Tagline: There are some things in life you can’t control.
Why does a 19-year-old girl plot to kill her own father? Katrina Skinner is stuck in suburbia with her toddler daughter and her devoted dad. Her brother Danny is in jail for life for murder. Her mother abandoned her years ago. The neighbours are scared of her. The police can’t keep up with her. Nobody can control her but everybody’s trying. Her dad won’t mind his own business…
Katrina misses her brother. She needs money for his appeal. She’s bored and she’s sick of living at home. She’s not going to work a day in her life and she knows her dad wants to stop helping her financially. She’s first in line for the family inheritance. All she needs to do now is convince one of her lovers to do the deed and she’s never had much trouble getting men to do what she wants. All for the love of her brother.
The film opens with the funeral of John Skinner, inside the Golden Grove Crematorium. Kat sits on the front pew between her cheeky fiancé Rusty and her toddler daughter Bailee. Her mobile phone interrupts the service when she receives a text message. Her family glares at her as she reads it… WANNA FUCK? She giggles, and suddenly we are thrust into Katrina’s world: youth culture, crime, sex and suburban mayhem.
The story is told from many perspectives: a kaleidoscope of flashbacks and testimonies fuelled by small town gossip, the police, friends and family, her fiancé and her many lovers. It seems everybody has a “story” to tell about Katrina Skinner. Their stories don’t add up, but they all take us to the same place…
After hearing the screams of her father in the next room Kat knew it was over. Finally! No-one would believe that she could do it, and now that it was done she couldn’t believe how easy it was… She closed the door to John’s room, put a Mr Squiggle video on for her little daughter then joined the killer in the kitchen for a glass of milk and a cigarette.
A girl without conscience, a world without morals. A family destroyed and a daughter getting away with murder. “I knew the grandmother, she was mad – I knew the mother, she was madder. It’s genetics I reckon, that’s the only thing I can come up with. You can’t get clean water from a dirty tank.”
Director’s Statement
One day, just a few years ago, a very close friend of mine, Alice Bell, unexpectedly asked me to read her film script.
I remember taking it home. I had no idea what it was about.
I remember reading and re-reading the first couple of pages, getting my bearings. And then suddenly I was launched on this crazy, scary roller-coaster ride. Humorous and harrowing by turns, Katrina jumped off the page like a wild animal. I found her seductive and terrifying. The storytelling was compelling, the script boldly visual, the dialogue fresh and authentic – wickedly funny, raw and brutal.
Katrina seemed unique, the script was already well developed: original, iconoclastic and uncompromising.
For a few hours afterwards my head was spinning. I could see it and hear it. I wanted to make this film.
I loved this strong, transgressive female character who tears up the rule book, trashing the suburban streets of my childhood (our great Australian heartland), trashing all those phoney, sentimental, oppressive family values everyone is trying to peddle us.
In a world where so many things have stopped making sense, here was a character who takes control and then pushes everything and everyone to the limit.
She’s manipulative, predatory and volatile. Katrina’s a bully with a monstrous sense of entitlement – she feels she’s entitled to everything she desires. The perfect poster-girl for these raunchy, reactionary, mean times of ours – for our psychopathic society. She’s a lawless child-woman taking revenge on the world that created her.
Katrina breaks all the rules and reminds us just how tenuous and fragile those rules governing society and “civilised” behaviour really are. She reminds us that chaos and anarchy, murder and mayhem really do lurk just below the surface.
Katrina unleashes her furies upon the world, even those she loves. A vortex of anger and vengeance, an emotional terrorist. So now you know that I wanted to make a film that was provocative and troubling. And hopefully, beguilingly subversive. Reading Alice’s script had set my imagination reeling. And the next two years spent developing it with her, Leah and Jan were very intense. Then we began casting.
Of course, casting Katrina was the biggest challenge. She is the lynch pin, the film’s core. The film would rely almost entirely upon that performance. It needed to be audacious and raw. Darkly cruel and savagely comic, full of bravado. But never, not once, self-conscious or self-censoring. I wanted to find a young actress that would commit herself to Katrina, love her and inhabit the role, demand to make it her own.
