Necessity really is the mother of invention. Just spend any time talking to Australian playwright-turned-filmmaker Stephen Sewell and you’ll realise how much creativity can be born from restriction.
The lauded writer’s debut directorial feature, Embedded – a stripped-back erotic thriller screening as part of Sydney Film Festival – didn’t come into this world naturally. In fact, on a strictly practical level, it’s a kind of large-scale demo reel.
“I have another film in the works with [Embedded producer] Steve Jaggi,” Sewell explains. “There was interest in the United States for it but the investors over there said, ‘The problem is, Stephen Sewell hasn’t directed a film before. Get him to direct a film and then come back.’ So Steve said, ‘Let’s make a film that we can get together quite easily.’ And I said, ‘I’m sure I can whip one up.’ So the restriction was a budgetary restriction, which translated into locations and the size of the cast.”
Luckily, Sewell is the kind of artist who really can simply ‘whip up’ such a colossal project at short notice. His experience writing the screenplays for such lauded films as Rowan Woods’ dark Aussie thriller The Boys (a new print of which will also screen during the festival) and the confronting, similarly minimal horror film Lost Things put him in good stead when it came to crafting Embedded’s troubling plot.
“I’ve been a writer for many, many years, so writing isn’t so hard for me anymore,” Sewell says. “I have a great history [in dealing] with political themes. I have a particular interest – along with many other people – in the conflict in the Middle East … Though maybe it’s wrong to say ‘interest’. It evolved in that kind of way. It wasn’t terribly hard to write. It wasn’t terribly hard to research. And the philosophical issues are things I have been thinking about for many years as well.”
Embedded hinges upon a one-night stand, as Australian war correspondent Frank (the gravelly voiced Nick Barkla) begins a tryst with a mysterious, potentially dangerous stranger named Madaline (Saw V’s Laura Gordon). Though the majority of the movie takes place in the confines of a hotel room, it quickly becomes apparent that the couple’s budding, brutal relationship is a kind of emotional stand-in for a whole myriad of other issues, not least of all the impact of violence and the state’s ceaseless desire to spy on its constituents.
And yet despite the intensity of the material and the fact the project represented his first foray into directing, Sewell paints a surprisingly non-taxing portrait of the shoot. “Having a producer behind me who really believed in my work and wanted it to happen was [great],” he says. “There were never any negotiations with him where he was saying, ‘Can we do this, can we do that, can you tone it down?’ It was nothing like that. He was just absolutely supportive and encouraging to me within the parameters of the budgetary restraints.”
Certainly, one can imagine the kind of producer who might have balked at the film’s subject matter. As much as anything else, Embedded is a staggeringly explicit film, though it’s more interested in shock than titillation. The sadomasochistic relationship at the movie’s centre isn’t simply meant to allure. In the style of Sewell’s celebrated play The Blind Giant Is Dancing, the intensely personal and the intensely political become intertwined with each other. “That’s certainly been one of the focuses of my entire body of work,” he says.
Such an erotic film as Embedded could not have been made without the support of a tight, immensely committed crew, and Sewell speaks gratefully about every member of his team – not least of all because his production designer, Karla Urizar, also happens to be his wife. “My wife Karla … found it really, really hard with such a small crew,” Sewell admits. “I was in a privileged position as the director. I was being protected by all the other heads of departments from their difficulty. My difficulty was simply getting the performance and the shot. From that point it wasn’t hard at all.”
The film’s erotic action is interspersed with battle scenes, as Frank’s brutal recollections of his time spent in the Middle East begin to bubble back to the surface. Unsurprisingly, these exteriors proved problematic in terms of shooting schedule. “We did two weeks in the QT boutique hotel down in George Street but then we had to wait almost another year to shoot the exteriors,” says the director.
Indeed, the sex scenes were much easier to shoot. Though erotic set-ups in movies are notoriously unappealing and embarrassing for all involved, Sewell bypassed this awkwardness by casting a real-life couple to play the film’s lascivious pair.
“There was an intimacy that they had anyhow that made it much easier to deal with those scenes,” he says. “I mean, professional actors know how to do eroticism for sure, but with the speed we had to get there, it was very good that they had a shorthand. They were comfortable with one another and they were trusting of one another.”
In many ways, that trust is the fuel that keeps Embedded’s fires burning. One just hopes for the sake of the movie’s two leads that their off-screen relationship is rather less intense than the one audiences will find themselves spellbound by come Sydney Film Festival.
Embedded [dir.Stephen Sewell]shows, as part of the Sydney Film Festival, at Hayden Orpheum Cremorne Saturday June 12, andDendy Opera Quays Friday June 17.
