Filmmaker Andréas Giannopoulos’ short film Friends Of Mine won him the prestigious award of Best Direction in a Student Film at the 2021 Australian Directors Guild awards. Made as part of his Masters project at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), Andréas’ short explores the lives of a creative group of people, with Alex Donnelly’s Lou acting as the conduit to explore the lives of Elena (Chi Nguyen) who is steadying herself to reveal her feelings for Lou, and Sylvie (Emily Joy), who Lou has fallen for. On paper, Friends Of Mine feels like a traditional love triangle scenario, but with Andréas’ considered direction and explorative script, that groundwork allows for a deeper exploration of the emotional bonds that tie us together.
This interview, recorded in July, echoes the vibe of the 2022 Melbourne International Film Festival, embracing the vibe, mood, and culture of Melbourne as a whole. Shot with on warm 16 mm film, Friends Of Mine is a delicate and tender embrace of autumnal Melbourne with all its beauty. Additionally, Andréas discusses his influences, from Howard Hawks to David Cronenberg, and the visual difference of Sydney and Melbourne.
What is the interest for you in shooting on film?
Andréas Giannopoulos: I feel, first of all, that we’re so bombarded by digital images these days. It makes sense to set yourself apart and have something that looks different. I think, as well, it looks better. I think the benefits just far outweigh the negatives. And it really doesn’t cost that much more either if you’re smart about how you do it. Like I did with Friends Of Mine, I got student discounts on both the stock itself and the scanning. But also, I feel like the amount of money that you have to spend on either lenses or production design or colour-grading in order to get digital looking nice and looking professional, you can just spend just shooting it on film. You can point a film camera at almost anything and it looks nice.
It might be hard for you to answer this but why is there such an antagonism towards people who make films on film? Because it doesn’t make any sense to me at all. As you’re saying, if it’s financially affordable, if you can do it, then shoot on film.
AG: I think with anything that’s an antagonism towards things that are seen as outdated forms, whether it’s vinyl and audio or whatever else, [there’s] a sense that maybe you’re treating your craft in a retrograde way because you’re engaging in something that’s seen as an outmoded technology, which is really not the case. Many of the films that were nominated for the Academy Awards — it’s always the case still that a great percentage of them are shot on film. West Side Story and many, many more.
Shooting on film now is quite a lot more emboldened than it was maybe 20, 30 years ago. I was watching the commentary for Metropolitan, the Whit Stillman film recently, and he said that shooting on 16 mm, he feels now with digital colour-grading and all those tools, you don’t need to do a 35 mmm blow-out. You can just do a 2k or 4k digital image scanned straight from the film. [With] digital technologies now, you can get the best of both worlds.
I do love that there is this real emergence of people who are keen to tell their stories on film. And I think for you, for Friends Of Mine, it reflects the narrative of the story. How important was that for you, to have that visual aesthetic married up with the actual narrative itself?
AG: I think it was very important. It’s a story, as far as I see it, about a character who sees himself as this romantic [person], or thinking he understands romance, but maybe not being able to make that a reality. So having an image that looked very sensual, very romantic like the films of the past that this character probably engages with was very important. A lot of the other decisions around the film play into that as well, not just shooting on celluloid. Like set in autumn and having this kind of melancholy sense was the intention as well.
The weather of this film is so evocative, it really felt like the season that you’re shooting it in.
AG: I’m glad that came across. We were prepared because in Melbourne in autumn, you never quite know what the weather’s like, We were prepared to shoot if it was raining, and every character had a colour-appropriate umbrella on standby which we didn’t end up using, maybe thankfully because the crew wouldn’t enjoy working out in the rain. But we were ready to take it as it came.
Your main character is such a fascinating person. He is somebody that we’ve seen so often in these kinds of stories, but he is often presented in a heroic light. And yet here you’re quite eagerly critiquing who he is as a person, but not condemning him. Can you talk about how you went about writing Lou?
AG: The most simple way of getting at it is [that] Lou and the story of the film in general [are] very much based on myself and people I know and experiences that we’ve had, trying to find love and be loved and accept love as well. I don’t think I approached it to either lionise him or criticise him. I think I just wanted to show that character and a way of dealing with that set of problems that he encounters.
In a way, it’s true of all the characters in the film. And maybe this is [what] got the result that you’re talking about. I didn’t see myself in Lou but in all four of the speaking characters, bits of myself in all of them. So potentially through that, I was able to see their various perspectives, and not necessarily try and hold anyone up in a greater moral or ethical light than anyone else.
One of the things which I really appreciate was that you manage to portray all of their perspectives equally. So often we get those kinds of stories that just focus on one character’s perspective. At times, I wanted to follow one character and leave Lou by the side and just see where they went. How important was it to get that shared perspective across the film?
