This week on the 5AM StoryTalk Podcast, you’re in for a treat — I'm joined by Sophie Hyde, one of my favorite contemporary Australian filmmakers. In addition to the numerous documentaries, short films, and TV series she’s helped bring to screens as a director, co-creator, and/or producer, she’s also directed such feature films as 52 Tuesdays (2013), Animals (2019), Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), and the upcoming Jimpa and The Ideal Wife.
The best way to enjoy this free conversation is to tap on the podcast play button right now and listen to an unabridged version of it in all its incredibly intimate detail. If you prefer to read these chats, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered; scroll down to find the article below, albeit edited for length.
Sophie and I are going to cover a lot in this conversation including:
Her formative years in Adelaide, Australia – especially a theatre group – and why she returned to her hometown to live and work despite how isolating it can be
The importance of collaborative creation to her over individual expression
Why she didn’t call herself a director for so long
The role of structural inventiveness in her films and the importance of narrative limitations/challenges in her work, with a special focus on 52 Tuesdays (which was shot over 52 consecutive Tuesdays with an ever-evolving script) and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (which essentially takes place in one location with only two characters)
How she uses her cast to further develop scripts – such as how actors Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack helped shape their characters in Good Luck to You
How her work focuses on character exploration, bodies and intimacy, and the pursuit of self-defined freedom and identity – such as Animals
How she used her own family’s experience to craft her upcoming film Jimpa – which stars Olivia Coleman, John Lithgow, and her child Aud Mason-Hyde
A bonus episode with Sophie will be available is also available here, so be sure to come back and listen to that, too. In it, she’ll discuss a seminal piece of art from her life — the iconic 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year)!
Bonus Episode: Sophie Hyde Talks 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show'
Earlier this week, Sophie Hyde — director of films such as 52 Tuesdays (2013), Animals (2019), Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), and the upcoming Jimpa and The Ideal Wife — joined me for some 5AM StoryTalk. You can listen to that here if you haven’t already. Today, Sophie returns for a bonus episode exclusive to my bad-ass paid subscribers whose support keeps the lights on here. We’ll be discussing a seminal piece of art from her life — the iconic 1975 film
My guest today is one of my favorite contemporary Australian filmmakers — Sophie Hyde — producer, TV creator and director of documentaries, short films and wonderful feature films such as 52 Tuesdays (2013), Animals (2019), and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022). We're going to discuss — among so many subjects — the narrative challenges she looks for in and even creates for each of her projects, the extensive effort that goes into finding the right tone for each of them (our discussion of Leo Grande will be especially helpful to you in this regard — and the transgressive nature of her character search for their own definition of freedom.
For my part, what I admire about Sophie's work is its constant structural inventiveness, how her films are very often dances between literary and commercial filmmaking instincts, and the in-your-face frankness of the sexual lives of her characters. For example, her debut film 52 Tuesdays was shot over 52 Tuesdays, was largely unscripted, and evolved organically during the production and post-production. Animals, a coming-of-age film about two women trapped in arrested development, plays like an Evelyn Waugh take on the female sex comedy featuring an especially brilliant performance by Holiday Granger. And in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Emma Thompson plays a recently widowed woman looking to discover what she was missing in her sexually dull marriage by engaging a male sex worker, played by Darryl McCormick.
As I told Sophie in our pre-chat, as the son of two people miserably married for most of their relationship, I found Leo Grande heartbreaking, but also ultimately triumphant. I've seen it twice, and each time I bawled in the final act. Do yourself a favor and check it out if you haven't yet.
All three of these films, including Sophie's upcoming film Jimpa, feature characters on complicated journeys of discovery. We'll get into Sophie's own journey, too, between this and the bonus episode, diving into her unique childhood in Adelaide, how her parents' divorce helped shape her as a storyteller and finding herself as an artist through intense collaboration.
This is going to be an incredibly craft intensive conversation, but I expect you, like me, will be utterly charmed by my guest. Now, let me introduce you to Sophie Hyde…
CH: Welcome, Sophie. I’m such a fan of your work. I'm really grateful that you're here today, and I'm excited to get to know you a bit. You grew up in and, after moving away, moved back to Adelaide here in Australia. It’s a bit out of the way, as some might say. I’m curious, what made you fall back in love with it as an adult and how do you think it shows up in your work?
SH: Hmm, I think Adelaide features in my life way more than is maybe healthy. [Laughs] 52 Tuesdays was shot in Adelaide. We shot that film every Tuesday for a full year. We're not sort of showcasing Adelaide in it, but we spent a year shooting here, which was gorgeous, you know, and you think a lot about a place when you're making a film like that.
The other films that I've made have all shot overseas actually. So, I've gone out elsewhere and come back here to edit, but I did make a TV series called “Fucking Adelaide”, which was really, truly was about Adelaide. Place is really crucial, it's really important to me. Like, I do feel that this is my home.
