The Aussie feature film comedy gets a welcome shake up in the form of Natalie Bailey and Lou Sanz’s pitch-black social satire Audrey.
Jackie van Beek plays Ronnie Lipsick, washed up TV star turned mother of two who envies her oldest daughter, Audrey (Josephine Blazier), for the theatrical life that lies ahead for her. Alongside her husband Cormack (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor), Ronnie pours all of the family funds into acting lessons for Audrey, and in the process they manage to neglect the needs of their disabled daughter Norah (Hannah Diviney). After Audrey dramatically falls off the roof of the family home and landing in a coma, Ronnie takes it upon herself to assume her daughters identity and embark on the youthful acting career that she had before she had children.
This synopsis barely scratches the surface of the outlandish and absurd lengths that Audrey takes audiences, with everything from Christian porn to high school relationship going dramatically wrong getting explored with welcome hilarity. While Audrey is the first feature film from director Natalie Bailey and writer Lou Sanz, their pedigree in Australian comedy is well established, with Bailey’s work on shows like The Unusual Suspects bringing her wide acclaim, while Lou Sanz helped shape a generation with work on shows like Life Support and more recently The PM’s Daughter.
The collaboration between Bailey and Sanz on Audrey suggests a working relationship that has been underway for years, however as Natalie details in the following interview, the two creatives met through a speed dating event, of sorts. Natalie goes on to discuss the history behind the film, the way that warped comedy plays a vital role in the story of Audrey, and the industry first changes that went into making the film on the Gold Coast.
Andrew F Peirce discussed the film with Natalie Bailey ahead of the theatrical release in Australia on 7 November 2024.
This interview has been edited for clarity purposes.
Let’s start by talking about how the film came about. I understand the process of how you and Lou got together is an interesting one.
Natalie Bailey: At the time, I was working for a company called Princess Pictures in Melbourne, and I went along to an Australian Writers Guild speed dating event. So, we speed-dated our way through the evening. I met Lou and she pitched me several projects, some which were for TV and this film. I was working as both a director and a producer at the time and I really wanted this film. I loved it. I wanted to direct it, but there was already a director attached, so I willed it my way over time, and it finally came [to me].
Originally, I was on board more as a consultant because I had a big comedy background. But finally, it was mine. Lou and I get along really well. We have the same sense of humor, the same darkness. It’s a match made in heaven.
Were you familiar with Lou’s work before the speed dating event?
NB: Yes and no. I’d only just moved back to Australia a little bit before that after living in England. I had been familiar with Lou because of another fantastic female director-writer, Sarah Jane Woulahan, who had directed a project of Lou’s (The Problematic World of Lou (You), 2011) that Lou had written and started when she was still in stand up. It was a web series way back before web series were really a thing. I’d seen that so I didn’t realise I knew who she was, but I did.
What was the aspect of the script that really pulled you towards this story?
NB: A couple things. I’m always very interested in trauma and how people don’t behave how you think they will when a trauma is happening. It’s something that I noticed in someone I’d met when I was about 18 or so. They were a teenager who was going through extreme trauma, and I was astounded by the way that he was cracking jokes, even though his mother had just been murdered. This was a very dark story. I wondered, ‘How is this kid cracking jokes? It literally happened a day or two ago.’ He was trying to process it and find a way to process it. It’s hysteria, really. It was such an awful moment. I was so young at the time, not knowing how to deal with it, so it was such a strange concept to me.
I’ve always been curious about the way people deal with trauma. Everyone wants to avoid talking to you. People just want lightness; they want a bit of brevity around them. They don’t want to have to do with the darkness of what’s happened all the time when they’ve experienced loss and other traumas. So that was really interesting.
Also, I’m an ex-actress, and I’ve seen my friends who are women and are writers, directors, actors that when they become parents, they have to give so much to nurture their children so that they thrive. Suddenly they have to take such a back seat. I’m sure the same thing happens to men at times. I was really curious about that. This was a project that really highlighted that, alongside what happens when someone is selfish enough to just go, ‘I’m not going to put them in the limelight anymore. I’m just going to go back to being me and doing what I want to do and go back to my goal.’ I love that.
I don’t have children. I never really wanted children. I thought about it, and I realised – and it’s not the only reason – that I would be a terrible mother because I’d potentially be so selfish. I’d never do a Ronnie, obviously, but I just really looked and went, ‘Oh no. I’m so into my career. I love my career, and I love my freedom and traveling and whatever. Could I take a back seat?’ I could have likely done at least a partial Ronnie and really tried to steer my child into living out my dreams that I didn’t fulfill.
