A Conversation With Director Glendyn Ivin
Director Glendyn Ivin by Hugh Stewart
Melbourne's visionary filmmaker takes us behind the scenes, revealing the pivotal role music plays in crafting the emotional landscape of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.
‘Alice Hart finds her life changing dramatically when her parents die in a mysterious fire and she is sent to live with her grandmother on a flower farm.’ is a succinct description of the plot of the show, but hardly gets at the show’s heart. The Lost Flowers of Alice Heart is a show about resilience, tragedy, travesty, violence, redemption, and friendship, embodied by characters that feel mysterious but deeply developed, and portrayed with performances that ought to be recognized (so we are).
Starring Sigourney Weaver and Alycia Debnam-Carey and boasting expansive, vivid, captivating cinematography, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart - based on the international best selling novel of the same name by Australian author, Holly Ringland - is well worth your time. We caught up with the show’s director, Glendyn Ivin, to talk about the experience, the soundtrack, and everything weird little thing in between.
Hey there.
Hi.
Audio good?
Yeah.
So straight into it. I read an article today saying The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is possibly the most watched Australian show ever. A 96% on Rotten Tomatoes!!
Thanks mate, I don't even look at that stuff ever and all of a sudden I was getting sent this information from friends. I'm like, fuck is this good? Like, this is amazing. Yeah?
It's crazy. I mean Ozark got 82%.
I’m happy it’s a mark with so many people around the world.
So straight back to the start, were you familiar with the book or a script sent first?
I got sent a script of the first episode from a producer Jodi Matterson who I'd worked with on my last feature film Penguin Bloom. She just sent me the script and said, I think you're going to like this. I knew by the first page of reading I was going to do it. I remember circling all the themes and highlighting all the things that I loved. I sent it to my cinematographer Sam Chiplin. And I was like, Dude, look at this, like, we've been talking about something like this. It was a few years before that we'd shot an ad campaign for the football in and around burning sugar cane and at that time it was so exciting to shoot around the burning cane fields I'd always wanted to see it. Sam and I were talking about why hasn't anyone ever made a story around this world like it's so uniquely Australian. So when this came in probably two years later it was like I manifested it. Ha. So no I hadn't really known about Holly's book then, but I read the book and got really into it. So yeah I fell into it all from there.
Tilda Cobhan-Hervey by Glendyn Ivin
And when does music for you make an appearance within this timeline?
Music starts while I'm reading the script. What is this making me feel? Then I just start listening to music, just digging through playlists or artists. It helps me visualise it in some ways, I've got to hear it before I can see it. I'm a visual person but I feel that sound is the impetus almost over the visuals. So it started very early in the process and a lot of those tracks on that playlist I put together have been there for three or four years now. And with Hania Rani, who is the composer, we started working on the soundtrack in pre-production. So I got her on board, and she just started sending music so I was actually shooting on set wearing headphones listening to the soundtrack of Lost Flowers while I was making it. There's artists that I got really drawn to like Emma Ruth Rundle who I didn't know about and I don't even know how I stumbled across her but because it's a very female story I just found myself listening to a lot of female voices. And because I'm into heavier music personally I was looking for female voices that are involved in heavier music. Emma Ruth Rundle is this incredible singer songwriter from the states who does like this sort of heavy folk Rock, but she does collaborations with bands like Thou, which is an amazing doom metal band. Hearing her vocals for this metal band was really amazing, through this kind of discovery I realised the soundtrack should be very beautiful but with an undercurrent of heavy distorted guitar and metal even though it's not necessarily on screen, It's just there reverberating underneath. A lot of the atmosphere of Lost Flowers comes from listening to heavy, dark music.
Are there any songs you really wanted in there that couldn't make it?
I really wanted to use the band Low.
Oh, yeah.
They're one of my favourite bands. The album Double Negative is one of my favourite albums of all time. And I even spoke to them about them creating music for the show, because I was just so obsessed with it. That was one of the most starstruck moments I've ever had. And I just tried all their songs everywhere to try and put a Low track in there. But you kind of have to respond to what the material wants. And no matter where I tried to force a track in, it just didn't feel right. It’s going to be one of my great regrets in life. But the Doom and Bloom playlist is full of tracks I regret not being able to find a place for. But in a funny way they are still in the series. They influenced it so heavily!
