Indianna Bell and Josiah Allen on the set of You’ll Never Find Me.

Indianna Bell and Josiah Allen are a directing duo based in Adelaide, South Australia.

Their first short film Call Connect, a 16 minute one-take drama, won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Short at the 2020 Austin Film Festival. Indianna was also listed in Austin FF’s 25 Screenwriters to Watch in 2020 list.

The duo’s following short film, The Recordist, was selected for nine International Film Festivals, including the BAFTA-qualifying London Short Film Festival and Norwich Film Festival, the Oscar-qualifying Hollyshorts Film Festival, Manchester Film Festival and San Diego International Film Festival. 

The Recordist also won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Short at the Oscar-qualifying Austin Film Festiva for the second year in a row. It was the first back-to-back short film win at the festival in recent history. It also won Best Short Film at the Byron Bay Film Festival and took out the Gold Award for Cinematography at the Australian Cinematography Society Awards.

You’ll Never Find Me is their first feature film which follows Patrick (Brendan Rock), a strange and solitary resident who lives in a mobile home at the back of an isolated caravan park. After a violent thunderstorm erupts, a mysterious young woman (Jordan Cowan) appears at his door seeking shelter from the weather.

Increasingly unnatural occurrences begin to unfold in the home, pushing an already paranoid Patrick into a deeper state of unease. The longer the night wears on and the more the young woman discovers about Patrick, the more difficult she finds it to leave. Soon she begins to question Patrick’s intentions, while Patrick questions his own grip on reality.

You’ll Never Find Me is currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Details here.

Brendan Rock as Patrick in You’ll Never Find Me.

“The power struggle between an older male and a slightly younger female is a common real-world dynamic that unfortunately exists.”

Interview by Matthew Eeles

What’s the origin of your filmmaking partnership?

Indianna Bell Joe and I met at university where we studied film together. We did some projects together at uni and we found that we both had very similar tastes and that we both watched the same films and enjoyed the same films. When we worked together, it just felt very natural and easy. We also work with another guy named John Chataway, who’s kind of the third member of our group. When we finished uni, we banded together straight away and we kept making stuff. We made lots of short films together and silly sketches and all kinds of things that you do when you’re learning how to make films. The next natural progression for us was to make a feature film. And that’s how You’ll Never Find Me came about.

Josiah Allen It’s very much a taste thing. There are a few natural benefits to co-directing like having the pressure halved. Another benefit is the instant feedback and response that I can’t imagine you’d get when making a film solo. It’s a real benefit to be able to have a quick power discussion about every take with each other before discussing it with the actor. It meant that we were able to be a bit more confident in our decision making and to get to the point of things quicker and to work off of each other’s strengths. In uni there was a bit of a divide between us in terms of what we wanted to do. In high school, Indiana did a lot of theatre, and a lot plays and writing while I was very visual. You can see those differences in our first-year uni projects before we started working together. Mine were very visual while Indiana had these amazing scripts. [Laughs]. When we started to become friends and collaborators, Indiana would write the scripts while I would storyboard. Over time we got used to coming together and sharing the work load equally.

I watched your previous short film The Recordist recently, which has similar themes to You’ll Never Find Me. What sociocultural factors inspired the exploration of male dominance over the female in both films? Is it a response to anything in particular?

Indianna Well, with The Recordist, we started making that film during the time of the Me Too movement. That’s what was going on at the time. It was really at the forefront of the media. And really the idea of Me Too accidentally lent into that zone because the whole idea for The Recordist came from another film set when we were making something for Tropfest. They were running a masterclass with Nash Edgerton and Spencer Susser. We were on a film set for that and they were filming us for a behind-the-scenes documentary capturing us directing. So for the first time ever, we were mic’d up. We’d never been mic’d up before. The guy who mic’d us up told us, “These are lapel mics. Don’t forget that you’ve got it on because we will be recording for the whole day and will hear everything.” [Laughs]. We’d joked with him about capturing some funny stuff and he said, “You’ve got no idea!” I found that really intriguing, and it sparked the idea for a film. Taking that concept in a darker direction, it becomes a powerful position to be in. What would happen if that power went to the wrong person? As we developed the idea, it began to align with the Me Too movement and the concept of a man wielding unfair power over a woman in the film industry. As for You’ll Never Find Me, the idea emerged due to our available resources and access within a low budget range. It wasn’t a deliberate plan to address a topical issue. Instead, it was a pragmatic decision to set the film in one location. We had worked with Brendan and Jordan, our lead actors, on The Recordist, and their collaboration was fantastic. So I thought, “What can we create with two people in a single location?” From there, the exploration of power dynamics between men and women unfolded during the story’s development.

Josiah With The Recordist, we had a distinct vision for the story and themes we wanted to explore. However, the concept for You’ll Never Find Me emerged more organically due to our need to create something small and contained. We brainstormed multiple ideas and played with the dynamics between the two characters. The power struggle between an older male and a slightly younger female is a common real-world dynamic that unfortunately exists.

