TASMANIAN DEVIL

How do you sensitively handle a real-life tragedy? A quarter-century after Australia's most infamous mass shooting, Justin Kurzel returns to the scene of the crime with NITRA M Total Film meets the director and cast behind one of the year's most devastating movies.

- JAMES MOTTRAM

IN APRIL 1996, IN PORT ARTHUR, a coastal town on the island of Tasmania, the unthinkable happened. A young man named Martin Bryant entered a waterside café and started shooting indiscriminately, before turning on those in a nearby gift shop and car park. In total, he killed 35 people, wounding a further 23. It remains the worst mass murder in Australian history. That day - and what happened - is something that's really hard to discuss, says director Justin Kurzel, scrambling for words when Total Film meets him in a leafy Cannes garden to unpack his new film, Nitram.

Kurzel is no stranger to violence in his movies: like his blood-soaked takes on Macbeth, videogame Assassin's Creed or mythic Aussie outlaw Ned Kelly in True History Of The Kelly Gang. It's been that way since his 2011 debut Snowtown, the Adelaide-set true story about a series of grim murders, scripted by fellow Australian Shaun Grant. It was Grant who decided to pen a film about Bryant, sending it to Kurzel to take a look. At the time, the screenwriter was living in Los Angeles, in a country where mass shootings were and still are - disturbingly commonplace.

There was a man who ran into my local supermarket and started shooting, Grant recalls. And my wife at the time was going to be grocery shopping, but got called into work. So it was exceptionally close. And then not long after that, there were two mass shootings, one in Pittsburgh and one in Thousand Oaks in California. Again, not too far from where I was living. Grant's reaction to both this and living in a nation where it was so much easier to buy arms than in Australia prompted him to start writing Nitram.