An idyllic getaway becomes the weekend from hell in this bold Aussie film

A weekend away in a beautiful rural retreat with your oldest friends and their respective partners: it sounds like the makings of a great time. But in The Birthday Trip, the debut feature from writer-director-cinematographer James Robert Woods, it makes for a well-lubricated descent into the hell that is other people.And with its tightly framed handheld camera, spiky dialogue and prickly performances, the movie positively ripples with a sense of veracity. Woods, you sense, knows these people.“It was born of years and years of pent-up observations,” he says of the film he has self-financed with his wife and fellow filmmaker, Stephanie Day, through their production company, Badlands. “Observing relationships in their natural habitat, observing people, observing dysfunction, being at a dinner party with that couple who should have broken up years ago, and just thinking, ‘Why am I having to deal with your issues?’”The three women at this joint 30th gathering are old schoolmates. But it soon becomes clear that their bond may owe more to custom than simpatico.Isabel (Annelise Hall) loosens up over lunch.BadlandsClare (Nicola Frew) is a painter, whose favourite colour appears to be envy green. Angie (Josephine Starte) is a documentary maker whose latest project is an anthropological study of the inhabitants of the Faroe Islands and their strange marriage customs. Isabel (Annelise Hall) has just started as a production co-ordinator at the ABC but has her eyes set on becoming head of content within five years.This gathering is the first time their partners have met each other, or the other women. Lars (Luke Jacobz) is a hyper-competitive finance bro and, improbably, soon to marry Angie. Mark (Ben Gerrard) works in the weapons trade, and is on the brink of a multibillion-dollar deal with Turkey, though he seems much more interested in the idea of bringing Clare into his sex life with Isabel.What Jim Conrad (David Quirk) does for a crust isn’t entirely clear – comedian, probably – but he is sharp-eyed, cynical, and locked in a cycle of bitter dispute with the chronically jealous Clare, who accuses him, with some justification, of being a lech.Aspects of the character are, Woods readily admits, “my self-insert … every time there’s a diatribe or a wordy opinion or some sort of acerbic deconstruction, that was usually just me, something I’d say at a dinner party, but with no one to shut me up.”As the weekend unravels, so do the bonds that allegedly tie these friends, and these couples, together. It’s a painful and funny watch, and a familiar one. We’ve all been there, right? Well, Woods certainly has.“I’ve lived in that world and been to those resorts and dinner parties,” he says. “Upper-middle-class Sydneysiders is a world I understand. And I think when you’re doing satire or class commentary, the call has to come from inside the house, because otherwise it doesn’t ring true. I feel like you can only render it authentically if you’ve lived amongst it.”There’s a touch of the David Williamson about all this (yes, Williamson started in Melbourne, but a more Sydney voice it’s hard to imagine). When I suggest that to Woods, he’s a little flattered.“I would very bashfully acknowledge a link, yes,” he says. “I’d like to think the film punches in a similar direction with a similar vigour.”There’s also a touch of Woody Allen about the merciless examination of people who imagine themselves to be good but who show themselves to be somewhat less than. “I mean, we watched Match Point as a reference, Hannah and Her Sisters, Husbands and Wives,” he says, nominating Allen’s mid-to-late period domestic dramedies. “I don’t think I would endorse him as a human being, but some of his work, and the way he makes dialogue sing, is impressive.”A few other reference points: Noah Baumbach and Aaron Sorkin – “I know it’s a bit naff, but the way he does exposition, and the way people talk at cross purposes and step on one another is so engaging.”And if you detect in the rough-and-ready, near-verite feel of the movie a hint of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, well the next round is probably on Woods.He was living in Denmark, home of the no-frills, no post-production Dogma movement of which Vinterberg’s 1995 film was the first example, when he decided to get serious about filmmaking, eventually doing a master’s degree in directing at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS).Writer-director James Robert Woods on set with Sapphire Blossom, who plays the wife of the long-suffering estate manager.BadlandsHe’d been working in reality television for a few years to that point. “I did the audition tours for MAFS early on, going around the country and filming the auditions. The content is questionable, perhaps, but there were amazing people making it, very talented screen professionals. It was really fun, but not totally fulfilling.”As a side hustle, he’d been making videos with a friend under the banner StuntBear, a couple of which went “pretty crazily viral”. One was a mash-up of news footage from the world’s hotspots, overlaid with real complaints from Domino’s customers. As a take-down of First World problems, it was as devastatingly effective as it was simple.It was at AFTRS that Woods and Day met and fell in love. After graduating they launched Badlands as a vehicle for their independent work (until now, short films and music videos), while doing commercial and corporate work on the side to pay the bills.The Birthday Trip – shot on video and made for less than $1 million – was funded entirely out of their own pockets, though they did have some in-kind help from his parents, who own a construction company. They provided the location – a rural getaway property that, crucially for the plot, included a building soon to be demolished.“That was quite lucky,” Woods says, “because it kind of gave us the absurd climax of the film, which in the script had been something a bit more tepid.”They made it fast – 15 shooting days – and tight, with a crew of about 15, and he edited it on his laptop over many months.“I don’t think we realised how big this project would be, how long,” he concedes. “The edit was 500 hours of me on the couch until the wee hours. It’s all opt-in and very positive, but it does create stress.”That was born of necessity, of course, but it’s also something Woods thinks the Australian industry should be doing more of.The “conventional filmmaking pipeline”, as he calls it, is a high-cost machine in which lots of people working in a traditional hierarchy “have, or need to have, equal input into a story … and I don’t think that always serves the final product in a good way.”The result is risk aversion, “a tendency to bend towards something safe and homogenised. That’s great if you’re shifting consumer goods, but I think if you’re making a film, you need to have a really bold, loud authorial voice, and I think the conventional pipeline can shave off those idiosyncrasies.”It’s one thing to make an Aussie film at a respectable price point; it’s another to convince people to go and see it. But Woods believes there’s an audience out there just clamouring for something a little different – and that The Birthday Trip could be just that.The not-so-happy revellers, and their hosts: (back left to right) Robert Preston, Sapphire Blossom, Josephine Starte, Ben Gerrard and Luke Jacobz; (front) David Quirk, Nicola Frew and Annelise Hall.Badlands“We’re not expecting it to make millions of dollars, but from our screenings so far people are getting really jazzed, like, ‘Oh, this is a new thing in Australian cinema,’” he says.And what do you want people to get from this film if they do come to see it?“I want people to be challenged,” he says. “I want them to be uncomfortable, and then laugh, and then be uncomfortable again.“First and foremost, I want people to take a good hard look at themselves. Because we tend to construct nice eloquent sentences about how good we are as people, but I think we still have societal structures that are not totally in line with who we say we are. And I think this film pokes at some of those things in a hopefully fun way.”And assuming audiences get on board with that, do you feel you have more to say about these people and this world?“I don’t think I’d revisit these exact people, in this exact world, but definitely this milieu,” says Woods. “Because it’s what I know I can render authentically.”The Birthday Trip is in cinemas from July 30.Want more movies? We’ve got you.Must-see movies, interviews and all the latest from the world of film delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our Screening Room newsletter.How does The Odyssey compare to Oppenheimer? We rank Christopher Nolan’s films.The film that made women wonder if the director had read their diary.The AI scene that was meant to make us laugh.