Our actress needed to be able to encompass a Katrina who is sexy and fatally charming: a spoilt young woman gone murderously berserk and an immature child crying out for someone to love her.
An actress with no fear, who would test me. I wanted her to push and dare us all. We didn’t know if she was out there. So we began searching. And after many months, and after torturously re-calling her many times, I asked Emily Barclay to take on Katrina. At the outset we agreed to ground her performance in emotional truthfulness. It would be the basis of everything we did, our commitment to each other and Katrina.
In rehearsals and eventually on set, in front of the camera, Emily’s performance was brazen and enthralling but above all else, always real. `Barkers’ is a complex person herself and her Katrina was dangerous and unstoppable – playfully drawing you in, getting under your skin.
Most importantly Emily humanized Katrina. In the most empathetic way she let us glimpse her vulnerability and pain a couple of times. I am very grateful. This unnervingly playful, violently intense and pleasurable performance often required Emily to reveal and expose herself emotionally. She never once stepped back from that commitment. She would not let Katrina be tamed or intimidated. Whenever I pushed her hard, she kicked back harder and more honestly.
Like Katrina, Emily triumphs most outrageously. We are repelled and attracted at the same time. Her Katrina is more than I had hoped for. These three young women – Alice, Emily and Katrina – have been an inspiration to me. It’s been a wild time thanks to them.
I set out to take some risks, stylistically and emotionally – we all did. There are no cathartic scenes at the end of the film, no redemption for any of the characters. Suburban Mayhem is unsentimental and makes no apologies. We hope we leave you with more questions than answers. At the beginning, I wanted to tease and taunt, flirt and fuck with you. In the end, I hope it will intrigue and affect people, provoke and entertain.
– Paul Goldman, Sydney, Australia, March 2006
About the Production
While every good film begins with a good script, the screenplay for Suburban Mayhem – the work of the precociously talented first-time screenwriter Alice Bell – has evoked the kind of praise that announces the arrival of a major new cinema talent.
Mark Gooder, CEO of Icon Films, the distributor in Australia and New Zealand, said: “Even an experienced script writer would be hard-pressed to match Alice’s screenplay for its sheer entertainment and originality. At the heart of Suburban Mayhem is a central character so remarkable and audacious that she takes your breath away. There’s an energy about this project that continues to excite all of those involved with it.”
Producer Leah Churchill-Brown said: “We have pulled together a superb cast and crew, and our investors have all been enthusiastic collaborators. I believe it’s because our writer, Alice Bell has written such a chillingly authentic and fresh screenplay, that everyone we’ve approached has wanted to join us on the mayhem roller coaster ride.”
Paul Goldman, who began as a script editor on the project but quickly signed up as director, said: “It’s been an exciting film from the day I turned the first page.”
Suburban Mayhem stars New Zealand’s award winning actress Emily Barclay (last seen in the critically acclaimed film In My Father’s Den) as a wild, conniving and dangerously compelling single mother. Michael Dorman (from the hit television series The Secret Life Of Us) is her besotted boyfriend. Other cast include Anthony Hayes (The Boys), Genevieve Lemon (The Piano), Steve Bastoni, Robert Morgan, Laurence Breuls and newcomer Mia Wasikowska.
Suburban Mayhem is distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Icon Film Distribution. Fortissimo Films is the international sales agent. Investors are the Film Finance Corporation Australia, the New South Wales Film & Television Office and PMP Showtime.
Development
Jan Chapman, whose films as producer include the Academy-Award winning The Piano, Lantana, The Last Days of Chez Nous and Love Serenade, is Executive Producer of Suburban Mayhem. It is only the second film she has executive produced and follows the multi-award winning Somersault.
“I started to want to help less experienced producers to get their films to happen and around that time Leah and Paul came to see me and they told me about the script which I later read on a plane. I was just so involved with the story, and finding it so funny and amusing, that I didn’t want the plane trip to finish,” Jan says.
