Filmed on the outskirts of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, Kid Snow tells the story of a down-and-out Irish fighter named Kid Snow, who gets a shot at redemption in a rematch against the man who beat him ten years ago. Directed by Paul Goldman, the film is set in 1971 and follows a rowdy traveling tent-boxing show. But it’s more than just a boxing movie; it explores deep themes of redemption, family loyalty, and the hope for a better life.

Kid Snow’s story is heavy with past tragedy. He’s haunted by an accident that killed his father, a guilt that has stuck with him for years. Now, with his career in decline, he’s offered a chance to fight the Commonwealth champion, which could be his ticket to making things right and moving forward.

Sunny, a single mother escaping a violent relationship, finds herself in the chaotic world of the boxing troupe. Played by Phoebe Tonkin, Sunny’s character is crucial – she’s strong and resilient, not just a love interest but a driving force in the story. Her arrival shakes things up and pushes Kid and Rory to face their own struggles.

Paul Goldman, has been helping original writer John Brampton, and producers Lizzette Atkins and Bruno Charlesworth, to develop Kid Snow since 2017. With a background in music videos, commercials, and notable films like Australian Rules and Suburban Mayhem, Goldman brings a rich experience to this project. His commitment to authenticity is clear in the carefully recreated tent boxing scenes and the film’s vivid depiction of 1970s Australia.

In this interview, Goldman shares the journey of bringing Kid Snow from script to screen, the challenges of capturing the raw essence of tent boxing, and the complex relationships between the characters. His insights show a film that’s not just about physical battles but internal ones too.

Interview by Matthew Eeles

The last time we spoke, Ego: The Michael Gudinski Story was about to screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival. How has life been for you since the release of that film?

I think everyone greeted that film very warmly. The film did very, very well at the box office, so it was a good experience for me. It was a tough film to make for various reasons, but it was very enjoyable getting that film off my back as well. It was only a matter of COVID and coincidences that saw me making Ego: The Michael Gudinski Story and Kid Snow almost on top of each other. But of course, that complicated my life unnecessarily. Michael’s legacy is enormous, and particularly in Australia, there was a very warm-hearted reception to it. It came on the back of the John Farnham documentary as well. Both John and Michael are enormous icons of Australian music and culture.

John Brumpton’s Kid Snow script was first brought to you in 2017, but I believe you didn’t start filming until 2022. Can you tell us about your involvement in the film during that time?

It was a tricky film to make because, once again, COVID was getting in the way of the casting. Even getting ourselves over to the West was a struggle. At various times, it felt like the film was going to fall over. So to get it out there in front of the public is going to be very, very satisfying. I find releasing a film both exhilarating and also nerve-wracking. I tend to lose any perspective on what I’ve made. I don’t know whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent. I certainly don’t think that it’s a bad film. I just don’t know what it is I’ve made in some ways, if that makes sense. John had written a script and he’d cold-called Lizzette Atkins to see if she would like to produce the film. I’d met John many, many times in casting sessions, and at times he came very close to being cast in a couple of films I’ve made. I’ve watched John’s career, and I know that he had written a very, very long script at one point, and then it went through various iterations with Lizzette attached to it and [co-producer] Bruno Charlesworth, and they tried to finance it. Somehow it kind of just went into a twilight zone. Then they approached me and I read it and said I liked the characters. I liked the narrative drive of it. I liked the background, I liked the world of the tent boxing. I’d always wondered why no one had set a film in that world. And I came on board with some determinations to where I would take the script.

You’ve said that the character of Sunny, played by Phoebe Tonkin, became a preoccupation of yours. Why was this character so important to you?

Well, a variation of Sunny was in John’s script. John’s script has driven everything we’ve done. Most of the characters are in John’s original scripts, and certainly the world of tent boxing and the world of professional boxing was in there. The narrative drive of the film, the story arc, was in John’s original script. But one of the things I found problematic was that I wanted a strong woman to come between these two guys. I wanted a woman, a stranger, to walk into their lives and turn their lives upside down and inside out. Rory and Kid are in a very, very toxic relationship full of guilt and remorse, and I wanted someone to step inside their world and say something about masculinity. When we meet these brothers, Kid has kind of given up and Rory’s a bitter manipulator. He’s trying to keep this boxing troop on the road. He seems friendless. And then this woman arrives in almost the worst place she could possibly arrive, given that she’s running away from domestic violence in Sydney. She lands there with her young son and, almost contrary to Kid’s best instincts, Sunny lights a fire in Kid’s heart and soul. I thought Sunny was going to be very, very important and a bridge to Kid finding some peace.

