Interview - Mister Babadook : Let's talk with Jennifer Kent

 

 

 

Jennifer Kent: I started off as an actress. But even earlier than that, when I was a child, I was writing and directing and acting in my own plays. When I became a teenager I decided to study drama, to study acting. I went to acting school. I was pretty much discouraged from watching and directing during that time, because you must be concentrating one thing. So I did, but I got bored being an actress. I slowly began to gravitate back to writing and directing.

 

 

 

Kent: All of those ! You were very spot on. All of those, really. David Lynch, for his ability to use abstractions and dreams in his films in a very beautiful way. This inspired me. I really love John Carpenter : The Thing, Halloween. These are very pure films. For me, they’re art films. I don’t see them as trashy or less than because they’re genre. I also really love Hitchcock. I think he was meticulous with sound and music. He really understood fear through audio.

 

 

Kent: Luck ? I really tried to connect emotionally to the film and to that woman. Every choice that I made was about that woman’s emotional and psychological life. In terms of the rhythm, I felt it should be like a pair of hands around your neck. It shouldn’t let go and it should squeeze more and more, until you feel you can’t breathe and then you explode. The film explodes like a crazy asylum. This was the rhythm that I always felt like a piece of music. That was what I followed with the writing and the production.

 

 

Kent: Essie is a very good friend of mine, we went through acting school together. Initially I did not want to cast a friend, because as a director you need to have a defined relationship. It should be a loving relationship, but it is not equal. It is someone leading another person through a difficult experience, especially in this film. Essie auditioned and she was extraordinary. I think because we had a very quick shoot, the fact that we knew each other, really helped us to go straight into the depth of the film. Noah was the opposite : he had no experience, he just had such a strong instinct. The other thing that he has is a real empathy for others. We really prepared him very well. I took him aside for three weeks before the production started. I told him the story of the Babadook. He loved the story and he understood that he was the hero of the story. He felt very involved. Then we brought Essie in, after a week. Essie, he and I worked together. We just play games, we did improvisation for two weeks. That’s how we introduced him to the film. We protected him a lot, too. The violent and aggressive things said to him in the film : he was not present during any of them. We had an adult stand in for those scenes. He became a real actor, a professional actor.

 

 

Kent: I think for me the most important thing is your own point of view and to really know what that is. Sometimes, directors don’t even know what story they want to tell. So for me, I was very clear : this is the story I want to tell. It is important to me. This is the reason why I’m making the film. For me, that is what makes a good movie : when the director has something to say. Whether you agree with what they say or not, it doesn’t matter. The other thing, equally as important, is to be honest in your filmmaking.

 

 

Kent: We had a very good response in Australia. It was not a wide release, unfortunately. It was a small release. But it really attracted and it was marketed in a sensible way, so people did not think that it was just a horror film. We had some critics, two in particular in Australia, who hate horror and who said that it is a very good and different film. It really helped us to reach a wider audience of people who would not normally see horror films.

 

 

Kent: I guess it was not an intellectual decision, it just felt right to me. It did not feel right for her to be in a relationship to a man. It was more about her being in a relationship to herself. These are the things that really intrigued me. I wanted to explore a very complex female character, one who was not perfect but who was worth watching for an hour and a half.

 

 

Kent: Many, but the strongest difficulty was having a child in such a huge role with no time. That combination was very stressful. And also the fact that we were filming in a studio. You could not take just a camera and go to take some extra shots on a weekend. We have big lights and to preload everything. So it was only through having such an amazing cinematographer, production designer, costume designer, such a perfect team that we were able to make the film look a lot more expensive than it is.

 

 

Kent: Yes to the last question : it helps me to be very balanced exploring these dark issues. I met some audience members who also found it very cathartic. For me, that is really beautiful because you put forward something that you feel is important. And then to have an audience member say, this really moved me : that is superb ! I tend towards the psychological horror movies, but I watch everything. Maybe the best cinematic experience I had two weeks ago is when I went to a drive in. There are very few, but this one was for the Sydney Film Festival. It was a screening of the remastered version of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We were in a van like in the film. My friend owns one of these vans. We were watching and I said, wouldn’t it be great if Leatherface came right now. And someone dressed as Leatherface came at that point with a chainsaw and scared the life out of us ! It was superb. This is a very violent film, but I think it is a masterpiece and one that I really love.

 

 

Kent: I have two scripts that I’m working on. Not horror films. One is a frontier film in Australia, in Tasmania in the 1820s. It’s a film about revenge and violence, again from a woman’s perspective.

 

thanks to Annie Maurette
Interview, video, photo and transcription by Mulder