In person, Elissa Down is a hell of a good storyteller – quick with a laugh, an interesting turn of phrase and a strong desire to make herself understood (I lost count of how many times she used the phrase “Know what I mean?” during our interview). And that storytelling nous is equally apparent in her first feature film, ‘’The Black Balloon’’. Starring Toni Collette, Erik Thomson, ‘’Kokoda’’’s Luke Ford, ‘’Home and Away’’’s Rhys Wakefield and young supermodel Gemma Ward, it looks at the Mollison family as they juggle life’s myriad demands while living with eldest son and brother Charlie’s severe autism. It’s a story that has a real-life connection to Down’s own – two of her brothers are autistic, and one of them, Sean, has traits and mannerisms like those of Charlie (played magnificently well by Ford). But it’s also a story that will hit home for anyone with a family. I spoke with Down just before she took off for the Berlin International Film Festival, where ‘’The Black Balloon’’ won the Crystal Bear award, presented by the Generation 14 programme’s jury of 11 young viewers.

You weren’t lying when you claimed ‘You’ll laugh, you’ll cry’ before the screening of ‘’The Black Balloon’’ I caught – I ended up doing both.

Well, that’s good, because when you set out to make that kind of film where you have the aim of making people laugh and cry you kind of hope you deliver. Because if you don’t, you kind of look like a dick, don’t you?
When you’re writing something like this, that draws so heavily from your own experience and is uncompromising about doing so, is it an examination or even kind of an exorcism of your own thoughts and feelings about your life?
You know, I was pretty much good with it. But when you do write it, there are little revelations that you get along the way. That was the process, and there was a stage when I think I was holding back and then I just went – excuse the French here – ‘Oh, fuck it, I don’t care what people think’ and just jumped right into it. That’s when I felt this complete liberation about how I wanted the characters to react emotionally, things like that. That anxiousness sort of left. I just went ‘Everything is on the table’. You do kind of put a wall up inside yourself. Not over anything particular, but you do just go ‘OK, let’s just protect the self a little bit here’. And there was a point where I just had to forget about that, just take down that wall, and whatever I had to dig around and get I would get.

Did you reach that point yourself or were you helped along by other people?

It was from Jane Campion, actually. We’d met on Aurora, the script development body - she was a patron of that. She was fantastic to me, asking to see my short films and giving me little master classes. We would talk about stuff, and she would say ‘Oh, who cares what people think?’ And I just loved that attitude. When she said that, I think I took that away as my ethos – ‘Yeah, who does care?’ You obviously care what the audience thinks but you do have that thought of whether people are going to psychoanalyse you. That was the thing that was holding me back slightly, wondering if people were going to watch it and try to go ‘Hmmm, OK, what’s Elissa like as a person?’ Taking Jane’s ethos on board, I thought, well, people can come up with theories until the cows come home. It’s not going to bother me.

Well, any piece of work that has real resonance or meaning is going to spring from somewhere very personal.
And when you make a film that’s semi-autobiographical, people want to know about it. And I’m more than happy to talk about it! It’s the same with songwriting – ‘Oh, You’re So Vain...you know Carly Simon wrote that about Warren Beatty!’ There’s a little extra grab because it’s based on something. ‘Ooh, what’s the story behind that?’

Given that, has your family seen ''The Black Balloon''. And if so, what did they make of it?

My family has been so absolutely supportive. When Mum saw it, she was just bawling but she was also cringing. She said ‘You captured our turn of phrase just too well’. There were lines that Toni or Erik would deliver, and you could almost see the hairs rise on the back of their necks: ‘Oh my God, that’s what we say!’ They loved it. James, my brother who isn’t autistic, was like ‘Why didn’t I have a girlfriend like Gemma in high school?’ He loved it too, and he’s a massive moviegoer – he’s looking forward to seeing the trailer and the posters. And my brother Sean, on who the Charlie character is based, has seen it as well. I found that really interesting because he and Luke hung out as part of Luke’s rehearsal process and they became great mates. So Sean’s watching the film and he’s laughing at Charlie, because Charlie does some pretty funny things, and he must have got that they were using sign language like he does, so there was that familiarity. But there’s a moment late in the film where it all turns to shit, and Sean freaked out that whole scene. And something I found really interesting is that’s when the majority of the audience is upset – most people tell me that that’s the scene where they cry or they get upset. So he was having the same emotional reaction as everyone else at the same time as everyone else. That was fascinating, because I’ll never know the inside of his brain – and I suppose that’s half the reason for making this film – but I had a little bit of an insight at that moment.

We sort of see ‘’The Black Balloon’’’s story through the eyes of Thomas, played by Rhys Wakefield. Is there much of you in that character?

It’s funny. I find myself in the Thomas character, and also in Gemma Ward’s character Jackie. Because I simply have to be in everything! But my co-writer Jimmy has parts of himself in Thomas as well, and Jackie is a composite of many people. But Charlie is completely drawn from my brother. When my relatives have seen the trailer, they all go ‘It is scary how much that actor has nailed him’. And it’s the same with my mum and my dad.
You’ve talked about the big part you played in helping care for your brothers growing up. Without wishing to draw too spurious a comparison, did that kind of childhood hold you in good stead for running a film set?
I never thought of it that way, but you’re probably right. I’ve had to be a personnel manager for quite a while! I’ve always been the eldest kid, the one who was looking after other people’s kids when all the families got together. I learnt to be quite bossy in my youth, and maybe that’s become authoritative. But it’s an interesting comparison to make.

One thing I enjoyed about the movie is that it’s not a public service announcement on living with autism. It’s a lively, engaging family drama in which autism happens to be a major component.

That was one thing that was really important – that it was entertaining. As I said, it’ll make you laugh and make you cry. On the flip side of that, people are coming out and going ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know that about this’. If you go in with this didactic view about reaching people something, they’re going to get bored. My priority was making a film that would be entertaining and touching. But when Aspect, the autism association in New South Wales, saw it, they thought it was like a documentary. So it still completely works in terms of its authenticity but people find it entertaining as well, so I think we got that great balance. It’s not even a balance, really; it’s a knock-on effect of doing a film the best way you can. It’s going to make you think.

The Black Balloon opens in cinemas March 6.

- GUY DAVIS