By Garry Maddox
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It’s become a familiar scenario at the movies: psychological thrillers and horror films about traumatised mothers dealing with disturbing family crises.
There was Essie Davis in The Babadook almost a decade ago, then came Toni Collette in Hereditary, Lupita Nyong’o in Us, Jamie Lee Curtis in the rebooted Halloween, Emily Mortimer in Relic, Rebecca Hall in Resurrection, Naomi Watts in Goodnight Mommy and, now, Sarah Snook – Shiv herself – in Run Rabbit Run.
Australian director Daina Reid, who cast Snook as a divorced fertility doctor whose seven-year-old daughter Mia becomes freakily obsessed with an adopted white rabbit and wants to be called “Alice”, reckons she knows why it is happening so often.
“There’s so much horror in just being a woman in the world”: Daina Reid, who has directed the psychological thriller Run Rabbit Run.Credit: Simon Schluter
“Oh my god, this is gonna sound terrible but there’s so much horror in the female experience,” Reid says. “There’s so much horror in just being a woman in the world, what you have to deal with and the terrors that can come for you. Your own vulnerability.
“So if you dig into that, it’s sadly fertile ground to go ‘what is this that terrifies me?’, ‘what is this that could happen to me?’”
Reid has gone from being an actor who once parodied Pauline Hanson on the ’90s comedy series Full Frontal to an Emmy-nominated director of the American series The Handmaid’s Tale, Space Force, Young Rock and Shining Girls.
She thinks Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook launched the trend of women-centred psychological thrillers/horror films that raise questions about whether disturbing events are supernatural or psychological in their origin.
“It’s becoming a genre in itself because there’s so much to explore,” she says.
On a Zoom call, Reid is talkative and direct. It’s easy to see why she is part of a generation of women who have gone from directing Australian series to quality American and British television, among them Kate Dennis (The Handmaid’s Tale), Catriona McKenzie (The Walking Dead), Kate Woods (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Jet Wilkinson (How To Get Away With Murder), Kitty Green (Servant) and Jessica Hobbs (The Crown). Now and then, they are directing films as well.
Run Rabbit Run, which is having an Australian premiere at Sydney Film Festival, is a prestigious package, starting with being novelist Hannah Kent’s first film script after acclaim for Burial Rites, The Good People and Devotion.
Sarah Snook in Run Rabbit Run, which is having its Australian premiere at Sydney Film Festival.Credit: Netflix
It has also brought Snook back home for her first Australian film in five years after shining as Shiv Roy in Succession, the hit series which finishes on Monday.
Around filming four cracking seasons – earning her two Emmy nominations so far – Snook’s international work has included the films An American Pickle, Pieces Of A Woman and the coming comic drama The Beanie Bubble.
But she was only cast in Run Rabbit Run when a COVID delay meant Elisabeth Moss had to drop out.
“Everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it?,” Reid says. “You go ‘it’s very sad that we don’t get to work with Elisabeth Moss’ but out of that comes this incredible opportunity and Sarah is phenomenal in this film. She’s phenomenal in bloody everything, let’s face it, but, in this, she just went to so many very hard places to go.”
While Snook has never shied from challenging roles, including a gender-swapping agent in the sci-fi film Predestination and a passionate St Joan on stage for the Sydney Theatre Company, Run Rabbit Run turns on her eerily gripping performance.
Just as haunting is young newcomer Lily LaTorre as Mia/Alice, with Damon Herriman playing Sarah’s supportive ex-husband Pete and Greta Scacchi her estranged mother Joan.
Backed by a Screen Australia program that encourages women to make films and TV shows centering on women’s stories, Run Rabbit Run was bought by Netflix after its world premiere at Sundance this year.
Before they worked together, Reid was a fan of Kent’s first novel, which is about the last woman to be publicly executed in Iceland.
“I went to Iceland because of Burial Rites,” she says. “Before all this happened, that book had been so impactful on me. It had real darkness to it that I absolutely identified with, so much so that I dragged my whole family off to a 36-hour flight.”
Producers Anna McLeish and Sarah Shaw (Relic, Snowtown) approached Kent to see if she would like to work with them.
Kent says that after “quite a funny pitch meeting, where I probably made some terrible pitches based on failed short stories”, she started talking about what was going to be her third novel.
Sarah Snook as Sarah and Lily LaTorre as Mia in Run Rabbit Run.Credit: Netflix
“I was really interested in the idea of children who report previous lives, specifically from the perspective of a parent who undergoes a kind of dislocation or alienation from their child throughout that process,” she says.