This goes back to the tone and undercurrent you spoke of.
Yeah, actually I spoke to Phoebe Bridgers as well because I'm a huge fan of hers and we did put two of her tracks in there, including some of the video for Motion Sickness. Which I just felt was a perfect fit. I feel I got turned onto Phoebe's music late. In a funny way, I felt like I spent my quarantine with Phoebe Bridgers.
I feel like music is great for that though. I would call myself someone that is passionate about music, but I'm still constantly being put onto new music that I'm not aware of whether you're late or earlier, whatever it is. I love the fact that music has that ability to knock you off your feet, and that just leads to a whole new journey.
Yeah, I'm always searching. I read an article recently that apparently when you hit thirty your interest in music drops off which is why classic radio exists because people go and listen to the music that they liked when they were younger. That never happened for me or lots of people I know, we're just always searching for new music, and still have an addiction, looking for that new thing that you're going to become obsessed with.
I found when I was younger I listened to punk or hardcore and that was it. As I grew older, my tastes grew and grew to cover pretty much all genres of music.
Yeah, yeah, I'm still as hungry as ever. I guess that's the beautiful thing about Spotify. For people like us, it just reveals so much. You can just keep digging and finding the most incredible artists that you've never had access to.
“That never happened for me or lots of people I know, we’re just always searching for new music, and still have an addiction, looking for that new thing that you’re going to become obsessed with.”
Spotify is great at curating music to your tastes for sure.
I'll send you this podcast or listen to it. It’s "The Album Years" podcast by Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness. They do a lot of these mixes of classic albums. They just pick a year, here’s 1987 just looking through the releases of that year, and they just talk about them, but then they find things that they were into at the same time. And I'm writing notes constantly, they'll mention a band that you may not have heard of and they never talk about the popular tracks they'll talk about an obscure track and you go and listen to that, it can really turn into a rabbit hole quickly.
I love those rabbit holes. What live music have you seen lately that you're really blown away by?
I went to Phoebe bridges, which was really good. It was one of those concerts that you walk into, and you expect to see people your age. But my wife and I were looking around and we concluded we are the oldest people here by a long way. But I still really connected with that show. I thought it was really special.
I saw you at the Nick Cave show at Hanging Rock.
That was my first time seeing him!
Yeah, that's right. You said that. That's amazing
It was like a religious experience. At some point, people were out of their seats, standing with their hands in the air, almost like they were moved by a spirit or something.
It does have that spiritual kind of feeling about it.
I mean, that was incredible. The other show that I went to was one of the secret TISM shows.
Oh what.
A friend of mine rang me up and said I can get you a ticket, do you want to go? So we rocked up to the Prince of Wales on a Saturday afternoon and it was packed to the gills. It was like an old school TISM gig and it blew me away, It was timeless. Like being transported back 20 years. Because they wear balaclavas they all look the same whether they are in their 20’s or 60’s.
That's so cool. A timeless experience. Are there any soundtracks that you've listened to lately that you really kind of like admire?
I rewatched Lost in Translation recently with my son. I realised how cool that Air soundtrack was. I was recently in LA and I bought a copy of the soundtrack to Days of Heaven by Terrence Malick.
Alyla Browne by Glendyn Ivin
With Sam Shepard?
Exactly. It’s pretty special. It’s pretty eclectic music but it's got some spoken word from the film as well. I love it when soundtracks have a bit of the film in them. It always makes it feel very special.
To finish up. When you start a project like this, you've got a vision in your head the way that it's gonna look and sound, when you get to the end of filming do you still have the same vision or do things happen and you adapt and change or are you quite strict with that kind of vision that you went into it with?
That's a good question. We create a lot of documents in pre production, like tonal treatments and visual treatments, you know, we listen to music. I do a lot of things to try and find the tone. Then you throw everything else away when you to start filming the thing. You've sort of got so hyped on what you're making that you've fed yourself all this inspiration, that you're kind of looking for it as you go, you're not conscious of it, but you're you've created a path for yourself. So it's sort of like, even though I don’t say, "I want it to look like this…", You just get so heavily doused with tone, so when opportunities present themselves you are ready to capture them. But the music is consistent throughout the process, I'm listening to the same music when I'm shooting as I am when cutting. So it really helps bring consistency to it all.
And on that I think we’ve got it.
Right on.
