’re sort of meditative.  For me they allow me to stop and be a bit calmer and analyse the way I actually look at the world, and allow me to maybe make a more distilled approach to the way I look at the little things that happen around me.  They’re the sort of things that I end up building films about. 

Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.

- Voltaire