Also, it’s a really interesting thing to look at in terms of looking back at your own parents. Sometimes it takes years to find out what their lives were. When you’re a teenager you have no clue; you’re so self-focused. You know lots of stories of teenagers being selfish, but what about when the parent decides to be selfish? That flip on it was quite interesting.
We’ve seen stories about being selfish before, but there is something that’s distinctly relatable about Ronnie, and that comes from the script and your direction. It also comes from the performance by Jackie van Beek. She has a great screen presence, but with Ronnie, I think she takes it to the next level. What’s it like working with Jackie and building a character like Ronnie with her?
NB: She is fabulous to work with. She’s so great. She commits 100% and she’s not afraid to take risks. And that’s what you want. I’ve worked in comedy for years, and it’s always been a thing for me in the workspaces I have that the crew and everyone else tries to build as best as possible a safe space for the actors to take risks. It’s all one big family. You make sure that that’s the environment that you set up.
Jackie is a writer and director in her own right, as well as performer. So, she begins by asking questions and making sure it’s truthful the same way that we like it to be truthful. As much as it is ludicrous at times, there has got to be honesty at the heart of it. These characters have to be people that are real, and [the actors] have to love their characters and believe in what they’re doing 100%, which Jackie does. She’s fabulous. She cracks us up. You go through a long casting process for your film, and then Jackie came along and now I can’t imagine anyone else in that role. She nailed it beautifully.
It’s not just her. There’s Jeremy, Hannah, and Josephine and the rest of the cast do an excellent job. What I’m in awe of is that this is a dark comedy. We don’t get to see these kinds of dark comedies in Australian cinema that often. I love the way that everyone involved walks up to a line and then agrees to step over it in certain ways. Can you talk about the discussions you had about stepping over the line of darkness and what’s acceptable?
NB: I sometimes think we’ve stepped on it, not over it. It’s finding that balance. In some people’s eyes, they’ll probably go, ‘No, that was over it.’ Look, there were discussions with Lou in the scripting process about what happens to Audrey? What happens to the family? What happens to Max? There were darker touches; Max was more of a sex pest than he is now. We were really trying to work out what that line is. We don’t think it’s in any way some people might find offensive. We don’t think it’s offensive, we think it’s dialing up reality.
I’ve heard it before, and I’m not kidding, parents say, ‘I wish we’d only had that one child. I wish we never had that second child, because this one’s a nightmare.’ Because I don’t have children, people confide in me. It’s this kind of guilty pleasure for people to go, ‘Oh yeah, sometimes it’s hard being a parent, and I would never take it to this extent, obviously, that’s fiction.’ But people have dark moments. They wouldn’t want to admit it to you. Sometimes they might. Hopefully people don’t flip. They keep on top of it, but their mind switches to it now and then. I think it’s just shining a light on it, to be honest and more than anything with a comic edge; it’s better to laugh at it.
Also, with one of our main characters having a disability, we have a lot of discussions about what is the line. There are some horrible things that are said, but that’s what these characters have to deal with and that’s the point of it. You can dance around it, but that’s why we’ve got such a strong central character who’s got a disability. She’s the one looking at the world going, “You’re all shit.” She’s one of our best viewpoints that we can see this family through.
I want to talk about the Australianness of the comedy. I feel a lot of people will think of the genuine nature of The Castle, for example, as being a prime example of what Australian comedy is, but with Audrey, you represent how I perceive Australian comedy to be. It can be extremely dark. It can be extremely bleak when we’re joking with friends or family. As you mentioned, people might say things in a private moment that is quite dark. Getting to see that style of comedy on screen felt so refreshing. This is the kind of comedy that I’ve been craving from an Australian context for a very long time.
NB: I’m influenced by Todd Solondz. Happiness (1996) and Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) were fantastic. He looks at characters who are having a pretty shit time in life, or very depressed characters, and we laugh at them, these people who are in misery. So there is an Australianness to it, as much as I’m pointing towards Todd Solondz, who is American, but if we go back and look at Muriel’s Wedding (1994), there’s a lot of darkness in that. People remember the ABBA songs and the joyful bits, but there was suicide, the mother, and there was an unhappy woman who was getting picked on, who was an outcast. People didn’t behave well in that film, either. So, I think that’s it. It’s just pointing a light on people not behaving well. The audience should find things shocking in the film, but that’s good. We’re definitely not trying to say these are good things.
