Kazuo Ishiguro: 'When you go from book to film, that's a fireside moment'
Kazuo Ishiguro 's mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped.
When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, first undertook fiction writing in his 20s, his first novel, 1982's A Pale View of Hills was inspired by his mother's stories, and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was 5, moved to England with his family.
A Pale View of Hills marked the start to what's become one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And, now, like most of Ishiguro's other novels, it's a movie, too.
Kei Ishikawa's film by the same name premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival in its Un Certain Regard section. The 70-year-old author has been here before; he was a member of the jury in 1994 that gave Pulp Fiction the Palme d'Or. "At the time it was a surprise decision," he says. "A lot of people booed."
Ishiguro is a movie watcher and sometimes maker, too. He penned the 2022 Akira Kurosawa adaptation Living. Movies are a regular presence in his life, in part because filmmakers keep wanting to turn his books into them. Taika Waititi is currently finishing a film of Ishiguro's most recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021).
Ishiguro likes to participate in early development of an adaptation, and then disappear, letting the filmmaker take over. Seeing A Pale View of Hills turned into an elegant, thoughtful drama is especially meaningful to him because the book itself deals with inheritance, and because it represents his beginning as a writer.
"There was no sense that anyone else was going to reread this thing," he says. "So in that sense, it's different to, say, the movie of Remains of the Day or the movie of Never Let Me Go."
Remarks have been lightly edited.
AP: Few writers alive have been more adapted than you. Does it help keep a story alive?
ISHIGURO: Often people think I'm being unduly modest when I say I want the film to be different to the book. I don't want it to be wildly different. But in order for the film to live, there has to be a reason why it's being made then, for the audience at that moment. Not 25 years ago, or 45 years ago, as in the case of this book. It has to be a personal artistic expression of something, not just a reproduction. Otherwise, it can end up like a tribute or an Elvis impersonation.
Whenever I see adaptations of books not work, it's always because it's been too reverential. Sometimes it's laziness. People think: Everything is there in the book. The imagination isn't pushed to work. For every one of these things that's made it to the screen, there's been 10, 15 developments that I've been personally involved with that fell by the wayside. I always try to get people to just move it on.
AP: You've said, maybe a little tongue in cheek, that you'd like to be like Homer.
ISHIGURO: You can take two kind of approaches. You write a novel and that's the discrete, perfect thing. Other people can pay homage to it but basically that's it. Or you can take another view that stories are things that just get passed around, down generations. Even though you think you wrote an original story, you've put it together out of other stuff that's come before you. So it's part of that tradition.
I said Homer but it could be folktales. The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They turn up in different forms. It's because people can change and adapt them to their times and their culture that these stories are valuable. There was a time when people would sit around a fire and just tell each other these stories. You sit down with some anticipation: This guy is going to tell it in a slightly different way. What's he going to do? It's like if Keith Jarrett sits down and says he's going to play "Night and Day." So when you go from book to film, that's a fireside moment. That way it has a chance of lasting, and I have a chance of turning into Homer.
AP: I think you're well on your way.
ISHIGURO: I've got a few centuries to go.
AP: Do you remember writing A Pale View of Hills? You were in your 20s.
ISHIGURO: I was between the age of 24 and 26. It was published when I was 27. I remember the circumstances very vividly. I can even remember writing a lot of those scenes. My wife, Lorna, was my girlfriend back then. We were both postgraduate students. I wrote it on a table about this size, which was also where we would have our meals. When she came in at the end of the day, I had to pack up even if I was at the crucial point of some scene. It was no big deal. I was just doing something indulgent. There was no real sense I had a career or it would get published. So it's strange all these years later that she and I are here and attended this premiere in Cannes.
AP: To me, much of what the book and movie capture is what can be an unbridgeable distance between generations.
ISHIGURO: I think that's really insightful what you just said. There is a limit to how much understanding there can be between generations. What's needed is a certain amount of generosity on both sides, to respect each other's generations and the difference in values. I think an understanding that the world was a really complicated place, and that often individuals can't hope to have perspective on the forces that are playing on them at the time. To actually understand that needs a generosity.
