Kangaroo Island sets the scene for Film Festival gala screening
New York-based director Timothy David bought a holiday house on Kangaroo Island then made his first feature film there. It will have its world premiere at the closing night gala for this year’s Adelaide Film Festival.
Timothy David’s film about a fraught family reunion on Kangaroo Island showcases the South Australian island’s enviable coastal lifestyle – including a house with private beachfront whose location must remain secret.
David, an acclaimed writer and director, returned after 20 years in New York to make Kangaroo Island with his Canadian wife and scriptwriter Sally Gifford. The couple bought their own holiday place on Kangaroo Island’s north coast in 2016 and know the area well.
During an intense, 24-day shoot involving more than 100 scenes, David filmed at Snelling Beach, Emu Bay and a beach house on KI’s north coast whose location the owners asked him not to reveal.
“We wanted to make a film that showcased South Australia but also felt international,” the director says.
David, who spent the school holidays on Kangaroo Island with Gifford and their two children, left Adelaide in 2004 and set up Piro boutique screen agency in New York. During an exceptional career he has specialised in high-end commercials and was named as one of Time magazine’s 200 most influential people in the world.
His work includes an advertisement for American design label Michael Kors featuring actress Zendaya, and the confronting Dove “Onslaught” and Dove “Photoshop” viral ads – starring Gifford, who is also an actress – warning against distorted beauty industry messaging.
David wanted to make an Australian film but he directed and cast Kangaroo Island with an eye to the international market. He believes that with notable exceptions – such as Crocodile Dundee and The Castle, which celebrated the quirks of Australian culture – making a film deliberately look and sound Australian can work against it.
In rehearsals, he encouraged actors to get rid of any Australian mannerisms.
“I think it becomes a habit for actors living in Australia in Australian films to play up their Australianism and it works against a movie, in my opinion.”
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The decision to write a film set on Kangaroo Island was made in New York after a different film he was working on fell through. When a funder pulled out of the earlier project, David’s cinematographer, who had seen pictures of Kangaroo Island, suggested setting a film there rather than in the US.
Gifford wrote the film’s script about a hedonistic, failed Australian actress in Los Angeles returning home to confront her troubled history with her sister and father. Although she’s Canadian herself, Gifford says she wrote from the way she hears Australians speak, without obvious slang or being overly expressive.
“I was very cognisant of the fact that my Australian friends and family have all the feelings but don’t feel they have to express them every moment, and I like that – I find that more interesting and more poignant,” she says.
“I didn’t want this family to be super sappy, saying ‘I love you’ all the time. We knew they loved each other but they didn’t have to say it.”
Director Timothy David on the set of his film. Photo: supplied
One of the film’s strengths is the outstanding cast, which includes two Australian actors working overseas. Rebecca Breeds, who played Clarice Starling in the television series Clarice (2021), is the returning actress Lou, who has a complicated relationship with her sister Freya, played by Adelaide Clemens, who recently starred with Andrew Garfield in the Mormon murder drama Under the Banner of Heaven.
South Australian casting agents Angela and Lou Heesom gave David a list of their top 20 Australian actors and he was quickly convinced Breeds was best suited for the lead role.
“She was my first choice,” he says. “I saw her as an incredibly natural performer who was also completely loveable no matter who she was playing.
“She [the character Lou] was a broken human being to begin with, and potentially quite cruel, and I wanted us to be able to just absorb her aura and to like her in spite of herself.”
The restricted budget meant he could not offer big salaries and he expected to be knocked back, but after Breeds read the script she was in.
I insisted this feel like an international film
Casting Freya was trickier and David had in mind a South Australian actress but there were scheduling problems. He had all but decided that Clemens was beyond reach but she shared an agent with Breeds, who told them Clemens loved the script and would be in Australia for a wedding.
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“She agreed even though she normally wouldn’t do something this small where she wasn’t the lead, but she loved the character and she came on board,” David says. “Having Clemens on set was like having a professional athlete on the team who delivered something special in every scene.”
Rounding out the cast are Port Willunga-based Erik Thomson, who plays the sisters’ genial widowed dad, and West Australian actor Joel Jackson in the role of local surfer Ben Roberts, who is part of a love triangle with the sisters.
In a nice piece of local casting, the golden-haired children of Ben and Freya are played by Bodhi and Forest Palmer, South Australian actress Teresa Palmer’s sons.
Erik Thomson as dad Rory in Kangaroo Island. Photo: supplied
David said the intense shoot benefited immensely from having quality actors who were committed to Gifford’s script.
“The one thing I said to them that they relayed back to me was that I insisted this feel like an international film, and not an Australian film,” he says.
Having been away for so long, David needed help familiarising himself with the industry and turned to film producer and former chair of the South Australian Film Corporation Peter Hanlon, who also co-chairs the reinvigorated The Mercury.
“In New York and Los Angeles, there are so many people working all the time you can pick and choose who you want,” David says. “But coming back to South Australia, I didn’t really know what many crews were like: who was fast, who was not; who was world-class, who was not.”
Hanlon liked the project so much he invested in it, and introduced the filmmakers to the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, which also provided funding.
David says Hanlon was a guiding light and “a good vibes” producer who was part of a small team that shared love, care and respect.
Kangaroo Island will be screened at the Adelaide Film Festival closing night gala and there are plans for a cinema release next year through Maslow Entertainment.
David says he knew the film was good and hoped it would get consideration from the AFF, but to premiere on closing night is cause for celebration.
“It is very humbling to get that slot.”
While he and Gifford move between here and the US, they are being seduced by the South Australian lifestyle. David still has a business in New York, and he and Gifford are dual citizens, but after living for a long time in America, the return has suited their stage of life with their children now aged nine and 11.
“We thought a year would be long enough to make the film and give the children a good sense of backyards and schools where you could play sport – Australian childhoods are very attractive,” David says.
“We put our New York apartment on the market to see what would happen and got a really nice offer so that persuaded us to come home, so all the planets aligned.”
Kangaroo Island will have its world premiere on November 3 at The Piccadilly as the closing night gala presentation for the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival.