Original subtitles

Because it just, you know, it just happened... happened like that. And there was absolutely no explanation for it.

So you're trying to go over events and find some reasoning

and looking for clues somehow to what might have happened

and there was absolutely nothing. What did you see?

Um... Alice was sitting at the end of her bed in her wicker chair and she's just staring at me and she looks really sad.

Brother, I don't know what that made.

I feel as though... I feel as though I did what I needed to do.

I was there for the amount of time I needed to be there

and there was sort of nothing more, nothing more to do.

I hadn't seen it, but I had felt it.

I guess I just feel very sorry, very very sorry.

I couldn't have done anything.

Glimpses of fleeting moments in a supermarket,

in a group of schoolgirls.

It saddens me that somebody is so in touch with their pain

that they are almost in preparation for this.

For some people, when they encounter this film,

it absolutely rocks them on a foundational level.

Few movies of any genre have the power to do that.

This absolutely does.

Joel Anderson, you know, who made this film,

he achieved something that is almost impossible.

It's a discovery film.

It's a sort of film that those that have seen it love it, love it,

and really want to sort of tell people about their secret love,

which is, you know, you've got to see this film.

It's a classic.

It's still super effective.

It still feels like a movie

that could be released today, you know.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

It really did.

It just got under my skin and stayed there forever.

Anyone who's a horror fan,

like a true horror fan,

knows Lake Mungo and reveres it.

For me, the film just has universal

and timeless sort of power

because of what it says about loss and grief

and, you know, secrets and all those sorts of things.

I just couldn't bring myself to identify how it was this body.

You know, a terrible thing happens, you know, they're thrown into this maelstrom

that's beyond their control and then they have to make the hardest decisions.

What are we going to do now? How do we live through this?

How does anybody live through this?

I just remember our kitchen and I don't know why.

I think that's just because that's where the table was,

so we were always there.

But it was always in treatment form.

But I use the word treatment,

but I don't think that really represents

the kind of document it was.

It was sort of a treatment-script hybrid.

Lake Vungo, Acapulco,

Nights,

Blood Frenzy, does that ring a bell?

No, but like, he,

I have never met anyone who has, or

keeps, as many notes

as Joel about everything.

So, yeah,

this tracks,

this is on brand.

You got that, but it was probably that. And then he just started cutting it down.

I wouldn't have seen anything until it was, like, readable, you know, like, coherent.

It was really engaging.

It was, you know, even though it wasn't in conventional

script form, it very much read like a script. It was really sad. It's always been sad. A

sad story. We met, we were working at a cinema together. We became, we were in a relationship

for over a decade.

Joel is a very thoughtful person and thinks about people, motivations.

He's got, you know, always got good insight.

He was able to put himself in the shoes of a father or a mother and a teenage girl and build the story.

I guess he was young.

Not so young that you don't know what it means to be alive

or to be part of a family or to experience loss

or to understand the complexity of a family, whether it's loving

or dysfunctional.

He had a relationship and still does with John Brawley, who's the DOP.

They met like early 2000s.

Do you think when we're actually shooting we'll be together for weeks, weeks at a time?

No, well I'll be in my suite in the motel.

And I'll ring through, make sure you've got the stuff, the material I need.

I'm not sure I'll be joining you on vacation.

Originally, it was just Joel and I who were going to make this film between us.

And then we sort of, it kind of grew into something bigger, which I don't think we really expected.

I think we were just expecting to just kind of make it as a lo-fi indie movie we both felt very similar about our our taste

in movies and making things you know the way we wanted to i think you know uh i'm trying to think

when dogma was was kind of happening as well maybe that was like a factor of it as well those

kind of process-based things were influencing they certainly

are an influence on me now capturing the Freedmen's was probably one of the biggest influences for us

because when you watch that film you're kind of thinking how can they have been rolling cameras

during I mean during this documentary that just seems crazy that the family were filming their

own kind of breakdown.

Kind of just wanted to cast ourselves and decide, like, what is our take?

Okay, well, let's say we're a prestige BBC, ABC type, highbrow documentary crew.

We'll have the resources of that crew, but it's really only going to be a couple of sound reporters,

the director, a camera person, maybe a bit of lighting equipment equipment we're not going to have these kind of big contrivances

of crane shots and so on and we had these artificial constraints on ourselves where we

just wouldn't want to take on you know stuff that would you know betray the idea you definitely

have to have rules and you have to have a certain um you know, adhere to them, you know, very much like a ritual,

almost like a religion or else it doesn't work.

Well, straight away, it's a documentary.

So everyone thinks, well, it must be, well, it's real,

it's authentic and it's real and this is sort of what it is.

But when you do make a documentary,

you suddenly realize that you as a director have the choice of what point of view

you want to make in the film and how you edit it together and what sort of thing you want to

sort of focus on. So to me it's just as manipulative and unreal in a way as a narrative

fiction feature film. We can't only shoot for four weeks.

We have to show that we've been here with this family for a year.

We need a year's worth of material in Ararat,

the town that we ended up deciding to shoot in.

We want a year's worth of season in that.

How can you get that in, you know, shooting for four weeks?

And so, you know, we ended up going on weekends for over a year, but of the period of the film, we had a four-wheel so you know we ended up going on weekends for over a year but

of the period of the film we had a four-week shoot but we ended up shooting just Joel and I

sitting by a camera doing time lapses and stuff

it is a ghost story isn't it it's always

whenever someone dies it's a ghost story

We'd go on weekend road trips but really Whenever someone dies, it's a ghost story.

We'd go on weekend road trips,

but really they were location scouts.

And we were kind of living that itinerant life, right? You know, like what Ray kind of does where he's going to.

Hi, I was looking at this reflection we should probably just pop Alice in a reflection

in the corner of the like at the bottom of the frame and some of the hotel room stuff

Do I look heroic?

Oh!

That's four! I guess we were so young and brash we didn't really know to take it seriously.

Yeah.

Found this place, John, what do you think?

I like the fairy lights.

Cheers. So tell me a bit about this technique you've got of John jumping out in the boot.

What's that all about?

Well, if he's been in the boot for a long time, um, he really becomes highly sensitised

to light, texture, location.

And I just find it's a good way of working a very good guide and

it's not often wrong when it comes to judgment he's been in there for a few hours now and

this is our first stop so he probably needs to go to the loo actually.

So anyway a few more hours to go and then we can, we'll give him something to eat.

Alright.

I mean, I hope he's okay.

But he likes doing it this way too.

It's demanding.

I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, there's sacrifices to be made, obviously.

But what happens is, he's desperate to get out usually,

but he's very committed, very dedicated, I find.

And you find that you can trust his judgment in this way?

I don't know.

It helps him make a judgment.

No, but I like having him in the boot.

That was a skit, really, but we were talking about, like,

you know, we sort of had this joke about, you know, putting me in

the in the boot of the car to, you know, shield me from light and not be affected. So I come out,

you know, completely unknowing, I know nothing about what's supposed to happen, they give me a

camera and then off the scene, we go. I mean, it wasn't serious. But like, that comes out of that

conversation we had about about how do we approach

this so we're seeing it for the first time you know how do you how do you make in those mistakes

visually that someone would make uh or in terms of storytelling um because you didn't know where

to put the camera to be in the right spot and you didn't react fast enough so you're creating a

character um and we were

characters ourselves we had to react as if we were in character so the actors are improvising

they're kind of making a scene and doing things and we have to always have in our heads okay what

would a documentary filmmaker do in this exact moment if the act if the actor was doing this

thing or reacting in this way or walked off

this way we have to also react in character as well.

When Dan and I went down the road with Blair Witch you know we originally thought it was

going to be a documentary very much like like Mungo we went down that road and we realized

how hard how difficult that road was it was so difficult that we ended up like removing all the documentary stuff and just

going with the footage.

Georgie Neville, I'm just returning her call about an audition time tomorrow.

Okay, thanks, bye.

My name's Georgie Neville, and on Lake Mungo, I was a producer.

Why are you doing this?

Why are we doing, why am I doing this film?

I've never stopped to ask myself that question.

Money, it's all money.

Glamour, fame, you know, all those sorts of things.

I don't know, I don't know, I don't really think about it.

I think it's a really cool project, I really like the script.

Joel, I think Joel is brilliant.

He's meticulous.

I'm not meticulous.

But also complimentary, I think.

She is a louder personality.

And so when Joel didn't speak up, Georgie did.

I thought I was waiting on you to get back to me

to confirm the time. I'm sorry.

You know, whenever somebody, usually an older bloke,

would sort of go, oh, no, that's not how we do it. She would be like,

well, this is how we do it. This is how we're going to do it. And I remember it as a, um, as a ridiculous,

impossible challenge, um, which is always, unfortunately for me, something that excites me.

That's aside from actually reading the treatment. And that excites me. That's aside from actually

reading the treatment and that that spooked me. It kind of touched

everything. I thought it was magic. I was knocked over. I mean the script was so

amazingly original and and he was writing with such clarity and knowledge

of what he was doing.

I mean, it was a very, very impressive script.

I passed it to a number of my colleagues.

And, you know, people just went, my God, this is just astonishing.

I said, well, I'll do the film, but I won't do it for $200,000.

That's just a way of breaking your head.

So I said I'd get them $2 million to do it

and that if we had $2 million,

I reckon we can make a really good job of it.

Having David on board gave the film,

or gave the production, a sense of legitimacy

that it probably didn't really have having us.

He looked like an old man, which made it feel like

he knew what was going on.

He has a Canadian accent so

that also felt really legitimate. You know and those things sound kind of trite but that really

does give you a sense of gravitas or a sense of kind of seriousness about the project. Now we've

got a proper person that's doing it with us and it's no longer you know a bunch of kids kind of

putting it together. I think I always felt a little bit like that. I mean there were a couple of rewrites of it that were done.

Joel didn't listen to much. He was

very sure of himself, really very sure of himself. And absolutely,

you know, no question he was entitled to it. The guy who

directed Romper Stomper, so he was working for

what is now Screen Australia.

And they had a program where they were going to give out

a million dollars to a film,

and it had to be a beginner's film.

And he just said, okay, this is the film.

And that put us over the hill.

We had enough money then to basically make the film.

Open the door and just move inside.

I'm Talia Zuka, I play Alice Palmer in Lake Mungo.

I mean, I was pretty young. I was only maybe 19, 18 or so.

But even then, I could tell that this was a very special and unique project because it wasn't written like a conventional script.

So that was the thing that stood out the most, I think.

And also I was very good friends with Marty,

who plays my brother in the film.

Yeah, it didn't feel real.

I was a working child actor in Australia.

I was in a children's series where I played

a pizza delivery boy who Moonlit is a secret agent.

A secret agent?

And Talia played the love interest in that show.

You like him, don't you?

Of course I don't.

So we have worked together a long time leading up to Lake Mungo.

I had such a close relationship with Marty anyway.

Like, we were such good friends at that point,

so it did sort of feel like we were, you know,

could be brother and sister in a way.

Who's sunglasses?

I don't believe you're here with Rosie.

Well, also, Rosie was a very prominent casting agent in Melbourne,

and Rosie had cast me in my first ever role when I was 11.

Sometimes, you know, I just forget that...

..she's not coming back.

I'm Rosie Traynornor and I played June Palmer.

I was working as a talent agent at the time.

So I've done a lot of different things.

I started out as a teacher, then became an actor,

and then got into casting.

Then became an agent, got back into casting,

and all along the way, I did the odd job, odd acting job.

I thought that was my responsibility as Ellie's dad.

You know, that's what our father does.

My name's David Pledger,

and I played Russell Palmer in Lake Mungo.

I mean, I wasn't so much an actor at that time.

I'd had a very long career as an actor, mainly in theatre.

And so I'd worked a lot in theatre in Australia.

And then I worked as a director.

I took my shows over to Europe and then through Asia.

Death is not the bitter end.

that it's not a full stop, which is a consolation. over to Europe and then through Asia. Death is not the bitter end that...

It's not the full stop, which is a consolation that I'm quite happy to give them considering

the fact that what happens after death is up for grabs anyway.

My name's Steve Jodrell and I play Ray Kemeny, the psychic.

I have a background as an actor, a director, a producer and occasionally writer

and script writer and script editor. So I'm a little bit of kind of everything. I have

to say in reference to this project, I had not acted for quite a while so I was a bit

more nervous than usual.

Worst night of our lives.

I'm Judith Roberts but I played Iris Long. So it was impro. All this impro and I was quite open to it, quite adapt to it because because my early training was with, like, Hayes Gordon,

Ensemble Theatre, Sydney.

I come to rest on a shelf at the bottom of the stormwater cistern in the dam.

Obviously, contacted the family immediately.

Hi, my name is Carol Pichullo,

and my character in Lake Mungo was Sergeant Sandy Druin.

What really piqued my interest was the idea

that there was improvisation involved in that

because I was heavily into improvised theatre.

You go in there and just have this bad feeling like in your gut.

I'm Tanya Lentini and I play Georgie Ritter in the film.

I actually had an operation.

I had an operation like it was just a little one

and it was the week that I got the audition.

So I believe he saw something.

Whether it's a real ghost or not, I don't really know.

My name is James Lawson and I play Frederick Roskamp.

I was at a very interesting point in my life.

My marriage had just ended or thereabouts.

So it was quite the tonic to get a gig on a feature film.

And then we looked more closely and I'm Natasha Herbert and I played Cathy Withers in Lake Mungo, yeah.

I hadn't done much film. I was working in theatre but had two young children there.

Yeah, just sort of hoping for the big break, I guess.

Um, why do you want to see me?

I was advised to come and see you, so I just... Why do you want to see me?

I was advised to come and see you, so I just...

..come and see you.

Sure.

It was run very differently to, you know,

I didn't have a scene to learn or anything like that. I really just had to come in sort of like this

and just sit opposite Joel,

and he just sort of asked me questions and I'd just answer them and he'd sort

of direct the conversation in a certain way. Are you ever in the drabis? It's kind of like, I don't know,

we've just studied this in psychology a little bit. It's kind of like I'm just there, like I'm sort of

hovering around. I sort of feel like I'm in the room, but I can't actually see myself.

There's an otherness about her that...

I know she matched Rosie so well.

Like, the whole family worked really well, I think.

When we first started trying to make this film,

we were like, let's get a family.

Let's cast a family let's cast a

family to do it. Joel and the producers started asking about who else was in my family and you

know would they be open to coming in and doing a read and I think my brother did did do an audition

I'm not too I'm not too sure and they asked about my mum but she wouldn't do it. Yeah you know I think he thought about lots of different ways to do it and what would be the

most realistic thing and how you could actually really get this performance out of people

who are trying to be someone else but trying to be themselves in those people.

I'm not sure whether Joel really wanted a casting person.

People often think that anybody can act and they can't.

There's only one Natasha Herbert, only one Tammy McCarthy, only one Rosie.

You know, it's like they're individuals and there's nobody else like them

Joel called me up because he said I keep thinking of you in regard to this and I've worked with him

on a um I cast a short film of his a couple of years previously and so he said come over

here's a little thing for you to have a read and I'm like yeah sure.

And the audition process was me basically being interviewed by Joel.

Well we know you've had a very hard time and we know that you were very upset when your sister died

and we know it's been an incredibly difficult year.

Yeah, yes it has. your sister died and we know it's been an incredibly difficult year.

Yeah, yes it has. But like I said I leave my home life at home. He was just throwing questions at me to see I guess how well I knew the backstory

and I guess how convincingly I could kind of improvise, deliver the lines. So yeah it was

very loose and Joel doesn't give anything away at allly I could kind of improvise, deliver the lines. So, yeah, it was very loose,

and Joel doesn't give anything away at all.

So you're just kind of, you know,

you're just trying to experience the truth of the situation

as best you can.

He had a delicacy about him.

He was delicate.

He was a delicate boy,

but he also had a bit of mystery about him in that he, again, you

didn't know what he was thinking, which I love.

How do you actually help people?

I listen to them.

I listen to their stories.

I listened to their fears, their pain, their wants, their longings. I let them see the possibility of things that are beyond maybe the world of their knowledge.