Phoebe Tonkin is arguably one of Australia’s best actors, who has recently turned to producing also. What does Phoebe bring to a role like this?

I hang my hat pretty seriously on my casting. I think throughout my films, my casting has been daring, and I’m pretty meticulous about it. I did go to NIDA, and so I like working with actors. I understand that all actors have different processes. I still find working with actors nerve-wracking and challenging, but in the most wonderfully creative way. I think the best actors I’ve worked with have brought such riches to the projects I’ve worked on, whether it’s Emily Barclay in Suburban Mayhem, or Phoebe in Kid Snow. The role was always going to be tricky to cast because those dancing sequences were going to be difficult for some actresses to put themselves out there like that. Phoebe, I think, had something to prove. We made Kid Snow before Boy Swallows Universe. I think Kid Snow gave Phoebe a lot of confidence. I thought she had amazing support from Billy Howle, Tom Bateman, Hunter Page-Lochard, Mark Coles Smith, and Shaka Cook. When I’m making a film, all my actors work together as an ensemble, and I expect them to be very supportive of each other and very collaborative with each other, and to listen very, very carefully to each other. I think there’s real chemistry between Phoebe and Billy Howle. But it was going to be a challenging role for a young actress. I mean, she’s walking around scantily clad in a very, very masculine, testosterone-driven environment. And that was the case even on set. I mean, we are out of fucking Kalgoorlie, and the conditions are pretty brutal and harsh. It’s pretty raw. And Phoebe essentially spent the entire shoot surrounded by men. And I thought that was always going to be challenging. But Phoebe came to this film with a real bee in her bonnet to prove something to herself, and I think to the wider world. She’s the most generous, delightful, wonderful, intelligent person to work with, and I think she brings something very, very special to this film.

I want to go back to John Brumpton for a moment. He has a very brief role in the film. As the film’s co-writer, did John stay on for most of the shoot?

John came over to shoot those scenes only. I know John really loved it, so I’m very, very glad we did that. The film had been through many iterations before I came on board. For me, it was very important that I brought on board my good friend Phillip Gwynne, who I’ve collaborated with a lot and who wrote Australian Rules. Phillip did some very important work on the Kid Snow script. Then Stephen Cleary came on board as a writer also.

You mentioned that Phillip’s work on the script was important to you. Why so?

Phillip loves this world. He loves masculine worlds and loves engaging with masculine worlds. It’s one of the themes of Australian Rules and undermining that idea, which is voiced in Australian Rules when one of the characters says, “When men get together, wonderful things happen.” Yes, of course, Australian Rules is about the exact opposite of that. In some ways, that’s also thematically rich territory in Kid Snow. The world of tent boxing and professional boxing is very brutal and violent. These are violent men, but it’s undercut by the camaraderie of the indigenous boxers in the film. Tent boxing plays such an important part in Australian mythology, and we shouldn’t forget that at the time, even though many, many indigenous men were exploited by boxing tents, it was a way for them to travel in a way that at certain times they couldn’t without permission. That’s kind of Phillip’s wheelhouse, working in those areas.

How familiar were you with tent boxing and this part of Australia’s history?

I wasn’t so familiar with it, but I was certainly aware of it. One of the strange coincidences in my life is that when I was at NIDA, one of the people who became a bit of a mentor to me was Jim Sharman, a highly esteemed and awarded theatre director who also directed The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But his grandfather was the man behind Sharman’s Boxing Tents. So I’d read Jim’s autobiography a long time ago, and there’s a lot about that in there. I was aware of boxing tents and had wondered along the way why we’d never seen a film that dropped us into that world. It’s magical. Tent boxing is strange because, at times, it’s brutal and violent, but often it was circus-like. The boxers standing up there on the boards were determined not to really hurt the people from various towns who put their hands up to climb in the ring. Things could go wrong pretty quickly and it could become pretty bloodied and violent, but it was a sideshow, and I’d always loved that aspect of it. So once the script was in front of me and I was engaged by the project, I started doing a lot of reading. One of the great delights of making this film was the fact that the actual tent is Roy Bell’s tent, one of the most famous boxing tents in the history of Australian tent boxing. We found it wrapped up in a shed just outside Dubbo. It belongs to Michael Karaitiana, owner and operator of Roy Bell’s Boxing Tent.

It’s such an incredible story that you were able to get that tent. I guess Kid Snow wouldn’t have worked as well as it does if it wasn’t for the production design along with that incredible set design. How important is it to maintain authenticity throughout a period film like this?