I feel really connected to the land, really connected to the weather, etcetera. There is an ease here, for sure, and I do love running into people that I haven't seen for 20 years. It can be a very stifling thing to have that, as well. I think it's hard to change, you know, when you are around the same things all the time.
For me, I love drama in my work, but I really like my life to feel kind of calm in a way. And so, I create that in a lot of ways and that suits me. But yeah, it's a, as I said to you before – I've always wanted there to be two of me, one that could go off and be out in the whole world, and one that could be here in the calmness and potter around in my garden and swim in the ocean. So, I try and do both.
COVID really shifted things for me because I’d always been, since I'd been making, I was always going elsewhere – and I had a version of myself in the world and another of myself at home. And I had to, during that time where we stayed home, kind of integrate the two. I sound like I'm a character in “Severance” in some way. [Laughs]
CH: It's all a journey of slow painful discovery. So, you returned to Adelaide after university to work out who you wanted to be as an artist. Did you have a sense of who you wanted to be yet? I'm thinking the character Amy Molloy in Animals, played brilliantly by Holliday Grainger. She's in her thirties – you were your twenties – but there’s a lot of overlap there.
SH: Great question. Because you sort of become the person that you have in mind, don't you? Like, I mean, I genuinely like swimming in the ocean. I genuinely like drinking my whiskey. I genuinely like sitting in a coffee shop, you know, writing in my book – and that's a huge part of me. There was a time in my life where they would've felt aspirational things in some weird way, but I don't think I ever named that. But the things that you look for, the desires that you have kind of become the life that you create if you let them, I suppose.
Who did I want to be? I mean, the people that I looked up to were, like, Spike Jonze and Wong Kar-wai and Lynne Ramsay for sure. They were filmmakers, there were visual artists sometimes. And I think I just was excited by the way that they just got in and, like, made things and thought about things. It felt like they were pushing things around in a way that wasn't super-naturalistic – that wasn't really naturalistic, which is funny because I'm really drawn to that kind of work when I watch it. But when I make films, I do tend towards naturalism a lot more.
CH: With 52 Tuesdays, am I correct in understanding that you shot it sequentially one week after another and more or less worked the story out as you were going along?
SH: Yes, we did. We had a series of rules. So, we shot every Tuesday for 52 Tuesdays for a full year. Every Tuesday had to be in the film, and it was in order. We had a kind of story idea, but we scripted as we went, which sounds like we'd just end the film, the shooting, and then you'd just be like, “Great, here's the movie.” But no, it still took a long, long time in an edit to kind of work out how to piece that together in a way that abided by those rules and still felt like it was satisfying, I suppose. So it was a project built on rules.
CH: How do you describe the film to people who haven't seen it?
SH: Hmm. I haven't described it for a long time, but I think it's the story of a teenager who's watching their mother go through a really big change over a year. And because it's a story that's set and shot every Tuesday, that teenager also changes a great deal over that time. So, it's a story of a teenager whose whose mother transitions to live as a man.
At the time, I, like many people in the world, didn't know a great deal about being transgender and certainly hadn't seen a lot of stuff that was. It doesn't seem surprising to me that I went into that, but it was a real learning curve. I was interested in change at that time because I was interested in the idea of what happens over a whole year, you know, if you watch it. And I was always interested in queer families because I come from a queer family, and so does Matthew Cormack, who was writing it with me.
CH: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is also a structurally inventive film in that it's more or less one location. You're described 52 Tuesdays as a filmmaking challenge. Not all of your work is that, but is that something that stimulates you, I guess? Do you seek it out?
SH: Yeah, I really like it. I do like some kind of restriction, I think. And I don't like the restriction just to be kind of monetary. When they came to me with Good Luck, Leo Grande, the idea of one room and two actors just seemed so exciting. Of course, you always then push those things around a little bit, and you burst it out a touch. But, no, I really love that. There is something about those restrictions and those rules that help me to stay really focused. I think it felt like I got to do a lot in Good Luck to You because we knew the parameters. We just, like, really delved really deep into those ideas and what we could do with those two actors. Well, three actors in the end, as you know.
CH: So, as I told you, I just rewatched Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, and I bawled at the end. Again. I don't want to give away the ending, but it’s a film about a character – played by Emma Thompson – struggling with the question of whether she can have pleasure in her life. Is that a fair description of it in your mind?
SH: Yeah. The question of whether she can and should and deserves to have pleasure and whether it's even okay [to want that]. Yeah.
CH: And that’s worked out over – I mean, structurally there's a sort of postscript – but over three meetings with a male sex worker, which is just such an amazing relationship. A moment ago [in conversation that can be found in the podcast, you referred to friendships in your films as romances.] What about this film – is it romantic, in your mind?
