Goran Stolevski. Photo by Rich Macdonald.

With Of An Age, Goran Stolevski has gifted us with one of the best Australian films so far this century.

The film is subtle yet complex, and the love story between two young men, Kol and Adam, which anchors the film’s narrative, is one of the most memorable love stories you’re likely to see in a film this year.

Written, directed and edited by Stolevski, Of An Age is set in the Summer of 1999. In blue-collar North Melbourne, 17-year-old Serbian immigrant Kol (Elias Anton) is out of school forever.

He’s preparing for the Australian Dance finals when he receives a distress call from his dance partner, Ebony (Hattie Hook), who has woken up on an unfamiliar beach after a big night out. With the help of Ebony’s older brother, Adam (Thom Green), they attempt to make it to the finals on time.

But when Kol and Adam get stuck in summer traffic, they begin to realise they have more in common than they first thought. Over the course of the next 24 hours, an unexpected and intense romance blossoms.

Award-winning Macedonian-born and Australian raised writer-director Stolevski came to prominence with short films including Would You Look at Her, winner of the Best International Short at Sundance 2018.

Collectively his shorts played over 200 festivals worldwide including Clermont-Ferrand, Palm Springs, Melbourne and Raindance. He also directed three episodes of the fourth season of International-Emmy-winning series Nowhere Boys. 

In this interview, Stolevski breaks down the opening scenes of Of An Age in which so much about each character is revealed.

Of An Age is in select cinemas now.

Hattie Hook, Thom Green and Elias Anton in Of An Age.

“I do feel like filmmaking is still very aesthetically conservative in Australia. There’s quite a limit on what kind of visions get support. I don’t want to blame the funding bodies, which is a very easy thing to do, but I think even our audiences are conservative.”

Interview by Matthew Eeles

As Of An Age opens, we’re hit with Ebony’s strong 1990s dialect which is probably the most pronounced of all the characters’. Can you tell us about working with Hattie on the delivery of her lines and the resonance of it.

I always aim for maximum naturalism rather than using other performances, or other actors, as a reference. This way of Ebony speaking came from people that we’ve know throughout our lives, and people who live in the vicinity of Melbourne Ladies College. Part of why I cast Hattie, who was the only girl who auditioned to get a callback, was because this character in her self tape was already so formed in so much detail. When we did a chemistry test with Hattie, she was so willing to improvise and build on top of what was there in the material. Hattie didn’t feel fake at all. Her performance felt so precise. The dialogue that she delivered during that chemistry test told me so much about the personality of this character.

I took Hattie and Thom Green and Elias Anton to Macleod, the area where the film is set, just to walk around before we shot to get a sense of the vibe. Macleod has changed a lot since then, but at the time it emphasised which bits felt like they’re still connected to the nineties. Hattie put a lot of thought into every syllable of the script and she would mark it up and study it obsessively. But then once you’re on set, everyone works on instinct so much. Her performance certainly doesn’t come off as being rehearsed. We wanted to make her feel like she could take her time and that she wasn’t being rushed and that she didn’t feel pressure that every take had to be identical. I edit my own films, so I like to give actors a lot of freedom to try different things, because I can come up with ideas on how to make it flow in the edit.

Hattie also had to Google a lot of things for this performance too. [Laughs]. I don’t think it made it into the finished film, but there was a reference to Savage Garden, and she had to Google Savage Garden. [Laughs]. She was born in 2002 so we can’t blame her. There were a lot of nineties references in the film that Hattie had to Google.

I guess Hattie wouldn’t have been too familiar with a phone box either. It can’t get any more nineties than having a majority of a performance set inside a phone box. 

[Laughs]. Exactly right. I had to demonstrate it to her. “So the coins go in here, then you take the handset…”

Was the phone box there at that location, or did that require some production design?

That did require production design because we were being picky with how authentic we wanted it to be. We did find a lot of real phone boxes in other areas, but it was more the Milk Bar in the background that I became attached to. We placed the phone box there. We’re kind of trained to zone out phone boxes now, but if you stop and look around, there are still so many phone boxes all over the place. If you stop and actively look for them, they’re all over the place.

While this is happening, Nikola is practising a dance at his home. Did Elias bring those dance moves with him to this performance, or was it something he had to learn? Elias dances like someone who has danced his whole life.

