Film festivals like Tribeca always come with their splashy, big-name-heavy premieres and screenings. This year’s Tribeca lineup includes new movies from Aubrey Plaza, Leighton Meester, Elizabeth Banks, Sam Rockwell and, though not exactly in the same vein, Nas. Unsurprisingly, those films, in turn, receive the largest amount of attention in the weeks leading up to the opening night; once the festival officially gets underway, though, the most talked about films tend to be the smaller, more inconspicuous ones that catch everyone off-guard.
Beneath the Harvest Sky is one such movie. After generating buzz at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the debut narrative feature from documentary filmmakers Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly premieres at Tribeca tonight, and it’s already one of our early favorites. Set in the rugged, financially humbled potato-farming community of Van Buren, Maine, Beneath the Harvest Sky follows 17-year-old best friends Casper (Emory Cohen) and Dominic (Callan McAuliffe), two high school seniors looking to head off to Boston and leave all of their small-town confinements behind. The problem is, they don’t have enough money to do so, meaning the level-headed Dominic must put in long hours harvesting potatoes while Casper, the town’s volatile bad boy, reluctantly works for his drug-pushing father (Aidan Gillen, a.k.a. Littlefinger on Game on Thrones). With every dollar they stack, their worlds get darker, sending Beneath the Harvest Sky to an emotionally taxing place.
Not to mention, places that was totally foreign to Callan McAuliffe before shooting the film in Van Buren. In the geographical sense, McAuliffe, 19, had never spent time anywhere nearly as backwoods gritty as the Maine town—it’s a far cry from his native city of Sydney, Australia. In terms of the film’s production, Beneath the Harvest Sky is also McAuliffe’s first time working stateside on a low-budget, down-and-dirty independent movie. Making his feature debut in veteran filmmaker Rob Reiner’s 2010 drama Flipped, McAuliffe subsequently co-starred in the pricey YA adaptation I Am Number Four and played a young Leonardo Dicaprio (or, rather, a young Jay Gatsby) in last year’s The Great Gatsby.
Beneath the Harvest Sky, though, was his first chance to really dig into a character, and the results speak for themselves. Nuanced yet charismatic, McAuliffe’s performance is the perfect complement to the equally impressive Emory Cohen’s combustible acting—together, they elevate Beneath the Harvest Sky well beyond its largely familiar storyline and lend the film a strong authenticity. Yes, despite the fact that McAuliffe’s actually an Aussie.
Complex sat down with McAuliffe before the film’s NYC premiere to chat about how he’s gone from youngster with zero Hollywood ambitions to one of the Tribeca Film Festival’s potential breakouts.
It’s funny hearing you speak now with an Australian accent, because I just watched the movie last night and your performance feels so authentic and lived-in. Was where you grew up in Australia anything at all like the gritty, potato world of Van Buren, Maine?
No, I had a very fortunate, controlled childhood. I went to a decent school and had a house near the beach. I was semi-well-off, so I didn’t have anything to relate to in terms of this film. But there are very similar environments in the back-country of Australia, towards the center, in the smaller towns. But it’s not quite as steeped in the drug culture as what we see in this movie, which was kind of cool, although my character isn’t involved as much in that scene as Emory Cohen’s character is. I was able to sit back and watch him pretend to be embedded in that drug world all the time. [Laughs.] It was great fun.
The friendships I had growing up weren’t anything like the one between Casper and Dominic in the movie, either. There wasn’t any of that “good kid/bad kid” dynamic; we were all just good kids being stupid and messing around. I was usually friends with the people I was the most similar to, as opposed to Casper and Dominic, who are polar opposites, really.
Was that part of the film’s appeal for you—how different its world from the one you grew up in?
Oh, no, no. I just auditioned for it and they happened to give me the job. [Laughs.] And then the script happened to be good as well, so it was a bonus.
The full script was probably sent to me over email, but I feel like a lot of the time, with auditions, they go through you so quickly that you read the entire script and spend so much time on it but then the casting people don’t give you the same amount of effort. But these guys, for this film, actually directed me in the room and everything, which was great. I just read the sides and interpreted the character in such a way that they appreciated.
That approach can definitely be a problem if you don’t know who the character is and what they want. I just did three auditions in one day a couple of days ago, and, of course, I couldn’t read all three scripts in one day, so I just did character searches in the scripts and read only that specific character’s lines of dialogue and every single time they’re mentioned, to see any ways they would react to a certain situation. That kind of shapes how I’ll do it in the room. And if I get called back in for another meeting or audition, then I’ll definitely try to read the full script beforehand.
The film was shot where it’s set, in Van Buren, Maine, which, as you said earlier, is nothing like where you’re from. Did you get to spend a lot of time there prior to shooting, to take in the sights and get a better feel for the culture?
