Every major city has its criminal underworld, but something intrigued and appalled filmmaker David Michod about the landscape of crime in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia.

More so than in other places, he said, Melbourne seems to have a fascination with turning criminals into celebrities, seeing crooks on the evening news and developing them into stars of reality television and the tabloids. It’s something that bugged Michod for years, and became the basis for his feature debut, Animal Kingdom.

“I just didn’t particularly want to participate in that continuing celebration of real criminal identities,” Michod said during a recent promotional stop in Dallas. “I knew I wanted the freedom to fictionalize this particular world. I wanted to build the characters from the ground up and make them my own.”

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Animal Kingdom co-star Guy Pearce, left, and director David Michod discuss the film on set in Melbourne, Australia.

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One specific instance that influenced Michod was the random revenge killing of two young uniformed cops by a dangerous gang of armed robbers that helped shape his story. Still, he insists that he drew upon several sources for the film, the biggest of which was his own imagination.

“To Australians, but especially to Melbournians, there are clear echoes of a particular era,” he said. “It’s been gratifying to see that it’s played back home as a film rather than a quasi-historical document. But it is important to me that it has a certain authenticity nonetheless.”

Michod’s complex story follows a particular family that has engaged in robberies and violent crimes for generations, from the matriarch (Jacki Weaver) to squabbling brothers and cousins to the teenage nephew (James Frecheville) who becomes entangled in their lives. That’s when a detective (Guy Pearce) steps in to both protect the youngster and use him to bring down his notorious relatives.

Animal Kingdom has been a personal project for Michod for several years. He wrote the first draft of the script almost a decade ago, when he was just out of film school. The idea stuck with him while he spent several years making short films, even if it makes for an ambitious debut feature.

One thing the director knew he wanted to accomplish was to showcase the urban culture within Melbourne in a less glamorous light than other films made in the city. Such a task coincided with the subject matter, and involved choosing a wide variety of locations that were both diverse and evocative.

“I certainly wanted to show a more expansive and more dangerous side of Melbourne than we’re used to seeing on film,” Michod said. “I find that stuff quite compelling and beautiful as well as dangerous and unsavory. In a sense, I wanted the film to be as much about Melbourne as it is about these characters.”

Since Michod was insistent upon not basing his characters on any real-life subjects, his research into actual criminal subculture was minimal. However, he did talk to a few experts about the role of armed robbery in Melbourne’s criminal history to help add texture to his script.

“There have been a number of quite infamous criminal families in Melbourne’s history that have had varying degrees of prominence of notoriety in the press, and therefore in the public imagination,” Michod said. “If anything, the family is based more on my observations of families generally that I know, and the way the dynamics work within them. By taking that, and transplanting it into a kind of heightened criminal world, the nature of those dynamics themselves become quite heightened.”

Just because they’re compelling doesn’t mean they’re good role models. And that gets to the root of Michod’s story, that of an impressionable young man who is led astray by the corrupt moral framework of the family in which he’s raised.

“I don’t want for it to appear like I’m trying to make them cool,” he said. “It’s important for me that I have a very real empathy for these characters and that they be fascinating to me on some level. I’d like to believe that an audience would have that experience with me also.”

Veteran Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, who plays Pope, perhaps the most violent member of the family, said it was a challenge to bring dimension to a character without much of a moral compass.

“We didn’t set out to make someone who was genuinely reprehensible,” Mendelsohn said. “There’s a couple of people I’ve known who had been incarcerated and gotten out. To encounter these kinds of people, you get a feeling from them. The type of people David was talking about rang very true.”

Mendelsohn said that because of the structure of the film, he spent more time than usual talking about backstory and character motivation with his fellow actors before filming began.

“It was quite organic. It wasn’t very forced or calculated,” he said. “It was incredibly intense [on the set]. Sometimes you couldn’t breathe in there. We had a lot to do in a short amount of time.”

Animal Kingdom is currently playing at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas.

TODD JORGENSON can be reached at 940-566-6871. His e-mail address is tjorgenson@dentonrc.com.