Why Nitram director Justin Kurzel is nervous about the release of his Port Arthur massacre film

Just after 1pm on April 28, 1996, Australia changed forever. On this fateful day, Martin Bryant, a 28-year-old man with long, blond hair and the IQ of a child, pulled a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle from a sports bag at the Broad Arrow Cafe, and embarked on a killing spree around Tasmania’s Port Arthur historic site. The lives of 35 men, women and children were extinguished that day, and 23 others were injured by bullets travelling so fast the impacts were felt before the victims heard the shots. If a nation founded on colonialism can be said to possess innocence, the last shred of it was lost that day. Less than two weeks after the horror of Port Arthur, the country’s overwhelming grief and anger gave way to a resolute determination, led by then-prime minister John Howard, that there would never be a repeat of the massacre. “I will do all that I humanly can as leader of the government to bring about a significant improvement and to address some of the great deficiencies that exist (in Australia’s gun laws),” Howard said at the time. Previously lax rules around who could own a gun were tightened, and Howard, who had only been in the top job for six weeks when the Port Arthur massacre occurred, pushed an historic gun buyback scheme through Parliament that saw more than 650,000 firearms melted down at a cost to the taxpayer of $350 million. It is not an exaggeration to say Howard’s scheme changed the trajectory of Australian society, and, to this day, it’s raised around the world as a shining example of gun control, usually in the wake of another mass killing. Now, one of the darkest chapters of Australian history is being brought back into the light by a new movie that makes a deliberate choice not to focus on the victims and their stories, or even on the unthinkable violence of the massacre and the societal changes it produced. Instead, Nitram, which is an anagram of the killer’s first name, is, effectively, a biopic of a monster that attempts to present a causal link between monstrous behaviour and social and familial neglect. By studiously avoiding any use of Bryant’s real name in the movie, it strives not to glorify the man, yet the timing of its release in the 25th anniversary year of the massacre raises uncomfortable questions about commercial imperatives. It is, at the very least, a fraught undertaking, and it’s one the film’s celebrated Australian director, Justin Kurzel, is openly nervous ahead of Nitram’s theatrical release next week. But it isn’t the typical anxieties of a filmmaker worried about box office takings or how an audience will respond. Kurzel is genuinely worried, and with some justification, the movie will re-traumatise Port Arthur survivors and the families of the victims. And, unlike with Snowtown, his acclaimed debut feature from 2011 about an infamous series of murders in a small South Australian town, Kurzel will have to live with the emotional toll the movie takes on the local community in which it is set. The director and his actor wife, Essie Davis, who stars in the film, left their home in London and settled in Tasmania four years ago, so he knows only too well how deep the scars run. “We came back because we wanted to bring our children up here, you know, because it is the most beautiful, incredible place on earth,” the director says. “And we’re aware every day of the events (of Port Arthur) because you meet people every day that are somehow connected, whether it’s directly or indirectly to that day.” This lived-in experience was at the forefront of his mind when Shaun Grant’s screenplay for Nitram first landed on his desk. “I was incredibly apprehensive. I was incredibly scared, I took a deep breath,” Kurzel recalls. “I started reading, but there was something about the pace and the way it was constructed, and what (Grant) was trying to say that felt very genuine. “And despite, you know, my enormous apprehension about it, I was sort of drawn to something that was very compelling, particularly the way in which he allowed you to be in this world, and with this family, and with this individual, and the way in which that individual is dismantled and became incredibly dangerous.” Nitram opens with actual archival footage of a TV interview Bryant gave as a child, after landing in hospital for playing with fireworks. Asked by the reporter if he’s learnt his lesson, the boy matter-of-factly declares he hasn’t. The film then picks up the story after Bryant has reached adulthood, with American actor Caleb Landry Jones tasked with playing Australia’s most notorious mass murderer in the months before he commits his heinous crime. We watch as this young man careens from one emotional trauma to the next, whether it’s increasing social disenfranchisement, the slow psychological decay of a beloved father (Anthony LaPaglia) or the cool disdain of his mother (WA-raised actor Judy Davis). Davis, who gives a stunningly nuanced performance, says accepting the role of Carleen Bryant was a “difficult decision to make” but she put her trust in Kurzel, who she’s admired since Snowtown. “I wouldn’t claim to have played the actual woman, I don’t think that was the purpose of the piece, it’s not a documentary,” Davis asserts. “There is no attempt to make me look like Carleen, I wouldn’t do her that disservice.” The legendary Oscar-nominated actress says, instead, the goal was always to create a character audiences would recognise. “She’s got a son who she doesn’t understand, and she’s not equipped to solve the problem that he represents,” Davis explains. “She certainly doesn’t have the insight, nobody did, to anticipate what he might eventually do under certain pressures, for whatever reasons he had.” Davis, who shares a number of incredibly intense scenes with Landry Jones, says the Texan never broke character during the production. “I think he wouldn’t mind me saying that he’s very much a method actor, and I never heard him speak in a Texan dialect at all,” Davis says. “He was only ever really (Nitram) with me, and it was kind of a little awkward, it wasn’t easy, really, to talk with him, which I think was true to the relationship between the mother and the son.” Rooted in real life, we see how Bryant’s bizarre relationship with Tasmanian lottery heiress Helen Harvey (Essie Davis) provides a rare moment of human connection, and how her death (likely by his hand) heightened his disconnection with society and allowed him to stockpile expensive semi-automatic weapons. “Like he was buying fishing rods,” Kurzel says, before highlighting this scene, and the current real-life debate about the proposed watering down of Australia’s gun control laws, as one of the reasons he felt compelled to bring Grant’s script to the screen. And, hanging over it all, is the dreaded inevitability of the massacre, which is not depicted. Davis reveals she didn’t allow herself to “brood” on the actual massacre while making the film, which was as much about keeping her performance grounded in the day-to-day reality of a woman in an unhappy life as it was protecting her own emotional wellbeing. “I mean, it is true you do these disturbing things, and you don’t know how it’s affected you,” she acknowledges. “In a year’s time, I might wake up after the most horrendous nightmare.” Omitting the violence was an act of respect to the victims, according to Kurzel, but there’s a case to be made that, in doing so, the film offers a portrait of Bryant that’s far more sympathetic than Australian audiences will find palatable. In one truly heinous act, for example, Bryant gunned down Nanette Mikac and her three-year-old daughter, Madeline, before chasing the woman’s terrified six-year-old child, Alannah, into the bush before shooting her, too. Not including such details, even in the closing credits, and omitting other distasteful elements of Bryant’s life (the animal cruelty, bestiality and attempted child molestation to name a few), while including scenes that portray him in a flattering light, is problematic. Despite this, the film has already enjoyed considerable success — Nitram screened to great acclaim at Cannes in July, where Landry Jones won the best actor prize, and it was awarded the $100,000 CinefestOZ film prize, which is the richest of its kind in Australia. It’s hard to dispute the film’s worthiness for such accolades, if the criteria is strictly based on artistic merit alone. In that regard it is, undoubtedly, one of the most accomplished pieces of filmmaking this country has produced, with an ensemble of brilliant performances, guided by a director in total control of his craft. What’s less certain is what Nitram offers Port Arthur victims, and, conversely, how it would be received should it ever be watched by the man responsible for their pain, as he slowly rots in a cell in the maximum security wing of Hobart’s Risdon Prison. “I’m extremely nervous about it, and the very last thing I want to do is traumatise people here in this beautiful place,” Kurzel says. “And I’m very aware of what it is that we’ve made, but I’m really very sure about why we made it.” Nitram is in cinemas on Thursday.