Jordan Cowan as The Visitor in You’ll Never Find Me.

Even though Brendan’s character Andy is slightly unhinged in The Recordist, he really couldn’t be more different from Patrick in You’ll Never Find Me. And the same goes for both of Jordan’s characters. Indianna, did you set out to push these two further as actors while you were writing the script?

Josiah We did. We thought they were so good in The Recordist. During post-production on that film, we knew that we wanted to work with both actors again on a feature film to really showcase their range as actors. Brendan is a very bubbly, entertaining man.

Indianna He’s also a massive extrovert.

Josiah That’s right. Obviously, he’s nothing like Andy, but we wanted to use him in a creepy way. We wanted to purposefully lean very hard into the opposite direction of what he’s like in real life and to explore that side of this character’s persona.

Indianna Throughout the process of making a short film, you spend so much time writing, rehearsing, and talking with the actors. And then, by the time you get to editing and you’ve seen the takes a million times, you just kind of get to the point where you definitely don’t want to do the same thing again. So I think we were pretty conscious that we’ve got these two amazing actors whom we can work with again. So we wanted to get them to do something that felt really, really different from what had been done before. Even with their physical changes, the difference in costumes, and just the general vibe. Especially with Brendan. I think some people probably wouldn’t even recognise Brendan as being the same person in both films, and that’s just a testament to how great an actor he is.

Josiah We certainly didn’t want to remake and expand The Recordist. We were done with that film. Rather than using The Recordist as a proof of concept to expand it into a feature film, we were using the fact that those two are so interesting and gripping to watch and to engage the audience. We really wanted to play on that.

Describe some of the processes of co-directing a film together?

Indianna Like Joe said earlier, when we first started out, there was a bit more of a divide in our roles. But as we developed further, I would be more focused on writing the script and imagining how each line would be performed. I would talk with the actors a lot and rehearse extensively. Joe would be more focused on the visual aspects, imagining how each scene would play out, lens choices, storyboarding, and collaborating with the director of photography. These roles became our fallback modes when we’re on set, especially when we’re short on time or when emergencies arise. We both focus on our strengths in that regard.

Josiah Hopefully, there isn’t a noticeable difference between us as directors on set now. We’ve worked so much with both Brendan and Jordan that they’re familiar with our strengths and weaknesses. In pre-production, we divide our responsibilities more. For instance, on You’ll Never Find Me, the shoot was pretty tight for what we were aiming to achieve, so we had a rehearsal period. During that time, I tried to step back and allow Indianna to work more closely with the actors, particularly because the first third of the film is akin to a theatre production. It’s an opportunity for Indianna to convey her thoughts to the actors. During this period, we attempt to avoid anything visual-related. I step back and observe them as an audience member, standing with our DoP, considering camera placement. By the time we get to the actual shoot, we’re all on the same page, and it naturally balances out. Either of us can approach the actors to discuss a scene, or speak with the DoP. It’s a fantastic collaborative approach, especially on a film like this, where the set is quite enclosed.

Brendan Rock as Patrick in You’ll Never Find Me.

You’ve said that you wanted your debut feature film to be inexpensive so that you didn’t have to go through the traditional funding methods which can take time. How did you go about funding this film?

Indianna We knew from the beginning that we didn’t want to get trapped in financing limbo, especially not for our first film when we could see that there was a way that we could get it made if we just kept the budget really small. We were inspired by the American filmmaker, Trey Edward Shults. We had a short film play at the Austin Film Festival. While we were there we saw Trey’s film Waves. During his Q and A he spoke about his career trajectory and how he got to where he is. He started by making a bunch of short films like we had done. And then he made a tiny, tiny micro budget film called Krisha which just took off and did wonders for his career. From there he was able to get his next project going, and then his next project. We thought it was really cool to know that we could actually take control of that aspect of filmmaking and do it ourselves, and not have to wait for years to get our first project off the ground. That’s what inspired us. Methodology wise, we wanted to keep this project really small, as small as we could and to keep it as simple. We knew that the idea had to be practical. Then from there we also put in a bunch of our own money as lots of young filmmakers do. We also sourced private investment also.

You’ll Never Find Me is mostly a two-hander, one-set piece. Was the film shot on location, or was it shot in a studio?

Indianna In a studio.

Josiah We had one day on location for the exterior scenes. We pretty much brought the set out into a field which looked ridiculous in real life. [Laughs]. But from the two specific angles we shot it at, it looked right.

Indianna If we moved the camera slightly to the left or to the right, you would’ve seen that it was essentially just a flat wall flailing in the breeze. But shooting it front on, you’d never know. But it was one of those things where cost-wise, yes, it does cost more to build a set and to shoot in a studio, but in the long run, it actually becomes so much more efficient because on location you have to deal with so much more trouble than you do in a studio, and you don’t have that control that you get when shooting in a studio. So many more things can go wrong. We knew from the beginning that it would be more efficient to shoot in a studio than it would to shoot on location somewhere.

