Last year’s Venice Film Festival got a bracing blast of fresh air from Shannon Murphy’s directorial debut, Babyteeth. The dynamic, devastatingly curtailed coming-of-age dramedy was adapted by Rita Kalnejais from her Australian stage play of the same name and earned a Golden Lion nomination for Best Film as well as the Best Young Actor Marcello Mastroianni award for its star, Toby Wallace. The film follows a Sydney couple (Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis) who discover their terminally ill 16-year-old daughter, Milla (Eliza Scanlen), has fallen in love with a small-time 20-something drug dealer, Moses (Toby Wallace).

It was originally a play written by Rita Kalnejais, who also wrote the screenplay: it was on at the Belvoir Street theater in Sydney, and the film producers Jan Chapman and Alex White ran into each other in the lobby after seeing it and said: “This is our next film!” They developed that project with Rita for about seven years, and by the time I came on board, the script was in a really incredible place and ready to go, so then it was just a matter of casting it. Our casting director had cast Ben Mendelsohn in Animal Kingdom, and she knew it would take quite a special film to bring him back from the U S to Australia, but she felt strongly enough to send him the script, and he read it and loved it.

: The role of Milla was really difficult because she’s transitioning from the moment you meet her, and I was quite scared to cast that role because I thought, “She’s constantly in flux and changing who she is; which young actor could do this?” Eliza was actually the first person I saw, and then I saw hundreds of others, and then circled back to her and went, “It’s been her all the time!”

: Smart actors are going to build chemistry whether it’s naturally there or not, and I knew these two were both exceptional and would work on that. But we never auditioned them together, so the first time they were together was in rehearsal, and they were great. Coming from a theater background, I had a lot of rehearsals, and we’d sit around tables and chat heaps about character, and then we’d get up on the floor and I’d experiment with them. Eliza did these amazing videos for me on Instagram. She had created a fake account for Milla where she would dance to different songs in her bedroom, and that’s how we found Milla’s physical life, so it was always a joy to get those messages from Eliza in the morning!

The first time I’d met Toby was a few years before, at a casting event in Sydney, and he didn’t remember me when we next met up, which was in Boston while I was filming Little Women and he was doing a Netflix show there. A mutual friend had us over for dinner and we were talking about Babyteeth – I knew he had the role, so I was sad that I didn’t think anybody was considering me after my audition months earlier. Literally, a few hours later, my agent called and said they wanted to offer me the part, so it was a weird coincidence. Toby and I got along straight away: he’s an incredibly charismatic, kind, generous human being and actor, so there were no issues when we finally did film together.

Eliza Scanlen in a scene from Babyteeth.

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I was really confident with the acting side of things because I’d directed theater for at least eight years before that and also gone into the TV landscape as a director, which is not that dissimilar to film. I also do an inordinate amount of planning with all my heads of department beforehand, and we go on a retreat and spend a lot of time together so that when we actually start, we all feel ready to go.

My Mom was a bit concerned when I said I wanted to do this film because she always thought I had a bit of a deformed head when I was a baby! But it was always a requirement that the actor had to shave their head for the film, and I wouldn’t have been cast if I hadn’t agreed. Being shaved and vulnerable actually made my job easier, because there was less imagining I had to do. I found it incredibly useful as a tool, to get to know Milla. It was also an interesting experience going on public transport and being stared at a little too long for having no hair on my head, seeing elderly women look at me with sympathy because they assumed that I was sick. It was very strange and confronting.

What I did was allow for a lot of takes so that there was room to play in the edit with that because I didn’t want to be arrogant enough to think that I knew exactly which moment should be one or the other. Sometimes I think what’s nice is when it’s surprising to me too, what they come up with. Rita is such an amazing observer of human behavior and how, at times when we expect a certain thing to happen, the opposite happens. I also wanted none of the characters to be judged, so for me, it was really important that all the audience could at some point connect with them and understand why they were doing what they were doing at any moment.