I came in about a week, a week-and-a-half prior to shooting, which, by contrast to Emory, was quite a bit less. I think he went there a few weeks before. He needed to do that, though, because his character is a lot further from what he is in real life. The character I’m playing is quite homegrown, a regular kid who just wants to get out of his hometown; he abides by the law and tries to get his grades right and all that, whereas Emory is playing a character who’s sweepingly different from himself. He went there and really occupied that terrain, atmosphere and aesthetic. I just kind of popped in for a week and listened to how some of the kids spoke. Then, I just jumped in.
Your character desperately wants to leave Van Buren. Are there any parallels between that and when you were in Australia? Were you looking at Hollywood as where you needed to be?
No, because, well, I never wanted to be an actor. I thought it would be a terrible, horrible job. [Laughs.] I always wanted to work with wildlife and nature in the field of conservation. Anything that put out into the wildlife, frolicking around with the lions.
Well, you’re in New York City for the Tribeca Film Festival—there are plenty of lions here.
[Laughs.] Exactly, yeah! There are plenty of lions in this industry. But I got very fortunate and landed some nice auditions and gigs,. It was after I did my first film in 2009 [Flipped, directed by Rob Reiner], though. During that process, I saw how it all worked and I developed a passion for it.
Did you just stumble into acting initially, then?
In a way, yeah. I dislocated my kneecap in a game of basketball, so I’d needed something to do. Plus, I’d always wanted a dog, but I didn’t have any money. I joined a talent agency and did commercials, and that was the gateway into larger things. I did a few TV gigs but I wasn’t seeing acting as a career. And then, I really have no idea how it grew. [Laughs.] I did an audition for a short film; an American manager saw it and said, “Just for shits and gigs, why don’t you fly over to Los Angeles for a vacation and do some auditions while you’re there.” The first one I did was for the Rob Reiner film, and, about five callbacks later, they gave it to me.
I’ve just been very lucky, really. There are a lot of people who are more talented than I am. [Laughs.] But I’m going to keep riding the bus until the wheels fall off.
What ever happened with the dog?
[Laughs.] We got the dog! But then, because I was flying so much, we had to put her up for adoption four years later. She’s with a much more responsible family now, though. She was really fat when I had her; I fed her way too much. She’s an American Cocker Spaniel, ironically enough. [Laughs.] A bit of foreshadowing, I guess. She was great. She’s the one who, in the end, put me in America.
Did things click for you immediately while working on Flipped, as far as knowing this was what you wanted to do full-time?
Well, even still, every single commercial you do, you feel like, “Oh, my god, I’ve made it! I’m huge now! I’m in a commercial!” But it never clicked for me. I guess it was within the first few weeks of working on the Rob Reiner film that it felt like something I could really do. I was also of the mindset that I’d been given a great opportunity, one that so many other people have tried for but never got, so I figured I owed it to myself to really give it a shot.
The two films you made after that, I Am Number Four and The Great Gatsby, were huge productions. Was it tough to jump into the big leagues so quickly like that?
Somehow, Flipped didn’t seem as immense as, I suppose, I would have expected a studio film to be, because it was a family-friendly script and Rob Reiner has so much fun on his sets. Also, I was a kid and the whole environment was very kid-friendly—they kept a “swear jar” on set, and every time someone cursed, they had to drop money into it. I, though, made a point of never swearing in that jar’s presence. [Laughs.]
But, yeah, it was a tad jarring at first. You get used to it pretty quickly, though, because people around you make you get used to it as quickly as possible. I Am Number Four was pretty soon after Flipped, but there were a few years there before I did Gatsby, so I had that lull, during which I was cast in [director Alex Proyas’]Paradise Lost. That was going to be a huge film, and I’m sure it would have been incredibly jarring. They got pretty far through it, and I’d done all the sword-fighting training with Djimon Hounsou and Bradley Cooper. I did all the motion-capture work—they’d scan every possible movement that my face could make. And then they shelved it. I was sitting in Australia with nothing to do, then, but fortunately I got Gatsby.
That Paradise Lost experience kind of numbed me. Now, whenever I get a call saying, “You didn’t get this job,” I just go, “Ehh, whatever.” That has been quite useful, too, in how it set me up for the long road of disappointments that are bound to happen in this industry, which then, by contrast, makes the successes seem that much better. It’s the yin and the yang.
Beneath the Harvest Sky, then, must have been a nice way to decompress and switch it up after those big productions.
Yeah, for sure. Again, I’d just gone back to Los Angeles and playing the game, doing a bunch of auditions and hoping one would come off. I find that I’m not really going to put the effort in and look like I want the role unless I genuinely like the character. People can probably see that in the audition room, too, which is why whenever I hate a script, I never get a callback or anything. It’s not that I tried to do a bad job—they can just see it on me.
With this film, though, it happened to come off. It was a great learning experience as well. I’d love to do studio films back to back, but we can’t all do that. We’re working actors. It was great because, since it’s such a small film, it was a family atmosphere. Everyone was staying in a Christian Life center for the two months we were in Van Buren. There were about 30 crew members all staying in one building, with bunk beds. It was nothing like any other film I’d done.
Interview by Matt Barone (@MBarone)
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