Goran Stolevski and Of an Age
Some episodes we go into prepared. This one our host went into a little bit in love. He says so himself, right at the top: he had thirty minutes with Goran Stolevski and no real idea how to fit everything he wanted to ask into them, because the film they were there to discuss had quietly taken over his last forty eight hours. He watched Of an Age twice, back to back, and the first time he forgot to take notes at all. If you have ever closed your laptop three minutes into something because you suddenly just wanted to be inside it, you already understand the spirit of this conversation.
So fair warning. There is fanning out in this episode, and we kept it in, because the affection is the point. What follows is a filmmaker and a host who both clearly care about the same things talking shop at speed, trying to cram a five hour conversation into a half hour window, and mostly delighting in failing to.
If you do not know Goran yet, you will. He is the Macedonian born, Australian raised writer, director, and editor who broke through with short films, including Would You Look at Her, which won Best International Short at Sundance in 2018. His feature debut You Won't Be Alone, steeped in Macedonian folklore with a genre twist, premiered in competition at Sundance in 2022 and drew rave reviews. Of an Age is the film at the center of this episode. In the summer of 1999, an unexpected and intense twenty four hour romance unfolds between an eighteen year old Serbian ballroom dancer and his best friend's older brother. A decade later, the two meet again for a bittersweet reunion.
The heart of this conversation is time, and what looking back does to a person. Goran is open about the fact that Of an Age is, in his words, a very detailed emotional autobiography of who he was. The lead, Nikola, is essentially his own personality at that age. The whole thing began when he was reading a short story about a boy going to a party and was suddenly flooded with the feeling of one ordinary party from his own high school years. Not because anything important happened there, but because the memory carried the whole sensation of being him at that age, and everything he then believed life and love were going to be.
He describes his teenage years as a waiting room, the place you sit before real life supposedly begins at university and beyond. The film is him going back into that room as the person he became, and sitting with how strange and tender and painful that distance is.
Goran does not soften the story of how he got to Australia. He arrived in 1997, at twelve, and he did not want to be there. He calls himself an unwilling migrant, and he describes turning to film and music as a way out of a day to day life he found unbearably quiet. While other kids watched what was on the charts, he was lost in Katharine Hepburn and Ingmar Bergman, in other eras and faraway places, because the present was the one thing he felt he could not handle.
He talks too about a brief window around seventeen, eighteen, nineteen when Australia almost felt like home, a feeling tangled up with realizing he was queer and becoming, very quickly, comfortable and even militant about it. Going back to Macedonia in those years, he found it no longer felt like home either. That double dislocation, belonging fully to neither place, runs underneath the whole film.
Ask Goran what he wanted audiences to feel and he points to a single thing he struggles to even name: an emotional gut punch at the end that he says is the only way the film lives on after him. The first person to watch his early cut forgot to take notes. So did he. So did his producer, Christina. That, to him, was the sign.
People did suggest he resolve things, that he show what happens to the characters if you stayed in the room with them another five or ten minutes. He has a very concrete idea of what happens. He chose not to tell us, because the film asks a question he did not want to answer for the viewer: is the connection worth everything you go through to find it, even the parts that are destructive along the way. He has his own answer. He deliberately leaves yours to you.
Our host admits something on the record here that he says has never happened before. The element that stood out most to him was the sound design. The bass bleeding faintly through a wall from another room. The overlapping crosstalk at the parties. The way a piece of music carries you through a scene that would otherwise go slack. Goran walks through how he gets there, and it is gloriously obsessive. He never cuts a rough version, because every pass has to feel like the best he can do in that moment, right down to slicing out individual breaths to control how close you feel to a person on screen.
There are thirty five pieces of music in Of an Age, and not one of them was composed for the film. They are all licensed, including the piece that sounds like score, which he stumbled on after a company used it in a promo. His whole philosophy sits in one line: work with what is in front of you, not the idea you had. He credits his sound designer, Emma Bortignon, who he says sets a standard for herself that is genuinely rare, and who is at work on his third film in Melbourne now.
The numbers in this episode are almost absurd, and Goran is the first to say they are not representative of anything. Of an Age was scheduled for twenty days, shot in eighteen, two of which were days off, so really sixteen. The script took eight very intense days to write. It was the first draft they shot. It was also his thirteenth screenplay, written after twelve others and somewhere north of twenty five short films across two decades.
He is careful not to let any of this sound like ease coming naturally to him. Before his first feature he was, in his words, unemployed for so long, turned away by more people than he can count, never quite good enough along the way. What changed, he thinks, is that with You Won't Be Alone he delivered exactly the vision he promised, and people started believing he would do what he said. After a lifetime of the opposite, that shift still seems to amaze him.
One of the most striking things Goran shares is how he works with actors. He sends them a director's creative statement, even a sound design statement, before they sign on, so they understand the world they are stepping into. But he keeps every editing and production note out of the script itself. He writes purely for the feeling the actor gets reading it the first time, because the shape of a sentence, the verbs, even the punctuation, quietly tells an actor who they are before they can think about how they look.
He shot lists obsessively, redrafts every night, then throws it away on the morning of the shoot and never looks at it again, because by then it is about absorbing the feeling rather than executing the plan. He goes looking for the thing he did not picture. And because he edits in his head while shooting, he often will not bother with safety coverage at all, which he says keeps the whole crew more connected to the film, knowing nothing they shoot is just backup.
The most moving moment of the interview is when he describes a scene he thought was light, almost comic, a daytime goodbye in a car. They had finished a day early and were essentially improvising it to fill time. Then the actor playing Cole, Elias, played it for real, and Goran, sitting in the back seat, started to cry. He realized he was watching a boy realize he is queer in real time, and the scene took on a weight nobody who had lived with the script had seen coming. It was the third day of filming, early enough that he could quietly reshape everything around it. His favorite scene, a seven page night drive, ended up at one page in the final cut, because the actor had already given that feeling somewhere it was not even scripted to live.
We ask every guest the same closing question, and Goran's answer was short and certain. One carrot cake. Literally, he says, much more comfort. We will allow it.
Of an Age:
Written and Directed and Edited by: Goran Stolevski
Produced by: Kristina Ceyton and Sam Jennings
Starring: Elia Anton, Thom Green, Hattie Hook
Of an Age Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtfkhimcnLY
Official Website for Of an Age:
https://www.focusfeatures.com/of-an-age/
THE SMITH SOCIETY is a podcast featuring storytellers. From actors, writers, and directors to producers, editors, we discuss a variety of topics related to the film and television industry, everything from writing a screenplay to selling your idea and preparing for your next big project.
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