SH: Yeah, I have a funny thing where I think, you know, romance is around in so many parts of our lives and oftentimes not with our – what is considered our – romantic partners. Your friendships can be very romantic, and I think that Leo Grande is a romantic film.
There is a romance between them because they're two people trying to work something out together and being there for each other, and there's something very romantic about that. It's not old-school romance, as in it's important that they end up together or that they love each other or they fall in love. I think it was really important to me that that wasn't the story of this film.
But yeah, I'd call it romantic.
CH: It's another film that I think exists in a place of tension between two things, which is the drama and the romantic comedy. [In an omitted part of our conversation found in our podcast episode, you described] Animals as something that could have gone more Bridesmaids. Was there a debate with Leo Grande? There’s another version, I think, a perhaps darker version than this. I guess I'm curious about how you worked out what feels like a perfect tone to accommodate such emotional intensity while also just being a crowd pleaser at the same time. It’s a feat.
SH: It's a tone that was really hard to talk about and describe because – and I often find this – it's between tones and between ideas. Good Luck to You needed to be funny, and everyone came into it wanting it to be funny, and I agreed with that. But I never wanted it to be funny in the way that, like, it feels false, you know? Like, “Here's a joke!” So, it was, like, how to find the way that the funniness while stilling telling us the uncomfortable stuff – which a lot of great comedy obviously does. That's the beauty of it, I think.
I guess the character of Leo, the who's the sex worker that comes in, it was really important to me that there was a kind of honesty to that character. He come in, he's playing a role in there, but that he is able to come in and show what I think a lot of really interesting people do – whether they're sex workers or in other fields – which is being able to see what someone is going through and offer things to them. Leo's a very serious person in some ways, and that seriousness, I wanted that to be in the film but still be funny [without making] fun of that character, you know? Which I think we've seen a lot of that kind of work especially with sex workers – but also with anyone who's really very sincere.
We want to make fun of them, you know, very quickly. We didn’t to find a way that Leo’s sincerity could feel appealing and light at times, and like it opened something for [Emma’s character], you know? Opened an intimacy. The writer who had sent the original version to me, Katy Brand, is very funny and very smart, and the combination of her ideas about it and my ideas about what I wanted to come in about someone's body and the idea of pleasure and, that seriousness of that character and how good he is at what he does – you know, those things coming together really helped.
On this film, the producer, and the writer, and Emma – who were all on at the time when I started – I asked them lots of questions, and all of them were just like, “Funny, funny.” Like, everyone knew, “It has to be funny.” And so, I had to maintain this funniness and that lightness. You talk about restrictions and how the hotel room becomes a restriction, but another is, “Can you have this tension underneath, but this lightness of touch?”
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CH: Collaboration is important to your process, you’ve told me. What is the role of the actor, especially in something like this? I mean, there are only two roles and there is technically a third as you mentioned, but it's largely a two-role film. What was their role in shaping the final product?
SH: For me, the actors, when they come into a project, everything changes with your cast. I want everything to change at that point. I certainly don't have an idea of a film, and then like, “God, I wish they would just do my thing.” One of the most exciting bits is like, “Oh, okay, that is a different idea.” You know, that watching a character that you've had in mind for so long on the page actually become something slightly different from that is beautiful, thrilling, and it means that it's very electric – and also you kind of have to stay alert to it the whole time because your film changes as that changes. What's there is very different to the script when that happens, I think.
But I do really love that, and Emma and Daryl McCormack were heavenly collaborators in so many ways. Emma was on before I was on the film and so already had a really distinct, very clear way of understanding that character. Much more I think than I even did when I stepped into the film. She was so sure of who that woman was. And that was very nice to walk into because I had more questions about her. The original script, I think, let her off the hook a lot, and so we worked a lot at that. But she knew her. Emma knew her so well. And then Daryl, when he came in, we sort of readjusted and changed things once we had cast him because he's just a very excellent ,open person. And so, we were able to have these conversations and think about how the role might be with him there. That was great.
And also, we just shut the door, we just workshopped. We had a week together. We just went through the script, did things like silly exercises that I had, but also really deeply connected with each other about difficult things. About sex, bodies, pleasure, our families – you know, all of those things that you can do when you're making work if it's safe environment. Then, we also had fun with like physicality. Like, we would like roll around the room trying different poses. “Well, what would that look like?” “Would that be funny?” “Is this silly?” Is that – oh, that's actually quite intimate, okay.” That was just delightful.
This was in the middle of COVID. Everything was in lockdown, so we were just together. Everyone else was kind of somewhere else and it was great.
CH: We were talking about challenges and what each film poses, and you were describing one here, but when I think about single location films, they tend to be thrillers. And I think that's probably because when you try to sell the idea of a single location to somebody, it's “How do I keep it interesting?” and that usually means it’s going to be really tense. It's going to be Locke or something like that, lots of cuts to try to keep people around for 85, 90 minutes. But this isn't that kind of film. Was there a challenge to keeping things moving and energetic, I guess, with two characters for 97 minutes?