It’s representation, not endorsement, right? And that’s what I love about the film. The dialogue in this is so rich. There’s a particular line that Hannah says when she sees Max, ‘Oh, it’s you, my rape victim.’ The delivery there is just through the roof, it’s so good. The commitment to the dryness of it is why it works so well. Can you talk about presenting those lines of dialogue and making sure that each of the people had the right tone for those kinds of line deliveries.
NB: Lou’s written such a fantastic script, and she is really the master of those fantastic characters and getting the one-liners perfect. Do you know what? As much as there are some really fresh faces here, I didn’t really have to explain it. I can’t say I ever really had to instruct anyone on how to deliver their lines. It was very easy. They were all fantastic.
It took us so long to find not only someone with cerebral palsy, but then to find someone who was witty was incredible. Hannah comes with natural wit. Everyone comes with natural wit. That’s why we cast them. Hannah had done a series, Latecomers (2022) for SBS, and we could see she could land comedy there, but more so we could see it when she was doing interviews with people, because she is an advocate in the disability and women’s rights sector.
We’ve got Jackie, who’s fantastic, and we’ve got Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, who’s such a beautiful clown and plays everything with such truth and such heart. And Josephine Blazier’s absolute commitment. She’s nasty, but you sometimes feel for her. We workshopped it. We had rehearsals. I think they just naturally got it to be honest. As soon as they knew that that’s the space we wanted to be in, they played it for real and be honest with their performances, and everyone just committed to that.
I’ve never seen Jeremy give a performance like this before. He appears to be having so much fun. Can you talk about working with him?
NB: Oh god. I love working with him so much. I can’t imagine not working with him ever again, really. When he did his casting, he really nailed it. He just got it so well, and he was so desperate. He said to me, he wanted this role so much once we cast him, he said he just knew who Cormack was. I look back at other work of his and go, ‘Wow, it’s such a big departure.’ I’m so glad he did this role, and I hope he does more things like this. I really do. I hope people see how fantastic he is. He’s such a great actor. He really is.
I love the vulnerability that he shows throughout the film. The levels that he goes to leads into the sex positive nature of the film. I imagine that was foundational on a script level, but can you talk about making sure that the sex positivity was presented authentically and right?
NB: These days we work a lot with intimacy coordinators, and everyone gets to have a discussion about what they’re comfortable with. Lou is very sex positive, and both of us are very open. So, for both of us, the important thing was, even with the Christian porn, we wanted to make sure that people were real. We both wanted to make sure it was the girl next door or the boy next door, not porn that, unfortunately, you end up watching and everyone’s got these perfect bodies and whatever and it screws up the idea for teenagers for what they think bodies should look like.
But also, being sex positive in that there are people who have open relationships or have had open relationships, so that’s really important to be able to represent that on screen. The same with sex and disability, it’s really important to represent that on screen. Championing that through was really important to us, as was making sure that everyone was comfortable. For some people it was the first time they’ve had to do these sorts of things on screen, so we had to really make sure it was handled well.
It feels safe, and it doesn’t feel exploitive. It feels like it’s amplifying and supporting the things that you’re putting on screen. That kind of leads into talking about the representation of disability on screen. Firstly, I want to talk about locations, because you shot this in Queensland, I understand it was really difficult to find accessible locations, such as the family home, that was accessible for Hannah. Can you talk about discovering that difficulty during pre-production?
NB: You’d find a house and go, ‘Oh, this is a great house,’ and then you realise, actually, Hannah can’t even access it because it has stairs. In the Gold Coast, a lot of things are built on hills. You’ll see the house that we’ve got in Audrey that it was not very accessible, but we had to make it accessible. It had a very steep drive up to the house, so she needed help getting back up towards the house. A lot of things are on two levels there.
I’ll be honest with you, there weren’t actually that many houses available in stock to actually be able to film in. We only probably saw a handful, and that was a post-COVID thing, really, because everyone moved to the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast, and suddenly everything had been sold. So, we found this one house that I think was in the middle of being sold, it had holes in it and everything. We loved that it was a bit cracked. We were looking for something that was a bit shit. Although we were looking for a different type of crap, I think we originally were looking for kind of more cookie cutter house, but those sorts of suburbs were all too perfect. We were looking for something that was cookie cutter but hadn’t been maintained.
