THERE’S a buzz in film circles as Canberra director and scriptwriter Jessica Beange prepares for the shooting of her 30-minute supernatural thriller, “Animal”.

When I catch up with Beange, she’s just back from an early morning visit with actors Karen Vickery and Michael Sparks to a remote spot about an hour outside Canberra where she and cinematographer Joachim “Jogi” Ellenrieder plan to shoot the movie in the October school holidays. 

The dedication of filmmakers has always been a mystery to me, so I’m impressed that she and Ellenrieder have been labouring for the last 18 months in preparation.

He’s a German-born Canberra photographer and cinematographer who has an interest in nature, likes climbing up walls and mountain faces and recently had a story in “National Geographic”.

“I wanted to work with Jogi for years, and when we got talking about the different locations, we said to each other: ‘Let’s make something as well as we can’.

“The main thing I wanted to do was just direct, but I also produce, as we’re a small production company,” she says. 

It was a steep learning curve for Beange, who admits that much of the preparation time was spent learning about all the choices needed, including decisions about the soundtrack, featuring Canberra singer-songwriter Emma Kelly (Happy Axe) and online sampling from CIT students, all mixed by Tim Duck.

Raised in Sydney and Dubbo, Beange studied journalism at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, known for its hands-on courses.

“There I was always running around with the camera and making stuff,” she says. 

She worked in radio in Melbourne then moved to Canberra in 2007 for a marketing job with Prime TV, and stayed on as a single mother mostly working in communications.

As for her star actors, all of whom live in Canberra, she’d thought of using a casting agent but put out a call on Facebook and the website “Star Now”, asking who would be interested. 

She’d already met Isabelle Faure, well-known as the former “directrice” with the Alliance Française de Canberra who stayed on and trained in acting with Perform Australia.

Faure applied for the role of Suzette, who, when her marriage implodes, escapes to the bush, where, “poised at the crux of intrigue, ambiguity, and the uncanny”, as Beange puts it, she encounters a strange being.

“Her rapport with the script was amazing, she saw so many things in it and she got the part,” Beange reports. 

They’ve even tweaked the script, allowing her to interpolate some French phrases – “I thought it would be natural for her to drift into French,” Beange says. 

Michael Sparks, one of Canberra’s most in demand-stage actors, plays Michael, the husband whose disintegrating marriage with Suzette sets in motion the story. He applied for and got the role using a “self-tape”, a newish method of auditioning where actors record themselves. 

An American by birth, his accent fits the international flavour of the narrative.

Vickery’s reputation as an actor intimidated Beange, but she dared to email her the script while she was in Sydney performing in “Urinetown”.

“Karen said lovely things about the script, so I got the courage to ask her to audition.”

She plays a mysterious supernatural being called The Woman around whom the mystery revolves. That’s a non-speaking role, otherwise, as a fluent Russian speaker, she could’ve thrown in a bit of that language. 

“The inspiration for the story was quite a simple one, just an idea of a woman’s life that is falling apart and how she ends up living in a hut in the bush, ” says Beang. 

“I’d already written another script about a woman in a bush, and I’m fascinated by the idea of women appearing and disappearing.”

With a touch of both the yin and the yang in the script, she feels that it will resonate with the many women who reconnected with nature through covid.

She especially likes what filmmaker David Lynch said about how having an idea in film – “Ideas are like fish. You don’t make the fish, you catch the fish.”