When the tree-change dream becomes a nightmare, that’s Alphabet Lane

You can take the filmmaker out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of the filmmaker – just ask James Litchfield, whose debut feature Alphabet Lane absolutely reeks of his upbringing.

Litchfield comes from a long line of pastoralists in the Monaro region in south-east New South Wales. His great-great-great-grandfather James Litchfield arrived from England in the 1860s and started raising sheep on a small block near Cooma; that small block has now grown to a multi-site empire across four states. The property has been passed from James to James to James over the generations, until this James decided his calling was in filmmaking (via the law), and sister Bea stepped into the gumboots instead.

His family was “extremely supportive” of his decision to trade the shears for the lens, says James, whose film was shot on the family’s Hazeldean Litchfield Estate.

“I knew I wanted to make something on the Monaro,” he says. “I grew up there, I’ve got a certain connection to the place, and a lot of emotions to tap into.”

His film, privately financed and made for less than $1 million, is a funny, spare and emotionally complex tale of a young professional couple who make the tree change from Sydney to the Monaro region and find it a lot more challenging than they’d ever imagined. It nudges at thriller and horror territory but ultimately is a surprisingly inventive relationship drama.

Anna (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) is a doctor doing the night shift at the local hospital. Jack (Nicholas Denton) is an engineer on the Snowy Hydro Scheme, driving miles from the fabulous bluestone homestead they’re renting to the site each day. We first meet them on a dusty road as they’re heading to and from work, stopping for an early morning hello full of longing and love. Later in the film, as they pass without even acknowledging each other, we know the relationship is in big trouble.

The crisis is triggered by the most innocuous of things: an imaginary friend conjured by Jack as a way of adding some spice to their lives, and filling the void of loneliness and isolation that’s crept in, though neither wants to admit it.

It would be fair, then, to say the film evinces a certain ambivalence to the place, right?

“The landscape for me is so fascinating because it’s very beautiful, but it’s also really cold, it’s windy, it’s sort of dry,” says Litchfield. “It makes such an amazing backdrop for this story of two people who are struggling to connect with where they are, and also have these little problems in their own relationship.”

He wrote the screenplay in his mid-30s, at a time when lots of his friends “had moved overseas or moved city or moved to the country or changed careers, or were at that point where they’re finding a new life. And a lot of them were finding there’s a lot of difficulties that come with that”.

He says the device of the imaginary friend – who turns out to have a wife, who also enters the increasingly strange dynamic between Jack and Anna – echoes something he has observed in real-world relationships.

“A lot of couples seem to have a third thing,” he says. “It’s often some sort of shared creative project. Couples who don’t have kids might have a dog that becomes quite an important character in their relationship, and they sometimes ventriloquise the dog and use it to negotiate certain things.”

That was, he says “the vague, rough concept” he set out to explore.

Lucinda Reynolds was working at Amazon when the script landed on her desk. Having grown up in the country herself, she saw things in it that both struck a chord and took her by surprise.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is so unique and alive’,” she says “It was very psychological. I felt it existed in this canon of Australian films about not belonging in a place, but it felt very contemporary and fresh too.

“I have lots of friends who have done this tree change,” she adds. “And I love anything that speaks to that conversation between urban and rural lives in Australia.”

She also liked that it would be a fun project for a small cast, was largely contained to a handful of locations, and would be possible to make with a small crew and budget – perfect, in other words, for her first outing as producer.

What she didn’t anticipate was that she and Litchfield would end up becoming a couple.

“I wouldn’t not advise it, but I wouldn’t tell everyone to do it,” she says of falling in love and making a movie at the same time. “Making a film is like making a family, it’s so intense. For us, it worked; I think we do work quite nicely together. And when you find the people you work well with, it’s a bit of a gift.”

Alphabet Lane is in cinemas from April 23

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