The Royal Hotel: Kitty Green explains why Americans thought film was a horror movie

The Americans thought The Royal Hotel was a horror movie.

“They can’t enjoy it, they can’t laugh with it at all early on because they’re so afraid of it,” The Royal Hotel’s director and co-writer Kitty Green said to PerthNow. “They’re terrified from the first moment.”

The Royal Hotel is Green’s second narrative feature, a follow-up to the lauded film The Assistant, a story about a young woman working for an unseen movie mogul modelled on Harvey Weinstein.

The Assistant was a tense drama that fueled its suspense with what wasn’t explicit – sexual predation, cover-ups and toxic workplaces with wildly unbalanced power dynamics. The Royal Hotel does something similar in how it plays with implied rather than actual violence.

The Royal Hotel follows two American women (Julia Garner as Hanna and Jessica Henwick as Liv) who take up bartending posts at an outback pub when they run out of money on their extended holiday.

When they arrive, they discover a mining town teeming with male aggression and a toxic drinking culture. The pub is run by Carol (Ursula Yovich) and Billy (Hugo Weaving) who rotate through travellers to staff the bar, offering them accommodation upstairs.

Old drunk Billy is one character that Americans audiences see very differently to Australian and British ones.

American audiences though The Royal Hotel was a horror movie and Hugo Weaving was playing the villain. Credit: Supplied/Transmission

“We see him as not that bad a guy,” Green explained. “He starts showing the girls the pub and the beer and he uses the C-word really early on, and I think that turns American audiences off and they start to think he’s the villain immediately and are so suspicious of him.

“Whereas Australians the Brits are like, ‘Yeah, that’s just part of it’. It plays very differently here where we can enjoy the world of it a little more, we can see the good in people, we can see the light and the shade.”

Or maybe they’ve seen too much of Wolf Creek.

The genesis for The Royal Hotel was a 2016 documentary called Hotel Coolgardie which followed two Finnish backpackers in a similar situation.

“I thought what I was watching was not overt violence but this kind of aggression that I found interesting because I don’t think it’s discussed enough,” Green recalled. “It was looking at behaviour which is the entry point of violence but not necessarily the violence itself.”

Green’s paternal grandfather owned and operated a regional pub, and her dad grew up living above it, and then also having spent time in remote towns, it was a confluence of experiences and ideas that gave birth to The Royal Hotel. Plus, the opportunity to use the visual backdrop of the Australian outback was too enticing.

The male characters (Toby Wallace, Daniel Henshall, James Frecheville) in the movie, different archetypes of Australian masculinity fueled by alcohol and their own personal failings, engage with the women differently, but often boil down to what they think they’re entitled to – their time, their attention, their affection, and maybe even their bodies.

Filmmaker Kitty Green started her career making documentaries. Credit: Supplied/Transmission

Their behaviour towards Hanna and Liv carries with it an ever-present threat of peril, in part because the movie plays with audience expectations and familiarity with those attitudes. Our minds lead us to lay the ground for onscreen violence.

Some audiences found the film anti-climactic, which Green took to mean they were expecting an outburst of actual violence.

“What were they looking for,” Green wondered, before answering. “I think what they’re looking for is active sexual violence or that act of violence we don’t give them. That’s challenging for some people who want to see it.

“That’s where those [types of] films went and that’s what I’m trying to challenge. It’s a sad state of affairs [when people] think that is what’s missing, and they need that scene. I didn’t want to shoot that scene and I don’t need to see that scene.

“It’s been interesting watching everyone grapple with that and whether they understand why we left it out or if they think we left unintentionally forgot to put it in.”

Green admitted she often engages with the reaction and online discourse of her work. She reads reviews and social media posts when many filmmakers either don’t or say they don’t.

The Royal Hotel was filmed in South Australia. Credit: Supplied/Transmission

The Royal Hotel’s denouement is in part in conversation with the reaction to The Assistant, which Green said some critiqued as being too bleak, especially the ending, or the main character was too weak for not standing up for herself.

The Royal Hotel’s ending – without specific spoilers – is going for something different. “I feel like they’re a pair of films,” Green said.

While The Assistant and The Royal Hotel have a lot to say about gender and toxic male behaviours and the literal and social institutions that reinforce the status quo, Green said her focus was always on the female characters.

“I see it through the eyes of the women. That was always my way of attacking it, let’s look at the way these women are trying to handle themselves in this environment. They way they’re learning to speak up for themselves and learning about their boundaries and their limits.”

The Royal Hotel is in cinemas now