I had trouble originally dealing with the fact that he was a psychic because I'm very

cynical about anything to do with the supernatural. I went and did a session with the psychic

to try and understand how psychics work. I read a bit about cold reading and warm reading,

how you deal as a psychic with people.

I learned some of the skills involved, like being able to observe,

looking at dress, facial mannerisms, reactions, body language when you ask questions, etc.

I had a lot of trouble actually getting inside how much Raya believed in what he was doing.

Steve is enigmatic.

He sort of, he holds back a bit as a human being.

He was an intriguing character.

I fully believed he was a clever man.

he really just, yeah,

made us feel like it was actually really happy.

What's your birthday, Dani? Um, 23rd of the 7th, 63. I'm having a bit of sadness, a bit of pain.

something in your upper body. I'm having a bit of sadness, a bit of pain.

Something in your upper body.

Do you think there is any element of exploitation or manipulation in his practices?

Possibly.

There was something happening inside that house and I wanted to find out what it was.

I would have been a fool to miss that.

I missed a once in a lifetime opportunity. I wanted to know.

It depends on how much you trust and believe in psychics and their ability to actually contact the other world, so to speak.

Mesmerising the palmmers, stealing their money,

doctoring the photos of Alice.

I think the prevalent kind of discussion had me

as some kind of Rasputin figure sent from hell

to do the devil's bidding.

You know, I just think I just wanted it to be, you know...

I didn't want it to be her, I wanted it to be someone else's... I want it to be her or it would be someone else's.

I wanted it to be someone else's kid.

I didn't want it to be mine or it would be.

But at some point they rang me up and said, would you like to do it?

And I knew enough about it to know that I didn't know enough about it. And so that excited me.

David has a similar thing to Rosie in that he has a...

He's grounded and very earthed.

He's warm. He's a warm person.

I identified the body.

Signed the papers.

Lift. So, you identified the body, signed the papers, left, sorry.

But we went through quite a long process with me going through casting for the Russell character and that was a beautiful way to engage into the world of the film anyway, to do that.

You never spoke about it? Not really. Everyone grieves in their own way and it wasn't really my

place to be telling him how to feel but I certainly was concerned. I don't know what process exactly

they followed as far as auditioning but they definitely got a certain kind of actor

or at least a certain kind of performance from those actors

that is not normal in film.

I think the biggest thing that really sells it

and what's extraordinary in the film are the performances

and the kind of tonality of them and the nuance of them

were kind of effortless

and and and really uh emotive they just feel like people i meet every day in the street yeah the the

the dad he just reminds me of you know guys i play in the cricket club with just felt realistic i

mean when you talk about a documentary about a family, this family felt real.

There's a magic that's achieved in the performances in Lake Mungo that I haven't seen in anything else.

All I know is that we, as audiences, know.

We know the difference when you're watching performances like you get to see in Lake Mungo

or performances like you get to see in John McNaughton's Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer or in a film like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre from Toby Hooper, where you're watching people do things that you feel like, I don't know if I should be watching this because it feels so real.

The hyper sense of tuned in reality that is achieved by this cast.

I can't explain it. It's one of those magic

tricks that happens when the right actors and the right story collide with the right filmmaker and

the right approach. And for that many stars to line up in a row to create such an unforced sense of

true reality, that's cinema. That's the whole thing that we're trying to achieve.

It's not showy.

And none of them are trying to draw attention to the performance.

They're just trying to be incredibly naturalistic and realistic.

And that's it.

It's like, I totally buy that they are these people.

It was Alice coming out that we are still dripping wet and coming to the end of our bed and just

staring at us.

This terrible feeling came over me.

And that's, yeah, that's what happened.

The rehearsal process was, it was really long.

Like, we did long, long blocks of interrogation, essentially,

with Joel at the Abbotsford Convent in a kind of, like, cold, dark room in this old convent,

which had a kind of spooky vibe.

So the production office,

which could have been anywhere in Melbourne,

was at the Abbotsford Convent.

Somehow, probably is haunted,

or maybe, you know, like,

it's another of those places that you walk through

and think what went on here for all those years,

like, who knows, all the stuff that got on there and you

felt that and that kind of set the tone I guess for the whole thing.

But I do sense it seems to be a great deal of sadness.

Yeah well, I mean a father and a daughter not being together so it's pretty sad.

We would keep building the character

So it was quite an interesting rehearsal period for me

That's the lock of Alice's head that and the DNA cells that they took you know through the

After they dug up the body. Basically there's

enough information there to make her.

Sorry. Sorry. Yeah.

It's interesting that it's not in the film. It's really important that you do, that those ideas are developed in a rehearsal

so that the things that are actually said and kept in the film have meaning for the character

when they're saying them that is not necessarily known to the audience. And in that place is where you get a kind of magic,

because the audience is going,

why did he say it like that?

Is there something else going on?

You can feel characters not saying what they're feeling

and there's a little beat in their eye and, you know,

we're kind of going, oh, right, there's he Joel's just really layered it with um you know this

just a whole lot of questions that that are happening in the performance. All you need to do

is for him to be thinking about it and in those moments of pausing that's probably what he's

thinking about but he doesn't say that in the next in theusing that's probably what he's thinking about but he

doesn't say that in the next in the words that he speaks and that creates mystery. Are there any

memories from that night that stand out for you? Joel is very enigmatic. He doesn't give a lot away

because he wants to see what you're going to bring and he wants to see what your answers are going to

be and what things you put into it that weren't in the script.

Joel was also a very good interrogator.

He was, you know, people don't notice the fact that here's this person asking questions,

documentary questions, over and over and over again.

And they're very intuitive. They're very effective.

He's, you know, he's quiet and he keeps the pitch down

and he helped the actors a lot to just be natural.

His questions were not overdone or overwrought.

He was very good.

He did something.

There's something, some direction he gave these folks.

There's some way he helped coach them through this

that just, oh, if I could do'd be I'd be a very happy actor

nobody seemed to know how to handle it I guess I wasn't really sure what June or the family for

that matter believed in so I guess you can't really force religion on someone that's not

what they turn to in times like this.

It meant I had to be inside what I was, inside that whole situation and inside, um, I had

to live it and, you know, to have the level of detail that kind of sort of came out of

that, that was something they brought out in their questioning.

I mean, the rehearsal process was painstaking.

I mean, they're obviously worried.

Yeah.

Do they make you scared?

Yeah, they do scare me, yeah, a little bit,

because they're sort of becoming a bit more frequent.

Like, I'm having more...

And I think I'm feeling more detached from my family in the dreams

as they reoccur, but...

Yeah, I guess, yeah, they do scare me, yeah.

It helped because we got to spend so much time together and, you know, once we arrived

on set, we sort of had that, yeah, really sort of comfortable

relationship, I think.

It was just awful spending Christmas Day with the family.

Without a stand there and more.

It needed a lot of concentration right, remembering what your thought process had been, remembering

what you said so that then became dialogue because if you kept wandering off and improv-ing

every time you took a shoot,

then you're never going to get a movie.

When you got what your director wanted,

that you had to keep it.

So then the actors' training has to come in

so you can repeat it.

Joel was able to kind of share that vision with us

without spoon feeding us. The reason, the only way I can kind of justify it I guess is you know I just

didn't want to be in my life anymore. I wanted to be in somebody else's life for a little while.

I just didn't want to go back to sleep.

And that's why I think, you know, the rest we filled in organically and that's why I think

he cast it really well. And I think it's because, you know, David is also a writer as well as

a director. I was in casting, come from a teaching background, I was an agent.

Talia's making films now, Marty's making films now, Steve is a director.

So it was quite Brechtian in a way in that we kind of sat outside of it a tiny bit without kind of, you know, going all method on it.

So we did the staff and then we were in the moment and played.

It was a very unconventional way to work. Yeah.

Joel had very specific key bits of information

that he wanted us to say in those scenes.

So he was very encouraging of us to find our own way through the words,

words, but there were key lines that we

had to communicate, I guess.

My Christian name is actually Chult, but I changed it to Ray. I think it's a more trustworthy

name for a psychic.

Australia's wog psychic of choice. Um, yeah.

Did I get it?

Oh, no, no.

Right.

Even though a lot of it was improvised,

those lines were sort of...

I don't know if Joel ever articulated it,

but they were non-negotiable as far as, like, a way through the story.

We had to sort of find different ways into those key bits of information.

But, yeah, it was in a way like we were, I guess, writing the script with him.

And as soon as I made that phone call

and I looked out at how still that I could,

and I just knew that she'd gone.

It felt very strange in the car on the way home because there was one empty seat.

In an odd way it reminded me of when I brought Alice home as a newborn from hospital.

One minute she was there and then she wasn't there.

Are there any memories from that night that stand out for you?

I remember we had the porch light on.

When you have a circumstance, like an event, like a death,

then that's when you see the enigma of humanity unfolding in front of you.

And I think that's one of the things that really prop of propels the whole story and the narrative and the movie forward.

It just didn't really feel real.

When grief affects you, it just comes out in the most ridiculous ways.

I remember going to my mother's, the funeral home,

when we were, you know, getting kind of,

we'll take that coffin and we'll, you know, she's going to wear that dress.

My sister and I hadn't probably eaten for two days,

and he had some lollies, and we were just eating those lollies and just laughing inappropriately at a lot of stuff that he said.

And I just thought you could not script that.

That is just bizarre and in the moment as it gets.

I had a number of sort of life experiences in which the process of grieving was very

prominent for long amounts of time.

I felt like there was an opportunity for that character as a father and I had two kids.

So there was an opportunity as a father to sort of explore what it means to lose a

child.

I don't know what that is okay but I found myself sitting at the edge of the bed and

uh...

Ali walked in and she went over to a desk and started sharpening a pencil and then she looked like she was checking for a text message on her phone.

And I just, you know, sat there completely frozen.

I felt like I could contribute within the methodology

some, you know, kind of ways of expressing grief

that were both verbal and non-verbal.

When you say non-verbal,

how did you sort of explore that with your...

..your performance in the film?

Well, actually, just a bit like that. Taking a breath, not answering straight away, waiting

for the emotion that's connected to the question to arrive rather than, I wouldn't say forcing it,

but rather than kind of being in dialogue.

And he doesn't divert his eyes from the camera,

and he stays so still,

and he kind of can't continue speaking at a point.

He takes a big pause and breath,

and then the way he breathes,

each time I see it, I go, holy shit,

I wish I could manufacture that kind of reaction.

There is this idea that some things are just so difficult

to talk about that they curse us and they haunt us

in either literal or metaphorical ways.

I'm really struck every time I watch Lake Mungo

about the emphasis on people being unable to speak.

What did you say?

Time and time again, Frederick talks about it.

He says, I couldn't talk to him.

All the way through the film, there's an early moment in the film

where Russell is talking about the porch light.

And it's an extraordinary performance.

You can see his lips moving, but the words aren't coming out.

He's trying to say something and he's having trouble articulating it.

I guess it's quite an Australian sort of stoicism

or understatedness to those characters.

Like, they're not hugely sort of demonstrative

with their emotions and all of that,

but it's all there simmering and, you know, under the surface.

I think he captures that really well.

But probably one of the strongest things was my father died

when I was 13.

So for me it was like a reversal of that.

You know, Talia, you know, her character dies,

my daughter dies at the age of 15, 16.

So it's sort of like a kind of weird flip on that. Because

when my dad died, I was 13, but honestly it took me until I was 17 that I actually, I

remember waking up and thinking, oh my God, my dad's dead. It took me four years to process

the grief.

Sounds right.

Three, thirty-four, take one. Mark it.

Just privately there was...

I had a drowning in my family

and I was able to plumb some of those experiences

of my own reaction to it and other members of the family.

So, yeah, it struck a chord.

How is that painful for you?

It is, but it's also cathartic at the same time because, you know, you don't always go

through those things at that time.

And surprisingly, certain things came up at particular times.

And I'm like, where did that come from?

And I'm like, I know exactly where it came from.

Sadness turned to fear.

I just stood there paralysed with fear

and I realised there was nothing that they could do for me anymore.

I've never felt so utterly alone.

Everything felt wrong.

My body, the way things looked.

Then I realised that there was something wrong with me.

Say for example when I was reading the diary

and I had an emotional reaction to that,

the art department had set that up beautifully for me

and I had no idea.

So me being in the moment, flipping over

and reading some of those moments from her journal

just affected me so closely

and so in the moment.

I had no idea where I was in that moment.

Then lost my dad in 2007,

a couple of siblings not long after that,

and then finally my mum.

So it was kind of a decade, you know,

of huge life events and things like that.

Lake Mungo was kind of at the start of that, I suppose,

not the cause.

Everyone grieves in their own way,

and it wasn't really my place to be telling

him how to feel. Yeah, I guess on reflection, that sense of grief, you know, I say in the

film, everyone grieves in a different way. So it's a little bit prophetic that, you know,

I then went through a decade of deep grief. Grief speaks to everyone.

My dad had passed away, but that was 10 years before that.

But at the same time, you know, grief is grief and it never goes away.

Everybody handles grief in a different kind of way, I guess.

It's not, I mean, use this if you want to use it or not,

but my father passed away last week.

And so I've been kind of dealing with, you know,

grief this past week or so and with the family and things. And we have quite a small family as well.

And it's, if anything, it's kind of brought us closer together

rather than put any wedges between us.

But, um, I can see how it could completely work the other way around.

I feel this, uh, this mess and so strange is someone dying.

Every actor then develops their own system, their own technique of how to get into a character.

That's what's interesting, that you allow yourself to go places.

Fiction draws on truth and reality and authenticity.

From equipment down to techniques, down to lighting.

I've got a background in some neuroscience and psychology too.

So there is...

It is kind of beyond self because the self is your consciousness.

And I think what you do when you're acting

and in lots of creative pursuits but in acting and you're accessing unconscious impulses

and I think when you're creating fiction you're drawing on all of those you're drawing on

your observations and strange things the world is is strange, existed strange. Yeah. People are

weird.

I rocked on up to the Ballarat Motoring. I mean I don't believe in ghosts and I was

a little bit skeptical but then I was, as I was walking up the steps I thought what am

here. You've got to be very open to

life is messy and things will just pop into your head or pop out of you and you think where on

earth did that come from? And that wasn't considered. And did June strike you as distressed?

Was she upset when she came to see you? Did you

get any idea of her state of mind?

I really had no idea of her state of mind. I didn't record anything specific.

Okay. And cut. Great.

That was out of the blue. What was that?

An interesting metaphysical kind of idea in itself. Where does this information come

from? What are you drawing on? Are you drawing on your life experience or are you drawing on something

that's actually kind of much older than that in a sense of kind of collective unconscious?

Actors are trained to use their imagination and to drop into a different reality and convince themselves that that's truth.

It's like the hypnosis, just to close one's eyes and, you know, visualize something.

Yeah, you can open your eyes at any point, Tony. There's nothing to worry about.

Now, I want you to open down the door.

I know I want you to be going to...

I'm not done with the teeth.

It's absolutely fine.

You're just...

It's just...

You're just...

It's a visualisation.

You're not able to worry about it.

You're here now in the mud.

I'm scared.

Of course.

Just take your time.

I want you ready to start a minute up.

There's nothing to do.

Oh my God, see ya. You know, visualize something, the walking through the house, I think, just it allowed the space for whatever was going to come to come without premeditating that.

We carry with us on a cellular level everything that's gone,

the generations that have been before us,

it's all there in our body on a cellular level.

That history, it's sort of like a database.

When you put yourself in, visualise something and go into those places,

I think that you can connect to some kind of raw, almost

dream space and dream can seem as real as reality when you let yourself go there.

What did you see?

No, she wasn't there.

He seemed like a nice guy, you know, like, he was nice.

He was fake and he was never like, you know, nasty or anything know. I'll ask you anything.

So I'll ask you the questions.

If you just get a direct answer to me.

Okay.

Do you think that Alice was secretive when she was alive and when you were friends with her?

Yeah, very severe. She had a way of keeping things to herself.

I don't know why.

Most of the time she would have opened up to us about certain things,

but she was just so secretive and kept a lot of things to herself.

Do you miss her?

Did she run well with her mum? Was that your impression?

Or did you feel that there was problems there?

