Five Minutes With: The Birthday Trip Director James Robert Woods

Cringe comedy nearly tips into full-blown horror in James Robert Woods’s feature debut. Shot at uncomfortable closeness with handheld cameras, The Birthday Trip follows three old friends who meet up in the picturesque Southern Highlands for a joint 30th. But these women have changed a lot since high school, and their partners couldn’t be more different from each other.

That familiar friction gives the movie its dramatic tension, while Woods’s script takes shots at everything from finance bros and arts funding to how we gloss over colonisation in Australia. In one especially cringeworthy scene, a copywriter suggests a whitewashing tweak to the luxury property’s Acknowledgement of Country to gel with corporate branding.

Woods – who also filled the roles of editor, cinematographer and producer – filmed the movie with a tiny crew over just 15 days. Two and half years later, The Birthday Trip is finally seeing a proper cinema rollout. Woods tells us about some of the more unusual moments, both in front of and behind the camera, including that climactic bulldozer scene.

I noticed that the film’s original title was Moonrise Over Knights Hill.

Yeah, we shot it in Robertson, which is where they shot Babe. It’s beautiful small town in the highlands. The moonrise you see at the end of the film is over Knights Hill. But as we got closer to release and people kept getting the name wrong, we knew we needed to change it. So we made the “studio decision” to give it a snappier name.

There’s a real sense of unpredictability to your film. Did you want to keep people off balance?

One hundred percent. It’s all carefully structured, but definitely it has tonal shifts. I think that rings true: you can feel uncomfortable about a relationship in one moment, and then the next you’re laughing at a dumb joke. And the couples in this film, while I do think they’re confronted with the weight of their privilege, they’re also quite resilient and able to laugh it off, in a kind of uncomfortable way.

I wanted it to sit on that knife edge. You’re laughing at it, but there’s an undercurrent of unease for sure. Certain parts of the film came from sitting at dinner parties where there’s [two people] that are dysfunctional or shouldn’t be together or have a bad vibe. You’re forced to absorb their negative energy. I was really struck by that and wanted to bring it to the screen, because it’s very real and relatable.

My favourite joke was seeing the characters’ individual artwork after the outdoor painting scene, and how different they are.

That scene is a bit of fun. It serves an expositional role, but it’s also a bit of a breather after the first 30 minutes of intense dialogue. We commissioned these weird works [from various crew members], and they came to life. It’s an insight into these characters: what do they think art is and, if given a blank canvas, what do they come up with?

You’ve got Angie, who is a shit painter but there’s a self-awareness to it. She’s happy to be bad at it. There’s Mark, whose idea of art is just replicating someone else’s idea of art, but without the cultural context. The amount of screen time they get is commensurate to the quality of the painting: Isabel’s half-finished bowl of fruit only gets a second, but some of the better paintings are kept up for longer.

Obviously, the big showstopper is the bulldozer sequence. How did you do that?

Funnily enough, I think we had our smallest crew on that day. So this house was adjacent to our location and being demolished anyway. We knew that early in the piece, so we could build it into the script. It was full of asbestos, so we had to completely strip it. And then, in two weeks, our design team rebuilt it and re-dressed it, and brought in a whole house’s worth of props and [set] design.

My uncle is a bulldozer driver, now retired. He showed up with a Caterpillar D6 dozer and taught Robert Preston, who plays Felix, how to drive it. We had structural consultants, who gave us all manner of conflicting and ambiguous advice. We rigged the house with 10 Gopros, and then we had more cameras. Then we basically just went for it.

It was incredible. We had no idea what would happen. In the script, the bulldozer cuts a scar through the house. [But] as soon as it hit and started to force its way through, the house turned into this pile of debris that took on its own kinetic energy. It became this wave of broken house. It was quite exhilarating, because we only had one chance to capture it.

How does it feel to have the movie finally coming out in cinemas?

It feels surreal. We’ve had a strange journey with the film, because it didn’t get into the festivals we thought it would. And it hasn’t had the support from the industry that we thought it might. [So] the momentum has taken a while to build.

It’s the kind of film that slowly wins you over, and that’s been happening person by person. It’s been a long road, so I think it will be very cathartic to finally have it out in the world. We tried to make something quite different to the other stuff you might see on Australian screens, and little by little people have been getting on board with it.

What it’s riffing on is still quite fresh: the contrast between marketing copy and reality, and social media and reality. The way we put this gloss on everything.

I think so. The satire really lives in that gap between what the Instagram caption is and what the reality is. I do think it’s very current.

The Birthday Trip opens in select Australian cinemas from July 30.