STACK Magazine December Issue 122

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DECEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi
FEATURE
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Aussie director/actor/writer/menschAngus Sampson has
released his engrossing and smart new comedy THE MULE,
and spoke about it to an enraptured Zoë Radas.
O n the surface, it’s a simple story: A first
time drug mule is captured at the airport
coming home to Melbourne from
Thailand; he’s shut up in a dingy hotel by the
police, where they wait for him pass the heroin
they’re sure he’s swallowed. They figure the
seven days they are legally allowed to detain him
will be more than enough time for the mule’s
body to do its natural thing. But within the ply of
new Australian comedy/drama The Mule, there’s
so much more going on.
Written by Angus Sampson, Leigh Whannell
(the man responsible for the Saw franchise)
and Jaime Browne, and with co-direction by
Sampson, there was a very collaborative spirit
to begin with. Sampson – who plays the hapless
mule, Ray Jenkins – took great delight in having
the lines he’d written with Whannell delivered by
the impressive cast.
“I tell you, there’s nothing greater than seeing
or hearing an actor and a performer of the calibre
of Hugo Weaving reciting these lines: ‘You
are this close to getting run over, spoofbag,’”
Sampson mimics, perfectly adopting the ragged,
slithering tone of Weaving’s cop character, who’s
been tasked with guarding the mule while
waiting for his body to process the drugs. “I
mean, I don’t drink cognac but it’s like rolling a
lovely cognac around the palate.”
Sampson and Whannell clearly had a lark of a
time penning the script, which is set in the 1980s
and really takes advantage of that old school
Australian knack for phrasing.
“I know this bloke in Victoria who’s a great
man, and one time we went to have dinner at
an Italian restaurant in [fancy Melbourne suburb]
Toorak, when we were 20 or something,”
Sampson recalls. “It was a BYO place. We were
sitting at a table, and he came in and pulled out
this box, and put the box on the table, and pulled
out two bottles of Bundaberg rum and a two-litre
bottle of Coke. And our faces just dropped,” he
sniggers. “And he says, ‘Well, we’re not here to
f*ck spiders.’ And I’d never heard anyone say that
before.”
That line became one of the gems that
Sampson included in his last collaborative effort
with Whannell, the horror comedy 100 Bloody
Acres (2012).
It’s clear that Sampson hugely valued the input
of his players. “The entire cast is so clever, so
clever,” he says, giving several examples of their
suggestions. “They’re wonderfully smart humans
and they’re wonderfully interested in society – so
they would often say, ‘OK, look. I know you’re
telling me you want this to be achieved from
this scene, but it’s not currently there.’ Noni
[Hazlehurst, who plays Ray’s mother] would do
that,” he says warmly. “Hugo said, ‘How are they
passing the time out there?’”, referring to the two
detectives who are simply sitting and waiting
with Ray in the hotel. “I thought, good question.
Hugo said, ‘Maybe they’re playing chess,’ and I
went ‘What about Jenga! Jenga! It could be like
a house, you know, and one false move and it all
goes wrong,’” Sampson yammers like an eager
puppy, laughing at himself. “And Hugo’s like,
‘Yeah, maybe chess.’”
The reason Sampson was so charged about
the symbolism of Jenga (and chess) is that there
are numerous little keys dropped throughout
the film as to where the narrative might be
turning, and Sampson questions me on which
ones I picked up. “It might only be someone that
watches the film 20 times, that they might pick
up that connection,” he says of one of the cues.
(Keep your eyes peeled.)
It’s difficult not to imagine anyone involved in
this film becoming hyper aware of their body –
Ray’s physique is analysed by the camera, he’s
often in pain, and there are several shots of the
inside of his body as his heroin-filled gut tries to
disgorge itself. Sampson has some fascinating
remarks about how he thought of these
physicalities, as well as what a mule (the animal)
is really like.
“Egotistically, I might normally go, ‘I’m doing
four months of training and I’m getting my chest
waxed and I only want to film from the left side
with lighting no higher than 2K’,” he rattles off.
“But Ray needs to have thick skin; [a mule is] a
bit wonky, wobbly, they have a tough hide. [Ray
is] a bit of a pack horse. So if you look closely, I
tried to play him with rounded shoulders, like he’s
got stuff on his back.”
One thing the actor was not interested in
during filming, however, was getting too much
detail from the prop guys. Needless to say,
there is some faecal matter in the movie – but
Sampson has no idea what it was made of.
“I didn’t want to know,” he says, “because
if they said to me, ‘It’s just a bit of peanut
butter,’ then that’s all you’re thinking.” An
extremely commendable proximity to
method acting, in this instance.
• The Mule
is out on DVD
and Blu-ray on
Dec 3 – only at
JB Hi-Fi
The entire
cast is so
clever
Angus Sampson as
Ray Jenkins, ‘The Mule’.
Angus Sampson and
co-director Riley Stearns