An outback Australian story looking at the thin line between women laughing off unwanted sexual approaches and picking up an axe, The Royal Hotel is set in a rundown, two-storey hotel at Yatina, near Jamestown in South Australia’s mid-north.
Australian director Kitty Green, who lived in the US before coming home to make the film, co-wrote it with Oscar Redding after seeing the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie, in which two Finnish backpackers worked as barmaids in a West Australian mining-town pub.
“That’s where it began but when you start diving into the interactions, and figuring out who’s who – Who are these men? What do they need? And what do they want? – it all shifts,” says Green, who will be on the red carpet next Wednesday with actor Hugo Weaving when the film opens the Adelaide Film Festival.
“Basically, we were holding a mirror up to the kind of behaviour that doesn’t cross the line but makes us, as women, feel uncomfortable in those spaces.”
On their first day in a remote mining town, Americans Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are picked up from the bus stop by Carol (Ursula Yovich) and driven along a dusty road to the pub. It becomes clear the hotel is dysfunctional, with Carol propping up owner Billy, a falling-down drunk played by Weaving. The two English girls that Hanna and Liv are there to replace are too hungover to speak.
Once behind the bar, they are subjected to an onslaught of jokes, sexualised banter, unwanted invitations and a heavy male gaze with undercurrents of latent violence.
Ursula Yovich and Hugo Weaving in The Royal Hotel. Photo: See-Saw Films
“I think most women have been subjected to a male joke that has made them uncomfortable at some point in their lives when they have had a little bit too much to drink,” Green says.
“I am looking at that behaviour, and how that behaviour can be seen as a gateway for worse behaviour. It can spiral out of control and if you let someone get away with this, it will be something worse next time.”
The psychological thriller has sinister moments mixed with the joys of the outback, including starry nights and crystal-clear waterholes. Hanna and Liv’s foreignness – they gently mock Carol’s Aussie accent – brings an outsider’s perspective to the toxic way Australian men can treat young women behind a bar.
The drama intensifies as the pair waver between going along with it and laughing it off, and fleeing in fear. Their responses also differ as Hanna, whose mother was a drinker, is more cautious while Liv joins the men in throwing back shots.
Director Kitty Green behind the camera. Photo: See-Saw Films
Green says she did not make the film with an agenda to expose toxic male culture or female responses to it, or the destructive force of alcohol in bad behaviour – although they are all part of it.
Her fascination was with the small moments and intimate exchanges inspired by the Hotel Coolgardie documentary and the way in which the Finnish women took a stand.
“There was something about the way the women were handling themselves in that space that was really interesting, and as an Australian I liked seeing how foreigners tried to navigate that culture,” she says. “It was something I hadn’t seen before and it was a way to talk about some of the issues to do with alcohol-fuelled aggression and how you deal with it.”
The Royal Hotel is Green’s second collaboration with American actor Julia Garner, whose breakout performance as Ruth Langmore in the TV series Ozark launched her career. Green previously cast Garner in her 2019 film The Assistant, about an office assistant silently observing predatory sexual behaviour in a film producer’s office while the other employees look on.
“We were looking for someone with a striking face, or a striking look, because the film is basically silent; there’s not much dialogue, it’s mainly her moving around an office,” Green says of The Assistant.
“We wanted someone you just wanted to watch and [who] had some kind of enigmatic quality. I had seen her in Ozark and The Americans, and every time she was on the screen I thought, ‘Ooh, who is she?’.”
After the success of The Assistant, Green wanted to work with Garner again and says this project was similar enough to The Assistant to make her think she could take it on, but also different enough to excite her.
Enigmatic quality: Julia Garner as Hanna. Photo: See-Saw Films
Part of Green’s learning curve was the technical challenge of directing rowdy pub scenes in which 10 people speak simultaneously while the camera follows the undercurrents and focuses on the women.
“It was so, so hard, particularly after The Assistant, which was basically Julia and a Xerox machine,” Green laughs. “Suddenly I’m on the spot with 14 speaking parts and 30 background actors and everyone needs my attention.”
She brought in two friends to help direct the background but also credits skills she picked up while directing two episodes of the Apple TV+ series The Servant, under the executive direction of one of the masters of cinematic tension, M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense).
Filming the outside shots on location at Yatina gives the film a distinctive South Australian flavour, and Green says the actors responded to being in an isolated part of the world. The town has only 29 people and the once-grand pub was built in anticipation of a railway line that never arrived.
“So there is nothing around it – just this incredible, barren nothingness,” Green says.
The cast and crew were spread across nearby towns, including Jamestown and Orroroo, and Garner and Henwick stayed in rooms above a noisy pub which gave them a taste of the real thing.
“They really lived it, they really did,” Green says. “I think it was actually terrifying for the girls for the first few days at least, then they got used to it and figured it out and got to know people.”
Green, whose heavyweight producers are Emile Sherman and Iain Canning of See-Saw Films (The Power of the Dog, The King’s Speech), has already had feedback on the ending after the movie screened at the Toronto, Telluride and San Sebastian film festivals. She also discovered that audience responses to Hugo Weaving’s character differed markedly between Australia, where Weaving is well known and loved, and the US.
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“My American friends found Hugo’s character immediately terrifying from the first moment they saw him and never felt safe with him at all, and the pub never felt like a safe space,” she says.
Green says she adapted the movie slightly so it didn’t come across as genre horror, which is not what it was meant to be.
“We tried to thread the needle a little and take it back a bit – I think the pub was actually a bit scarier in the early cuts and we probably pulled it back because it felt like it was playing horror,” she says. “We tried to do something we felt Australians would appreciate without terrifying Americans too much.”
The Royal Hotel is the opening night film of the Adelaide Film Festival, which runs from October 18-29. Read more Film Festival stories here.
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