Word: shortland
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...Most messed-up of all is Heidi, Shortland's angel with dirty wings, whose eternal openness almost leads to her destruction. In the film's most daring scene, she brings home two city boys to her room where, drugged out, she is passed around like a rag doll. Both funny and unbearably sad, the scene developed from intensive rehearsals with National Institute of Dramatic Art graduates Toby Schmitz and Henry Nixon. "It was almost as if it was just her body in the scene and not her soul," Shortland recalls. With Cornish's out-there performance (the light to Worthington...
...acting newcomer brings to Heidi a slow sensuality. She's disarmingly innocent, with the cheekbones of a young Nicole Kidman. But it's her upward-inflecting voice that perfectly captures adolescence, the state of self-discovery first mined by Shortland in Joy (2000), her graduating aftrs short. "You know what it is?" she muses. "I was reading about Gus Van Sant. He was saying that it's a time of life where you're open to the most change, and that makes for fascinating characters...
...Without the New South Wales Film and Television Office's Aurora Script Workshop, from which Somersault is the first feature to be made, these characters might have turned out differently. Shortland had originally envisaged a Scarlett O'Hara femme fatale hooking up with a working-class road worker who lives on the shores of Lake George. Then Aurora introduced her to Oscar-nominated screenwriter Rob Festinger (In the Bedroom) and The Piano producer Jan Chapman. "They just said, Throw out the script and start again," Shortland recalls...
...What they didn't get rid of is a truthfulness that comes from characters drawn from life. Heidi was an art-school tomboy type Shortland had observed while working in a jeans shop in Canberra, where she grew up, while Bianca's Asperger's brother, in whom Heidi sees a mirror image of herself, is an amalgam of the children the director worked with as a teaching aide at a special school in Sydney. "There's something beautiful about their fixation with detail," Shortland recalls. The same could be said of her own painterly eye. And her extraordinary ability...
...guitar (Kelly), keyboards (FitzGerald) and percussion (Schutzinger) defy description. But over the course of three years, one album and legions of live shows, the Sydney band has created countless sounds tracks in search of a movie. Then last year, while watching the rushes of Somersault in Jindabyne, director Shortland was handed their CD by music supervisor Norman Parkhill, and the sound chimed with her vision. "Do you know that Icelandic band Mumm?" Shortland says. "We were listening to them as well, and Bj?rk, and Goldfrapp, so there's a lot of sampling of that Austrian mountain music...