AP: You've always been meticulous at meting out information, of uncovering mysteries of the past and present. Your characters try to grasp the world they've been born into. Did that start with your own family investigation?
ISHIGURO: I wasn't like a journalist trying to get stuff out of my mother. There's part of me that was quite reluctant to hear this stuff. On some level it was kind of embarrassing to think of my mother in such extreme circumstances. A lot of the things she told me weren't to do with the atomic bomb. Those weren't her most traumatic memories.
My mother was a great oral storyteller. She would sometimes have a lunch date and do a whole version of a Shakespeare play by herself. That was my introduction to Hamlet or things like that. She was keen to tell me but also wary of telling me. It was always a fraught thing. Having something formal - "Oh, I'm becoming a writer, I'm going to write up something so these memories can be preserved" - that made it easier.
AP: How has your relationship with the book changed with time?
ISHIGURO: Someone said to me the other day, "We live in a time now where a lot of people would sympathise with the older, what you might call fascist views." It's not expressed overtly; the older teacher is saying it's tradition and patriotism.
Now, maybe we live in a world where that's a good point, and that hadn't occurred to me. It's an example of: Yes, we write in a bubble and make movies in a kind of a bubble. But the power of stories is they have to go into different values.
This question of how you pass stories on, this is one of the big challenges. You have to reexamine every scene. Some things that might have been a very safe assumption only a few years ago would not be because the value systems are changing around our books and films just as much as they're changing around us.
Kazuo Ishiguro 's mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped.
When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, first undertook fiction writing in his 20s, his first novel, 1982's A Pale View of Hills was inspired by his mother's stories, and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was 5, moved to England with his family.
A Pale View of Hills marked the start to what's become one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And, now, like most of Ishiguro's other novels, it's a movie, too.
Kei Ishikawa's film by the same name premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival in its Un Certain Regard section. The 70-year-old author has been here before; he was a member of the jury in 1994 that gave Pulp Fiction the Palme d'Or. "At the time it was a surprise decision," he says. "A lot of people booed."
Ishiguro is a movie watcher and sometimes maker, too. He penned the 2022 Akira Kurosawa adaptation Living. Movies are a regular presence in his life, in part because filmmakers keep wanting to turn his books into them. Taika Waititi is currently finishing a film of Ishiguro's most recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021).
Ishiguro likes to participate in early development of an adaptation, and then disappear, letting the filmmaker take over. Seeing A Pale View of Hills turned into an elegant, thoughtful drama is especially meaningful to him because the book itself deals with inheritance, and because it represents his beginning as a writer.
"There was no sense that anyone else was going to reread this thing," he says. "So in that sense, it's different to, say, the movie of Remains of the Day or the movie of Never Let Me Go."
Remarks have been lightly edited.
AP: Few writers alive have been more adapted than you. Does it help keep a story alive?
ISHIGURO: Often people think I'm being unduly modest when I say I want the film to be different to the book. I don't want it to be wildly different. But in order for the film to live, there has to be a reason why it's being made then, for the audience at that moment. Not 25 years ago, or 45 years ago, as in the case of this book. It has to be a personal artistic expression of something, not just a reproduction. Otherwise, it can end up like a tribute or an Elvis impersonation.
Whenever I see adaptations of books not work, it's always because it's been too reverential. Sometimes it's laziness. People think: Everything is there in the book. The imagination isn't pushed to work. For every one of these things that's made it to the screen, there's been 10, 15 developments that I've been personally involved with that fell by the wayside. I always try to get people to just move it on.
AP: You've said, maybe a little tongue in cheek, that you'd like to be like Homer.
ISHIGURO: You can take two kind of approaches. You write a novel and that's the discrete, perfect thing. Other people can pay homage to it but basically that's it. Or you can take another view that stories are things that just get passed around, down generations. Even though you think you wrote an original story, you've put it together out of other stuff that's come before you. So it's part of that tradition.