Elias definitely had to learn it. He’s never done any professional dancing in his life. This scene is choreographed by Lauren Drago, who also taught Hattie for the later sequence. Elias had two weeks to learn how to dance, and how to dance specifically. Lauren and I spoke about the kind of dance that it was meant to be and what the context was within the world of the character. I specifically selected a song that was from Eurovision 1990, which was the only Eurovision that was done in ex-Yugoslavia. And then that was the Spanish song that became a hit all through the nineties. It would fit that this boy would know this song, and that this is the one that he intends to dance to.

I gave Lauren all these details and spoke a lot about the characters and the choreography. She adapted the dance to suit his strengths. Elias then became eerily good at dancing very quickly, so we could then make it quite complicated and layered. There were even elements that I only picked up on in the edit once I was slowing it all down and focusing on individual moments and individual moves. I could tell Lauren had planted those in there to hint that this boy is wanting to be sexy, but not being aware of what sexiness is. Not wanting to not be gay, but being gay. [Laughs]. It’s actually a really layered choreography. We did seven takes with Elias, and each one of them was perfect. I thought I would have to edit around someone who’s just learned dancing, but I had way more options than I needed in the end.

Elias Anton in Of An Age.

Following the dance scene, there’s a complex choreography going on within Elias’ house. Was this a complex shoot compared to the other scenes in the film considering a majority of Of An Age takes place within a car?

Everyone thought this scene would be a lot more complicated than it was. That entire sequence, when he’s running around the house, when he’s in the garage with his mother, his dance sequence, we had scheduled the full day to shoot that, which is standard for the amount of pages in the script, and the amount of movement it took. We ended up finishing it after half a day of filming. We finished it all in half the time that was allocated. We ended up shooting a lot of other scenes afterwards. It seemed very complicated logistically, but we had planned a lot in advance. In the end it was a very fluid process. And also because it depends on an actor having to maintain a certain level of adrenaline. Because it’s all direct continuity, there wasn’t much time for breaks

The lighting was designed so that we didn’t have to adjust much once we started. The space was designed and lit so that Elias could go anywhere and the camera could follow him wherever he went. The entire house was dressed and in character, so to speak, in terms of the background. Elias had space if he wanted to shift things, but in terms of getting from point-to-point, that was all made quite clear. So miraculously, it was actually an easy shoot. We finished two days early which never happens. [Laughs]. Emotionally, it was very intense all the way through, but it was also really beautiful. It never felt like we were trying to overcome difficulties or obstacles. In terms of onset movement, everything was really fluid. 

The cast and crew spent a lot of time together bonding in the lead up because we were shooting during a lockdown and trying to avoid covid. Because so much of the film involves the characters and the actors putting themselves in a very emotionally fragile state, the crew instinctively wanted to shield them and protect them. So everything would operate very smoothly and everyone was very quiet all the way through. We didn’t have to tell anyone to be quiet on set, which is remarkable because it was quite a young crew. Experienced, but young. And really empathetic. I think that helped enormously all through every aspect of filming.

There are many powerful moments of connection throughout the film, but to me, one of the best moments of connection happens between Nikola and his mother in the garage of their home. There’s not much being said verbally, but there’s a lot happening emotionally. I’m very keen to know about the casting of Milijana Cancar as Nikola’s mother.   

I have collaborated with Milijana on more films than I have with anyone else. She was in my Graduate Diploma film in 2007, my Masters film in 2008, and another couple of short films since then. She was meant to be in You Won’t Be Alone, but covid got in the way. She’s a Bolivian-born actress, but she’s been an Australia since the nineties. I work with her any chance I get. Honestly, she’s just one of the most sophisticated and emotionally-deep actors that I’ve ever had the pleasure and privilege to work with. I wanted her to be in this film because I knew she could imbue that very simple moment and interaction with the sense of a life lived. I feel like Elias and Milijana look like they could be family, which I love. To me, it’s really important that all these people in the film who aren’t technically main characters also feel like they’ve lived a deep life. I wanted it to feel like we’re touching a lot on moments in the lives of other people who have their own stories as well. I think that helps deepen this universe and make it feel more real. I spoke with Milijana quite a bit to fill her in on what the story was and what the context of her character was. We’re both migrants. We have a shorthand. [Laughs].

The next important sequence in this opening scene is Nikola’s sprint to find Ebony’s dress. When did you settle on the Zdravko Čholićh song, Ti Is Mi I Krvi, for this sequence. Are the lyrics of that song speaking to anything in particular within the scene? Are they significant to it?