“I was very enchanted by it, I thought it was a great tale. Then I met Alice and understood where this fresh young voice came from. We did quite a lot of work on the script to make sure that every scene contributed to the ride. It is the kind of film where you can’t have extraneous stuff, you have to be totally engaged. I’ve always thought about our audience being open-mouthed in anticipation of what’s going to happen next!”
The film began with an idea by Leah Churchill-Brown. Leah is renowned as one of Australia’s best producers of commercials and music videos, and earlier in her career was associate producer of the Academy Award nominated documentaries Nicaragua: No Pasaran and Chile: Hasta Cuando, but was keen to branch out into feature films. She was working with a journalist to develop a script about a domestic crime, but the idea didn’t work out. Then she discovered that Alice Bell, who’d worked with her as a production co-ordinator for six years, had started to write her own script.
“I didn’t even know Alice was a writer, other than that she would go on holidays and write hysterical emails. But Alice and I love a tabloid newspaper, we share the same black humour and we both love to read a good crime story. It seemed to us that ever since the days of the Menendez brothers and more recently.
Sef Gonzales in Sydney, there have been a series of terrible crimes in families. That fascinated me because I come from a very happy, normal family,” Leah explains.
“I became obsessed with the idea of nature versus nurture. Does evil exist or does it have to be a crime of passion? Alice started to write ideas down and a year later, with Alice beavering at home at nights and us spending weekends together watching thousands of films, we had a script.”
Early in the process, Leah showed their ideas to her mentor on another project, the well known Australian producer/director Robert Connolly. His use of the word `naughty’ inspired Leah and Alice to continue with a script that treaded a fine line between humour and dark drama and to create one of the most arresting central characters ever in an Australian film, Katrina Skinner.
During the development process, Alice was advised that Katrina needed to have something in her background to excuse her bad behaviour. Alice pushed back, determined to create a surprising and original screenplay:
“The film, and Katrina, are not apologetic. It seems that in `script writing law’ you have to give reasons; i.e. what had Katrina’s father done to her, but I didn’t want this to be like other films, tied up as a neat little package. I wanted audiences to walk away at the end saying `wow she got away with it’, so I purposefully planted lots of story lines and characters that go up against each other, because the best thing that could happen for me as a writer would be for people to be arguing as they left the cinema and asking questions. Was she abused? Who is the father of Bailee? What did happen between Andretti and Katrina? That’s what small town gossip is like. I want audiences to have their own opinions about what really happened in Golden Grove… ,” Alice says.
Production of the film coincided with the assault on New Orleans by Cyclone Katrina; and not for the first time, cast and crew described said of their lead character: “Katrina is a force of nature.”
Alice Bell had a huge collection of newspaper clippings about crimes within families and was clear that she wanted to write a film that explored an awful event within a family – and she wanted the protagonist to get away with it.
“To do that I had to come up with a character who was probably a version of myself if I had taken away all the boundaries you get growing up. I took characteristics from different murderers and I took away all of society’s boundaries and any concerns for consequences, and that’s how I created the idea of Katrina,” Alice says. “Once I had the character, I threw her into the middle of suburbia, I gave her a baby – because it was such a nice contrast to what she was about to do in the film – and then Katrina wrote herself. She’s a character who just doesn’t stop.
“I had always thought of Katrina as a hurricane. It is easy to talk about the terrible things Katrina does, but what I like about her is that she is so exciting. She’s terrifying to watch but she’s also the person you’d rather be with than not `cause otherwise the party is pretty dull. She is alive. She may not be living life the way we all would, but she’s definitely having a better time. She has a lot of wit. She says things that no one else would ever dare to say and that’s why she is so funny.”
Jan Chapman describes Katrina as a girl with a strong sense of her own entitlement. When Katrina is thwarted by her father who finally stops giving her everything that she wants, she enrols everyone around her in her wicked scheme.
“The film is a wild ride, a ride of madness, energy, power, wickedness, but it is mainly about someone who has no boundaries and I think it is exciting for people to watch someone with no boundaries; it’s like that vicarious part of yourself that you’d like to be able to indulge a little bit,” Jan says.
