From its genesis, “Nitram” was designed to be a difficult film to watch. Tackling the events leading up to the 1996 Port Arthur mass shooting that took place in Tasmania, director Justin Kurzel (“True History of the Kelly Gang”) and writer Shaun Grant were treading similar waters as they did in their debut feature, 2011’s “The Snowtown Murders,” utilizing cinema’s ability to bring light to the pain of real-life atrocities and ask important questions as to how these violent men became the way they were, and what gave them the tools to take the actions they did.
Intentionally never using the real name of the perpetrator of this shooting, “Nitram” (the nickname by which the man is referenced) nevertheless centers its focus on him, as played by Caleb Landry Jones. Winning the Best Actor award at Cannes in 2021 for his performance, Jones fulfills the promise he’s been demonstrating in livewire scene-stealing parts for the past decade, running away with this leading role by unnervingly inhabiting the headspace of this troubled young man.
Described by Kurzel as a “Jacobian four-actor ensemble,” this tense drama revolves predominantly around the character’s relationships with his parents, played by Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia, and a woman he meets named Helen (Essie Davis), an outcast similar to the man, who forges a friendship with him that seems to be his one hope to veering off the path we know he’s inevitably heading towards.
It’s a grueling, deeply unsettling watch, as Kurzel, Grant and Jones fully embed us into the character’s perspective not in an attempt to justify his actions, but rather to demonstrate how he was a real person, not some cartoon psychopath that other films may portray him as. We see the warning signs that were there all along, and the ways that the institutions around him failed to take the sort of action they could have to possibly prevent this mass shooting from taking place — namely Australia’s shockingly flimsy gun laws, which allowed him easy access to firearms without a permit.
In our review from its Cannes premiere, Caroline Tsai described the film as “a perplexing, though powerful character study of a person capable of doing extraordinary evil and feeling almost nothing,” continuing to say, “it’s an indictment of a broken system whose laxities have facilitated and even encouraged the perpetuation of this very type of crime.”
As the film prepares for release in the United States, I spoke with Justin Kurzel about tackling this delicate subject matter, what draws him and Grant into these murky moral waters, and the process of working with his actors — both his ace veteran stars and the first-time actors who crucially filled out the film’s supporting roles.
Something that’s admirable about your films is the way they leave the audience with questions we should be asking ourselves. Seeing as this isn’t the first time you and Shaun Grant have collaborated on a film that confronts real-life violence head-on, what were the kinds of questions you were asking yourself when you made the decision to tackle this subject matter?
Shaun and I both grew up in the country, and I think we both come from communities and places where we’ve been around violence and we’ve been around people that feel familiar and recognizable. Usually the thing that comes through in the writing and gets us interested is this feeling like this is someone I remember from my childhood or someone that I passed the other day down the street. There’s always something familiar in Shaun’s writing that makes me tap into something and go, ‘Okay, well here is this horrific event and an individual that has made such horrific choices, but who were they? And what was leading to those events that felt every day or felt recognizable?’
It’s a taboo subject to make a film in Australia about the Port Arthur shootings — it’s an event that’s incredibly difficult to talk about for a lot of Australians, especially in Tasmania. I was really moved by how Shaun created a way into the event that allowed me to understand how a character had gotten to this place of being so dangerous and walking into a gun store and buying that sort of weaponry. I think a lot of that had to do with the feelings I had towards that family that were having to live and be around this individual, and it felt like a family that was from my same street.
Australia has been a violent place, and is a violent place — there are pretty dark chapters in its history that have been settled on violence. There’s a long history there, in terms of what settlement did to the Indigenous culture here in Australia. That dark past is all present there when we try to understand why this place is so violent. But I think it’s the way Shaun is able to create film scripts that speak to me in a very personal way, and I can see the people in them and feel like I’ve almost met them before.
Other filmmakers may have chosen to focus the story on the macro community, or maybe even taken the angle of the police trying to apprehend somebody after this event has happened. What did you find to be the challenges and the benefits of approaching the film from your main character’s POV?
Yeah, it was very hard. It’s very hard to take a point of view like this, but I think Shaun thought it was the only way really — to take the audience into the mind and into the life of someone like this and walk in their footsteps. Then you get the absolute absurdity of seeing that guy walking into that gun shop after we’ve lived with them for the last 70 minutes of the film, and we can see the absurdity of him being able to get all that weaponry without a license.
That was a huge part of it, but I think it was the other characters that really started to shape the nuance of the film, and I think started to question how someone like that becomes an outlier. And what our responsibility is, the community and citizens, to those that are starting to walk in the wrong direction. The mother’s story and the father’s story became so much deeper and such a stronger part of the film from that point of view, giving me a more domestic insight into what led to it.
When Shaun was researching it, and even when we were talking about it, there was something about the ease at which it all happened, the kind of simplicity in a way in which he stepped towards that tragedy, that was probably the most confronting thing. There were warning signs everywhere, and yet he still walked step-by-step towards it. That sort of train crash is something that we wanted an audience to really feel through the film.
