A five-part short form black comedy series presented by Screen Australia, Buried is a mum-noir comedy thriller created and written by Miriam Glaser & Charlotte George, directed by George, produced by Fran Derham and starring Glaser as Abi, a single mum who accidentally kills a stranger on her morning school run. With this violent incident, her ‘to-do’ list gets a lot more complicated as she tries to juggle parenting along with disposing of a corpse. Set over the course of one not-so-average school day, Buried is a dark comedy that flips the Good Mother trope on its head. Then sets it on fire.
As the series releases online, Charlotte and Miriam spoke with our own Peter Gray about how this twisted idea came to fruition, the real-life instances that inspired some of its most outlandish moments, and how they manoeuvred their dark idea around working with young children.
I’m a black comedy person, so I absolutely love the set up of Buried. I’d love to know where this idea originated from?
Charlotte George: Well, I think it was based on when Miriam killed a cyclist (laughs).
Miriam Glaser: Yeah, I’m a method actor (laughs). No, Charlotte and I made a film together a couple of years ago about a bad mum returning to work, but it was done in the style of a spy-thriller. We got a really cool response to it because, I think, we were challenging that idea of a perfect mum and putting two genres together that didn’t usually go together, and with Buried we just wanted to take that idea and push it even further as far as we could. We wanted to mix something really domestic and perfect with a look at something much darker and gruesome.
Charlotte George: I think genre is a really great way to add a metaphorical layer to something, and I feel like what Buried does is, in some ways, give an authentic, emotional experience of what it’s like being a parent. You’re laughing, but also stressed at the same time. The actual storyline is incredibly out there and, you know, exaggerated, but I think what genre can do is give people an emotional reaction, and I feel like Buried gives that of being a parent. When Miriam and I were first talking about what we should do after our short film we were throwing ideas around and this was what immediately grabbed us. We could immediately see those juxtapositions of, you know, the breastfeeding next to a grave (laughs). I think it can be hard to express these experiences authentically on screen with just straight drama.
I feel like the horror genre is such a perfect gateway to express all the difference facets of life. I mean, life can be kind of terrifying in general…
Charlotte George: There are so many horror films out there that so often use their horror as a metaphor. Obviously so many try for gore, but so many are trying to say something deeper. You can get into people’s psyche through the blood and the gore, (but) then you actually have the opportunity to say something, and I think that’s certainly what interests me as a filmmaker. When Miriam an I were talking about (Buried) it absolutely fit into that. Same with comedy, I think comedy also lowers people’s guards. When you’re laughing you can introduce them to challenging concepts. So Buried was an opportunity to push all of those things and to develop our creative relationship as well.
That opening shot where Miriam’s character is clearly very stressed and not having the greatest day, and the fact you just get to tell those onlookers to “Fuck off” must’ve felt cathartic. Is there a sense of that when writing? That you get to say all the things that you might not be able to?
Miriam Glaser: Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of the scenes in this were born from our own experiences, and then we just dialed it up a little bit. As a parent you get so much unsolicited advice, so to be able to tell my dear friend, Fiona Choi, to “Fuck off” was, um, incredibly cathartic (laughs), and I think that carries through the whole series. My character is like Walter White, right? She becomes this dark inversion of herself by circumstance, and I think that first scene that you’re talking about is, obviously, one of the last scenes of the series. Charlotte wrote that episode, and I love that it starts with this kind of real image of, like, Madonna and Child, which is a motif we’ve tried to use through (the series). It’s challenging that idea of “the perfect mother” and really flipping it on its head.
Charlotte George: She’s liberated by this terrible thing that she’s done. It’s like she doesn’t care anymore about the fucking WhatsApp group and, you know, all the judgement that you get as a parent. She deserves to be judged with the other things she’s done, but the judgement about whether or not she has screen time for her kids or if she feeds them organic muffins, and stuff like that…she doesn’t care about that anymore. She’s got much more important things to worry about. By the end she’s kind of liberated from that element of parenting and, particularly, mothering. Mothers get particularly acute judgement from society and from other mothers, and that’s kind of built into the patriarchy that we live in. I feel like I never thought about it in quite that way before the end, so the fact that she tells that other woman to “Fuck off” is just a sign that she’s over it and she’s moved on as a mother.