I said Homer but it could be folktales. The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They turn up in different forms. It's because people can change and adapt them to their times and their culture that these stories are valuable. There was a time when people would sit around a fire and just tell each other these stories. You sit down with some anticipation: This guy is going to tell it in a slightly different way. What's he going to do? It's like if Keith Jarrett sits down and says he's going to play "Night and Day." So when you go from book to film, that's a fireside moment. That way it has a chance of lasting, and I have a chance of turning into Homer.
AP: I think you're well on your way.
ISHIGURO: I've got a few centuries to go.
AP: Do you remember writing A Pale View of Hills? You were in your 20s.
ISHIGURO: I was between the age of 24 and 26. It was published when I was 27. I remember the circumstances very vividly. I can even remember writing a lot of those scenes. My wife, Lorna, was my girlfriend back then. We were both postgraduate students. I wrote it on a table about this size, which was also where we would have our meals. When she came in at the end of the day, I had to pack up even if I was at the crucial point of some scene. It was no big deal. I was just doing something indulgent. There was no real sense I had a career or it would get published. So it's strange all these years later that she and I are here and attended this premiere in Cannes.
AP: To me, much of what the book and movie capture is what can be an unbridgeable distance between generations.
ISHIGURO: I think that's really insightful what you just said. There is a limit to how much understanding there can be between generations. What's needed is a certain amount of generosity on both sides, to respect each other's generations and the difference in values. I think an understanding that the world was a really complicated place, and that often individuals can't hope to have perspective on the forces that are playing on them at the time. To actually understand that needs a generosity.
AP: You've always been meticulous at meting out information, of uncovering mysteries of the past and present. Your characters try to grasp the world they've been born into. Did that start with your own family investigation?
ISHIGURO: I wasn't like a journalist trying to get stuff out of my mother. There's part of me that was quite reluctant to hear this stuff. On some level it was kind of embarrassing to think of my mother in such extreme circumstances. A lot of the things she told me weren't to do with the atomic bomb. Those weren't her most traumatic memories.
My mother was a great oral storyteller. She would sometimes have a lunch date and do a whole version of a Shakespeare play by herself. That was my introduction to Hamlet or things like that. She was keen to tell me but also wary of telling me. It was always a fraught thing. Having something formal - "Oh, I'm becoming a writer, I'm going to write up something so these memories can be preserved" - that made it easier.
AP: How has your relationship with the book changed with time?
ISHIGURO: Someone said to me the other day, "We live in a time now where a lot of people would sympathise with the older, what you might call fascist views." It's not expressed overtly; the older teacher is saying it's tradition and patriotism.
Now, maybe we live in a world where that's a good point, and that hadn't occurred to me. It's an example of: Yes, we write in a bubble and make movies in a kind of a bubble. But the power of stories is they have to go into different values.
This question of how you pass stories on, this is one of the big challenges. You have to reexamine every scene. Some things that might have been a very safe assumption only a few years ago would not be because the value systems are changing around our books and films just as much as they're changing around us.
Kazuo Ishiguro 's mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped.
When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, first undertook fiction writing in his 20s, his first novel, 1982's A Pale View of Hills was inspired by his mother's stories, and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was 5, moved to England with his family.
A Pale View of Hills marked the start to what's become one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And, now, like most of Ishiguro's other novels, it's a movie, too.
Kei Ishikawa's film by the same name premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival in its Un Certain Regard section. The 70-year-old author has been here before; he was a member of the jury in 1994 that gave Pulp Fiction the Palme d'Or. "At the time it was a surprise decision," he says. "A lot of people booed."
Ishiguro is a movie watcher and sometimes maker, too. He penned the 2022 Akira Kurosawa adaptation Living. Movies are a regular presence in his life, in part because filmmakers keep wanting to turn his books into them. Taika Waititi is currently finishing a film of Ishiguro's most recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021).
