Writer/director Charles Williams is one of Australia’s strongest emerging filmmakers. With a Short Film Palme d’Or under his belt for 2018’s All These Creatures the arrival of his debut full length feature has been greatly anticipated. Inside delivers on all the promise shown in the award-winning short. The same permeating sense of confusion and the struggle to reconcile self-identity with the vision of a damaged father figure at a formative age carries over to Inside starring Guy Pearce, Cosmo Jarvis, Vincent Miller, and Tammy McIntosh.
Nadine Whitney had the opportunity to ask Charles some questions about Inside.
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In one of your MIFF screening introductions you said that originally you hadn’t meant to make or write a prison film but it turned out to be the best way to bring the variety of characters together. Can you tell me a little about how your writing process changed?
Charles Williams: It initially began with this scene I wrote back in 2016, which became the scene where Warren (Guy Pearce) meets his son Adrian (Toby Wallace). I wrote that scene, which was the start of a movie, but wasn’t sure where to take it. Then in 2018, there was the this want to extrapolate something of my short film All These Creatures into a feature. With successful short films, there is always the temptation to essentially stretch out the running time as an expedited way of making a feature. However, I’ve never seen that work out very well.
Instead, I wanted to take elements from the short that were still obsessions of mine, both thematic, aesthetic and about also relationships, and reimagine those into something that I’d like to see in a feature film. So, it was really more of a spiritual outgrowth or extrapolation of the short. It’s also the hardest thing I could have done, which tends to be almost a modus operandi with me for some reason…
Inside becomes a metaphor not only for people in the corrections system but for Mel’s struggle to get outside his circle of trauma. Your three main protagonists Mel, Warren, and Shepard each come from a background where mental health, poverty, class, and lack of resources means they were ‘damned’ by the cyclical nature of social disenfranchisement. Mark is (was) functionally illiterate which makes his ‘reading’ of Pentecostal Christianity flawed and highlights his inability to reckon with his guilt.
Can you elaborate on how you wanted to address these issues?
CW: There’s a feeling or determinism to these issues that I’ve always felt kind of haunted by. Both in my personal life, but it’s also in a lot of films that have stayed with me. Can we be better than how we’re moulded? Can we liberate ourselves from the prison we’re born into? And the prison we make for ourselves? If there’s congenital damage of some kind, or if we’ve been disfigured by something, addiction, mental illness... I don’t know, if it all comes to some mix of nature and nurture, we don’t author either, so real responsibility is not as simple to reckon with. Even if accountability is still non-negotiable.
Prison is a place where these themes are explicit, but it’s really what we all live with. And ultimately, even if someone isn’t to blame given their mental state or experiences, does that matter? If someone is causing serious harm, you still probably need to get away from them. I don’t have real answers to this, but it is just very fertile ground for the kinds of films I gravitate to.
And to the point of Mark’s reading of Christianity, I think that’s really true (personally I don’t believe he’s ever read the bible despite what he says, which is why the bible he holds looks like it’s never been opened), however I think his understanding, based on what a prison chaplain has told him as a kid, is valid. I was very religious growing up, I went a little far, even reading gospels that were excluded from the bible, and if I was Mark this is how I would find a spiritual prism to view myself and the world. That’s where he comes in with Jesus being the lamb of God, the ‘escape goat’ in Leviticus and Yom Kippur etc.
The prison itself is named after a biblical reference ‘Gadara’, which references a story in Matthew. It’s very barely there in reference in the final film.
It was said Cosmo Jarvis went full method for his role as Mark Shepard. Have you directed an actor who chose that style of performance before?
CW: I don’t usually use the term ‘method’ -I think of it more as just being ‘immersive’ rather than ‘method’ – just because that such a loaded term and has grown to mean something way outside of Stanislavski, and always was another thing to Stella Adler than to Lee Strasberg. Over time it’s come to get a bit of an eye roll from people who think it is actors being indulgent.
For Cosmo, it’s really just that he works very hard. There’s a lot of balls to keep in the air, with the accent and the behaviour and it’s just about maintaining a focus once you’re working. He wants to do the best he can and, especially when it’s a character that is far from you, you want to stay in it as much as possible.
He’s really doing whatever he needs to convincingly play make believe and nothing that he does in any way compromises anyone else’s work; he’s always there as a professional to make any technical adjustments and he was wonderful with Vinny.
I found him to be a total pleasure to work with. He likes to push, but I like that. Everyone actor has their own way of not just finding a character, but also dealing with the constraints, frustrations and humiliations of the process.
You also worked with a highly talented newcomer, Vincent Miller. How did you shape the character of Mel Blight with him?
CW: It’s a very different process with each actor. With Vinny what you initially are searching for is an incredibly specific presence for the role, and that presence was more important than anything. You really need someone who you are just innately curious to follow and want to understand on screen. And, also, this mix of innocence and maturity that he has in spades. Vinny is very different from Mel, but he also just has this talent for empathy that allowed him to understand some of the complicated decisions Mel makes in the story. There was just a lot of prep, not just to get him to the character, but also to give him the confidence to stake up space on the film set.
