Brooding, dense and hypnotic, David Michôd’s feature debut, Animal Kingdom, opening Friday, enters the viewer’s bloodstream quietly, then completely, and leaves a concussive aftershock. Based loosely on real events in the crime world of Michôd’s native Melbourne, Australia, the story of one particular (fictional) thieving family unfolds in lurid detail against a throbbing thicket of sound created by Sam Petty. When the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival early this year it claimed the Jury’s top prize and performances by the intensely menacing Jacki Weaver and Ben Mendelsohn, and by newcomer James Frecheville haven’t stopped collecting laurels ever since. And, oh yeah, the Aussie star Guy Pearce is amazing too.

We sat down with the breakout director to talk about myth, mafia and what to do next.

Chris: The film feels to me like a mythic saga—Greek, tragic, epic. Is that the way you intended it?

David: Yeah. I wanted to make a crime film and I wanted to make one of substance. Something weighty. I didn’t want to make a crime film that would disappear into the back shelves of DVD stores. I didn’t want to make something that was small and a little bit thrilling but ultimately unsubstantial. I wanted to make something of scale and classic, if not austere, and kind of terrifying at the same time.

Chris: Easier said then done. But it does resonate that way. It feels arch without the camp of, say, Tarantino or Guy Ritchie—both of whom you’ve pointed out as making the other kind of crime film.

David: I’m always at pains to make clear that my desire not to make a film like a Tarantino film is not at all about me not liking his films. I love them. I just felt like—especially in Australia, in the Australian milieu—I wanted to make something that took itself very seriously.

Chris: It is operatic. I mean, you are into Godfather territory here—those slo-mo sequences with the absolutely killer sound design are just chilling. Did those elements, the heightened, lyrical moments come during post or was that all drawn in?

David: Yeah. That stuff was quite—there was a lot of stuff that came alive in post—but that stuff was always the intention. I made a short that was in Sundance in 2008 that was kind of a style reference for Animal Kingdom in a way. I had at that time been having a lot of meetings with people, trying to get Animal Kingdom happening and I was describing in these meetings a crime film I hoped would be both very dangerous and raw and violent and yet poetic a beautiful at the same time. People either didn’t know what I was talking about or they didn’t believe I could do it. And so I made Crossbow to give a sense of that world—a seedy, dangerous world with dangerous people—but represented in a strangely beautiful way.

Chris: The young guy, our sort of cipher for this experience does in a way take a classic character arc—from near catatonic apathy to action, but there is something else at work here, as if the fabric of the family is the story—again as in a Greek saga.

David: The story, and certainly J’s story, is a very simple one. It’s a story about a young man, aimless and emotionally immature as so many young men are, letting his faith be determined by all of the forces and people around him, and coming to realize that, for his own survival, he needs to be the engineer of his own destiny. In the process it is also about a young man forming a moral compass in a morally upside-down world. What does it mean to be good in a bad world.

Chris: It is horrifying. He is almost inert in the first half of the movie and the audience kind of bleeds through him into the scenes. It is a great empathetic draw, his stillness.

David: Funny how some people—I came across this as I was writing it, the classic cinema template—think you need to have a central character who is somehow driving the story. In the course of the years I was writing the film a couple of times I tried to generate a character of that nature and every time it felt so inauthentic to me. It didn’t in any way mirror my experience of teenagers, specifically teenage boys, who are in a way defined by their inability to drive their lives forward. They find themselves dealing with whatever situation they find themselves in and also are so emotionally immature that they don’t know how to properly express themselves either and that can appear as a strange blankness that can appear dumb but is simply the external manifestation of a rich bubbling inner world that hasn’t found a way to express itself.

Chris: Then there is this context—this crime world that doesn’t smack of artifice. These aren’t cartoon villains. The whole movie plays as genuine.

David: I think it’s about—I think this is the work of all good cinema—making the characters feel authentically human. And in the criminal terrain they are still human they just live in a world where the stakes are much higher. Dangerously marginal lives which their human traits can manifest more extremely but at the core they have human frailties, human strengths.

Chris: These are desperate characters.

David: There is a lot of confusion. In a lot of ways I made a film about human confusion. All of these characters aren’t sure about what is going on around them or how to deal with change. All of them. The criminal family. The cops. And obviously the young man at the middle.

Chris: The crafting of suspense, both in the architecture of the film but in every scene is just stellar. Everything feels like a chapter with a growing sense of dread. How did you get such a polish in a first film—especially in a crime film where everything usually errs on the side of efficiency? How did you achieve this slow-burn pace, and maintain it?

David: I don’t know.

Chris: It’s impressive.

David: Thank you. That was the main challenge. Especially in the edit. I had a clear sense of the brooding menace I wanted to run as an undercurrent throughout the film. What I hadn’t counted on was how strong some of the more thriller elements would play. Such that what I had imagined would be a big sprawling crime story with some kind of menacing flavor became in the cut (whilst it is still kind of big and languorous) tighter. Then we suddenly realized—editor Luke Dolan and I—that we were able to build that tension so well (the menace was really palpable at some points) that it wasn’t in our interests to let it sprawl. So it became about finding a balance between the tension and the sprawl.

Chris: How?

David: You keep chipping away at it. You keep showing it to people. It’s a painful process. To be honest I hated it. Editing taxes me emotionally more than any other part.

Chris: More than shooting?

David: Shooting’s fun in a way. It’s totally anxiety stricken. You’re living on adrenaline, you’re out in the world, you’ve got a whole crew with you.

Chris: Tell me about casting. It would have been so easy to cast Pope as a big Alpha bruiser, but you went in the opposite direction and it ends up making him more wicked. He scared the shit out of me. But also with J—how do you find a first timer and get him to not act?

David: In a way the two central pillars of the thing to me were Jacki Weaver and Ben Mendelsohn and I wrote their characters for them. And I know what you mean about Ben and I could tell that was how some people were reading the character in the script—they’d see some kind of tattooed Alpha in that Pope character. And I always knew I wanted Ben because he doesn’t need the muscles or the tattoos, he’s just a force of nature. He’s this wildly charismatic, captivating, if not intimidating, personality. And we were very specific when it got time to talk about it during preproduction that we didn’t want Pope to have tattoos. He doesn’t need to advertise his toughness. What was frightening about him was all in his brain. It was challenging but fun building that character with Ben, this character who was scary in ways even he didn’t understand. We wanted him to look like he’d been dressed by his mother. His jeans are too big for him. He’s got bad shoes, a shirt from another era and a bad haircut—there is nothing aesthetic going on.

Chris: How long was rehearsal?

David: We had a couple of weeks. With the kids it was just about getting them comfortable, comfortable with each other, comfortable with the other actors, comfortable on set, comfortable with all this as work. With Jacki who is a very experienced theatre actor who has a very rigorous work ethic. She would come with questions, want to get the scenes up on their feet. And then you have something like Guy Pierce who didn’t have a lot of time to rehearse but never wanted to get the scenes up but just wanted to talk. We talked in detail about character. I think it was him trying to get a sense of the movie I wanted to make. On another level I think he was just sussing me out, getting a sense whether when he walked on to the set cold if he could trust my direction. With Ben we realized, after a few frustrating days of rehearsal, that we needed a lot of work, we needed to map the whole character beat by beat.

Chris: Kudos. It is really great. But, where do you go from here?

David: It’s really odd, that. I could not have hoped for this whole thing to unfold any differently, from the reception at Sundance, to the Grand Jury prize, to the way it opened at home, to some the reviews, I couldn’t ask for anything more. But it feels as though it has created a whole list of future problems.

Chris: I think that is a good problem to have.

David: It is a quality problem.