SH: I never felt that challenge. I know people talk about that. I really love characters, especially when I'm making a film, so I could just watch them and look at them forever, and like people and their faces and their bodies. I'm like, “We’ll light them well and that's it!”
I guess there was the challenge of how does it move. You know, is there enough plotting, like enough turns? Is there enough dialogue, but not too much dialogue? We needed there to be movement. We didn't want it to all be sex, even though it's about sex in so many ways. We actually don't show huge amount of that on screen – but intimacy and “how do they move around the space?”
That was a big part of it, just working out how to shift their dynamic in terms of the script, but also in terms of the location and the blocking and what they did. There's dance sequence and they're looking in mirrors, and they move around the room, and one goes into the bathroom and, you know, there's all of those things, but I always felt it was a privilege to be able to watch someone for that long, to be able to look at their faces for that long.
Also, I’d made this really strange choice, I suppose, if I think back on it. Which is that I wanted a lot of it to play out during the day. So, I wanted a lot of light, and that's very unusual, I think, for a story that's about a sex work and intimacy in a place, you know? But for me, that was important. It's not all during the day, but a lot of it is. And I think that just helps because people in light and intimacy feels like there's enough – of course there are these things that happen in it. There were plotting devices, and we, we roamed around with a lot of things, and at one point it was, yes, it was more dramatic what happened – and it felt like it had been pushed into a place that, that didn't feel authentic to me. So, we pulled it back to sort of where we ended up.
CH: What about the sex?
SH: We had a lot of talk about whether orgasms were needed on screen and things like that.
CH: Was it the intention from the start to push almost all sex offscreen until much later in the film? Because I try to imagine watching this with more conservative people. It's already, you know, from the very first moments – you don't hide what the film is about it very quickly. You hear “sex worker” and there’s Emma Thompson potentially having sex with this hot young man. But it feels like more conservative people are having their hand held a little bit into these more intense emotional and physical conversations. I don't know if that's in my head, but it's certainly how I experienced it.
SH: I think that's true. Like, I'm somebody that I could watch people be naked on screen really quickly and just be really comfortable with it. Like, it doesn't bother me, but for a lot of people, it really does. It's very frank for me, like bodies feel very ordinary or something. I'm like, come on, like get over it. Like, it's not always sexual, do you know?
Katy Brand, the writer, in her original script, there was no sex at all. You definitely didn't see a single thing. And in fact, I think she was doing that very consciously wanting it to be about the ideas of sex and intimacy without showing it. It was all dialogue, I believe. But I really felt that there needed to be some sex in it.
There's a point, I think it's about halfway into the film, that their bodies become very important even if they're not sexual at that time. So, that was crucial to me, that their bodies started to be at play physically. Before that, the very first act is very similar to the very first version that Katy, I think, ever did. And it stayed that way apart from the bit outside where Leo comes in and I sort of – I enjoyed that it felt like old movies in some sort of way. Do you know where there’s this feeling of, like, that's all off screen? Like, we'll just talk about it? I thought that it was nice. In Animals, we play a little bit with romantic comedy ideas, even though it was not a romantic comedy. In Leo Grande, I felt that we were playing with those same kinds of old romance movies in some way. But then, slowly, you kind of just let those things slide away and their bodies and the truth of being a human, that's a bit messy and true, sort of just comes out – because that's what happens between two people. You're actually sitting opposite someone else with flesh and blood and feelings, not just a brain. So, I feel like that's what was going on – it was just letting go of all those artifices and all those things, so that by the end when there's like a little bit of a sex montage. [Laughs] By then, you know them so well, it doesn't feel big or scary or, you know, too much. I hope. And I think people have responded that way mostly, you know?
CH: It feels triumphant in my mind. It's very celebratory. But listening to you talk, I now realize in the way that I asked about maintaining energy, moving the story along…to some degree sex might be Chekhov’s gun here?
SH: [Laughs] That’s so true!
CH: Or, you know, like Hitchcock’s bomb under the table. It's going to go off sooner or later – and your explosion is really big at the end. [Laughs]
SH: It's exactly the tension of “Are we going to see them have sex, as well?” I mean, intimacy is very tense as well, don't you think? Like, I think that's always there and between two people, but that's a great thing – it is Chekhov's gun.
CH: Well, let’s wrap this up. Thank you so much for the conversation and letting me dig into your creative process and thoughts on art.
SH: Thanks, Cole.
CH: As for you at home people reading today, wherever you are, I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation with Sophie Hyde as much as I have. Don’t make a run for it just yet. Sophie returns to discuss a seminal piece of art from his life — the iconic 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. You can listen to this bonus episode conversation here. Make sure you’re at least a free subscriber to be alerted when it’s published.