Um, well um... Did she get along well with her mum? Was that your impression? Or did you feel that there was problems there?

Um...

Well, um...

Alice's mum was really nice and I felt that they got on well, so...

I just feel really bad for her mum because I don't know what to say to her.

I don't believe in coincidences.

I believe in fate.

Everything happens for a reason.

And, you know, recently leading up to when Rosie had mentioned to me

about the film and reading the script, I had, you know,

lost someone, you know, at the time.

So reading the script, it had, you know, lost someone, you know, at the time. So reading,

reading the script, it was almost quite therapeutic to me. So channeling, you know,

those sorts of emotions, you know, when I went, you know, into the audition just came

like that straight away.

Do you miss it?

That question. that question that was that was like that was like the icing on the cake just like to hear him you

know ask me that question it was just I for I couldn't even answer I couldn't even bring into words to explain how I missed Alice

and for the person that I was thinking of at the same time.

And that's when the tears came and, you know,

I could only nod and say yes.

I couldn't verbalise it.

You can't put into words grief when you lose someone.

Joel was doing his role as a kind of interviewer a bit like you

very well because he actually kept pushing them pushing the actors you know he'd be off camera

you know beside me and he'd say,

so, and then what happened? He wasn't letting them off the hook. They had to

answer and go to places.

Are you scared of dying?

Yeah. Why wouldn't I be? Isn't everyone scared of dying? Yeah.

Why wouldn't I be? Yeah.

I was never scared of dying.

There is this level of this transcendence where like you don't see the acting.

In found footage, it's like finding your true self

and molding it with the character that is there

because you don't want anything to feel fake.

Start like that for a second.

Pepper's Ghost is like a 100- old, you know, theater trick.

That was the starting point was like, okay, how do we create something, whether it's in a mirror or, you know, is it going to be something that you only notice once we zoom in?

And in fact, I'm looking at it now, I'm pretty sure that is Joel actually walking around in the background.

These tests were about trying to create home movies that

had a disturbing sensibility to them and you know in the end like we kept on coming back to like

doing it in camera and keeping it simple like if you can convince people that they're watching a

documentary and then there's somebody there that shouldn't be there then that's terrifying but when

I looked at some of those early tests, which Joel sitting there um we spent ages on those tests we actually I I took that

little character I desaturated it I blurred it I reshaped it I put different characters there we

we did a lot with those initial photographic tests to to determine where does something fall apart and where does it go here and

that grainy world you know it's almost like a curtain that you go through into

this little little world more that just perception changes you go in you know I

have this great memory of John ripping tape out of a VHS cassette and scrunching

it up and jumping on it and stuff and

then winding it back into the cassette and then dubbing that so that we could

use that for you know to play with the footage in this way like there were just

so many really fun experimental things that we did outside the kind of production.. You're welcome toarat and welcome to Jayward and the building behind me.

Originally it was built as the Ararat County Jail, but its life as a jail was less than

30 years and then it was had a change of life and it became a ward for the criminally insane

and had a name changed to the name of J Ward

This is called a suicide blanket

basically because there are no strings attached to it.

We've got a 12-year-old boy, Wayne Patrick Clancy, came in here when he was 12.

His life had been moving from institution to institution, and at the age of 12 he attempted

to murder a 13-year-old boy, and he was uncontrollable. So you've got a young, 12-year-old kid

basically living next door to a murderer,

sex offenders, and all sorts of serious criminals. The What about this door? What does it go to?

You're welcome to our app. There's something unsettling about it. You have a place that's

very ancient like Australia is. You have this idea sometimes with certain places that there's There's just a lot of dark history in a place, and maybe ancient like Australia is you have this idea sometimes of certain places that

there's just a lot of dark history in a place and maybe it's the asylum that causes that vibe for

Ararat that you know has this kind of unfortunate long dark history there with you know incredible

suffering that I'm sure happened during the time that that place was operating and

it just seems to seep out into the into the environment. Oh well one of the time that that place was operating and it just seems to seep

out into the into the environment. Well one of the things that didn't get

included of course is it has an insane asylum and I didn't find out that until

I've been up I think the third time and I said you know this is a spooky film

why don't you know why don't we use? Anyway, Joel just kept it cool and said,

that's not what we're on about, this is not it,

that's another film.

A lot of my students always raise the question,

why is it called Lake Mungo?

It should be called Ararat.

I mean, you know, Ararat's a bit haunted.

The old jail and stuff like.

Ararat's a strange place.

I think in the end it was probably a brilliant decision by whoever made that decision because it is a bit weird.

Ararat's a small regional town, under 10,000 people,

I'm going to guess, were living there at that time

and it's two most famous things or three most famous things are a Jay Ward which was a prison

for the criminally insane that's no shutdown and ironically hosts ghost tours

like haunted tours to this day. The other thing is a brand new prison that is a

protective prison so it hosts sexual predators, child molesters,

stuff like that, the wasp of the wasp. They live there. And the other thing that's huge

in the town is an abattoir.

I usually stay at Matthew's house two or three times a week.

It kind of casts a pole over the whole town.

So it's a pretty strange place.

There's also a kind of strange spirituality or a spiritual feeling around the place and certainly in the outskirts

of that, in the Grampians which is a mountain range nearby and in some of the locations we

shot at on the outskirts of Tone had a kind of strange vibe to it, it's hard to explain.

I can't remember how many we used. We used a lot of sort of featured extras and actors from around

Ararat we used as many as we could.

And they loved that.

We used...we had a publican who was a few doors down

from where our production office,

which was in the old telecom building or something,

in the main street of Ararat.

And he ended up playing Georgie's husband.

I mean, one of the members of the community

ended up being my husband, so... I mean, not my the members of the community ended up being my husband.

I mean, not my real husband, for the record.

But the people of Ararat, I don't think we could have done it in Melbourne.

You know, they were very welcoming.

I remember we had the porch light on.

Still two, actually, just in case.

And why's that?

Just in case she comes home I guess. My name's Graham Mildrum, I'm the owner of the house that was filmed for Lake Munger.

I've been here for six years, I moved here for my work from Melbourne.

When I first moved here the house was in great need of renovations and it's all been renovated

and done up nicely.

Back during the war years,

this was used for an emergency hospital.

I was told by previous people who live in Ararat,

it was just an emergency storage hospital

during the war times.

And how old is the house?

1900 was built.

Have you ever had any paranormal experiences in the house?

No, but I had a clear void in here once

and she said that there was two people sitting next to me

in the couch, in the lounge room.

And she said they're harmless,

they won't do anything to you,

but they're both sitting right next to you now.

So I don't know whether that was true or false,

but yeah, there was supposed to be a man and a woman

sitting next to me, and a young girl.

A young girl?

Mm. Wow.

So I'm not too sure whether there was anyone there or not,

but I've had no, I've had a lot of creepy floorboards,

but it's just the house. I think.

Definitely wanted an older house so the house itself had history and interest.

It also had a great corridor.

It had a great feel to it, but it also had this

really great darkness and light in it. One of the main things about Alice that we wanted to do was

a lot about the artwork. We really wanted, again, that authenticity of the work being done by a

teenage girl. So we enlisted the help of our location manager's daughter, Michael Madigan,

his daughter. She did the anatomical drawing, a large anatomical drawing,

and a lot of other little drawings and artworks to dress into the room.

The other thing that I did notice was the little house too on the left-hand side.

we talked about having elements of home.

I mean, the room itself was really significant

because Alice wasn't really there to talk for herself,

that the room itself was sort of her present-day character.

No longer is the image the true true true true true true.

That the photograph in a way like the realm of dreams, like the realm of the undead is not a finished space.

The sense that we are disconnected from our reality.

This furious attempt to document everything,

to capture everything through media technology,

this idea of ownership, staking a claim on the truth.

Here's the evidence of what is true

and media technology will not lie to me about that.

What do we remember?

We remember filming it.

We don't remember what actually happened.

Happened.

Well, I think we carry our afterlife around with us

in our pockets. It was a pretty unusual shoot, I would say.

Because the script wasn't conventional, the shoot wasn't conventional.

So, you know, there's so many small moments and scenes

and, you know, things that happened in the script that had to be captured.

It was very challenging to pick all the bits out. because I would talk about, you know, things that happened in the script that had to be captured. It was very challenging to pick all the bits out because they would talk about, you know,

in the script they would be looking at a photo of, you know, them as young children and it's like,

well, okay, we have to create that photo. So we have to set that up. You know, there was home

videos, there was Super 8, there was photographs and Polaroids

and all of these things

everything had to be created

you know we had to create you know the

Christmas tree from Christmas'

past

Charlie can you look around at us?

Look at your dad

To schedule all of that without missing noise. can you look around at us? Look at your dad. Cool. Yep.

To schedule all of that without missing those things,

it was quite complex, but integral to creating that family and the family history and making them, you know,

like a family that would just go to the shelves

and pick out a photo album and, you know, there would be that history just go to the shelves and pick out a photo album

and, you know, there would be that history there.

It was quite an inexperienced crew and I think all that helped as well for some reason.

If you'd been more experienced, we might have looked at it and said, there's no way we can

do this.

It's not possible.

They got a very good person running the show.

Georgie was really very capable for someone who had no experience.

I mean, it was very low budget, so we were like bunking together.

Like, I had a room where I was sharing it with like one of the art department guys

and a runner, I think.

We're staying in this beautiful old Victorian house.

We would all walk up to the local pub at the end of shooting

and kind of like debrief from the day.

And I have this cattle property.

And one day, Nana Long told me a story

about how a bolt of lightning took a picture of a cow.

What? We were all kind of a cow. What?

We were all kind of a little bit nervous.

And I can tell as we were walking through,

I'm like, God, what am I, how am I walking through that?

That's ridiculous.

But we, it was a nice bonding time.

And Ray was in that scene, yeah.

David was supposed to get leeches on himself.

Too close, maybe. Right. Oh, shit. Oh yeah. David was supposed to get leeches on himself.

I just got the giggles because he you know had such a horrible reaction to it and it just made me laugh but that is also my sense of humor. I will kind of like just you know.

He was distressed. that is also my sense of humour. I will kind of like just, you know. Down his back too.

Okay.

He was distressed and I just found it very funny.

And I think that's kind of real, thank goodness.

You know, there's nothing worse than playing

the obvious card going,

you poor darling, you've got leeches.

No, it's funny.

Yeah.

Around the other side.

No. Not too costly to the skin, right? leeches. No, it's funny. Yeah. Around the other side.

Not too close to the skin, Ray.

Well, they're better off than on, I can tell you that.

Thanks, Ray.

Okay.

What are you doing?

We were looked after, don't get me wrong,

but it was rudimentary.

We understood it didn't have a huge budget.

Nobody... nobody gave a rat's ass about that.

That kind of made it feel like we were...

You know that sense when you go camping

and everyone's pitching in, they've all brought their little bits.

You do those things where you're like,

OK, we'll turn up, we'll have control of stuff,

like, everything will be fine, and then you get to places and there's a family having a picnic or there's kids swimming in the dam and you're like okay we'll turn up we'll have control of stuff like everything will be fine and then you get to places and there's a family having a picnic or there's kids swimming

in the dam and you're like no this doesn't work we can't have that so in that case you've got to go

and talk to people and hey hey we're just we're up here making a film would be okay if you got

out of there for a while or not be up that tree or i remember the the scene when they were the

farewell party scene and thinking

wow I kind of don't know whether I'm acting now or whether I'm just me at a party and

and that kind of being a bit strange as well like this is sort of like where life and life and art

were kind of the the lines between the two and I remember having a conversation with David.

We were chatting and I was like and he was saying oh we must catch up so you know down there because

I was moving to Melbourne the characters were but I was like are we talking as we enroll here.

It was a funny moment where I wasn't kind of sure what was real and what was improvisation

from the film.

Especially during the interview scenes and things like that, it kind of felt so real

because they were so realistic, the portrayal.

You felt that someone was actually talking about a thing that was happening.

It wasn't just a scene and a script.

All kind of felt real and you felt like it needed to be sort of kept quiet and

on the down low to make that, to help that work. Okay, stand by.

So quiet and still everyone, thank you.

All right. Turn over.

Three, thirty four, take one.

There was sort of like blurred lines between when the filming would stop and when we'd

kind of wrap for the day.

I'm trying to make a home movie.

Upside down eyes look so weird.

Oh my god, they look really weird mum.

Thank you darling.

You look really weird.

Thank you. You look really weird too.

Only because I can't see your face.

They look so weird. They're freaking me out.

I remember my character as well also had,

at several points, like a handy cam

that like Matthew was shooting his own personal footage

and there was the footage when he goes on the road trip.

But yeah, we would give him the camera,

show him how to use it.

And we had lots of different models.

I had this database I built based on the timeline and that was an important part of the veracity of the documentary, right, was to have all of those

different textures be a part of it. Because then it couldn't be made up, right, if you had all of

those different sources, if you'd been there for a year or more shooting with all of those seasons.

Joel cast my dog in the film.

But I do think the benefit of having the dog there is an example of Joel thinking about how to make sure

that people don't get too comfortable.

It stays fresh and that things would come up and change things and that real reactions are required.

I was right in and a dog, I mean you know like that, that's kindling for a Christmas

scene.

We push and we see this whole room and then we'll see this whole room again from a slightly

different angle and then push in. It would be odd.

I was thinking more that you would see just the door frame itself and then push

in through that. Ah okay. It'd be hard to get there though.

Yeah well you do see it obviously in that one. It'd be hard to get there. I think it's

better to start clean, new environment. I actually really loved seeing there's some

great scenes where we had some there were some local

undertakers as well I think they were brothers. Laurie can I just get you go that way a little bit

yep and just go a little bit further back towards the coffin yep and that way there we go yep you're

right there John. They were very welcoming and and were terrific and were like so helpful uh for for what we were trying to do and

i think they were a bit amused by us and weren't really exactly sure what to make of us but you

know they were they were very like also australian you know i just remember country good australian

country country folk you know um that just happened to be in the business of burying people

that really added again I keep saying authenticity,

but it did because they were real people

and they were genuine and you can tell that.

You can't act that.

Funeral director, for example,

as soon as the cameras are turned on, he's ready to go,

he would suddenly act quite differently.

So you have to put them at ease.

You have to...

And sometimes it's as easy as chatting with them,

make them feel comfortable. So by the time the camera rolls they'd recognize me and they'd know

joel they'd admit john and so we tried to do that a bit with them as well the first lake the lake

that she drowns in that's that's you know i think with it just so dry and desolate with the dead

wood around it like skeletoid trees and stuff like that

it's a grim place for somebody to die

and uh if the search and rescue divers found anything then they'd let us know immediately

we had someone that was on off duty i think they were they're part of the the search and rescue

police search and rescue so we had them when they were off duty the search and rescue police search and rescue.

So we had them when they were off duty come up and bring some friends.

Essentially, we said, we're going to stage like that someone's gone missing, and then you're going to find the body.

And so here's the site, here's the information that the family are going to tell you about where they think the person might be.

and you just go and do what you would normally do to look for a body.

Action.

You know, and then we'd film them do it.

Alice's body's retrieved.

It was creepy.

It was, it was, it kind of felt very real.

I remember the night that we filmed on the lake and we were pulling the body out.

And that was was it was actually

really confronting like up until then it had been you know oh here's this thing just sitting on a

table that I'm working on and you know Talia had been around and seen it and we would joke about

things um but actually seeing it and we had you know like the SES people there and actually seeing

it in situ

you the SES people there and actually seeing it in situ.

It did feel real to a certain extent.

That's it. We've cut. Thanks, guys.

Have we cut? Yeah, it looks bloody fantastic cut and then we also invited news media so we had the local i think they'll win tv whoever they were some journalists we said

hey there's this event that we've created it's as if somebody's drowned or is missing you know

they're looking for a body they're probably going to find, just come down and do what you would normally do.

And then we filmed them doing that

and we also got them to roll,

they even did their little stand-up interviews.

After the funeral of Ararat teenager Alice Palmer,

her grieving parents formally requested

her body be exhumed from the General Cemetery.

They just couldn't be sure that the body they identified was indeed Alice.

