'Burning Man' director/writer Jonathan Teplitzky - interview

With his third film, Burning Man, which opens in cinemas this week (read our five-star review here), writer and director Jonathan Teplitzky has crafted his most personal narrative yet.

He spoke to TheVine about the writing process that led to the film's creation, as well as wanting the film's characters to have "a cumulative female effect".


This is such a wonderful film, with such a complex script. How do you write a narrative like this?

“As you probably know or have heard, there’s a certain autobiographical element [to the film]. As the years rolled by, I just was very keen to respond to that creatively, what I’d been through. I’d also been writing a script about a chef, which I hadn’t really done much work on for a while, and then one day I realised the two belonged together. That brought what I wanted to tell and how I wanted to tell it into sharper focus. What I found personally was that in the year after the events that I’d experienced, you go through this incredible, tumultuous thing where your senses seem heightened and everything’s turned upside-down. It’s quite a surreal experience, and so I really liked that as an energistic thing, for film. The sadness and the tragedy of what you experience never goes away, it’s always what it is, but what you don’t expect is, almost, a sense of exhilaration. It’s a sense of freedom, if you like.”  

A kind of catharsis?  

“Exactly. What interested me, is that if you look in the guidebooks, no one tells you that that’s part of the grief process. And that really interested me as a starting point; I drew on that a lot. The thing that I realised straight away is that to make a film about that sort of material, you have to find a way to tell the story that cinematically is able to get under the skin of the story, and under the skin of the character. So I developed this idea of the fractured narrative from that. One of the things that people told me, people who’d had similar experiences, was that your life is fractured, so I felt that if ever there was a time to use a fractured narrative, this was it. Also, it’s very simple – it’s not like a plot where you have to find out ‘who did it’ or whatever – so in a sense you have to find a way of dramatising the story. I really liked the idea that we would experience Tom in a way that we don’t really know how to read, to start with, and then reveal elements really slowly as the film goes on to, in a sense, undermine our initial judgments of Tom.”

It’s kind of beautiful how all those fragments at the start of the film, some of which aren’t really even ‘scenes’—

“Yes, exactly.”  

—They kind of flip around in order at the end and one by one you work them all out, and it’s such a beautiful pay-off.  

“Yeah, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do. That was the emotional arc that I thought an audience would find really satisfying. I guess I was very conscious, as well, that it’s an adult film and it’s full of adult material, if you like, so I think there’s a great need to tie up a number of loose ends to varying degrees but that some thigns could also be left ambiguous, and let the audience make their own decisions about it. When I was writing it, the only real rule I followed was that going from one scene to another scene, there had to be some sort of emotional connection that would link them, or that would allow the through-line of the film to build some momentum. And I think having one character that takes you through the film allows you to fracture it, to a certain degree; it can be less successful when you’ve got multiple stories and you’ve got to work out how all the characters fit together.”  

At what point did Matthew Goode come into the picture? Did you have him in mind early on?  

“I had a pretty much finished screenplay when I met Matthew. We’d been going through the usual lists of people, but I was in London and I met Matthew through a mutual friend and I really got on well with him. He read the screenplay and really responded powerfully to it, so we met and circled each other for a while and I very quickly realised that not only was he a very fine actor who could actually do this, he was also really committed to it. The third element, which you can easily forget about, was that he’s a very funny, warm, engaging person.”  

He’s terrific, and there’s a lovely natural quality to those occasional jokes that will come out of a sad scene. And that’s how it is with grief and depression: you can be rock bottom and all of a sudden step outside yourself and pull a one-liner, and I loved that quality in the film. 
 
“I think that’s not only how it is, it’s also essential when you’re talking about making a film. I think if a film wallows too much in its own emotional self-importance, you run the risk of losing the audience. In the same way, the best comedies have always got some kind of poignancy and some kind of contrast to allow you that landscape to be discovered; gag after gag doesn’t always end up being the best comedic film. It was really important to have that dimension to not only the story but also the characters.”  

It’s often tough saying that there’s a real Australian quality to a film, since it makes people, particularly audiences, think of Australian Film™, but that very Australian spin on Oscar’s school concert was fantastic. You go into that scene shifting in your seat, thinking ‘he’s going to make some grand speech, this will be awful’, and instead it comes off so beautifully.  

“You know, when I thought of that, I thought, ‘What are the two things that audiences would expect?’ And they were, a) the really mawkish speech that would be obvious for the kid to make at that point, or b) that he’d play some beautiful poignant tune on the trumpet. I just thought, what’s the exact opposite of what he would do [in that context]? And I think that’s how kids deal with these sorts of things, particularly at that age. They process them, and perhaps later in life when they’re more emotionally mature they revisit these things in different ways, but at the time life is about the moment. Quite quickly, kids find ways of – in a sense – making the most of it, without even thinking about it, making the most of their situation emotionally, whereas adults spend most of our time intellectualising it.”  

Another thing that I thought was wonderful was how many fantastic roles for women there were in the film. That’s a constant narrative in film commentary, ‘Where are the great roles for women?’ Was that an intention of yours in writing the film, to surround Tom with all these female characters? 

“Oh yeah. Once I decided that Tom was going to collide with all these women – I’m not sure whether they’re relationships or collisions, but they’re a bit of both, in a way – I really wanted each of the women to be strong, opinionated, feisty; all those really powerful images of women, and I wanted to fill the film with those. A lot of the roles are quite small, but by having them quite strong – even though they have their own agendas and are just as dysfunctional [as Tom] – they make their presence felt without having to have a whole lot of extraneous scenes that tell us all that. I wanted them to be individual characters but I wanted them to have a cumulative female effect.”