Australian prison drama Inside defies the push to simplify characters into heroes and villains

Australian filmmaker Charles Williams was searching for a word.

“I’m going to make up a word here and say ‘child-ification’ in storytelling,” Williams told The Nightly.

The writer and director of Inside, an Australian prison drama starring Guy Pearce, coined this term while talking about what he saw as a simplification in films and TV shows where there is increasingly a clear delineation between the hero and the villain.

“You’ve got your good guy and that’s who you’re with, but I love stories where you change how you feel about characters as it unfolds.

“I like movies and stories where you see where both characters are coming from, and neither of them are necessarily wrong or necessarily right.

“It’s something you don’t see as much in films anymore.”

Inside has no white hats and black hats. Every character has something about them you want to root for one moment and condemn the next. Sometimes, that’s in the same scene.

Set mostly inside a prison, the film is centred on two characters. One is the young Mel (Vincent Miller), an 18-year-old who has transferred from juvenile detention to the adult prison. There he meets Warren (Pearce), who tries to recruit Mel into killing another inmate, Mark (Cosmo Jarvis), to settle a debt.

Warren might be trying to exploit a younger man for his purposes but he also wants to forge a better relationship with his son on the outside.

Both of these things are part of who he is, and the audience relationship to the character chops and changes. It’s the opposite of the “child-ification” Williams saw as an industry trend.

He doesn’t have a be-all-and-end-all answer for what’s behind this simplification he has witnessed for the past 20 years, but he has some theories.

“In the nineties, the seventies, the sixties, even the twenties, the thirties and forties, there was a lot more appetite from mainstream audiences to see adult films,” he said. “Adults likes to be challenged by the characters in a story.

“Even kids like Grimm Brothers stories where things are darker and you don’t always like the people, moment to moment.

“I don’t think it’s a Marvel thing at all. It’s happening in arthouse cinema too. One, it’s really hard to do.

“Two, people who finance films and read scripts, they feel if the character isn’t always a goodie and the other isn’t always a baddie, that you don’t know how to write. They’re like, ‘Wait a minute, you’ve messed up here’. You’re like, ‘No, I haven’t messed up, you’re supposed to feel that way’.

“It’s driven from multiple areas, and then, of course, audiences get used to it and before you know it, your palette starts to change. You start to eat enough and you think, ‘McDonald’s is great’, and suddenly there’s a more interesting or complex meal and it’s like, ‘Where’s the salt and simple flavours?’.”

He is no movie snob. Complicated characters and multifaceted narratives is not the exclusive domain of arthouse cinema. He named Michael Bay movies from the nineties as something that wasn’t always clear cut.

“I like that in movie, you want to eat popcorn, you want to disappear into an experience. It’s more interesting and involving.

“You can’t blame everything on this, but storytelling has become much simpler and dumber the more people have had to make stories for a second screen. If people looking at their phone while a story is on in the background, as it often happens now, they won’t understand what’s going on unless it’s just ‘Oh yeah, there’s a plot moment that has happened’.

“A lot of stories have been made for a second screen and it’s just becomes a series of plot beats rather than a more immersive grey area of characters.”

Williams said it doesn’t have to be like that. You can trust the audience to want more.

There are certain tropes you come to expect from a “prison movie” but even in that, Inside defies assumptions. It’s not another drama where the conflict is between the jailed and the jailers.

Here, the conflict is internal and philosophical.

Williams’ 2018 short film All These Creatures won the Short Film Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and in that, he explored themes he would expand in Inside. That’s where the environment of the prison kicked in. In that location, the “subtext is text every day”.

“I love movies where the themes are represented in the plot or the story. If you’re going to make a film about self-imposed loneliness, you have it in a taxi and it’s Taxi Driver.

“(In a prison) everyone is constantly saying, ‘How do I not be guy that got me here? Can I not be the guy that got me here?’.”

Through Inside’s characters, Williams explored our essential natures. How much of what we is ordained and how much of it is driven by what we’ve internalised of how we think others see us?

This is not a plot-driven film but a character-driven one. There’s no escape plan or revolt against the guards or the system. The demons the characters face are themselves.

Asked what he would like cinemagoers to take away from Inside, he said, half-jokingly, “I want them to walk out and be so astonished how great a movie that was! That’s the truth of it.”

In all seriousness, despite its weighty subject matter and focus, Williams doesn’t have a didactic message.

“The movie has a lot to reckon with and some things to say, but I don’t think of it as a message. None of the movies I’ve loved ever seem to really have an agenda to push, and this doesn’t have an agenda to push.

“At the same time, it’s got a lot of things people can chew on, but you can also chew on some popcorn.”

But if there is one thing Inside is pushing, maybe it’s for more complex, less infantilised storytelling.

Inside is in cinemas