How did it come to be? How did it get put together? And what are you doing with it?

Great question.

So the film is called The Birthday Trip.

In the shortest possible terms, it's a story of three bougie couples who go to the Southern Highlands for a farm stay weekend, and chaos ensues.

There's sort of relationship dynamics, there's class and race dynamics that sort of bubble to the surface.

It's also a bit of a romp, like it's fun and funny and satirical.

We're kind of calling it a bit of an Aussie White Lotus, like it's got that kind of flavour.

Most recently.

Why was that so important to you, James, in the moment to sort of make the camera a personification in that moment?

Yeah.

I think it's important to have a voice, the voice of the author, uh, loud in the piece.

Um, and the camera is the way that comes to life.

Like, in a lot of those heady scenes, you can, you can feel the, like me rack focusing or, or panning or whatever it may be.

Like, there's a, there's a, yeah, my internal metronome is imbued in the use of the camera, and it brings the scene to life.

Um, or it, it's another element in bringing it to life.

Yeah.

While, while you're mid-thought there, I'd love to then kind of ask you a question which probably should've been asked at the beginning, which is about the start of this film, and where the idea came from, and how you decided that for a, a feature length debut film, this is the story that you were gonna tackle.

Um, yeah.

G- good question.

I, I, I think it was many, many years of observation and experience.

Um, so knowing these characters in, in various ways.

Um, so I think there was like a decade of like pent-up relationships and observations and beats and moments, um, that I just felt, I don't know, felt strongly enough about that when I sat down to like, um, pull together a feature, I was like, oh, I had like this ...

Yeah, um, this, this well to draw from.

So yeah, tell me about Badlands, and then have that in the back of your mind, I guess, while you're doing it.

And so, yeah, it is a catch-22, right? Yeah.

That's where the disconnect is.

Like, the more time I spent with the film, looking at what was getting programmed and getting released, and then seeing our film screened to an audience or seeing a writer respond to it in the way that Pat does in that article.

um like the the more I kind of was able to observe the disconnect between audiences and the the film machine that's supposedly serving them um because there's a massive disconnect I mean there's a million articles about it um people aren't going to see Australian films the people are going to see films, 55 million tickets every year, less than 5% Australian films.

I think it's lower in the first six months of this year.

I think it's like two or 3%.

That's right.

It's a long way of kind of asking on a structural level how, Do you embed those things as a thematic thing of being like, I'm going to make a comment on this, or is it just kind of an organic thing that comes out of the script writing process?

What's it like trying to make anything in that space?

It's tough.

Well, it's tougher, I suppose, to release it in that space.

To make this film, Steph and I have made a whole bunch of shorts over many years now and music videos and corporate videos.

So pulling together the crew and the cast... was a big undertaking but not difficult but yeah as far as the release of it in a in an industry that doesn't necessarily want to be challenged at all it's um it's been very very interesting i've done a few interviews now and uh like at least four of them have started with quoting your article pat um they read the first at least couple paragraphs and they're like what do you think I'm like, yeah, yep, that's it.

But yeah, it is in many ways like an astroturfed kind of industry.

Like we have a huge, huge glut of government funding.

Is that sort of...? What's going on or am I watching too hard here?

So can you tell us a bit more about your approach?

Of course.

It's not for everyone.

We had someone walk out of a screening after 10 minutes on Friday.

And they wrote on Letterboxd the handheld camera was too much for them.

And fair play to them for that.

But yeah, in the first instance, I think it's important that the emotion that drives the scene is present in the camera.

I wonder, apart from Malik, and maybe I'm not sure how much Malik has informed this particular picture, but what are the other influences that have informed the birthday trip?