Director Paul Goldman had made two feature films – Australian Rules and The Night We Called it a Day – and was also well known for his work in music videos and television commercials. He’d worked closely with both Leah and Alice for several years when Alice showed him the script at first draft stage.
“I had just finished making a film where I was a gun for hire. I had been asked to direct the film in which I had had no involvement in the development, so I’d just been through that experience and it hadn’t been a happy one for me. Then, in the last bit of post-production I read Suburban Mayhem. Clearly already it was a screenplay with a very strong voice, it had a very, very strong character, and I saw potential for taking it in some directions that would be very interesting to me. I wanted to do a project where I was engaged by the characters and by the principal people around me. I had had a long association with both Alice and Leah and I knew I could trust them and that they were exciting people to be around,” Paul says.
Paul script edited with Alice for a year, bringing his own perspective and ideas to the story: “I think it was understood implicitly by Alice and Leah that I wanted to make the whole tone of the film a lot darker and of course Alice always wanted to guard the integrity of the humour of the film. Any creative conflict over the two and a half years of development came out of my insistence that the film be absolutely anchored in emotional and psychological truth; I guess I like stories that are dark… I like the underbelly.”
“I didn’t want the film to descend into farce. There are lots of black comedic moments in this film, the humour of it is very, very important, but it was always going to be a fine line; I didn’t want it to become Kath & Kim or Sylvania Waters, or too knowingly self-conscious.”
Casting
Casting the role of Katrina was an obvious challenge. It was clear that Suburban Mayhem would sink or swim on that one casting. Paul chose as casting director Anousha Zarkesh with whom he’d worked on his previous two features. They were committed to a long casting process, which is Paul’s preferred modus operandi.
“Anousha knew that I was never going to have any `eureka’ moments. I never sit there and say `wow I’ve found the character’. I tend to tease myself and tease the whole discussion out. We saw a lot of girls and we saw a lot of good actresses. Emily’s name had been floating around ever since we’d seen her in
In My Father’s Den 18 months before we started casting. I always had my doubts and spent a lot of time convincing everyone else that Emily wasn’t the right person, but there was some quality about her which meant that strangely she was always in contention. To Jan Chapman’s credit and to my eternal gratitude Jan insisted that we keep going back to Emily. We got her back from New Zealand for an audition and she just blew us all away. It was so obvious that she was the girl we’d been looking for. She is amazing in the film so it`s strange to think we had doubts about her.”
Alice Bell and Emily Barclay quickly became close friends – in fact, Emily could almost be Alice’s doppelganger – and they spent a lot of time hanging out together on set.
“Emily is perfect to play Katrina. She’s sassy, funny, intelligent and a little bit crazy. She has an intensity that I haven’t seen before. She’s a rare find and her performance brought out so much in the other actors. I think everyone was racing to meet her. Sometimes I had to remind myself during the shoot that she was Emily not Katrina – she really inhabited the role,” Alice says.
Emily Barclay is supported by a superb ensemble cast including another relative newcomer, Michael Dorman, as her devoted boyfriend Rusty.
Producer Leah Churchill Brown says: “We called Michael back for a second audition and got him to do the sex scene. I saw in that moment that not only is he a hunk but your heart just goes out to him as Rusty. He has a softness in his performance which is the perfect antidote to Katrina, you believe in him fully and you can understand why he does what he does. It was critical for the actor to be able to get that balance.”
Rehearsals
Paul Goldman is noted for his perfectionist drive and attention to detail. Part of the process he’s developed over three films is to have actor David Field work with him and the actors throughout an intense rehearsal period. For six to ten hours a day for 13 days they worked together with the actors filling in back stories, creating a social milieu, and using various techniques to, Paul says, “load the actors up”. Rehearsals took place at the pre-production office so the door was open for crew to wander in and participate. The writer Alice Bell was also there.
