Nothing Else Mattress will be my debut feature and a more personal continuation of themes in my previous work. My last two shorts were magical realist takes on domestic trauma. Jonah and the Vicarious Nature of Homesickness (2010) was a B-movie-inflected tragicomedy looking at the emotional consequences of a man’s decision to leave his family. Moritz and the Woodwose (2013) was a modern fairytale looking at the coping mechanisms created by children to deal with domestic trauma. Moritz was a more realistic portrait of a family but also gave equal weight to the protagonist’s imagination; reality and fantasy were treated as equally natural.
By contrast, Nothing Else Mattress will be my first film to take place almost entirely in the real world, if you can call Australia that. I want to look more directly at family dynamics and how damaged people attempt (and fail) to relate to each other and their environment. The story is partly based on my own experience of sudden divorce and emigration, which was a strange and difficult time for a kid who already had his fair share of neurosis. The time which has passed since has given me enough distance to be able to look back and laugh – not a purely ironic laugh but also an empathetic one, and although the film’s humour will derive from our ironic distance to Rhys and his desperate attempts to maintain control, it is equally important to understand the sense of dread driving him. We need to share his dread, otherwise the film would become a farce, and so it will be important to strike the balance between irony and empathy to make this film not only a comedic experience but also an authentic, cathartic one.
Although the film is told through Rhys’s unreliable worldview, it is the story of his whole family and how each of them feels ill-equipped to deal with the dismantlement of the family structure. When chaos enters the home, they turn on each other and there’s no way back. I am not interested in seeing characters heal on-screen, rather in getting them to a place where they have no choice but to expose their wounds to each other. In order to move forward they will need to rediscover each other on new, slightly damaged terms, and ultimately Rhys and his family must accept being lost not as a weakness but as a strange and unmistakable cause for optimism.
References include Submarine (2010), The Squid and the Whale (2005), Thumbsucker (2005), and the book The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3⁄4 (Townsend, 1985).