When something like this happens, blame can tend to fall on the parents for not being able to see those signs, but “Nitram” takes a very multi-dimensional approach to how we see them. We feel their frustration with their son, but also the fact that they still care for him and want to support him. They just maybe don’t know how to.
It was really, I think, Judy who brought a certain perspective to the mother. On the page, the mother was written a little colder than the way Judy eventually played her. She was very aware of creating empathy for the mother, that allowed you to understand her fatigue and allowed you to understand the role that she had, which was really different from the father, who was dealing with all the challenges of this kid by being the enabler, by being the “yes man.” Suddenly the discipline, the rules, and the day-to-day grind all fell in the mother’s lap. Just exploring how a relationship between a mother and a father, between a wife and a husband, can be and how much of an effect it can have on the child. There’s just no help around her.
That was the biggest thing we saw — no one in 1996 in Australia, in Tasmania, was talking about mental illness. He had been expelled from six schools, he was never diagnosed with anything. He was always just pumped with pills. That would have been very, very tough for his mom, and I think that side of the story becomes really important. Her fear, too, in what he’s becoming, and how she’s slowly seeing this trainwreck about to happen, and what can she do? What power does she have in that? How responsible is she? All those sorts of questions. I think that we have constantly, as parents with our own children, found ourselves asking if we are doing a good job. Are there decisions that we are making that are going to suddenly have some impact down the track? It’s really hard being a parent. What probably started very much as a gun reform film quickly became a family drama, and that aspect brought a particular nuance to the storytelling. That was really important.
As difficult of a film as it is to watch, the actors are consistently put in grueling circumstances. That scene with Caleb just beating the hell out of Anthony is so tough to see. What was the relationship between the actors like on set? Were they keeping a bit of a distance from each other or did that tension and those walls come down between takes?
It was really unusual because we made it through COVID and we had to be in a bubble. In Australia, we had really, really strict COVID rules. Victoria, where we filmed, was basically in lockdown for the whole year. Actually, longer. So, everyone was feeling a real sense of isolation anyway, and we all lived in this conference center where we had these rooms and we all ate together in the morning and then came back and ate together again and drank together. We were kind of living in each other’s suitcases. There was something very close there, but yeah you could feel the dynamics of the characters in the way the actors were with each other. Caleb was definitely very immersed in the character, and that’s his approach. He’s very method in a way, which is what I love about him. He doesn’t really have a turn-off button. Judy and Anthony, on the other hand, very much need that time and distance away from their characters, and to be able to look at them from the outside a bit.
It’s weird on set, though, whenever you’re doing those big scenes. Like that scene with Caleb beating up Anthony. They’re great scenes. Anthony probably hasn’t done a scene like that for a while, and there was a real adrenaline about the day and you do suddenly realize that that’s what they love doing, and that’s what they pine for. A lot of the time they can’t do that meaty stuff, so it was a really exciting day for both of them. It was really hard, and Caleb laid into him. Anthony, I think at the beginning of the scene, was like, “Yeah, yeah, go for it,” then after two takes was kind of like, “Yeah, okay, maybe I’m done now.” [Laughs] I always find, the same with “Snowtown,” that when you’re doing films that do have incredibly intense, serious subject matter, there is a lightness on set that organically happens that allows you to be able to manage it and get through all that stuff. So, surprisingly the set is actually much lighter and calmer than you’d think.
You’ve mentioned that apart from the main actors in the film, a lot of the supporting parts were filled with first-time actors. The travel agent was a real travel agent, the gun shop owner was a real gun shop owner. What impact did it have on the film to cast those roles with people who really had those jobs?
We did a similar thing with “Snowtown,” where a lot of the actors in there were first-timers and were from the community. They bring a lot of authority, in terms of who they were playing and the experiences that the characters had were right on their doorstep. I was determined to have a level of authenticity in this film as well, mainly with those fringe characters. So, the doctor was a real doctor, the travel agent was a real travel agent, and the car salesman was a real car salesman. There was something I enjoyed about when someone really knows a particular job, or how to do a particular thing. It’s pretty amazing seeing that come to life on screen. It’s sort of second nature, and adds a ton. A lot of the film is this really intense, Jacobian four-actor ensemble with those main actors, but then around them to bring in these really authentic people, I think it gave the film a base level of immersion that you are able to believe in and feel as though the world existed.
It’s certainly an incredibly immersive film. Before I let you go, I did want to ask you about the Apple series you’re involved with, “Shantaram.” I know it’s been through quite the difficult production schedule for a while now, and I think the last update we got was that principal photography had finished. Do you know where the series is at now, or when we might be seeing it?
I don’t know much about where it’s at right now. I’m an EP on it, and was part of setting it up in the first two episodes, but they had a change of showrunner and then COVID happened and I became unavailable. So, I know they’ve finished shooting, but I don’t know much about where they’re at with it now. My involvement with it was quite a while ago.
“Nitram” will be released in theaters, on digital and AMC+ on March 30th.