Sleep. Those hours at night when we are at our most vulnerable, are explored in first-time Australian director Julia Leigh’s film Sleeping Beauty.  

The inspiration for the disturbing story about a university student, played by Sucker Punch’s Emily Browning who earns a living allowing herself to be anesthetized and left in the company of wealthy clients, is murky, according to Leigh.  

“I think the question of where a project comes from is essentially mysterious,” she says. “It’s very mysterious to me why and how something rises in me that I find so compelling that I have to begin a work.

“When I look back in hindsight I see that I had been told the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty as a girl. I’d read and loved two famous novellas, one by Kalabata, one by Gabriel García Márquez. Both stories told from the point of view of an older man who paid to sleep next to a younger girl.”

The novelist-turned-filmmaker says her decision to make the film was influenced by “a recurring nightmare that I had after I published my first novel The Hunter. I did a bit of press and I had a bit of exposure. And my nightmare was that I was being filmed in my sleep.”

That experience led her to write and direct the film.

“I did ask myself, ‘What would it be like if you knew something was happening to you in your sleep and you knew it probably wasn’t good for you, how would it seep into your waking life?’”