“They’re noisy, they’re messy, they’re reckless, but they’re living intensely and their loves and losses should be in no way considered any less important, or real, or true than the ones we experience when we’re 30, 40 or 50.” – Rhys Graham

In the weeks leading up to their final year of school, best friends, Laura (Lily Sullivan) and Billie (Ashleigh Cummings), spend their summer days sunbathing on the banks of Kambah pool and riding their bikes through the nature strips and echoing underpasses that map out Canberra’s suburban streets.At night, the girls meet up with Laura’s boyfriend, Danny (Toby Wallace), whom Billie is madly but secretly in love with, where they rove around house parties, getting wasted and stirring up trouble.

When Billie’s mother, an overly committed social worker (Maya Stange), brings home yet another kid from the office, Billie is quick to defend her space. An old caravan sits out the back of their home where Billie’s unwelcome houseguest,Isaac (Aliki Matangi), will stay with the intention of keeping out of trouble. A reckless night out in a stolen car, at first, brings the group closer than ever. But as fires threaten the outskirts of town, the secrets that once lay dormant amongst friends begin to surface. Just as relationships are starting to flourish and characters begin to mature, everything falls apart.

Galore is a stunningly accurate portrayal of suburban youth culture, exploring the complex relationships and raw emotions we often experience for the first time in our late teens. Effortlessly matched with Rhys Graham’s authentic and alluring screenplay, Stefan Duscio’s exquisite cinematography captures a side of our nation’s capital which is rarely explored outside of local photography and film.

Coming-of-age dramas are seldom this authentic, with exceptional performances from the entire cast, in particular Lily Sullivan (from ABC’s Rake) and Ashleigh Cummings (Puberty Blues, Dance Academy, Tomorrow When the War Began)  whose onscreen connection is wonderfully natural and intimate.

Galore is Writer and Director Rhys Graham’s first feature film and hopefully one of many to come. If you have ever lived in Canberra, or any suburban town for that matter, I urge you to see this film.

Writer and Director Rhys Graham talks about Galore

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Galore is set in a time and place that is very much a reality for some of the people who might go to see the film. How important was it for you to make everything appear as authentic and real as possible?

It was hugely important for me. I think the onscreen reality of having a world that feels authentic in terms of time and place is vital to the audience’s experience.

The other thing about having that authenticity is that it’s important for those of us behind the scenes to feel like what we’re doing is creating a world that we can one hundred percent believe in. All of those subtle things like the music, the fashion, or even going to the same locations that were the kind of places that people went to at that time. All those things felt like what we were doing was being really true to that world. So the actors could completely believe in the places that they were a part of and the experience they were a part of.

Was Canberra always a part of the story?

The characters, as I wrote them and in my mind, came so specifically from Canberra… As I was writing the script, [the characters] were always so alive in those locations. Whether it was hanging out at Kambah pool, riding around the streets in Kambah or down by Tuggeranong Lake. Those kinds of experiences, for me, were what I was trying to describe in the script. These were real world characters.

A lot of times people said why can’t you just set it in Melbourne, it’s going to be a lot cheaper, it’s going to be easier, and I would say, it absolutely has to come from this place. On top of that it’s a really cinematic place, the quality of light and landscape there, I really wanted to explore and convey that on screen.

How did you find that kind of authenticity, knowing none of the actors were local?

It was more just about them being really familiar with the landscape.

One of the things that I did [to prepare everyone] was have a very long rehearsal period prior to the shoot. I just took [the cast] around to a whole lot of places and got them really familiar with these areas. I gave them bikes and was like go off in character and just hang out.

They all said that was a really great process for them, because rather than working on their scenes or the text, they were building up a connection between the characters and the locations. For me when you’re doing realist stuff, or you’re trying to get emotional authenticity, it’s just those little details that are really, really important.

When Billie jumps the back fence of her house, I literally got [Ashleigh Cummings] to do that over and over again, so that it was something she was really physically familiar with. So that when she did it for the first time on screen, it didn’t feel like an actor doing it, it felt like Billie the character, who was used to doing that her entire life.

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Were you worried about people reacting badly or becoming emotional from the scenes that cover the 2013 Canberra bushfires?

