Parties, drugs, guns, girls and not an adult in sight. It sounds like the perfect teenage world, but the hyper-realised wasteland portrayed in new Aussie film Wasted On The Young is far from it. Beneath the shiny veneer of antagonist Zack – played by Alex Russell – and his jock brethren lurks a frightening dark streak where power and status are everything and 140 characters on a social networking site can be a death knell for an outsider.

Wasted On The Young is a startlingly bleak assessment of modern youth culture as Zack’s reign over his high-school dominion becomes threatened by new student Xandrie’s – Adelaide Clemens – budding romance for Darren – *Oliver Ackland -, Zack’s step-brother. Burned by this seemingly inexplicable event, Zack drugs and sexually assaults Xandrie, later uses his powers of popularity to bully her into silence, before everything fractures into chaos with rape, drug abuse and school shootings up for exploration under director/writer Ben C. Lucas’ lens.

With Wasted On The Young receiving a national theatrical release through Paramount this week, inthemix caught up with Lucas to discuss the darkness of the material and the gestation process of Wasted On The Young.

Now that you’re at a national release for the film, I can imagine that it would’ve become your whole life in a sense?

“Yeah, pretty much. It’s been four years since the idea for the film first began and probably about two and a half years working on it full time. But it keeps on giving! I walked away from it eight or nine months ago, but with film festivals and now the wide release it keeps pulling me back in. That’s pretty cool, I think.”

Does it feel like all the hard work is over, or is it more stressful now that you can’t change it and it’s out there far and wide?

“Well in a way it’s done everything it can. It’s funny, we’ve done so many premieres at different places that it’s weird to think it hasn’t actually been ‘released’ yet. But for the last six or seven months I’ve been using it as a show-piece for my work and now it’s no longer a private thing that very few people will have seen.”

When you first began making the film did you envision or hope that you’d get to this point where it was in mainstream cinemas around the country?

“I think we always had pretty high hopes for it, but where we are now is beyond the scope we could’ve anticipated. I thought we were making a cult film, you know, this little independent group of filmmakers doing something on a typically indie scale. You never think that you’re going to get picked up by Paramount for wide distribution or get it over to the States or Korea and Japan like we have done. It’s totally crazy. But we knew that we were making the film for an audience, I just thought it was a much narrower one. Who knows why? It might be part zeitgeist or partly because of the effort we put in. We were definitely a professional production, we worked hard for that.”

So how long has it been since day one of the film?

“It’s about four years since the idea came from the producer and he set it to me as a writing task, which is pretty quick as far as indies go. Then it was a year and a half after that that the script turned into something that was actually going to get made and then we shot it all in March 2009 to finish it early last year.”

So how did you go from writing a screenplay from the concept to directing the whole feature?

“Well I didn’t really consider it as a directing thing for quite some time. The original concept was quite different and I was basically just writing on a commission which is a really good gig for a writer if you can get it. I had wanted to get into directing features for a while so when they made the offer I had to say that I really wanted the opportunity but it wasn’t the project that I felt was right for me at the time. We kinda then went into overdrive re-writing and reinventing it into something that I was really excited about. And once it started there was no stopping it.*

Going into the film, I’m not sure why, but I didn’t expect it to be as dark as it was. It covers a lot of ground that is almost taboo for high school films, certainly in Australia where something like a school shooting seems impossible.

“I’m not really a fan of just straight-up drama…I like stuff that’s more conceptual. Fables, if you will. I think people will take very different things from it. And that’s great because this isn’t about me cramming a ‘message’ down peoples’ throats. I had a philosophy when we made it that it wasn’t my job to soap-box, you know? My thinking was to try and make something more classic, a kind of Greek tragedy. Like the courtroom overthrowing the king, Julius Caesar, it’s that kind of story. In that context school shootings and suicide are part of the parcel. All the big moral fables are about murder and incest, really. That’s why the design of the film is so pronounced; we were trying to create an alternate reality where this sort of stuff is plausible.”

I didn’t pick this up when I first watched it but thinking back about the film I realised that there no adults on screen, like, ever! Right? I thought that was a really interesting trick and it kind of makes it the kids’ own little world that they play in.

“One thing I remember about high school was that it was everyone’s job to make sure that the teachers never found out about anything you were doing. Your whole life was secret from authority. There were versions of the script with adults but you make a bigger point about how little they matter to these kids by excluding them altogether. This is their world and their perception of it and the adults don’t really factor into it.”

And even still they’re so brazen about their activities, like the kids going on their intranet and almost bragging about how fucked up they get at parties.

“Yeah, well there’s a huge amount of cred that you get for getting away with something. I think there’s this moral exemption that only happens in high school – maybe in sports teams too – where if you do something and don’t get caught for it then it’s okay. Like, it wasn’t wrong if nobody found out about it. It can be really fucked up, basically.”

Something that seems really important to the film is the music. As well as HEALTH I saw in the credits that the score was done by Perth duo The Transients. How’d you get them involved?

“I was friends with their manager and we were looking for cool Australian electronic acts that were musicians, not just club producers, you know? People who could compose a whole film score. We sort of searched the whole country and then realized they were right on our doorstep in Perth. Both of the guys are trained musicians that came out of WAPA before forming their band and what they do is quite different than the score they did, it’s more poppy, and they really nailed the brief we gave them.*

Yeah I had a listen to their original stuff and the score is quite different. It’s very muscular and pounding. It certainly seems as though dance music and youth culture are moving together and it plays an important role in the plot of the film. Did you go into it knowing that you wanted to involve dance music and that kind of underground element?

“Absolutely, yes. Where I was coming from with the brief was that I wanted something sounded good and also something that was consistent with the world of the film. You know, we couldn’t just go to The Presets and license one of their tracks firstly because it would date and also because it would connect audiences with something they were already familiar with. I wanted to have something original and that would keep with the sensibilities of dance culture and everything that comes with that from raves to ecstasy and clubbing.”

Wasted On The Young is in cinemas now. You can check out a clip from the film below and for a chance to win an Apple iPad and other sweet swag courtesy of Paramount head over to inthemix’s Wasted On The Young competiton.