Ishiguro likes to participate in early development of an adaptation, and then disappear, letting the filmmaker take over. Seeing A Pale View of Hills turned into an elegant, thoughtful drama is especially meaningful to him because the book itself deals with inheritance, and because it represents his beginning as a writer.
"There was no sense that anyone else was going to reread this thing," he says. "So in that sense, it's different to, say, the movie of Remains of the Day or the movie of Never Let Me Go."
Remarks have been lightly edited.
AP: Few writers alive have been more adapted than you. Does it help keep a story alive?
ISHIGURO: Often people think I'm being unduly modest when I say I want the film to be different to the book. I don't want it to be wildly different. But in order for the film to live, there has to be a reason why it's being made then, for the audience at that moment. Not 25 years ago, or 45 years ago, as in the case of this book. It has to be a personal artistic expression of something, not just a reproduction. Otherwise, it can end up like a tribute or an Elvis impersonation.
Whenever I see adaptations of books not work, it's always because it's been too reverential. Sometimes it's laziness. People think: Everything is there in the book. The imagination isn't pushed to work. For every one of these things that's made it to the screen, there's been 10, 15 developments that I've been personally involved with that fell by the wayside. I always try to get people to just move it on.
AP: You've said, maybe a little tongue in cheek, that you'd like to be like Homer.
ISHIGURO: You can take two kind of approaches. You write a novel and that's the discrete, perfect thing. Other people can pay homage to it but basically that's it. Or you can take another view that stories are things that just get passed around, down generations. Even though you think you wrote an original story, you've put it together out of other stuff that's come before you. So it's part of that tradition.
I said Homer but it could be folktales. The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They turn up in different forms. It's because people can change and adapt them to their times and their culture that these stories are valuable. There was a time when people would sit around a fire and just tell each other these stories. You sit down with some anticipation: This guy is going to tell it in a slightly different way. What's he going to do? It's like if Keith Jarrett sits down and says he's going to play "Night and Day." So when you go from book to film, that's a fireside moment. That way it has a chance of lasting, and I have a chance of turning into Homer.
AP: I think you're well on your way.
ISHIGURO: I've got a few centuries to go.
AP: Do you remember writing A Pale View of Hills? You were in your 20s.
ISHIGURO: I was between the age of 24 and 26. It was published when I was 27. I remember the circumstances very vividly. I can even remember writing a lot of those scenes. My wife, Lorna, was my girlfriend back then. We were both postgraduate students. I wrote it on a table about this size, which was also where we would have our meals. When she came in at the end of the day, I had to pack up even if I was at the crucial point of some scene. It was no big deal. I was just doing something indulgent. There was no real sense I had a career or it would get published. So it's strange all these years later that she and I are here and attended this premiere in Cannes.
AP: To me, much of what the book and movie capture is what can be an unbridgeable distance between generations.
ISHIGURO: I think that's really insightful what you just said. There is a limit to how much understanding there can be between generations. What's needed is a certain amount of generosity on both sides, to respect each other's generations and the difference in values. I think an understanding that the world was a really complicated place, and that often individuals can't hope to have perspective on the forces that are playing on them at the time. To actually understand that needs a generosity.
AP: You've always been meticulous at meting out information, of uncovering mysteries of the past and present. Your characters try to grasp the world they've been born into. Did that start with your own family investigation?
ISHIGURO: I wasn't like a journalist trying to get stuff out of my mother. There's part of me that was quite reluctant to hear this stuff. On some level it was kind of embarrassing to think of my mother in such extreme circumstances. A lot of the things she told me weren't to do with the atomic bomb. Those weren't her most traumatic memories.
My mother was a great oral storyteller. She would sometimes have a lunch date and do a whole version of a Shakespeare play by herself. That was my introduction to Hamlet or things like that. She was keen to tell me but also wary of telling me. It was always a fraught thing. Having something formal - "Oh, I'm becoming a writer, I'm going to write up something so these memories can be preserved" - that made it easier.
AP: How has your relationship with the book changed with time?