Beautiful. I’m glad you asked asked that question. It was during the edit. It’s really funny because it’s an extremely famous song in all of ex-Yugoslavia. Everyone knows that song. Zdravko Čholićh is kind of the Elvis of ex-Yugoslavia and that song is his biggest hit ever. It’s not a song I’ve listened to much since I was quite little, but those kind of needle-drop moments with a big pop cultural hit don’t happen with Yugoslavia love songs. I wanted a big pop moment. I’m not sure how I thought of that song very quickly, but I think the other reason was it’s just the very classic and very naive conception of romance that is being sung about. It’s about a man who is going to save a woman because he loves her. It’s so naive, but so earnest. And in this romance, Nikola is so naive, but so earnest. It’s also the kind of music that his mother would be listening to. It suits her generation perfectly, so it made sense that she would have had that on the radio in her quiet sanctuary in the garage. That’s what she listens to because all of us migrants from that era were still listening to the music we grew up with. It’s also a commentary on this boy who probably has diluted romantic feelings towards Ebony too, but not really because he’s gay. That scene is about as autobiographical as this gets, because those power lines in that scene were the actual power lines that I was running under every fucking day of my life in the late nineties.

Thom Green and Elias Anton in Of An Age.

The conclusion to this twelve-minute opener is Nikola and Adam’s first meeting. They have an instant connection which penetrates the screen. How much time had Elias and Thom spent getting to know each other prior to that scene? 

They had around three weeks together. Thom was living in Sydney at the time. We’ve converted him, because he’s now living in Melbourne where he belongs. [Laughs]. He flew in for three weeks before the shoot. Elias lives on the outskirts of Melbourne. But we all stayed in the centre so we could all hang out quite a lot, and those two individually by themselves as well. But to be honest, we didn’t really do any rehearsals. There were no readings. I went through every single sentence in the script with each of them individually, and then with everyone together, to explain what my intentions were. Not in the sense that I was telling them what to do, it was more so they understood where I was coming from so they could absorb it and then have an opportunity to change it if it didn’t feel right. They always had the permission to change things. They improvised quite a bit. Rehearsals were more for understanding the whole story and the characters’ relationships, and why I wrote not just the dialogue but all the lines in between the big print, the descriptive parts. We also just hung out as ourselves. I think it’s really important to connect as human beings before you start connecting professionally. 

I think directing is really all about nurturing people more than anything else. It’s important to create a space for people where they can feel safe and that they feel they can ask any question if they feel uncomfortable about something. I wanted them to feel that they could say something on the spot rather than worry about it internally. When I say action on set, it doesn’t mean we have to start straight away. It means the camera is rolling and the crew is ready and we’ll keep out of the way. The actors could literally just fit in one spot and do nothing for three minutes until the feelings come and they feel like they can start inhabiting the character.

They’re all very generous people, but especially Thom. Thom was like my fellow nurturer and director in terms of making sure that Elias, who is a lot younger and slightly less experienced, also felt very safe and had someone to talk to. I think having that sense of mutual understanding of each others characters really helped as well.

This question is a cliché, but will you continue to make movies in Australia? Your films obviously have a European aesthetic to them, and both You Won’t Be Alone and Of An Age are universal narratives, but I’d love to see more Australia-based stories from you.

Thank you. We’ll see. [Laughs]. To answer your question, I definitely want to make more movies, but I’ve become quite a princess in the sense that I’m finishing a third film since Of An Age. I shot that one in Macedonia, but I’m doing the post-production in Australia. We’re working on the sound at the moment. It’ll be finished next month. It’s called Housekeeping for Beginners. I guess it’s a co-production between Australia and Macedonian. The producers on the next two films I want to make are Australian, and I want Thom Green to be in one of them at least. Those stories take place all across the world, but mainly in Europe, and not so much in America where everyone expects me to go. I have some other scripts that are set very much in Australia. I do feel like filmmaking is still very aesthetically conservative in Australia There’s quite a limit on what kind of visions get support. I don’t want to blame the funding bodies, which is a very easy thing to do, but I think even our audiences are conservative. We need to start selling Australian films to younger people because most Australian cinema audiences seem to be a lot older, so inevitably the stories are for a more conservative audience, not ideologically so much, but aesthetically. I’m not interested in making aesthetically safe films. They’re just not very exciting. Even films that I admire, I wouldn’t necessarily want to make them myself.

Of An Age is in select cinemas now. 

ADVERTISEMENT