I’m smart enough to never comment on whatever a woman is doing regarding their child. The conversations and comments we see in Buried, are they stemming from real life interjections? I can only imagine how some people would want to give their “advice” when it’s not needed.
Miriam Glaser: Oh, absolutely. I want to tentatively answer this question as to not have some type of Baby Reindeer situation. There’s so many parents at the school that I stole conversations from (for Buried). Let’s hope the mums don’t read The AU Review (laughs). But that WhatsApp group? I got accosted by another mum for not being included in a WhatsApp group, and it got very heated. I wasn’t quite prepared for how big a deal this was. It was awful when it happened, and she said to me that “Exclusion is a form of bullying.” My writer brain switched on as soon as it happened, because I thought how really fun and weird it all was. I speed dialed Charlotte and was like, “You’ll have no idea what just happened!”
Charlotte George: I think parents are always trying to justify their own decisions as well. Everyone is constantly being made to feel guilty as a parent about all the decisions being made. I think there are people who over-justify it, and you have to have a theory about why you’re doing this. Whether they’ve read an article or heard a podcast, everyone’s trying to justify their decisions. I mean, a baby doing sign language? I think what happens a lot with people is that they have low self-esteem and they’re unhappy, and they try to project that onto other people to make themselves feel good. And that happens with parents.
And the language in the show is colourful, to say the least. And you have to say some of these things in front of the young actors playing your children. How was that to manoeuvre?
Charlotte George: That was actually a little cinematic magic on the day. In order to work with children you have to get a license, and part of the license is that you won’t expose them to words such as that, right? So Miriam actually yelled the word “Cut” when we did that shot. So it was a little cinema magic there when we panned down to the child for her reaction. We just told the child that she’s shocked that her mum is yelling at somebody, so it wasn’t about the word for the actor. It was a feeling of “Mummy shouldn’t be yelling at people”, so that’s how we got away with it.
Miriam Glaser: The little girl’s mother, I was so worried about finding an actor for this, because I was so scared of showing the parents the script for the show, but she was down with it. The mum was so on board. It could have gone a very different way, so that little girl, Audrey O’Sullivan, and her mum really got the world that we were shooting for. I hope. Audrey kept asking me what happened to the cyclist, and asking me if he’s okay. I kept saying that everything was fine, but I think she called bullshit (laughs). Kids always bring you down to reality.
Well, with her asking about the cyclist, that opens up to that final reveal of the show. Do you both have an idea as to what fate awaits Abi?
Miriam Glaser: I wonder whether she doesn’t mention it and just hopes to get away with it. We always had the idea that there was going to be one final thing that could undo her. When we wrote this, we didn’t want her to just 100% get away with it. I guess the mum guilt is enough. She has to live with having traumatized her child. Kids don’t necessarily say they saw something horrible, they express themselves in different ways. They don’t vocalize that and that can be scary to grown ups. I can imagine Abi watching her daughter like a hawk (laughs).
And before wrapping up, I wanted to ask about the dark comedy genre for the both of you, and if there’s a film that sticks out for you? Whether it be a favourite or one that you view as being the pinnacle of the genre?
Charlotte George: There’s a bit at the end (of Buried) where it focuses on the picture and it starts getting faster and faster. We were inspired by Election, which is one of my absolute favourite movies, as to how we can make the final moment land really strong. My editor and I watched that scene with Matthew Broderick when he realises he’s done for, and it cuts between all these different faces, and the pacing gets faster and faster. So that movie was on my mind. Even though thematically Election isn’t the same, tonally I think we’re similar.
Miriam Glaser: One of my favourite shows is Back To Life. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s this idea of this unlikely criminal. She’s this woman sent off to prison for 17 years, and when she’s released back to her small town she’s witch hunted and kind of victimized. I felt the same thing with my character. She’s not a criminal mastermind. She’s a very amateur murderer. There were times where the production crew would come up to Charlotte and be like, “Oh, we just think that she wouldn’t have this type of shovel, but it’s got to look like she’s gotten whatever from the shed.” It’s this very slap-dash kind of thing.
Buried is now available to stream online here.
