David Michôd, Ben Mendelsohn Talk 'Animal Kingdom'

When the young actors in the Australian import Animal Kingdom got fed up with fellow actor Ben Mendelsohn's on-set behavior, they didn't dare challenge their co-star.

"I was fairly brutal with them," says Mendelsohn of his approach to playing the film‘s coiled villain, Andrew "Pope" Cody. Some cast members feared approaching Mendelsohn while he was in character, so they ended up punching one another to blow off steam.

"They didn't want to punch me," Mendelsohn says with a sly grin.

Mendelsohn doesn't look like your typical screen villain. He's handsome in an ordinary way, and he's not as physically imposing as other tough guy actors.

Then again, Animal Kingdom isn't your garden variety mob film. The movie follows a tightly knit brood being squeezed by the cops, a tension that spikes when they invite their naïve cousin (James Frecheville) into the fold.

The cousin catches the clan at an inopportune time. The cops are killing off family members one by one, and an increasingly anxious Pope isn't sure the cousin has the guts to make it in the business.

Writer/director David Michôd wrote the role of Pope for Mendelsohn in the hopes of leveraging the actor's "intelligence and quiet dangerousness."

"Ben has been acting for a long time, and he started out as a kid," Michôd says. "He's known for his boyish [demeanor] that I wanted to subvert."

Michod started working on the movie nearly a decade ago, using a real-life incident in Melbourne as his inspiration.

Two very young police officers were murdered at random by local thugs, a crime which rocked city dwellers, he says.

"That event seemed so unusual and horrifying to me. I almost immediately started imagining the days and weeks preceding the events," Michod says. "That was the core of the movie ... the cold brutality of that never left me."

"There was no escaping that event. It's still something that's spoken about now," Mendelsohn says of the killings.

Many mob-style stories end up glorifying a life in crime. Not Animal Kingdom.

"I wanted to make a film about a pervasive and relentless anxiety these characters feel given the nature of the world they move in," Michôd says. "To achieve that, it's important that I not make that world look fun."

In Australia, some criminal behavior is seen as "cool and exciting," Michôd says.

Mendelsohn ticks off the case of two real-life criminals who enjoy tabloid fame in his home country - John Ibrahim and Chopper Read.

"[Ibrahim] is photographed regularly in the tabloids with a couple of lovely looking lasses," Mendelsohn says.

The violence in Animal Kingdom - brief bursts of mayhem that arrive out of the blue - highlight Michôd's approach.

Violence in the real world "comes out of nowhere, explodes in a flash, and you're left with a very unsettling aftermath," Michôd says.

Mendelsohn says the restraint shown in the film only magnifies the impact.

"You have indications of what people might do, and what they might do is really [expletive] ugly," the actor says. "You're much more ‘in' the violence than if David shows it to you."