Joel Jackson, "Kangaroo Island" Press Junket | The Latest With Maya

A conversation with Joel Jackson.❤️ "Kangaroo Island" is out now!


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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

It's the latest. Hi, um, my name is Maya from The Latest with Maya, and I'm so excited to be talking with you.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hey mate, it's beautiful to have you here, and thanks for taking the time to chat.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Um, so what attracted you to the script of Kangaroo Island?

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Firstly, the fact that I'd never heard of the island before. I thought it was a made-up place. Um I honestly didn't know that there was a beautiful island off the coast of South Australia that existed. I just thought it was this really interesting name of something that I'd never heard before and went, oh, cool, that's an interesting place. And yeah, it sounds pretty, you know, out there. And then the more I started to read about it, I fell in love with the story and I spoke to a friend, and I realized that Kangaroo Island was very much like one of the most pristine places in Australia. Um, but it was the it was the challenge of shooting on a remote island where the nature becomes so much more of a character rather than a bystander as it normally does in lots of other films. And I think having grown up remotely in you know the remote desert of Western Australia and down south on farms as a kid, I hadn't really been able to play with nature as a main character in film before. And for this character, for Ben and his silence, his his avoidance, the way that he plays his life game in order to get exactly what he wants at all times, I knew that that would work alongside this beautiful, harsh nature. And so for me it was a good challenge to remind myself to let go of the acting and let the world do the work. That's what I really wanted to play with.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Oh wow. Um, so can you relate to your character in any way?

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Not no, not not not in the sense of like I have a wonderful fiance. If I were to say yes, she'd be like, what do you mean? Um but no, um yeah, there's there's stuff that I do, you know, his his love of his kids. Um I really wanted to make Ben a beautiful father. I I wanted him to be kind of capable of having a great life, but incapable of stopping himself from getting in his own way. So whether it be his gambling, his love for other women, um, his want to just be wanted by absolutely everybody and everything. So there are some elements of Ben that I can relate to. His love of the ocean, of fishing, of surfing. Um, you know, it was so beautiful to be able to shoot some of those scenes and go out swimming with dolphins that you didn't know if they were sharks or dolphins until they kind of like bridged through the wave next to you, and you went, Oh, okay, okay, I live today. Fantastic. Um, there's there's slight elements, but I wanted to make him enough of a stretch that I could detach and go home as well.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Yeah. Oh wow. Yeah, that would make me too anxious to not know if it was a dolphin or a shark.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

And there's the same kind of like like the same kind of color underwater, especially, and you're focused on getting the shot, and you're aware that there's a drone up there and someone's got a long shot on you, and then there's like another camera down the beach, and there's only one other person who's watching you, and it's like the safety supervisor who's about 400 meters away, so about 150 feet on like, yeah, and and not with a surfboard. So you know that if something happens, you're like, oh, I'm kind of done for, so I've got to make sure I've got my wits about me, but good challenge.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Um so what do you hope people take away from watching Kangaroo Island?

SPEAKER_00 4:17

That life is messy. I think I think all too often we get these films that package up a problem or a family or a transitional moment in time, and we get a neat little bow and where we kind of leave the cinema going, yeah, it was like, you know, okay, cool, cool message. But I think the beauty of this is that it's a real family who who aren't good in the ways that they work through things, you know, like the father will get them and lock them in a shed and turn the lights out and make them figure out their problems. And, you know, they they quarrel loudly, they argue at the dinner table, they they try to figure things out as they go. And I think that's why it resonated in Australia, especially on Netflix and and New Zealand, is because it resonated with this kind of it's imperfect, but it's life, it's ours. Um, so I hope that people can walk out of the cinema or wherever they're watching it and whoever they're watching it with and maybe have some of the harder conversations they've been avoiding for a while and know that it doesn't need to start right and it doesn't need to end right. It just needs to happen. And the moment that it starts happening is the moment that you start making progress.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Yeah. Oh wow. Yeah. I um I was uh so grateful to get a screener for the movie, and I just I love it. It's immediately one of my favorites.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

So that's beautiful. Thank you, Maya. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Yeah. Um so were there any scenes from the movie that were particularly challenging to film?