“David’s a close friend and colleague and we have a very detailed understanding of what we want to achieve in rehearsals, I throw the rehearsal room open to David to do what he likes. David followed the development of this project as his partner Anousha was casting the film, and throughout that period we’d just keep talking about what we wanted to achieve and he’d keep checking with me about where my ideas were going. There’s always a very, very rich dialogue between David and me and the reason I have him there is because he is fearless in the rehearsal room,” Paul says.
“I like our rehearsals to be very `impro’ based and that can definitely become very indulgent, and sometimes even destructive in less capable hands. But David’s just so focused, he’s so demanding, he’s also got a wonderful way of encouraging people. He’s an amazingly generous person and he leaves everyone thinking that anything is possible. His contribution to the three films I’ve made is invaluable.
“It was an exhilarating time for all the cast, but especially for our young actors Emily, Michael and Mia Wasikowska.”
An interesting example of Paul’s technique with actors is his approach to the character of Aunty Dianne, played by Genevieve Lemon, who is essentially the narrator of the story. Her character speaks directly to camera in a series of interviews looking back on the events depicted in the film. Paul was aware of the danger of turning the character into a parody or stereotype.
“I’d given Genevieve a few films to watch, for example, I made her watch a couple of episodes of Sylvania Waters and the documentary Cunnamulla. We spent a lot of time in rehearsals with the interviews. They aspire to be real and to have all the resonance of real time direct to camera interviews. Aunty Dianne has to go to quite a few places emotionally and so I thought the best way to load her up before we started was to ask Robert Morgan, who plays John, Katrina’s father, and who is very, very close to Aunty Dianne, on the last day of his rehearsals – do a video taped birthday message to Aunty Dianne.
“We got in a cake and some candles. This was meant to be a surprise gift that John was going to give Dianne for her birthday… but unfortunately in the meantime he’d been killed. So on the day we were shooting Genevieve’s scenes we played her the tape, which she had no idea about, and I think it was fantastic for her. So they are the kinds of things I like doing in rehearsals and the kind of preparation I like for actors.
“I insist that people get very, very involved and use their imaginations; that goes a long way to really focusing people and myself as well.”
The technique of using interviews and flashbacks was one that Alice, Leah and Paul all had to fight for: “I had admired the technique in To Die For but a lot of people told us that the interviews were just dead time, whereas I think they give a real insight into characters as you get to see their various perspectives,” Alice says.
About the Production
Paul chose as his cinematographer Robert (Bob) Humphreys, production designer Nell Hanson and costumer designer Melinda Doring. The team of Paul, Alice and Leah had a very clear view of how they wanted the film to look. Paul had assembled a remarkable visual reference collection, including images from filmmakers and photographers such as John Cassavetes, Larry Clark, Corinne Day and Nan Goldin. The decision was made to push the film two stops and to use a rich colour palette to give the film a sense of hyper reality.
“Pushing the film has given it such a beautiful look. In my experience as an ad producer, you often show tear sheets of how you want it to look to the client but it never goes that way because the client wants it to look like something else. But Suburban Mayhem has been such a joy creatively. Because of all the pictorial reference that Paul put together for us, we’ve been able to fulfil that vision. It is like designing your own destiny,” Leah says.
It was important to Paul to situate the film in a real place. Newcastle, two and a half hours drive north of Sydney, was chosen for its proximity to Sydney but also because of its suburban streetscapes.
Leah, as producer, was also determined to make the film outside Sydney. “From the very beginning I knew that if we got out of Sydney we would be able to move around a lot quicker. We had many, many locations so I knew being in a busy city just wasn’t going to work and I also wanted to create a hotbed where the team were all on location together. We scouted all around from Adelaide to Wollongong, but the film office in Newcastle here was obviously very persuasive and very helpful and part of our financing package was being able to get finance from the New South Wales Government’s Regional Filming Fund.”
Newcastle offered so much rich material for Suburban Mayhem that Paul says in many ways the film was a thankless task for a production designer and art director: “Nell Hanson was always enormously articulate about ideas and the aspirations for the look of the film and understood that I wanted
“I wanted for this film to be absolutely founded in reality and naturalism, I didn’t want it to be too jokey and self conscious; I wanted it to be very real and very understated. That’s a very difficult assignment for an art director.