That's why it looks so authentic,

because it is the actual journalist that was local to that area

that would have reported if that had really happened.

It was the search and rescue divers that would be in the water

searching for this body that were actually doing it.

I love that section.

I actually thought, there's a lot in the film I thought

that Joel must

have got permission to use real footage and I was expecting suddenly the father to be there in that

footage and come in and us seeing for the first time the father seeing the body. I mean lesser

filmmakers would have done that but Joel stuck to his rules, which was, no, no, no,

what's important here is that this footage is completely authentic

and real and follows what that procedure would have been

and is not diluted or undermined by suddenly the drama

of the father seeing the body for the first time.

You know, that image of even when the body is uncovered

that no longer looks like a recognisable...

You know, the person that was so alive, like, yeah,

like what water does to the body.

Water even being an element that often represents the unconscious, like what's below the surface, what's in the unconscious, what comes out of the unconscious. Is a ghost

something that comes out of the unconscious, like a need to hold on to life? Or does it

come from the other side?

What's the other side?

What's the veil?

In this case, it was a little bit more like try and make it as realistic as possible.

I think I did the cast by myself.

Like I did the actual life cast and body cast of the actress myself

in someone's shed, I believe.

I can't remember, not mine.

I remember Talia hadn't loved the experience of getting the mask,

the body

mold made actually I think it was she's a little claustrophobic I don't think it's a pleasant

experience to get those things done. It was up to me to do the breaking down and the coloring and

lay some hair in for eyebrows and eyelashes and then fit the wig and make it all look suitably

waterlogged and manky.

I had to sort of keep her, yeah, recognisable to the audience. And obviously for her dad,

you know, straight away to recognise that it was her as well.

I think I was always like a little embarrassed or something because I'm the dead girl in Lake

Mungo. So it always felt like a little bit, I'm not, I love the film, I'm so proud to have been a part of it but you know when someone

brings it up I'm like oh yeah I'm the dead girl in the film.

So I don't know why I played it down because I'm so, I am so proud to have been a part of it.

It's such a loved film as well. But yeah, I always felt like a bit embarrassed about that. I'm not sure why.

Yeah.

I think she was only late teens maybe. So it's pretty, pretty confronting stuff to be thinking about and dealing with, you know, at that age, yeah.

Yeah, one thing's on.

It's on her, isn't it?

Yeah, it's not coming on.

I remember that, you know, we did have a stand-in for Talia

for some of the other things that we did,

but sometimes we did just pop it on whoever could have it on um just you know when it

was a blur in the script you know just like a you know quick little shot um and I remember that we

were trying we were going to put it on in but his head was a little bit too big for the week

and so then I sort of I I just, you know, said,

oh look, do you want me to put it on?

And then I put it on and I was like, oh, okay, right.

Oh, it's not very comfortable to wear a shirt.

Yeah, let's get my throat purposes.

You look nice.

So, but I think I'm on the cutting room floor.

I don't think that actually made it into the movie,

which I don't know if that says anything about my imitating a ghost skills or not.

A lot of the time you sort of say, if you don't notice the makeup, then it's good makeup, you know.

But it's so it's sort of an unsung sort of thing a lot of the time.

so to know that something that I sort of designed and and

created um had such an impact you know that's a little bit that's a bit of a drill that's great

and yeah sorry about the nightmares people

but did you sort of feel yourself almost becoming a part of the Palmer family?

I did, but did not, I would say, by sort of through the shoot, because a lot of my stuff was separate to them.

I did the home videos and the photos and everything, but a lot of my stuff was on to them. I did the home, I did the, you know, the home videos and the photos and everything,

but a lot of my stuff was on my own, I think.

So I did feel a little separate

from the rest of the rest of the family.

I think it was probably helpful to the performances.

I think she did feel a bit removed, a bit detached.

I'm sure that was very intentional for Joel,

particularly between Talia and Rosie's relationship,

that kind of disconnected mother-daughter relationship.

I think it was very important

that she was often filmed separately or away from us.

So I think, yeah, Talia struggled.

I think she wanted to, I mean, I had so much fun with David and Rosie just mucking around

when we were filming Chinese restaurant, you know, birthday dinner, whatever it was.

We were having a hoot.

We were having such a great time.

Talia herself is kind of a very self-contained person. and I've known her for a very, very long time. Talia herself is kind of a very self-contained person and I've known her for a

very very long time. Being outside of it would have made her feel a little bit

marginalized. She was the one with all the you know the very big deep secrets.

Lake Munger has its own story. It's very, very powerful.

There's definitely something in there, something that I can't explain, but something that the original inhabitants of the land know full well.

Like I stepped back in time.

It felt very, very historic because it was so rural and it was so barren.

It almost felt like it was another planet, actually.

We can only film at Lake Mungo with the participation and invitation of the Indigenous people that look after that site, that is a very important site. It's one of the places where there's been the

oldest recording of human habitation almost continuously and it's tens of thousands of years.

I feel like Lake Mungo, there's a real energy there. It's a really charged kind of place. It

was literally a lake at one point that

provided fish and food and livelihood to people 40,000 years ago or longer.

Yeah, you definitely get that sense when you're there. It's a place that is kind of

generative

because it provides us with new things and new information,

but then it also seems to suck things away

because it's a dry lake bed.

It represents all the things that are good and hard

and new and old and more information

and then just depth of more than centuries,

millennia, all of that sort of stuff about Lake Mungo.

Lake Mungo being a sacred Aboriginal burial ground, of course, is incredibly significant

rights throughout, you know, like they didn't call it something else. They didn't call it

hanging rock, you know, so it's obviously there's reverberations of burying things,

knowing that you're going to pass.

Calling the film Lake Mungo,

I think that's why it's a really great name for it.

Because when it was told me, I thought,

oh, my God, we're going to go to Lake Mungo.

It's all about that.

But actually, the use of Lake Mungo

is a metaphor for, you know,

all these kind of concentric circles.

You've got the family, you've got the death that amplifies the family, you've got the town around the family,

you've got the environmental world, you know,

the landscape around the town that has this really strong presence,

around like a lake where Alice dies.

And then you go into this massive, massive world

where you zoom out and you get to this massive world.

And there, that's when you as an audience, I think,

try to make sense of all of those connections.

That environment provides the backdrop

to this really strange situation for this young girl

who, you know, goes there,

has an experience with a bunch of her schoolmates,

buries her phone, and that's the story.

So it kind of tops and tails the film in a way

and surrounds and supports it.

You know, I'm not going to talk for Joel,

but I think, you know, we can't really tell an Indigenous story. It's not for us to say,

other than acknowledge that as a site, that that had been there for a long time, and there must be

other stories to tell, you know, from the fact that it's been continuously inhabited for tens of thousands

of years. And so just generally, we had this idea of, you know, that Australia itself, and this is,

I think, you know, what you see in a lot of representation of Australia is that this is very

old country, it's this very ancient place, it has all this, all this history, some of it's dark.

And we wanted to kind of show that the landscape around was

was important. Ghosts inhabit a place, they really they stay in allocation and that's an important

part of the of the of the storytelling you know in the in the lore of ghosts. And we want to

analyze Lake Mungo and consider its connection to Australian cultural themes and horror texts.

One of the big questions I'm going to ask you, which I always ask all the time, is how Australian is this?

I loved the way that they shot the landscape, the full thing.

Yeah, it feels really suppressed and even in the family and the way that they react to it.

In a way, I think we can understand it through the story of the Palmer family.

from the very outset of the film there is such an emphasis on landscape.

You know, there's this overwhelming presence of the land.

This overwhelming presence of these beautiful, huge mountain ranges that kind of dominate

the town of Ararat.

So the land is always part of this world, but it's not talked about.

Everybody's caught up with their own immediate drama of people dying and grief and all of these things

kind of happening immediately in your life, but it's constantly in the shadow of the land.

I think we're very good at this feeling that the land is greater than us, you know, and that we're strangers on it and that we sort of don't belong in a way and that we don't understand it and that it's quite sort of foreign and at any time it can kind of come and

sort of lean on us and shadow us. All this landscape sort of having a pulse and you know

being quite a kind of force around these sort of more domestic kind of characters.

We so often look at the world from the perspective of being our movie, but it's not.

The world is the world's movie, and we're just players in it.

Because we tend to see land as property, and property as being fungible and interchangeable like any other commodity,

we tend to overlook aspects of our relationship, our intimate relationship to land and place, take that for granted.

Aspects of that that indigenous cultures, if I can generalize, tend to look at quite differently and see as irreplaceable.

There's certainly something there in terms of the unsettledness of the family's relationship to place.

I mean, they sell the house at the end, right?

That's the answer to their problems.

Sell and trade this land, this place for another, as if that's going to solve their problems.

You're looking good, Russell.

Oh, yeah, we're pretty good. Yeah, good. Work's going well. Yeah, very busy.

Looking forward to, you know, moving.

Because it's like the ending makes you feel like this is good. The family...

I've moved on because they really invaded privacy. You know, they didn't respect the sacred, you know,

and that is a reflection of white Australia's inability

to respect the sacred, yeah.

That in a nutshell there is, you know,

the whole dynamic of settler colonialism, right?

You know, trade the homeland for another

because things have gone wrong there or there are ghosts or there is a past that needs to be escaped from.

In the script it says, Ray has said that he's seen so much of Australia and its people,

he can't help thinking it's a kind of lost country, secular. Reyes said that he's seen so much of Australia and its people,

he can't help thinking it's a kind of lost country,

secular and unsure and full of suppressed rage and guilt.

He says Australia is a place where two broken cultures have met

and refuse to face each other.

He says it's a good place for migrants because here no one feels at home.

That's a fabulous quote.

As a society, we're living in a country

that doesn't belong to us,

and some of us are angry about that.

Some of us are wanting to understand

and become closer to it.

There's a very strong tension for most people about living here

and perhaps that's being reflected in Joel's attitude, perhaps not.

Indigenous culture is the bedrock of Australia

and so whatever we do is all, you know, a response to that

and the things we don't pay attention to about Indigenous culture, the spirituality and all

that and perhaps, you know, even if we don't it doesn't mean it's not still there.

Every country has to deal with its history.

And if you think about the people that have come here and the early settlers and what they

brought with them, their trauma, they brought all of that, their generations of their experiences.

There's a lot of trauma that was brought here

and then a lot of trauma that was thrust upon people.

I think what that underscores is his sense of displacement,

of never quite finding a place that you fit,

that is so intrinsic to Alice's story,

but also the broader kind of thematic story

about colonialism in Australia, you know, the immigrant experience,

all of these ideas that we have the land

and we have this sort of colonial history

and these stories have never quite come together.

And there is this sense of displacement or dislodgement.

There is a lack of harmony.

You know, any signs of Aboriginal presence, any expressions are completely absent from the film.

It's what you could call also a structuring absence insofar as it's the conspicuous absence of

any reference takes on an effective force.

I've always felt, you know, this is actually long before Ali's death, I've always felt that

there was something dead at the heart of this country.

Seems so old, seems so tired of life.

It's got this whitefella lens.

Then it goes to blackfella country and it asks a series of questions.

And there's dissonance in that.

And I think that's what Russell is saying.

You know, he's actually saying there's stuff that needs to be contended with at the,

you know, at the heart of the country.

There's a couple of rooms over there too. Can you see that?

You know, at the worst point, it felt like we were going to keep finding out really disturbing

things about Alice forever. We'd gone from knowing pretty much nothing about our daughter and then finding

out that she had secrets. You know, where would it end? We'd gone from looking for things

and we'd found them. At a certain point you just have to say, stop, there's only so much

you can take.

I think the story that it's telling with this family is kind of a microcosm for a

bigger story about the stories we tell ourselves to deal with trauma and obviously there's a lot

of trauma connected to associated to the indigenous people of the land and yeah I even kind of think there's a connection with Rosie's character, June, who can't deal

with her daughter's death and kind of like doesn't want to look at it.

So I think all the characters in the film, whether it's they're going to psychics, they're

staging photos, they're agreeing to let a

documentary film crew into their house they're kind of doing anything they can to craft a narrative

to not have to look at the reality of what's happened and I when I watch it that's the sense

that I get that I sort of feel like there's a larger bow that's being drawn to Australia's overall narrative.

You know, like Alice and June at the end,

we have these very clear kind of singular histories

of experience in Australia,

but they're just not coming together in a harmonious way.

There's a connection between this smaller trauma within the family

and then this larger trauma that the nation experienced and is still grappling with.

June and Alice were very similar.

How so?

In that they, I've always felt that they were searching for more.

They weren't complete.

there was something that wasn were searching for more. They weren't complete.

There was something that wasn't fulfilled in them.

And I guess as I've got older I've been able to see that in my own life as well.

There's more disappointments that you experience and you just learn to cope

with them in life. And you know, so you just get through your life and I guess we teach

You just get through your life. I guess we teach the young that they can achieve anything, do anything they want to do.

But life is very much different to that.

You have to take what you don't.

My word, Judith.

Deep.

What can I say?

And only that I, by then, well, you know, I had three kids.

I would have had two grandkids then as well.

I don't know, my background, you know,

coming through the 40s and all of that

and what we were taught, I mean, so different, you know.

It was just honour thy mother and thy father

and, you know, get on with life and

do good to people and of course there's uh and you know setbacks but when you think of what past

generations have been through and even when you think of it today with what you know

every how everything has changed.

So what's going to happen when this lot go, right?

Unless you hand me down that stuff and you talk to your kids and you teach them, you know?

I've never been able to give myself over wholly to June.

What's she saying?

She's not saying anything.

I don't think she knows I'm there.

I don't think I realized the power of those two sequences until much later in the edit.

What Joel was trying to achieve in terms of the overlap between mother and daughter, in

terms of what they saw or what they heard and what they imagined.

in a phenomenal sense that they each knew about the other,

but a sense that that room still holds power later on.

We didn't know about it.

And I think had we known that that was the intention

of overlapping those scenes and, you know, plaiting them together.

It might have affected how we played it,

but Joel didn't tell us,

so we kept it kind of in the moment as our scene

and, you know, as her scene and my scene.

And then the magic of filmmaking and editing,

he created that.

And so I didn't know that was going to happen until I saw it.

Yeah.

It feels like Talia's character is the ghost left in the house

and her mother is packing everything up

and not seeing her anymore and just leaving.

For the mother, it felt like it's a generational thing.

You know, she didn't have that sort of mother,

so she didn't know how to mother to Alice in the way that perhaps she wanted to.

And I think she really wanted to be that kind of mother to her daughter,

but she just didn't know how.

She didn't have the tools.

She hadn't been shown the way. So I think it's a generational thing.

I had more spiritual beliefs than anybody else in the family. Strangely enough, not from

Italia going to the same psychic, another thing in that we were so similar but we didn't

share it.

We kept it separate.

What did you say?

Alice was sitting of the work. that a mother and a daughter have, and I have that with my daughter, and there is something about recognising aspects of yourself in that person,

and they might not necessarily be things that you see as good qualities.

It's my mood. It's our mood.

Yeah, go.

Brilliant.

What do you think?

We see that Alice has this incredibly mature sex life that's going on, very transgressive,

and she can't talk to her parents about it.

And one imagines that's probably because, A, she's 16 years old, but also it signifies

that she's changing into something that perhaps she's worried they won't recognise, that

they won't approve of.

Yes, very attractive.

What?

You are absolutely dripping all over the...

Oh.

Yeah. Oh. So I think the film suggests that really this is about a family who maybe are not able to come to terms with the ways in which

their daughter is changing and separating from them in some ways. And the tragedy is that,

you know, because they can't come to terms with that,

she separates with them in this incredibly final way,

which is through her death.

And clearly part of their grief was,

or is not only the loss of Alice,

but like they're grieving, like, did they really know her?

Like they didn't get the chance to know her.

They didn't get the chance to see what she would become as an adult

and maybe work through some of the things that she went through.

None of us can truly know each other.

Even those of us who we should be the closest to,

they continue to elude us.

And in death, they elude us in a profound way

because there's no chance to come back and reestablish that connection.

There's no chance to try to dig through it.

Within the film, it's like nobody really knows anybody, really.

Generationally, I think you are.

