Thomas: Between this and Come to Daddy, Bookworm seems to be a film with a bit of a larger scale. What was it like to work with a bit of a larger scope this time out?

Ant: It’s strange, because it felt like it was still an intimate story between a couple of characters. In some respects, there are probably more mechanics going on in terms of characters than Daddy, but in terms of logistics and scope and actual production, it was hugely different. It was a monstrous one compared to Daddy. Yet, still very independent at its core. It wasn’t like we went Hollywood style on this one; it was very much still a small indie. At its heart, it was either going to live or die on whether the characters gelled together and the chemistry worked on screen. And so, I felt pretty confident once I saw them together that we had something special. So, it was just just don’t get in the way. My job was to let that breathe and just let them have fun together and really see if that relationship feels like a very real arc that works throughout the whole narrative. Watching it with an audience, I could totally feel it was connecting with people.

Thomas: That must be a really good feeling.

Ant: It absolutely is, because you lose perspective. look to Clint Eastwood and how he makes films and I think that’s how you should do it because I don’t do it that way. He hardly gets involved with the edit. He turns up, looks at him once gives notes comes back, they do the re-edit. I’m there every single frame movement of the edit.It’s a ridiculous amount of time that you spend from script to prep production all the way through to post. I was so burnt out by it. I didn’t want to look at it ever again in my life. So I needed some distance and I had no inkling of what we had. But [at Fanatasia] it’s a heightened atmosphere, of course, but it was the first sort of real public screening and it was just, I couldn’t, honestly,  couldn’t have asked for a better reception.

Thomas: You mentioned the sort of idea that that core of the film has a heart that the film was going to live or die off that core relationship between Nell and Elijah. The question I want to ask you is that I found that that this seemed to come from the campfire sequences. What was the impetus behind those sequences?

Ant: To be honest during the making of it, , I suddenly realized “wow, we’ve got sort of a lot of repetition in this film. How are we going to break it up? Because it’s an adventure film that really doesn’t have a lot of action sequences compared to what you expect from adventure films. It’s definitely not Raiders. It’s way more of a -if you take out the humor – like a Kelly Reichert movie. It’s a very languid you hanging out with, it’s like a buddy movie of people just sort of wandering through the wilderness together. So how do you give those scenes a kind of vibrancy and life to them, even though there’s not much kinetic energy happening in them. We just had to have a way out of giving the film a kind of quality that felt like there was a journey happening, which is why we had the idea of chapters and breaking it up and giving a sense that it tied in with her as a bookworm.

Maybe this whole thing is like a post-journal, where there’s kind of a meta sort of overview to the whole thing of that. I felt like it moves…enough. I’m the worst person in the edit because I just think everything’s boring. Get rid of it, kill your babies. I have no qualms in cutting things down, which is unusual. Usually, it’s like the director is the last person to want anything to go. But I really feel like I’m an audience member first and foremost. Sometimes that puts really overt pressure on the film itself, and it should sometimes have its own natural rhythms. You shouldn’t fight those initial gut instincts of what you need. There was a couple more sequences in there that we thought about doing, but we just didn’t have time, didn’t have money.

Thomas: What were those sequences if you don’t mind me asking

Ant: There would have been like a couple of more sort of moments of jeopardy, of actually going down rapids or something of the like, a sort of heightened that sense of what I connect to those adventure films of the seventies. They all had those moments. But, they also just threw kids down waterfalls without it. You know, nowadays you need four weeks of planning, you have to get approvals. It’s such a different world now. You can’t just make up things “like, hey, go chase those dogs over there.” Part of me feels like I wish there was a couple more elements like that, but then again, the film is own beast and you have to be happy with what you got. I’m always wanting more; I always look for those things which is crazy. It should just be done and dusted and you move on. I keep thinking about everything I want to change about it, but I swear to God, I’m never going to be one of those people who go back and actually do anything about it. I think that’s the craziest thing on earth is where directors go back and Recolor their films, or come up with some crazy reasons why they have to change it. After years and decades.

Thomas: Have you worked with child actors before?

Ant: No, no, we were a few months out of Nell turning 12 and that would have made things a lot easier in terms of the hours. We were very short hours because she had to get from certain areas to location and that’s all covered in her work time. So, there was a lot of planning on how to work with Elijah and then shoot blocks. And that kind of adds pressure across the board to everything. That was also a reason why we just couldn’t add a lot. You can’t just think of things. We were lucky enough to be ahead of schedule at one stage where we could go off and just get some beautiful sort of just ad living moments of the sense of wonder of just hanging out together.

There’s a couple of segments of them running around through the forest and playing tag and running through cascade. I was so happy we did because that’s my memories of those films about the joy of just being in that kind of in the absolute wilderness, the sense of freedom of just running wild, which is an expression that we use back home. All the time as a kid, we just had freedom of being able to roam free like wild animals. There was no parental supervision, kids could just get out in nature, never give a time when they were going to come back. And so this is kind of an ode to all those that crazy beautiful past before technology came and ruined everything of that freedom and that sense of wonder that, which is why the legend of the Panther is so important. It’s that kind of sense of wondering of the unknown that we used to have as kids of the seventies. We believed in all that stuff because the world was still unexplored. There were still areas that we don’t know anything about. We completely believed that something beneath the Bermuda triangle was pulling down planes. It was all very real for me. The world was incredibly mysterious. And now it just feels like we know too much. Repo man: the more, you know, the less, right? It totally feels like he was on the money on that one.

Thomas: What was it like working with Nell then?

Ant: She was so well prepared. If anyone forgot a line, she knew their line off by heart, she pulled me up on some grammatical errors in the script. She is a bookworm. She’s very literate. She reads every day. She just an incredible. I wouldn’t say precocious because there’s a sort of negative connotation to that, but to me that’s just someone who’s super confident, young knows what they want, she got a great sense of humor. She’s just a delightful human being, man. Like she is Mildred. She doesn’t think there is because she finds Mildred, sarcastic and quite mean spirited and she’s not like that, but strip it, take away that kind of layer, she nails a lot of it.

Thomas: Two features under your belt, what’s next for you, my friend?

Ant: I’ve got a couple of scripts. We’ve got a long dormant one that we’ve tried to get up multiple times in the pandemic, screwed us around once and then we had some financial restructuring to do so that one’s on the pipeline. And then I’ve got another one which is kind of a really smaller kind of unique. I keep doing these films that don’t fit into any category, which is really annoying because they’re so hard to finance because people just want them to be put into boxes, but I’m more interested in things that kind of fit between the boxes. So yeah, I’ve got multiple things. You have to have multiple projects on the oil because they constantly tip over or something’s going to change. I don’t want to say anything because I want to jinx it for sure, but I hope, I hope it doesn’t take five years again before the next one!