Accidents Happen starts off like a live-action suburban fractured fairytale, set somewhere in an imagined universe that could be Connecticut USA, circa the late 1970s. Director Andrew Lancaster and writer Brian Carbee set up an atmosphere of sweet comfort. There are wide green lawns; a garden sprinkler sends pretty streams into the air, where they hang for seconds, like tiny diamonds. There's even a narrator to help set the storybook mood. But the safe, warm feeling is shattered when, in a bizarre BBQ mishap, a man is set alight. In slow motion we watch as he runs around like a human torch, while onlookers panic. It's uncomfortably beautiful and funny? Well, it could be, depending, the filmmakers say, on an audience's pain threshold.
“It was about finding that balance between comedy and tragedy that's so classic,” Lancaster explains. “It can be a hard line to negotiate.”
After a long and successful career as a filmmaker in short subjects, videos, composing and sound design, the movie is his feature debut. Based on US born Carbee's as yet unpublished novel, Accidents Happen, says Lancaster, is a drama with “black comedy elements,” about Billy Conway (Harrison Gilbertson), a fifteen-year-old with a gift for domestic disaster.
For Carbee and Lancaster striking the right attitude to the material was crucial since the movie is frankly, full of unhappiness. A lot of stuff goes wrong for the characters – car accidents, illness, the death of loved ones. Yet, the tone is brittle, sharp.
“We wanted something outrageous at the beginning so as to give people permission to laugh,” Carbee adds. [That given the outline] the movie was not going to be a chore, that's it not going to be so heavy.”
Central to the action is Billy's mum, Gloria (Geena Davis), a version of Carbee's own mother. Loud, abrasive, dominating, self-absorbed, the movie is about how Billy must face up to Gloria's all-enveloping force. He has to, Carbee says, or else there's no way he can get on with his own life. Gloria is volatile and embarrassing, mostly because of a high-octane potty mouth. To paraphrase Carbee, Gloria doesn't so much turn a phrase, she flips it over and kicks it death.
“The use of language is protection,” he reasons. “It's an armoury but also it's a weapon so they can fight for themselves.”
The first version of the script says Carbee was written nearly ten years ago. It was definitely a black comedy, bleaker and blacker than the charming, larger than life tone the film eventually assumed. “The thing about black comedy is that the characters are really disposable.” He says that a lot of the development process was dedicated to making the script more emotional – so that the black comedy was more about the characters own need to bottle up their feelings.
After Carbee, Lancaster and producer Anthony Anderson tried to set up the film in the US, Accidents Happen was shot in Sydney over thirty days in the winter of 2008 with an entirely Australian and NZ cast (except for Davis, of course), including Sarah Woods, Erik Thompson, Rebecca Massey, Harry Cook and Joel Toebeck. Still, at no time did Carbee and Lancaster consider 'transposing' it 'to make it Australian.'
“My mother actually spoke like that,” says Carbee, “and that vernacular doesn't really translate.”
In the end, shooting in Australia meant that the picture achieved more bang for buck, says Lancaster. Strict union regulations and fringe costs in the US would have reduced the films scale and detail. A more restricted budget would have restricted Lancaster's style: “It's not a handheld gritty world I'm trying to capture,” he explains, “it's actually a constructed world I'm trying to create.” The director planned a raft of visual and practical special effects shots, including a slow-mo car smash and an errant bowling ball that seems to have a life of its own. In the final version cinematographer Ben Nott and production designer Elizabeth Mary Moore convincingly re-create a version of Connecticut in the '70s and '80s, that's both familiar and slightly strange all at once.
The roots of Accidents Happen stretch back thirteen years to Carbee's one man show, In Search of Mike, which was later made into a successful short, directed by Lancaster in 2000. Inventive, funny, fast and very rude, with Carbee playing all but one of the roles, including his mother, it was a sad and he says somewhat cruel portrait of 'Gloria'. His novel and the film were meant to whittle away at the harsh “bitch” to reveal the vulnerable woman underneath.
“Geena was a little scared of the short,” he says, laughing. “But it turns out she had a mother who was a bit of a trial but amazing too.” As for Davis, he says, she has a warmth that bleeds through, “no matter what…she brings a welcome good vibe to the screen just by our history with her and so she could afford to be a bitch.” Says Lancaster: “I got really excited after Brian told me that [Davis] looked like his real mum.”
Accidents Happen debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last year, where, says Lancaster its sense of humour about death and loss seem to resonate powerfully, especially with younger audiences. “There is a way about making jokes about death that's becomes a valid way of dealing [with the emotions]. It's not about suppressing emotion. It makes grieving real because it's not all about gloom and doom.”
Read our review of the film here
