“All writers are procrastinators,” laughs filmmaker Nicholas Verso, the director of a new Australian coming of age drama Boys In The Trees.
We’re sitting on the outdoor rooftop bar of QT, the newest boutique hotel/bar in Melbourne, built on the site of what was once the Russell Street Cinemas. It seems a fitting location to chat to a filmmaker who grew up on a diet of 80s cinema from directors like Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Richard Donner (who made the cult favourite The Goonies). As he grew older, Verso discovered the darker sensibility of filmmakers like Tim Burton, David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Richard Linklater, and also great teen films like The Craft and Empire Records and Clueless.
“I wanted to see something like that made in Australia,” he says. As a youngster, Verso found solace in cinema. “I would always go there to escape into other worlds,” he explains, “and I always enjoyed the characters and the other worlds. I couldn’t find masculine or male role models. So with my films I wanted to try and find new voices and new depictions of masculinity that I hadn’t seen before that I could identify with and share with people who in my boat.
Boys In The Trees is a coming of age story with quirky touches and a supernatural element. It is set on Halloween night in 1997 and follows Corey (played by Toby Wallace, from Galore, etc) as he hangs around with his friends, led by the bullying bogan Jango (Justin Holborow). Corey is a keen photographer and has set his sights on going to New York to further his ambition, a decision that doesn’t sit well with Jango, who has no idea of what his future holds. During the night, while Jango and his gang, known as “grommets’ egg houses and have fun at the local skate park, they cross with Jonah (Gulliver McGrath, who has worked with the likes of Spielberg and Scorsese), a loner and outsider who has been mercilessly bullied throughout school by Jango. But when they were younger Corey and Jonah used to be best friends, almost inseparable, as they went on adventures together. But something happened that drove them apart. On this night, Corey reluctantly agrees to walk Jonah home, and is forced to confront the demons of his past and comes to terms with his betrayal of that friendship.
The film was set in 1997 because Verso believes that that was one of the last times that teenagers had that sense of innocence and freedom, it was time before mobile phones, the internet and social media began to dominate their lives.
Explaining the genesis of the film, Verso says: “I just wanted to make a film that was very me, that noone else would like. I wanted to draw together a lot of my passions , my loves, so a lot of that was Halloween, night, skate culture, dealing with the end of adolescence, these were themes that were really important to me, great music. So it all came about from that. But also looking at friendship, and how quite often we don’t know when we’re saying goodbye to some friend. We don’t know how to deal with that, and we don’t have the emotional language for that. So I wanted to do a film about male friendships and how they evolve over time, especially at the end of high school when you can lose a lot of friends or they can change and you don’t realise the impact that can have on you.”
The film has had a long development from page to screen. Verso first submitted it to the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 2011 where his script won the award for best unproduced screenplay. “That was based on the first draft we wrote, which was lovely,” Verso continues, but I wrote it to hit that deadline so I could apply to that competition. Those deadlines are very good with procrastinating writers – I think all writers are procrastinating writers, we are all very good at putting it off. But after that the script just sat there for a little while.”
Luckily Mushroom Pictures optioned the script immediately. “Mushroom Pictures was totally supportive from day one,” Verso enthuses. “We entered financing, which everyone who has tried to get an Australian film up knows isn’t easy, but we got there. And all the aspects of the film that I think other people would have shied away from they embraced, particularly the music, we’ve got a really big sound track, big songs and a lot of producers would have gone: ‘Oh that’s too expensive, you can’t do that,’ but Mushroom loved that because they wanted some of their own artists and other great artists from the 90s that they love. And then things like the visual effects, they wanted to go there, they loved the ambition and the scale of it. So that was great, to be with people who are courageous. When it came time to go into financing there was a bit more development, tweaking the script and making it a little bit more precise, because it is quite a big film, there is a lot going on in it. But originally it was even bigger, and we had to leave stuff out because we had to make it under a budget. So that was the main process. ”
But as the company was committed to working on other projects at the time, Verso went off to make his short film The Last Time I Saw Richard. Which was where he first met Toby Wallace. Initially Verso thought Toby would be perfect to play the role of Jonah, but by the time the financing was sorted a couple of years later he realised Wallace was too old to play the part convincingly. Toby was no longer believable as this young kid because he is so handsome and cool, enthuses the filmmaker, and so there was just no way you were going to buy that Toby wouldn’t be popular. “So then we decided to move him over to the lead role of Corey and find someone else to play Jonah.
“Toby is such a brave actor, he’s very courageous and he’s able to be very funny and charming and handsome, but then he’s not afraid to go into very dark places and strange places. So he’s very fearless in that respect. But as a person he’s very open hearted, very kind, and he’s always very lovely to everyone else in the cast and crew, and he’s just a joy to work with.”
As a tyro filmmaker Verso says that he was open to input from his cast, because, in his words, they knew that characters almost better than he did. “Justin was really protective of the character of Jango and he understood it so well, he gave it real strength, real vulnerability, because on the page I think some people just saw Jango as a bully, and Justin made sure he was so much more than that. Honestly Justin understood Jango better than I did, so I would really listen to him. He would always have really insightful comments, ‘Jango wouldn’t do this,’ or ‘Could Jango say this?’ and they were always really good suggestions, and so sometimes I would be tweaking dialogue on the night because of things coming out of the actors. Particularly with Justin, and with Toby as well. Toby really understood Corey. I was definitely open to that. The script is quite tightly wound in many ways, so there were some things that couldn’t change, but when the actors were bringing their own life experiences to it, their own souls, I would love that.”
Much of the film was shot at night, which presented its own series of challenges, but as a self-professed night owl the rigours of working those strange hours didn’t bother him. “When you’re working twelve hour days and shooting all night you want to be with someone who you want to spend time with, and Toby is definitely that.”
A character named Jonah is one of the constants running through Verso’ cinematic canon, but he admits that he doesn’t quite know why. “It’s very funny,” he says, “but a character called Jonah has always flittered through my imagination. He’s been in other stories that I’ve written that haven’t been made into films. I think they were all leading to this end point, and both Lights and The Last Time I Saw Richard came to me while I was writing Boys In The Trees. I think I was always trying to work out who this being was, this strange character who was always coming to me, and they helped me work out who he would be for this film. So I thank Jonah for coming to me and letting me tell his story.”
Greg King
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television