Creating a Mystery Means That Every Character Must Have a Secret, Something That They Are Hiding by CRUSHED Writer/Director Megan Riakos

Film Courage: Where did you grow up?

Megan Riakos: I was born and raised in Sydney, Australia, first generation Aussie born to a Lebanese dad and American mum and the fourth child out of five (the perfect position in the family to be left to your own devices when it comes to deciding on a career path). Our house was loud and crazy and although we were creative in our own ways, there was no history of working in the arts in the family. I didn’t really understand it could be a career, but even so I was putting on plays and writing stories from as far back as I can remember.

Film Courage: Have you always wanted to make films?

Megan Riakos: When I got to high school, I was able to to formally study drama and it was then that I really started to appreciate theatre and performance. However it wasn’t until a Media Studies class where we studied some old classics, including Sydney Pollack’s THEY SHOOT HORSES DON’T THEY that it all clicked into place for me. Watching Pollack’s film resonated so strongly with me, my family were working class and this film framed the devastating effects of the depression through the eyes of an individual which I found deeply affecting. It opened my eyes to how you can convey a perspective about the world to an audience. Films can be a great medium to create empathy for the other (without people even realizing it!). It made me want to create films that make people think and feel differently about a person, a subject or a situation.

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Film Courage: Did you go to film school and/or University for writing?

Megan: I have had several stints studying film over the past 15 years – Straight out of school (in the year 2000) I enrolled in a Bachelor of Communications (Media Arts & Production) – although this was a general filmmaking degree, this was where I was first introduced to the world of screenwriting. In 2009, I also completed a Graduate Certificate of Screen Drama at AFTRS which led to a Graduate Diploma in Directing. Again there was plenty of study surrounding script theory in these courses. And finally I did the Professional Screenwriters program at UCLA which was less about learning script theory and more about the actual writing of two full features, the challenge of which I found completely invigorating – and led to the first draft of Crushed.

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Megan: I have had two stints of living in LA so far. First time round was as a new graduate from my bachelor degree when I was 21. This was a complete change for me, I immediately started working on indie features and movies of the week. It was a huge learning curve but it cemented in me what I wanted to do in my life. After a year of working massive hours on film sets I became quite homesick, I was over the concrete jungle and was yearning to make more of my own stuff. I realized that I needed to step away, live life in the real world a little more and find a stronger level of creativity that can be hard to find when you are a little cog in the world of film production. I took those lessons, traveled around Europe for a little while before heading back to Australia where I started work on my first feature script. It was 10 years later that at the age of 31 when I made my way back to LA to study at UCLA. Second time round I kept my expectations low about LA and I really loved it. I knew that I needed to base myself near nature so took up residence in Los Feliz just next to Griffith Park – the perfect antidote to writers block for me is a run in the hills. I have been back and forth plenty of times since and I’m sure I’ll be there again soon.

Film Courage: The best and worst advice on filmmaking or writing a screenplay you’ve received. Did either statement effect you for longer than a day?

Megan: Getting the right kind of feedback for your film is incredibly important and although all writers must navigate these murky waters there is a special kind of trap female writers must beware of. The history of cinema has been dominated by the male gaze and male protagonists, so when you introduce a female voice to the way a script is told or the use of female protagonist who doesn’t fit the archetype of what a woman should be (i.e. has been presented on the screen to us over the years) you can get some really unhelpful and damaging advice. In regards to character, I was told many times that my female characters couldn’t do certain things because she would be unlikeable and therefore unable to gain the audiences empathy, even though these same actions are carried out by male protagonists every day of the week without anyone batting an eyelid. These flaws are what makes characters interesting, human and three dimensional. It creates the grey areas of a persons moral outlook. When I first encountered this I took it personally, I worried about my skill conveying my characters and questioned my own voice and what I was trying to portray. But once I understood where these comments were coming from I was able to assess them more clearly and to understand that perhaps this person was not my audience BUT that there is an audience interested in the female gaze, and that it is important to find someone who understands my voice who will give me solid feedback to improve my script.

In regards to best advice, I think not panicking when a script isn’t quite working – a tight brain is not good for the imagination and a loose one is. If you are stuck, go to the cinema and see a completely unrelated movie, go to the art gallery, go for a run…let your mind wander and do its thing unconsciously and all of a sudden the answer will pop up when you least expect it!