The producers were keen; Reid, who had directed the SBS series Sunshine for them, signed on.
“Horror is a wonderful place to play with discomfort and ambivalence and things that happen that aren’t necessarily spoken about in society,” Kent says. “There are so many aspects of parenthood but particularly motherhood – what makes a good mother, how to be a good mother, how to be mothered, how to be a daughter – that still haven’t necessarily entered the mainstream dialogue.”
Kent’s novels are all being developed for films: Luca Guadagnino has been down for a while to direct Jennifer Lawrence in Burial Rites for Sony Tri-Star; she is adapting The Good People, about three women who conspire to free a young boy from evil spirits in 19th century Ireland, for Aquarius Films and Ireland’s Port Pictures; and she is also scripting Devotion, a love story between two young women in 1836 Prussia, for Dollhouse Pictures.
After she was given the creative freedom to write the script like a novelist, Kent says Reid gently nudged it from psychological drama to psychological horror.
It was a collaboration that both screenwriter and director thoroughly enjoyed.
So, how does a Pauline Hanson impersonator managed to go so far as a director?
Growing up in Perth with a father who was an electrician and a mother who worked with an all-women housing agency, Reid and sister Kendra’s enthusiasm for dancing had them performing on TV variety shows.
She studied film and television with Judith Lucy and Frances O’Connor at what is now Curtin University, took acting classes at Hayman Theatre then, at 21, started studying acting at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
That led to a role TV series The Flying Doctors – “I played a housewife addicted to Valium” – and acting in the comedies Jimeoin, Shaun Micallef’s World Around Him and Full Frontal. But Reid had long wanted to be on the other side of the camera.
“I wanted to be a director ever since I saw Star Wars, which is really, really daggy but true,” she says. After a directing attachment, she directed episodes of Blue Heelers then worked her way up to Offspring and such mini-series as Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo, Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War, Never Tear Us Apart, The Secret River and Romper Stomper.
Her first film was the 2010 comedy I Love You Too, written by and starring Peter Hellier.
Reid credits friend Kate Dennis, whose directing work in the US has included Glow, New Amsterdam and Run, with helping her get a start in Los Angeles
On the ’90s TV comedy Full Frontal: Ross Williams as Alexander Downer, Glenn Butcher as Jeff Kennett, John Walker as John Howard and Daina Reid as Pauline Hanson.Credit: Seven
“I got to stay at her house and she guided me a lot when I went over and started meeting people,” she says.
In 2018, Reid was terrified on her first day directing The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian series starring Elisabeth Moss, in Canada.
“You get to a certain age and you’ve had a lot of experience but you’re that incredibly nervous,” she says. “And it was 20 below that first day. I really quickly worked out that I had the wrong clothes on but there’s nothing that can prepare you for mid-winter in Canada. It’s just berserk.”
With a first name that was sometimes misspelt as “Diana” in her early television credits – “It’s a Latvian name but we’re not Latvian” – Reid lives in Melbourne with her horticulturist husband Tim Uebergang and their teenage sons Austen and Henry.
So, did she bring her own experience of motherhood to the film?
“Absolutely my own fears,” she says. “Absolutely my own insecurities. And absolutely my own vulnerabilities.
“No-one tells you how vulnerable you become when you become a parent. And the fear of your own inadequacy is so great.”
In Run Rabbit Run, the death of Sarah’s father brings unresolved feelings to the surface. That subject felt brutally real to Reid when her own father died the week before she started work, which made her appreciate Snook’s strength of character in supporting her through the shoot.
“At the same time, my dad was 85 years old,” she says. “He’d lived an amazing life. So you go ‘well, that’s happened, now we can turn it into something really authentic and real for this character’.”
While many more women are now directing films and TV shows, Reid thinks progress has not been quick enough.
“As a woman, you get judged very harshly,” she says. “God forbid that someone somewhere says you’re difficult because then it’s all over. So there’s still a long way to go. I feel like Australia was nurturing female directors a little bit earlier than America [and now] Australian women are doing extremely well overseas and at home.”
So, without seeming difficult, how does she get her way on set?
Reid laughs. “I like a set that’s fun,” she says. “I love what I do and there’s no point gettin’ stressed or gettin’ too worried about it. It’s about enjoying all these people and all their brilliance. And feeling lucky to be there and enjoying yourself.
“We all work hard and sacrifice a lot to even be in this industry in Australia. So I want everyone to have a good time when they go to work.”
Email Garry Maddox at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.
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