Her father found Sam Neill. Has this debut director also cast a future star?

If you harbour ambitions of being a filmmaker, there are some positives to having a director as a parent. But, says India Donaldson, daughter of Ballarat-born, New Zealand-trained, Hollywood-famous Roger Donaldson, whose 1977 debut feature Sleeping Dogs featured a young Sam Neill in one of his first roles, “there’s two sides to that coin”.

“Growing up watching him make films, there’s a great luxury to that,” says Donaldson, whose own debut, Good One, will screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival. “I got to see that it was possible, and a viable way to make a life, so in some ways it exposed me to this idea that filmmaking was accessible. But also, I had a very specific idea of what it meant to be a filmmaker.”

It took Donaldson time to find her own voice, and the confidence to step out of her father’s shadow. Through her 20s, she worked in the fashion industry, developing knitted textiles. She made her first short in 2018. She brings her feature to Melbourne – the city where she spent a few months after graduating from college, while her father was editing a film here – aged 39.

“My dad always encouraged our creative pursuits, but I think it was my own fear and my own trepidation around pursuing it, and finding the things I wanted to say [that took time],” she says.

Good One made its debut at Sundance in January and screened in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in May (in Melbourne, it screens in Bright Horizons, the competition for first- and second-time directors, which comes with a $140,000 cash prize for the winning film). It’s a lean, quiet, tense piece of work about a young woman, Sam (Lily Collias), who finds herself in the woods on an awkward hiking weekend with her father, Chris (James Le Gros), and his erstwhile best friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy), after Matt’s teenage son bails at the last moment.

Poor Sam finds herself unexpectedly cast in the role of peacemaker as niggling resentments between the men simmer and threaten to boil over. And when a drunken Matt crosses a line, she is forced to deal with her father’s inadequate response, prompting a reassessment of how she sees him, and the role she has been playing in this weird triangular dynamic.

Sam is a character “rooted in my own experience as a teenager”, says Donaldson. “Feeling like a peacekeeper, wanting to be a good kid and not make any waves, and then in my adult life, realising, ‘Oh, wait, actually, conflict can be a good thing’. It’s sometimes good to push back and not always go with the flow. And so with this character, Sam, I wanted to explore this idea of the downside of being a good kid, basically, something she’s been praised for her whole life.”

In Collias, Donaldson may have found an emerging star of the future, just as her father did with Sam Neill 47 years ago. Collias was 18 and just two weeks out of high school when she started shooting the film, but she holds her own – often almost wordlessly – like a seasoned pro.

“I actually met her through my younger sister,” Donaldson says. “We were having a hard time finding the right person and I asked Octavia, my little sister, ‘Do you know any actors?’

“I still can’t believe that’s how we met,” she continues. “She’s very smart, very grounded, a very curious, thoughtful person, and I just immediately felt connected to her. It’s a cliche, but she’s just a natural.”

The story began to take shape in Donaldson’s head during COVID lockdown, at which time “I was dreaming of shooting a movie outdoors”. She grew up hiking and camping with her family, and during lockdown she and her husband had moved in with her father, his wife and their teenage children. And that swirl of proximity and longing for space started to coalesce into the themes of the movie she was writing.

“The outdoors, when you’re with the same people for days on end, can feel sort of claustrophobic in this very counterintuitive way – you don’t have an easy escape,” she says. “I wanted to create that feeling of tension and claustrophobia, and also bring a sense of humour to it, too. There’s a lot of humour to be mined in these limited, contained spaces that bring out the worst, and sometimes the best, but always the funny in people.”

Though her script was “very much a product of that time”, she insists “I have mostly warm memories of [lockdown]. I hadn’t spent that amount of time with my family my whole adult life, close to 20 years.”

But given so much of the film is about the shifting dynamic of the relationship between Sam and her old man, inevitably one has to ask if it is reflective of life in Chez Donaldson.

“This film is not autobiographical,” she insists. “I make the distinction between the personal and the autobiographical. What’s personal for me about the story is the feeling of being blindsided by someone you trust.

“I remember that moment where you’re transitioning from teenage-hood and going from being seen as a kid to being seen as an adult – I think it happens for a lot of girls in stages, and not always when you’re prepared for it – and you realise that how you want to be seen isn’t always how you’re being seen by those around you. The disappointment that comes with that is an integral part of growing up, I think.”

Still, you never had to reassure your father at any point that the father in the movie wasn’t him?

“He’s a secure man, and we’re very close,” she says with a wry laugh. “As a filmmaker himself, he’s kind of uniquely positioned to understand that you can make work that mines your personal experiences, the personal, without it being a reflection on reality.

“This character is not my dad. He wasn’t my dad in the script, and even more so once an actor makes it their own.”

He’s also not the character she originally envisaged. Donaldson wrote the first version of the story before she became a parent, and revisited it after her daughter’s birth. And that shift in her life experience worked its way into her perspective on the story she was telling.

“I had a new sense of empathy towards my own parents,” she says. “And as a result, in revisiting this script, a new sense of empathy and appreciation for these two guys, these two fathers who fundamentally are trying their best and love their kids and probably love their ex-wives.”

She softened her take on them, in other words. And while the film burns with Sam’s sense of anger, frustration and disappointment, the men who let her down aren’t so much awful as merely flawed, in the way most grown-ups are.

“My hope,” says Donaldson, “is that the audience feels some sort of empathy and affection for them. Because I do.”

Good One screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival. MIFF runs August 8-25. Details: miff.com.au

Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and Twitter at @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.