One of the great pleasures of my job is getting to watch so many debut feature films from exciting new talent, and right now the Australian film industry is absolutely brimming with it.

What makes that even more rewarding is when a debut feature leaves you completely floored by its quality, and that’s exactly what Gideon Aroni’s Pure Scum did. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like I’d been hit by a car, shot in the kneecaps and thrown off a bridge.

The film follows ex-private school boys Jesse and Ayden, played by Nikita Chronis and Will Hutchins, respectively. After a drug-fuelled car crash, the pair flee into Melbourne’s CBD, where they’re plunged into a night of unbridled debauchery and rapidly escalating violence.

As a viewer, I was pinned to the edge of my seat, watching the horrors Gideon puts his two lead characters through over the course of a single night. Murder, drugs, guns, desperate escapes – there’s barely a moment to catch your breath. The punishment is relentless, making for a gripping, uncompromising experience.

A passionate emerging writer and director based in Melbourne, Gideon previously made a number of acclaimed short films, including the award-winning Playback in 2022, before graduating from the FTV program at Swinburne University of Technology. 

He wrote and directed Pure Scum at just 24, and the finished film is a remarkable display of confidence and maturity behind the camera.

Cinema Australia caught up with Gideon to discuss crafting one of the year’s most intense debuts.

“The more I read the script, the more I decided I wanted to reposition the audience to be observers of the absurdity rather than equal participants with the boys.”

Interview by Matthew Eeles

Pure Scum has all the makings of a Greek tragedy. Are these the kind of stories you enjoy the most as a storyteller?

Absolutely. For me, my characters always come first, and obviously this film has an ideology permeating through it. Pure Scum is about entitlement, but for me, I had known these types of characters in my own life. I’m referring specifically to privileged, elite, private school boys. I hadn’t seen those people depicted accurately on our screens. There’s such a specific cadence to the way they interact with each other, and that was the inception of Pure Scum. The stories that I like to tell are big ideas in small packets. I adore films set over the course of one night, which are now becoming a very popular genre. I enjoy films and stories that unpack a specific subculture. The more niche it gets, the more excited I get because I get to learn something, and I also get to throw myself into a new world.

I interviewed Adam C. Briggs recently, whose new film Phillip Philadelphia was inspired by a pen. What inspired Pure Scum‘s specific narrative?

At the time, I was thinking a lot about these particular private school boys and how they were being portrayed in the news. Around that time, I was out with a bunch of friends and we witnessed the aftermath of a car accident outside the Melbourne CBD. Everyone was okay. The accident was the fault of two boys who bolted from the scene and ran on foot into the city. I started to think about people’s primal impulses when we realise that our life may be over and our instinct is to bolt. What happens next? How does this affect our mentality? These people were morally reprehensible, so I married this idea with what I had experienced with entitled people.

I notice you said “entitled people” this time rather than “elite private school boys.”

[Laughs]. Well, I think entitlement can come from anywhere. It’s privilege. It’s a lack of wanting to take accountability. It comes from all sorts of places.

Did you go deep into your research regarding the psychology of what makes people bolt?

Yes. But rather than trying to read every news article from around the world about similar things happening, I also dived straight into the writing and created my own scenarios about what could happen in this situation. What would be going through their heads? I’m also a big observer. I used to take the train home from school every day with a lot of these boys, and I would watch the way they interacted with each other. I would write down parts of their conversations, and the story evolved from there.

Did you always intend for so much to happen to these guys over the course of the night?

Absolutely. At first, I pitched it to the people I wanted to make it with. I told them it’s a rollercoaster ride that goes off the rails. We wanted audiences to be hooked from a thriller perspective before we dialled up the social commentary.

Pure Scum is non-linear, and I really enjoyed how you’ve presented the past entirely in the daytime and the present entirely at night. What challenges did you experience filming so many night shoots?

There were so many. Where do I even begin? [Laughs]. I mean, we were in the city shooting with no permits, which I’m very comfortable saying because you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. We were also dealing with a lot of local residents. Having to start your day at sunset and finish your day at sunrise isn’t really common on a film set. It was ruthless and brutal, and we’d have to run in and out of locations to get what we needed. We rehearsed a lot before we started shooting, but there were still a lot of challenges.

Most indie feature films shot on the street are filmed handheld to make the process easier, but you had full camera setups.

When we were on the streets, we mostly used one camera, but there’s a restaurant scene that had a two-camera setup to make it look as cinematic as possible. And that’s thanks to our cinematographer, Jackson Hayat, who’s incredible. We planned as much as we could. We scouted alleyways for a long time so we knew we would have space to set up our equipment.