Josiah A lot of people have asked us if it was shot on location or in a studio, which is a huge compliment to our production designer, Hannah Sitters, and her amazing team, and to how Max our DoP lit it. We were all in this box on a set which we knew was looking awesome on camera, but you always wonder if people will buy that this is connected to the exterior.

How restricting was it to shoot in such tight spaces?

Indianna It was actually great to be honest. Some aspects of it were so wonderful because of the fact that we had that control. When you shoot on location you have to spend an hour or more packing up and putting things back into the trucks and so on. Shooting in such a small space, we could just work right down to the last second of each day and then leave and get there the next day and everything was as it was left the day before. So factors like that were amazing. Some other downsides, which luckily didn’t turn into a downside for us, but something that was a major fear of ours when we were in pre-production was Covid because we were in a really confined space. If someone was to get Covid it was likely that they were going to pass it on and wipe out half of our crew. We were very lucky, and everyone was very responsible on our end, so nothing like that happened.

Josiah I think we would’ve found the small space more restricting if we had gotten onto the set without a plan. By day four we would have lost our minds if we hadn’t done the pre-planning that we had done before shooting. We worked with Max our DoP to really work out how to maximise the space in pre-production. We really storyboarded it and knew exactly where we wanted the camera in certain sequences. So by the time we came to the studio we knew how we were going to react to the space. We had a good game plan going in. We could trust our system. It still gave us all a great challenge of how we could use lighting to make the space feel entirely different for different sections of the film, but Max and the entire camera and lighting team just smashed that.

Jordan Cowan as The Visitor in You’ll Never Find Me.

You’re also working with a lot of water here. Was the water a strain on your budget?

Indianna It was definitely something that we questioned from the early script stage. We were like, “Okay. We have written a storm into this film and we don’t have very much money. How do we make this work?” [Laughs]. But we were also very conscious that 99% of the film is spent inside, but how do we keep reminding the audience that the storm is still there, and that it’s still a threat, without necessarily seeing it all the time? We talked to Max about this a lot as well. We needed to establish the storm. It exists in this big wild exterior. We knew that from the inside, we could pepper in a few times when a character looks out the window or draws the curtain to remind the audience that the storm was still there. We did that in the studio by rigging some hoses against the window essentially, and then the rest of that storm work was done just using sound. We worked with Duncan Campbell, our sound designer, and we gave him this challenge of setting an entire film during a storm which needs to be raging the entire time. And he did it. He found ways to really push it back when it needed to be in the background and to not take over a whole scene. And then he really brought it forward when we needed to remind the audience that this storm is still going without having to physically see it all the time.

Josiah Hopefully it feels like there’s a lot of water involved, but there was actually hardly any physical water. We just had to be super tactical about it because, as you said, it’s very expensive and very time-consuming because you’ve gotta stop and clean up. There was a lot of movie magic happening. [Laughs].

For a low budget indie, You’ll Never Find Me really is a technical marvel, which is a testament to the talents of everyone involved. Josiah, you edited the film. Can you tell us about that process for you?

Josiah It was really, really hard because with something like The Recordist we had that natural film language to fall back on like being able to jump time, or being able to cut earlier than we had intended. With You’ll Never Find Me, we set ourselves the challenge of this narrative playing out in real time, or seemingly real time. So the pacing was really, really tricky. I will say, although I am listed as the editor, it was John Chataway, Indiana, and myself who were all in the editing room together smashing this thing out over the course of a year while working other jobs to be able to pay for the film and life. [Laughs]. It was a really interesting process. There were a lot of challenges because we were translating this script into a film even though it had those theatre-like aspects. But a lot of the things that seem like really impressive editing components were actually written into the script. The script had a lot of really interesting sound transitions and it read visually interesting. It was really about executing those editing aspects as close to the script as possible. At the end of the day, what you really want is for the audience to be engaged. You want them to be on a ride that even if they don’t understand every single thing that’s happening, hopefully they understand enough that they’re engaged.

Indianna, from a screenwriter’s point of view, were the visuals executed as you had pictured them while you were writing the film?

Indianna Yeah, definitely. And that was a great bit of feedback that we’ve had from a few people who read the script and watched the film and went, “Oh, that’s exactly how I imagined this or that,” which is really cool. Of course, the thing that you write changes so much when you shoot it, and then it changes again when you edit it. All we wanted to do was to make the best version of this film as possible. There was a lot of discussion in the editing room to make it as strong as we could make it with what we had. In the end, I think we ended up with a film that was better than the original script just purely because of all those stages and transitions that it went through. It’s always hard to let go of what you initially wanted, but in the end, if there’s an opportunity to make it better, then you have to take advantage of that opportunity.

You’ll Never Find Me is currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Details here.

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