‘Art makes me feel seen': Young creator tells
Fitz: Bridget, congratulations on your art. When did you take it up?
BK: I have been drawing since I was little but I started using Posca pens in year 12 at St Scholastica's College, Glebe, which I went to with my two sisters. That was when I got really excited about my art.
Fitz: When did you realise you were not just good at it, but seriously talented?
BK: When I finished high school, I kept doing my art because it made me happy. When I was 21, I won the Blooming Arts 'Emerging Artist' Prize. I won a mentorship to University of Sydney College of the Arts. I felt happy because people started to call me an artist.
BK: I get ideas for my art from the world around me. I like colours and shapes and showing people how I see things!
Fitz: What did your parents and sisters say when you told them your work was to be displayed at Vivid?
BK: They were so excited and happy for me. They told me they were really proud. I am the first (and probably last) person in my family to have my artwork on a building! I was really happy because I love doing art and I got to show it to lots of people.
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Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘So cool': Stranger Things star finds his happy place among the Ochi
Having grown up on our screens as the golden-hearted schoolboy Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things, Finn Wolfhard is used to inhabiting an otherworldly has spent the past 10 years – almost half his life – heading off attacks from the alien forces of the Upside Down dimension. Mostly, he has confronted the unknown on greenscreen: blank sets where the work of computer animators will round out the action. 'They are amazing artists in their own way,' he says. 'But as an actor, you are reacting off nothing.' What attracted him to making fantasy film The Legend of Ochi, he says, was its hand-made quality. Isaiah Saxon's film, which is screening at MIFF, is also a fantasy about a clash between humans and bizarre creatures, but it is a very different beast. Most of it was shot on location. It is set in the Carpathian Mountains – Count Dracula's old haunt – where the villages, save for the occasional passing car, look very much as they always have, surrounded by mountains covered in thick forest. Here, the foolhardy explorer may encounter the Ochi, which are like large apes with an alien tweak. The smaller Ochi are played by puppets; the larger ones are actors in furry suits. 'I didn't want to go too far from nature,' says Saxon. 'I wanted the audience to see the Ochi as real animals living in a real place.' For Wolfhard, all this was fantastically old-school. 'I loved the idea of working with animatronics and puppets,' he says, speaking over Zoom along with German actress Helena Zengel, who plays the film's heroine, Yuri. The puppets, he says, required people to operate them; one person's entire job might be operating a key Ochi's ears. 'This was an opportunity to really have this kind of amazing experience which not a lot of people get to have these days,' says Wolfhard, who has been in our lounge rooms as Mike since he was 12, but is still only 22. 'There was a whole team of people piloting the Ochi. And there was something so cool about that because, as they were controlling the puppets, they were the real actors.' Zengel is 17, but her character is just emerging from childhood, torn between loyalty to her embittered father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and longing for her mother Dasha (Emily Watson), a mythic figure who left the family under an impenetrable cloud years before. Maxim regularly takes the local boys – his proxy sons, handed over by their fathers for Maxim to toughen up – out on raiding parties. They try to kill any Ochi they can find, then come home for a revivifying wrestle; it's a sort of genocidal version of Scouts. Wolfhard plays Petro, a hesitant orphan whom Maxim has taken into his home. Petro is repelled by this bloodlust but is too timid to say so; it is Yuri who is the good shot, keen to hold her own among the boys. Until, the day after one of these night raids, she finds a wounded baby Ochi in the woods. The little Ochi looks like a cross between Yoda and a bush baby. Miserable Yuri feels an immediate affinity for it; more remarkably, she discovers she can trill its musical language. She takes it home, bandages it, sings to it. Loading 'I wanted to centre a kid who felt that her ability to express herself had withered or died,' says Saxon. 