I’m so happy that you mentioned Jackson because I was going to tell you that I couldn’t believe this is his first feature film. Was he an easy choice for you?

Jackson and I went to uni together, and we’ve worked together on a bunch of things because we have a shorthand. With this particular film, we knew it was going to be shot in a very run-and-gun style, which meant we had to communicate by osmosis a lot of the time. [Laughs]. He’s a great friend and an incredible cinematographer. As much as it is true that it was his first narrative feature film, he has been working in the documentary space for a very long time, and he also makes short films of his own. I knew this shoot was going to be gruelling, so we found people who were going to be kind and considerate of the cast and crew. We explained to everyone exactly what the challenges were going to be. I trust Jackson implicitly. If he tells me that a shot isn’t going to look good, I believe him. It’s so important to trust your collaborators.

Early in the film, the two lead characters, Ayden and Jesse, are involved in a car accident and flee the scene. The shot of them running from the scene is a slow-motion, stylised shot, and the lighting is absolutely perfect. I’m curious to know whether you shot this scene on the actual bridge or in a studio. The shot itself is excellent, and it looks like a lot of work went into it.

Thank you. The scene wasn’t filmed on the bridge itself, but it was shot on a suburban street that leads onto the bridge. We scouted for the right location for quite a while. It was funny because when I was writing the script, the location was described as “Exterior. Bridge.” Then you have to go and scout for the right location because we couldn’t shoot on the bridge itself. [Laughs]. As far as filming this scene goes, we were in the back of a car driving forwards with the camera pointing out of the boot. It was a RED Raptor shooting at 200 frames a second. We had the biggest lights we could find in the sky acting as street lights, and when you’re shooting at that high a frame rate, you only get a few seconds of usable footage. So we shot it a bunch of times across the night and stitched it together. We didn’t know if it was going to work, but I thought it would be a fantastic shot if we could execute it. The actors also had blood dripping off them, which I knew would be tough. I’m really happy with how it turned out.

When was it decided that part of this narrative would be told via a TV interview?

My first draft was entirely set at night with just the boys. But the more I read it and shared it with other people, the more I decided I wanted to reposition the audience to be observers of the absurdity rather than equal participants with the boys. As an audience, if you’re only seeing it from the boys’ point of view, then you’re complicit. You’d feel terrible by the end of the film, and you wouldn’t get a full sense of the ideology coming through. So I decided to add the interviews, as well as the flashback scenes, to reposition the audience as a third party watching it holistically.

More often than not, interview scenes in movies fall flat because it’s difficult for actors to pull off such an organic response when they’re already anticipating the question and their reply. I think the only time I’ve ever been genuinely convinced was by Christian Bale in The Fighter. Did you take an alternative approach with your actors when directing these particular scenes?

Absolutely. I did a small stint on 60 Minutes as a PA, for one story. I snapped a few cheeky photos of their setup, and I really observed what they were doing because I wanted to replicate it as closely as possible. We staged our interviews as if they were real life. I had the sound bites that I knew we needed in the script, but those were the specific questions that would be asked. The actors basically improvised their entire interview. You might remember at the beginning of the film, the interviewees come in, sit down and say hello to the interviewer, played by Jess Zuker. We staged everything as close to reality as we could. We’d roll for 20 minutes and take the bits that we thought worked in the moment, which was hard in the edit. We had done a lot of rehearsals with the actors, and we gave all of the characters backstories to make their improvisation a little easier. When we threw questions at them, they knew exactly what those people would say.

Considering that, I’m curious about the swearing during these scenes. Was the swearing improvised?

No, the swearing was in the script. I intentionally put the swearing into the scene because I wanted the audience to see pieces of that character’s real personality peek through. He even says, “Excuse my French.” The way he says it gives you a chill. I could talk about this for hours, but that particular character is emblematic of a very specific type of person who believes they’ve graduated from that private school world and thinks they’re immune to consequences. But now that he’s in the business world, he’s experiencing all of his school life again, just in the corporate landscape.

I’d never seen a picture of you before, but when the Chance character came into the film, I immediately knew it was you. I thought it might be a brief, Scorsese-type cameo, but Chance becomes a major character in the second half of the film. Why did you decide to play Chance yourself, and how did you balance the dual roles of both actor and director during those scenes?