ISHIGURO: Someone said to me the other day, "We live in a time now where a lot of people would sympathise with the older, what you might call fascist views." It's not expressed overtly; the older teacher is saying it's tradition and patriotism.
Now, maybe we live in a world where that's a good point, and that hadn't occurred to me. It's an example of: Yes, we write in a bubble and make movies in a kind of a bubble. But the power of stories is they have to go into different values.
This question of how you pass stories on, this is one of the big challenges. You have to reexamine every scene. Some things that might have been a very safe assumption only a few years ago would not be because the value systems are changing around our books and films just as much as they're changing around us.
Kazuo Ishiguro 's mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped.
When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, first undertook fiction writing in his 20s, his first novel, 1982's A Pale View of Hills was inspired by his mother's stories, and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was 5, moved to England with his family.
A Pale View of Hills marked the start to what's become one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And, now, like most of Ishiguro's other novels, it's a movie, too.
Kei Ishikawa's film by the same name premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival in its Un Certain Regard section. The 70-year-old author has been here before; he was a member of the jury in 1994 that gave Pulp Fiction the Palme d'Or. "At the time it was a surprise decision," he says. "A lot of people booed."
Ishiguro is a movie watcher and sometimes maker, too. He penned the 2022 Akira Kurosawa adaptation Living. Movies are a regular presence in his life, in part because filmmakers keep wanting to turn his books into them. Taika Waititi is currently finishing a film of Ishiguro's most recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021).
Ishiguro likes to participate in early development of an adaptation, and then disappear, letting the filmmaker take over. Seeing A Pale View of Hills turned into an elegant, thoughtful drama is especially meaningful to him because the book itself deals with inheritance, and because it represents his beginning as a writer.
"There was no sense that anyone else was going to reread this thing," he says. "So in that sense, it's different to, say, the movie of Remains of the Day or the movie of Never Let Me Go."
Remarks have been lightly edited.
AP: Few writers alive have been more adapted than you. Does it help keep a story alive?
ISHIGURO: Often people think I'm being unduly modest when I say I want the film to be different to the book. I don't want it to be wildly different. But in order for the film to live, there has to be a reason why it's being made then, for the audience at that moment. Not 25 years ago, or 45 years ago, as in the case of this book. It has to be a personal artistic expression of something, not just a reproduction. Otherwise, it can end up like a tribute or an Elvis impersonation.
Whenever I see adaptations of books not work, it's always because it's been too reverential. Sometimes it's laziness. People think: Everything is there in the book. The imagination isn't pushed to work. For every one of these things that's made it to the screen, there's been 10, 15 developments that I've been personally involved with that fell by the wayside. I always try to get people to just move it on.
AP: You've said, maybe a little tongue in cheek, that you'd like to be like Homer.
ISHIGURO: You can take two kind of approaches. You write a novel and that's the discrete, perfect thing. Other people can pay homage to it but basically that's it. Or you can take another view that stories are things that just get passed around, down generations. Even though you think you wrote an original story, you've put it together out of other stuff that's come before you. So it's part of that tradition.
I said Homer but it could be folktales. The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They turn up in different forms. It's because people can change and adapt them to their times and their culture that these stories are valuable. There was a time when people would sit around a fire and just tell each other these stories. You sit down with some anticipation: This guy is going to tell it in a slightly different way. What's he going to do? It's like if Keith Jarrett sits down and says he's going to play "Night and Day." So when you go from book to film, that's a fireside moment. That way it has a chance of lasting, and I have a chance of turning into Homer.
AP: I think you're well on your way.
ISHIGURO: I've got a few centuries to go.
AP: Do you remember writing A Pale View of Hills? You were in your 20s.
ISHIGURO: I was between the age of 24 and 26. It was published when I was 27. I remember the circumstances very vividly. I can even remember writing a lot of those scenes. My wife, Lorna, was my girlfriend back then. We were both postgraduate students. I wrote it on a table about this size, which was also where we would have our meals. When she came in at the end of the day, I had to pack up even if I was at the crucial point of some scene. It was no big deal. I was just doing something indulgent. There was no real sense I had a career or it would get published. So it's strange all these years later that she and I are here and attended this premiere in Cannes.