There's only so much that you can know about your child.

And as a child, there's only so much you can know about your parent like

we have masks to fulfill the function of the relationship that we have in a family

be it a kid the child the, the mother, the grandparent.

I think that's what's also, you know, really unsettling

and, you know, disturbing for me to watch now, as I said,

because, you know, I'm a parent now and the connection, you know,

that I have, you know, with my own children are, you know, like this.

But who knows what it's going to be like, you know,

as they grow older when they're teenagers.

They're going to think that they know everything and, you know, they end up saying, you know,

like they hate me, you know, when they're adults, like, who knows what's going to happen. So

looking at it now is very different. I think the Palmer family really struggled to be truly

close to each other because they're Australian. I think it's a very, I mean

it's a universal thing, but it is such an Australian thing to laugh it off, brush it under the carpet,

dare I say punch through a drywall. You know, I think Australians are very good at burying our

emotions. Universally there are a lot of films

about missing young girls, like Picnic at Hang Rock,

Virgin Suicides, where it's like these lost girlhood.

Keeping the fact that she had secrets a secret,

like there could be more to that,

more secrets that aren't shown,

we don't know about, that the family hold,

I think it's yeah

interesting it's quite shocking that she felt the need to keep that a secret from me

most people have secrets and uh it's just you know people have different ways of um

keeping those secrets close.

I mean, I was in the closet.

You know, I was like a gay child actor.

So it's like that, you know, that's a pretty tangible secret.

Well, I mean, it wasn't much of a secret to anyone who knew me.

But, yeah, I think teenagers and just sexuality in general even,

you know, which is a big part of the film,

it's shameful because, you know,

we're taught to feel shame about all these things

because society's only progressed so far.

It was complicated the end of the shoot because,

well, Joel's dad was also very sick so we knew that we were going home to that um to yeah um some difficult family stuff so it was sort of colored by that

really but um I But I loved the shoot and I was

sad when it ended.

For me being in the situation where I was, you know, among the youngest people on the

crew and the producer, and the producer who was on set all the time because David Rapsy didn't come and live down in Ararat.

So I was kind of in that position where I was a bit on my own.

You know, we had a fantastic production team.

They were incredible.

We had a great time together.

I loved everybody that was in the crew.

But for me, I was in this position where I just could not really

let go of anything at any point.

You know, that was pretty amazing.

So it was really intense.

Last scene that we filmed, or the last bit of footage we filmed, was actually at the morgue.

And going in there for the first time, I've been into a few morgues now, but going in there with our cameras and filming the gurneys and the equipment

and you realise that no matter what station you're at in life,

no matter how wealthy you are, everyone goes through that.

That process of that table, that was pretty sobering for me.

There's something how the subconscious plays over the emptiness of the spaces.

And when you sort of, it's almost like

when you remember those shots again,

like even now, as I remember them all,

I'm sure she's in it.

There's that wonderful thing where sort of different,

the time periods sort of overlap in the memory of that shot

or the feeling of that shot when you watch it.

And there's a real skill to kind of,

how do you bring those sort of dead spaces alive?

And when did the pictures cut?

Good question. Sorry.

That's fine. Cut.

Ooh.

Cutting. Oh, cut in.

The footage, Matthew's hallway footage. And it wasn't until later that I mentioned that, that he became very curious.

That's up.

That's because you're not...

7, 9.

Mark it.

Thank you.

And...

And action.

Yep, that's nice, Steve.

Just on the spot there.

Yep. Yeah, that's nice, Steve. Just on the spot there. Yeah.

We photograph everything instead of, like,

absorbing it and remembering it personally.

We can't yet capture everything.

We're still trying... We're trying to.

You know, Alice is like a kind of black hole through which we really can't go past the event horizon, you know,

but the event horizon is shimmering

and it's distorting the space-time around it.

And you're also trying to construct that moment in a way that you want it to be presented.

But there's that vanishing point across which there's just no more that can be known about her.

no more that can be known about her.

The edit process was extremely long. I think it took 23 cuts of the film to finally get it down.

And there was an enormous amount of time looking at the imagery.

For some reason, they kind of didn't get it on the director's cut.

And so it meant you know

there was this really quite painful process of editing editing editing I was

an editor when I first started out and so I was difficult and I'm probably known

as you know the real person who ruined the project to some degree but it was

important that it got done in a

refined way. It's not a happy story, that one, except that it turned out well.

I just remember that it was probably a struggle where you see how much material you have,

sort of like pushing an elephant through a needle.

Alice's room.

This is the corner where you put stuff where you don't quite know where to put stuff.

It accumulated a lot.

there was always that tension between those two different desires,

the creative and the market.

For me, it was a very pleasant experience.

You know, I liked Joel as soon as I met him.

I mean, he's clearly a very intelligent man,

but he was also, like, a lot of fun.

He wasn't rigid in any way you

know when we were working on the film you know he could see when things weren't working or could

work better another way you know and we'd you know respond to that. Ten days after Ellie's funeral

so that makes it the 15th of January the house was completely overrun by mice and rats

vermin everywhere.

Well, there were obviously elements in the film like the rats and so on

that, you know, were in earlier cuts of the film.

But, you know, they weren't working as well as, you know,

we thought they could or they just maybe got in the way

of the story a little bit.

um so you know in that sense he he wasn't sort of you know he we thought they could or they just maybe got in the way of the story a little bit.

So, you know, in that sense, he wasn't sort of, you know,

he wasn't afraid to, you know, to ditch stuff that he, you know,

that was in the original script.

I'd love to be able to also have... I'd love a director's cut.

where it's like

long or

reimagined in with all of the

all of its parts Well, what I remember was the breeze waking me up from the open window.

And the figure was standing by the chest of drawers.

And it went into the sitting room, so I followed.

And there she was, Jen Palmer, standing looking at my things.

She looked lost, like a little child.

We are, as humans, we're very good at spotting humans.

One of the things that we are very best at

and one of the things as a visual effects artist

that I struggle with or enjoy every day is reality.

You know, we are perfectly attuned to know what physics to know what a human

silhouette looks like so because the human mind is is great at spotting faces and recognition

for us the fun and the joy of this was to really try to work with the audience's perceptions by

changing that silhouette by creating a figure on screen that was neither Matt nor Alice or

was a version of Alice that was not a lot like the actual character,

which was really fun as well.

You know, shots, for example, where Matt is walking across the hall,

we actually blended together, you know, the character of Alice and Matt

together into the same plate.

So we took some of Matthew's hair and silhouette.

We put that onto Alice's body movement performance

in order to blend those together.

Photos like the Bob Smeet photo, we took a photo that was taken,

but then we subtly manipulated the edges of the silhouette

to try to find a midpoint between Alice and Matt.

So quite a lot of those story points where we see Matt trying to be Alice,

we've actually blended some of Alice into that.

And it was really important to Joel that we couldn't always determine exactly what we were seeing on screen.

All of these clips here, we've worked with her face in these tests.

You can see how her screen right eye is larger than her screen left eye

and her eyebrows have been manipulated and that she's got like a scowl on her face.

Now, that's absolutely not what the actor looked like on the day.

In the visual effects tests really you've got,

you'll see that we did some takes where I'd asked

for there to be some movements, some subtle movements in Alice.

Technically, what I did was then i i used

optical flow analysis to to basically determine what her movements were and then exaggerate them

it was then me trying to sit in this movement so that it felt like she was made up almost of the

brain in the media joel was was really punishing on this stuff.

Like he had a great eye.

He has a great eye.

John has a great eye.

We did lots of versions to find this type of language.

There was a lot of beautiful 16mm time-lapse footage,

which enhances that mood of time passing.

And again, that time dilation effect that you get from that was what kind of fed back into maybe we could use

that type of idea with Alice.

If you think about the visual poetics of time lapse,

it brings us into a temporality

that is not that of human duration

in what might seem like a long time for us is accelerated or the accelerated

is truncated. So it kind of opens up this Pandora's box with regards to the plasticity of time

that gets exploited in much more profound ways throughout the rest of the film. Playing with

time also evokes other times,

deeper times, ancestral times

that transcend the present.

What we did, which is less apparent

unless you re-watch the film with a fine-tooth card

and a microscope, is that there's two versions

of this photo in the film.

One is this version, which is the less distinct figure and the one that we show at the end has that

figure slightly lifted to make it easier to see so that you you know we can more clearly see it it's

still there in the initial time we see it it's not a cheat but it it does we do enhance that second

time you see it to pull out make that figure easier to

see just to help the audience so the respect that John Grawley had for image making and for the

integrity of the image informed every part of this film and I think the reason why it feels plausible

is because of the love and care and attention that was put into ensuring that the way these

were captured were

very true to the way that they were captured in reality.

So I really respect that.

I think it makes the film beautiful because of the respect for the characteristics of

image-making.

This is already recording.

Say hello.

Hello. Hello. It had been a long night of shooting and we were all tired and we were a little bit delirious. So Joel said, okay, we're going to start shooting now.

Like get the lights up on the phone and just go nuts, go crazy,

go scream as loud as you want because no one's going to hear you out here.

And it's just like that freedom, like that rush that you just felt,

the hysteria and the rush that you get from it.

But that emotional space of a teenager's life where there's that both,

like you can't wait to be an adult, to be on your to make your own decisions but that's all tied in with this over almost overwhelming fear of the

future like this this excitement and fear of the future and i mean that's in the image that she sees

she's seeing the fear of her future and then there's an element of kind of psychic madness

that goes on at Lake Mungo.

These girls are roaming around and they are like crazy, crazy girls.

And they're screaming and carrying on and there's lightning and it's dark and so on.

And this sort of sense of the kind of mystical background to it.

I hadn't seen anything that effectively uses most of his running

time to build up to one big scare, right? It's got that one huge scare that works no matter where you

are, no matter what audience you're with. There was a massive jump when the scene came. I remember

that very clearly because someone screamed, you know, along with the scream on the the scream and it was just suddenly the room just popped and it was i was i thought

this this works this is really great i'll never forget the first time i saw the shot in lake mungo

and i think everyone who knows the film knows exactly what shot it is when when you say that

the grainy video and you see this figure in the distance

getting closer and closer and closer,

but you still can't make it out

until just as you're about to make it out,

there's a little effect that kind of pushes you toward it.

And it's that kind of like, oh, shit.

Like, you know, just as I see what it is

and understand what it is,

camera kind of pushes into it suddenly.

And it's just, and it feels like it's lunging at you.

And I've seen so many people, like, jump out of their seats.

It's a terrifying moment.

I remember I was sitting on my couch as the shot began.

And by the time there's that

brilliant cutaway to Alice's face, I was up on my feet. I don't remember getting up, but I jumped

off the couch and was suddenly pacing back and forth in the room, looking at the TV with my arms

I was that kind of sent by what I

saw. That broke my brain. I've honestly never been so frightened. I kind of had to look at my own

phone just to give myself a little bit of ground or a little bit of light in the room because I

just found it just so overwhelmingly terrifying. The revelation of what that image meant

instantly reframed everything I'd seen

leading up to that point. It echoed back in time through the film all the way to the beginning

and gave me the most tragic sense of realization. It changed the way I thought about horror and it's utterly affected my own storytelling.

I've been reaching for that feeling ever since.

Yeah, actually felt kind of good to get jump scared.

Like, haven't had like a really strong reaction

to a horror film in a while.

It wasn't really written as a jump scare moment.

It turned into that really in the cut, I't really written as a jump scare moment it's it

turned into that really in in the cut I think um with sound and everything and it's great it's

obviously very effective. I think we shouldn't underestimate in all of this the effect of um

of Craig Carter's fantastic um you know soundscape um that if you look at it quite clearly just before

the the image of the ghost sort of jumps towards us,

there's a wonderful sort of sound effect

that scares the living bejesus out of you.

And, you know, sadly, it's sad that Craig's no longer with us.

I mean, he was a wonderful sound editor and designer

and did a great job on the film.

He was so precise and just put everything into it

and would come to the mixes and pull stuff up.

A phrase from a piece of music, either my music or Fernando's,

or a piece of the sound design recorded on the day,

and either stretching it, putting it in key with something else,

maybe the wind or the sound of the wind in the telephone wires

that he has added or recorded on the day,

and then just subtle things, you know, letting them link up,

letting them bleed a bit at the end.

I think it's important to note that we didn't actually do any visual effects

on the footage you see on the Nokia phone in Lake Mungo.

That's all straight out of camera.

Yeah, I can see it now.

Quite nice, you know, oily and dark.

But you couldn't see it further away?

At this point in time, nobody's shooting on a mobile phone

mobile phones are barely taking photos let alone shooting any video and we're like well you know

let's shoot with the mobile phone or that's what was going to happen in story terms we had a lot

when we're starting to make the film,

there's a lot of post people that were saying,

you know, you can't do it.

It's quality is terrible.

We just kept on liking the mobile phone stuff better.

Set, here we go and action.

And rain.

And I think we were trying to just stick to it. and rain.

And I think we were trying to just stick to those rules where we were like, you know,

just doing it in camera as much as possible.

So everything is a little bit already in decay.

It's already kind of, you think you've got something,

you've got like an element of it.

The medium is struggling.

Like when it starts to become dark, you can feel the an element of it the medium is struggling like when when it starts to

become dark you can feel the medium of it that the the technology of it really struggling with the

light so you you end up getting these kind of imperfections and these glitches that that add to

this perception of you know what, what am I seeing?

And actually, is that imperfection something?

Your eyes are sort of playing tricks on you

because you can feel the camera's really struggling

to get light into it.

And we had a young woman who was going to be Talia's body double.

I got a call from Paul Steiner II saying,

Rita, get out here.

She's not feeling well.

Like the mask is not allowing her to breathe properly.

So we need to give her a break and we've got to shoot this now.

So I drove out there and it was a bad storm that day.

Like I think we had to like walk over a tree on the road and I ran out there

and I remember putting on the jeans I'm like skinny but she was like very skinny I could couldn't do

them up so they were like mostly done up and the mask and I walked towards camera which was John Brawley holding a phone um and so fun fact

I'm pretty sure in the final film that I'm the very scary ghost at the end

and if you look really closely their pants aren't done up I you what, it was a small crew but everyone pitched in.

You know, that was the thing.

So if something like that happened, yeah, for sure, Rita would,

you know, she'd be in there.

Everyone would, you know, would help out.

I hope that Alice did know how much I loved her.

I guess I held something back a little as she grew older.

That would be the saddest thing to think she might not know.

I was pushing for the idea of having these, not voices as in physical voices, but the voice of the music

being like a haunting, something that would come in into a scene and you don't really

know when it's come into the scene and when it leaves.

But the work, I think a lot of the work went into keeping things from revealing their face

to a scene.

It needed to be, I wanted it to be like a bit of a,

just a dull kind of ache in a way.

But also I liked the idea that it was a dead person

trying to talk in these scenes in a way.

Which I guess is Alice.

When it comes in and then sort of leaves a lot

of those scenes, there isn't any real resolve.

But I think right at the end when it does, it kind of opens up.

It's just going to find a sort of resolve,

but then it goes back in again on itself.

And, you know, you never... It's dead.

It was a sort of bed, a kind of... Quite a deep sort of dronal kind of bed in the film.

You sort of felt as though it was Lake Mungo

sort of coming from under the earth.

The strategy was to get a good release of it

with one of the major distributors here in Melbourne or Sydney.

The options were not great.

The final option that we decided that we would try

is to try and put it into cinemas ourselves. And we got one of the distributors to give us their

cinemas to do that, paid for and so on. But then we were responsible for the publicity and we didn't

have any money. If you haven't got $500,000, you probably can't sell anything.

You know, it went out in a small number of cinemas in Australia,

you know, the minimum that it could.

It didn't play very long in any of the cinemas.

It didn't grab an audience in a big way very quickly.

It did get sold into multiple territories around the world,

so it was always well-received, but just not broadly received.

It didn't get the eyeballs.

It's just a flop in terms of money.

I think when we really started to realise people were watching it

is when we started being able to track it in illicit downloads

or whatever was going on at the time.

In a way, it felt like that was the natural way for Lake Mungo to go.