'Yuri is shut down and her only outlet is listening to screaming black metal. Then she sees an animal that is an antidote to everything humans are: direct, intuitive, instinctual. What would happen to that kid if that Ochi energy was in her life?' As it happens – and happenstance proves unusually obliging here, even by the standards of fairytale – she rediscovers her mother, Dasha, now a shepherd high in the hills. You can't befriend an Ochi,' says Dasha. You shouldn't try. 'Look at what we did to wolves,' she spits. 'Turned them into lapdogs!' This is Saxon's first feature, but he has already carved out a significant career as an inspired music video director, working with artists including Björk and Grizzly Bear; Wolfhard, who recently released his first album, was drawn to the project initially because he was a fan of those clips. 'I have this discomfort with our reliance on language as the primary communication format as human,' Saxon says. The Ochi communicate by merging their emotions through their voices, which are produced by mixing a mockingbird's call and something called a throat whistle. Saxon discovered the throat whistle and its great exponent, Paul Manalatos, when he was trawling the internet. There was Manalatos, warbling into his webcam. Somehow, that's very much in the spirit of the film. Zengel started acting even earlier than Wolfhard. She was 10 years old when she was lauded as revelatory in the tough 2019 German drama System Crasher, about a frighteningly volatile ward of the state who is passed from one agency to another, all her carers soon admitting she is beyond them. 'I was super young, you know,' she says. 'Back then, obviously I had fun saying these bad words! It was a cool time; I was able to do anything that kids shouldn't do. But I understood what was going on, I understood the topic and I took it seriously.' Loading The Legend of Ochi, as a family movie culminating in a clutch of benign messages about tolerance, diversity and the environment, is ostensibly that film's polar opposite, but Zengel notes that it doesn't condescend to younger audiences. Very young children might have eyes only for the baby Ochi, but there is a darkness at the heart of the story that could provoke uncomfortable questions for viewers of any age. 'I think there are adults who might take life lessons from it,' she says. 'It has beautiful side stories that it tells and things that you can project on today's society and today's life. So I think it's a very complex film.' Wolfhard agrees. 'I loved the script for just that reason. That, yes, kids could watch it, but it wasn't explicitly for children. I think movies made for kids in the last 15 years really try to spoon-feed children and assume they can't take in more nuanced themes.' Think of a great movie for children: almost everyone goes straight for The Wizard of Oz. 'I watched that as a kid and there's a lot of scary stuff in that movie. But life is scary!' says Wolfhard. 'Oh yes! I was traumatised by The Wizard of Oz!' enthuses Zengel. 'I like when children even at a young age see films or talk about things that are more serious.' Obviously, the Ochi are standing in for all the real animals that have been hunted or crowded out by humans – wolves, whales, tigers – at the same time as pushing a plea for peaceful co-existence that children readily understand. Closer to home, however, is the film's frankness about families' failings. Loading When Yuri runs away, mad Maxim dons some armour that could date back to Vlad the Impaler, gathers his boys and prepares to run his daughter to ground with a rifle. Dafoe's Maxim is ultimately a pathetically vulnerable man, but he's dangerous with it; Emily Watson, as the bolter, is hardly a cosy mother figure. They compare poorly with Ochi parents, who enfold their young in their fur, singing. The film is also prepared to face the unhappiness of children. As someone who grew up in front of millions of people, Wolfhard has spoken with feeling about how he was unable to explain to anyone, including himself, that he was not enjoying his Stranger Things fame in the way that everyone around him assumed he was. 'When people ask a kid, 'Are you OK?' they'll say, 'yes'. And that means nothing,' he told Cosmopolitan. 'Kids don't want to disappoint anyone. They don't even know if they're OK.' All these kids are unhappy. In the great tradition of children's literature, however, they will find a way out through having their own adventures, away from adult meddling. And, in Yuri's case, with a secret furry friend.
