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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - I'm Kitty Green and I directed a movie
00:06 called The Royal Hotel, which is screening at TIFF.
00:08 The Royal Hotel is about two American girls
00:12 who are pretending they're Canadian
00:14 and they're backpacking in Australia.
00:16 They run out of money and they have to take a job
00:17 in an outback mining town in a pub,
00:21 dealing with a lot of the men, unruly men.
00:25 I'm Australian, but I'd never made a movie in Australia.
00:27 So I wanted to.
00:29 My mother was keen that I came back home for a bit.
00:32 So I kind of was looking for something I could do there.
00:35 And I found a documentary that was about
00:37 two Scandinavian women who are working in an outback pub.
00:41 And I thought it was kind of an interesting,
00:42 I hadn't seen that point of view.
00:43 I could see a lot of films in the outback,
00:44 but never through like a female lens.
00:46 So I thought that was an interesting
00:47 kind of jumping off point for a screenplay.
00:49 So I started writing something.
00:51 Well, I was kind of unsure about whether I wanted to do,
00:55 I saw this documentary and I thought I'd want to
00:58 maybe adapt it, but I wasn't a hundred percent on it.
01:00 And I worked with a company called Seesaw
01:03 and they were interested in,
01:05 Ian Canning had seen the assistant and was like,
01:07 do you want to do something in Australia?
01:08 We have an Australian office.
01:09 And so I floated it by some people at Seesaw
01:12 and they seemed to like the idea.
01:13 So I started sort of developing it.
01:14 I brought on a co-writer,
01:16 'cause I needed someone who'd spent a lot of time
01:18 out in regional Australia,
01:19 Oscar Redding, who's brilliant and crazy.
01:23 And the two of us kind of put the script together.
01:25 It was quite quick, really the process.
01:29 Yeah, he was, 'cause he was in Australia
01:31 and I was in New York at the time
01:32 and I would write all day and then send it to him
01:34 and he'd write all my night, which is Australian day.
01:36 And so we'd kind of constantly be kind of fighting
01:38 over this script, but yeah.
01:40 I mean, I guess we took kind of the premise
01:42 and kind of some early story beats
01:44 and then we sort of turned it into our own thing really.
01:46 Yeah.
01:47 Well, I'd worked with Julia Garner before
01:49 and I was looking for an excuse to work with her again.
01:51 So I think this project was also attractive to me
01:53 because she could play the role.
01:56 And then I was looking for a co-lead
01:58 and I needed someone that would fit in with her.
02:00 And I found Jessica Henwick, who's amazing.
02:03 And she just naturally had the right,
02:06 energetically felt like the right fit,
02:07 not only for the role, but just to fit in
02:10 with Julia and I on set and feel like part of a trio.
02:13 And she was fabulous.
02:15 And then I had to cast a bunch of men
02:18 and I found the most beautiful, lovely, kind guys
02:21 in Australia to kind of populate our cast.
02:25 Yeah. So we were really lucked out.
02:26 We shot in Adelaide.
02:29 We built the interiors of the pub in Adelaide
02:31 and we shot most of the exteriors in an outback,
02:34 like an abandoned pub a few hours North of,
02:38 it's not really outback to be honest,
02:39 it's just a few hours North of Adelaide,
02:40 but it was a remote location.
02:42 It's a bit of a cult clash movie.
02:43 It's a bit of a, it's sort of exploring power dynamics
02:46 and yeah, and gender dynamics and what's,
02:51 and yeah, it's doing a lot of things.
02:54 I hate summarising it, sorry.
02:56 But yeah, we're trying to throw a bunch of stuff at you
02:59 and it's a bit of a wild ride.
03:01 I like a little more control than I get in documentary.
03:04 So I think features, fiction is lovely
03:06 'cause I get to kind of fuss over every frame.
03:09 So yeah, I'd like to continue making fiction,
03:11 but I could make docs again.
03:13 I had a good time making documentaries.
03:15 I was sort of unaware of what happened with this.
03:18 Like it was sort of a weird one 'cause it was so,
03:21 it mostly screened in the film industry
03:24 and within, at the Telluride Film Festival,
03:27 which is all film executives,
03:29 most of them had worked at the Weinstein Company
03:31 and all of them were traumatised at the time.
03:33 And so it was really hard to gauge how much people,
03:36 like if, to see if anyone,
03:37 I didn't know if anyone enjoyed,
03:39 you know what I mean?
03:39 It's not really an enjoyable movie.
03:40 So it was hard to tell what reaction it was having.
03:42 It wasn't until, to be honest, it's not until lately.