One thing was writing him his own script, which excluded some information that isn’t helpful, but also making it more novelistic, with more prompts and thoughts in different moments. Not at all didactic, where I’m telling him what to think, often just questions or ideas – ‘do you think he means that?’ ‘Don’t let him know this’ etc. It’s just really important for him to be having all these feelings and neurons firing, and making sure it all in there, then hiding it as much as possible. I’m just there to facilitate what works best for him, and it’s not always helpful to know too much.
Vinny is also an incredible listener; he’s so present in each moment, which makes him a great scene partner. Though you’d think it would be the opposite, but he was actually a boon to Guy and Cosmo as well, as they’ve both said. And he was only fifteen. He’s a gift.
Inside was filmed (beautifully by Andrew Commis) in a real prison and some of the background actors had been in the corrections system. Can you speak a little to creating veracity in the film?
CW: The prison was actually pre-used. It was incredibly important to me to not be stuck using an old, decommissioned prison, because they just don’t reflect what the system is, and it’s where you see all the cliché’s, it iron bars etc. And it becomes that prison film where the environment itself is just this source of antagonism and just dread – it’s miserable to watch –which would be wrong for this kind of story.
Andy and I collaborated for months before pre even began. He said he’s never done so much testing for a film before. We were rigorous with finding the right lenses and camera and processes. Ironically after all the blind testing we ended up using the exact lenses I suggested before we began, but there was a lot of other technical elements that we discovered over this time that we used in creating the look of the film.
It was about finding a look and a language that was raw, but also spiritual. So there halation and bleeding in the highlights, and the image isn’t too clean. There was a lot of discussion and references for finding the language we were going for, and in the end, you want some of it to feel found, like there is little premeditation to it all, despite that being the opposite.
I can’t talk about Andy’s work without mentioning our incredible production designer Leah Popple. She is in every frame of the film.
As for the actors, yeah there was a lot of actuals in the cast. Most of the officers in the film are real officers and still working in the system, and a majority of the inmates are formerly incarcerated men. This was a large process that was helped by my four years of developing a relationship with Corrections Victoria (which also secured us this unprecedented access and the location) as well as former prisoner associations like The Green Collar or Voices for Change who specifically deal with people with lived experience of the justice system who have an ABI; acquired brain injury, which is a condition that is overwhelmingly overrepresented in incarcerated people.
Not really a question; more a statement. Guy Pearce!
CW: Agreed! Guy is kind of a filmmaker himself, just on the other side of the lens. So, working with him is a completely different process to Vinny and even Cosmo. He has his own way, but for this he also stretched into a slightly different process. He would allow himself to be less in control than usual, and really did anything I asked. The character is much more of a live wire, id, impulsive presence where he thinks one thing at the start of a sentence and then contradicts himself by the end of it. So, it’s not an easy thing to do, and you slowly reveal more about who this man is as the film unfolds, in way that contradicts what you think at the start.
Guy was my first choice for the role, so I’m very glad he came on board. He has an astonishing ability to pull an audience's empathy and understanding into a character because of their 'flaws', not despite them, which was so important for this character.
Thomas M. Wright is one of your producers. How did he assist with the process of getting the feature off the ground?
CW: Tom and I became friends around the time my short film and his first feature were playing festivals. We initially were just sharing our writing for our next features and hanging out. However, after The Stranger got made, he was keen to join the EP team of the film and was really there was a sounding board and just a good friend throughout. Also, it was Tom who passed the script onto Guy via a mutual friend (I had been rebuffed going through the traditional channels) and Guy immediately read and came on board.
There is so much empathy for your characters in Inside without pretending they didn’t commit terrible crimes. How did you balance those issues?
CW: I suppose that’s what I’ve been wrestling with, both in the film and out. In making a film in this kind of world you need to really be reckoning with the real and profound damage that these characters have caused while also being able to hold the context of their own damage and victimisation, and one doesn’t erase the other.
It’s kind of offensive when you see films where they’re all just a good bunch of blokes who had some bad luck. I really like humanistic films when you have a kind of push/pull relationship toward the characters. You’re not always with them, they’re not easily likeable, and that makes it so much more interesting. It’s hard to do though, and it’s not something those with the power to greenlight a film are so fond of.
What do you hope audiences take away from the film?
CW: It’s a difficult question when I’m asked what I want an audience to take away. The films that drew me to want to become a filmmaker, were in some ways films that made me feel less alone growing up. Not because they were palliative, or kept me company, but they connected with my nervous system in a way that showed me my feelings were not just unique to me, and they could be seen in worlds unlike mine.
They were usually generous, sometimes strange, about very complicated people, yet still became moving and oddly transporting. They helped me understand myself and the difficult people around me in a way that was humanistic and almost spiritual, while still being visceral, cinematic movies. I think I’ve spent a lot of decades to try and offer a similar experience, and I hope I’ve gotten close.