Grant Scicluna’s new feature Downriver tells the chilling story of James, a teenager who serves time for drowning a little boy when he was a child.
Ahead of its release in 2016, Grant chats with us about developing the script, inspiration and bringing Downriver to life on the outskirts of Melbourne.
Was there a particular event or moment in your life when you realised that filmmaking was not just a hobby, but something that you wanted to pursue?
Writing has always been part of my life. As a young child I loved to write stories which developed into plays and screenplays in my teens.
I began to make movies with friends after the film The Nostradamus Kid was shot at my Boy Scout Hall and I was able to observe director Bob Ellis at work. With due respect to Bob, he made a good movie, but he didn’t get up off his chair once. I thought that was a wonderful profession. I studied media and film, not knowing really what I wanted to do until two university lecturers, Gill Leahy and Margot Nash, encouraged me to think about screenwriting as a career. It was only when someone external, who I really respected said, “Hey, stop. You’re good at this” that I begin to wonder whether indeed I may have been good at it.
I grew up in the Blue Mountains, outside of Sydney. I came to Melbourne to study writing at RMIT and I stayed.
What influences the stories you create?
I think in my heart of hearts I always write about my childhood, which means I am writing about isolation. There is a common thread of imprisonment that someone noticed stretching across my work to date. I think that comes from my rural upbringing, longing to get out, get anywhere, get far away from the bush.
How and when did you know that you had a good concept for a film?
The very first stab at the script that became Downriver, I wrote entirely for me. I wanted to see if I could write a feature script. So it was never really written with other people’s opinions in mind. It had a queer bent to it and it was about a dark hero with a dark treatment of a coming of age story. All of these things you get warned against doing for various reasons. However, that first draft caught people’s eye. I was selected for the New Feature Writer’s Lab at Film Victoria back in 2004 and I remember Michael Brindley (my teacher at RMIT who repeatedly failed me on a horror project I was writing) leaning in to me on the first day and whispering, “Your script is fantastic”. That rocked my world.
I am always battling this idea that I’m a fraud. It made me feel like maybe I deserved to be there. It made me feel like maybe my film was worth discussing. It also became clearer to me what kind of material I was good at writing.
You participated in Film Victoria’s New Feature Writer Lab, how much did your project change or evolve over the course of the Lab? How did your thinking about the script development process evolve?
I had a very contentious structure in those first drafts. Some people liked what I was doing, others did not. This debate around structure went on for four drafts. I remember just getting really worn down by these debates. It was a good "worn down” though, it made me interrogate my script. I did the homework. I asked a lot of questions of my work. There are principles I learnt in that lab, beliefs I developed about cinema and writing that I still employ today. I also learnt the art of receiving feedback. Sometimes as a new writer, with the power imbalance stacked against you, you feel the need to incorporate everyone’s thoughts. I began to see that feedback was contradictory at times. So how could I please everyone? So ultimately only I could be the barometer for my script. I came out of the Lab thinking, “there’s a lot of hard work ahead. This is gonna hurt the head, the heart, the wallet, those around me, but I asked myself, is it worth it? And the answer was yeah, I think it is.”
The majority of your film was shot in Warrandyte and the Yarra Bend area – were these filming locations how you imagined it when you were writing the script?
Ultimately in my mind’s eye, I saw the Blue Mountains of my childhood. Parts of the Hawkesbury, but mainly a little river called the Colo, which flowed near my house. I would swim in it with my friends, even though we’d heard all kinds of myths about people drowning it it and murder victims being pulled out of its waters. The landscape of Warrandyte and Yarra Bend looks remarkably similar to where I grew up. Rugged, gnarly, unkempt. Dead trees and other stories poking up above the waters. Melbourne has the most incredible landscape and locations just on the suburban fringe. I can’t for the life of me work out why film crews travel hours away to get the look that you can find in Kew, Abbotsford, Warrandyte. It was a hop and a skip to get to set every day and I was able to sleep in my own bed at night. To me it felt like I was having my cake and eating it too.