Yeah, I mean, the original release of the film, it was disappointing

because essentially we maybe made a mistake, but we released it ourselves because there was no one

who wanted to release it, you know, and so it didn't really travel very well in Australia,

you know, it only played a couple of places. I remember thinking, this film's amazing and we're

and it's just going to

and it didn't seem to do that.

Definitely

some disappointment in

the kind of reception

or the theatrical screenings

and the fact that people didn't just love it

and jump on board and didn't go

gangbusters.

I got a hint from Georgie a few times

that it was really

disappointing. She'd worked so hard. She'd gone against the system. She'd made a bloody great film

but nothing came of it. I'm pretty sure the recruitment was total bollocks at the time

and that's hard. That's really hard to get off the map from. I'm not disappointed now in how it went then.

I would approach it so differently.

There are so many things that I would have done differently

and that's why I think it would be interesting

to do another film again,

but it would be pretty hard to find a story like Lake Mungo

and it would take something pretty special for me to jump on and do it.

I remember seeing it in a screening in a film festival in America and there was like four people

in the audience. Like I brought some friends along. I was like oh I'm in this movie like come and see

this movie and it was just no one knew about it at the time but actually it's sort of what Joel

intended to some degree.

I mean, obviously people want, you know, an audience to find their film

but at the time he wanted people to kind of discover it

on late night television or just be flicking channels

and be like, what is this?

Like, is this real?

And he sort of manifested that.

That's sort of what happened.

We had an international sales agent that picked up the film

and it went into After Dark. I guess a film festival that did horror films and it became a kind of midnight

screening film and you know it did well there but also again like I said there's also a little bit

of a disconnect with some you know when you market this film as a horror film I really think it's

more of a supernatural um eerie you know suspenseful kind of film it's not really a supernatural, eerie, you know,

suspenseful kind of film.

It's not really a slashing, horror, jump scare kind of film.

I remember the poster, I don't know if it was the American poster,

but it just was a different film.

Is it with the woman sort of flailing?

The woman sort of flailing and it was like blue splatter on it.

Yeah.

Like it didn't even make, that didn't even make any sense.

And that kind of creates some expectations that don't, you know, always get met.

Was it the first time you saw it?

It was the first time I saw it.

I kind of was expecting a little bit more horror.

I liked it, but I did think it was kind of overrated since I'd heard so much about it.

But then re-watching it again, I think I developed more of an appreciation for it.

Like, I think my problem the first time was with the pacing.

I thought a lot of it was really slow and at times boring.

But now I think it gave more time for the movie to settle in.

And, like, in all those shots, like, I was looking for Alice in the background.

People thought it was real, despite telling them that it wasn't.

People just want to believe what they want to believe

and so they'll ignore the information that's put in front of them.

And when we talk about the production of the film

and we talk about the actors and we say it's not real,

you know, people would say, is it real?

And you would say no.

And the next question would be like, were you scared of the ghosts?

And you're like, no, because they weren't real.

I had a friend who rang me up and said, after they'd seen it,

and said, I'm really, really sorry.

I mean, I just didn't know.

So they thought it was real.

It was a documentary.

You know, we hadn't been in touch for a number of years.

They said, I'm really...

I said, what are you fucking talking about?

I said, what are you talking about?

I said, I'm really sorry about your daughter.

I said, it's a fucking movie.

We went to a screening in Sydney and it was great,

really good reception.

We went out for drinks afterwards and there was a guy there

and he came out and said oh shit sorry

like i thought that was a documentary which honestly i don't know how i mean i don't

necessarily believe it goes to like a tangible sense so i don't know how you could necessarily

finish like mongo and think it was real but yeah there was people in in the audience who um thought

it was a real doco at the time.

If they don't know anything about it coming in,

not many people will pick that it's not the doco.

And we're very, I'm very proud of that.

I mean, I think that was really what we set out to try and achieve.

So the fact that we were able to make that, you know, so believable and trick the audience into thinking that you know this was

legit we obviously done a shit hot job in doing that. I think I read a review of it and uh in

Variety or Holler Reporter at the time and it sounded really interesting and uh um I just

managed to get a DVD of it and uh I remember watching it and it really becoming one of the things that I

found scariest that I seen that year. It was like,

I was unsettled by it.

I told everyone I knew that how great the movie was and it was scary.

And I tried to see if there was a way to adapt it for like just to do a,

a narrative version of it or some new version,

just because it was such a great movie. So the David Leslie Johnson script is a straight narrative

adaptation. That was done, like, probably the same the year or year after the movie came out.

Wow, that was, I feel like it was Paramount Pictures now,

but you're just refreshing my memory.

Yes, I should actually pull up that script

because that was probably a very good script

because David has since went on to write

The Conjuring movies and, yeah, Orphan.

And I reached out to Joel,

and he put me in touch with the producers

that controlled the rights,

and we made a deal with Sony Pictures TV

to develop a script, and we got a deal with Sony Pictures TV to develop a script

and we got a script that was decent the writers were Jason Pagan and Andrew Deutschman but nothing

that it was able to get any network to pick it up at the time drawing it out into six to ten episodes

it was not the way it just didn't feel like you could sustain it for that

long there's been many actually there's been like half maybe six or seven attempts at doing it um

most of them are pretty um crazy uh not not i can't see how it works like how does it how do

you remake this story it doesn't really I mean the original

is so good um it's hard to see it working but um there have been some attempts um as well so you

know I I probably won't say who it is that have looked at it more recently but I did catch this

sort of you know this sort of slow burn like over the next sort of 20th it was 2008 so it's almost 20

years about how people would kind of rate it and you know I was in the Guardians top 10 last year

or something and some somebody you know rang me up and said oh my god that movie you made all those

years ago it's in the top 10 I looked at it and then I realised that it had been really appreciated.

New people are coming across it, obviously, all the time, yeah,

with the advent of them online, you know.

Otherwise it'd just get lost, wouldn't it?

I guess I really enjoy, I guess, the drama of it

and trying to uncover this mystery of Alice and what happened to her.

I think that's kind of what kept me engaged with

it and then the scariness was just kind of a bonus. I'm not surprised that it's

had this resurgence and has such a it's such a loved film throughout the world

now. It seems to have just been going along you know it comes around every year

there are you know every year there's some sort

of article about the 10 best thriller films you've never seen or the, you know, the greatest horror

or these things and Lake Mungo is always talked about very favourably and people are always trying

to encourage other people to see it and it's really nice to see that people fall in love with the film, but it's a very slow burn,

hoping for a very long time.

So, you know, it started out in a little town,

you know, in Ararat in Australia,

and now it's just catapulted, you know,

everywhere internationally.

So it's incredible.

Beyond Fest is the largest attended

genre film festival in the US.

It's in LA every year.

I was talking to Ari from Umbrella Entertainment.

He said they had the 4K restoration of Lake Manga.

My first instinct immediately was to say,

don't let anyone show it.

I want to have a premiere if possible.

Just want to do a big thing with it in the

United States because it's a film

that truly deserves to be rediscovered.

I said, we'll put it in the Egyptian

theater. And I knew Flanagan

was a big fan of Lake Munger

and I thought, well, let's take a swing, you know?

And I said, Mike, would you mind introducing

Lake Munger? I know you're a big fan

and he's absolutely delighted and he

did one of the best introductions I've seen.

Thank you guys so much for coming out to see Lake Mungo on the big screen.

And so I was thrilled and honored to do it.

I was just disappointed because I would have so much rather sat in the audience and listened to Joel Anderson talk about it.

Which is, as a fan of the film, is something I've been hungry for for decades now.

I'll be honest with you.

I came into the scare scene.

And people dropped their popcorn and dropped their drinks.

And the room jumped.

And I was like, this is great. I was in 2008 in a room and the room jumped and I was like this is great you know

I was in 2008 in a room and the room jumped it's 2024 and the room jumped again to see Lake Mungo

with an audience to feel that dread spread contagiously through a group of people to feel

the energy when that shot hits and it hits the crowd like a shock wave you know that

was an incredible thing on a friday night 420 seater this movie palace sold out with flanagan

introducing it and lake manga just magic i genuinely one of the things i'm really proud of

Thank you. I genuinely, one of the things I'm really proud of.

I think that Alice wanted us to know more about her.

She wanted us to know who she really was.

I think Lake Mungo provides a gateway into a bunch of questions.

And everybody's questions will take them down a different path.

And it makes you explore your own grief, your own connection to family,

your sense of self, your sense of premonition, whether you believe in ghosts or not.

Good horror always leaves you with questions. the whole interesting thing with all these enigmas in this movie is it speaks to the nature of truth that I think this film's kind

of getting at. It's all about perspective and we'll never really know any of these characters' truths.

It's enigmatic because it captures that side of, you know, the human experience of being human

that is enigmatic. We're not closed. We're not resolved. We're, you know, completely in motion.

Joel really sort of leads you towards, you know, imaginings and sort of thoughts. You have to work.

Like there's a kind of, you know, relationship there with the audience's sort of thoughts. You have to work. Like there's a kind of, you know, relationship there

with the audience's sort of mind.

And I think that's very, you know, it's very clever.

I think it's a film that left me with a lot more questions

than answers.

And I was pretty content with that.

Like I enjoyed the questions that it left me with.

I mean, grief is an internal theme.

It's, you know, something that everyone always has to deal with. So mean grief is an internal theme it's you know something that

everyone always has to deal with so I feel like it's going to always reach to people reach out to

people in that way. It's dealing with profound truths about family, about human nature, about

secrets, about our knowledge of each other, about regret. Some films do that.

They get released and no one talks about them.

And they just have this life afterwards.

And I think, like, Mungo really has a life.

And the reasons are because I think the things

that are talked about when it was released,

more people are talking about them, want to know about them.

They're asking questions that they can kind of feed into

what the film is doing for them when they watch it.

It just was very, very universal.

You can really translate it to your individual life.

Yeah.

I get a lot of people just contacting me via social media saying,

that really affected me.

So people didn't know what to expect,

and I think that is the joy of it. I honestly think it'll just get me. So people didn't know what to expect and I think that is the joy of it.

I honestly think it will just get bigger and bigger. I think this will keep going. And

I think that for us, those of us who watch on it should be really proud that we were

part of that.

We're all just components of the bigger picture. And you know, the editor, the music,

you know, photography,

magnificent, created this world.

And luckily, kind of, Joel was able

to kind of share that vision with us

without spoon-feeding us.

For any sort of, like, a movie or a song

or a book where that happens,

where, like, a second life sort of happens,

that's usually a sign of,

maybe it's

like quote-unquote ahead of its time you know fast forward five ten fifteen years you instantly as a

viewer have this technological language to connect with the movie and to know even on a subconscious

level how that how that's going to play in the story and what it means well i think all the good

ones i kind of missed you know i mean wake inight wasn't a huge success when it first came out and you know

Jennifer Ken's film The Babadook I mean that was one that really kind of grew and evolved and became

a you know really strong cult classic and I think it's inherently Australian I think that

It speaks to our history of horror, what we fear,

what seems to be sort of in us that we question.

And there's something about this film that sort of hits the zeitgeist

of that that, you know, I think is what makes it so durable.

At the end of the day, it's a film of such quality.

It's found its life. It's found its fan base.

And, you know, almost 20 years later, we're talking about it.

And any film that's had that life is a good film.

It's a lucky film.

I think Joel's story is quite brilliant

in the way that he's teased out all the different aspects of it.

It's an intricate story that builds as a slow burn.

I had this experience last few years where I re-watched the film with my husband.

We were, you know, away at the coast and it was like really you know in the woods really dark and

we watched the film and I was very scared and unsettled watching the film and it was really

weird because I you know I was in it but it was really it really got under my skin actually.

So Joel obviously hasn't been very vocal with talking about the film.

If you could talk a bit about that, I guess, why do you think that might be?

I have no idea.

I actually have no idea.

I've never had a conversation with him about it.

And he dropped out completely with no interest in the film for a very long time.

And he's come back to take control of the film.

He has control, not me.

Very intelligent, very capable, a very good writer.

It's a shame that he hasn't written other movies, but it may, you know,

I don't know, maybe this spoiled it for him.

I don't know.

I just, I don't know. Well, I got very excited for the director, because I was like,

this guy's going to do something great.

Then I got excited that Lionsgate had picked it up for their, you know, 10 films to die for, After Dark, Horrorfest thing.

And then they announced the remake, and I was like, all right, well, you know, if he's involved, they'll do justice.

And then it sort of disappeared.

And periodically, I'd be like, I wonder what that director's doing.

I'm not sure. It's interesting.

Joel's a pretty quiet guy.

I don't think he'd give too much away and maybe he's rather...

The more he spoke about it,

if he answered all the questions that people would have for him,

like, did the son do it?

Like, all those things that would take a lot of the mystery out of it.

The less he says about it, the better.

That adds to the mystique, you know.

Oh, he made this thing and he's never made

anything else again what a story it's almost romantic you know this idea of this I'm it's one

film and it's and it's done that's that's the end of my body of work. And I know that he cares about

the film and he cares about the story and that he while he's not talking about the film out the

front anywhere and has never wanted to, he's always been involved in it.

But why he actually doesn't want to talk about it, I think, is maybe just a mystery never to be solved.

In your recollection, Joel happy with the film?

I don't... I don't...

I don't know if he was. No. I mean, I don't know. I would be really interested to know how he feels

now. Maybe he is happy with it, but it isn't what he had intended,, I think, in his heart wanted.

I don't know. I don't know because it's 20 years since, right?

Well, I have been waiting for the next Joel Anderson movie

with bated breath since the credits first rolled on Lake Mungo.

He's always working.

I mean, the guy's constantly, like he's worked with us

on the last couple of things.

And so his talent and experience is getting put to good use

by other people.

And maybe it's the problem of Lake Mungo is just a bit ahead

of its time and maybe the stuff he's working on now

will find its time.

It's just

you know hopefully we're just moments away from that and also i think the mungo uh

the universe sounds tacky but you know there's like we're saying there are so many layers to it and i i think there could also be more to unpeel in that world

What's true? What's real? could also be more to unpeel in that world.

What's true, what's real anymore? I want to be based in reality, in real life,

in the here and now.

We now have ghost images,

these endless array of photos in the digital sphere.

They just sit there.

This idea that we can experience reality unmediated,

is that a fantasy?

What is this present moment?

What are we actually living in?

Are we living in an afterlife?

If you were to disappear, there's still an awful lot left of you

in the machine. And if we aren't in the here and now, where are we?

Image is sort of like a continuum that flows

around us and through us.

And it's not always good

because we're not in control of it.

I think it's moving at such a rate and such a quantity

and it's got such a weight to itself now

and it's, I don't think we really can see it anymore.

Image defeats itself over and over again

because there's so much image.

At the end of the day, that's what remains of a person.

I think you can tell so much from a photograph.

Imagine going back in time before there was media, you know, electronic media.

Your sense of what was real would pretty much be limited to the people you interacted with face to face, the horizons of your vision on the physical landscape.

All these things would define your reality.

But we live in relationship to all sorts of concepts that we treat as real, which would have no existence for us if they weren't mediated for us by electronic modes of representation.

The arbiter of what is real is contained within our devices and within our media systems,

rather than in terms of what we see with our own eyes. So yeah, I think we're living in a world

where it is a composite or a hybrid reality between the virtual and the real, what one sees with one's eyes.

And, you know, that makes us incredibly vulnerable to propaganda. That makes us also incredibly

vulnerable to forms of sign manipulation. We are living two lives. We have our real life. We have our life

that exists in reality with real people, with real stakes. And then we have our digital life.

And that's much bigger. And it carries us across the world. The relationships can be just as real.

But there's an unreality to the whole thing.

There's an alternate reality.

It's an overlay on top of our tactile reality.

A great theme of Lake Mungo that isn't,

well, I don't think it's talked about a lot,

is that it talks about our immersion constantly in media.

The undercurrent of the film is we are surrounded

by recording devices.

We are surrounded by media all the time.

From the Bob Smeet photograph, someone taking photos,

to the mobile phones in our pockets,

to the fact that Ray is continuing recording his interviews.

