Ashleigh Cummings Galore

Cast: Ashleigh Cummings, Lily Sullivan, Toby Wallace, Aliki Matangi, Maya Stange
Director: Rhys Graham
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 104 minutes

Synopsis: Billie and Laura, two teenage girls living in the bushfire prone outskirts of Canberra, are lifelong best friends. It's a sweltering summer during the high school holidays and Billie is in love. Madly, passionately in love. She is immersed in all the pleasures and intensity of her first encounters with sex and desire and it's perfect. Except that Danny is Laura's boyfriend.

Billie is sick with her own betrayal, yet she simply buries it deep and, with Laura, throws herself headlong into the pleasures of summer as these two girls live out their days and nights with all the raucous joy of being seventeen.

When Isaac, a troubled teenager trying to set his life straight, moves into the caravan in Billie's backyard, the girls are fascinated. His brooding presence gives rise to desire and jealousy, throwing the fragile balance of the intertwined loves of Billie, Laura and Danny into turmoil.

Billie, desperately in love with Danny, desperate to make it work, and desperately guilty, vows to confess all to Laura. But, at a party one night, as bushfires burn on the edges of their suburbs, Billie, looking for trouble yet again, steals a car and takes them all joyriding. As they soar through the wide streets of Canberra, a couple of kids appear in the headlights. She swerves… the car flips… and grinds to a halt on the deserted suburban street. Incredibly, the four friends emerge unscathed but, from that moment on, their lives are irreparably changed.

Through Billie's eyes, Galore takes us on an intimate, lyrical and sensory journey into first love and loss in that time in our lives when we live only for our friends, for love, sex and the possibility of happiness… a time when beauty is found in the most heartbreaking experiences.

Galore
Release Date: Release Date: June 19th, 2014

Director's Statement

I began writing Galore many years back – first as prose, then as sketches of scenes, and, finally, as a screenplay. I always knew that this story of love, loss and betrayal needed to be set in the bushy Canberra outskirts where I'd grown up; a world of bored kids living through all the usual trouble and desire of isolated suburbs. I also knew, from the very beginning, that the character at the heart of the film would be a teenage girl, Billie, who in her search for love, makes terrible, very human choices with grave repercussions. I wanted the film to create a vivid evocation of being in your late teens - the messiness, beauty and joy – and to explore the complexity of love, sex and desire in our teenage years when we just want to live life like a song. In this world, friendship and intimacy are everything; adults are peripheral and the long days and nights of a sweltering summer are spent chasing the possibility of any kind of intense sensation. Yet, in Galore, like in life at that age, I hoped to convey that each day always teeters on the edge of collapse - as the central characters, Billie, Laura, Danny and Isaac hurl themselves into experience, their energy driving them into each other's arms and into danger.

I wanted to make Galore an intimate character driven film and so the casting process was the most challenging and vital part of the film. We began casting a year out from the shoot, auditioning hundreds of young actors and street casting hundreds of first timers. The final cast was assembled with the delicate balance of the ensemble in mind. There had to be an energy between the actors that was charged, fragile and had the feeling of years of familiarity. The work that the four lead cast did in making this ensemble, in creating a shorthand in working, and developing a love and warmth that coursed through every scene, was amazing to watch. We had a three-week rehearsal period for the five-week shoot to ensure the strongest sense of naturalism and to develop a shared language through dialogue, development and play.
- Rhys Graham

About The Production

Rhys Graham's feature debut is an intimate and hauntingly beautiful drama set against the backdrop of one sweltering summer in the bushland suburbs on the outskirts of Canberra. Four teenagers – on the cusp of adulthood – live life with a burning intensity, experiencing those first indelible emotions of love, loss and betrayal. It's a physical and emotional landscape deeply familiar to Rhys Graham, who was raised in the suburbs the film he so authentically portrays.

'I grew up on the very edge of the city, where the bush meets these very ordered suburbs. It's a big car culture and there's nothing much to do, so kids are usually doing a lot of dumb stuff whether it's getting loaded, or getting into fights. But at the same time it's a very beautiful landscape, with low horizons, amazing hills and there's a light there that's just not like anywhere I've ever discovered. When we were young, my friends and I would spend all of our time going back and forward through bushland to each other's houses and it was very easy to get up to any kind of trouble you wanted to find as a general rule. But, maybe for that reason as well, we tended to be very insular in the friendships we made," Rhys Graham says.

'The film is not autobiographical, but, a lot of the events in the film are things that I or my friends experienced, or that I experienced in an emotional sense, more than an actual sense. There was lots of death when I was growing up. There was lots of car crashes. There were lots of fights. But, also there was the experience of everyone was desperately trying to fall in love with someone."

Rhys Graham was also inspired to capture the beauty and lyricism in the experiences of his youth by a passage written by writer Pierre Kast: 'love, at the very instant it happens, is already threatened with being forgotten or destroyed".

