First You Set Up Your Reality, Then You Push Into Oz

"Even when we made it as a theatre piece, we knew we were going to make it as a film," says Rosemary Myers. The filmmaker behind Girl Asleep may be making her cinematic debut, but she's the longtime Artistic Director of Adelaide's Windmill Theatre, where she's made a host of works that "centre around teenage experiences". Girl Asleep was conceived of as the third in a trilogy, following Fugitive ("a look at a group of alpha males") and School Dance ("a triumph-of-the-nerds story"), both of which premiered at the Adelaide Festival. Girl Asleep's own teenage tale finds a girl in the suburban '70s escaping from her 15th birthday party by disappearing into a fantastical dreamworld.

"We were looking at this idea that the teenage experience is one half risk and adrenaline, but then has this other side that is quite latent, and how much you exist in your bedroom in your own mind."

"The '70s is a really interesting time to tell a girl's story, because it was such an interesting time for women in the Western world, moving away from the post-war idea of the housewife towards liberation," says Myers. "So, we really wanted to explore a female as the central protagonist. And both [writer] Matthew Whittet and I are very interested in fairytale, and very interested in rites of passage. We were looking at this idea that the teenage experience is one half risk and adrenaline, but then has this other side that is quite latent, and how much you exist in your bedroom in your own mind.

"We naturally think about transferring things to quite fantastical worlds. It's very obviously a dream play. It's quite a common form of storytelling: The Wizard Of Oz is a famous example. The characters go into another realm, but they're really going into their psyche. You set up all these relationships and dynamics, and then you make a leap into a psychological, metaphorical telling of that story."

Bringing that story to screen, Myers has leant on some of the signature stylisations of Wes Anderson: the symmetrical framing, flat tableaux and air of deadpan whimsy. The evocation of the "colourful" time-period comes with wide collars and wood-panelling and removes the story from the realm of modern technology. "In our theatre work, we like to create a world that's part recognisable reality, but part its own little bubble. In some way, that makes it easy for the audience to engage with something; it feels both familiar and distinct," says Myers.

"One of the things people enjoy most is the quirky style. And that comes from the limits of the theatre, where you can only be in one time and space. As a group of makers, we're used to solving everything in 3D time and space; the idea of waiting until post-production or using CGI is something completely foreign to us. The ideas we come up with to solve these problems can be quite lateral, and always becomes a fun part of the language of our stories. And what we ask of our audience can be quite a leap of imagination... It was quite ambitious, what we were doing. A few people said to me along the way: 'You're only making something with this much ambition on this small a budget because you don't know what you're doing'."