Aaron Wilson set aside time to talk to me about his feature début Canopy, and went into particular detail about the film’s most memorable aspect: its very ambitious and deeply haunting sound design.
So Aaron: was the initial idea behind Canopy to do with the World War II story or to do with the soundscape?
It started less as a war story than as a story about individuals who were experiencing fear in the context of war. And it came from me talking to war veterans, less about the war than their own personal experiences about when they were isolated and by themselves… And I thought those stories were the ones that I could really connect with as someone who’s never been to war. I could understand what it was like as an individual to be fearful… And when they were feeling like they had been never more lonely, you know, I could relate to that, and it’s not just me: it’s people all over the world. I thought that as a filmmaker it would be a very interesting way to tell a story, a story that’s part of our history.
Some people have compared your film to Gravity as both are about the fight to stay alive, but there’s another comparison that could be made, as both your film and the recently-released All Is Lost feature essentially no real dialogue.
I don’t think that I consciously set out to write a script with no dialogue. After I’d heard these stories and read some books, I just started writing back in about 2006… And the first draft had no dialogue, as I thought that it was a way to keep that authenticity about the stories that I heard. Under those circumstances you wouldn’t talk, you’d be quiet, and you probably wouldn’t say anything when you were by yourself. And it’s like the sounds around you would become a voice: in fact, years later these people were telling me that they vividly remember the sounds of crickets and birds and the jungle around them. I just thought that all the talking was being done by the jungle, and that when the human characters met, any dialogue wouldn’t bring them together or move the story forward but only put them in danger. I wanted the script to be practical and authentic… I guess that as many films have a lot of dialogue, it was therefore harder to get across to people what exactly I was trying to do, especially as so much of the sound design was to be done in post-production… Comparing the film to All Is Lost and Gravity is helpful for someone who’s trying to sell a movie without dialogue, as I don’t have to push it too far to the audience… I can say that it’s a story of survival, and that the dialogue is secondary. It all becomes about body language and gesture, the non-verbal communication we use every day and take for granted.
The sound design is seriously intricate, so how long did it take to complete?
Once we got stuck into it, it took about seven months… I was sitting in jungles pre-recording during many days and nights, sitting in the mangroves, the mountain tops, at all times of the day, just trying to get a breath of this voice of the jungle world. So when we came back, we had authentic sound from that space: I mean, someone from Singapore would say, ‘Yes, that’s Singapore’… But we did also want to play and manipulate with sound, so that as day turns into night, and Jim’s becoming restless and lethargy and panic are setting in, we started to manipulate the sound, as he starts to become freaked out by what he’s hearing. We looked at making some of the jungle sounds sound more mechanical, as if the jungle is mimicking back the war sounds to him… It became more of the whole psychological experience of sound, and given that there’s no real dialogue, that really allowed us to push and play with the sound, making it somewhere between sound design and [musical] score.
How was Khan Chittenden cast as Jim, and how challenging was it for him to play a character who says nothing?
I cast Khan by taking him and other actors we were looking at and putting them alone in a room and asking them to imagine a place or a world that would feel foreign to them, or scary to them. Something like the Australian bush at night… I wanted them to just exist in that space, and I was going to film them, and see what happened. Just let them sit and be, and so I rolled the camera, and then turned it off about 15 or 20 minutes later… And it’s interesting what actors start to do, as either A) they freak out as you haven’t told them to stop yet or B) they drift off and forget that they’re being filmed. And that’s what happened with Khan: he went into this quiet space and he didn’t do a lot. But his expression evolved, and that was fascinating for me, as I was wholly engaged by what he was doing and where he was going, and so I thought that that was something that would translate well to the film, especially the first part… And so we expanded upon what we did in that audition, and I took him into the real jungle space, real jungle-type spaces around Sydney, and then we took him to Singapore and to the jungle spaces every day for about two weeks, all so that he could immerse himself in that world, and we could see how he would react.
And what about the casting of Tzu-yi Mo as Seng?
He’s a Taiwanese actor. I was at the Hong Kong Film Festival looking for actors, and I knew I wanted a Mandarin and Hokkien-speaking actor… And I was looking for films from Taiwan, and I saw this particular film and the lead really stood out for me, and I thought he was wholly captivating, and so I went to the Taipei Film Commission’s stall at the market and I said, ‘Look, I’ve just seen this film, and I really love this actor, so do you know where I could find him?’. And they said, ‘Well, actually, he’s standing right behind you!’ And so we spent the weekend talking and getting to know each other and getting to know the story. He didn’t know a lot about Australians being in Singapore during the war, like a lot of Australians don’t know that Australians worked very closely with Singapore Chinese during the Japanese occupation.
So Aaron, after such an impressive feature début what do you do next?
We’re already working on another film. It’s something of a follow-up to Canopy… The idea was that it had to be a much larger project than Canopy, and it has this individual who goes to war, and we see the birthplace of this trauma, but then he goes home and we see how that affects his families and friends. And that was very important to me, as I grew up in a little country town and I was very aware of the legacy that these men came back with, and how that stays with the family of ex-servicemen down through the generations.
I Wake Up Screening 