Interview: David Easteal

David Easteal

There’s nothing plane about The Plains.

The three hour film follows Andrew, a man in his fifties, on his daily commute to and from work over the course of a year. Occasionally Andrew is joined by David, a colleague who Andrew drives home from time to time.

The Plains is set almost entirely inside Andrew’s car, and shot from one angle from the middle back seat.

While that description of the film may sound like a drag to some, The Plains is anything but. It’s actually an emotionally, ahem, driven and highly captivating piece of work, expertly crafted by first-time feature filmmaker, David Easteal.

Not only is Melbourne-based Easteal a filmmaker, he also practices as a barrister at the Victorian Bar which plays into the dialogue and The Plains’ narrative.

David’s short films have screened at various international festivals, including the New York, BFI London, Chicago, Kiev Molodist, Sofia and Singapore film festivals. He received the Award for Emerging Australian Filmmaker at the 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival.

The Plains received the Films en Cours post-production support award at Belfort International Film Festival Entrevues.

The Plains premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022 as part of the Tiger Competition before its local festival run at the Melbourne International Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival and the Adelaide Film Festival.

David and Andrew on one of their daily commutes.

“It certainly wasn’t the case that I just placed a camera in the back of Andrew’s car for a year and filmed all year. We filmed about once a month over twelve months so we could see the year passing and feel that visually in the film.”

Interview by Matthew Eeles

Have you studied film?
No, I never studied film. I studied law and humanities. I’ve learnt how to make films through making short films, which I started when I was quite young. I also just watched a lot of films. Certainly the short films that I made earlier on were perhaps a lot more conventional than The Plains. I went through a process of figuring out the type of films that I liked and the type of films that I’d want to make myself and how I wanted to make them. That’s perhaps the only way I can describe my film studies. When I was a teenager I might have read a few books on script writing. There was maybe a bit of self research like that. But I think aside from that there wasn’t a great deal of research. I think it’s just through watching films, and having a real passion for film, and having a desire to start trying to express myself through film. It’s all been trial and error really.

You work as a barrister. Would you say filmmaking is a hobby for you? Or is it something you’d like to do full time?
The great thing about having my work as a barrister is that I got to make the film that I wanted to make. The Plains had a bare outline of a script from the outset, and it was largely made with improvised dialogue without professional actors and only a crew of a few people. Also, we shot The Plains over a year. So it’s understandable that it would never have been funded by a state funding body or anything like that. [Laughs]. I really cherished being able to work this way so freely. I need to have a day job, really. A lot of filmmakers who make all sorts of different films have to have a day job in some respect. I certainly love making films. I love every process about making films and I want to keep making films, but it’s important to me to make the films that I want to make and to have that independence. I think pragmatically, if I’m going tokeep doing that, I’m going to need to have some other means of earning an income.

As a general filmgoer, do you seek out films like The Plains?
I’d say so. I’m very attuned to what’s going on on the festival circuit, even when I’m not making films. I follow film. I have done since I was a teenager. I think my taste in film has developed a lot over the years. I still watch broadly. I don’t only watch three hour art house films, but it’s important to me to keep across what’s going on generally. There’s only a finite number of distribution companies that will release movies theatrically in Australia, so the film festivals really hold a very important role in terms of bringing certain of films to audiences. And now of course there’s streaming services. But film festivals have always been very important to me and I’m very excited to be part of the festival circuit this year.

I don’t read reviews before seeing a film, and I avoided press before going into this film. I have to admit that I do feel a bit silly now that I’ve learnt more about the making of The Plains. I thought I was watching a genuine documentary, but it is in fact a scripted narrative. What are the origins of The Plains?
The Plains stems from a year in my life when I worked with Andrew. Over the course of that year that we worked together in the outer suburbs and he started to drive me home. Over that time we got to know each other. I got to know about his mother who was ailing, her dementia was worsening. I got to know about his wife and we developed a friendship. I left the workplace and we remained friends because we did live in the same neighbourhood. We caught up every now and then. And when I started trying to make a film, I was thinking about a character like Andrew and I was trying to write a more conventional script about a man who’s in his late fifties hurtling towards retirement, who has more of a sense of his mortality, with the passing of his parents. I struggled and it seemed to me as though the best idea for the film was how I got to know Andrew through these drives. I’ve always loved films set in cars. I made a short film largely in a car, and it seemed like a unique opportunity to craft the film, or shape the film, just with these commutes. So it came about from looking back at that period, bringing in events from those original commutes, as well as more contemporaneous events and manipulating things a little bit. It certainly wasn’t the case that I just placed a camera in the back of Andrew’s car for a year and we filmed all year. We filmed about once a month over twelve months so we could see the year passing and feel that visually in the film. Each month was a process of writing and constructing what would occur during the next month’s shoot, keeping in mind the overall shape of the film, like Andrew’s mother passing away and me coming and going and departing the workplace. It was a very interesting process to keep it changing and taking shape in the various ways that it did, because a lot of things happened over the course of that year which could have never really been foreseen.

