Director Renée Mao’s succinct, insightful, emotionally harrowing 2018 short film The Last Line convinced producers of A Beginner’s Guide To Grief that she was the ideal fit to helm their series.
depicted a young actress, Bella, auditioning for the role of a heartbroken woman. A faceless man off camera demands more devastation, more humiliation, more acquiescence. In only a few minutes, the audience witnesses Bella transition between a furious, pained fictional character and the present moment, where she is a vulnerable, harried actress desperate to please a bunch of strangers sadistically wielding their power over her.
A year later, Mao’s short film for Pride in New York documented , telling the story of Panthera Lush, the alter ego of 25-year-old drag performer and visual artist Alika Hall.
In both Bella and Panthera, Mao’s nuanced narrative direction enabled her subjects to be vulnerable, relatable and beautiful. There is a confidence and a resilience in their stories that producer Linda Ujuk (of KOJO Studios) immediately recognised as the beating heart of Anna Lindner’s own story of grief, healing and truthfulness, told in A Beginner’s Guide to Grief.
In Lindner, Mao found a co-conspirator who shared her love of dark, satirical comedy that doesn’t edge around grief and dying, but gleefully celebrates that there is no life without death and no comedy without tragedy. Mao and Lindner had both devoured Flowers (starring Olivia Colman and Julian Barrat), Back To Life (co-written and starring Daisy Haggard) and After Life (created by and for Ricky Gervais).
Working closely with Lindner as writer and lead actor, Mao had to navigate both the technical aspects of directing an experienced crew of actors while also feeling her way through a story that was – as the title indicates – also threaded with Lindner’s own family, grief and survival.
It was early in 2021 when producer Linda Ujuk from Australian studio KOJO asked Mao to read the script for the first episode of A Beginner’s Guide To Grief.
Mao recalls, “She really liked my work, particularly the short film I’d done in 2018 [The Last Line] and reached out. We hopped on a Zoom call with Anna, the creator and writer of the show, and it felt like an instant connection. For me, it felt like a no-brainer when a couple of days later they invited me to come on board the project.”
Renée Mao and Anna Lindner. Source: SBS
It was a rare opportunity. Not only does the series confront illness, death and the many ways we experience grief, but it was a production in which many of the creatives behind the cameras were women.
Though it’s uncommon in Australia for women to be directors, technicians and crew, Mao was accustomed to much greater representation in the United States, where she’d gone to film school at NYU. Mid-high school, she and her family had moved from Western Australia to China, so Mao completed her final three years at an international school where many of the students were American. She was surrounded by friends applying to colleges in the US, so it seemed like the most natural thing to do.
“I started working in the industry in the US,” she explains. “I went to NYU and lived in New York and worked in the advertising industry there. New York is a really special place to be a young female filmmaker, there’s so much diversity in the film industry. I saw a lot of female DPs [Directors of Photography], Directors, film crew. When I came back to Australia at the beginning of 2020, I was shocked by how few women there were behind the camera, and in general.”
Cassandra Sorrell as Daisy and Anna Lindner as Harry in ‘A Beginner’s Guide To Grief’. Source: SBS
With Lindner in particular, Mao found a kindred spirit both personally and professionally. Their shared language and references bring a tangible fizz to the snappy dialogue, the nuanced expressions and the clever, compassionate articulation of resilience that each of the characters abound with.
“Anna and I had a lot of conversations in the pre-shoot period about general vision. She had such a strong feeling of what she wanted to evoke in the audience through this series, what she wanted people to feel, and so I was very aware of that sensitivity to begin with… We were so fortunate to have that deeper connection where I really understood what she wanted, and we were both very attuned in that way.”
Harry’s cousin Isaiah (Carlo Ritchie) and other relatives. Source: SBS
That kinship extended to the cast and crew, and Mao recalls that many of them approached the on-set nurse to discuss the memories and emotions they were experiencing around grief. These conversations, Mao believes, were made possible because of Lindner’s indomitable candour in the script – as Harry – and on set.
“One of the greatest things about Anna is that she’s such a genuine person. She really has this ability to make everyone that she meets feel so special and heard. She’s so rare, especially in this industry. I witnessed her again and again giving the gift of this story through this show. The cast, the crew, everyone that came on board this journey, she prioritised everyone’s safety and comfort on set. She wanted everyone to gain something from this experience,” Mao relates.
Harry and friend. Source: SBS
She’d work with Lindner again in a heartbeat, she says. Whether that aligns with her other future ambitions is yet to be revealed. Mao wants to direct feature films, ideally sci-fi and fantasy genres in the vein of post-apocalyptic The Handmaid’s Tale or larger-than-life The Lord of The Rings.
She also wants to tell local stories.
“There are specific Australian stories that I’m really interested in telling, even specific projects based on books I love by Australian author Melina Marchetta. I read all of her books through high school. On The Jellicoe Road has been my all-time favourite book since I read it, I would love to work on that.”
For now, she is enthused about sharing A Beginner’s Guide To Grief with audiences.
“I’ve loved this project since I read the first script. I love the tone, the uniqueness, the comedy and starting such an important conversation. I love Anna, and I loved working with her on this.”
A Beginner’s Guide to Grief is streaming now as a six-part short-form series (also available subtitled in , , , and ).
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