One of the most well-crafted, well-acted, and terrifying movies to come out this year is David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, about a Australian crime family in decline. FrontRow spoke to Michôd about the origin of his movie and the make-up of two of the film’s most memorable characters, the suspiciously intimate mother Janine (Jacki Weaver) and older brother Pope, realized in a Oscar-worthy performance by Ben Mendelsohn.

FrontRow: Where did your story for Animal Kingdom come from?

David Michôd: I grew up in Sydney and I moved to Melbourne when I was 18. And in the course of familiarizing myself with a big new city, I started reading a bunch of true crime books, particularly by a guy named Tom Noble who used to be chief police reporter at The Age newspaper in Melbourne. And he was at The Age during the 1980s, in essence charting a period of decline of armed robbery as kind a serious professional pursuit carried out by these hardened and profession gangs of armed robbers, and charting the animosity between these groups. That animosity culminated in the end of the 1980s in an event which is kind of the event at the center of Animal Kingdom, which is the brutal and totally random revenge killing of two young cops by one particularly band of armed robbers. And I found that particular event so chilling and unusual that I almost immediately started imagining what the hours and days immediately preceding an event like that might have been like. But I knew from the beginning that I wanted to build my own world with my own characters around it.

FR: The characters you add to this crime context are the Cope family, and the idea of family becomes incredibly important to the story. How did that development enter into your script?

DM: It part it was born out of Melbourne’s relatively long and rich history of low rent crime families, but also out of my fascination with the relationship dynamics just in families that I’ve observed and that I’ve had close contact with, totally normal families. And particularly in very tight knit families, the more I observed them, the more insidious they started to appear, particularly the more normal and affluent families. There was something about the cloying natures and the intimacy that existed often between kids and parents that seemed a little toxic to me, and I just really liked the idea of dropping that toxicity into really a quite heightened and dangerous world.

FR: The toxic relationship begins with Janine, the matriarch of the family. Why is she so strangely intimate with her children?

DM: That inappropriately intimate relationship she has with her kids is for me more about that kind of a quite selfish and proprietary relationship she has with her kids. In the absence of strong and reliable men in her life, she has built for herself a sense of identity built around her relationship with her young, powerful, and dangerous sons. She really likes that sense of power that gives her. It’s almost like a selfish need on her part to keep her children close.

FR: Pope is the most dangerous and frightening of her sons. How did his character develop throughout the course of writing the script?

I think originally when I first started writing the script, dealing in more obvious archetypes, Pope was a much more traditional hard man. The more I worked on it and the more I started to identify the family tropes that are at play in the story, the more I started to like the idea that Pope is a guy who was dangerous not so much because of the sense of his own toughness, but more because of the dangerous confusion that is brewing inside him. I mean, he is a guy that is relatively mentally unwell but has been able to function because of a certain structure built around him, in the form of family and career, albeit a criminal career. And as soon of the basic pillars of that structure get pulled away, the confusion starts bubbling to the surface and manifests in a really dangerous and frightening way.

I wrote the character for Ben [Mendelsohn], and when we started working on him together, a lot of our conversations were about those things that made him frightening – that the people in the world who are the most frightening are the ones who don’t need to advertise how frightening they are. They don’t need to cover themselves in tattoos; they don’t need to wear tough outfits. It’s something about their inner instability that makes them truly terrifying.

Photo at top: Left to Right: Ben Mendelsohn as Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody and Joel Edgerton as Barry ‘Baz’ Brown (Credit: Tony Mott, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)