The Age
a day ago
- The Age
MIFF 2025: Stranger Things star finds his happy place in The Legend of Ochi
, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Having grown up on our screens as the golden-hearted schoolboy Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things , Finn Wolfhard is used to inhabiting an otherworldly has spent the past 10 years – almost half his life – heading off attacks from the alien forces of the Upside Down dimension. Mostly, he has confronted the unknown on greenscreen: blank sets where the work of computer animators will round out the action. 'They are amazing artists in their own way,' he says. 'But as an actor, you are reacting off nothing.' What attracted him to making fantasy film The Legend of Ochi , he says, was its hand-made quality. Isaiah Saxon's film, which is screening at MIFF, is also a fantasy about a clash between humans and bizarre creatures, but it is a very different beast. Most of it was shot on location. It is set in the Carpathian Mountains – Count Dracula's old haunt – where the villages, save for the occasional passing car, look very much as they always have, surrounded by mountains covered in thick forest. Here, the foolhardy explorer may encounter the Ochi, which are like large apes with an alien tweak. The smaller Ochi are played by puppets; the larger ones are actors in furry suits. 'I didn't want to go too far from nature,' says Saxon. 'I wanted the audience to see the Ochi as real animals living in a real place.' Helena Zengel as Yuri, with her baby Ochi. Credit: Madman Films For Wolfhard, all this was fantastically old-school. 'I loved the idea of working with animatronics and puppets,' he says, speaking over Zoom along with German actress Helena Zengel, who plays the film's heroine, Yuri. The puppets, he says, required people to operate them; one person's entire job might be operating a key Ochi's ears. 'This was an opportunity to really have this kind of amazing experience which not a lot of people get to have these days,' says Wolfhard, who has been in our lounge rooms as Mike since he was 12, but is still only 22. 'There was a whole team of people piloting the Ochi. And there was something so cool about that because, as they were controlling the puppets, they were the real actors.' Zengel is 17, but her character is just emerging from childhood, torn between loyalty to her embittered father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and longing for her mother Dasha (Emily Watson), a mythic figure who left the family under an impenetrable cloud years before. Maxim regularly takes the local boys – his proxy sons, handed over by their fathers for Maxim to toughen up – out on raiding parties. They try to kill any Ochi they can find, then come home for a revivifying wrestle; it's a sort of genocidal version of Scouts. Finn Wolfhard with Willem Dafoe in The Legend of Ochi. Credit: Madman Films Wolfhard plays Petro, a hesitant orphan whom Maxim has taken into his home. Petro is repelled by this bloodlust but is too timid to say so; it is Yuri who is the good shot, keen to hold her own among the boys. Until, the day after one of these night raids, she finds a wounded baby Ochi in the woods. The little Ochi looks like a cross between Yoda and a bush baby. Miserable Yuri feels an immediate affinity for it; more remarkably, she discovers she can trill its musical language. She takes it home, bandages it, sings to it. Loading 'I wanted to centre a kid who felt that her ability to express herself had withered or died,' says Saxon. 'Yuri is shut down and her only outlet is listening to screaming black metal. Then she sees an animal that is an antidote to everything humans are: direct, intuitive, instinctual. What would happen to that kid if that Ochi energy was in her life?' As it happens – and happenstance proves unusually obliging here, even by the standards of fairytale – she rediscovers her mother, Dasha, now a shepherd high in the hills. You can't befriend an Ochi,' says Dasha. You shouldn't try. 'Look at what we did to wolves,' she spits. 'Turned them into lapdogs!' This is Saxon's first feature, but he has already carved out a significant career as an inspired music video director, working with artists including Björk and Grizzly Bear; Wolfhard, who recently released his first album, was drawn to the project initially because he was a fan of those clips. 'I have this discomfort with our reliance on language as the primary communication format as human,' Saxon says. The Ochi communicate by merging their emotions through their voices, which are produced by mixing a mockingbird's call and something called a throat whistle. Saxon discovered the throat whistle and its great exponent, Paul Manalatos, when he was trawling the internet. There was Manalatos, warbling into his webcam. Somehow, that's very much in the spirit of the film. The discovery of a wounded baby Ochi changes everything for Helena Zengel's Yuri. Credit: Madman Films Zengel started acting even earlier than Wolfhard. She was 10 years old when she was lauded as revelatory in the tough 2019 German drama System Crasher , about a frighteningly volatile ward of the state who is passed from one agency to another, all her carers soon admitting she is beyond them. 