5 Questions with Madeline Mack
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I grew up in Byron Bay which was a little hippy beach paradise on the east coast of Australia. We lived on a ten-acre permaculture farm and in a beautiful house we built ourselves out of chicken wire and clay. My father is American and my mother Australian, and they both came from wealth but rejected it for an alternative lifestyle.
I am one of those lucky people that have always known what I wanted to make movies, but for me it wasn’t a fascination with movies, it was an obsession with capturing and recording my own life. We had one of those tape deck handy cams that my mother bought for a family road trip and by sixteen I had saved up for my own digital camera and would record little lifestyle videos with my friends. Rather than developing into documentary or fashion, my interest shifted into recreating things that had happened in my life and finding meaning in them.
When I was 18, I made a first time short about suicide. Looking back, I am embarrassed in the cliché of it but the film screened in a pretty major local festival and I was asked to speak on the radio. My first film in college was about asexuality and even though my fellow students didn’t understand it, one of my teachers did. Thank god for teachers.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
It is inspired by my first shared living experience in America, I was only twenty when I moved from across the globe and I didn’t have a job or credit or anything. I was naive and lonely and those first few years in Hollywood were rough. I was fascinated with the fact that villains in horror movies are often represented as some far away man in the woods or a supernatural creature, but the threats that I find most unsettling are the ones that are close to home. To be clear this isn’t a horror, it's about creating a language for the grey areas, the everyday threats to safety that women have to navigate in their lives and the banality of misogyny.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?
Ha! I didn’t really have a producer. It's tough to produce something on your own, especially when you don’t have a budget and then need to be present and creative as a director. Lucky the idea was really manageable and it was set in my apartment so I could prepare in my own time. My DP, Michael Lincoln, did an amazing job with very little equipment and support and my actors, Nell Teare and Hunter Cope were incredible, they taught me so much. Working with talented people makes all the difference.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
“Marlina The Murderer in Four Acts” - Taika Waititi meets Tarantino but directed by a woman with a female protagonist. It's so simple yet deliciously masterful.
5) What’s next for you?
A pilot I wrote, Small Fry, just won best episodic at Hollyshorts and we will be shopping it around next year. I am also writing a feature that I plan to self-fund and shoot in early 2022. In the meantime, I am a part of Ryan Murphy’s Half program and I am assisting Dan Minahan on Halston, a netflix mini-series currently in production in New York.
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www.madelinemack.com | IG: @madelinemack_