Film Courage: Where were you in your life before you began writing the script for CRUSHED?

Megan: I had just graduated from the Australian Film Television and Radio school primed to make my first feature but without a script with a low enough budget to enable me to make it. I spent about a year looking for the right story and struggling with confidence and motivation, so I specifically looked for a course where the aim was not to learn how to write a script but to give you feedback and deadlines. UCLA was the perfect place for this and I wrote the first draft of Crushed during that course.

Film Courage: How many short films and or scripts had you made previously before CRUSHED? How did you know you were ready for a feature?

Megan: I had made over a dozen short films, docos and music clips and had written five unproduced feature film scripts before making Crushed. While I was trying to find that elusive low budget feature idea, I made another 2 short films. Although i loved making them, I just knew it was time to move into the feature world. The stories I wanted to tell just couldn’t be contained in shorts anymore.

 

Film Courage: What inspired the story for CRUSHED?

Megan: I had just seen Jane Campion’s TOP OF THE LAKE and I really responded to the beautiful but eerie New Zealand setting, the mystery as the driver of the plot and the flawed female protagonist that led the series. This combined with the documentary THE STAIRCASE by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade which is a documentary following a man accused of killing his wife. His children from a previous marriage believes he is innocent, but the wife’s daughter from a previous marriage believes he was guilty. As the court case continues, all kinds of secrets and lies come out and I though what an interesting idea; if the two people you trust more than anything in the world have this life you know nothing about and that they could possibly be capable of murder.

Film Courage: Did you have previous knowledge of vintners or wineries?

Megan: Taking a weekend trip to a wine region is quite popular in Australia, so I had been to a few different wine regions around Australia and do enjoy a glass of wine, but what drew me into this world for Crushed was after a girls’ weekend to Burrundulla Wines – a friend’s family vineyard where I discovered the true appeal of a winery as a setting. Years later when it came time to embed this mystery somewhere interesting, I remembered Burrundulla and how beautiful and complex a world it would make for the film. Being a low budget indie film it was also a location I knew I could access cheaply that would provide a huge amount of production value. I then did a whole lot of research about viticulture and did mandatory trips to wineries to taste wine while picking the brain of the winery owners.

Film Courage: Why had you not made longer work previously (since you’d written many feature scripts)?

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Megan: Making a full length feature is a huge amount of work and locks you in to 3-4 years to not just make the film, but bring it audiences. Up until this point I hadn’t found or written a script that was achievable on a low budget that I wanted to make. The longest short I had made was 21 minutes, but unless you have a really amazing short, anything over 10-15 minutes gets lost on the festival circuit as it is too hard to program.

Megan: Creating a mystery means for me that every character must have a secret, something that they are hiding which ends up making the audience suspect multiple characters as the killer. It helps to create subtext and an inner world that the audience may not necessarily see, but one that definitely enriches each of the characters. I have heard Crushed described as a character driven thriller, plot is definitely essential to this script, but for me I want juicy, flawed characters to inhabit my films. The next step is to allow the characters to transform further during the casting period, actors bring a whole new layer of meaning to a character and their story and they are great allies in strengthening the world of your film.

 

Film Courage: Your story had multi/layers and deep twists? How much did you rework the story to have it be multi/faceted?

Megan: The plot was tricky in Crushed, there are a number of red herrings and dead ends and it did require several drafts where we were working through the plot progression. After completing a draft, I would often return to either doing a beat sheet or creating cards from that draft, to ascertain if the plot was working and what needed to change. It helps boil down the film to see if it is working. Not only did this have to logically make sense it also had to emotionally make sense, ie. Just because a character could physically do something, would they actually go through with it in reality?

Film Courage: Can you share how your film CRUSHED passed The Bechdel test? Did you change anything or revise it to meet those standards?

Megan: There are three strong female characters in Crushed – the lead character Ellia (Sarah Bishop), her mum Sophie (Roxane Wilson) and her sister Harriet (Millie Spencer-Brown). I didn’t specifically set out to pass the Bechdel test, it was just a story I wanted to tell. Although some of the talk between these three women is about their dead father/husband and the mystery behind his death, it is also about how to deal with the failing vineyard and the family business in which these three women are an integral part. After the fact I did double check that we passed it!

Film Courage: What did you want your main character to be and what did you know you did not want?