'That always stayed with me, this idea that the potential for love and the potential for physical connection and sex is always on the verge of collapse, so in a way, Galore became this love story about two possibly perfect loves, which are completely screwed up by the events that happen. It's a romantic tragedy, but it's also hopefully full of all the joy and possibility you experience at that time in your life as love opens itself up."

Rhys Graham teamed with producer Philippa Campey, with whom he'd worked on short films and documentaries. She first read the script in 2005 and was immediately attracted by the authenticity of the voice.

'I was actually quite surprised and amazed that Rhys Graham got the voice of the two young girls so well. It was really true to how I had felt as a young person, particularly in the journey of the main character Billie. I remember distinctly those confusing betrayals of friendship where you're trying to actually do the right thing, but things don't work out well. I think also specifically the experience of death at a young age is very well presented in the film. It's a very authentic account of how confusing death can be when you're young and you think you're invincible and you think you're going to live forever and that everybody is around you as well."

Rhys Graham and Philippa Campey assembled a stunning cast of young Australian actors with varying degrees of experience: Ashleigh Cummings, one of the country's most exciting young actors fresh from her starring roles in Puberty Blues and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Lily Sullivan, in only her second film role having been discovered by PJ Hogan for Mental, Toby Wallace, who had just completed a starring role opposite Bindi Irwin in Return to Nim's Island, and newcomer Aliki Matangi, discovered at an open casting call in Sydney. They are joined by the hugely talented and experienced Maya Stange, as Billie's mother.

'We tried to do a lot of street casting to find kids who know what it's like to live in the kind of isolation represented in the film. A lot of young actors can be really sophisticated, so we did try to cast people who felt like they belonged in the world that we were trying to establish. It's not a unique world, but it is different from an inner city experience, or a sophisticated urban experience, so we tried to find kids who'd grown up in and around the skating world. We tried to find kids who were at least were familiar with car culture and so we have people like Lily Sullivan who grew up in Logan, outside Brisbane, or Ashleigh who had spent so much of her time wandering with her family, so that she knew what it was like to be quite isolated, and then we found Aliki Matangi, who played Isaac. We found him in the western suburbs in Sydney. Aliki Matangi hadn't done a lot of acting, but he had such an incredible presence and an emotional intelligence, and an ability to just totally capture what Isaac was.

'Each of the actors was able to bring out the best in each other as well, which was amazing. Ashleigh Cummings as Billie, is the emotional heart of the film. We see and experience the entire world of Galore through her. Ashleigh Cummings has an extraordinary ability to tell so much about the secret world that everyone hides underneath their skin. With Ashleigh Cummings, you get all the nuance. In the film you see her confused and bewildered by her own choices, but at the same time, you feel the strength of her desire as she pursues her choices," Rhys Graham says.

'The character of Laura has an incredible energy and lust for life and she genuinely wants to make the world around her to fit with the world inside her. It's like she believes in the good in people. She has a creative impulse and she spends all of her time reflecting on the world around her. So in that way, she's bold beyond her years. To cast the role, we had to find someone who really felt like they had that kind of wisdom behind their eyes. And, Lily Sullivan is an amazing character who people just completely fall in love with her because she's got so much lightness and energy, but she's also got an amazing wisdom.

'Ashleigh Cummings and Lily were wonderful together. They would work with each other to refine and find their character in a really amazingly intelligent way that was kind of staggering. 'The role of Danny was quite tough to cast. We'd seen SO many young guys and it was really hard to find someone who had all of the complexity that Danny needs to have, but also someone who felt like they could belong in that world. Very late in the day, Jane Norris, the casting agent said to me, -I'm just going to show you this one guy, he's just come off a film, I just think he would be amazing' and it was one of those stories you hear, where he just walked in and as soon as he did the scene, he just completely blew me away."

Keen to be located in the environment in which the film is set and with funding from the recently established Screen ACT, the production was based for several weeks in empty offices in Tuggeranong, on the edge of Canberra. Several key cast and crew were brought from interstate, particularly Melbourne where Rhys Graham and Philippa Campey live, but local cast and crew were recruited wherever possible. Bringing the film to Canberra was an expensive option but, Philippa Campey says, the authenticity of the screenplay demanded an equal authenticity in production design and location….and heart wrenching as well, as the film crew shot in the lead up to the ten years anniversary of the devastating bushfires which destroyed so much of the local area and which are the backdrop to the long hot summer in which the film is set.

'Everyone around Tuggeranong and Kambah and Woden where we were filming had a story to tell about the 2003 fires, which was really quite a beautiful contribution from the community. So it really was a beautiful project to be a part of in that sense – to be making the film where it was set and where that was a real story that people could connect to," Philippa Campey says.

Galore
Release Date: June 19th, 2014