Adelaide’s Tilda Cobham-Hervey on ‘the jump from scrappy indie’ to Hollywood heavyweight
Ahead of her new film releasing in Australia and a letter-writing activation at an Adelaide city cinema, Tilda Cobham-Hervey tells how Alphabet Lane is making film differently, and how the SA industry should take note.
When this Adelaide-based reporter was organising a chat with Tilda Cobham-Hervey in the newsroom, two voices piped up: “I went to Cirkidz with her!” “My sister did too!”
Telling Tilda, she laughs – “I love Adelaide,” she says. “Anytime you bring up Cirkidz, someone’s been a part of that.”
For the uninitiated, the circus school that runs classes for all ages is deeply embedded in SA’s theatre community – one Tilda knows well and credits with getting her start in the arts.
She has just wrapped up her directorial debut, titled It’s All Going Very Well No Problems At All, filmed in Adelaide and expected to be featured in an upcoming Adelaide Film Festival program.
But fans won’t be waiting long to see her on screen, with her latest film Alphabet Lane hitting Australian cinemas from next week.
Alphabet Lane follows Tilda as Anna and co-star Nicholas Denton as Jack, a couple who have moved to an isolated town and struggle to make friends, culminating in a joke that gets out of control.
It’s a dark comedy that Tilda says is about friendship as much as romance, and covers the “in-between” of relationships, “where it’s just sometimes hard work”.
“Making new friends as an adult is also really hard and I really enjoyed the awkwardness and the exploration of that,” she says.
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While grappling with that in the film, her character Anna turns to writing letters to her husband, under the guise of their imaginary friends.
Letter writing is something Tilda doesn’t think people do enough.
She wrote “a lot” of letters in her first time properly away from home and in Tasmania aged 19 saying “I would send like nearly 200 letters a week!”
“I think it’s such a beautiful thing to have letters,” she says.
“I have a little drawer of letters I’ve received over the years and I think there’s something that’s so beautiful about the tactility and the time it takes to see and write a letter.
“And that you see the mistakes, you can’t delete something, you’ve got to cross it out or work with what you’ve got, and I think there’s something really magical about that.”
Her love of letters was on show in a special interactive exhibition called Dear Stranger at WOMADelaide last year, and she’s bringing it back to Palace Nova Eastend this weekend, with an Alphabet Lane twist.
Tilda will visit the Rundle Street cinema on Sunday to exchange letters with fans and passersby, promoting the film and the art of connection in putting pen to paper.
Letter writing is an “art form” she believes has been lost to the digital age, but re-emerges when you’re in a setting like the countryside, where Alphabet Lane is set.
“The landscape is such a big part of the story…It’s sort of a naturally treeless plain, and you do feel a bit like you’re aliens in a space that you shouldn’t really be.”
The film subverts the classic rural Australian setting, with writer and director James Litchfield opting for a slow-burn relationship drama over an outback horror.
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“That was really exciting to see something set in sort of a rural place in Australia and not go completely down that route,” Tilda says.
“I think we have a real problem in our industry that when one film has worked, we go ‘okay we’ll make 20 of them’ instead of trying to come up with something completely different.”
She says taking risks on new stories – and more funding for those stories – will start to close the gap the film industry feels locally.
Drama production in Australia amounted to a record $2.7 billion in 2024/25, Screen Australia research found, but South Australia – where Tilda hails from – tallies just three per of the total spend.
It’s a figure she says is “so sad” because “so many incredible Australian films have come out of South Australia”, like the Philippou brothers’ Talk to Me and Sophie Hyde’s Jimpa as examples.
“There is a huge jump between scrappy Indie and giant Hollywood movie, I think that’s probably always been a challenge,” she says.
She said the indie rom-drama Alphabet Lane – which she executive-produced as well as starred in – appealed to her because it took a different approach to storytelling.
“I loved the bravery to make something on a really small budget in a different way to how most films are made,” she says.
“This was made over like three weeks, and we all lived together, all of the different teams had to really work together in a different way to when you’re on a really big set, and there’s a billion people to do every little thing.
“All of those things I think made me really excited about what this film could bring and how it could be quite a unique story and project for Australia.”
But she still holds Adelaide near and dear when it comes to filmmaking for its “incredible landscapes” and “incredible crew, creatives and post-production”.
From taking the reins on her directorial debut to other projects like Monkey Man, which had post-production done in SA, Tilda always has the local industry in mind.
“I guess I’m ushering people towards South Australia, but not intentionally, only because I truly believe it’s where I’ve had my best creative experiences,” she says.
“I always come back to Adelaide, and I will always do that. I’m very close to my family and whenever I have a moment free, I end up back here.”
ALPHABET LANE is in cinemas from April 23, with a Q&A screening with Tilda Cobham-Hervey at Palace Nova Eastend on April 24.
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