Michaela Kolofsky

But even before that, we're looking at this very beautiful and strong friendship he had with a friend who he was kind of his only friend at high school.

And we start to get a very good sense of...

how absent Amy and Alex's parents really were.

There's a very great scene.

As we said before, Amy and Alex's parents are these very successful New Zealand filmmakers.

They're producer-directors and throughout the flashbacks in the story we learn about all the different times they started to be nominated for Oscars and nominated for Emmys and they were away from their family home.

In fact, they were away for so long that they used to just be away for three or four months when the kids were 14 or 15.

They'd just leave them a credit card and

You know, say, we hope we'll be back for your birthday.

And there's a great scene where Amy and Alex are talking about that.

And Alex says to Amy, remember when we didn't have any money and we never saw our parents because they were always working?

I used to lie in bed at night waiting for things to get better, trying to block out the noise from your Walkman on the bottom bunk.

I used to lie there with my eyes closed and wish that things would get better, that something would happen to pull us all out of that hole.

And then it did.

And here we are, no better off.

So success really doesn't change anything for the kids there.

the constant in their family is a sense of dislocation, actually, is a sense of kind of not belonging.

It's a fantastic turn of phrase.

I have to say, it's a very, very impressive first work of fiction.

I was actually pretty blown away by it.