'I was super young, you know,' she says. 'Back then, obviously I had fun saying these bad words! It was a cool time; I was able to do anything that kids shouldn't do. But I understood what was going on, I understood the topic and I took it seriously.' Loading The Legend of Ochi , as a family movie culminating in a clutch of benign messages about tolerance, diversity and the environment, is ostensibly that film's polar opposite, but Zengel notes that it doesn't condescend to younger audiences. Very young children might have eyes only for the baby Ochi, but there is a darkness at the heart of the story that could provoke uncomfortable questions for viewers of any age. 'I think there are adults who might take life lessons from it,' she says. 'It has beautiful side stories that it tells and things that you can project on today's society and today's life. So I think it's a very complex film.' Wolfhard agrees. 'I loved the script for just that reason. That, yes, kids could watch it, but it wasn't explicitly for children. I think movies made for kids in the last 15 years really try to spoon-feed children and assume they can't take in more nuanced themes.' Think of a great movie for children: almost everyone goes straight for The Wizard of Oz . 'I watched that as a kid and there's a lot of scary stuff in that movie. But life is scary!' says Wolfhard. 'Oh yes! I was traumatised by The Wizard of Oz !' enthuses Zengel. 'I like when children even at a young age see films or talk about things that are more serious.' A mother Ochi leaves her human counterpart in the shade in The Legend of Ochi. Credit: Madman Films Obviously, the Ochi are standing in for all the real animals that have been hunted or crowded out by humans – wolves, whales, tigers – at the same time as pushing a plea for peaceful co-existence that children readily understand. Closer to home, however, is the film's frankness about families' failings. Loading When Yuri runs away, mad Maxim dons some armour that could date back to Vlad the Impaler, gathers his boys and prepares to run his daughter to ground with a rifle. Dafoe's Maxim is ultimately a pathetically vulnerable man, but he's dangerous with it; Emily Watson, as the bolter, is hardly a cosy mother figure. They compare poorly with Ochi parents, who enfold their young in their fur, singing.
Sydney Morning Herald
19-07-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
Dying For Sex has earned this talented Australian an Emmy nod
Fitz: So what was the 'hinge moment' in your life which veered you towards actively pursuing directing as a career? SM: I was about 13, and my first drama teacher at Caulfield Grammar, Mr Joachim Matschoss – who I'm still in touch with – actually wrote in my drama book, 'you should really consider this as a profession'. I had no idea what that really meant because for me drama was fun, and I enjoyed doing it, but I didn't know how you could make it a life's work. But that put the idea in my head… Fitz: And the influence of attending Sydney's own NIDA in 2007? SM: It was honestly the best year of my life. I loved being surrounded by people who all were as enthusiastic as I was about theatre, and took it as seriously as I did. I was just in awe of that school and the teachers and my classmates. I always loved listening to the directors and the choreographers and the designers and listening to how they did things, how they saw things. Fitz: Go on. SM: At NIDA, it was about the rigour of being an informed artist. There was always so much pressure – and rightly so – to make sure that you're at the forefront of the entire creative industry. And the only way you can do that is if you watch everything, see as much art and theatre and opera and everything else that you can, so that you know who everyone is, and you know what art is in the world right now, so you can be ahead of the zeitgeist. And I really take that so seriously in my daily life now. I'm always at galleries and staying adventurous and creative, and that's what has made me the artist that I am. Fitz: So you are operating by informed instinct, with no rigid playbook? SM: Yes. It is all instinct, from years of being in rehearsal rooms and then NIDA and then AFTRS [the Australian Film Television and Radio School]. Fitz: And so when you moved from theatre to film and television, what would you say were your own hallmarks in approach? SM: I think it's the performance style I create with the actors. I want it be grounded and believable, but I'm not