Award winning director Sophie Hyde had the whole film world talking when back in 2015 her film 52 Tuesdays garnished great reviews both here in Australia and overseas. Now Hyde returns to the big screen with her latest film – Animals – a film that is based on the novel by Emma Jane Unsworth and mixes comedy and drama in a way that very few films do these days.
“It’s funny, you’re right it had been awhile,” says Hyde as HEAVY Cinema chats to her in Melbourne and mentions that there was a four year gap between 52 Tuesdays and Animals. “I’d been making some television and you know directing is all parts so when I first got into it I felt a little lost…actually not lost that is not the right word… it felt like I was walking on sand without any practice. It was a bit of a challenge, but now I see the time where I am working on the script and the development as part of that process so I didn’t have that same feeling. Luckily I had made this television series, Fucking Adelaide, in between so I felt fresh, I think it would have been hard to get back into it if I hadn’t done that. But it was great, it is a real privilege and a pleasure to direct a film.”
That leads me to ask the question what it was like for Hyde to go to Ireland and direct away from Adelaide for the first time. “Well I was lucky in that I got to take some of my team with me,” she explains. “The cinematographer, the make-up artist, the costume designer, the sound-recordist, producer, so I felt like I had some of my trusted team… that was great. It was a real challenge though because we were thrown into a city and we had to get to know it really quickly, not just know it but understand where our characters would be. But whenever you are making something your eyes start to look at things differently, so we got to meet Dublin the city through filmmakers eyes which was brilliant. It was tough though because you get shown things through a location manager, who is great but they view things like a film set and there are things that have been shot before so we had to find people that we could trust and would know the characters really well to try and tap into a really authentic Dublin, but we did and that was really good.”
In the full interview which can be listened to on this page Sophie also talks about the casting choices and what it was like working with two up and coming stars.
Animals is in select cinemas now.
