Shannon Murphy on how she put Babyteeth together, from casting to blocking, and why Milla’s cancer treatment is largely left off-screen. Read our review of Babyteeth.
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Every character in Babyteeth is highly strung. From the very first scene, where 16 year-old MIlla (Eliza Scanlan) has a meet-cute with the older, rat-tailed and face-tatted Moses (Toby Wallace) on her way to school, director Shannon Murphy shoves high-fructose emotions right in front of the lens. At her magnificent modernist house in the Sydney suburbs, Milla attempts to introduce Moses to her parents.
Those parents, Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) and Anna (Essie Davis), are introduced in a mundane but loving sex scene at psychiatrist Henry’s office. He’s having a flirtation with a pregnant neighbour; Anna will openly chug a bottle of wine and an adderall at dinner. They are performatively bougie and liberal, though not open enough to accept Milla’s fledgling relationship with the 23-year-old Moses.
This is further complicated by the recurrence of Milla’s cancer. With what may be so little time left, Milla and her parents have to work out what to prioritise, and what a teenager should be exposed to.
Babyteeth started life as a 2012 play by Rita Kalnejais, and Murphy has kept the Brechtian devices that Kalnejais uses to represent the swirl of teenage emotions. Chapter titles like ‘Insomnia’ and ‘A little bit high’ locate the viewer in different character POVs, while Milla will very occasionally look and grin directly to camera, interrupting the narrative flow. Blocky colours give the film the style of a Mambo Shirt, while the cast of roguish, mad characters leap off screen as if straight from a Jonathan Demme film. Babyteeth is so well sketched out that even if the style is sometimes oppressive, it builds to a well earned emotional payoff that will not leave a dry eye in the house.
Between carving out an acclaimed theatre career in Sydney, Shannon Murphy directed episodes of TV shows like legal drama Rake (2010-18) and mini-series On The Ropes (2018). Throughout her work, she explores the place where psychological extremes meet the body, either through dance, desire, or addiction. Murphy has now found a global fanbase through directing episodes of Killing Eve’s (2018-20) third season, which should turn viewers on to Babyteeth, which premiered in competition at the 2019 Venice Film Festival and then became a word of mouth favourite at the London Film Festival. Now, it comes to VOD, where it will play just as well on a laptop to YA viewers as it will in awkward family viewings.
I talked to Shannon Murphy about how she put Babyteeth together, from casting to blocking, and why Milla’s cancer treatment is largely left off-screen.
Seventh Row (7R): How did you get involved with Babyteeth?
Shannon Murphy: It was a play originally at Belvoir St. Theatre in Sydney and Rita Kalnejais, who had written [the play], was approached by Jan Chapman (producer of The Piano, Love Serenade, and The Babadook); they asked to turn it into a film. I came on six years later. They had developed it, and it had gone to another director and then that had fallen through. It just landed in my lap when it was completely ready to go, and it was a real gift because I didn’t have to develop it. But Rita and I got together and did a director’s cast.
7R: How did the cast come together?
Shannon Murphy: It was a play originally at Belvoir St. Theatre in Sydney and Rita Kalnejais, who had written [the play], was approached by Jan Chapman (producer of The Piano, Love Serenade, and The Babadook); they asked to turn it into a film. I came on six years later. They had developed it, and it had gone to another director and then that had fallen through. It just landed in my lap when it was completely ready to go, and it was a real gift because I didn’t have to develop it. But Rita and I got together and did a director’s cast.
7R: It’s interesting that you found Ben through a Sia show because the film is so driven by music. The music is really well chosen — from Bach to Tuneyards at the party to Sudan Archives, which will not leave my head. How did you find the songs and choreograph their use, particularly the dancing?
Shannon Murphy: I have been working with the same [music] supervisor, Jess Moore, for quite a few projects. These are songs that have been on the list for a while. Stephen [Evans], our editor, has an incredible taste in music, and the three of us jam a lot and send each other playlists. We would send music to the cast and crew throughout pre-production and just keep the music alive while we’re working. Then, it starts to fall into place where they could go.
It’s interesting, when you make work as a director, people start defining what you do more than you do yourself. For years, people would talk about my theatre work as being really physical. My screen work is, as well. The body has a whole language of its own. If you removed all the words, you should still be able to describe what is happening.
I got Eliza to make videos on Instagram on a private account as a fake Milla, and she would play music all the time in her bedroom and send me them, and that’s how Milla would move. Alex, our producer, used to be a dancer, and I made her choreograph Toby’s dance at the party. She thought I was joking, but every day, I was like, “Now’s your session with Toby,” and she choreographed that. She knew what I wanted, and it was really playful. Toby got up on the day and nailed it. We were all hooting and hollering for him.
I think it’s really important that music isn’t used in a contrived way; its really important that it’s doing something else in the scene. If it’s emotional, I don’t want it to be too manipulative.
7R: How do you use the camera to do that? Everyone is so neurotic and energetic that they bounce off the screen. How do you keep control?
Shannon Murphy: Cinematographer Andy Commis and I plot a bunch of images we want to capture. On the day of filming Henry and the exploding lightbulb [his neighbour’s light is out and Henry hops on a ladder for her, the exploding bulb humorously symbolising their sexual tension], we ended up only having three takes. We were just pressed for time, and I knew Andy was going to have to whip around with that camera. I wanted Henry to be small in the bottom of the frame with all the pictures in the [neighbour’s] child’s room floating above him. We cut out loads of images that we wanted to shoot from the script, and Andy always said, “No matter how manic it gets, we still have to nail these shots.” He just does it, it’s extraordinary.
