Lunch with Nursery Rhymes

An interview with Thomas Noakes, director of Nursery Rhymes

 Why were you interested in heightening tension further and further?
Myself and the writer Will Goodfellow were more interested in subverting the audience’s expectations than heightening the tension. It was about creating a landscape of withheld information that implicated the audience. You can’t help but project assumptions onto the unknowns – the diving question of “why” is that Metalhead singing a nursery rhyme on the side of the highway. The heightening tension was just a natural byproduct of paying off the mysterious tonal opening.

 Did you plan to shoot according to the weather or did you add the grey sky digitally?
Oh no! Those were fortunately/unfortunately in camera. Despite Australia’s stereotype of sunburnt sweaty beaches, it can get really cold! We shot west of Sydney, up in this extensive plateau where it can snow during winter, which is exactly what happened! We anticipated weather hovering around 10-12°C, but the day of our shoot it dropped to -2°C. So the shirtless and courageous Toby Wallace is actually braving sub-degree temps and shivering for real. When I say it was fortunate/unfortunate, is that it really hindered the crew and cast’s ability create this incredibly complex choreography during a single shoot day. We’re just not used to shooting in that kind of surprise cold, and it was understandably difficult on our performers. The upside is the naturally melancholy and brooding tone the bad weather brought to the film. And yeah, the lightening was a post element added via the generous White Chocolate post team in Sydney.

 How much did you want Nursery Rhymes to be an awareness video for road safety?
None at all! Ha. It does echo similar qualities of those Road Awareness ads you see on TV. But honestly, it’s not intentional.

 Why were you interested in picturing heavy metal band members?
The image that compelled Will Goodfellow and myself to embark on this project is the striking incongruity of a shirtless Metalhead standing on the side of a rural highway and singing “Old MacDonald”. That to me is cinema. Simple and engaging. Everything afterwards is a means to justify and rationalise that opening image.

 Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
Oh absolutely! I make my living directing advertising, and so the short dramatic form is a welcomed relief from creating by committee. There’s still a master, but that master is the film itself, and testing every idea and adjustment against the script and not a client. So in that sense, it felt like free-diving without a parachute.

Nursery Rhymes is being shown in Lab Competition L2.