Megan: I definitely wanted our main character to be a flawed woman. We don’t get to see this woman on our screens nearly enough and yet we see her everyday of our lives (and in fact we are her). I did not want her to be a screaming topless final girl in the typical chase of a thriller/horror, I did not want someone to rescue her in the way women are so often rescued in films.

Film Courage: What do you love about your protagonist Ellia that you secretly wish for in yourself?

Megan: Ellia couldn’t give two f*cks about what anyone thinks. Sure she has some pretty big flaws but she doesn’t try to be something she isn’t and she is comfortable in her own skin. Something a lot of women learn to do as they get older I think.

Film Courage: Did the shoot go smoothly?

Megan: The shoot went as smooth as possible for a low budget indie – we shot for 19 official shoot days and then several other skeleton shoot days. There were many challenges, one of which was the change in weather in a rural environment. The film is set in harvest time but for logistical reasons we shot over summer with the idea that we would return approximately 6-8 weeks after wrap to shoot some harvest scenes. Due to ongoing drought and extreme heat, the harvest ended up being 5 weeks earlier than expected, so we had to drop everything and head back out to shoot these final scenes. When we got there, Mudgee had finally gotten some decent rain and the entire region had transformed from a dusty, straw colored world to a rich, green one! So we had to be selective in how we covered the landscape second time round.

Megan: We shot at two main locations: Burrundulla Wines which covers a really large and diverse parcel of land – this was my friend’s family vineyard so was always on the cards to be our main location. This covered us for the cellar door, vineyard, shearing shed, cottage, house, farm land plus more. They don’t have their own winery, so we also shot at Robert Stein’s Winery who in real life are the winemakers for Burrundulla Wines. The most crucial element was the wine – it is so rich with meaning – obviously the blood and wine metaphor, but also the hard work it represents and how it can also be the undoing of people.

 

 

Film Courage: What cameras did you use?

Megan: We used primarily Sony F55 and Alexa – unusual to combine two very different cameras but we took whatever we could get for our small amount of money so we made it work in the grade.

 

ABOUT MEGAN RIAKOS:

Megan Riakos is a Screenwriter and Director with a passion for telling stories that engage and provoke. She recently completed her debut feature film Crushed, a mystery thriller set in the beautiful Australian wine region of Mudgee. Crushed premiered to sold out screenings at Montreal World Film Festival and went on to screen at Miami International Film Festival, Napa Valley Film Festival, Vancouver International Women in Film Festival before mounting a successful limited Australian theatrical release. She has also completed over a dozen short films ranging from the psychological thriller The Shed to the 1930’s crime drama 50-50 and even an experimental dance film The Eye of the Beholder. Her tastes are eclectic but it’s the love of telling a good story no matter the genre that attracts Megan the most.

Megan’s screenplays have also garnered acclaim. Her period drama The Last Reprieve was awarded the Grand Prize in the Greater Philadelphia SIP Screenplay competition and her political drama Victory and Defeat made the semi-finals in the Final Draft Big Break Competition.

Megan earned her Bachelor of Arts in Communication (Media Arts and Production) at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and has completed both a Graduate Certificate in Screen Drama (Writing and Directing) and a Graduate Diploma in Directing at the prestigious Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). During 2012-13, she also completed the Professional Screenwriters Program at UCLA.

Megan has just release Crushed on iTunes and Google Play and is currently in development on her second feature.

 

Now on iTunes! – CRUSHED movie from writer/director Megan Riakos

 

Synopsis:

After her father dies in an eerie accident at the family’s winery, Ellia returns home from the big city to tend to the remaining members of her disaffected family. The death is eventually ruled a homicide, with Ellia’s mother emerging as the prime suspect. Ellia takes matters into her own hands, compelled to discover the true story behind her father’s death. But the family and small-town secrets that emerge are more than she bargained for. Australia’s stunning wine country is the backdrop for this thrilling murder mystery from Director Megan Riakos.

CRUSHED – 111 minutes – Mystery thriller
Genre: Mystery Thriller
Starring: Les Hills, Sarah Bishop, Roxane Wilson

 

 

 

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CRUSHED Movie Now on iTunes! – Ellia returns to her family vineyard after her father dies in a winery accident. When his death is ruled a murder and her mother becomes the prime suspect, she’s determined to find the truth. As Ellia uncovers secrets about her family and the winery, she becomes the murderer’s next target.

 

 

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