It’s a bit of a sad but funny story, really. [Laughs]. We had cast an actor to play that part. As we were about to film, I offhandedly asked him, “Oh, by the way, you have a licence, right?” And he did not. The entire character’s role is to be a chauffeur to the boys. We didn’t have the budget to do SimTrav [simulated travel], and we had always planned to shoot it for real. I didn’t feel safe putting this guy in the driver’s seat. Luckily, I was there for all of the rehearsals, so it just made sense that I’d play Chance. I also have an acting background. We discussed me playing Chance a lot, but in the end, it was the right decision. As far as the challenges of acting and directing go, it’s not easy. That was probably one of my biggest struggles on this film because I’m restricted by my performance, and I can’t watch myself on the monitor in real time. Thankfully, I had people who were blunt with me about my performance and gave me feedback on what I needed to do better in certain scenes. I could never really be in the mindset of just an actor, but I still think it works.

Can you remember a particular piece of feedback?

Oh, I do remember one, which is the running scene. I won’t spoil anything, but there’s a moment towards the end of the film where Chance has to run away from something. I had to shoot that probably 12 times because apparently I just don’t know how to run. [Laughs]. Even when I watch it back now, I still think I run a bit awkwardly. [Laughs]. But it was also the timing of it every single time and the way I was supposed to get there. I just kept getting it wrong.

Did the Chance character’s persona change from its original iteration after you decided to take on the role yourself?

It did. I had a slightly different approach to the original actor. I think his was a lot more internal, while I leaned into the comedic side of him. He’s kind of a reprieve from the extremely dramatic scenario all of the characters are experiencing at this point in the film. I don’t often think about my approach to that character because I just felt like I had a job to do at the time.

You’ve just mentioned that you have an acting background. Is acting something you’d like to continue doing?

If somebody wants to hire me, sure. [Laughs]. I definitely enjoy it, but I don’t know how I would feel about acting and directing at the same time again. I have no idea how people direct full feature films and play the lead character. That makes no sense to me. But yes, I would love to keep acting.

Growing up in the ’90s and 2000s, I feel like I’ve known these two lead characters, Ayden and Jesse, throughout my life, and both Will and Nikita have absolutely nailed their respective personalities. Talk us through their casting.

Well, Nikita [Jesse] and I went to uni together. He is amazing. I wrote Jesse thinking about Nikita, who is the loveliest person in the world, but is fortunately or unfortunately incredibly good at playing an asshole. So I knew he would be able to nail that role. Also, the whole film was predicated on the chemistry between the two of them. Will [Ayden] was in our graduate year at university, and there were probably about 20 graduate films made during that time. Will was in about 18 of them in some capacity. [Laughs]. No matter whether he was the lead or just an extra, he’d put 110% into it. I put Will and Nikita together, and the spark was instant. Prior to the shoot, we would send them out for the night in character. They would go clubbing as Jesse and Ayden to get a feel for what a night out together would be like. We’d get calls from them in the middle of the night as these characters, which was a great insight into what their approach would eventually be.

How did Nikita and Will manage to produce so much snot throughout their more emotional scenes? It’s more snot than I’ve ever seen in a film. Were you feeding them chilli powder?

[Laughs]. They just did it. We called it “going pure snot” colloquially. There’s one particular sequence where Nikita has to regress to being quite childlike. We had to build up to that scene, and there were a lot of things going on that day. By the time we got to the scene, it was just a mess of fluids. The snot became a recurring theme, I guess. [Laughs]. Also, if anyone found themselves in these situations in real life, they wouldn’t be too concerned about what fluids were pouring out of them. These two really threw themselves into that mindset and went for it.

What can you tell us about your new feature film that you’re currently developing, Elephant Toothpaste?

I’m currently redrafting and redrafting, which is an interesting process. It’s slightly different from Pure Scum genre-wise. It’s more in the sci-fi realm, but it’s also very grounded in reality and quite raw. It’s about a female street portrait artist on Southbank Promenade in Melbourne who finds out she is the clone of a famous Baroque-era painter. Suddenly her art goes from being worth $2 on the street to being worth a huge amount of money. It explores exploitation and the way a seedy company wants to use her for its own gain.

What’s next for Pure Scum?

We have some screenings coming up in Melbourne, and in mid-August we’ll be screening at Alamo Drafthouse cinemas all around the United States. I have to shout out Chroma in America, who are distributing the film there. The fact that Pure Scum will be screening in cinemas across America is just a dream come true.

Pure Scum will screen at the Sun Theatre on Friday, 7 August and the Pivotonian Cinema on Tuesday, 7 August.

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