WEST - An interview with Director Dan Krige

West of Sydney are the Blue Mountains. They rise steeply once you cross the Hawkesbury River, and from there you can look back down over the congested suburban sprawl that stretches from Parramatta to Penrith. It is there, now the geographical heartland of Sydney, that writer/director Dan Krige set his new film West. “I grew up in the Blue Mountains and my cousins – a whole truckload of them - lived in Merrylands near Parramatta,” he says. “As a kid, I would wag school and hang out with them.”

The film, about two young men who are friends and cousins, and who indeed ‘hang out’ together for much of the story, has a distinct personal feel to it. There are incidents and details that could only have come from an intimate knowledge of the urban landscape and social rituals of Sydney’s West. Yet Krige is careful to make it clear that it’s not a true story about himself. “It’s personal in the sense that it’s been with me for a very long time,” he explains. “I wrote the first draft when I was sixteen, and it was inspired by my friendship with my cousin. But in the intervening years and the many re-writes, the narrative has changed. The story as a whole isn’t real, it just includes bits and bobs of my life.”

One of the more tragic bits of Krige’s life that found itself co-incidentally reflected in the script was the death of his brother, Michael. “I’d finished the final version of the script in 1994,” says Krige, “and Michael died in 2004. He suffered depression and took his own life. It was like a terminal illness for him.” But it was the nature of his brother’s death that really effected Krige. “He took his life by jumping in front of a train, the way a character does in the film. It was already in the script,” he says.

At the same time, the financing for the film fell through and Krige felt it was never going to get made. “We had all the money, we were casting, and then Michael died and the money fell through. When that happened I thought that it didn’t matter, because I couldn’t make the movie anyway. I thought that life couldn’t get any worse. I went to Thailand for a while.”

After a break overseas, Krige came back and spoke to an old friend and mentor Sue Smith, writer of some of Australia’s best television mini-series, including Bastard Boys and Brides of Christ. “Sue told me not to decide so quickly,” says Krige, “and then she said, ‘if you are going to do it, do it for him’, and I suddenly saw how it was going to work.” After that, Krige found a new strength for the project. “The whole vision of the film, the whole way that it finally came out was suddenly clear to me,” says Krige. “I realised that I could hit people with this story in the same way that I had been hit, with the same energy.”

From that point on it seemed like plain sailing. The film was re-financed and Krige started casting again. He settled on two young men with bright futures to play the lead roles: Kahn Chittenden who is only 22 but has already starred in Club Land and The Caterpillar Wish, and Nathan Phillips who is most widely known for his work in Wolf Creek and Snakes on a Plane. Alongside them, is Gillian Alexy who plays the girl in the dangerous space between these two troubled men. “For me she’s the standout discovery of the film”, says Krige. “ The character is vulnerable and beautiful, and I wanted to find someone who could make us believe that two boys would fall in love with her, yet someone who wasn’t so special that she could escape the place. I had this gut feeling that Gillian was the right person when I first saw her,” says Krige.

To help the actors understand the world they had to create for the film, Krige took them west. “I drove Gillian and Khan out to Penrith and invited a whole bunch of my most feral friends,” says Krige with a wild laugh. “There are women out there who you wouldn’t pick a fight with. They have a different energy. And when we came back,” continues Krige “Gillian said to me she knew how to play the character. She realised that the girls there have a male energy, that they’re like blokes. And from then on she got the role perfectly. This is a girl who stands up to the boys.”

Despite thinking about using the currently popular handheld and grunge style of cinematography, Krige opted to film with a more classical beauty. “Because the story is confronting, I wanted it to be easy to look at, to bring the audience into the world slowly. The Western Suburbs of Sydney has a particular character to it. It’s a place where people do it tough, where the sun seems to be brighter, the nights darker – it’s really the heart and soul of the place we call Sydney. And I wanted to capture this character on film, in particular the places I hung out as a teenager.”