Five Minutes With Tilda Cobham-Hervey on Alphabet Lane, Imaginary Friends and Taking Things Too Far

What if we just packed it all in and moved to the country? It’s a question that every city-dweller has pondered when faced with a $20 bacon and egg roll, or ceaselessly gridlocked traffic.

Alphabet Lane, a new Australian film from writer-director James Litchfield, explores what happens when a young couple Anna (Cobham-Hervey) and Jack (Nicholas Denton) move to the country. Faced with isolation, they invent mysterious new “friend”, which is when things quickly get out of hand.

Cobham-Hervey spoke to Broadsheet about the project, the eeriness of the Australian bush and shooting in remote NSW.

The entire time I was watching this film I had no idea what was coming next. How would you pitch it to people?

I think what’s nice about this movie is its unusual tone. People might come in expecting one thing and get something quite different. I’m enjoying people having very different experiences of the film.

My elevator pitch: the film follows an isolated couple who have moved out to the countryside. They lose control of a joke, which they started in an attempt to reconnect with each other. It’s a story about desperation. It’s a story about truth. It’s a story about how we need to get better at communicating with each other. It’s very generous in how James [Litchfield] has made the film. It it allows audiences to come away with their own ideas. It doesn’t tell you how you’re meant to feel at every moment.  

What was it that initially drew you to the project?

For me, it always starts with the script. This script was very different to other things I’d read – particularly things I’d read in Australia. I really liked that it was a movie about the middle of a relationship, because we always see movies about people falling in love or breaking up, but rarely do you see people trying to fix the middle part of a long-term relationship. I liked the sort of creative, playful way that that was being explored.

Often that middle bit of a relationship is where you can find yourself really committing to a bit or an in-joke. What’s the longest you’ve ever kept a bit alive for in your personal relationships?

That’s a great question. I don’t know if I have any specific “bits”, but humour and play are essential for me in a relationship.

Do you think the lengths Anna and Jack go to keep the bit alive speaks to the strength of their relationship or the weakness?

I felt like the ability to go to that extreme with each other takes huge trust and love and creative freedom. I see it as a sign of their great love and the extreme desperation that they both have to make it work. I found that quite beautiful about the story.

The film was eerie the whole way through. It’s something we’ve seen recently in films like The Royal Hotel, where the isolation of Australia adds a layer of fear to a film. Have you ever lived that remotely?

That’s interesting, isn’t it? I feel like Australia has such a long history of outback horrors that if something’s set in an isolated place, you assume it’s going to be a horror movie.

I’ve never lived long term in an isolated place, but there’s a quietness that can happen in Australia that is so unlike other parts of the world, you can really be so far from other houses or other humans. I think that’s beautiful but it comes with an eerie feeling.

We were shooting in out in Cooma, and the place we were staying in was probably a 20-minute drive to other humans, shops and everything. So there were some nights where you’d hear a noise… We were all a bit convinced that there was a ghost.

Do you think staying out there during the shoot and feeling that sense of isolation helped your performance?

Completely. It was such a beautiful environment to be in. It’s a naturally treeless plain, and you often felt a bit bad that we were there, like we should just leave it to the hills and animals. It felt like we were really trespassing on this very sort of sacred space.

We felt like the city folk coming into the smaller town, and that’s exactly what Jack and Anna are experiencing. Also, just being in a remote area with a crew, you bond in a really different way. You’re having every meal together. You don’t escape back to your own lives and your own families. You all live together. Me and Nicholas [Denton] actually shared a little bungalow. So we’d wake up every morning and have breakfast and have cups of tea before bed. It was like life imitating art.

Something that struck me were the scenes where their friends from the city come and visit. To me, it really spoke to the stage of life they’re in where everyone is on such different paths. Do you think this film will speak most to that late-twenties to mid-thirties audience?

I would imagine so. I’m 31 and it’s definitely that period of your life where you go, ‘okay, where are you meant to be?’ Everyone’s getting married and having children; these characters don’t have those things and have decided to sort of start a new life in the countryside, and [think] that’s going to fix their problems. It always sounds so idyllic, moving to the countryside. But [in the film] they’re dealing with the realities of that choice and being confronted with friends who have made very different choices.

Do you think Anna and Jack are trying to convince themselves that they’re happy in the country or trying to convince other people?

Oh, good question. Not that many people have seen this film yet, but everyone has a slightly different feeling about what the purpose is. For me, it’s that they had such an inability to express what they were really feeling to each other, so they were using these characters to try and communicate with each other. I think it was sort of for each other and for [others] equally.

Their imaginary friends function in the way imaginary friends do for a lot of kids, where they’ll say, “I’m fine but my invisible friend is scared.” Did you ever have an imaginary friend growing up?

I don’t think I did, but I was definitely a child that was in full play mode all the time, and acting things out with dolls, or forcing my parents to play characters. I think I probably still do that by being an actor. Using creativity to try out different experiences and running through different scenarios, it’s what Jack and Anna are doing and what children do so beautifully all the time. I feel strange that adults forget they can do that.

Alphabet Lane is in cinemas now.