AG: It was incredibly important and I’m actually glad that you’ve identified it. I made the film as part of a Masters project at AFTRS. The whole idea of it as a project is that it’s a piece of research and we write an exegesis alongside it that explains the process and how the film was functioning as a piece of practice-based research. And one of the very early topics that I explored but then veered away from because it was getting a bit too complicated was the idea to pool point of views within a story.
And through that, I looked at a lot of 70s structuralist film theory which took a lot of time to read and didn’t really go anywhere. But I watched a lot of Howard Hawks as well who became one of my favourite directors through the process. [Only Angels Have Wings is] about this group of men who are delivering mail [by] aircraft in South America, but it starts with the perspective of the Jean Arthur character coming into that group. And then through her perspective, you then come to understand the perspective of the Cary Grant character and everyone else around her. I was very interested in how Hawks tells these stories without focusing on a particular character’s point of view. Somehow you’re able to see through the eyes of multiple people at the same time.
How do you manage to keep your voice authentic while being inspired by other filmmakers?
AG: I don’t know. Just try not be too derivative, maybe. I guess it comes with time. I’m tempted to say maybe Friends Of Mine is a little too derivative of certain filmmakers. Everyone who sees it brings up either Noam Baumbach or Eric Rohmer or Woody Allen. But I do feel like the earliest shorts I’ve made have probably been a little more derivative and a little more obvious what they’re being influenced by. So I’m not sure. Maybe it comes from delineating yourself, or taking on a lot of different influences but not necessarily referencing them, just using them as a starting point to develop your own ideas.
I love the reactions in this. The performances are really quite beautiful. How did you find the right people for the roles?
AG: In terms of casting, I spent a lot of time finding the right people. It’s like that quote that [you’ve] probably heard, that 90% of directing is casting. I think that’s true in a sense. [A] good quote from Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton that he said at a talk he did at AFTRS was “There’s no such thing as bad actors, only bad directors”. Because you’re the person in charge who’s putting that in front of the camera. If they’re not giving you a good performance, then it’s your fault for not choosing the right person or not getting them there.
Those were two things that I thought about a lot and spent the time seeing a lot of different people from all different backgrounds, whether they had studied acting or whether they had self-studied, whether they had more experience with stage or with screen. We cast Lou first and then decided on the other characters around him even though I didn’t want to put any necessary superiority on Lou’s point of view. It just makes sense to do that and build the ensemble cast around one person.
Alex Donnelly plays Lou. I can’t remember the stage that we came across him, but there was something about him, like you can never quite place him. He’s a bit awkward and a bit funny and then can come across as very serious like in that scene at the train station towards the end. And [he’s] very good at hiding pain, I think. We did that train station scene as part of the call-back auditions. When he was able to do that and be a little bit funny about it, but then sort of try and hide his heartbreak, that’s when we knew.
Chi Nguyen who plays Elena, and Andrea Mendez who plays Larisa also did a BCA along with Alex. Not in the same year, but in different year levels, so they kind of knew each other and already had a bit of a camaraderie because they’d worked on productions together. That helped a bit in already getting an established sense of them being friends. It was quite easy to work with them and workshop scenes because they had been in the same course and spoke the same language and were familiar with the same improvisational games and techniques.
Emily Joy who plays Sylvie studied in Brisbane, I think. So she was already coming at it as an outsider, which worked perfectly for that character being this older woman who was infatuated with trying to enter the group and become friends with the rest of the group.
We went with the people who gave the best performances and asked the right questions and were the most constructive to work with. Chi was incredibly constructive to work with, very great at challenging me on certain things, or really trying to understand the character if something didn’t make sense. A lot of things that ended in the final film are really owed to her, particularly the last scene where they’re both sitting on the couch. I think at one point that was scripted as being totally silent and there was this idea that you would understand because of Lou’s essay and what was going on between them. But she rightly said that she didn’t feel like that was the case and it didn’t seem real, that they would just sit down [and say nothing] after all this. There needed to be something there. So off the back of that, we workshopped those few lines, and I think it’s much better than how it would have been [laughs[ if I had insisted they do it my way.
Is that how you like to work on set, that collaborative machination of making a film together?
AG: Maybe not on set but that was all in rehearsal. We did a lot of rehearsals which I think helped greatly to get all the actors understanding each other, understanding how they got to certain points. On set, I’m actually not sure yet. AFTRS very much pushes this idea of collaboration. But at the same time when you’re on set, things need to get done. And there are a million possibilities [of how] a certain shot can be set up or a certain set can be dressed or a certain scene can be played out between actors. It needs to come down to someone’s executive decision, which is the role of the director. David Cronenberg recently said that directing is a benevolent dictatorship, which is maybe what I am leading towards.
Let’s talk about filming in Melbourne. What suburbs did you film in? Was there a creative choice to choosing Melbourne over anywhere else?
