Cody Fern knows he needs to rip the Band-Aid off. “I guess I’m going to have to talk about it at some point,” he says. The Australian actor and filmmaker, preparing to premiere his feature directorial debut Closing Night at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday night, is sitting for his first interview about the project, which he describes as “emotionally autobiographical, but narratively fictional.” Those memoiristic strands remain intensely exposing all the same.
The film, seeking distribution, took initial inspiration from a key moment in Fern’s upbringing, in the tiny town of Southern Cross in western Australia. When he was young, his “wayward” aunt dropped a bomb on him. “She revealed to me that my mom had been denied an abortion while she was pregnant with me,” Fern says. “That was strange information to learn so young.” He then grew up with his mother as well as his stepmother — “two remarkable women who raised me,” he says, whom he yearned to understand better in adulthood. So he started writing a script: “When I wrote it, it was a very strange little bird — it was a very personal piece and I didn’t know how to feel about it. It was quite raw and sensitive.”
Same goes for the finished product, even though, through several rounds of revisions with Fern’s longtime co-writer Devon Bostick, Closing Night took on a life entirely of its own. This movie marks a striking introduction behind the camera for Fern, who broke out as an actor in Ryan Murphy franchises like American Crime Story and American Horror Story before most recently starring in the third season of Foundation. He helmed his first short, Pisces, about a decade ago, and had intended to pursue filmmaking before his acting career took off. Now, he’s come full circle.