We [told] the actors that it would feel like there’s another character in the room because Andy is so up close and personal at times. He’s an amazing dancer; he just moves in and out with them.
We pre-blocked everything in the house. We got four acting friends to come in, and I blocked all of it because we knew we would need to move quite quickly. But I also wanted it to be pre-lit so we wouldn’t get stitched up by that. I hadn’t done something like that before in cinema, and for people who say actors want to feel freedom when they move — that’s not true, particularly with these actors who’ve all done theatre. They don’t mind being told where to go as long as it feels justified for their characters.
7R: The film is also completely linear until the last scene, which flashes back a little. Why did you choose to break the linear narrative then?
Shannon Murphy: I always thought that [time leap in the final scene] was really bold. It was in the original script that I read. There are times where we talked about whether it should be in order or not. But I loved that it was a coda. I knew it needed to have a different feel, to sit separately from the rest of [the film] in some way. It just really worked. It was so important to know where she was at and why she makes the decisions she does at the end of the film. [I also wanted] the ability to see Anna and Henry and think that possibly they will survive it as a couple, but not to tie things up too perfectly.
7R: You chose not to focus so much on the chemo and other cancer treatment. Why is that?
Shannon Murphy: We always used to say it’s not a film about cancer any more than it’s a film about a girl who knows how to play the violin. It’s not about the illness, because that’s not what Milla’s doing. We had 2 small scenes in the hospital that we took out. It just didn’t feel necessary.
When i spoke to people who worked for Canteen, a children’s organisation for young kids with cancer, they were saying the film script felt believable. The kids are pushing back, not just rebelling against their parents, but everybody wanting to talk about it or [treat them] like the sick child. It’s not how they’re living their life. I wanted to honour that. People want to make teenagers look vulnerable and weak, when actually they’re the most brilliant members of society that we’ve got.
7R: There are two Australias in the film, rich and poor. Moses and Milla both seem to move between the two quite easily. Were you conscious of class conflict or any political elements that you wanted to tell the audience about?
Shannon Murphy: I can’t say I ever consciously thought of it like that. But what I wanted was for the house to feel like a glass atrium that’s warm and beautiful, in some ways, and in other ways, traps her like a bird. She’s been cocooned. They often say, when a child is sick, especially in a relapse, the parents return to treating the child like the first time they ever got sick. That is completely stifling for the child, and they shut out the rest of the world. I really wanted to capture that idea. It’s interesting, now that the film is coming out in a time when people have all been stuck in their bubble at home, whether it will add to the intensity of how people watch it or not. I’ll be curious to find out.
7R: How did you find those locations?
Shannon Murphy: Our producer Alex [White] found that house, and we basically got there and knew we had to secure it. The woman who lived there has been there her whole life. She was a pilot. The people who live there were very generous and let us come in a lot. We got to rehearse in there and changed the carpet colour and walls and everything. They were amazing. It just felt right even though I wasn’t sure how Andy would feel about all this glass. He loved playing with it.
7R: How did you work with the city of Sydney?
Shannon Murphy: We shot the night out in Redfern, which is a real collision of gentrification and a history of Indigenous population and rebellion against white society. It’s been a very historical place for that, and I live near there. It’s amazing to go out at night: there’s so much excitement on the streets. I wanted to show that, and how as soon as she ventures from the boring rich suburb, she gets to really experience what she’s desperate for, which is a more holistic place. As a skeletal crew, you can just go and shoot on the street.
When Henry and Anna are driving around, that’s in Glebe [another nearby suburb], and the basketball courts are something we’ve all seen. I wanted particularly for people who know Sydney to feel like it represented the city they love without those iconic images that make it feel like a tourism advert.
7R: How did you find the balance, when so much of the film takes place in the house, to not feel stagebound or like you’re leaving that central location for the sake of it?
Shannon Murphy: I think it’s about changing it up. When will we have stillness, and when [will we move] with the energy of Milla and Moses? We gave ourselves rules, but also freedom on the day to be experimental with that. We really busted out the energy on the night out, wall to wall music, but before that in the film, we have very little music.
That train shot of them going across the Harbour Bridge, we don’t show where it is, but people who know will recognise it. We knew the outside would need to have a different energy because of the house, but what I loved about the house is that it didn’t feel too boxed in. You can see all the way out to the pool from one end.
7R: The film really reminded me of Jonathan Demme from the colour and art style to the way the mad characters bounce off each other. Were you watching any films or inspired by any particular artworks?
Shannon Murphy: The sound used Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996) as a reference point, because I love how raw the sound design is in that film. For the shooting style, we’d talk a bit about [John] Casavettes. For the night out, we looked at Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (Uli Edel, 1981).
But it’s hard not to think about that amazing German film Victoria (Sebastian Schipper, 2015)even though our shoot was so much shorter than theirs. What I love about that film is it’s so surreal. Our film had a different quality, but you felt like you’re on a journey with Milla, who’s for the first time getting to go to this kind of art school party and having this interaction with a performance artist with whom she feels this spiritual connection. We played music on the day and that’s so important, to have music pumping on set, to how the camera moves and the actors are feeling. Stephen and I often joke that we’ll just make the scenes into music videos.
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