AG: I think it was twofold. Even though I had moved to Sydney, the experiences that I was writing about and making the film about did take place in Melbourne. So that was one creative decision.
The other is that Sydney in autumn really doesn’t bloom the way that [the] Melbourne [inner city] does. You don’t get as many nice yellow and orange trees. They turn brown immediately and then go dead. So that was an important thing for the aesthetic of the film. I know that out in the Blue Mountains, it can get very beautiful. But the urban inner city was appropriate for these characters and this kind of story.
The other one was more of a production decision than a creative decision, a practical decision. I knew more crew down here. When I was in AFTRS, I tried making a short film between the summer breaks and sort of snuck the gear out. And it was a nightmare because I didn’t have the support network in terms of family and friends to pick stuff up or be there when stuff was going wrong. And I hadn’t had enough experience with different crew members up there. I had more relationships down here. It didn’t cost us that much. The main cost was hiring a van to drive all the gear down which I got a pretty good deal on because I hired it like 12 months in advance or something because I knew this is how I wanted to make the film.
Looking back, I think staying in Sydney and shooting it there would have had a lot of benefits also. The fact that we were doing an away shoot in Melbourne meant that we were very limited in terms of time. We didn’t have much flexibility in terms of moving gear around, and we weren’t able to go back and do pickups very easily. It would have already been hard shooting on film to do pickups and getting [it] processed all over again and trying to meet the minimum footage that the labs and post houses require. Doing it in Melbourne [meant it was] possible to take the gear out or rehire gear from a house here in Melbourne. I’m glad I did it. But I do always wonder what if I had stayed in Sydney and made the best of it.
The personality of Melbourne comes across on screen and informs the narrative of the film. There’s something about the light of Melbourne, that orange hue is just really quite tender and lovely. You’ve won an award for this particular film. What’s that like?
AG: Thank you. It was very surprising because we hadn’t really had that much recognition from festivals until being nominated. And even though we were nominated, I mean the other films in that category were far, far better in my opinion and had already screened at festivals. But I don’t know what it was. Somehow we were the favourite of the Australian Directors Guild judges and I’m very grateful for that and thankful.
It’s a pretty great achievement. Where to from here? Have you finished up at AFTRS?
AG: Yes, I graduated at the start of 2020 so just before the pandemic, thankfully. I’ve used the past two years to detox a bit. Fellow students said that after you’ve been through something like that, it’s almost like you’ve been institutionalised, and you need a year just to get it out of your system and readjust to the outside world. I’ve been doing that and furthering my self-education.
I think when I look back at Friends Of Mine, it’s actually a lot better than I remember it being. I can also see decisions that I would make now in terms of pace and particularly in terms of coverage. We were already needing to be quite tight on our coverage because of the film aspect. Since graduating, I’ve taken the time to keep learning some things. But I’m working on another film now because Friends Of Mine didn’t quite hit with festivals the way we were hoping. I’d like to do another short using everything I’ve learned from the experience and since then. And I’m also developing a feature for whenever the time’s right for that.
Do you have a vision of what kind of stories you want to tell going forward, whether it be shorts and features, or moving into documentaries even? Is there a plan for what you see as being your voice?
AG: Not really. In an ironic way, the best way to develop that is to not think about it, to just bring your personality in your films, and eventually they will reflect that voice. I think get getting rid of that pretence that I had during my undergrad that I’m going to be this great art film director in the style of the European masters has been kind of great and liberating.
And it’s another thing that comes from Howard Hawks as well, because all those old Hollywood guys had no pretences like that at all. Hawks would say, “Well, if there’s a joke in the films, it’s because I found it funny. If there’s a character in the film, it’s because I like to look at them.” He was probably being a little bit flippant, but I think there’s truth to that as well. That if you follow your muse and just make what you’re interested in, eventually the personality will come out.
[I want to explore] the importance of romance, the importance of bonds with one another [in the film]. I think that in Australian films, we’re [almost] afraid of exploring that. There’s been just a few films in modern years that have explored what a relationship can be.
AG: I know what you mean. Perhaps there’s this sense [that] because our society is becoming so dysfunctional, the possibility of actually liking another person long enough to live with them for the rest of your life or for years at a time seems more and more difficult. And I don’t know why in particular in Australia, it is rare to see at least in a mainstream context.
I should say that there were some really important Australian works to me making Friends Of Mine. Love And Other Catastrophes was one, a film called Strange Fits Of Passion which no one has seen. I had to get the AFTRS library to order it from the US, weirdly enough. And Dating The Enemy by Megan Simpson Huberman which has this magical realist thing. All those films showed me that it’s at least possible to tell this sort of story with an Australian accent or in an Australian city. It kind of paved the way for me.
