WHEN KITTY GREEN speaks with Empire she’s in Barcelona, where she’s travelling with a friend. It’s a fitting setting to talk about The Royal Hotel, her pressure-cooker thriller about two holidaying friends (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick) who take jobs in a pub in the Australian outback to make some much-needed cash. “I feel like naturally when you travel, someone has to take charge and be more cautious, and the other person can drink a little more and have more fun,” says Green sheepishly, the latter in this instance.
The characters are out of their element, a dynamic which is exacerbated by the pub’s patrons, largely male miners, whose misogynistic behaviour curdles from jokey asides into violence. During a busy night, leering local Matty (Toby Wallace) asks Liv (Henwick) for a “Dickens Cider”, which when spoken quickly sounds like “a dick inside her”. “That happened to me in a bar in Australia,” Green remembers. “It immediately made me feel like I didn’t belong in that space.”
She uses these moments to underscore the girls’ early shifts with a creeping sense of dread, drawing on small but uncomfortable interactions she had while travelling around her home country (she hails from Melbourne). She also references