Heading into 2016, no director showed more promise than Justin Kurzel. After shocking audiences with his disturbing and intimate examination of the Snowtown Murders in 2011’s “Snowtown,” the filmmaker instantly became one of Australia’s exciting new voices. This excitement only amplified following his striking adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Personifying the playwright’s own words of “sound and fury” with fire and blood, Kurzel created a visual mood poem that solidified his mastery over cinematic grammar. Kurzel’s continued exploration of “outlaws” paired with “Macbeth’s” astonishing visuals and primal action sequences positioned him nicely for a successful adaptation of the popular video game franchise “Assassin’s Creed.” Sadly (while I enjoyed and defend that film), the film was met with harsh criticism. At the time, Kurzel was living in London and the failure of “Assassin’s” paired with a detachment from Australia caused the filmmaker to feel a bit lost. It was during this period of soul searching and missing home that Kurzel found Peter Carey’s novel, “True History of the Kelly Gang.”
“True History,” both the novel and Kurzel’s film, tells the story of famed Australian bushranger turned legend Ned Kelly (George MacKay) and his gang as they oppose British rule and flee from the authorities during the 1870s. As opposed to more historical examinations of Kelly, “True History” is a fictitious interpretation told through the perspective of the infamous outlaw himself. It’s precisely this lens that grabbed hold of Kurzel in a way the legend from his childhood hadn’t before allowing him to return to his filmmaking roots.
“I was coming off ‘Assassin’s’ and really just wanting to connect a bit more to things I’ve done in the past, but also be quite brave in the approach to telling the story,” said Kurzel. “‘True History of the Kelly Gang’ was really about prodding and poking at a mythical legend in Australian history in Ned Kelly,” said Kurzel. “It was about how you get past the true crime and the biography of him and start to look at why we put him up on a pedestal throughout history.”
Kurzel has stated how his time away from Australia helped inform his decision to post-modernize “True History.” Stripping away the myth in order to humanize the man was important to him.
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Kurzel continued, “I was fascinated with the idea of someone’s history being stolen from them. The film was a broader take on mythology and a country desperately needing that mythology and how it was dealing with its own history and its own past. Why did we attach ourselves to this 24-year-old bushranger? My only interpretation of Ned is the man that Pete Carey wrote. Even though it’s a fictitious point of view, it felt the most truthful, and it was the first time I was able to relate to Ned Kelly in some way.”
During my conversation with director Justin Kurzel, we not only discuss his relationship with Ned Kelly but delve into his fascination with morally gray characters. We also discuss how Kurosawa, Béla Tarr, Gus Van Sant‘s “Elephant,” and Scorsese‘s originally storyboards for “Raging Bull” helped shape his filmmaking sensibilities, how Ted Kotcheff‘s “Wake in Fright” influenced “True History,” his experience making “Assassin’s Creed,” why “Joker” inspired him, and much more.
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“True History of the Kelly Gang” is now available to rent on VOD and now playing at a handful of drive-in theaters across the country as well, exclusively in the LA area at the Mission Tiki 4 Drive-In in Montclair.