“I really want the production design, the art department, the dressing of locations to be very, very truthful and take a really big back seat to the rest of what was going on. To me the story and the characters needed to unfold in the foreground.”
Nell Hanson spent a lot of time travelling with the location manager to potential locations to become steeped in the suburban ethos. “Paul is a very visual director and he had more visual references than anyone else I’ve worked with so there’s no confusion. You get such a sense of what he’s after and the tone of the film. He also involved the actors, which was very interesting too, allowing them to own their space. Emily was particularly involved and Paul wanted it to be right for her,” Nell says.
“The best research was going out to location recces; I was treated to going inside hundreds of suburban houses where I met hundreds of people and I just collected ideas along the way. When I first started I was a bit depressed because I thought every house looked the same, but then you adjust your eye and start to see the subtleties.”
Nell particularly noted houses where young adults, some of them with their own children, were still living at home as does Katrina. “I got a lot of ideas about how someone can still be a child and live at home and how their rooms can be quite childish, but then there are layers on top which are adult. It was exciting building Katrina from little girl to maniacal demon and creating a contrast between her room, which is full of colour and life, and the rest of the house which is basically soulless and empty. Katrina’s the life in that house,” Nell explains.
“Kenny and his sister Janelle’s house has a similar idea; there is a distinct contrast between Kenny’s room and Janelle’s room. It’s a bland, cheap, thin, nastily dressed beige box and then you open the door of Kenny’s room and see his crazy world. He’s holed himself up in his room and that’s his life contained in a 3 x 3 metre space. It is kind of scary and also kind of endearing, like Kenny. You only see it for a second but it’s the one I had the most fun doing.”
Lilya’s house is a picture of perfection. It is a house with a welcome mat at the front but one at which you’re not actually welcome. “It is a slightly dated, conservative house with the Polish element where two precious little girls are kept away from the world. When Katrina rocks up and causes havoc you really feel the father’s tension,” Nell says.
The film ends at a beach house. We’re not in suburbia anymore and the house is the symbol of idyllic living. Melinda Doring, as costume designer, had the exciting brief of creating a wardrobe for Katrina. Paul Goldman says her work was critical in enabling Emily Barclay to so completely transform herself.
“We always understood, and it became more apparent through the rehearsal process, how important costume was going to be for Emily. We had to give her a mask initially to work with and if we got it right then it would give her licence then to inhabit the character. Emily had these big acrylic nails and big, dark hair and enhanced breasts and that look gave her some sense of bravado and just pure enjoyment in the character,” he says.
“Melinda did a wonderful job giving Emily signature short dresses and long boots. We made Emily wear that kind of stuff out on the streets to experience what it was like; she’s a slutty thing sometimes Katrina, and that’s not the way Emily dresses at all; Katrina’s so far away from who Emily is so it was always going to be important to get that right. And visually it’s a lot of fun as well, one of the enjoyable things about the film is that Katrina is so shameless and Emily had enormous fun with it. I think Melinda and Nell both did a great job.”
The cat motif became important in Katrina’s wardrobe and her character’s feline qualities were an inspiration for Melinda: “Katrina is someone very confident in her body so her wardrobe is basically all about her best assets – her boobs and her legs. She’s always strutting her stuff and making a statement with what she wears. She is very feline – the way she prances about, the long nails, so there are a lot of cat motifs and leopard prints throughout her wardrobe… and she has the biggest collection of sexy bras I’ve ever put on an actress!” Melinda says.
Cinematographer Bob Humphreys set out to create a gutsy look for the film, rooted in contemporary reality and complimentary to the raw performances of the cast: “The images were designed to be a bit rough with the gloss taken off. There is still a lot of finesse but it has a direct, muscular quality,” he explains.
“The colours are very saturated and intense, like a vivid version of suburbia. It is real but there is a sense of heightened awareness. The film is also predominantly shot hand held. It is not a rough, `wobble cam’ feel, but the film does have a raw contemporary edge. It is an observational camera style with the saturated richness coming from a combination of lab work and exposure.”
