You Don’t Have To Let Go Of Who You Are To Grow Up, Says ‘Animals’ Director Sophie Hyde

Holliday Grainger (The Borgias) and Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development, Search Party) star in Animals – screening at Sydney Film Festival in June, and Melbourne International Film Festival in August – as Laura and Tyler. They've been friends for ten years but their relationship shifts as they enter their early 30s. 

Laura feels that she ought to be further along in terms of both her career and her romantic life, diving headfirst into a courtship with classical musician, Jim (Fra Fee), while Tyler is determined to reject those same paradigms, encouraging Laura not to settle, and to keep pursuing new, often drug-addled experiences. 

It’s effectively a coming-of-age story – if you believe that coming of age isn’t about puberty or becoming an adult and leaving home or going to university, but is instead a gradual, ongoing process. 

“My belief is that we don't come of age once,” director Sophie Hyde says. “We don't just come of age and then we're adults – I think that coming of age is like a perpetual thing, we're constantly going through changes in our life, new seasons of our life, where we come into a new age, I suppose, of what we are.”

What drew Hyde to the film was Emma Jane Unsworth’s 2014 book. She describes the world of the novel as “very visceral and real and connected [and] that I thought was really familiar”, bringing to life a relationship that isn’t often the sole subject in popular culture: female friendship.

“[I was drawn to] the idea of friendship being a really important thing, maybe something that is equally as important as romance, but not necessarily because it lasts forever, but because it's just another important relationship.” 

Hyde says the relationship between Laura and Tyler described in the novel “feels like what you experience” – rather than falling into the categories of female friendship that have been deemed worthy of screen time, like flicks about girls behaving badly (Bridesmaids, Bachelorette) or very earnest friendship movies (Now And Then). 

“It was always really important to us that the friendship was a celebration, but that wasn't to say that the friendship was perfect – it's like we're telling the story of someone who needs to get out of a friendship and end it to be able to do the things they want to do in their life.”

Animals deliberately subverts the expectations of its set-up, concluding in an almost meditative place; it doesn’t have a rom-com ending, that loved-up happily ever after – not even between the two friends. “We kind of set up in the story that it felt like a rom-com, like a decision between two lives or two people, but it doesn't end like that,” Hyde agrees. 

It doesn’t even end with Laura deciding to drastically change the course of her life, completely letting go of her hard-partying past. “We were really clear that we didn't want to have it like, 'And now she's tipped all her alcohol down the toilet!' That it didn't feel like we wanted to tell women that to grow up you have to let go of everything about yourself, but maybe you just have to find something new.” 

With Animals, Sophie Hyde directs Australia’s first official feature film co-production with the Republic Of Ireland. While the novel is set in the northern English city of Manchester – Unsworth, who also served as the film’s screenwriter, is a Mancunian – the film takes place in Dublin. Hyde says she was asked to consider shooting in Dublin as if it were Manchester, but upon visiting the city with her partner Brian Mason, the film’s director of photography and editor, she made the decision to transplant the action to the Irish capital city. 

“We learnt that actually we were gonna get rid of a whole lot of the beauty of what you can create by shooting in a city where it's set. It's really important in a story like this that the character of the city is part of it, so you don't want to turn it into a generic city. 

“And then you find yourself in Dublin where it's this very strong literary background, there's literally poets' words on the walls everywhere you walk around, and everyone's drinking a lot, and suddenly you're like, 'We've found a very happy place for our characters.'”

Her and Mason were “both outsiders” in Dublin: “We had to land in a city and get to know it really fast. 

“You come in as an outsider and it's really exciting to learn and fall in love with a place and to put that on screen and to find all the bits that you adore and your eyes are really open to that. I think it's really crucial in these kind of films that are telling stories to people all over the world that they need a specificity of character and a specificity of place to really make us feel like we understand them as an audience.”  

While the filmmaking team had a fairly even split between men and women, Hyde acknowledges that it is “driven by women at its centre”: “It's a film about women sort of uncovering something about their place in the world, and certainly we were women from all over the world together telling that story and challenging each other and questioning each other and supporting each other. It did feel amazing. When you lead with people who've been raised as female, we tend to do things just slightly differently I think. There's a different feeling on set, and there's a different feeling between you all. I loved it, everything about it feels great.” 

Sophie Hyde