‘The Babadook’ is one of the most assured, masterfully directed feature debuts ever made. Jennifer Kent seemed to have been born to direct, she just didn’t realize that was a career path.
“As soon as I could read and write, I was reading and writing plays and acting in them and directing them, but I just didn’t know as a little girl that girls could direct films,” said Kent when she was a guest on IndieWire’s Toolkit podcast to discuss the 10th Anniversay of ‘The Babadook,” which is being re-released in theaters this week. “I mean that never occurred to me. I just involved myself in any storytelling I could and kept writing plays.”
Kent became an actress. Attending the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art, she was a year behind Cate Blanchett and “Babadook” star Essie Davis, and she went on to work professionally.
“I just got bored with acting very quickly,” said Kent. “I didn’t want to spend my life doing TV commercials or bit roles on series.”
Kent would go on to write a number of unproduced screenplays, before writing “The Babadook” while in a state of grief following her father’s death. After five years of studying acting in school, she didn’t want to go back to the world of education to learn a new trade. Tracking down the email address of one of her favorite directors, Lars von Trier, she wrote asking the opportunity to observe him work so she could learn how a director works.
“I wrote to him in this sort of off-the-cuff kind of way. I said things like ‘I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than go to film school’ — I really don’t want to learn in that way — and I said that ‘I’m quite subversive by nature,’ and I’ve just been incredibly moved by his films,” said Kent. “I got a message back from his assistant saying Lars just doesn’t do that. I thought, ‘Oh, well, I tried, followed my instincts. And then an hour later, I got a message back again, ‘Lars has just read your email and he wants to know what you would like to do.’”
Not fully understanding the roles on a movie set, or how it worked, Kent naively asked to be the Assistant Director. The offer came back that she could visit the set of “Dogville” for one day. It was enough for Kent to make the Sydney-to-Denmark flight. One day would turn into the whole shoot, in what turned out to be invaluable apprenticeship.
Kent is the first to acknowledge she is a very different filmmaker from von Trier. So, what did she learn from her “Dogville” apprenticeship?
“What I truly admired was a singular vision, that he protected from start to finish. And surprisingly, that’s actually very rare. Even now I think it’s gotten worse, it’s harder for people to protect, but I learned, I learned that from watching him,” said Kent. “And I also learned that the whole ‘us and them’ — this idea of, ‘Oh, I’m just a lowly person trying to make films and you’re a genius’— that sort of divide evaporated. I don’t mean I started to think I was a genius, I just mean that I thought, ‘I can do this.’ It gave me the confidence to do it my way. As long as I just could protect the work, I would throw myself in.”
To watch the full conversation, see the video at the top of the page. You can also subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
“The Babadook” will be re-released in theaters starting today, September 19, in over 500 theaters. For ticket information, click here.
