5 Questions with Sam Rogers
Fueled by ever-flowing nitrous oxide, two young Australian women live out an age-old tale of reckless youth in “Nangs.” We asked director Sam Rogers how the project started, about leaving out character backstories, and a recent film he’s loved…
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
From a young age, I was interested in photography and was very serious about how to frame an image. It was very important to me that things were framed in a certain way. I was a shy kid and have always been a voyeur. The first film I made was in year 10 and it was called Bin Jump. It was slow-motion footage cut to a Rage Against the Machine track of my friends in class jumping over rubbish bins. I think we were meant to be taking photos with these digital cameras that were replacing film at the time but they also had a video function.
Next, I went to film school in my hometown Melbourne, Australia and made a whole bunch of friends that I still work with and haven't stopped making passion project films.
2) What was the original inspiration to create this film, and what were some of the first steps to get it going?
I wanted to make a film about partying and hedonism and the joy of all this. I don't feel like it's been explored enough on-screen and in the process of making this film I realised why - there isn't really a story in doing drugs at a house party and dancing all night. I hadn't seen people doing nangs much in films and thought that they would be exciting to watch on screen. The house that we shot the film in and where I was living at the time, my housemates and I would DJ to ourselves and just dance around a lot and love it. I wanted to capture this joyful feeling.
3) We don't learn much about the backstories of your characters, but they feel very real and I was quickly engaged in their lives. I'm curious to hear more about how you built those characters, and what were you most interested in showing or not showing with them? And how did you work with your actors to convey those identities?
Originally the two characters were a traditional couple - male and female but I couldn't cast the male actor I wanted so I thought - let's make them both female, there are too many males on screen and it'll be more interesting anyhow. From the snippets of ideas I got as I became interested in making a 'party film' it became clear that the film was about a character who was partying too much and was starting to question that. I was reading Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens at the time and he was talking about humans being these gods who have so much power but no idea what to do with it. And that became the subtext of the film - this woman who can party all the time, just for the sake of partying but realising that it's pointless and not inline with what she really wants.
I had written a lot of scenes of the couple dancing around and loving dancing that were meant to be contained scenes but in the edit, they turned into a big montage. I wasn't interested in showing why they were living this lifestyle or revealing their backstory, I was more interested in creating a mood of what their lifestyle felt like in the now.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I saw Gaspar Noe's Climax at the cinema recently and really loved how visceral and technically brilliant the experience was. I'm so glad I saw it a cinema because the music in the film has been chosen so beautifully and the cinematography by Noe's great collaborator Benoit Debie is as always, astonishing. Climax is a story that is best served by the language of cinema - not by a book or a play. What also makes Climax great is that it explores the descent into madness across a whole range of characters rather than just a central character.
5) What’s next for you?
I'm currently in production on a five-part anthology web series entitled Content. It's about a series of interconnected characters in their late-20's who are addicted to the internet. A cross between Black Mirror and High Maintenance. Hopefully available online at the start of 2020.