Paul applauds Bob’s work on the film, noting his flexibility and ability to get lots of coverage. “It was going to be very important that we look after Emily. We made the decision to shoot the film hand held so that it would have this immediacy and to shoot the film on very, very long lenses, longer lenses that Bob had ever shot on before. I had said to Emily before we started that she had permission to do anything she liked, she didn’t have to lock herself down. That made it very, very difficult for Bob and his focus puller. Emily had permission to change the way she moved in a scene, the way she blocked a scene, in any take and I think Bob really relished the challenge of it all,” he says.
“I really enjoyed working with Bob, I enjoyed that he’s got a bit of an attitude, that he kept pushing me and I could push him. He worked incredibly fast. I wanted a lot of coverage on this film, I wanted a lot of cutaways. For a film with this momentum I needed to be able to recut and reshape scenes in the edit, so I needed coverage to do that. I think Bob got on board with all these ideas from day one and made an amazing contribution, it was one of the great joys of the film for me.”
One of the significant challenges for the production, perhaps for producer Leah Churchill-Brown most of all, was working with babies. Katrina’s baby Bailee features in many, many scenes in the film. Leah can laugh now, looking back, but also recalls the difficulties: “I was a naïve first time feature film producer and an optimistic one. Prior to shooting I was obsessed with the script and how fabulous the characters all worked together so I was determined to have the baby as much as possible. And then I was in the six week pre production period and the first AD was saying every day `baby scenes, which ones can we lose’, and pointing out that we had babies in night shoots and travelling in cars.
“It was really difficult from a welfare point of view because you can only use babies for such a limited time and because, of course, babies cry when taken away from their mothers. We started out thinking we would get twins or triplets, but our first twins didn’t like to be separated so we ended up using nine different babies throughout the film!”
For all the stresses of producing her first feature film, Leah loved the opportunity to work collaboratively with old colleagues Paul Goldman and Alice Bell on a big project. And she’s immensely proud of the final film.
“I think audiences will love it. It is about rock and roll, sex and fast cars. We’ve got a gorgeous young cast and we’ve created an icon in Katrina. She’s so incredibly funny, sexy and watchable. It is a roller coaster ride and such a naughty, compelling ride to go on.”
Emily Barclay as Katrina
Emily Barclay stamped herself as one of the most exciting young actresses working in contemporary cinema with her extraordinary performance in
Brad McGann’s New Zealand feature In My Father’s Den for which she won the New Zealand Screen Award for Best Acting in 2005 as well as the 2005 British Independent Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Her explosive performance as Katrina in Suburban Mayhem confirms her place as a rising star.
Emily’s previous films, all made in New Zealand, include Terror Peak, No One Can Hear You and Cockle.
Prior to her work on Suburban Mayhem, Emily was cast by Executive Producer Jan Chapman in the television movie The Silence, directed by Cate Shortland (Somersault). She has also appeared in the US television productions Kidnapped and Deceit and in the New Zealand programs Spin Doctors and Mercy Peak.
Interview with Emily Barclay
Describe the character of Katrina.
She’s Hurricane Katrina – she has no boundaries, she breaks all the rules. She reminds us how fragile all those rules are and how easy it is to step outside the boundaries of what we think is morally right.
She is volatile, she pushes everyone, she’s always one-upping people, and she’s also charming and manipulative. If you look at her with middle class morals and values you’d think she’s really wrong and behaves in an incredibly inappropriate way, but in her own head everything she does is justified. She does the wrong things, but for the right reasons.
She is an empowered female character and that’s what I love about her; she’s incredibly powerful and incredibly sexual, she has the ability to emasculate men; in this film all the men are weak and all the women strong and powerful and no-one’s apologetic about it. Katrina is not apologetic about the way she behaves; she has incredible lust for life, she does all this crazy stuff but she has a great time doing it. She’s so exciting, you want to be around her. She’s frightening at the same time because she embodies that dark space deep inside all of us, she’s the thing parents are afraid of their children becoming. She’s so free and it’s great playing a character like that.