I was very concerned that the film didn’t become a period piece and get lost in art direction and production design. There are quite a few Australian films that were red flags for me where I thought that had happened.

Name them.

Nope. [Laughs]. I was determined that the film should be authentic. I met production designer Clayton Jauncey a long time ago. So in the very earliest days when we were developing the script, I was making trips over to Western Australia and I met with Clayton often. Clayton came on board very early, and I have an enormous debt of gratitude to Clayton. His work on Kid Snow was tireless. His passion for the project in every aspect of it was tireless. We spent hundreds of hours on the road around Western Australia looking for locations and meeting people. I think his work on this film is extraordinary. It’s remarkable. I think Garry Phillips’ cinematography is remarkable, and I’m enormously beholden to those people and my first assistant director, Mark Boskell. But the determination was to make a film that was very authentic. One of the films that was hugely influential for me was a John Huston film made in 1972 called Fat City, shot by one of the greatest cinematographers of all time, Conrad L. Hall. I kind of gave this film to everyone, and even though it bears no resemblance to the film I’ve made, it’s still a brutal, sad film. But the production design on it and the way it looked was certainly in many ways influential.

Kid Snow is a return to the sporting genre for you following Australian Rules. Do you have an interest in sports films, or boxing films in general?

I’ve always loved boxing films. Certainly, Raging Bull was a very important film to me. It came out when I was a young film student, and it was very influential. The performances of De Niro and Joe Pesci are phenomenal. Also, for the sake of Kid Snow, Raging Bull is a film that seems to be about boxing, but it’s actually about the toxic relationship between two brothers. So that’s mirrored in Kid Snow. And of course, their toxic relationship falls apart around a woman. But whether it’s Cinderella Man, The Wrestler, or Iron Claw, I’ve always liked those films. I think boxing films, particularly as a sub-genre, are a wonderful microcosm to step into because of their brutality and visceral nature. I’ve always thought sport is a wonderful microcosm to examine things. I’ve always been attracted to that world where men are set about destroying each other. I also play on it in Suburban Mayhem. And as you know, I made a documentary about Ben Cousins. So I found those worlds enticing and difficult to reconcile how destructive they are. And boxing, of course, attracts people because of its violence.

Talk us through the challenges of shooting a boxing scene.

Yeah, they were very important. There are two types of boxing in Kid Snow. There is the carnival-esque boxing inside the boxing tent with an audience literally standing around and immersed in the action. And then there are the scenes inside the professional boxing ring, and obviously the big set piece with Hammer. I directed all of those scenes, and of course, the first reference for me was Raging Bull, but I also wanted to do something a little bit different. Those scenes were very hard. Billy Howle certainly did a lot of boxing training. Those scenes are very dangerous to shoot. There are a lot of stunt people around. Inevitably, some of those punches actually slipped through. Billy took some pretty heavy knocks. Tristan Gorey, who played Hammer, was a real boxer. He’s a wonderful actor, but his boxing was brutal, and it was quite common for the punches to slip through Billy’s defense. We’re talking a matter of inches here. So yeah, they’re very scary scenes to shoot. Billy was also concussed a few times, but there are a lot of people around those scenes who have an enormous responsibility to the actors in every way. But all of us, the actors, the stunt crew, the cinematographer – everyone is hunting for authenticity and realism. You need to be careful to step back from that sometimes because of the exhilaration of it. And of course, stepping into a boxing ring with young guys, there’s a lot of testosterone, and everyone gets very excited. So they’re exciting scenes to shoot and exciting scenes to cut as well, but those scenes very much come alive in the editing room.

This is the first film you’ve made in Western Australia. What sets WA filmmaking apart from other states?

I had a great time in Western Australia. We’re enormously indebted and thankful to the involvement of Screenwest. Western Australia holds a very dear place in my heart, not least because I barrack for the West Coast Eagles as well, which is an anomaly considering I’m a Victorian. [Laughs]. I had a great time over there. The crew was remarkable. Kid Snow was a very tough film to make. We literally arrived days after the WA border finally opened, and we had grave fears that we wouldn’t get to make the film during COVID. There were a lot of hurdles to jump over and through, and it was tricky getting us there. It was tricky casting the film for all those reasons. I think people have some kind of amnesia about how devastating COVID was, and the impacts here in Victoria, particularly in Melbourne, but also the perceptions overseas. But the dedication of everyone who made this film was remarkable and inspiring.

Kid Snow will premiere at the Sydney Film Festival on Tuesday, June 11. Details here.

Kid Snow will open the Revelation Perth International Film Festival on Wednesday, July 3. Details here. 

Kid Snow will release nationally on September 12. 

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