afraid to push extreme performances – because I also think people are extreme. I love colour, which probably comes from growing up and staring out at the Hong Kong harbour and neon lights my whole life. I'd also say I've got a dark and unusual sense of humour, but that would also come from living in so many countries and understanding many different kinds of comedy, right? And music. Nothing captures mood better than the right music. Fitz: So for your debut feature film, Babyteeth, at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, you received a standing ovation for 15 minutes? SM: Yeah, that was crazy. We'd just finished it at the last minute, so we had no idea how they were going to respond. We'd never known where people would laugh, where people would cry. So it was quite overwhelming. We were very stressed to work out whether it was any good or not. Obviously, the standing ovation helped us feel better about it. Fitz: How do you do get the best performances out of your actors? Are you somebody who wants 50 takes? SM: I do like to have a proper relationship with them off-screen, and for them to have that with each other. We must know each other, beyond just being professionals together. No, I don't do a lot of takes, and when I do repeat them, they're always quite different. I'm very confident about when I've got something and I can move on quite quickly. I don't want to over intellectualise it. I want to work out how we're really going to transform this character through their movements, not just being a talking head. Fitz: After you yell 'Cut!' and 'That's a wrap for the day, people,' do they all go home, while you sit there until midnight, going through the rushes? SM: No. I've got a bit of a photographic memory, so when it comes to the content that I've shot, I don't need to rewatch anything afterwards. And to be honest, I don't really like looking at any of it until I've finished because I find it confusing. In this art form, scenes might move into different spots, so you can't overly plan every transition from one scene to another, because that scene might end up at the end of the project instead of at the beginning. Fitz: And when they all finally do go home, are you then buried for six months putting it all together? SM: Yes. And that's the bit I always struggle with because it's a much more lonely process. But at least I have the most amazing editor, an Australian, Steve Evans, and he makes my life really exciting during that period because he's so proficient in music, and a huge reason why my work has so much great music in it. And I come in to the editing booth at the end of a shoot as an exhausted shell of a person, and he revives me creatively again. Fitz: How did Dying For Sex come across your desk, and what is the premise of the story? SM: It was based on a podcast about a woman called Molly and her best friend, Nikki. They're both actors and when Molly finds out she's dying of cancer, she realises she hasn't had enough sexual experience and variety in her life and so starts to explore it in the time she has left. When I read the synopsis, I loved it. I knew it was going to be a really strong tonal challenge. Fitz: What's a tonal challenge? SM: It's when I read it and I love the really interesting tone on the page, but start wondering how do I actually execute that with all the other elements of the visuals and performance and music? And I know that it's going to be hard to get right. Dying For Sex could easily have come across as bad taste, and it had to be handled carefully. And so all of us were on board with that, and the challenge was delicately working out you could have a scene that talks about sexual abuse and then making a fart joke in the same moment. Fitz: When you go to the Emmys will you have a speech prepared in case you win, or would that be bad karma? SM: Yes. I am so nervous about public speaking that there's no way that I wouldn't have something written down, because I just can't get up and wing it. I'm not a performer. Loading Fitz: Well, if it's not bad karma, let's have a little practice. 'Thank you, thank you all! The person I'd like to thank most is …' SM: '… is my daughter, Dylan. She's 10, and she was just six months old when I started doing television, and she has very much been on this journey with me the whole way.' My daughter loves hanging out on set, and we have wonderful, creative people around our house all the time. Life is more rich because of it. Being a single mum is a little bit challenging in this industry, but I also feel like this industry is incredibly supportive of that – particularly in London, where I live now – and it never seems like it's a disadvantage, which is really nice. Fitz: So now you've got an Emmy nomination, and maybe an Emmy itself, we can presume you've nailed the zeitgeist with your work. How do you define that zeitgeist in 2025?
