The Tangled Web of Birdeater

Courtesy of Blue Finch Film Releasing

Australian filmmakers Jack Clark and Jim Weir are part of the rising number of director duos. There are six such pairings at this year’s South by Southwest, where their debut feature Birdeater received its international debut on Saturday. All such power-sharing arrangements must find their own cadence and divisions of responsibility: For their psychedelic relationship thriller about a bachelor party gone wrong, Clark became the main point person for department heads, while Weir was more likely to talk to the cast. However, everything came down to preparation. Weir credited extensive preproduction conversations for getting them on the same wavelength, “So if anyone came to either of us with a question they’d get the same answer.”

Preparation is everything, but, as Joe Louis said, everyone has a plan until they’ve been hit, and nature decided to sucker-punch Birdeater. According to Clark, on set they quickly learned an important lesson: “Weather matters.”

Being caught off-guard by nature provided a certain symmetry between the film and the filming. Birdeater follows Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) into the literal and emotional wilds when he invites his fiancée, Irene (Shabana Azeez), to his bucks party. Equally, the great outdoors seemed to have it in for the production.

Filming for the low-budget indie had already been delayed by COVID, but when production started in remote St. Albans in New South Wales in November of 2021, apocalyptic storms brought chaos to the set. The pair desperately tried to keep going, applying what Weir called “Band-Aid solutions.” When the long dirt road to set turned to mud, “we had to hire a bunch of four-wheel drives to get people back and forth.” There was a river to cross too, “so we bought gumboots for everyone. But the water kept rising, so we had to get waders, and the waders weren’t working anymore, so we built a makeshift ferry out of a gate on the property and some stand-up paddleboards.”

With those extra costs burning through the budget, half the cast and crew sick, and nature seemingly against them (“someone discovered a python on the set,” Weir recalled), the pair decided to cut the planned four weeks of location shooting short, wring out their socks, pack their soaked belongings, and head home. They briefly contemplated just editing what they had into some shape, but instead chose to finish what they started. At that point, Clark said, “It became about setting a date and powering towards it, and hoping that the momentum would swell underneath us, and funding would suddenly arrive.”

Luckily, that funding did arrive, and so in May 2022 they returned for two more weeks of filming. After getting flooded out first time around, and with the waters still high, the duo were terrified of a second soaking and so built a shanty town of lean-tos and shacks to protect the set and equipment. However, after all that preparation, Clark said, “It only rained once or twice. But once you’re aware of how much the weather can ruin your entire film, you’re on edge.”

Even with the much more clement climate, the rain could still catch them off guard. There’s a pivotal dinner scene in a barn, and by coincidence they filmed it on one of the few rainy days. When the downpour started the set was covered, but deafening. “It was a tin roof,” Clark said, “and that was one of the times that sound design saved us. They could just pick a frequency and just cancel it out.”

Birdeater

Thursday 14, 6pm & 6:30pm, Violet Crown