Joe Bird & Adrian Chiarella interview: Discovering the Love and Horror of 'Leviticus'

Australian natives Joe Bird and Adrian Chiarella didn’t expect their supernatural love story “Leviticus” to be one of the major hits at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, but they’ll gladly accept the accolades. To hear them describe their festival journey, a wild ride would be an understatement.

Their new film centers on teenage boys Naim (Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), a pair completely devoted to each other in the way only young love can bring out of you. But when their connection is threatened by outside forces, the allegorical nature of the film fully takes shape into something special. Bird and Chiarella recently traveled to San Francisco to promote “Leviticus” and talk about some of the story’s undertones. The following is a transcription of that conversation.

Q: How’s your day going so far?

Joe Bird: I went to Alcatraz this morning.

Q: How was it?

Bird: Amazing!

Adrian Chiarella: His dad wants to do all these tourist things while we’re in San Francisco.

Q: That ties into your experience traveling with this film all over the world. How has that experience been for you?

Chiarella: It’s been really good. We started at Sundance in January and then did SXSW and New York. It’s been nice to see how people respond to the film in different parts of the country. I think the metaphor of the movie is very clear in terms of what it’s about and I’ve discovered that it affected a lot more people on this side of the world.

Q: What have been some of the biggest audience takeaways you’ve gotten from those reactions?

Chiarella: I had a sense of what homophobia meant in contemporary Australian culture but learning that we share that in the last few years it’s felt like a lot of the rights we’ve worked so hard for have started to peel away again. It’s been interesting to hear that from people here.

Bird: A very beautiful thing that I’ve had said to me quite a few times is that they wish they had this film when they were younger. This is a film that they’ve really felt the need to see and have told their friends to see as well. I think that’s great because regardless of what you think the message of the film is, its inspired people and they’re responding to it. That’s a very beautiful thing to see.

Q: Your other lead Stacy Clausen is also a big piece of this puzzle coming together. How closely did the three of you work together to get that unique connection going onscreen?

Chiarella: I think it helps that you guys got to know each other so well before the shoot because we did the casting six months out. I sent them out to the locations and told them to get lost and find each other by going out in character. That way you can feel other people around you in character. I also told them to hold snakes.

Bird: Stacy and I just hung out and held snakes (laughs). Having that kind of connection fosters that sense of trust.

Chiarella: It was very apparent that Joe and Stacy had this very grounded connection and that connection could form the basis of everything we were trying to build this film out of. Unless you believe the chemistry of these two, not only does the love story not work but the whole mechanism for the horror movie monster that we’ve created doesn’t work either. That was really important to us.

Q: Adrian, did you look for specific things from your actors to maintain that connection on set?

Chiarella: It was about all of us trusting each other. I do believe really good performances come out of actors reacting to each other. Giving each other the space to do that was a big part of it and we also took the time to do different things. Every take we’d do a different variation, playing up the fear, playing up the desire for the other character, sometimes playing off the energy from the other person. We always had those options but doing that was also a sense of discovery.

Q: Joe, some of your strongest scenes in the film are you reacting to the unknown. How easy or difficult was that for you to pull off in front of the camera when you’re literally acting opposite an invisible monster?

Bird: It was mostly the trust and conversations I had with Adrian because it never felt out of place. Everyone was so supportive, I can’t take any of the credit.

Q: You both have been getting a lot of questions on this press tour, is there one question you wish people would stop asking you?

Adrian: (laughs) Everyone wants to know what I’m doing next and I’m not going to say.

Photos courtesy of Antonia Cupic. 

“Leviticus” is now playing in theaters nationwide.