‘We had $0 in the bank account’: How a little Australian thriller went from zero to hero

There is a famous quote by legendary US director Francis Ford Coppola in the documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which follows the behind-the-scenes drama of his 1979 Vietnam War epic. “We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.”

Sydney filmmakers Jack Clark and Jim Weir, both 27, know a little bit about how Coppola felt – except they had the opposite problem: not enough money, not enough equipment and not enough crew. Oh, and a small thing called La Nina that washed out their set.

Little by little, Clark and Weir, who were shooting their debut feature-length psychological thriller, Birdeater, in rural NSW, also went, if not quite insane, certainly something close to it.

“We were sleeping on the set, which I don’t imagine we’d want to do again, but it meant that it was us on set before everyone was there, walking around in our pyjamas arguing or walking around pretending to be the camera and stuff in our pyjamas,” recalls Clark. “Pretty sorry kind of state.”

Birdeater – which won the audience award at last year’s Sydney Film Festival – is in cinemas next week, and it’s testament to Clark and Weir’s determination, and desperation, that it got there at all. It also underlines how difficult it is to get films made in Australia, especially without the backing of major studios.

“It took maybe a year-and-a-half to get enough money just to get into production,” says Weir, who met Clark while they were studying at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.

“Largely getting $10,000 to $15,000 from a bunch of different places, probably six, seven or eight parties put in $10,000, which isn’t the usual way to finance a movie.

“But it was the only option because no one is willing to take a huge financial risk on a couple of young filmmakers. But we found that there are a lot of parties who are willing to take a little bit of a risk, knowing there’s a good chance they won’t get their money back.”

And that was before shooting even started in 2021, in a remote location called the Forgotten Valley – “which rang pretty true,” deadpans Clark – near the hamlet of St Albans, about 70 kilometres north-west of Sydney.

“We were supposed to shoot the film in four weeks,” says Weir. “But our shooting location was right on a riverbed. It was during La Nina, that big weather event where it didn’t stop raining for months, so we ended up getting flooded out of our shooting location, mid-shoot, where we had to abandon that location … [and] one of our actors left because they weren’t able to come back for reshoots.

“We lost all of our money and all of our post-production money, just by spending it on Band-Aid solutions, just so we could keep on shooting every day. So we got to the end of this four weeks, we ran out of money, and we’d only shot half the film. So we told everyone, ‘See you in six months, we’re gonna go try and find some more money.’

“And we scheduled dates for six months later and, until about two or three weeks before the shoot began, we had $0 in the bank account, but then an angel investor came in at the last minute and paid for the second shooting block. And then we finished the film in two weeks.”

Were they crying in the corner on set, as disaster – quite literally – rained down on them?

“We did do that quite early in the shoot,” says Clark. “We hung our heads in our hands when something went wrong, and sort of had a bit of a cry to ourselves and then everybody else kind of fell apart as well.

“Then everybody else was sort of leeching off our bad energy. So we made a decision that day, that regardless of what was happening, we would remain outwardly extremely optimistic, extremely hopeful, and that would hopefully have a run-on effect on everybody else.”

Birdeater follows 20-somethings Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) and Irene (Shabana Azeez) who appear to be a normal, loving young couple until their relationship is revealed to be quite dysfunctional.

They decide to get married, but instead of throwing a bawdy all-bloke buck’s party, Louie invites Irene to a weekend with his friends in the bush, where things take an unexpected turn.

“We wanted to depict an unusual relationship from the outset, and then that developed into one that had separation anxiety as part of it, and then slowly turned into something that was more explicitly emotionally abusive,” says Clark.

“And then we wanted to put a framework around it that meant that those two would have to be separated. So that felt to us like a buck’s party, and then, once that part of the premise came into play, it shifted the whole tone of the film into a new territory.”

The result is an uncomfortable look at Australian men (and a buck’s party to which you would never in your life want to be invited) and how they can easily brush off difficult situations with a laugh or a joke, even when something is clearly not right.

“We were interested in finding the type of male behaviour that we think is a bit more common, the more subtle types of manipulation that we think is more common in guys we know,” says Weir. “And we wanted to largely make it about how groups of friends react to bad male behaviour because that’s something we’ve had to negotiate with, growing up here in Australia.

“So humour was a big thing for us, just because we think that’s the default for Australian men, whenever things get a little bit serious, you revert to a joke. So we wanted to use comedy in the film, hopefully have an audience laughing with these guys, for the first half of the movie, and then perhaps feeling complicit in the second half of the movie when they start saying and doing some pretty terrible things.”

Shabana Azeez, best known for a small part in TV series Utopia, plays Irene, the person to whom the “terrible things” are directed. Irene’s relationship with Louie is clearly toxic, but Azeez says what interested her was that Irene was not a black and white character.

“[Their relationship] is like a power struggle, massively so,” says the 27-year-old. “But with huge systemic things that are not working out in her favour and malicious intent on one side. I know some people would call her passive, but for me, she is fighting for her life.

“She’s consistently trying to undercut the power he feels he’s entitled to throughout the whole film, so she’s quite, I don’t know, she’s quite scrappy to me and quite resourceful and clever.”

Azeez says she was fascinated by audience reactions to the screenings at last year’s Sydney and Melbourne film festivals, as well as its spot at this year’s South by SouthWest festival in Austin, where it was called “tense, chaotic and uncomfortable”.

“Jim [Weir] had that thing where he was like, ‘You know, we want half the audience to be laughing and the other half to be livid, but the other half is laughing.’ And it’s always been like that,” says Azeez. “Like, every single time in the audience there’s a sort of weird dynamic and I quite liked that. But it’s been quite polarising. It’s either a feminist masterpiece or a misogynistic piece of crap.”

Now that Birdeater is done and dusted, Weir and Clark already have their next film lined up. It’s not a story of two plucky filmmakers fighting against each other and the odds, but a coming-of-age thriller set at schoolies.

“We want to keep on making films in Australia that can reach an international audience,” says Weir. “We think there’s a growing appetite for international cinema in a way that we know what a South Korean thriller feels like, or what a Kiwi comedy feels like. We want to have our own brand of Australian films and keep on making that.”

Birdeater is in cinemas on July 18.

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