AP: To me, much of what the book and movie capture is what can be an unbridgeable distance between generations.
ISHIGURO: I think that's really insightful what you just said. There is a limit to how much understanding there can be between generations. What's needed is a certain amount of generosity on both sides, to respect each other's generations and the difference in values. I think an understanding that the world was a really complicated place, and that often individuals can't hope to have perspective on the forces that are playing on them at the time. To actually understand that needs a generosity.
AP: You've always been meticulous at meting out information, of uncovering mysteries of the past and present. Your characters try to grasp the world they've been born into. Did that start with your own family investigation?
ISHIGURO: I wasn't like a journalist trying to get stuff out of my mother. There's part of me that was quite reluctant to hear this stuff. On some level it was kind of embarrassing to think of my mother in such extreme circumstances. A lot of the things she told me weren't to do with the atomic bomb. Those weren't her most traumatic memories.
My mother was a great oral storyteller. She would sometimes have a lunch date and do a whole version of a Shakespeare play by herself. That was my introduction to Hamlet or things like that. She was keen to tell me but also wary of telling me. It was always a fraught thing. Having something formal - "Oh, I'm becoming a writer, I'm going to write up something so these memories can be preserved" - that made it easier.
AP: How has your relationship with the book changed with time?
ISHIGURO: Someone said to me the other day, "We live in a time now where a lot of people would sympathise with the older, what you might call fascist views." It's not expressed overtly; the older teacher is saying it's tradition and patriotism.
Now, maybe we live in a world where that's a good point, and that hadn't occurred to me. It's an example of: Yes, we write in a bubble and make movies in a kind of a bubble. But the power of stories is they have to go into different values.
This question of how you pass stories on, this is one of the big challenges. You have to reexamine every scene. Some things that might have been a very safe assumption only a few years ago would not be because the value systems are changing around our books and films just as much as they're changing around us.
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There was pandemonium in the Theatre Croisette, home of the Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight, before and after the screening of Australian film Dangerous Animals, announced as the first 'shark movie' ever to screen at the festival. Admittedly, the audience was stacked with mates – you could tell, because clustered cheers went up for the various production companies credited at the beginning – but there were also a lot of horror fans, including press colleagues who live for jump scares, gore and villains getting their comeuppance. A journalist and critic from Poland, who is one of those horror buffs, told me she was sitting next to the woman who screamed loudly enough to fill the auditorium every time we saw a fin or fang. That just added to the joy, as far as she was concerned. Like everyone, she had clapped for a full nine minutes when the final credits rolled and Sean Byrne, the Tasmanian director, brought his cast up on stage. Dangerous Animals delivers on a popular menu of genre expectations, starting with the maxim that Australia is full of creatures that can kill you. It is set on the Gold Coast, where ostentatiously Ocker skipper Bruce Tucker (Jai Courtney) takes tourists out to swim with sharks, protected inside a metal cage. From the first minute, it's clear that Tucker is too much like a carbon copy of Steve Irwin to be true. Of course, he's a serial killer who preys on backpackers away on their own, ties them up and dangles them over the water in a harness of his own design and films them as they're torn to bits. Tucker himself was mauled by a Great White as a boy. Now he sees himself as a victorious apex predator. His big mistake is picking on Hassie Harrison's Zephyr, a surfer who has purposefully drifted a long way from her American home. When she hooks up with Moses (Sydney actor Josh Heuston), something clicks between them – so that when she goes missing, there is someone local who is looking for her. She is also a fighter. 'It's so fun to play a character with that badass-ery and swagger,' says Harrison. 'It comes pretty close to home for me, growing up spending a lot of time in nature. I'd already been to Australia about 10 times. Being a Texan, I feel we're very kindred spirits.' You can anticipate fatal turns in the plot, which is part of the pleasure; there is also fun to be had spotting those conventions and the sprinkling of quotes from other films. There are plenty of jokes and grisly bits of ick. 'Music to my ears,' says Byrne of that screamer in the audience. 'You work so hard on these moments, giving the audience permission to be scared, but also to have a good time.' It was always supposed to be fun. Byrne's previous features, The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy, were lower-budget US horrors. 'This was a big step-up in terms of budget and logistics, with underwater filming,' he says. 'I'm a massive fan of '80s action cinema like Die Hard and Speed. A lot of horror films are slow-burn or mood pieces, but mine tend to be fast-paced, so it's almost kind of action horror. Survival horror, in this case.' With some romance and comedy tropes, he adds; he likes the mix of genres. Until this festival, I had no idea that 'shark films' constituted a sub-genre in themselves, with Steven Spielberg's Jaws as the daddy. 'There's no bigger cinematic shadow than Jaws,' Byrne agrees. 'But at the same time, what a great reference point! I kept coming back to Jaws and the power of the fin. Shooting in the middle of the night, open sea, and there's a young person screaming for his or her life, it can creep through the armour. Jai Courtney The fin is almost the definition of suspense. If you see a fin above water, moving around, that is foreshadowing terror. Then, when the fin goes underwater, you are anticipating the attack, but the audience can't see what's happening. You've got them! I feel that has been lost a little bit in shark films recently, where you see dozens of sharks underwater, sometimes with their faces animated in an angry human way. I wanted something more like documentary reality.' Loading Most importantly, the sharks in this movie are not the villains. Humans are cruel, possibly psychotic, sometimes just criminally negligent. Sharks are beautiful, stately princes of the sea, albeit princes with a lot of teeth. 'I've never seen that in a shark film, so that was an incredibly exciting opportunity,' enthuses Byrne. Nick Lepard, who wrote the script, is married to a marine biologist; the film is full of facts about sharks, including the news that they don't actually like the taste of human flesh. 'I think it's such a breath of fresh air that the sharks are not the monster,' says Byrne. 'A man is the monster.' Heuston says his impression, when he read the original script, was that Dangerous Animals would be more arthouse fare. 'When we started filming though, it became much more of a genre film.' He puts this largely down to Courtney, who brought an outsize dynamism and humour to the character of Tucker. Harrison agrees. 'There's a levity he brings to the table. When I came on, they were talking about casting other people ... another actor would have taken it to a really dark place, whereas [Courtney's] performance is so funny I was often laughing on the other side of the camera.' Courtney found it quite dark enough. 'Some of the acts Tucker commits, some of the way he does things, we have young actors hanging on a hook over the open water and when you're ... shooting in the middle of the night, open sea out on a boat, and there's a young person screaming for his or her life, it can occasionally creep through the armour of separating that from reality. And there were definitely moments in this film when I was saying right, can we get this done?' Filming on water is difficult enough. Cameras rock along with the boat, actors and crew get seasick, the space is confined. Byrne didn't want to film in a tank, however. For a start, he says, the tank cost a prohibitive $80,000 a day. Secondly, he says tanks feel sterile. They're just big bathtubs, after all. 'Whereas filming at sea is really hard but exciting as well. It's really hard to replicate Mother Nature, with wind and salt and water hitting you in the face. Also, when we put the actors up on the crane and swung them out over the water, doing it for real gave it an immediacy and a primal quality we would never have got in a tank. But it was difficult. I think I'm one and done as far as shooting a film on water goes.' He never imagined, he says, that they would end up in Cannes. It is true that a diverse bunch of successes, ranging from Wolf Creek to The Babadook to Talk to Me, have put Australian horror on the international map. 'We've got some great genre filmmakers,' says Byrne. 'And I think Australia is getting a reputation internationally for being attacking.' He had thought they would do well in the market. 'That combination of shark film and serial killer film, I sensed that would sell well. This is a risk-averse industry, but you are ticking two very popular boxes.' He had a handle on its demographic. 'But I didn't expect it to end up in the festival,' he says. 'Because when you think of Cannes, you just don't think of shark films.'
