Last Ride: An interview with director Glendyn Ivin
By Rachel Power
Finding the story: childhood and “the cyclic nature of parenthood”
For a director who left documentary school believing drama to be the “dirty end of filmmaking,” Glendyn Ivin is proving himself a formidable storyteller. Ivin, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with his 2003 short film, Cracker Bag, has again put a child at the centre of his film with his debut feature Last Ride.
Ten-year-old Tom Russell stars as Chook alongside master thespian Hugo Weaving, in a story about a father escaping with his son into the South Australian desert following a mysterious crime.
With Chook at the mercy of his father’s unpredictable moods, and the pair’s predicament seeming increasingly hopeless, the tension builds to a devastating climax in which the boy takes things into his own hands.
It was the complex and shifting bonds of the father–son relationship that first spoke to Ivin when he came across the script, written by Mac Gudgeon (Ground Zero, The Delinquents) and based on Denise Young’s award-winning novel, The Last Ride.
“I’m sure if I’d read the script before I was a dad, I would maybe still have had a strong reaction to it, but [being a father] I saw it from different angles,” he says.
“I saw it from Chook’s perspective as a son. But [my son] Ollie was a year and a bit when I first read the script and I think I was beginning to think about what it means to be a father, really, now that he was becoming more of an individual of his own. So the film was really for me that cyclic nature of parenthood – we are who our parents were and they are who their parents were. In a broader sense, for me it was an exploration of ways of making things different from generation to generation.”
Like Ken Loach’s Kes and 1977 AFI Award winner Storm Boy – both of which left an impression on Ivin – Last Ride reveals the story from a child’s perspective, throwing the adult behaviour into sharp relief.
Following the worldwide success of Cracker Bag, about a pivotal moment in the life of a young girl obsessed with collecting fireworks, Ivin didn’t set out to make another ‘childhood film’ he says, but was always interested in exploring the theme on a much larger scale.
“I think Last Ride, even though it has a child at its centre, doesn’t feel necessarily a film about childhood, because it’s very focused on an event,” he says. “But I do really like seeing the world with open eyes, with an innocent outlook, that doesn’t feel corrupted. Not to be naive or anything, but I always think, if you can, let’s look at things the way children do, because they look at things with the widest eyes.”
Ivin says finding the right story, rather than any technical difficulty, is the most challenging aspect of making a film. He could have grabbed the first or second script he was offered following his Cannes success, but waited for one he could “thoroughly fall in love with and remain in love with for many years”.
“From the moment I read the script [for Last Ride], it was something that got under my skin. The hardest thing is actually finding the material that you become interested in when you first read it, but then over the years you form this really deep relationship with, because it takes so long and you’re hit so many times with obstacles.
“I mean, I would hate to get to that point and feel like ‘Oh, man, I can’t believe I’ve actually got to make this crap now.’ Whereas I don’t want to let go of this even now.”
Assembling a cast: “finding a kid I could trust the film with”
Perhaps second to that challenge of unearthing a great story, was finding a cast who could match the talents of leading man Hugo Weaving.
“Finding Tom was a pretty big process. For me, it was more about finding a kid who I felt confident with trusting the film with, as opposed to finding a great actor.
“Tom is a great performer – he can sing and dance and play the guitar, and he’s very comfortable in front of the camera. But we were trusting our whole production on this kid enjoying this next six weeks of production and getting up at 4 o’clock every morning. What a nightmare it’d be if, three days in, the kid goes, ‘Well, I’m over this, can I go home?’”
“But, apart from Tom being a kid who, even if you just see a photograph of him, there’s stuff going on behind the eyes, he came from a fantastic background. Tom’s a very creative but very grounded person because he’s got these very lovely and supportive parents behind him.”
Equally important was the casting of Kev’s ex-girlfriend Maryanne, played by Anita Hegh, who early in the film reluctantly lets the pair in for a feed on the basis that they won’t stay. As someone who loves Chook, she becomes a vital point of light and hope in the film.
“I really wanted to find someone that, even though they’re on screen for eight minutes or something, they’re there all throughout the film,” says Ivin.
“There’s something really fascinating about Anita as an actor and – a little bit like Tom and a little bit like Hugo – even when she’s just [being] still, there’s all this stuff going on, and I guess that’s what I was looking for because there’s not a lot of dialogue in the film.”
Finance and Production: “what the Palme d’Or gives you is five years”
While it is hard to quantify the benefits of winning an award as prestigious as the Palme d’Or – “You always get asked questions like, ‘How much money did you win?’; none of that associated with it, unfortunately” – Ivin agrees with the person who told him what the prize gives you is five years.
“I think what they were saying is that it might have taken you ten years to get a film up, but from the time of the Palme d’Or to the time I was into pre-production was probably four years. So, in reality, I don’t know if it shuffles you up the queue, but it opens the doors a bit quicker.”
Originally due to shoot across three states, the SA Film Corporation convinced Last Ride’s producers to consider the Flinders Ranges. Discovering the drama of that landscape, plus financial incentives from SA Film and the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund (AFFIF), prompted the decision to shoot the whole film there (other finance sources for the film included Screen Australia, Film Victoria and private investment).
Mirroring the film’s road trip, and with a $4 million budget, a team of around 25 cast and crew covered 5000 kilometres in the six-and-a-half weeks of filming. Shot in breathtaking widescreen by cinematographer Grieg Fraser – who has worked with Jane Campion, Scott Hicks and Baz Luhrmann among others – the film makes the most of the beauty and isolation of the South Australian landscape.
The restrained use of music only adds to the sense of unease. Ivin wanted music to be part of the general ambience, “but also the breath or the heartbeat of the film, because I wanted it to feel alive in that sense.”
“I’m obsessed with sound,” Ivin admits. “In some ways, making films is so that I can sit in a sound studio and play and create world sonically as well as visually.
“When you go to these places, particularly desert environments, they’re huge vacuums. It’s like being in space; your breath becomes the loudest thing. So working with the sound guys and even Paul Charlier, the composer, I was like, ‘How quiet can we make this film before it sounds like there’s nothing happening?”
Despite the physical challenges of the shoot, Ivin says making Last Ride was a chance to work not only with people he thinks are the best filmmakers in Australia, but some of his best friends as well.
“In hindsight, I can say I enjoyed every single second of being there. Absolutely tough, but for me as a first-time [feature] filmmaker, I couldn’t have hoped for a better experience.”
Last Ride opens nationally on 2 July. For more information about the film, including production diaries, blogs and stunning photo galleries visit http://lastridemovie.com/
Rachel Power is a Melbourne writer and editor. She is the author of the book The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood (Red Dog Books) in which she interviewed a long list of Australian writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers, including Sarah Watt, Jocelyn Moorhouse and Rachel Griffiths. Rachel also blogs at http://rachel-power.blogspot.com/.