SPEAKER_00 6:06

Yeah. Do you know the scene since you've seen it where um myself and Beck, so it's Lou and Ben, are down near the rocks near the ocean, talking about her having coming home. Yeah. Yeah. So that that was tricky just in because of like where we shot it. So we were waiting, you know, we were around this curve of a bay, high tide was coming in, and in Australia the tides are very big compared to like the rest of the world. So you've got to worry about, you know, if you don't get the scene right soon, you're gonna run out of rock and everyone's gonna have to leave because there's gonna be water everywhere, and then it's freezing. Beck's just wearing nothing but a dress. Um, you know, so she's she's starting to get more like colder and colder, and it's harder to act and feel free and you know, impulsive when you're freezing cold. So you're trying to get it right, and the wind's playing havoc and changing, and the lights going behind huge clouds and all these other external elements, not to mention that we were still trying to figure out where it sat in the story, and if we were giving too much of Ben away, and like would would would we still, we didn't want to turn our audiences away and make them all go, we hate this guy and we hate this girl. Like, why are we why are we gonna, you know, cheer for these people? I think it's such a precarious balance when you make films like telling people what they need to know without telling them everything. Um, and so that was incredibly tricky. And I I would say it's one of the moments where watching it at the Adelaide Film Festival for the you know, the premiere was the moment I was most proud of. Because despite all of the obstacles, we never stopped investigating what it was that we were trying to say in that moment, and so the moment we left and said, cut, and we moved on to the next scene. He could tell that everybody was really pumped, everybody's smiling to themselves and doing that little small kind of like smile, like just really intrinsically pumped. So, yeah, that and then all of the surfing stuff because it was very cold. Um the surfing on surfboards that like weren't yours on waves you didn't know, and trying to tell a story to your mates who were like all mad surfers, and I grew up surfing um and hoping that you were gonna surf well enough for people to go, yeah, he's cool, he's a surfer.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Yeah, I always thought surfing is so cool, and like I would just immediately fall right off if I tried.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

It's so much harder than it looks. I remember like I went to Indonesia for like a surf tour two years ago, and I remember thinking, oh yeah, I can surf, I can surf. And the moment you go out to this like remote island and start surfing, and then there's some little kid who's like eight and he's just tearing it up and absolutely destroying you, you go, oh okay, like no, I've only scratched the surface. Uh-uh, not at all.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Um so what genre of movie would your life story be told as?

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Good question. I think my life story would be told as a perpetual coming of age mixed with like a a comedic western.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

I like that.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Yeah, yeah, like a bit a bit goofy, a bit, you know, a bit moody, but continuously kind of falling forward, if that makes any sense.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Yeah. Yeah, I like that.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Yeah. That's a great question.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Thank you. Um, so if you had a warning label, what would yours say?

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Um oh yeah. What's that one where it's like uh extreme noise or like extreme extreme activity? It's like yeah, warning, like no need to replace the batteries, like the battery life goes forever. Or like um yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. Danger, do not push this button, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

I love those. Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, I just have I'd have several. I couldn't pick just one, I don't think.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Yeah, it would depend on the day. Like weekends would be like, don't poke the bear. And then like during the weekday, it'd be like, yeah, just like if it's going this way, please stay out of its way.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Yeah, I love that. Um, so is there a movie world that you wish you could live in?

SPEAKER_00 11:19

I I continuously go back to this, and my buddies and I discuss it all the time. It'd be way too expensive to make it again or do it. But have you seen Waterworld with Kevin Costner?

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Oh, I haven't.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Oh my god, you have to see Waterworld, Maya. It is it is one of those things where they started the movie, I think they changed director twice. It was so expensive because it's all shot on open ocean, right? It's Kevin Costner, there's no more, like there's no more earth left, and so sand and fuel has become sand is like gold. And he's growing all of these plants on his massive like catamaran, he's cruising the ocean, it's like Mad Max on the high seas, right? It basically is, but it's awesome, it is so cool, and he goes diving with a little pocket knife in his mouth and catches this huge monster shark eel thing. And if I could exist in a world, it would be that one because it's like this one's so wackadoo, regardless, that it wouldn't matter if I was in that one. Um, but also I just love to be, I would love to be in the remake or or the like the continuation of the Waterworld universe. It's so I think it's such a 90s kids movie. It was just so awesome. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Oh wow, I love that.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

I'm writing down the movie.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Um Yeah, I think being Australian, like we grew up with Mad Max, especially if you grew up in the desert where I grew up, as like a a second language. Um, and Dr. George Miller and and his wife who who edits, and her name always escapes me, so forgive me, but she is incredible. They've always worked as director-editor on all their films. Um, and they've created this kind of universe that everybody then latches onto that's become this like that's where Terminator steals from. That's where all of these things kind of have come from. And Waterworld is just if you're not doing it in the desert, it's the complete opposite, and it's and it's the same thing, it's so cool.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Oh wow. Um, so I just have um one final question for you.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

So today, what are you most grateful for?

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Oh well. Well, the the real simple answer is like the ability to continue to do what we do and connect with new people. So, like, for example, you're the first person I'm speaking to today, like, for longer than 10 seconds, and it's a brand new face, it's a brand new person that I've never met before. And I think that's something that's really special about what we do. Like, you know, you would chat to many people within the space of your week and share stories and wonder like watch films and take them apart. And I think all too often we forget that part of being a storyteller is like sharing new spaces and places with people and and like learning more about yourself and having conversations that excite you, like you asking me about my life and how I would see it, and it it changes things a little bit and makes you a little bit more aware of what's going on. So I think to me, that's what I'm most grateful for is that continuing of getting to become a storyteller and share stories and meet new people. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

I love that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

It's beautiful to connect, and thank you for taking the time to chat.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and answer my questions. I've loved speaking with you, so thank you. Yeah, thank you, and I can't wait for everyone to see the movie.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Thanks, mate. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

Thank you.