Australian writer/director David Michod has made a remarkable triumph with Animal Kingdom, his first feature film. The crime family drama won the Jury Prize for World Cinema at Sundance in January and it played to a packed theater at the LA Film Festival in June. It comes out on Friday and Michod talked to LA2Day about his striking debut.

The story is set in the Melbourne underworld, where criminals and ruthless police officers gun each other down like it's a video game. Drug-dealing and bank-robbing are family businesses for the Cody brothers -- Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), Darren (Luke Ford), and Pope (Ben Mendelsohn). The Armed Robbery Squad has had them under surveillance for months and the Codys worry that a sting is imminent.

Enter "J" (James Frecheville), the teenage son of the Cody brothers' only sister, who had long been estranged from the clan. In the film's opening scene, she dies unceremoniously of a heroin overdose and J is taken in by his grandmother, Janine "Smurf" Cody (Jackie Weaver), and his three uncles. A couple days later, cohort Barry "Baz" Brown (Joel Edgerton) is shot by cops in a busy supermarket parking lot in broad daylight. The Codys strike back with the killing of two policemen. After being arrested and released on bail, they realize J has been detained for questioning and the Codys' fears of prosecution swell higher than ever. From that point forward, J is the object of escalating scrutiny by both his family and detective Leckie (Guy Pearce), who knows he's the key witness that can make or break the case.

The movie's crimes are loosley based on the 1988 murder of two Melbourne police officers by a well-known gang of criminals, after one of its members was shot by cops. But Michod deliberately didn't stick closely to true events. He says, "I wanted it to be fictional so I could be free to build those characters." He also avoided feeding into the recent glamorization of Australia's violent criminals on hit TV shows like "Underbelly," based on the exploits of Melbourne's most notorious drug gangs over the last couple decades. "The lives of those people are made out to be really cool and it feels really false to me," he says, "I wanted it to be classic and have a grand quality, I wanted the characters to be genuinely menacing, I didn't want to make a Rock 'n' Roll crime story." Instead he strove for something more realistic and psychologically intimate. "When I first read about those murders, random revenge killings of two young uniformed cops, I found the event itself so harrowing, to die in that way, it was so chilling," says Michod. "I [wanted to depict] the days and hours immediately following that, what it would have been like."

The script was nearly ten years in the making and Michod says barely anything remains from the original draft, but the film has benefitted from the long process. "What I discovered is that at its root, Animal Kingdom is about confusion," Michod says, "the most dangerous people are very often the most confused, they feel threatened, and animals are most dangerous when they feel most threatened."

One of Michod's best accomplishment is the impeccable pacing of the character development. We are scared of Pope from the onset, there's an unsettling hidden psychosis (much later confirmed by his mother's suggestion that "maybe you should start takin' your pills again"). J too is clearly cautious around him, but Michod reveals his exceedingly cringe-inducing behavior over the course of the film. Mendelsohn's portrayal sends tingles down the spine.

We also come to know Smurf as a more dangerous creature as the family's desperation swells. Weaver, a veteran Australian actress, plays the mother hen with syrup-y sweetness and eerily fierce maternal protectiveness. Her intense affection for her brood of beasts is creepy from the beginning. She's the only one who doesn't panic. Instead she goes straight to work blackmailing and manipulating those who threaten her boys' fate, showing she's actually more sinister than her gun-toting sons.

J's evolution is more subtle -- some reviews have even suggested Frecheville wasn't acting at all -- he is written to be the character whose morality is most mainstream. The audience learns on the same course as J and he acts only as any of us would with the information that the film has given us up to that point, so it was critical that viewers relate to him. Michod says the young protagonist was the most difficult to create. "It required me trolling my emotional memory of what it was like to be 17 myself," he says, "[when I tried] to have him be a more expressive driver of the narrative, I found it laughably implausible, not a kid like any I knew, they're not good at driving their lives forward." Frecheville himself helped the director understand J -- his "man-child" physicality brought the character into focus in a way Michod hadn't imagined him before. "Given his mature appearance, it was conceivable that his uncles would have allowed him to participate in their world,... forgetting that he was really just a young kid." Frecheville had never acted onscreen before, but he beat out over 500 boys to land the leading role during an open casting call. In a post-screening Q&A at the LA Film Festival, Frecheville said that after he got the phonecall giving him the job, he ran around the house screaming then promptly proceed to get very drunk. The 17-year old didn't disappoint, Michod says he had an intuition for the character that enabled him to deliver a compelling performance with little direction.

Animal Kingdom is relentlessly suspenseful, but J's normalness keeps us oriented in its wild world. We see him struggle to figure out how much he's willing to sacrifice to protect himself and how much he's willing to risk to protect his relatives, realizing that those two objectives are sickeningly intertwined. "Don't you get it?! Everything has got everything to do with everyone!" Darren tells J in the midst of the debacle, and that reality becomes more and more apparent. The Codys' family loyalties are tested and their various depths revealed. As the police close in and the stakes rise, every character -- brother, mother, lawyer, cop -- has the opportunity to help each of the others and knows the consequences of his choices.

The mind games play out in the able hands of the stunning ensemble cast, while strategic cinematography and tight editing ensure an unforgettable viewing experience. Come awards season, we expect Michod's masterpiece will get consideration in a slew of categories.

Director and cast at the LA Film Festival:

David Michod:

James Frecheville:

Jackie Weaver and James Frecheville:

Sullivan Stapleton:

B&W photos by Melody Dye.