Anyway, we found that house and we built it into the film that she needs help getting down the stairs. We just decided to embrace it. There was a point where we talked about putting a stair life in, and it was pretty much impossible. So, we just went with it, ‘Actually, it’s interesting that they poured all the money into the other childs dance routine and have made no allowances and haven’t actually fixed the house so that their child who has no ability to be able to get from one floor to the next and has no autonomy, can get down the stairs.’
We got ramps built in so Hannah could actually access the space and for the fiction. That was provided by JobAccess. They came on as partners and sponsored that part of it so Hannah could access the space. A makeup truck was also made accessible for her, and it was the first makeup truck, if not Australia, then at least in Queensland that had been made wheelchair accessible. Good things come out of that. She was, in many ways, a trailblazer.
I was really impressed with how the producers went about trying to solve those problems and finding partners to solve it with, because otherwise it becomes financially not viable, which is ridiculous. If we can’t make a film because we can’t include actors with disability, then that’s a massive problem in our industry, because then you’re not accounting for it in scripts. Screen Queensland and Screen Australia are really great, and bumped up the production fee so that we could just because it does have its challenges. I hope that in future productions that’s always looked at and made sure that there can be disability access and funding so filmmakers can achieve what they want to achieve.
I feel like you’ve tapped into a great talent. I had seen Hannah’s work before, but this is her first feature film, and I can’t wait to see where she goes from here. I hope that people tap into her talent and make sure that she’s given the chance to continue creating great characters, because she’s just phenomenal here.
As we lead into wrapping up, it’s interesting you mention being away from Australia for a while. I’m curious then what it’s like to come back home and to be able to tell Australian stories again on screen. What does that mean for you as a filmmaker?
NB: It’s great look, because I used to write short films and I made some short films back in the Nineties, and I went away because I felt like I had nothing to say. I went away and thought, ‘Oh, I need to see more of the world and experience life.’ It’s difficult to stay in Queensland in particular and make films. Well, I felt it was, particularly back then. Particularly in the Nineties when we got a lot of stuff coming in to the studios from America. At that time, we were getting a lot of television shows like Beastmaster coming in. I didn’t know what story I had to tell at that time, and I’ve waited a really long time to find the right story. I’ve been attached to other films in the UK. I made a lot of television here (Bay of Fires, Joe vs. Carole, The Unusual Suspects), but I’m so glad that my first time, as much as I wish it would have happened a many years ago, I’m so glad it’s this one and that we can be brave with it.
The Gold Coast is not exactly my home on the Sunshine Coast, but it’s great. It feels really fantastic. Then you’re circling back and working with these people who you might have gone to uni with. Two of my crew members went to my High School. It was so fantastic. It was such a joy to bring back this community of people, and to be able to work with a DoP and an editor I worked on The Unusual Suspects with; it’s so lovely to work with people from Australia who are great at their craft.
I feel like Lou has just been hidden away, not that she meant to be hidden away, but no one’s really taken enough notice of how great she is. I’m so glad I found her, because there’s people like her out there who have these warped sensibilities and fantastic, unique lives. She’s lived a full life and has lots of stories to tell. We haven’t heard the end of her yet. I hope her and I get to make another film together. That would be my dream.
I really hope so too, because I tell you what the collaboration that you both created here is just phenomenal. I think it’s a really brilliant film. I’m looking forward to seeing this in the cinema and cackling alongside everybody else. Congratulations.
NB: Thank you. We’ve had a great reception across the world. I just came back from the London Film Festival, and it’s so good to be in large cinemas with 350 people all laughing. It’s such a joy. I sat in on a few ones at South by Southwest and in London and at MIFF, we had a 500-seater there, and it’s just been fantastic to hear a full cinema laughing. I really hope people come to the cinema watch it, because it’s a great place to watch it. Somebody said it’s like the horror version of a comedy, where you’re just gasping with shock.
They’re the best films. There’s a film that Robin Williams did with Bobcat Goldthwaite called The World’s Greatest Dad, which is a similar story to Audrey, and I’d love to watch a double with both films because they feel like they’re two films in conversation with each other.
NB: I’ve never seen it, but it is something that Lou has referenced before. We were looking at Muriel’s and Todd Solondz, but American Beauty is another one that is fucked up, really. It’s a very dark film. Tonally, I feel that’s got a relationship to this. It’s a lot darker, obviously, but it is warped.