Describe Katrina’s relationship with the other characters.
She blames John for everything wrong in her life. It is like she’s created a world for herself; it’s like when you tell a lie a certain number of times and it becomes a truth and you look back on an event and you distort it in your head; that’s how she lives her life. She’s slightly detached from reality. John’s her scapegoat. There’s so much that’s been horrible in her life; her mother abandoned her and her brother Danny for a life of drugs and prostitution; I think that at some subconscious level that’s her excuse for what she does; she’s been abandoned, she’s been really hurt and let down. To her, John’s the reason why her mum left, he’s the reason why Danny is in jail, so she constructs this idea of how she can get Danny out of jail… .not really real to her but it is the perfect solution in her head.
Rusty is just a total martyr to Katrina, even though he knows she’s never going to love him like she loves Danny, but she puts up with Rusty because he does love her so much and he looks after Bailee and he’s always someone to come home to. That’s part of her frustration with Rusty – someone loves you so much but you know that you don’t really deserve all that adoration so you just wish they’d stop being so great!
Kenny is someone that she can manipulate; she can look at someone or a situation and sum it up in a second and she does it with Kenny; he’s easy and she can just use him to her advantage. Lilya is an innocent, and so is Kenny; Katrina isn’t a bully, she defends people like Lilya or Kenny. She is not out to corrupt Lilya but it is exciting for her to watch the transformation of Lilya.
Describe how you developed the character of Katrina.
I never thought I’d get this part, I wanted it so badly but I just didn’t really believe I had it in me to play a character like this. One thing which really freaked me out was the whole sexual element, being so `out there’, and it was something I found difficult and quite embarrassing to begin with. It took me a while to click with the character.
But more and more I really love her and defend her; it took a while to make the connection but when it clicked I realised that I totally understand her at every level. We had a very intense rehearsal period where Katrina developed. Paul (Goldman), Alice (Bell) and David Field (drama coach) encouraged me to just get out there and be her and make it physical and bring Katrina alive. The day it all fell into place was when I realised Katrina was Kat, a cat, the way she moves, the way she looks at people, the way she acts…
I also understood that while she is incredibly strong, there is also a part of her which is lost, a part of her which is just a little girl, and she is desperately searching for something or someone to make her feel okay and all the men around her let her down. Her line: “I want someone to fuck me like a tiger and who cares for me” is very revealing, but all the men around her are pussies. That’s the most tragic thing, everything she does is for her brother Danny but in the end he doesn’t really care about her and that just breaks her heart.
What attracted you to the script?
You don’t often get a really strong female character, even the femme fatale characters end up dying or being punished. I thought it was an incredibly brave script and a riveting story. It’s also hilarious, it made me laugh out loud. Katrina is just an amazing character to play. She has a million different personalities – whether she’s being emotional for real, or whether she’s putting it on, there are many different places you have to go to as an actor which is really challenging, but great.
Describe working with Paul Goldman.
Paul is incredibly supportive and he gave me a lot of creative control. He wanted my input into casting, costume… every single aspect he discussed with me. Paul has great vision, he really cares about the emotional truth of this film and he’s an actors’ director.
What do you think the film is about?
The film is about so many things, there are so many themes you can explore and discuss – truth, who tells the truth, what is true, what is real. It explores moral boundaries – what’s right and what’s wrong and why, and who creates the boundaries and these moral standards we all adhere to and why; and what happens when you cross that line. It looks at suburbia, and what lies beneath these manicured hedges and the masks people wear, what’s happening behind closed doors.
These production notes provided by Icon Film Distribution.
Suburban Mayhem
Starring: Emily Barclay, Michael Dorman, Anthony Hayes, Steve Bastoni, Mia Wasikowska, Genevieve Lemon
Directed by: Paul Goldman
Screenplay by: Alice Bell
Release Date: October 26, 2006
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive strong crude and sexual content including graphic nudity, and language.
Studio: Icon Film Distribution
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