It really did predict or at least hint towards you know this this increasing where we

live in now we're almost always recorded um and i think that's part of the the chilling aspect of

the film is that we are always being recorded and there is still mystery even though we feel like

we've we're documenting things there is still room for mystery still room for ambiguity and i think like mungo was like the

future of um you know the danger of social media of like capturing everything you know capturing

things that maybe shouldn't be captured you know what i mean oversaturating um your life with

images when the movie came out there wasn't tiktok and and youtube wasn't as

as prevalent where everyone's sharing video i suppose back then when the film was made the

you know the camera with you know the phone with the camera and it was still to a large degree a

kind of novelty item and uh you know and it was just wow i can carry a camera in my pocket whatever

now it feels like we exist within the machine

that we carry around with us.

It's like there's a huge part of us and our lives

that are contained within that machine.

Our memories and thoughts and ideas and our communications

and all that kind of stuff is all within the machine.

Social media was rising around the time

that this film came out.

YouTube was bought by Google, I think 2005. The uptake of smartphones with video technology and

video capabilities becoming more prevalent. It's remarkable that the film kind of almost predicted

the kind of hold that these kind of things would have, not just on culture as a broad concept,

but specifically on young people and especially on young women,

especially on young women trying to develop an identity,

trying to develop a sense of self,

trying to claim a space for themselves

where their image, like Alice, can be taken and manipulated

and used against them by anybody.

Once upon a time the machine served us, now we serve the machine.

And, you know, that seems to be the way it's going.

So the image that now of me in this film being interviewed,

that's a really simple image.

It's basically a guy in front of a camera having a chat to a guy

on the other side of the camera. That's easy to kind of process. But if you go online and you look at a

whole series of images or you go on like an Insta feed and there's, you know, 25 boxes that are just

pushing out different stuff, that we don't really understand it.

We can process it to a certain degree and we can make sense of it in the back part of our

brain that allows us not to go mad, but we don't really understand it because it's driven

by an algorithm that has actually gone past our capacity.

Thank you very lovely. algorithm that has actually gone past our capacity. Move in.

What do we get there, Jake?

Thank you, very lovely.

And smiles all around, please, boys.

You know, things are ephemeral.

We want to capture and have a record

and that will evoke a beautiful memory later.

I mean, as long as it's been like photography,

but even before that, you know,

we documented our lives in different ways

through paintings or through cave paintings,

if you want to go back to the forest.

As long as we've been able to put our thoughts

and ideas down on another form,

in a visual form to share them,

we've been, you know, documenting our lives.

When we're given an opportunity to observe ourselves

from any other perspective, even one from right here,

you know, one from an arm's length but turned around,

there's something inside of us that makes it really hard

to resist that opportunity.

It's the same reason why human beings are drawn to mirrors.

And technology provides a mirror that sees way more than the surface.

You know, that's a mirror that penetrates us and that can haunt us.

I mean, it's a good question.

Like, you know, why are we capturing all this stuff?

It has to do with our mortality is the idea that, like, you want to take in as much of life as possible.

No matter how we wrap our heads around it we're all all all of us utterly terrified of our own

mortality. You scared of dying? Yeah of course I'm scared of dying. Isn't everyone scared of dying?

It's evidence for our future. Isn't everyone scared of dying? Isn't everyone scared of dying?

It's evidence for our future selves. We're one of like billions of humans that have lived and are gonna live.

And, you know, it's, we want to leave our mark, you know, and it's why people, I think, you know, make art and, you know, make

movies and, you know, write books and, you know, there's this like desire to just leave something.

And it's the same reason why we have kids too, you know, like you want to leave something

to this world, you know, after you're gone, you know, we're trying to fight it, you know,

you're trying to, again, it's all about the fight against, you know, against our mortality, you know, we're trying to fight it. You're trying to, again, it's all about the fight

against, you know, against our mortality.

You know what I mean? It's our fear of death.

Well, many of us, I think, believe that we're going to pass them on

to our ancestors in posterity, right?

This is home video footage that we took on the day that Alice drowned at the dam, the 21st of December, 2004.

That we're going to show our grandchildren or our children, you know, what their parents or grandparents looked like or what we looked like at their age, perhaps.

but it's very interesting to think this doubles back to that question of,

you know, ancestry and family cohesion and continuity within indigenous cultures,

not being a function of representation, but being almost anti-representational

in terms of a relationship to place, which defies representation. So in a way,

you know, the place where we cohere as a people now, the place where we cohere as a family

is in a collection or a system or a network of representations where it's almost like we're

haunting our own reality. I mean, if you were to read Lake Mungo as an allegory of the kind of

condition of being unsettled in space or unsettled in place, I think you could read it that way as a

compelling allegory of our condition of being you

know so imbued with so dependent on and so having our lives so structured through and structured

around uh networks of images the weird thing is it's become so disposable it used to be that

you know photos were were these things that you would cherish.

My own personal thing is I have a problem.

Like, I've got a little old Nokia here, because that's self-forced.

Because otherwise, I have a phone in my pocket that sucks the soul out of my face continually.

And I don't have discipline in that way.

And I don't think many of us have discipline.

And it's become so normalized this idea of having something

that captures sound video and the quality of all these things is just like

every year just gets better and better. I think the experiencing of the moment

while it's ephemeral is it's important that stuff goes into our you talked about

the unconscious before.

Like that's, that lives with us while we're alive.

But I think there is something about no longer being present when you're, I don't want to get too metaphysical with it,

but when your

consciousness is projected to you know you're watching someone in Paris do like an outfit

check or like you know like some influencer I really do feel like where we become disconnected

from ourselves when we lose ourselves for long stretches of time, really.

OK, guys. Photo opportunity.

When you're photographing something,

you're in the moment of photographing something,

but you're not directly experiencing it

because you've got a camera in front of you

as a filter somehow somehow and you're also

trying to construct that moment in a way that you want it to be presented. I think the ubiquity of

photography destabilises our relationship with the present moment, the now. We're constantly

thinking about how it's going to be reframed and reconsidered

and reflected upon in the past tense. This idea of spectral selves. You know, we're haunted

like Alice, we're haunted by our future selves.

I fear as somebody who existed before mobile phones and devices of any sort. I fear that we're losing

the ability to be intimate and to contact each other. My daughter would rather text me

than to actually speak to me on the phone because I guess she's more in control then.

She doesn't have to bother about staying on the phone

all the time to her old man.

But I think it's true of many people.

Everyone is much more interested in

keeping everyone else at a distance.

And that saddens me,

but I don't have a solution for it.

I think we're missing on the experiential side of life.

And life is fleeting.

Everything changes within an instant.

And if we aren't in the here and now, where are we?

Are we taking snapshots of time for posterity?

Is it so that we can have an album to show people what we did or who we were?

Because we were there, but we weren't actually there.

The other thing that makes me think of

is the possibility

of image creation

in the

production of like what could be called

like egregores.

Well, egregore,

it's a magical term

for a

thought form that is created by a group of people engaging together

in a purposeful and structured activity which takes on a life of its own.

So yeah, I think you could see Facebook, Instagram, other social media platforms

that engage people in repetitive structured behaviors with one another as actually being

egregorial engines that are giving rise to occult entities, unbeknownst to those that

participate within them. A family is an egregore, insofar as a family has a character that is

composed by but transcends the identity of its members.

And especially insofar that that family extends forwards

and backwards in time through generations

in which certain traits are reproduced,

certain character types are born and reborn,

recirculated even.

You could think of a family as kind of a trans-dimensional egregore

that has a certain character.

The son, it turns out, he was making up the pictures himself.

And you go, why was he doing that what's going on

up close and tight you could see that it definitely was neither female nor alice

it was matthew it's one of the biggest questions in the film matthew was the person who wasn't dead.

So therefore, for his parents who were concentrating so much on Alice, he felt at sea, which I

think probably is the motivation for a few of the things that he did.

I think Matthew in the movie is trying to exert some sort of control over this, over, you know, the grief that he's feeling because it's too unwieldy.

It's too big.

You can't handle it.

No one can.

You know, it's not a sort of moral judgment on Matthew, you know, especially as a teenager.

This is him trying to exert control over the uncontrollable, which is a totally natural response.

There is a moment or a line in the film

where Matthew speaks about becoming attracted to photography

after the death of Alice.

So I do think this idea of A, being able to immortalize memories

is very important to him.

But then I also think, yeah, this seed that's planted that he could

bring hope um to his mother at least that maybe she's lived on maybe there is an afterlife I think

that was a very powerful motivator um yeah to to create this narrative that like yeah she's gone

but she's with us in the house.

This is where I was when the Bob Smith photo was taken up there.

And I didn't mean to be in the Bob Smith photo,

but I want to make something clear.

That wasn't me in the Seth photo at the birthday party.

I don't know who that was.

The magical history of impersonation in regard to faking,

that impersonating somebody else

has an occult power associated with it.

Impersonation is also connected

to like mummification and rebirth, right?

And so, you know, making oneself in the image of another.

He is sort of conjuring her up through very practical things, you know, very kind of visceral,

practical kind of things.

What if faking a haunting

isn't the cancellation of the haunting

or the negation of the haunting,

but its invitation or even its manifestation?

And here we're entering back onto the terrain

of something that has also quite been observed

in quite widespread ways in Indigenous cultures, and that is the notion of something that has also quite been observed in quite widespread ways in indigenous

cultures and that is the notion of imitative magic. That you imitate something not in order

to fake it or negate it but you imitate it in order to evoke, invoke or summon it.

And I find it interesting that the start of the... in order to evoke, invoke, or summon it.

And I find it interesting that the start of the first title sequence

is a montage of photos that are false.

Photos of, you know, ghosts that are supposed to be ghosts

but weren't back in the old days

when you could do double exposures of photos.

And I find that an intriguing entree into the story. And that is bookended by the end of the

title sequence where we keep seeing Alice sometimes in the background of shots that we had not seen

her in before.

So there is that sense that perhaps memory lingers.

Perhaps, perhaps the photo is more profound than we give it credit for.

So, I mean, I think this is the film's kind of most definitive statement at the end, at its culmination, that the faked photographs were in fact working productively to conjure up or create something beyond the binary of the fake and the non-fake.

that the photograph in a way like... beyond the binary of the fake and the non-fake.

That the photograph, in a way,

like the realm of dreams,

like the realm of the undead,

is not a finished space.

You know, to tie it into today,

you know, if the movie were to be remade,

as we might have talked about earlier,

you know, Matthew would probably be using AI to manipulate what was, you know,

what appeared in the images if we were doing it the same way today.

No longer is the image the truth.

What we see now, we don't believe anymore.

Action.

One rope.

Two ropes.

One move.

It's interesting that Joel's made this film about, you know, how you can see things beyond

what you're seeing in a film or in a photograph, but we also now, everything's so manipulated

or it's open to manipulation that we can't, you know, believe it anymore.

And so even if Alice's phone turned up you know people might just be

well that's just AI or that's just you know some sort of manipulation of an

image or I'm worried that there's going to be false versions of ourselves out

there speaking to our loved ones in words that we didn't say and June do you

think that you understand the rage that Alice shows?

Oh, yeah, look, I totally understand Alice's rage.

I felt it, and I could completely understand her rage

because she'd felt betrayed and fooled.

We'd all been fooled.

We've all been fooled in this town by the Toohey's.

And you know what really gets me is

Marissa Tuys involvement in all of that I mean she's a mother with two kids two young boys

I almost can't put into words how devastated I am watching Lake Mungo today because I look at what

happens to Alice and this sort of this this reproduction of her image by people that are not her,

and I can't help but think of things like deepfake AI,

which is so pervasive for young people.

It's a genuine, terrifying threat.

The sex tape, the proliferation of the sex tape,

what can happen to the sex tape,

this lack of control, this lack of autonomy.

Lake Mungo, I think, is extraordinarily prophetic

in how it

sort of predicted things like deepfake AI, which is obviously such a concern for not just young

people, for everybody today. You know, Alice experiences, the ghost of Alice's experiences,

people are trying to reproduce my image and make me do things that I don't, I'm not doing,

that kind of frustration and that terror of having your identity taken from you like that

and used for perhaps uncool reasons

is something extraordinarily impressive, I think,

that Lake Mungo really predicted.

I believe she recorded the future coming to get her.

Yeah, I think Matthew's line that Alice was haunted by her future self

really speaks in quite a disturbing way, I think,

about Alice's understanding of how damaging

losing your identity to media technology can be.

You know, whether it's owned by other people,

so the Tuys when she was alive,

and obviously Matthew in her death, that she's sort of this embodiment of what happens when your image is taken from you, you know, when it becomes a commodity, when it becomes something that other people can use and wield against you, when your image isn't something that you can assume is yours and it's part of who you are in your sense of self.

And it's something that I think is made very literal in that final confrontation between Alice and her dead self, that kind of future echo of her dead self.

The horror of that moment, aside from the visceral effect of seeing a ghost of yourself

dead.

I am convinced that Alice knew she was going to die.

I'm convinced that Alice knew she was going to die. I'm convinced of that.

I think the figure at Lake Mungo was an omen for her.

She's confronted with the fact that she's been split in two,

that she's been divided between her image and herself,

and that destroys her.

I couldn't comprehend what I was actually seeing in those images.

It was very intense, a violent kind of anger.

Um, yeah, I just didn't know where it was coming from.

How did my child get so angry?

What did you think when you first saw this material?

Scared the shit out of me.

In this day and age, images, you know, the camera always lies.

It's not a question of the camera never lying.

The camera always lies now.

And in one way or another, either it's making things,

as simple as making things brighter that should be darker,

or filters, or God knows what else it is like one way or another

we treat every single image the camera lies to a large degree just by just by digitizing stuff

um it's not necessarily an honest depiction of things anymore it's a statement on how you can't

you cannot trust images um you can make connections to the dead internet theory none of this can be

tried you know a documentary is still a story that someone is telling

who has a perspective, who has, you know, limited details.

I think there's something in that that is reflexive

throughout the story.

So, you know, stuff that's hidden within the images,

stuff that's hidden within people's lives,

stuff that's hidden within the landscape.

You know, it's about exposing things and understanding more.

June and I started digging and after a bit, June said she'd found something

and she pulled out a plastic bag. And inside the plastic bag,

there was Ali's favorite necklace,

the ring, the watch, the mobile phone.

Her most precious things buried out here on a school camp.

And we didn't know why she did that.

It was a very bizarre thing to do.

That's what...

Yeah, why do you bury a la the pharaohs?

You know, like, why do they take stuff with them to the afterlife?

Is she... Yeah, is she making amends? They were things that were significant to her.

Yeah, maybe she just didn't want anyone else to see it. You know, it's a bit like looking at Medusa,

like if I can, if I can get rid of that and, and, and there's no risk of anyone else seeing this

image. They, you know, like a curse kind of thing just just dispose of it yeah

I've got a dog who buries things and you kind of like what and it's just no because that's a sacred

space now he doesn't go she doesn't go back and get them but she just likes to bury things for

yeah it's a primal animal kind of reaction. just likes to bury things for...

Yeah, it's a primal animal kind of reaction. And I'm not really quite sure why.

It's just one of those things. I don't know.

A reflection of our burying, our history, our common history,

for no-one ever to find it, to no-one ever to find out.

I think that Alice, like Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks,

like Miranda in Picnic at Hanging Rock, you know, her sort of ancestors,

I think that she has a very strong idea of the unspoken power

of the natural world.

And I think there is something very ritualistic about her

not just burying her phone

but giving her most precious things,

you know, her jewellery, her watch, her phone,

back to the earth.

I think she's making a deal.

I think she's trying to make a deal.

She'd lost her three favourite possessions, really.

OK.

And cut.

OK, good.

Cut there. Three.

To me there seemed to be a knowingness about something much more kind of spiritual and much

that there was a meaning that went way beyond her story that drew her to that place.

There's something else going on there that's almost prehistoric

that, you know, definitely I can sort of sense and feel in Joel's film.

I mean, it's an offering to land.

I mean, it's the way that Ancestry connects itself to place is through burying its dead there. I mean, it's an offering to land. I mean, it's the way that ancestry connects itself to place is through burying its dead.

I mean, we're all indigenous to somewhere, right?