We spent a lot of time talking with people who were involved and, I guess because my family was there and lots of people we knew were there, I hope people didn’t think that we were just dropping it in and using it as some kinds of glib visual idea.

We really wanted to create the sense that this story could have happened in the month leading up to the fires and these are real kids, real characters. That was the world we wanted to create.

I would hope that we treated the events of what happened with respect. For [Billie] as a character, it’s about her acknowledging that these catastrophic things occur and sometimes it’s hard to make sense of them and hard to look them in the eye. There are things that are bigger than us and we have to deal with those on a regular basis throughout our lives.

Were the fires meant to be a metaphor for all of the chaos going on in the characters’ lives?

I didn’t want [the fires] to be a metaphor, because they were such a wild experience. It was actually more that I wanted it to be a real world setting.

Billie is so confined, so involved in her friendship with Laura; she is so involved with Danny. She is so myopic in everything, that the idea that she is living this intense life while there is this environmental disaster on the edge of her town I found really interesting.

I guess I’ve always been inspired by films that have a real world setting so I really wanted that. I think sometimes when we see elemental things like fire and water we instantly assume that they are a kind of character allegory, but what I wanted to do I suppose was more than that… because that’s the reality for lots of people that live on the edges of the city.

Every summer or two there’s a catastrophe just waiting to happen. It’s not an exceptional thing but unfortunately sometimes, like in Canberra, it is an enormous community tragedy.

Billie is the strongest character in the film. She is destructive, at times quite selfish, but still relatable. When you were writing that character, was it your intention for her to be perceived in that way?

I didn’t even want her to appear to be destructive in a selfish way. She genuinely feels enormous love for her friend, but she is falling in love with the wrong guy and in a way all she is trying to do is be true to her heart and unfortunately she just keeps making really bad choices.

In Australian character drama, I think we’re really used to people doing the right thing and we have this real worry about people being likeable. But for me, I am interested in people who are doing the kinds of things we can relate to and most people are at the mercy of their desires or their lapses of reason when they make really bad choices. They’re full of regret and that’s a really human experience.

I think we expect teenagers to behave somehow better than we do as adults. To have a complex character that has a good heart, but out of recklessness and impulsiveness would do the wrong thing, I felt like that was something we can understand and empathize with.

Galore explores the complex and raw emotions that many of us experienced in our teens and takes it seriously. Do you think sometimes society glosses over the relationships and emotional battles that many teenagers experience?

The reason I wanted to make this film was, I guess it came from a frustration with films that oversimplify teenage relationships. The traditional “coming-of-age” film is about a young person, usually coming to an understanding with their parents or their culture or their society at large. For me, my experience with young people is mostly that the most difficult and challenging experiences they have in a kind of moral and human sense are actually their relationships with their friends and discovering love and loss for the first time; the other stuff comes later.

I think there is a really destructive and deceptive relationship that mainstream culture has with young people. More and more as you get older, you hear your peers talking about kids with this kind of contempt and in a way it’s a bit of a ‘they should be seen and not heard’ throwback…While I’m older, I still remember vividly the relationships I had, the romances I had, the way I fell in love, the way I grieved, the way I discovered things. It was just as complex and as illuminating to me when I was 17 as it is now. Maybe more so.

I think the way we dismiss kids is based on the intense fear we get, gradually, as we get older where we need to try and control and constrain everything, whereas kids’ lives spill out and over. They’re noisy, they’re messy, they’re reckless, but they’re living intensely and their loves and losses should be in no way considered any less important or real or true than the ones we experience when were 30, 40 or 50.

I wanted to ensure that at no point was this film a moral judgment on any of the choices that they make. Really it’s about four characters that are all trying to live well and all trying to love well. Most kids are doing that.

What’s next for you?

We are currently financing a film called The Warmth and I’m working on getting up a low budget film called Fire Arm at the moment. We’re also focusing on launching our indy film studio BIRD as well as the usual madness of little jobs, music clips and writing…

the essentials

What: Galore
Where: Playing exclusively at Palace Electric in New Acton
When: Until Wednesday 9 July.
Tickets: www.palacecinemas.com.au/movies/galore