Does it sound silly to you when someone like me says that I thought that it was a documentary about a man on his daily commutes?
It certainly doesn’t sound silly. There are a lot of people who think that. I think there are some clues in the film. A few things become a bit too neat. [Laughs]. There are a few indicators in there.

What are they?
Well there’s a stage in the film where Andrew pulls out his iPad and starts to show me videos of both his mother and his sister’s residence which he had to clean up after his sister passed away. And there are videos of he and Cheri out on this property that they have on the Western Plains of Victoria. There are a few moments that if it hadn’t been shaped to some sort of a narrative. It would’ve been quite remarkable for all of this stuff to have occurred. It’s obviously playing into this boundary of fiction and documentary, it’s just not that obvious. It has played at certain festivals which are documentary film festivals, and some people see a lot of documentary elements in the film. Documentary is a nebulous term. There are certain elements which are documentary, like watching the streets of Melbourne. I had no control over that. So if you see documentary as just being purely documenting something, then I guess you get a real time vision of Melbourne in the film. Recreation can also be a style of documentary as well, like reenactment. A large part of this film is a reenactment.

The Plains

Did you have the audience in mind while you were making this film? This is a three hour two-hander set in a guys car and shot mostly in one angle. You must have been thinking about how audiences would respond to such a film.
I had no idea how long it was going to be. I would be lying if I told you that I don’t want my films to be seen. As a filmmaker, there’s a part of you that knows you want to have your film seen. I think that your instinct, that feeling in your gut, is the only thing you can trust. I couldn’t be thinking, Oh, is this going to appeal to this audience or that audience? I think it’s important to be true to that feeling inside of you. And maybe if you are completely true and honest to that then hopefully the film might resonate. I’ve only made this one feature film, but I just tried to keep true to myself and hoped that if I was true to myself, then it might connect with other people. So in that regard, I guess I was thinking about an audience, but I knew it was never going to be a film that’s going to be playing in multiplexes all around the country. The audience that I had in mind was a film festival audience that’s open to films that aren’t just your standard narrative. I’m a part of that audience, so I knew that that audience exists.

Andrew plays a big part in capturing the audience’s attention. He’s a fascinating character. Tell us about Andrew?
Andrew has an ability to hold your attention. How Andrew speaks and engages with people was something that I experienced in real life. I only wanted Andrew to play Andrew. I think instinctively, I don’t know if an actor could bring the qualities that Andrew does to this performance. In reality what he’s doing is performing. He might be performing a version of himself, but he’s also recreating moments that occurred years ago. So in that respect, he’s acting, he’s performing, and I think he does an extraordinary job. I approached Andrew with the idea of a man doing the nine-to-five and the daily grind, which I think he’s grappled with his whole life. he was very interested in the themes. When we worked together, I had a short film that played at the Melbourne International Film Festival and he came to watch it. So he knew I was involved in filmmaking and he just thought this would be an interesting thing to do. It was a very, very, very small production. I mean, it was just myself, Andrew, the cinematographer and a sound recordist and that was it. I think he was more open to it in that respect, because it was such a small production.

You play yourself in the film. Do you consider yourself to be an actor?
Well I’m certainly not a professional actor. I acted in this film playing a version of myself from a few years prior. I was already at the bar when I made the film. And in the film, I’m struggling with being a solicitor in the suburbs with Andrew. So in a similar way to Andrew, I think we’re both acting. It’s not like I have any great desires to continue acting. I think it was just the only way this film was going to work would be for Andrew to really open up. And I think it had to have been someone sitting next to Andrew who knew Andrew and could have this sort of dialogue with him. It also provided me with an opportunity to direct in an indirect way, as I could attempt to shape the conversation in real time. .

How much of the dialogue was scripted?
The basic outline or the structure of what’s said each month was largely scripted, but the exact words were improvised. I never gave Andrew a whole script. We’d agree on the topics that would be discussed and there may have been a bit of further direction beyond that in terms of his conveying mood. But the actual words were never scripted. Maybe a few words. The process was that each month I’d write out what I would think could occur in the next month’s shoot. And then I’d start a dialogue with Andrew and maybe Cheri, Andrew’s wife, because she was involved. Once we settled on which direction we were going to take that month’s shoot, both Andrew and I knew where we were going to take the dialogue.

Andrew acts out speaking with his mother over the phone, who had obviously passed away by this time. That must have been hard for him to act out conversations with his mother who had died years earlier.
I can’t speak for Andrew in terms of how difficult that was. When I drove home with Andrew in reality many years ago, his mother passed away. So in the film, he’s not speaking to his mother, it’s all recreation. In fact, his wife Cheri is on the other end of the line playing his mother. Cheri knew how his mother was, so she was able to act as his mother. A big part of this story is the deterioration of Andrew’s mother over the course of a year told through these phone calls to her.

