Odessa Young The Daughter Interview

Odessa Young The Daughter Interview

Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Ewen Leslie, Paul Schneider, Miranda Otto, Anna Torv, Odessa Young, Sam Neill
Director: Simon Stone
Rated: M
Running Time: 95 minutes

Synopsis: In the last days of a dying logging town Christian (Schneider) returns to his family home for his father Henry's (Rush) wedding. While home, Christian reconnects with his childhood friend Oliver (Leslie), who has stayed in town working at Henry's timber mill and is now out of a job. As Christian gets to know Oliver's wife Charlotte (Otto), daughter Hedvig (Young) and father Walter (Neill), he discovers a secret that could tear Oliver's family apart. As he tries to right the wrongs of the past, his actions threaten to shatter the lives of those he left behind years before.

The Daughter
Release Date: March 17th, 2016
Website: www.thedaughtermovie.com.au

Interview with Odessa Young

Question: What attracted you to The Daughter?

Odessa Young: It is really rare that you read female teenage characters that have complexity and depth to their personalities. Typically teenage characters are used as a buffer for the adult characters to project their childhood feelings. When I read the script the first time, I was entirely blown away by this character I was reading which I actually had to think about. I had to try and analyse who Hedvig was rather than it be spelt out in front of me.

Question: Did that make the role of Hedvig more challenging?

Odessa Young: The Daughter is by far the most challenging thing I've had to do in terms of transforming myself, I've never had to transform to this level before. Hedvig is completely different to me as the characters I have played, previously, have hit quiet close to home and there has always been a common element which has tied me to the character.


Question: Are you able to relate to your character, Hedvig?

Odessa Young: Hedvig is the polar opposite of me; it was such a challenge to get into her head.


Question: Could you talk us through the audition process for the role of Hedvig?

Odessa Young: The first time I ever met Simon Stone was in a workshop for The Daughter, he was beginning to think about casting and he wanted actors to read the script out loud, so he could hear it as a way of workshopping together. I was invited to workshop the script with absolutely no thought that I'd be playing Hedvig, in the film.

At the time of the workshop, the character of Hedvig was 12 years old and I had just turned 16 years old; I didn't even consider the chance of playing the character of Hedvig.

A couple of months later I received an email from my agent asking to put down an audition tape for Hedvig; which I found interesting as the last I had heard, the character was 12 years old. Simon Stone had changed the age of Hedvig and I put down a tape which completely missed the mark; if you talk about 'hit and miss', my tape was a miss times 100! I did not understand who the character of Hedvig was, at all. Thankfully Simon Stone has the insight and experience to know that a first impression does not dictate how an actor will act, later on.

I received another audition chance and was in the room with Simon Stone and Ewen Leslie; at that time Ewen Leslie was reading for Oliver and Christian (which was interesting). Simon Stone directed me, in the audition, to do the opposite of what I did in my audition tape as he said 'I was too cool or too old" in the tape. I understood I had misinterpreted the character as someone who was really affected by external coolness whereas Hedvig is so much less self-aware.

My audition period for Hedvig was more showing Simon Stone that I could peel back all the expectations that I had put onto the character before I had auditioned. I had to show the true core of Hedvig which is what Simon Stone wanted and was completed with a lot of coaxing; that was the biggest thing Simon Stone and I were rehearsing for as he knew the character and what he wanted; he just needed to get me to understand Hedvig, before I could play her.


Question: What did you learn about yourself whilst filming The Daughter?
Odessa Young: Yes, definitely. Every time you play a new character you are meeting someone else who is very in-depth and whatever you can learn from having a deep friendship or relationship with someone else is what you learn from playing a character. The character is real, be it in our minds; a character is a real person you are trying to give life to.

I learnt human experience such as being more aware of what other people go through and at the time I was trying to equate Hedvig to someone that I knew – that is a really easy way to jump into a character. I usually have an image of someone I know and equate them to the character and that's how I've always started the process. Noone is like Hedvig, Hedvig is an enigma, she is a one-of-a-kind character that I couldn't think of anyone I knew who shared any personality or attributes with her whatsoever and I had to learn to work around that.

When Simon Stone and I worked on stripping my performance back to the bare bones, I learnt a lot about acting, on that shoot. Simon Stone has been acting and directing conceptual theatre for such a long time – he taught me so much about characterisation and projection. Everything I learnt on set was adding to this big acting class I felt like I was taking (laughing); you learn about acting by doing it. There were many realisations; I'd been doing certain things one way, for so long yet doing it now, I feel like it is this way. Acting is a constantly changing web of things you tell yourself acting is.


Question: Can you tell us about the locations the film was shot on?

Odessa Young: The location, for Hedvig (which is who I saw it through) was very important to the characters development because they are so wildly isolated from where it is all happening, the city. For Hedvig there is a huge disparity between how kids grow up in the city and how kids grow up in the country. I am an inner-city kid and I've lived there all my life although I did spend one year, living in the country (so I completely understand.. not). The fact that Hedvig has spent her entire life in this tiny town with very limited opportunity to expand her experiences really says a lot about her character and how she thinks about things, as that's all she knows; she has known the same town and same people, all her life and what she has read in books. Hedvig has a strange perception of reality which informs her decisions and reactions.

The location is very important to The Daughter as it informs what relationships the characters have with one another because the stakes of the relationships are so much higher as you don't have a million friends to turn to.

Physically in terms of the environment, it is a dilapidated logging town, it's broken and it's rapidly shutting down which is such an intense and reflective backdrop for this story of people breaking and shutting down. It was a very deliberate decision on Simon Stone's path, he knew what kind of location he wanted from the start; he wanted broken machinery and things falling to pieces in the environment before we even knew what was going on, with the family.


Question: How difficult was it working with a duck?

Odessa Young: It is weird but I am weirdly obsessed with birds and I have a bird as a pet. I have strange bonds with birds; I've had crows follow me, my entire life. The duck was the best thing in my life during the shoot, it was so beautiful. The ducks name is Chewy quiet literally because a fox chewed on its wing when it was a duckling; the wound that you see on the duck is actually a real wound with fake blood, the wing really looks like that.

It was hilarious having all the animals around in the -forest' enclosure; it was overwhelming having tiny little wombats barrelling at you from out of the bush. I'm sure so many people dream about the -forest' especially the newborn wallabies and other mammals. I often was thinking about how I would get through the scene without stepping on a quokka. The animals all performed brilliantly (laughs) they did not give us trouble, at all.

The Daughter
Release Date: March 17th, 2016
Website: www.thedaughtermovie.com.au

Interview by Brooke Hunter