I mean, there's somewhere on earth where each of us has a pile of bones that's genetically connected to us.

You know, most of us just don't know where that is anymore. And it's also interesting

that because of these images and the doubts that they raise within the film, her body is subjected

also not only to a burial, but to an unburial and reburial like Lady Mungo's. And so I'd say that there's some sort

of contamination going on between her corpse in the coffin, the box she buried at Lake Mungo,

the original burial of an exhumation of Lady Mungo herself and Mungo man, and the

box that she hid in her bedroom.

To make peace with the past.

It's interesting, like, how she buries her, that we're in Lake Mungo itself,

where this is a site where, you know,

First Nations human remains were excavated

and then put into universities for decades.

And I feel kind of sad that they actually did dig it up,

that they did actually take away her belongings,

that she deliberately kept there.

Yeah. And it feels kind of parallels that. Lake Mungo is the oldest burial site in Australia.

It's where the Mungo man and Mungo woman were found. And I think it was not too far back that their

remains were actually returned back to their their original burial site

so it is known as the oldest burial site in the world so for for Alice to bury something there

maybe she's burying the ghost maybe she's too frightened of what she saw that night that she

doesn't want to see it ever again.

And so she buries it in the place where she was,

and it just happens to be coincidental that it's Lake Mungo?

I think not.

There's also then there's a thread to the remains, the Mungo Man,

the history of Lake Mungo,

where there's all these ancient things buried,

these unspeakable things that we don't want to,

a lot of people don't want to talk about.

I guess there's, again, there's a connection where she's doing the same,

where she's burying these kind of secrets in the hope that she won't have to face them in her own way.

Yes, Naomi.

I think it just kind of goes back to the clip where she's talking to Ray and she's like,

yeah, something bad is going to happen to me.

It's not now, but I know it's going to happen.

So she came to the realisation that she was going to die.

And, like, I guess the clip of her seeing herself, I guess, drowning,

or, like, drowned, that just scared her.

So she probably was like, oh, let me bury this here

and keep my belongings here to, like, signify this as my last actual place of,

not really safety, but the old hurt.

Conceptually, I mean, it's an ancient place

and ancient remains were there

and then putting a modern piece of technology there

but that had within it an omen of death

and a metaphysical ghost.

Is it the dark web that she's foreseen,

that she's going to bury,

that she doesn't want that image to kind of be,

you know, to proliferate?

I mean, I guess...

I don't know, if I think about our relationship to our own phones these days, I mean, I guess, I don't know,

if I think about our relationship to our own phones these days,

I mean, they are, they know us so well.

Like, I think they've got everything on it.

You know, they've got our...

I mean, I know my own phone.

It has, like, everything.

My whole family is on it.

So there's something so personal about it.

And I guess, you know, probably her relationship with her phone,

she, you know, it was so close to her, she didn't want...

It would almost feel like a violation if someone found it.

And I guess if she had these feelings like she was going to die

or, you know, was going to give in to death

or she had accepted that she was going to die,

then, you know, it would be so humiliating for someone to find her phone.

It's the last thing she would have wanted probably.

Everything's on phone now.

Good luck burying it at Lake Mungo, by the way, because, uh, yeah,

Mark Zuckerberg knows where that phone, that content's buried.

In a thousand years, you know, what if somehow we've survived and have kept all the information of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and everything,

the human record that is going to exist for people coming after us.

Some of our greatest achievements, but also our worst nightmares,

are going to be captured in that amber.

And in a digital age, in the Internet age,

that amber is forever and floating all around us.

Lake Mungo is talking about that.

I think some of the dread Alice feels about what's coming, you know, can absolutely apply to the technology we don't know about yet or the technology that's here and evolving faster than we can understand it.

We are creating digital ghosts, each one of us.

We already have.

This image of me talking

right now

will outlive me.

And it's almost like if you were

to disappear, there's still an awful lot left

of you in the machine.

And it's

virtually that next thing of

transferring your soul into a machine

and so that when you go

it'll still live on in there. So I mean, it's kind of heading that way. And you think into a machine. And so that when you go, it'll still live on in there.

So, I mean, it's kind of heading that way.

And you think that the machine has absorbed

in the intervening 20 years,

how much of the machine has absorbed

of us and our lives and our essence.

And that's quite scary.

You could argue that it's actually

the next stage of consciousness and where,

where, you know, 2001 style kind of reaching forward through to something that we don't quite

understand yet. Well, I think we carry, we almost, I say, carry our afterlife around with us in our

pockets. Someone who, that you know or love has passed away and their social media page is still

there. Like, you know, the absurdity on Facebook where people will like wish them a happy birthday,

you know, not, you know, obviously just an acquaintance who doesn't realize that they've

passed away. So if, you know, if it has created an afterlife, it is a really sort of

bizarro, bizarro afterlife. You know, in Aboriginal Australian culture,

there's resistance to being photographed,

to having a photographic image.

And it's sometimes to do with, you know,

capturing a person, like, in a frame,

which is really, you know, counterintuitive to knowledge systems

around, you know, in Western concepts, living and dying.

In sort of Western civilisational, you know, kind of cultural modes, the photograph changed

changed the way that we, you know, we of cultural modes. The photograph changed the way that we, you know,

we see the world.

The camera trying to capture and trying to help us

and trying to, you know, understand what's happening.

And in the end, not understanding anything, you know.

It really is about, like, you know about the power of just how helpless we are

in this world, how clueless we are,

and how we're not even close to understanding

what the hell is happening in this,

that we're doing on this planet.

I think while they were making Lake Mungo,

that they tapped into something.

And I think that something, whether it's cross-dimensional, interdimensional, whether it's just science

that hasn't been scienced yet, or whether it's just a good old fashioned ghost, something

turned up in the celluloid the digital data something lives in there still show

that film to somebody that's never seen it see what happens one way to read the film is that

the family the Palmers, and we as a culture, because they're certainly constituted as a normal family, as a stand-in for every family in a way.

perhaps we're incredibly naive about the power of the images that we produce because we simply see our images as objective empirical artifacts and not as talismanic devices, perhaps, that inadvertently involve us in some sort of magical activity for which we're not prepared,

you know, like the sorcerer's apprentice that then has all sorts of metaphysical and ontological

consequences that we have no language and no intellectual framework for comprehending

I don't think she knows I'm there

Alice isn't here she's not here

do you think she's lying when she says that?

Yes.

I've got no evidence, but yes, I do.

But also, um, Al says mum's gone now.

So for both of them, there's that sense that there is an exit from the room.

And my takeaway, like the biggest enigma from the film for me

was in Rosie's performance where it almost seemed like she'd lied

or, you know, there's definitely a misconnection there

where the spirit of Alice is in the room

that she wasn't necessarily seen.

But I feel like Rosie just comes out of that session,

sorry, June comes out of that session

and doesn't want to talk about it anymore.

But I feel like there's things unsaid

that maybe only her and Joel know.

But yeah, that moment really stuck with me

more than any time i've seen the film

also grief being a very selfish thing you know being so blinded by your own grief that

you genuinely don't see the ghost of the person you're grieving for because ultimately you're

grieving for all the things you've lost and and the film does it so smartly you know alice has

always been there and yet they don't see her,

and then they leave because they feel better.

But she's stuck there forever.

June senses Alice at times when Alice is absolutely there,

kind of across time and space.

June does connect to that.

But she doesn't know what to do with it.

And with it comes so much guilt,

so much of a sense of failing her little girl,

not only in life and in death,

but in knowing her and in sympathizing with her.

I think it's kinder to herself to believe Alice isn't there.

She knows she's not gone and she's choosing to leave.

She's choosing to leave.

And that is just, you know, it's heartbreaking. Breaks my heart. So that's why I think it's just

an incredibly, yes, it's a ghost story of, yeah, a familial ghost story.

She's gone.

Now I remember that last image, you know, when they're driving away and she's at the window.

Oh my God, that just, I mean, that's the deep tragedy of this story is that that family,

you know, they're now living with, and of course there's this sense of hope and we had to have that, that they're kind of moving on, they're now living with. And, of course, there's this sense of hope,

and we had to have that, that they're kind of moving on,

they're literally moving out.

But, you know, that sticks, that stuff,

that doesn't disappear.

And, you know, there's no sense that there's a deeper,

you know, a big, deeper change for them.

They've just kind of moved.

The family drives away still unaware of just how intertwined their stories really were,

of just how close they came to touching a real connection with their daughter and only to feel

it slip through their fingers. It's what makes it so sad.

her image appearing there is about,

that's the physical representation of this family's grief.

Whether or not it's her actual ghost,

it's always going to be there in every corner,

every photo that they see that in any way relates to Alice,

that she's going to be, she know, she'll be there tucked somewhere.

The memory of a person is a ghost that exists in your head, because they're still walking and talking and living and breathing inside your mind. And that's, that's a form of a ghost. It's not a

physical manifestation, but it is an echo of their life that carries on with you. And as long as you're around, they're around.

And it's not just you, because it's obviously a lot of other people

that carry that ghost around in their head.

If you're a person, which most people are, who's experienced deep trauma or loss,

then you're kind of stumbling around often,

trying to step outside of that haunted house

that is the past, the regret, the loss.

This young woman, the memory of this woman,

the specter of this woman is haunting everything, all of it.

It's so human. It's so haunting.

Whenever somebody dies, there's usually a ghost story not far behind

and I think Joel said this I think this is where I got it from ghost stories are stories about grief

you know and this is a story about grief and a story about loss and a story about

you know sadness and missed opportunity

or finding things out later.

And I think there's a bit of ghost story in that kind of idea

is understanding more about people when they're gone.

And that's where the kind of the ghosts come out.

But that last image suggests that she didn't want to be separated

and that she just wants to be alive still

and that she's in pain.

And so I think that the sort of the kind of ghost...

I give the ghost...

I think that's why it's so beautiful in the film

because it's so much connected to grief.

It was for me.

And that you...

One hangs on to people who have passed but also ask the question do

they hang on to you? Is it about them as much as it is about you? So I guess it's a curiosity

we're going to meet when we all go.

I love the thought that this we all go.

I love the thought that this film will live on and hopefully will never be remade, that it will go on in its entirety and the characters and the actors are there still and they will carry on into the future in this way.

It's, yeah, I think it's fantastic.

It's really interesting to think how it will be perceived in the future.

I think it will...

I think it will still hold a lot of interest for people in generations to come.

And it's kind of nice that um yeah you live

forever on celluloid or videotape whatever it is it's kind of an odd thing 20 years later or whatever

it is to revisit a tiny moment.

It's a bit akin to what we're talking about,

going back to an old photo,

but this is a film instead of a photo.

And we misremember things,

and we remember things in different ways.

If that was a thing that people remembered me by,

I'd be OK with that.

Yeah, I'm happy for that to be my legacy.

If that's the only thing that remains about me on this earth,

then that's okay.

I know, it sounds really crazy to say,

but I don't have kids or anything like that,

so it's not even like I have anything to pass on.

But, yeah.

I mean, that cultural memory to have been a part of Australian cinema

as well in that regard, that cultural memory to have been a part of Australian cinema as well in that

regard.

That's, you know, yeah, something.

I mean, when I think about it, when I take the time to think about it, that's pretty

incredible.

Well, yeah, maybe that speaks back to Lake Mungo and like the life of the life of what's

on your screens or what's in a photo or what's on film or

what's on the tape that it's it has a life of its own You're going to die. You're going to die.

You're going to die.

You're just the start of something else, alright?

She was fabulous and she gave me so much.

She was grief-stricken.

It was very easy for me to be with her.

It was a lot harder for me to tell her the truth that she was going to die.

I didn't give a time frame to it but she was very sick so I felt it was important to provide a possibility

that there is something after death but at the same time to be honest about the fact that she will die

In fact, we all will die sooner or later.

I'm fairly okay with it.

I'm 76 now so on statistically I've got

about four to five years left of living. It doesn't bother me because I've lived a

really good life. I have a family, I have people who love me, I have people I love. When it's time to go,

it'll be time to go. There is nothing for me afterwards. I don't believe in an afterlife.

But I'm going to record a message on my phone so that when they're putting me in the ground

everyone's going to get a phone call saying it's very dark in here.

Ah, that's it. Well, I got diagnosed with breast cancer last year.

So I had to come back to, well, I didn't have to,

but I was much happier for coming back to Melbourne

to get treated for it.

I got very well taken care of, so luckily I was fine.

And it was very early detection.

Having said that, you know, yeah, I did start,

I did go, all right, am I ready to go?

I think at the end of the day,

when I'm thinking about death, I think, you

know, when it's going to happen and I'd like to not know it's going to happen. I think

I'd just rather it happened to me and I was gone. I'd rather not have a projected like

wandering or anything like that. So, but yeah, I did, you know know we're all sort of heading in that direction and

you know it's coming up all the time and you know I don't know if well I wish I could say something

really deep about it I think you know you've got I think the, you know, sort of the reason you should live.

And in 1995, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

And, of course, at the time, it was pretty unusual for someone my age to be diagnosed with breast cancer.

I had this strong instinct that I would survive it,

so that was always there.

Like, I could see my life beyond it,

but when I was in the midst of it,

I guess there's a kind of calm that comes to you in a way

because you have to kind of accept it that it is a possibility and once I did

come to that I realised that you know we're all facing that every moment of every day that

the possibility of death is there just lingering. The death of a child is something that

never ever ever leaves you.

She's there every day.

And certain things remind you, and it's good.

I love those reminders so that she is not a physical presence anymore,

but a spiritual and a heart connection every day, every day.

But as a father, I hope that Alice has found a degree of resolution that allows her to go wherever you go when you pass,

and that you go to a place which you can be at peace with what has happened to you

in the life that you've lived before you died.

Always be proud of the person that you are.

Don't feel like you need to hide anything because you are enough.

You are our daughter.

and we've always loved you anything because you are enough, you are our daughter.

And we've always loved you and we always will, no matter what you do.

I'm lucky with my children and my grandchildren, so that circle of life is there.

That's what it is, the circle of life is there. That's what it is, the circle of life. Thank you. I'm out. Thank you. Open the door and just move inside. Thank you. Are you ready?

Yes.

OK, so you are standing at the front of your house.

Now tell me what you see.

On the front porch.

The light is on.

Shoes at the door.

All right, now I want you to go inside the house.

To the left is our family room with some windows.

Nothing's changed in my...

..in my mind

in terms of the way that the house is set out.

It's sort of set in time.

I'm in the hallway leading on to my mum and dad's bedroom.

We walked down the hall.

Alice's room on the left with her shoes outside.

The kitchen where we...

..where we had some wonderful times.

Kitchen's ahead.

But I feel a lot of sadness just through the idea that we can never go back there.

That those memories, you know, someone else lives there now.

and outside the beautiful, beautiful garden.

The back steps.

Country.

Can you go inside Alice's room?

Nothing's changed.

She's still got all her stuff on a dresser, a bedroom, posters.

to

there's her bed which is a cast-iron bed, painted.

There's a big picture of her that she drew

when she was in late primary school.

There's the fireplace with the fake...

the fake board out the front.

There's a wicker chair.

Her... dressing... There's a wicker chair

Her dressing room table is her desk

Her diary is on her desk

It feels It doesn't feel like my room anymore, I guess.

Yeah, it feels a bit unfamiliar.

And what does that mean to you?

Feels heavier.

Darker, but in a literal sense.

There's an energy here still, yeah.

Tell me where you are. There's an energy here still, yeah.

Tell me what you see.

Is Alice there?

I don't know if I feel her any more there than I have for the last 20 years

in the life we've had since.

Because I feel like...

I feel like...

Actually, she's not in the house.

So she's not in the house. So she's not in the house.

So she's gone.

I thought she would be in the house, but no, she's gone.

So she's not there anymore.

And, you know, the presence that I've felt...

Yeah, I don't feel that anymore.

And where is Alice?

Everywhere.

She's jumped off that picture on the wall and is everywhere. so Thank you. so so Thank you. I was doing a tour here one day with a group of people and that door kept opening and closing. There was no wind, there were no doors open. It was quite... I couldn't explain it. It just kept opening and closing and opening and closing. you