Putting Theory Into Practice: Two VCA Graduates Discuss Their Work
To accompany the 2024 VCA Film and Television Graduate Season, running from 26 November until 10 December, MIFF asked two featured directors – VCA graduates Xunyan Liu, director of Long Zhong Niao, and Matthew Neumann, director of The LORD – some questions about their experiences of bringing their ideas to fruition, and how it’s changed them as filmmakers.
Where did you first get the idea to make your films, and how much did those concepts change over the course of shooting them?
Xunyan Liu: It was after finishing my narrative film Yu – as my film was cancelled by the school, I needed to make another film for my graduation. Therefore, my supervisors and I came up with the idea of making a documentary that reflects my journey. The concept didn’t change much; it only got more concentrated on self-discovery.
Matthew Neumann: The idea behind The LORD came from my experience moving into my current home, which is also the house in which the film was written, shot and edited. This place has housed punk musicians for over a decade and, as such, has a sort of shambling texture one would be hard-pressed to fake on our budget. So, a strengths-based approach. Over the course of developing the script, the story was revised for simplicity until I arrived at the simplest way I could express the core concept.
What were your experiences of studying at the VCA, and how would you say your filmmaking voices have developed as a result of your studies?
XL: I gained a lot of support and confidence throughout the course. It made me more determined to become a director and writer.
MN: I loved studying at the VCA. It’s genuinely really helpful to be around people who get all my stupid movie references and who get genuinely excited talking about film. Filmmaking is weird. A lot of it can’t be figured out from the outside without endless trial and error, so it’s been invaluable to be advised by people who really care about the medium and know the ins, outs and weirdness of creating work within it.
Above: The LORD director Matthew Neumann | Header: Xunyan Liu’s Long Zhong Niao
What were the biggest challenges you encountered – and discoveries you made – in bringing your visions to screen?
XL: Location agreements. As an international student, I was not familiar enough with Melbourne. It always cost me a lot of time to find locations and negotiate with people to get the shooting permit.
MN: Two things I took away from the production. First: make a serious priority of feeding your crew well. Solid meals. Protein. Good coffee. Really. Hiring vintage lenses might look really cool, but if you want to really get production value from your budget, there isn’t a better place to put it than in your crew’s stomachs. It’ll make your film better than any piece of gear you can hire. Second: to trust any technology that you could not personally strip down and rebuild from its components is hubris, and will be punished as such by the short-film gods.
Considering your finished works, do you see yourselves continuing to work with a similar style and related themes as your careers progress? Or are you keen to explore quite different directions?
XL: I will continue to explore queer stories and films as a Chinese queer director. I would also love to make horrors and thrillers.
MN: I will absolutely keep making genre films. Probably specifically horror – the genre is a good way of addressing difficult themes without being painfully literal in their exploration. In the case of The LORD, I felt that the capacity of horror to (hopefully) hold the viewer in an extended state of unease was the most appropriate manner to address the fundamental terror of housing insecurity, and the dangers we are exposed to in our response to an externally engineered artificial scarcity designed to exploit fundamental needs towards the enrichment of another. Sounds spooky to me.