03:46 Like when "She Said" came out,
03:47 everyone started talking about "The Assistant" again
03:48 and going, oh no, at the time, like,
03:50 but at the time I think there was a lot of trauma
03:52 and it was a hard movie to make
03:54 and so I think it was hard to really see where it sits.
03:57 But it seems to be remembered fondly,
03:59 which is a great, a sign it's still got a life actually,
04:02 which is good.
04:03 I just like, I'm attracted to subjects
04:04 that I find interesting
04:05 and I guess I like a little bit
04:07 to be a little bit provocative.
04:08 I mean, it's a lot of,
04:09 it's, you know, three years of your life to make a movie,
04:11 so it's nice to make a little bit of a bang,
04:14 I don't know, or a little bit of a mess as you do it.
04:18 Yeah, so I don't know, I guess it's just something,
04:20 I don't know, naturally I seem to gravitate
04:22 towards these things that are a little, yeah.
04:25 Well, we have a great relationship.
04:27 We don't need to communicate that much at this point.
04:28 We kind of, you know, I don't know actually,
04:30 to be honest, how much of it's her
04:31 and how much of it's me.
04:32 Like, we're kind of so interlinked at this point.
04:35 But also, I mean, her face is incredible.
04:37 It's like I can kind of,
04:39 my movies hang on her expressions, basically.
04:42 Her watching a room and assessing an environment
04:44 and whether it's threatening or not is,
04:47 that's what I do.
04:48 That's my whole kind of body of work now.
04:51 So yeah, I don't know.
04:53 We'd like to keep doing them.
04:54 Hopefully they'll keep letting us make movies.
04:56 Honestly, I don't get the budgets to have room to play.
05:01 Like, I really have very minimal coverage.
05:03 We shot this one in 25 days.
05:06 We shot the assistant 18 days.
05:07 Like, there's not enough room to try things.
05:10 We just have to be very specific about what we need.
05:12 So I'm very kind of precise, I guess.
05:15 And I'm very, I pre-plan everything
05:16 and then figure out how to execute it on the day.
05:19 And you know, you run out of time.
05:20 You gotta cut shots and you gotta figure out
05:21 then how to cover things.
05:22 It becomes a very technical exercise, I guess.
05:25 I'm hoping as I keep going,
05:27 that I get a little more time to just,
05:29 I'd love to have more surprises and things like that.
05:31 But it's, you just need to touch more money,
05:33 I think, to do that.
05:35 Yeah, I don't know.
05:35 It seems to be going quite well.
05:37 The reviews were great.
05:38 We're feeling good.
05:39 And I like the reactions from people.
05:40 It's a different, from the assistant,
05:42 everyone was afraid to walk up to me or something.
05:44 And this one, everyone's grabbing me
05:46 and saying they enjoyed it, which is great.
05:47 I still, you know, I don't,
05:49 still figuring out why, whether that's like,
05:51 you know, what the reason is there.
05:53 It's tricky 'cause I technically made it
05:55 for an Australian audience.
05:57 So I'm looking forward to getting home to Australia
05:59 to screen it and seeing what it does there.
06:02 And we've tested it.
06:02 We've done test screenings and things in Australia.
06:04 So we kind of know how it plays,
06:05 but we'll see when it's a bigger group, what happens.
06:08 But yeah, I don't know.
06:09 I like, we've had a, I don't know.
06:11 It's a weirdly like, I love it when women love it
06:13 and say, oh, I get it.
06:15 And that's what I went, but I also like,
06:16 it's not that clearly divided along gender lines.
06:19 You know, so who knows?
06:21 I just like it when anyone's sort of can relate to it.
06:23 Look, it's a complicated one,
06:26 but it's a film about, it's a film about a certain,
06:30 it's a film about like a certain aspect of sort of,
06:34 it's about sort of an aggression
06:36 that's associated with drinking culture.
06:37 That's a very, and it's about sort of,
06:40 I guess it sits in this kind of weird space of when you're,
06:43 I'll speak as a woman in the space like that.
06:47 You're never quite sure if it's a joke or a threat
06:49 or what's, where this kind of behaviour is,
06:52 how threatened you should feel
06:53 and when you should speak up for yourself.
06:54 So it's a film about that kind of weird,
06:56 the weird ambiguity of those spaces
06:58 where you feel a little unsure and you're not sure,
07:01 you know, how seriously to take something.
07:04 So it's sort of about,
07:04 the film is about standing up for yourself
07:06 and figuring out how to say no when it's enough.
07:09 And I hope that that's, yeah,
07:11 I hope people are kind of inspired by that
07:13 or, you know, can, yeah, enjoy it, I guess.
07:17 (upbeat music)
07:20 [Music]