What camera setup did you have for this film?
It’s a full camera rig. Quite a big rig for a car. It is the original ARRI ALEXA Camera, which is quite hefty once you put the lens on. [Laughs]. This was a self-funded project so we could have used the ARRI ALEXA Mini, but it would’ve been significantly more expensive than the ALEXA Classic, which was not as desirable. We worked with a production gear house in Melbourne and each month we would rent this gear for two days and we’d have two attempts at the take because we could only do one take a day. We’d have the gear for the whole day, but because we had to drive at 5:00pm in rush hour, we’d only do the one take. We could fake the clock in the car, but you can’t really fake the light, which at 5:00pm the light changes across the course of the year, which was one of the things I was interested to show visually. Rush hour is particularly bad at 5:00pm so if we shot all day and just manipulated the clock, we wouldn’t have captured the light or the rush hour, so we had to just have the one take a day.

I’m going to offend a lot of Melbournians here, but I visited Melbourne recently where my brother lives and works as a truck driver, so he’s on those roads all day, every day. One thing I noticed is that Melbourne drivers aren’t patient. In the short time I was there I witnessed at least half a dozen near-misses, and my brother told me I wouldn’t believe what he witnesses daily on those roads, from minor crashes to fatalities. Were there any nervous moments for you during the shoot?
There’s a lot of tension out there, especially during rush hour time in Melbourne particularly. There are so many people moving around, and there may have been one or two nervous moments. The more you watch the film, you do pick up little things that might be happening on the road, and there are a few close calls that you see. But in terms of us in the car, thankfully it was all pretty safe. I can recall one moment where the whole camera rig slid forward because Andrew had to break so hard. Our heart rates went up. The rigging just worked really well, and it was quite stable.

The Plains

How many hours of footage did you capture?
Not an excessive amount as it was just the two drives each month.

Was the editing process a fun experience for you? It sounds like something you’re quite passionate about.
It was fun for me. I’ve always loved the editing process the most and I hope that doesn’t change. I spent a lot of time on the editing process. There’s only a limited number of cuts, but those cuts can really change the rhythm. The Plains is not a film that’s intended to be on a loop in a gallery where you can walk in and watch it a little bit and know what’s going on. It’s shaped like a narrative film. Editing this film really became about rhythm. When you are talking about a rhythm over so many hours you need a lot of time because you need to be able to watch and see how the story, and the film as a whole, is affected by the rhythm of the cut. Running a shot for five minutes longer, or shorter, could have had a major impact on the story. Making any tweaks like that would affect the film greatly, so that was what I think took the most amount of time.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that editing process.
I don’t think you would have. [Laughs]. It was a long, drawn out process. I was also transcribing what was said during different takes because it was easy to lose track of what’s said where. It was quite an arduous process. I don’t know if any editor would’ve actually been all that keen to have done it. So I think maybe I was the only person who was going to be able to edit this.

The film is three hours long. Do you think The Plains could work if it ran for half the time?
No. I actually attempted a much shorter cut. At a certain stage I had friends who hadn’t yet watched the film, but they told me I couldn’t make a three hour film. And so, as an exercise, I cut it right back. The only way you can drastically reduce the duration is to introduce jump cuts, which I did just to test it. The edit has to be a time where you let go of preconceived notions of what the film has to be and you really work with what you have in front of you, which might be different than the idea that you have in your mind. You need to be open to trying out different things. So I had a go at cutting it back, and it was just so flat. The film lost a lot. There are emotional moments in the film which resonate with me, and that was all lost. In that shorter cut, those emotional moments felt completely flat because they didn’t have the space around them that they needed. And again, it came down to rhythm. Others might disagree, but I genuinely feel as though this was the shortest this film could be. Having worked with the material for so long, I’m convinced that this is how the film should be. I don’t think the film should be longer, and I don’t think it could have been shorter. I didn’t set out to make a three hour film. This is just where it ended up.

I’ve been covering movies for a long time, and I’ve learnt not to ask filmmakers about budgets because I know budgets aren’t something every filmmaker likes to discuss. But could you give us a ballpark figure of what The Plains cost to make? I think a lot of independent filmmakers would be keen to know.
I never kept a spreadsheet so I can’t give you a precise amount. The greatest expense on this film would have been the post-production, however fortunately the film received some support through a film festival in France for post-production, so we were able to complete the film in Paris. Post-production requires a bit of money, especially a three hour film. But the shooting budget of the film was minimal because there were four people involved. We were getting the gear at a cheaper rate because we used a bigger camera. It was a very small budget across the board.

Now that you’ve made this one-angle, two-hander, how do you think you’d go making a more conventional feature film?There is certainly mostly one angle in The Plains, but I’m not averse to using more than one angle, and I have done so in the past, in my short films. It was an angle and a structure that suited this particular film. As far as making a more conventional film, I’m not sure, I hope I can continue to make work I’m drawn to make and am interested in, I just feel lucky every time I get a chance to make a film.

The Plains will screen at the Adelaide Film Festival on Friday, 21 October at 2:30pm. Details here