Decolonizing Australian Cinema: A Conversation with Warwick Thornton

While I was working at the radio station, I became aware of CAAMA’s new video unit. A lot of Indigenous people in central Australia are illiterate, so radio and video have been key to connecting with them. CAAMA would make these thirty-minute video programs to communicate what was happening in central Australian communities—issues like land rights and addiction. I used to watch the video-unit team from a distance. They had an old Datsun. They would load all their equipment into it, drive off into the sunset, and come back a week later after visiting all these far-off parts of the country. Meanwhile, I was playing records and ads every day, so the choice was obvious.

CAAMA had a music recording studio that it used to record Aboriginal bands. The first thing they would do after completing a mix is take it to the radio station, ask the DJ to play the release, then run down to listen to it on car speakers. That’s how they were able to tell if the track worked. So, being exposed to weird methods like this helped me understand the power of sound in different contexts. Obviously, the track will sound good in a studio, but how does it sound in a 1970 Dodge pickup on the AM radio? With movies, if you can turn the picture off and tell the story using only sound, then you’re on the right path. That’s where the genesis of storytelling is for me: your voice and the darkness. No whizzbangery.

I composed the score for Samson and Delilah, and I was nominated for the Australian Film Institute Award for it that year, which is like Australia’s equivalent of an Oscar! That felt weird because I was going up against people with multimillion-dollar mixing budgets, and I had used GarageBand—I thanked GarageBand in my speech! Me writing the music for Samson was completely an ego thing. We had the money to get another composer, but I was set on making the music and testing the waters, even though, technically, I’m a terrible guitarist. More recently, I did the music for my documentary series The Beach, where I’m sitting around in a shack on a beach with no electricity.

I was seventeen when I was a camera trainee at CAAMA, and I shot tons of documentaries, mostly informational programs and sometimes community service announcements, but no fiction work. I did that job until I was about twenty-three, and then I decided to go to film school in Sydney. I had mainly grown up with blockbusters, but there I had this massive reeducation and learned about European cinema. Thankfully, VHS came along at the time, so that provided me with the opportunity to choose what I wanted to watch as opposed to whatever Hollywood decided to send our way, or whatever the cinema owner considered the most profitable. My world would have exploded if Criterion had been around back when I was a kid.

My mother was a photographer before she worked for CAAMA, so I grew up with projectors and still cameras, which I originally didn’t care about. When I joined the video unit, I thought, what’s the coolest job here? For me that ended up being the job of the cinematographer—the total egomaniac. I usually find cinematographers to be complete wankers, though I guess that’s why I’m one of them! I liked being that guy who shows up and says, all right, what do you want me to shoot? So, the initial attraction came from a stupid place. But doing more and more of it, making a lot of dumb mistakes, and ultimately being able to capture some really beautiful things made me fall in love with it. In the early days, I was a very grumpy and angry cinematographer because I didn’t have the experience. I was withdrawn and felt like no one understood me, but then I bloomed with more and more practice. That’s when I began to have fun on set. The best way to become a cinematographer is to shoot as much as possible. Feeling comfortable with the camera allows you to work with the director more effectively, as opposed to you forcing your vision onto the film because you only know how to do certain things with the camera.

When I was exposed to new films in film school, I realized that storytelling doesn’t need to be a classical three-act structure revolving around the good guy. That’s when I realized that I have a unique voice and that I’d seen a lot of shit as a teenager and as a child growing up in an Indigenous community. The kind of structures that I was thinking about and the stories that I wanted to tell weren’t totally from another universe. At that point in my midtwenties, I realized I had a good foundation to make my own work because I knew about lighting and how to use a camera and how to capture sound.

Nana was the product of me being confident about what I wanted to do using dark comedy. Its genesis started with the inspiration of Sesame Street, so the goal was to make an Aboriginal-community version of it. In that show, there’s a sketch with Lily Tomlin, who used to sit in this huge chair and, as a grown woman, play this little girl and talk about things like making sandwiches. Nana takes the voice of an innocent-sounding narrator, an actual little girl, and uses it to tell a story about the sweet, delicate relationship between a grandchild and a grandmother, but the twist is that you’re not in Kansas anymore—you’re in an Aboriginal community in central Australia. Nana is about a child growing up in a dark, strange place but still very much having a childhood. In the end, when you see Nana beating the shit out of those guys, it’s jarring to have the narrator continue on that cute wavelength of “I still love my Nana.” The world you grow up in is the world you know. Some people would be shocked and horrified, but others . . . That’s how I grew up, and that’s what I know. It’s not just a matter of desensitization. It’s just what I—and a lot of Indigenous people—know.

The same actress who plays Nana plays the grandmother in Samson and Delilah—Mitjili Napanangka Gibson, who is very much one of the most revered Aboriginal artists. The rest, well, that’s just reality. You walk into an art gallery in Alice Springs that’s designed for tourists and there’s a 2,000 percent mark-up on the works. In the back there are a bunch of old ladies painting and painting, almost like an art sweatshop. People don’t know what they’re looking at, but when they’re told something’s important, they go for it. It’s the way things are.

Indigenous people are incredibly affected by ghost stories, and we don’t have the same fear of the dark that others do. We talk to the spirits of our ancestors, whether good or bad, every day, especially where I come from in central Australia. In mainstream cinema, mostly everything that has to do with ghosts has to do with fear. For us, ghosts are good; they’re your ancestors coming to check in on you; they’re your grandmother or your best friend who died paying you a visit, playing games with you, and reminding you that there’s more to life than the silly shell that is physical or biological existence. I was looking to find connections—some scary, some beautiful—between the dead and the living. I wanted them to be true stories rather than some shit I had made up, so that each story would have a true connection to Indigenous people. The Darkside is one of the films I’m most proud of, because it focuses purely on storytelling and emotion. In a way, it also demystifies the ghost-story genre, which of course means it did terribly, financially, because it didn’t have monsters or special effects. It’s just the voices of people telling their stories.

The landscape needed to be heard. If I were to have flooded the film with violins and cellos, there would have been too much emotion. You’d think that a western should have a massive score, but the Australian landscape already provides sound, so I wanted to emphasize that, since we’re looking at people on the run. I wanted to hear the horses and the gunshots and give the landscape a voice.

If I’m pushing myself and on the edge of getting fired, I’m doing my job. Movies with a perfect storytelling arc, that are formulated to ensure the audience isn’t lost or asking any questions—that’s tragic. We’re human beings so we should be active and wondering what’s happening, not staring with a bit of spit dribbling from one side of your mouth because you already know who is going to win and who is going to lose.